Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [15]
As a result of this lack of basic information, too often in Western analysis, when local forms differ from the supposed Western ‘norm’ they are not examined, but are treated as temporary aberrations, diseases to be cured or tumours to be cut out of the otherwise healthy patient’s system. In fact, these ‘diseases’ are the system, and can only be ‘cured’ by a revolutionary change in the system.
The only forces in Pakistan that are offering such a change are the radical Islamists, and their cure would almost certainly finish the patient off altogether. Failing this, if Pakistan is to follow Western models of progress, it will have to do so slowly, incrementally and above all organically, in accordance with its own nature and not Western precepts.
THE NEGOTIATED STATE
In the course of Pakistan’s sixty-year history, there have been several different attempts radically to change Pakistan, by one civilian and three military regimes. Generals Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf, military rulers in 1958 – 69 and 1999 – 2008 respectively, both took as their model Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk’, the great secular modernizing nationalist and founder of the Turkish republic. General Zia-ul-Haq, military ruler from 1977 to 1988, took a very different course, trying to unite and develop Pakistan through enforced adherence to a stricter and more puritanical form of Islam mixed with Pakistani nationalism. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistani People’s Party and civilian ruler of Pakistan in the 1970s, for his part tried to rally the Pakistani masses behind him with a programme of anti-elitist economic populism, also mixed with Pakistani nationalism.
And they all failed. Every single one of them found their regimes ingested by the elites they had hoped to displace, and engaged in the same patronage politics as the regimes that they had overthrown. None was able to found a new mass party staffed by professional politicians and ideologically committed activists rather than local ‘feudals’ and urban bosses and their followers. Indeed, with the exception of Bhutto none tried seriously to do so, and after a short while Bhutto’s PPP too had ceased to be the radical party of its early years and had become dependent on the same old local clans and local patronage.
The military governments which took power promising to sweep away the political elites and their corruption also found themselves governing through them, partly because no military regime has been strong enough to govern for long without parliament – and parliament is drawn from the same old political elites, and reflects the society which the military regimes wish in principle to change. Western demands that such regimes simultaneously reform the country and restore ‘democracy’ are therefore in some ways an exercise in comprehensively missing the point.
To have changed all this, and created a radical national movement for change like that of Ataturk, would have required two things: firstly a strong Pakistani nationalism akin to modern Turkish nationalism – something that ethnically divided Pakistan does not have and cannot create; and, secondly, a capacity for ruthlessness to equal that of Ataturk and his followers in suppressing ethnic, tribal and religious opposition. For the pleasant Western story of Turkey’s ascent to its fragile democracy of today ignores both the length of time this took and the hecatomb of corpses on which the modern Turkish state was originally built.
With the exception of the dreadful atrocities perpetrated in East Bengal in 1971 – committed against people whom the Punjabi and Pathan soldiery regarded as alien, inferior and Hindu-influenced – the Pakistani state has not been able to commit abuses on a really massive scale against its own people, either because, in the case of Punjab and the NWFP, its soldiers were not willing to kill their own people, or, in Sindh