Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [48]
But while this two-party balance – like those of India and Bangladesh – has demonstrated its resilience, neither party has demonstrated its ability to provide good government to the country, let alone radical reform. The ‘democratic’ period of the 1990s was a miserable episode from the point of view of governance, apart from the privatization and economic stabilization measures introduced by the second Muslim League administration from 1997 to 1999. Both PPP and Muslim League governments used illegal methods against political opponents, and savage (though perhaps unavoidable) ones to contain ethnic and sectarian violence.
The PPP’s economic and social populism remained at a level of pure rhetoric, with the government of 1988 – 90 distinguishing itself as the only Pakistani government not to pass a single piece of new legislation. The Muslim League’s Islamist policies also remained largely symbolic, contained no element of the social justice and progress which is the hallmark of such policies at their best (for example in Turkey), and often seemed designed mainly to boost the personal authority of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Both PPP and Muslim League governments were corrupt, owing chiefly to the perennial need to reward kinsfolk and supporters. For example, the PPP Speaker of the National Assembly from 1993 to 1997 (and prime minister after 2008), Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, created or freed no fewer than 500 jobs in various parliamentary services to give to his supporters. The PPP leadership under Benazir Bhutto (and her husband Asif Ali Zardari) went beyond patronage and limited corruption into outright kleptocracy.
Despite their high claims both main parties have been the prisoners of Pakistan’s political society and Pakistan’s political culture. As later chapters will analyse, the first has made them dependent on patronage systems necessary to reward local power-holders. The second has meant that, whatever their ‘democratic’ pretensions, both parties in fact function as dynastic autocracies, with no internal elections and all key decisions and appointments made by the head of the dynasty and his or her closest relatives and advisers. At the time of writing, there is no sign that either of these parties is capable of transcending these deeply ingrained patterns of Pakistani life.
PART TWO
Structures
3
Justice
From the unwritten comes the law which is sanctioned by use, because long-lasting customs, which are approved of by agreement of those who are used to them, resemble laws.
(Code of Justinian)1
A visit to the Mohmand Tribal Agency in September 2008 (described further in Chapter 11) summed up for me the attitudes of most ordinary Pakistanis to the official judicial system, and how the Pakistani Taleban have been able to exploit this to their advantage. As Tazmir Khan, a farmer, told me, to the approval of the other local men sitting with him,
Taleban justice is better than that of the Pakistani state. If you have any problem, you can go to the Taleban and they will solve it without you having to pay anything – not like the courts and police, who will take your money and do nothing.2
Strikingly, his views were supported by the steward and the mullah of the local malik landowning family whom I was visiting, and in whose dusty, sun-drenched yard we were sitting – men who were, if by no means members of the elite, then not part of the truly downtrodden masses either. The steward, Shehzad, spoke approvingly of a recent case of Taleban justice:
Last week, a woman and her husband from Shapqadar were killed. She was a prostitute and he was selling her. So the Taleban warned her twice, then arrested them, killed the husband, cut off her nose, gouged out her eyes and drove a car over her.
The mullah, Zewar,