Who is PM Sharif’s worst enemy?

The writer is an analyst and
commentator.

The top stories from the Panama Papers so far were first published on April 3, 2015. Less than forty-eight hours later, the prime minister made a speech that belongs in the hall of fame for the most poorly conceived televised addresses to the nation in our sad and unfulfilled history.

Within hours of that pathetic appeal for sympathy, PM Sharif’s people began a vilification campaign against the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital (SKMH) – a philanthropic effort that, while dependent on Imran Khan’s star power, is a stand-alone tribute to Pakistani generosity. A few days after that, ill-health forced the prime minister to the United Kingdom, where, instead of lying low, he allowed hooligans from his party, in keeping with the thoughtless and suicidal rhetorical attack on the SKMH, to set up camp outside the family home of Jemima Goldsmith, the former wife of Imran Khan.

Statements from PML-N leaders in the interim have largely been so pathetic that they deserve little attention, except for the most egregious ones in which the minor children of a never-prime minister are equated to the grown men that comprise the direct offspring of a three-time prime minister.

This series of disasters is more than a public relations fiasco. As I wrote last week, it certainly puts at risk the gains made by this government. But that is not all it does. The legendary self-immolation of the government at the sight of the Panama Leaks actually proves what some of us have feared ever since the prime minister emerged from the dharna with more political capital and credibility than the two circus ringmasters that put on that historic show: Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri.

What was that fear? The fear was that in the absence of robust political resistance, the Sharif enterprise would revert to type. That type is simple: close your eyes and shut your mouth – because Nawaz Sharif is in charge, and he’ll take care of everything.

The problem with this model of governance is that sometimes it works like a charm (like Daronomics’ macroeconomic stability) and sometimes, simultaneously, it also fails spectacularly (like the shrinking of Pakistan’s exports in the World of Dar). When it works, it feels like PM Sharif is made of political Teflon. When it doesn’t work, it seems as though PM Sharif is a most fragile political China doll. The reason, in all cases, is not the quality or robustness of the challenge PM Sharif and his team face from the opposition. The reason is PM Sharif himself.

Blessed with the historic opportunity of being elected prime minister for a third time, the PM won the lottery when he was blessed with Imran Khan as his principal political adversary. Perhaps nothing quite captures the misfortune of the country as the irony of PM Sharif and Imran Khan being rewarded each other. More and more, this seems to be a marriage made in heaven. The prime minister, incapable of being vulnerable to anything Khan can do. The great Khan, incapable of inflicting any meaningful damage on the PM. Yet each, in his disastrous way, his own worst enemy.

Khan’s sins on this front are easier to forgive. Not because he isn’t a monumental disappointment, but because he disappoints from outside the executive. He has no power over the state machinery. The best he can do is a lot better than he has done. But even if he was as flawless as some of the hyperventilating teenagers that support him think he is, what is the most Khan could do? He cannot grow the economy as opposition leader, he cannot lead a war, he cannot reform the national civil service, and he cannot fix relations with Afghanistan or India.

In stark contrast, the office of prime minister of Pakistan is among the most powerful in the world. The PM happens to be the official line manager of General Raheel Sharif. That alone puts him in some pretty exclusive company. The fighting general has already written his name in the books for a tenure that has been breathtaking in its industriousness. If the gains made under the general endure beyond his time at the helm, his legend will only grow.

The range of advantages PM Sharif enjoys extends far, far beyond the person of Raheel Sharif however. He has been blessed with a set of riches unparalleled for any PM in Pakistani history – from China’s appetite to do business, to having the conveyor belt of bureaucratic talent that his brother Shahbaz has built for him in Lahore, to a friendly and sympathetic media, to a US presence in the region whose influence is wielded more maturely today than ever before.

The prime minister’s agency is much grander and larger than that of his principal political opponents. Failure for the prime minister is failure for Pakistan. The stakes are much greater for a prime minister than they ever are for an opposition leader.

Yet when we see how the PM and his team has responded to the Panama Leaks, there is nothing grand or large about it. Petty, vindictive, bitter and tone-deaf would only begin to scratch the surface of how the PML-N has dealt with the Panama Leaks. Worse, by framing the scandal as a contest between the government and the PTI, the government has ceded the moral ground to the PTI of being a cleaner, more transparent party. What would possess the PM and his team to do so?

One theory is that the PML-N thinks that its position after the dharna is a permanent state of political dominance. All the analysis that has pointed towards the unassailable advantages the PML-N enjoys over everyone else has gone to their heads. The Teflon version of the PM is the only one he and his team see in the mirror – and of course this is how it works in Sharifland, a herd of sycophants competing to show the PM the Teflon version, and only the Teflon version.

Yet all the while, the China-doll version of the PM lurks, waiting to hand his opponents an opportunity. Systemically, this is done by an overreliance on personal loyalty. Sporadically, it is done because these elites have more skeletons than they have closet space. Put the two together, and a political equation that seemed unassailable is now palpably teetering.

All this domestic fragility has wider, global implications. Though the Foreign Office will never permit such a memo to reach the PM Office, Pakistan is in grave danger in Washington DC. Pakistan’s enemies have the resources, the gravitas and the raw material (no pun intended) to inflict long-term, existential damage to the country’s interests in the US Congress, in the American imagination, and upon the DNA of whichever administration takes up the mantle from the outgoing President Obama. This is the price Pakistan must pay of being perceived to have allowed two different kinds of non-state actors to act against other countries: the Haqqani Network to disrupt US and Afghan efforts to secure Afghanistan, and the various Kashmir-centric militant groups to continue to threat to India. As the entire burden of effort in government fixates internally, these external challenges risk metastasizing. Whatever seems to weaken or distract Pakistan, will only work to embolden its enemies.

Yet, instead of working with the military and cracking the code of regional stability (whilst protecting Pakistan from any malign intent out there), the government is busy green-lighting protests against Jemima Goldsmith. Instead of consolidating democratic power, by deepening ties with other parties, the government is busy alienating even conciliatory powers like the PPP, with whom it has enjoyed good relations. Instead of institutionalising the Raheel Sharif era of civ-mil relations, the government is busy ceding all legitimacy to anyone willing to pick up the pieces.

Sadly, the worst is yet to come. Unlike the late 1990s, there is no egomaniacal General Musharraf to intervene and immortalise the democratic Sharif. Unlike the dharna, there is no one out there at D-Chowk who will hang themselves with their own rope. It is PM Sharif alone who is in the eye of the storm. Imran Khan and other opponents of this government don’t need to do anything more than casually prod the government along. The insecurities and arrogance at Maison Sharif will do the rest.

All the megawatts, all the macroeconomic stability and all the smart, common sense regionalism in the world cannot protect Nawaz Sharif from his worst, most potent enemy. Himself.