Permacrisis continued

There is an insidiousness to the triumphant fatalism that many voices in Pakistan are increasingly tending toward. This fatalism isn’t because of any ill intention or lack of integrity – the permacrisis of polycrisis in the country and the available pathways forward all indicate a set of short- and medium-term outcomes that are at best, as bad as today.

There is no realistic path forward for the Pakistani people at large that suggests an imminent improvement in the economy, in society or in politics. If someone is being fatalistic about what they see for the country in the immediate and foreseeable future, it is because that is all there is to see.

An election will change this only to the extent that it may alter the balance of power amongst the political classes. But no serious person really believes any party is on its way to winning any kind of overwhelming majority. Imran Khan could win the next election, but will he be able to do any better than he already has in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa? Can the PTI solve for the PML-N all along the GT Road and around greater Lahore? Is the PTI capable of beating the PPP in Sindh? Is anyone? Even without Altaf Hussain, remnants of the old MQM have held the Ministry of Information Technology and the Ministry for Maritime Affairs (the new nomenclature for Ports and Shipping).

This durability and endurance among the existing political parties has been proven, over and over and over again. Under the existing constitution and with the state of the judiciary and bureaucracy as they exist, the best Pakistan can do is rotate in (and out) new faces at the Prime Minister’s Office. Yusuf Raza Gilani, Raja Pervez Ashraf, Nawaz Sharif, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Imran Khan, and Shehbaz Sharif – we can all choose our personal favourites. That is what this has ended up becoming: a rotational polycrisis.

There is a delicious joy that many take in restating the obvious, over and over and over again. The current system cannot deliver. Democracy cannot deliver. These politicians cannot deliver. And all this is true, but it leaves out the most crucial baselines from the analysis altogether. The same, indeed, even worse systems, seem to be delivering just fine in India and Bangladesh. Corruption and rent seeking can’t seem to slow down Turkey or China (though Covid-19 lockdowns in China and overzealous fiscal looseness in Turkey just might). Having an overwhelming majority of dedicated, even zealous Muslims doesn’t stop Malaysia or Indonesia from making economic progress. Messy democracies of all sorts elsewhere seem to have no problem carving out paths to becoming seriously powerful economic engines for their people and their regions. What makes Pakistan so spectacularly unique that it can’t manage what all other countries of its size or greater size have managed just fine?

This is what is so insidious about this triumphant fatalism. The fatalism is justified. The triumphalism is not. When we declare the existing system as being incapable of delivering, we are not stating some purified truth for the ages. We are regurgitating a sanitized fiction that caters to a very peculiar urban, educated Pakistani triumphalism about democracy. This is a fiction that has been ingrained in Pakistani culture over seventy years of excruciating effort on the part of the state.

Today, this state is most ably embodied by the military and especially the military leadership in Rawalpindi and Aabpara – hence the obsessive coverage of men like Qamar Javed Bajwa and Faiz Hameed. But the state has historically always been a combine of three colonial artifacts: the civil service, the judiciary, and the military. The state has birthed and nurtured the triumphalism of the political system’s failure and incapacitation. It is the very reason for the failure that it encourages us to point to and mock. It is the basis of the perpetuity of political mediocrity and failure. And it cannot be embarrassed or negotiated with.

The problem is that the power and capability to convert the state, from a self-serving, dysfunctional cabal of elites that wheel and deal from crisis to crisis, to the principal instrument of the will of the people of Pakistan is not likely to emerge from the existing discourse or institutions available. Hence the triumphalism. Is there a way out of this cul-de-sac of failure?

There are three ways out.

The first is a political compact between Imran Khan, the Sharifs and the Bhutto-Zardaris. This is not going to happen, because the entire value proposition Imran Khan offers is a stark contrast to the regionalism that the Zardari-Bhuttos rely on, and the patronage that is the bread and butter for the Sharifs. Khan offers neither of those two powerful ingredients – just an intoxicating cocktail of fantasy. But one whose hangover has already shown itself to be much messier than the ease with which the PML-N and PPP come and go. A national dialogue that features the PML-N, PPP and PTI and that leads to a new political compact and a grand economic bargain is the ideal way forward for Pakistan, but it is hard to imagine how this will come about.

The second is violent extremist ascendancy. This is what informs some of the longer-term fantasies of the Taliban in Afghanistan. That’s why the TTP remains salient. But the larger threat is Pakistan’s own willingness to continue to leave its most vulnerable regions ungoverned and under-governed. For the longest time, the major impediment to a Taliban expansion in Pakistan was also ‘sectarian’ or perhaps, cultural – but the growing muscularity of Barelvi leaders in Pakistan and increasing cultural convergence between those that attend shrines and those that don’t, should signal serious alarm for anyone invested in the Jinnahist vision of a modern Muslim society. What happens the day the TTP and TLP begin to see the value in a ‘muk-mukka’? We don’t want to find out.

The third is martial law. Not the diluted, Coke Zero version of it in place right now, nor the non-binary hybrid regime that forced Pakistani war veterans to sit and nod as Imran Khan lectured them on courage and bravery. A real, full fat version of martial law. The Pakistani state would love nothing more, but can’t actually say so. For Pakistani democrats and Jinnahists, this is a nightmare. But is it a worse nightmare than the country being run by the TLP and Taliban? Violent extremism is the bogeyman that has sustained military domination of Pakistan society for at least three decades. With the TTP scaling up its attacks across the country, and the Afghan regime engaging in direct conflict with Pakistani authorities at border posts like Chaman, the specter is not entirely a fictional one. The question then becomes whether yet another martial law is inevitable?

The way that the Pakistani state is likely to try to wiggle out of the notion of martial law is to try a second iteration of the ‘hybrid regime’. For years, this iteration has been war gamed. Quasi-political talent that can help run the country has been test-tubed, piloted and in some cases launched. The demonstrable impact of technocratic inputs is well established.

The new buzz in Islamabad is not ‘martial law’. It is an extended caretaker setup. But Pakistan has been in the grips of an extended caretaker setup since 2018. Imran Khan was a casualty of the vote of no-confidence, but the extended caretaker set up has survived. One or two years of martial law by another name is still martial law. And neither the diet version of martial law nor the full fat version have ever delivered anything worth retaining.

See? Permacrisis.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.