Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [233]
In addition, leading the government from 2002 to 2008 meant that the JUI, like the ANP after 2008, was exposed to the standard accusations against all Pakistani governments: of not having fulfilled their campaign promises of better government and more development; of engaging in corruption; and of not giving my brother/cousin/uncle/ nephew a job, contract, or whatever.
The JUI – a bit like Communists in the past – also suffered from their own inflated promises. They had promised to introduce true Shariah rule in the Frontier, and thereby to transform society. Since by definition the Shariah – being the Word of God – cannot suffer from inherent flaws as far as conservative Pathans are concerned, the explanation of the MMA’s failure in this regard could only be attributed by voters to the failings of the MMA and its leaders.
The MMA had its very origins in Pakistani Islamist outrage at the US invasion of Afghanistan, and took shape in 2001 – 2 as the ‘Pakistan – Afghan Defence Council’. Its six parties included the two wings of the JUI, the JI, three smaller Sunni parties and one Shia party. The inclusion of the Shia and a party belonging to the Barelvi theological tradition (old rivals of the Deobandis) marked the ‘broad church’ nature of the alliance, and also drew a line between the JI and JUI on the one side and extreme anti-Shia Sunni radical groups like the Sipah-e-Sahaba on the other.
The record of the MMA in government between 2002 and 2008 reflected a number of features which say a good deal about the ‘mainstream’ Islamists in Pakistan, about the balance of power between the centre and the provinces, and about Pakistani politics in general. The first was confusion. The government took a long time to put a legislative programme together and, even when it did, no one was quite sure what was and was not a law. Secondly, the only really radical Islamist laws that the MMA government passed (for example, extending the writ of the Shariah in the state legal system) were in any case blocked by the Supreme Court and the government in Islamabad – something that has happened to every provincial government that has attempted serious change.
Lastly, there is the actual content of the MMA’s legislation and governance, which in some respects was very different from the standard view of Islamist politics in the West, and showed an interesting mixture of what in the West would be called ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ elements. The more progressive sides of the MMA government mark the alliance off very clearly from the Taleban, in both its Afghan and Pakistani manifestations. Thus, while on the one hand the MMA tried to bring in a range of measures enforcing public standards of dress for women, and its activists launched vigilante attacks on video stores and other sources of ‘immorality’, on the other hand its government did more than most previous administrations to increase education for girls. This was due not to the JUI, but to the presence in the MMA coalition of the Jamaat Islami and a Shia political party.
When I visited the MMA’s Minister for Local Development, Asif Iqbal Daudzai, in May 2007, he was at pains to emphasize his government’s progressive agenda. This included community participation in developing local infrastructure projects, Rs50 million for improvements in sanitation in Peshawar, and a great increase in primary education, including for girls. While this was doubtless mostly for Western consumption, it did not seem wholly so. He and other government officials laid special stress on their moves to end the negative features of the pashtunwali as far as women are concerned, and in particular what he described as the ‘hateful’ practice of giving girls in compensation as part of the resolution of disputes.
The problem was and is that, as with both previous and later governments, resources are so limited. This was rubbed home by the minister’s own office, which I approached up a flight of broken stairs with hardly a lamp working,