Software and hardware of Pakistani politics

Many have seen the famous interview where Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sat down together for a lengthy discussion about their parallel journeys in the convoluted universe of Silicon Valley. At one point during that interview, Steve Jobs, while praising Bill Gates, says that it was Microsoft that had realised before anyone else that it was really the software that was the key to computers.

Nation states are no different than computers if you think about it. There is the hardware and there is the software. The strong army and their skills and military hardware make a state’s hardware and the internal culture, the society, the people, their rights, their education and skills, and so forth make the software of a state.

The mistake many nations made in the past and perhaps still do is that the strength of the hardware is equated with the entire strength that is needed for the nation to survive any threats. Nothing can be further from the truth. History is replete with examples where strong empires and strong nation states came down or became extremely weak not because some foreign standing army invaded or defeated them but because they were weak from within. Their software was weak, obsolete, and infected with viruses. Even when a foreign army invaded and defeated them, the defeat came not because of that but because of the weaknesses that already existed. The invasion was merely a push needed for a falling man to go ahead and fall.

Iraq and Afghanistan may have been defeated with the invading American army and its destructive role, but those societies had their software infected before that. They had been the weakest societies due to lack of democracy, justice, rights, equality, and so forth. The strong hardware of the Soviet Union did not prevent it from imploding from within once the push was given by the CIA-backed mujahideen.

I had the chance to watch the congressional hearing of Kimberly Cheatle, the now former chief of the Secret Service, this week. The Secret Service is a governmental agency in the US that is in charge of keeping the current and former US presidents safe from any threats to their lives. The men and women wearing black suits and black sunglasses throwing those mean looks at the people around the president are the members of this Secret Service. Cheatle was grilled by members of both the parties over the failure of the Secret Service to prevent President Trump from being shot at.

The fact that a public servant was asked of her failure and grilled over that is something unthinkable in Pakistan. And while Pakistan too has a strong hardware, being a nuclear-armed state and having a large army, the software of the country should not even belong to the trash bin. Political leaders, including the most popular in the history of the country, faced an assassination attempt. Yet, no public servant or any governmental agency in charge of the security of such leaders was ever questioned, let alone punished or asked to resign. It was not only not done, it won’t even happen in future. The worst of all is that going into that uncharted territory of thinking is not permitted. And that right there is what I mean by software problem.

America is a superpower not because it can deliver bombs anywhere on earth and invade any country. It is a superpower because it has a democratic system at home where weird questions like these can be asked and answered. America may be hard on other nations but it is very subservient to its own people. When a nation does the reverse of that, it is in suicidal mode. Because while foreign states may be happy with the policies and actions of such a nation, the citizenry is extremely disappointed, a sign of which is to witness millions of citizens exit the state in search of better rights and income. Such a nation may look like a tough cookie but it is very easy to crack it. Such a nation will bring about its own demise should it continue down the same path.