Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [125]
It is important to note that the speaker had been finance minister under the ‘military dictatorship’ of General Zia-ul-Haq (no relation); but, as he candidly admitted, this regime had been almost wholly unable to change these basic features of the Pakistani system. Lack of revenue, and the diversion of what revenue there is to political patronage, are especially disastrous for Pakistan’s ability to develop its national infrastructure – something which in the area of water conservation could in future literally threaten the country’s very survival.
On the other hand, the Pakistani system creates immense barriers to revolutionary change, including that offered by the Taleban and their allies; and these barriers are formed not just by the raw power and influence of ‘feudals’ and urban bosses, but also by the fact that, for a whole set of reasons, the system requires them to use at least some of that influence and patronage for the good of poorer sections of the population.
As Stephen Lyon and others have emphasized, patronage in Pakistan should not therefore be seen as the preserve of the elites, and as simply a top-down relationship. A mixture of the importance of kinship loyalty and the need for politicians to win votes, and – on occasions – to mobilize armed supporters, means that quite wide sections of society have the ability to exploit and even distribute patronage to some extent. Quite poor people can thus form part of ‘human resource networks’ and mobilize some degree of help or protection from their superiors. Even the very poorest in the villages often benefit from the deg tradition, whereby local landowners and big men distribute free food to the entire village to celebrate some happy event, to boost their local prestige through public generosity, and by the same token to try to cast local rivals into the shade.
People gain access to patronage by using their position within a kinship network to mobilize support for a politician who then repays them in various ways when in office, or by using kinship links to some policeman or official to obtain favours for relatives or allies. In certain circumstances, this can benefit whole villages through the provision of electricity, roads or water. Of course, everyone complains bitterly about this in public when others do it successfully, while following precisely the same strategies themselves. In the words of Professor Iqraar, vice-chancellor of Faisalabad University:
The problem with Pakistan’s political and government system is not so much feudalism as what I would have to call South Asian political culture in general. Everyone here seeks personal and family power by all means and then misuses it. The feudals just have more of it, that’s all.
Rather than being eaten by a pride of lions, or even torn apart by a flock of vultures, the fate of Pakistan’s national resources more closely resembles being nibbled away by a horde of mice (and the occasional large rat). The effects on the resources, and on the state’s ability to do things, are just the same, but more of the results are ploughed back into the society, rather than making their way straight to bank accounts in the West. This is an important difference between Pakistan and Nigeria, for example.
As this parallel suggests, part of the reason is the nature of the resources concerned. Unless you are right at the top of the system and in a position to milk the state as a whole (like Zardari in the PPP governments of the 1990s), to make really large individual fortunes in the poorer parts of the world today requires the ability to make, extract or steal something which can then be sold in the economic metropolises of the world – in Nigeria’s case, oil.
Pakistan exports textiles and agricultural products, together with limited amounts of steel and copper – not the kind of goods or raw materials that can generate this kind of fortune. Even its most successful legitimate businessmen do