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Tuesday March 19, 2024

No time for buyer’s remorse

By Mosharraf Zaidi
November 20, 2018

It has been three months since Prime Minister Imran Khan took the oath of office. Just like new dispensations all around the world, the post-truth discourse here too tends to cling longer to all perceived slights. This has meant that criticism of the new government is unwelcome.

The absence of space to debate with the PTI and its leadership has prompted highly partisan narratives, which in turn, has made PM Khan’s devotees even more hardened and obdurate. This has now produced a ridiculous multi-cycle narrative around the term ‘U-turn’, with the official PTI Twitter handle spewing gems from all manner of leaders glorifying the ability of good leaders to change their minds. The real question of course, is not whether Imran Khan can or will change his mind about any given issue. It is whether people in positions of great power may change their mind about Imran Khan.

Pakistan had a relatively open debate about the election itself, because the election, though problematic, was not indefensible. The overarching direction for the outcome of the election was set long, long before July 25 – and though it may have been affected in terms of degree, it was not going to change direction altogether.

The debate about what happened between 2013 and 2018 is an important one, but only for historical record’s sake. There is a more urgent and substantially more problematic debate about what is happening now, as we begin to close out 2018, that is much more problematic. This is the debate about potential buyer’s remorse.

When Nawaz Sharif became prime minister for the third time in 2013, there was genuine hope. Part of this hope was desperation. Pakistan had endured a lot between 2001 and 2013. The TTP was birthed in the rubble of a madressah in Bajaur in 2007, and came whole after Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The TTP alone would have destroyed many other countries.

But the country also endured a lot of complex political upheaval. The lawyers’ movement to restore Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry turned institutional equilibrium on its head and essentially forced a change of leadership in Rawalpindi, and the end of the Musharraf era. In a discourse infatuated with binaries, the lawyers’ movement’s complexity and wide-ranging impact is rarely acknowledged.

The assassination of Nawaz Akbar Bugti triggered an insurrection that was eventually used by Pakistan’s enemies to bleed Balochistan. The hollowing out of Karachi’s potential as the prime metropolis of the land, and the MQM’s brand of bottomless pit extortion and violence helped prepare the stage for its symbolic beheading soon after the 2013 election.

But perhaps most damaging was the indefensible economic performance of the PPP-led coalition that ruled Pakistan after Musharraf.

From 2013 to 2018, the country had to contend with this fallout. In 2014, the military set itself the task of dismantling and destroying the TTP. The institutional disequilibrium between the judiciary, the military and civilian leaders was left untouched. The Balochistan and Karachi situations were managed through a complex but effective strategy that asphyxiated the most militant anti-state voices, and negotiated with the ones that could be reasoned with. Nawaz Sharif and his people focused mostly on the economic front, using three pillars to buttress their already solid reputation for delivery: electricity megawattage, roads and urban infrastructure, and CPEC, as the financing and planning platform for the electricity and infrastructure.

For spoilers, including Pakistan’s enemies, institutional disequilibrium was seen as an opportunity to be exploited, rather than a vacuum that needed filling. Efforts for trust-building and mutually reinforcing confidence at Nawaz Sharif’s end came to a screeching halt as August 2014 became September. Once the dharna became an all-consuming issue, the institutional disequilibrium exploded into 1990s-style contestation. The peak of this was Dawn leaks.

Throughout all this, Imran Khan was tactically brilliant. He had established his presence with the October 2011 protest rally in Lahore – triggering electoral anxiety in Raiwind. But he had neither the muscle, nor the smarts, to win a national election. The 2014 dharna, as big a setback as it was for the Sharifs, was an even bigger one for Khan. He spent all of 2015 smarting from the wounds of a process that diminished him, even in his own eyes. Enter the Panama Papers.

The Panama Papers, and Nawaz Sharif’s unbelievably poor handling of that crisis, opened the door for a second chance. The shattered trust between traditional parties, led by the PML-N, and the rest of the institutional framework of the country did the rest. Combined with the hypernationalist zealotry that had been cultivated as a wider response to the threat perception matrix, the Panama Papers, and the weakness of traditional parties helped make mincemeat of the chances for a PML-N re-election in 2018.

For the naïvely optimistic Pakistani – whether in a position of great power or comfortably living life as an expat – the happy coincidence in all of this was the outcome: at long last, what good, honest, patriotic Pakistanis had yearned for all along.

They wanted a leader this country could be proud of. They wanted a leader that didn’t have a compromised financial past. They wanted a leader that was not hell-bent on bequeathing his political legacy to his inexperienced and unqualified daughter. They wanted to be inspired, instead of being embarrassed. They wanted a leader that looked good in a suit, and that could carry a sherwani. They wanted a leader that could make a speech without referring to notes. They wanted a leader that is not intimidated by Westerners.

They got what they wanted. And it is exactly that, and no more. The attribution of any kind of messaging or policy sophistication has proven to be premature. PM Khan is doing exactly what he is capable of, and not a whole lot more. The PTI will win the U-turn debate, because there is no news cycle debate that can’t be won when you master social media, have friends that suppress your opponents’ voices, and have a relentless addiction to winning, rather than to accuracy.

But winning hashtag wars won’t tackle or solve any of Pakistan’s most urgent challenges. When you win elections in the former Fata and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa because you actually believe the myth of your unassailable integrity, you will ignore the complexity of post-conflict linguistic and nationalist politics. When you falsely believe that the word ‘youth’ is an attribution to your fitness regime, and not to the desperation and hopelessness of your nearly 100 million citizens below the age of 25, you will ignore rage in the discourse.

When you spend a decade feeding the false beast of hyper-nationalism to endear yourself to those too busy to have long-term vision because they were fighting and dying in a war to save the country, you will have to try to justify apologetic visits to Riyadh, Beijing and Abu Dhabi (and one, not too far in the future, to Washington DC too).

All of this can still be worth the trouble, and the tilting of the playing field that got us here. But it has to start to manifest itself soon. The things that we are not allowed to discuss in these pages are like little grenades in the hands of Pakistan’s enemies. The longer we pretend they do not exist, the more toxic those grenades become. They will grow into bombs. They will develop their own timers, and their own detonation schedules.

With the kind of courage, ingenuity and resilience we have, Pakistan has nothing to fear. Our young will not be misguided by the cunning of our enemies. But they will turn on us for our obduracy, our neglect of history, and our capacity to ignore them. There is no time to wallow in the misery of buyer’s remorse. Pakistan’s problems await.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.