Is this the best decade in Pakistan’s troubled history?

Before you fall off your chair and use words unfit for print to question the size of my lifafa (envelope), allow me to make the unpopular case for why this decade will be remembered as the decisive turning point in Pakistan’s disturbing history. Exhibit A: Pakistan entered this decade labelled as the world’s most dangerous country. Extremism and terrorism threatened to rip apart our social, political and economic fabric. Today, Pakistan is the only country in the world, which has decisively defeated terrorism when many Muslim countries were shattered. For the first time, Pakistan has come out on the right side of history in terms of developing a national consensus against the existential threat of terrorism.

Does this mean Pakistan’s all problems are solved? No. But we are graduating in the level of problems dominating our national discourse. Earlier in the decade, headlines screamed the number of dead bodies and scattered limbs in bomb blasts every day. Today, they scream dollar exchange rates, inflation and current account deficits. While Pakistan’s headlines continue to blink red, the trendlines are turning green. And this is only the beginning. Consider that a dictator has been convicted of treason with a death sentence in the Land of the Pure. Is this real life or fantasy?

“Perception is the new reality,” Musharraf famously said, at the height of his power. Well then, perceptions are changing dramatically. This is the only full decade in our history when Pakistan wasn’t ruled by a dictator for a single day. Now, let’s talk about the role of the boys in context of this government. There are only two possible arguments; this government is selected or it’s elected. Let’s make an apolitical assessment of both scenarios to see what the glass half-full looks like.

If the PTI government is elected, this is exciting news because they finally managed to break the chokehold of two oligopolistic political parties, which run democracy in Pakistan as a private limited enterprise or a family business. This was done by a two-decade-long struggle to politicise and mobilise an otherwise disenfranchised, young population, who is now well educated on their rights and aggressively holding their elected government accountable. If this government does well, the people will re-elect it for another term. If not, we’ll vote in someone else. This is democracy at its best.

If this government has been selected, it means the boys calculated the country will no longer directly accept a military coup and they must work within the political system. I’d like to extend this argument: if at the end of two complete democratic terms by Zardari and Nawaz there is no military coup, then is the door to direct interventions permanently closed? If the judiciary in a hybrid government is ruling that a dictator has committed treason, doesn’t this mean Pakistan’s constitutional system of checks and balances is working and self-correcting when any one pillar of the state over-reaches?

Now, one might argue this is all pie in the sky celebration and these ideological debates don’t impact the common man. That’s partly true. But they do impact the common man eventually. Like ending the TTP’s reign of terrorism. Like equal justice for the powerful and powerless. Like the security situation in Karachi, where a decade earlier, a lunatic in London could shut down the city within minutes but today he’s been reduced to an internet meme. This is progress, Pakistan style.

Pakistan is probably the only country that can go from the world’s most dangerous country to the number one tourist destination in a decade’s time. From the death of international cricket to bringing it back to life in a decade. Yes, there are a lot of things wrong with our country. But we get a lot right as well. Let’s take a moment to celebrate this beautiful country we call home.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2019.

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