Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [230]
Apart from the issue of Afghanistan and the Taleban, the changes in government in 2002 and 2008 were also part of the rather melancholy cycle of Pakistani political life, in which incumbent governments are voted out because of their failure to fulfil their promises, to be replaced by their opponents – who then also fail. Both the ANP and JUI are deeply divided internally, partly along purely factional and family lines, but also over ideology and strategy. This constant, time- and energyconsuming infighting helps swallow up any potential for reform and good governance that may originally have existed.
Businessmen with whom I talked in the NWFP said that there had been absolutely no difference between the last three governments (PML(Q), MMA and ANP) in terms of corruption. The level of bribetaking had remained the same – in other words extremely high. Indeed, a Western businessman in the security construction field said that even in the Middle East he had never seen anything quite like the level of corruption that he had experienced in Peshawar, under both the MMA and ANP: ‘Everyone wants a bribe. And the worst of it is, the government is so chaotic and faction-ridden that even when you pay half a dozen people you can’t be sure of getting a result, or that some new guy won’t pop up asking for his share.’
The voters have little real expectation of radical improvement, but hope that things will get a bit better, and above all that their neighbourhoods or families may draw some specific benefit. As far as the JUI is concerned, taking over the government proved as much of a curse as a blessing. As a result, many ordinary Pathans have come to see the party and its allies as just as corrupt and incompetent as the Pakistani national parties, and no sort of radical alternative to them.
A common answer on the streets of every NWFP town I visited, when I asked people how they had voted in the last elections, was either that they had not voted at all, because ‘the parties are all the same – none of them keep their promises,’ as Sayyid Munawar Shah, a shopkeeper in Peshawar, told me; or, if they had voted for a given party, it was because ‘my father and grandfather voted for them’, or ‘we are followers of such and such Khan, and so we vote for him’. Any kind of convinced support for any of the parties was extremely hard to find.
This was true even outside the front door of the ANP’s headquarters on Pashaggi Road in Peshawar, where the shopkeepers told me that they had not voted in the last elections. ‘Why should we? They are thieves, all of them. They promise and promise, and then do nothing,’ as one told me. The doing nothing was rather obvious. The street was deeply potholed, without street lamps, and littered with stinking rubbish. The idea that enlightened self-interest and party propaganda alone might have dictated an attempt to improve the neighbourhood did not seem to have occurred to any of the party activists lounging listlessly inside their cavernous headquarters – and the same was true of the other party headquarters I visited. With the exception of the Jamaat Islami and the MQM, this is not how Pakistani parties think.
Looking at the condition of Peshawar, I asked several ANP leaders if they had ever thought of trying to initiate some kind of urban renewal scheme like the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi. No one even seemed to understand what I was talking about. However, in this they are only reflecting their own society – for, after all, the shopkeepers on Pashaggi Road might have organized themselves to clean up the rubbish from their front doors, and it hadn’t occurred to them either.
As of 2009, the same fate that befell the MMA seems to threaten the ANP. The party stood for election in February 2008 on a platform of negotiating peace deals with the Islamist militants, gaining increased autonomy for the NWFP, changing the name of the province to Pakhtunkhwa (in line with the other four