Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [45]
Bhutto was well aware of the need to create a disciplined cadre party. Ironically enough, he had given precisely this advice to Ayub Khan when he was serving in his government (and Bhutto’s plans for the PPP in some ways echoed Ayub’s hopes for Basic Democracy). But to create such a party across Pakistan it would have been necessary to pay and to motivate its local cadres in such a way as to make them a power in their own right, and independent of local social and economic power structures. That has never been possible in Pakistan, because the state is too poor and weak, and local bosses, kinship groups and religious affiliations are immensely strong. Moreover, no party in Pakistan has been able to generate the ideological fervour required to turn its cadres into purely obedient and disciplined servants.
The only exceptions are the Jamaat Islami and the Mohajir Qaumi Movement – and for reasons that will be explored in Chapters 6 and 8, they have only been able to do this on a local basis. Bhutto’s failure to create a disciplined party also meant that local PPP leaders used the breakdown of state authority to set up their own private armed groups and local fiefdoms, and to engage in violent turf battles with each other as well as with the PPP’s opponents.
Lacking an effective mass party with real control over society, Bhutto was forced back on instruments of state control. He managed to a great extent to bend the bureaucracy and judiciary to his will, though in the process causing personal hatred which contributed to his death. The police were another matter. As successive Pakistani leaders have found – including in the struggle against the Taleban – the Pakistani police, though often savage enough on an individual basis, are an extremely unreliable force when it comes to mass repression. One reason for this is sheer laziness, exacerbated by bad pay. ‘Would you risk your life and run around in this heat for the pay we get?’ was the response of many policemen to whom I suggested a more active approach to fighting crime, and, as in the rest of South Asia, it often seemed to me that ‘Brutality Tempered by Torpor’ wouldn’t be a bad motto for the force as a whole.
More importantly, from a force under the British which was to some extent independent of society and under state control, the Pakistani police at ground level had already become a force colonized by society; that is to say, whose officers and men as often as not were working in alliance with local kinship groups, landowners and urban bosses, classes which they naturally therefore were very unwilling to attack.
Bhutto therefore set up his own paramilitary group, the Federal Security Force (FSF), staffed by PPP loyalists drawn from the most thuggish elements of the police and military; and by doing so, he can be said to have signed his own death warrant. It is not clear whether Bhutto gave specific orders to this force concerning the savage victimization of opponents and their families, but at the very least he played the role of Henry II concerning the murder of Thomas à Becket (‘Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’).
On the other hand, just as the PPP was not the Soviet or Chinese Communist Party, so the FSF was not the NKVD. It was not remotely strong enough to terrorize Pakistani society as a whole into submission. It was, however, strong and vicious enough to raise hatred of Bhutto in sections of the elite to a degree not seen of any Pakistani ruler before or since. Hence in part the difference between Bhutto’s fate and that of Ayub, Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif when they were overthrown. Ayub was allowed to live on in peaceful retirement in Pakistan; Sharif was eventually permitted