From power to purpose

Were half the power that fills the world with terror

Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts

Given to redeem the human mind from error

There were no need of arsenals or forts

(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Politics in Pakistan appears to be heading towards another round of confrontation. The country's political history is filled with leaders who promised to bring stability, peace and change, and many believed that their plans failed because others were unwilling to accept them or listen to them. But the deeper problem was not always the plan; it was the method chosen to pursue the plan. Pakistan's political history can, in many ways, be read as a history of methods. President Ayub Khan's method was to centralise executive authority and concentrate political power. President Yahya Khan approached a vital political crisis through a military solution, with consequences that culminated in the shocking breakup of Pakistan in 1971.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto pursued nationalisation and a highly centralised model of political and state authority, while General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq made Islamisation a central instrument for reshaping the country's political and social order. The democratic decade of the 1990s produced yet another method. Both the PPP and PML-N preferred to engage the military establishment and seek its support to strengthen their respective positions against one another. General Pervez Musharraf's rule, however, eventually pushed the two parties towards cooperation. Their new political method was reconciliation, symbolised by the Charter of Democracy signed in 2006 and the subsequent Murree Declaration in 2008. This wasn't political reconciliation; it was a political understanding and an arrangement not to interfere with each other's political interests.

Imran Khan's emergence transformed this political arrangement once again. His politics was built around confronting this reconciled established political order with a strong tendency to frame political choices in sharply contrasting terms. Khan's method was to treat politics either as black or white, with no room for grey. Yet the inability to seek and sustain political accommodation eventually became a weakness of his method and resulted in his downfall. Pakistan now finds itself in a familiar predicament – a political system in which competing sides continue to see politics largely in terms of black and white, with little room left for grey.

A plan is a roadmap, and that is perhaps what Pakistan has never had. Our politics has rarely been concerned with the difficult question of how the country should be governed, developed, and institutionally strengthened. Instead, the political priority has almost always been what needs to be done to acquire, consolidate or retain power. History is a succession of events, but those events cannot be divorced from the individuals who shape them. Pakistan's leaders have often had political methods, but rarely a comprehensive framework for governing the country, building institutions, generating sustainable economic development and administering the state in the public interest.

Consequently, all methods designed primarily for political survival have repeatedly been mistaken for solutions and have only deepened the structural problems. A prescription based on a faulty diagnosis can rarely produce the desired outcome. Winning or losing a political race is not determined simply by the method of running - whether one runs fast or slow. A runner may lose because of inadequate training, poor preparation, insufficient rest, inappropriate equipment or a badly judged pace. The method of running matters, but understanding why the race is being won or lost matters far more. Pakistan's political problem, therefore, cannot be understood merely by examining the methods adopted by its many political actors in the past and even now. It requires a deep examination and analysis of the underlying conditions that have repeatedly produced political failure.

History has already provided us with numerous analyses of why Pakistan's political races have been lost, yet we have learned few lessons from them. Analysis is not merely an exercise in looking backwards; it is a test of whether a chosen political method or prescription is capable of producing the intended outcome. An examination of Pakistan's political history reveals recurring attempts to maintain political control through coercive power - force, threats and punishment - alongside ideological manipulation, institutional interference, patronage, favouritism and material incentives.

What has remained largely absent is the deliberate attempt to construct consensual or structural power. The ability to secure the willing compliance of citizens by building institutions and a political order in which people see their aspirations reflected. Political success has too often been measured by the ability to maintain, increase or demonstrate power over rivals rather than by the ability to win and sustain legitimate public consent. Had political competition consistently been settled through credible institutions, free and fair elections, and the peaceful transfer of power, Pakistan's political trajectory might have been very different.

Political power in Pakistan has frequently been used as an end in itself rather than as a legitimate instrument for delivering security, justice, prosperity and public relief. Unfortunately, the ordinary Pakistanis, for all these years, seem to have largely been preoccupied with what St Augustine described as humanity's most fundamental motivations: self-preservation i.e. the desire to live rather than perish in misfortune.

What, then, should change in Pakistan? Most political commentators believe that the answer to the country's problems lies simply in changing governments. History suggests that changing governments without changing the political mindset has repeatedly produced the same political instability. The real transformation that Pakistan needs is not merely a change of rulers, but a change in how rulers understand power itself.

Pakistan does not suffer from a shortage of political methods. It suffers from a shortage of political purpose. Governments may change, alliances may shift, and new leaders may emerge, but instability will persist if power continues to be treated as the destination rather than the instrument. The real challenge is to move from politics designed to control people to politics designed to serve them. We need to move from coercive power to consensual power – the power of consent. From political survival to public purpose, and from winning the next political race to building a country that does not have to run the same race again and again.

Longfellow's question therefore remains relevant. What might Pakistan achieve if the resources devoted to the struggle for power were redirected towards redeeming the human condition?