Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [17]
In Pakistan, only the armed forces work even in the second half of this way. For the rest of the state, the law, the judiciary and the police, authority is a matter of constant negotiation, with violence or the threat of it very often one of the cards that can be played on either side. The negotiated nature of the Pakistani state was summed up for me in a grim anecdote from a retired general who in the 1990s was responsible for commanding anti-dacoit operations in Sindh.
A subordinate had run a dacoit gang to earth on the estate of a parliamentarian from the then ruling party, and wanted to send troops in to get them – which would have led to furious protests from the governments in Islamabad and Karachi, and most probably the immediate release of the men arrested. His commander overruled him, and instead invited himself to lunch with the landowner concerned. At the end of a convivial meal, he passed his host a note and said that he’d be personally obliged for his help. The next day, four of the dacoits were handed over to the army with a message from the landowner-politician saying that the general could shoot two of them, but could he please charge the other two before the courts.
‘Any two?’ I asked, somewhat faintly.
No, he said which two we could shoot. Probably they had offended him in some way, or they were not from his tribe. As to the other two, he knew perfectly well that his influence meant that the courts would never convict them, and they would be released after a few months. The courts are useless when it comes to criminals in this country if the criminals have any connections – they are bribed, or scared, or both. That is why if you really want to deal with a miscreant, the only way is to kill him out of hand. This is a hard country, and this is the way things are here, sadly.
This negotiated nature of the state also applies to the workings of democracy. For democracy is representative not only of the people, but of all those classes, groups and institutions through which the popular will is refracted until it eventually finds some kind of distorted reflection in elected institutions. In other words, democracy usually reflects not so much ‘the people’ or ‘the electorate’ as the distribution of social, economic, cultural and political power within a given society. The nature of Pakistani society, and the weakness of real democratic development, are shown among other things by the lack of real, modern, mass political parties, with their own cadres of party workers.
A while spent pondering on these themes should bring out why so much Western analysis of Pakistan misses the mark, because it expects institutions with names like ‘the law’ and ‘the police’ to work as they are meant to work in the West, according to rules rather than negotiation. Similarly, Western language about ‘corruption’ in Pakistan suggests that it can and should be cut out of the political system; but in so far as the political system runs on patronage and kinship, and corruption is intertwined with patronage and kinship, to cut it out would mean gutting Pakistan’s society like a fish.
This of course is precisely what the Islamist revolutionaries would like to do. The modern Islamist political groups are trying to replace the clan and patronage politics of the ‘feudal’ landowners and urban bosses with their own version of modern mass politics, so far with only very limited success. With the partial exception of the Jamaat Islami, the Islamist political parties have themselves been swallowed up by the patronage system. As for the Pakistani Taleban (the Tehriq-e-Taleban Pakistan, or TTP), they are so far a primitive collection of guerrilla and terrorist groups, which would be completely at sea if they