Pakistan: Modern state, traditional leadership

The believing mind is taking over the planning mind. Future is giving way to the past as focus of political agenda.

The state in Pakistan, as a modern institutional apparatus, has suffered from a longer-term downward spiral of movement into pre-modern ends and means of public policy in the past six-and-a-half decades.

Pakistan has moved from rule by a modernist leadership to rule by a traditionalist leadership. Modernists include Quaid-e-Azam, Liaquat, Ayub and Bhutto, among others. They were liberal in approach and globalist in worldview. Traditionalists, ranging from General Zia as the arch-traditionalist from yesterday to Imran Khan as a neoconservative leader in contemporary Pakistan, are introverted in approach and insular in worldview.

This transition ran along a parallel line, moving from separation of religion and politics to conflation between the two. The independence generation of leadership was supra-sectarian. The father of the nation belonged to the Shia minority, as did his two illustrious predecessors on top of the All-India Muslim League, Sir Agha Khan and Raja Sahib of Mehmudabad. Over time, this tradition of religious tolerance led to sectarian strife as the country moved to Sunni majoritarian nationalism from the 1980s onwards.

The new ideological mindset was bound to affect the formulation of sound political judgment and strategic calculations. The Afghanistan-savvy generals led by General Hamid Gul learnt the wrong lesson out of the resistance movement against the Red Army that the mujahideen could push India out of Kashmir since they had pushed Moscow out of Kabul. The fact that one super state had got the other out by using local manpower was totally missed out. This led to a fruitless engagement across the border at a great human and diplomatic cost from 1989 to 2003.

Pakistan was born as a pro-Western state, ruled by a cosmopolitan elite. It set two goals for itself — democracy and development. Both goals were immersed in a futurist agenda. Half a century later, the country finds itself anti-Western, along with a commitment to reviving the political system of early Islamic history. The believing mind is taking over the planning mind. The future is giving way to the past as the focus of the political agenda.

The strident march of insularity has led to shrinkage of the diplomatic universe available to the country. Gone are the days of official visits of leaders from Washington, Moscow, London and Paris, even Tehran and Kuala Lumpur. Pakistan has become isolated not only from the larger world but also from the region of South Asia itself, where it has no friends except China. There is a steep decline from the days of the 1974 Islamic summit when scores of world leaders descended on Lahore.

A decade of terrorism on the soil of Pakistan after 9/11 has cost it in the form of acute distrust of the world community. It has been accused of training terrorists, exporting terrorism and funding such banned organisations as LeT/JD. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s encounter with the House Foreign Relations Committee during his recent visit to Washington fully exposed the gap of understanding between the two sides. Lack of appreciation for the diplomatic world’s sensibilities is the hallmark of the current generation of state managers in Pakistan and its support base in the urban middle class.

For decades now, political discourse has been moving from an interest-based to identity-based approach to politics at home and abroad. Not surprisingly, education by textbooks and the media has created a dichotomous worldview that was based first on a mini-clash of civilisations between India and Pakistan, and then on a global war between Islam and the West.

The diplomatic community accuses Pakistan of breaking every rule in the statute book: the national interest and not religion as the defining variable of the state in the post-Westphalia world system; no role for non-state actors, especially after the Cold War; no compromise on the counterterrorism agenda; war or war-like posturing, not the first but the last option, for conducting international relations; and self-segregation from the comity of nations not a viable option.

When General Zia pursued his Islamisation programme to use it as a source of divine legitimacy for his illegal regime, he created a rival contender for power for the state itself. Islamic laws and institutions challenged the established laws and institutions of the state from the superior position of the faith. The state’s legal-institutional apparatus has been crackling down ever since under the pressure of the Islamic lobby. Loyalty to religion can supersede loyalty to the state as a logical corollary of ideologisation of attitudes.

This process was most obvious in the case of the judiciary. Justice Kaikaus and Justice Tanzilurrehman, among others, supported the legal battle to eliminate the 1973 Constitution altogether as an un-Islamic body of laws. Others from the bar and the bench cast a grim shadow on the legitimacy and credibility of the lawful authority of the state in the face of the alternative and morally superior model of Islam.

A similar process of Islamisation has been vehemently pursued in the armed forces from the 1980s onwards. In several cases, commitment to faith overtook the commitment to institution. Musharraf’s somersault in policy vis a vis the Taliban led to some of the ex-military personnel to attack his convoy, the GHQ and other military installations during the following years.

Mixing of religion and politics has led to a meshing of legal ideas and political norms that has adversely affected the erstwhile coherent writ of the state. The Taliban, who want to dismantle the current — allegedly un-Islamic — state on way to establishing the rule of sharia are very clear in their strategic objectives. On the other hand, their traditionalist supporters from within the modern state system, who press for negotiations with them or support them in other ways, are totally unclear.

The two sets of obligations, one to the state and the other to religion, have led to the current social, political, legal and administrative paralysis. The state in Pakistan has been treading on a path laid out by the proponents of an alternative model of state while it continues to follow the classical constitutional route on the ground. Two formidable challenges stare it in the eye: stopping there and turning back.

The way out lies in growing out of the paranoia that the world is out to destroy Pakistan. Living as a pariah on the margins of the world community is highly dangerous. The way to security and prosperity lies — such as in the case of Russia and China — in integration with the global community, understanding and internalising its internal dynamics, adjusting with its value system and policy structure, and pursuing peace, not war, as a solution to its myriad problems.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 31^st, 2013.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.