Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [123]
Democracy has failed – it is not suited to our temperament. It took Western countries hundreds of years to develop and we have only had forty. The military is the only force in the country which has some discipline, which can guarantee stability and economic growth. If there has been army rule for most of Pakistan’s history it is not the military’s fault. Benazir complains that the military did not give her a chance – well, grow up. This is a serious game. Let’s accept that no force that has power wants to give it up. If the PPP wants to keep power, then it has to prove itself to be better at government than the army.5
Because real political power is spread among so many local actors, and depends so heavily on patronage, this also places limits on the ability of the military to control things for long – because, as I’ve said, there just isn’t enough patronage to go round. On the other hand, both civilian governments and the ISI have other means of influence, as sketched for me by Murtaza Jatoi, son of the caretaker chief minister of Sindh, in 1990:
If this were a political government running a political campaign, then PPP candidates would have no water for their land, all the state loans to them would be called in, there would be raids on Asif Zardari’s home and those of his relatives to pick up known dacoits taking shelter there, and every vehicle with a PPP flag or sticker would be pulled over to see if its licence is in order or its tyres in proper shape. That’s how governments in power run elections here.6
The key military institution for the manipulation of politics is of course Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). In private, the army is unabashed about the need to keep an eye on politics as part of internal security in general. As a retired senior general pointed out to me with considerable justification, since its foundation the Pakistani state has been faced with parties in the NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan which have been committed to breaking up the country, and have also had close links at different times with India, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. ‘No country in our circumstances could do without a strong domestic intelligence service,’ he told me. He pointed out that while the ISI has helped Pakistani military regimes against their domestic opponents, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) has been used by different civilian regimes, first in one direction, then in another, ‘to the point where they have become almost paralysed as a force to defend Pakistan’ (not of course a judgement with which the IB would agree).
In July 2009 one of the ISI’s senior officers gave me an account of its political role and its limits, an account which needs to be taken with several pinches of salt, but which is nonetheless interesting:
I just have to laugh when I hear these conspiracy theories about how the ISI controls everything in Pakistan. If that were true, don’t you think that General Zia would still be in power? Or that Nawaz Sharif and his party would have stayed our loyal servants instead of becoming our enemies?
As to political manipulation, I must tell you that every single civilian government has used us and the IB to target their political rivals and to rig elections, so their complaints about this are also a bit of a joke ...
We have never controlled elections either on behalf of civilian governments or the military – Pakistan is much too big and we aren’t nearly strong or numerous enough for that, and we also don’t have the money. Remember how much money is involved in winning one Pakistani assembly seat, and then multiply it by hundreds. What we have sometimes done is pushed a bit – usually if things were moving in that direction anyway. There are various ways in which we can help get the result we want in some individual constituency. But across the whole country, no.
This is certainly a very considerable understatement of the ISI’s ability to influence politics, but it is accurate on some points – firstly, the fact that the civilians