Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [122]
As far as most of the political parties are concerned, these do not exist in the form taken as the norm in the West. With the exception of the MQM and the religious parties, all of Pakistan’s ‘democratic’ political parties are congeries of landlords, clan chieftains and urban bosses seeking state patronage for themselves and their followers and vowing allegiance to particular national individuals and dynasties. Most of these individuals inherited their positions from their fathers or (more rarely) other relatives. Where new individuals gain political power, they invariably found political dynasties of their own, and seek to pass on their power, influence and followers to their sons (or occasionally daughters).
Thus the Pakistan People’s Party is built around the Bhutto dynasty, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) around the Sharif dynasty, and the Awami National Party around the Wali Khan dynasty. The smaller building blocks of these parties are also local political families. These often break away to form new alliances with other families, or to create a new small party based on one leader and his family, like the PPP (Sherpao), founded by a dissident local PPP politician from the Frontier, or – on a much larger scale – the Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam), created by the Musharraf administration but put together and led by the two Chaudhury brothers from Gujrat.
As will be seen, ideology does play a certain part in political loyalties, but outside the Jamaat Islami it is not dominant. Furthermore, a long-term loyalty to one party, sometimes taken by observers to reflect ideological allegiance, may in fact be reflective of something more like a medieval allegiance: an obstinate personal loyalty to a particular leading family. In many ways, the kind of politician who is personally admired today (for more than simply his or her ability to gain patronage for supporters) is still very close to the Pathan chief described by Mountstuart Elphinstone more than 170 years ago:
Proud, high-spirited and obstinate; frugal, but not sordid in expense, steady in his attachment to his party, and strict in conforming to the notions of honour which prevail among his countrymen ...4
Long-term loyalty to one party can also reflect the fact that the individual and family concerned have no alternative, because they have burnt their boats as far as all the other potential loyalties are concerned. Thus in my travels round Pakistan, I have quite often been told in private (sometimes by the politicians themselves): ‘Of course, So-and-So Khan would like to join the ruling party; but he can’t, because the Sharifs [or the Bhuttos] will never forgive him for what he did to them when he was in government’; or, sometimes, because a rival local faction, or set of cousins, is so firmly entrenched in one party that their local rivals have no choice but to stick to the other, come what may.
In the Pakistan of 2010, there are only two areas where this is not the case: the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which were never fully part of the state patronage system, and much of which have been removed from state control by the Pakistani Taleban; and to some extent the MQM-controlled areas of Karachi, where the removal of the Mohajirs from their ancestral roots in India, and the disruption of their kinship networks, as well as their old urban culture, has produced a more ‘modern’ form of ethnic party politics.
THE MILITARY AND POLITICS
The nature of the Pakistani political system has made possible three military seizures of power, and the long periods of military rule that have followed. Even more common have been military attempts to manipulate politics from behind the scenes, to influence and put pressure on journalists, to bring down civilian governments that have fallen out with the military, and to shape the results of elections.
Retired officers, or serving officers speaking off the record, are usually quite unapologetic about the military