Policy on the precipice

The newspapers, tickers and talk shows all drip with tragedy. The accumulation of the despair is hard to escape. Over the last decade, a depressing candour has swept through the land. Pakistan is a country fully conversant with the various overlapping crises that envelop it.
In recent weeks, I’ve wondered if perhaps the cold comfort of being candid about our national failures is having a paralysing effect on leaders of state and society both. The thinking may be this: “We admit our land is rife with incompetence, corruption and ineffectiveness – and our problems are huge”. And then? And then nothing. Silence. Of course, just because we see our own faults doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to address them. This, surely, is elementary.
Luckily, not everyone is afflicted with paralysis. Across the country in a wide array of fields, people are trying hard to deal with these challenges. Mama Qadeer, much as many of us may want to hide from the problems in Balochistan, is tapping away at the resistance of the state to his appeals for justice with regards to missing people. Allama Raghib Naeemi is trying to refresh the religious discourse from those that have infused it with blind rage and violence.
Perween Rehman speaks from her grave, reminding us, though not often enough, of the unmitigated threat not just from religious violent extremism, but from the urban warfare wrought upon Karachi by dangerous mafias, political and non-political. These people inspire us, even when we have reservations about their causes.
Yet these kinds of examples also tend to exacerbate our national sense of self-doubt. Indeed, it is an alarming state of affairs, when even narratives of those that are trying to do good are replete with reminders of so much bad.
Appeals to positive stories are often rightly seen as attempts to mitigate the damage of our own faults and simply restore false pride. That said, there is also a less cynical way to

see them. Positive examples not only motivate other positive actions, they can also offer lessons in both what to do, to achieve success, and what not to do.
Two of the more recent examples of large-scale Pakistani success in public policy that Pakistan should be learning from deserve greater scrutiny and attention than they get. One represents a broad, yet still fragile, political consensus that has taken many years to achieve, the other represents the drive and ambition of a particular politician, yielding visible results (though lacking the guarantee of long-term sustainability).
The first success story is in the arena of foreign policy. Pakistan’s approach to India and Afghanistan, two of the neighbours with whom it shares long and complex borders, has changed substantially in the last decade. Is the approach now perfect? Far from it. Indeed, some would argue it is worse now than in the past. But few would disagree that they way Pakistani leaders talk about India and Afghanistan represents a sea-change in the mainstream Pakistani foreign policy discourse. Given the decades-old typecast that existed for these two countries, does the change not represent a rare victory? It absolutely does.
The second is in the arena of service delivery at the provincial level. Shahbaz Sharif, Punjab’s chief minister, has produced a range of politically potent service delivery wins in recent years. Service delivery in Punjab is far from perfect, but there are now so many individual examples of the Punjab government doing something right, that it is impossible to ignore the trends.
In the last three years alone, Punjab has built one major metro line in Lahore and has launched work on expanding it to two other cities. It has reduced teacher absenteeism by a full 50 percent. It has employed a corruption tracking and monitoring system, originally piloted in Jhang, and expanded it across the province. It has experienced a deeply embarrassing and tragic dengue epidemic in one year, only to follow up the next year by essentially wiping out the problem.
All this has been achieved with the same national civil services, the same police services, and the same share of the National Finance Commission agreed to by all the provinces and the federation. Notwithstanding all the accumulated (and legitimate) grievances of the smaller provinces, Punjab’s successes represent the rare and laudable Pakistani examples of public policy that works.
What is the secret in both cases? The first is politics. Politicians are certainly at the root of many problems, but no problem can be solved without them. On India and Afghanistan, the change we see has been made possible because an array of leading politicians, from Asif Ali Zardari, to Nawaz Sharif, and everyone in between, all agree that Pakistan can ill afford sustained conflict with its neighbours.
In Punjab, there is a bit of a virtuous political cycle that drives its success – Shahbaz Sharif knows that the only irresistible appeal in an election today is performance, and the votes that his performance has generated, allows him the space to operate as fiercely as he does.
The other secret is leadership. On India and Afghanistan, a range of leaders can rightly take credit, but perhaps no one typifies leadership like Ambassador Mohammad Sadiq, our former man in Kabul. Armed with the confidence of both the political and military leadership, Sadiq reconstructed Pakistan’s diplomacy in Afghanistan, away from the model of intervention and interference preferred by us for decades, to a model of relations between two sovereign states. Nothing is perfect, but Sadiq represents entrepreneurial flair and competence that is rare in any civil service, much less the fast eroding resources of Pakistan’s bureaucracy.
In Punjab, the CM has leveraged the talents of a host of individuals, tapping talent from within the bureaucracy, like the tireless Major (r) Azam Sultan or Education Secretary Abdul Jabbar Shaheen, as well as going outside the system to find change agents like Dr Umar Saif, the head of Punjab’s IT Board, and former MIT professor who has been at the nerve centre of many of Punjab’s problem-solving efforts.
Despite the political wherewithal and exceptional leadership that define changes to our India and Afghanistan policies, and improvements in service delivery in the Punjab, there are mortal threats to these examples of Pakistani success.
The greatest threat is our inability to consolidate, institutionalise and protect success. The Pakistani shift on India and Afghanistan is not without domestic opposition. This opposition will be emboldened by failure to produce visible victories in those arenas. This is particularly important in Afghanistan. If Afghanistan’s fragile stability does not hold beyond 2014, Pakistan will almost assuredly struggle to maintain the decency it has adopted in recent years.
The threat in Punjab is even graver. Its record of success is highly person-specific. If Shahbaz Sharif were to move to a different job today, the province would in no way be able to replicate the culture of governance he has adopted. Despite the 18th Amendment, system-wide reforms of service delivery require federal action – starting with dramatic changes to how the civil services are configured and managed.
Unfortunately, the vital signs are not good. From Pakistan’s adoption of a pro-intervention posture on Syria, to the federal government’s recent awarding of even more power to the DMG group, the indicators suggest that Pakistan is on the precipice of undoing even the little good that it has managed in recent years. This would be consistent with a national history of wasted opportunities. Can we stem the tide?
The writer is an analyst and commentator.