Pakistan's Slide Into Misery

Sumit Ganguly

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2002

Summary:  Three new books detail 50 years of misrule in a country ill served by its overweening military. Now Pervez Musharraf seems bound to repeat these mistakes.

Sumit Ganguly is Professor of Asian Studies and Government at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions since 1947.

After the creation of Pakistan, these ethnic differences quickly came to the fore. The new country's leaders showed scant regard for representative institutions, accommodative policies, or pluralism. And when this neglect resulted in serious political disorder less than ten years later, the military stepped in, inaugurating what would become a long tradition of seizing power. In fact, since this initial coup in 1958, Pakistan has been ruled by its military for more than half of its history. Even when civilian governments have managed to assume power, they have for the most part been hamstrung by pressures and demands from the military -- the best-organized entity in the country.

In forging Pakistan's foreign policy, successive regimes have made matters worse by further bolstering the military's prerogatives. To do so, both civilian and military rulers have exaggerated the threat from India (asserting, for example, that India seeks to repossess the entire territory of Pakistan), single-mindedly fastened on the unresolved Kashmir dispute, and assiduously courted the United States as a strategic ally.

The military alliance with the United States has been the subject of considerable polemic but little dispassionate examination from Pakistani, as well as Indian, writers. Pakistani scholars, most notably the historian Ayesha Jalal, have sought to blame the U.S.-Pakistan nexus and India's putative aggressive posture for Pakistan's pervasive militarism. For their part, Indian academics, particularly the historian Mannakal Venkataramani, have argued that Pakistan's hostility toward India was largely fueled by the former's military relationship with the United States. Kux's book, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies, provides a more disinterested account of the creation and development of the strategic relationship between Washington and Islamabad. By thoroughly examining the U.S. documentary record and interviewing both American and Pakistani decision-makers, Kux has revealed that Washington's interest in such a relationship was actually scant at first. It was only Pakistan's adroit and sedulous diplomacy, combined with India's refusal to align with the United States during the early Cold War, that led to the formation of this bond. Kux also shows that, far from encouraging Pakistani adventurism against India, key individuals in various American administrations have repeatedly sought to thwart Islamabad's attempts to inveigle the United States into adopting an uncritically pro-Pakistani posture on Kashmir.

All the same, the U.S. friendship has translated into substantial military and economic assistance for Pakistan. And such aid has further bolstered the prerogatives of Pakistan's military, thanks in part to the weaknesses of the country's civilian institutions. During the Cold War, the United States agreed to ignore Pakistan's internal arrangements as long as its ally remained staunchly anticommunist. Free from any American pressure to pursue domestic political reform, Pakistan's military and its conservative civil service skewed the nation's developmental priorities, privileged the military's own position, and did little to dismantle the country's feudalistic, inegalitarian social structures. Unlike neighboring India, for example, Pakistan never undertook even a modest program of land reform.

The debility of Pakistan's institutions and its failure to modernize politically is vividly portrayed in Weaver's Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan. In some of the book's more striking vignettes, she shows just how utterly unable Islamabad has been to control vast swaths of territory in tribal Baluchistan and feudal Sindh. In Baluchistan, tribal lords still dispense justice based on local customs and practices -- in many cases simply ignoring the laws of the Pakistani state. And Islamabad, for its part, has done little to bring economic development to this vast, trackless region where violent secessionism remains prevalent. Despite devoting much of her book to Sindh, however, Weaver does not discuss one of the most critical fault lines that cleaves the province: the recrudescent violence between locals and mohajirs (Muslims who immigrated from India during and after partition).

Still, the anecdotes that Weaver uses to paint her portrait of Pakistan provide carefully crafted glimpses of its many pathologies. Through an extended tale of illegal falconry, for example, she shows how sybaritic sheiks from the Persian Gulf (most prominently from Saudi Arabia) flagrantly violate Pakistan's laws governing the hunting of endangered wildlife. Such tales reveal the endemic corruption that invariably emerges as state authority and institutional order corrode.

Many of Weaver's accounts, unfortunately, have a breezy, chatty tenor that entertains more than it informs. And despite its current-events title, many of the essays she includes were written several years ago (in many cases for The New Yorker) and are thus quite dated. Although she has sought to update the book to take account of more recent events, Weaver's efforts feel a bit contrived. For example, her long conversations with Benazir Bhutto do illuminate the myriad problems and challenges that a young, Western-educated woman encountered as the first female prime minister of a deeply conservative and patriarchal country. Yet these interviews offer few insights into Pakistan's contemporary political realities, in which Bhutto's political relevance is limited. Although Bhutto continues to command some support from her Pakistan People's Party and segments of the electorate, her husband (a former cabinet minister) languishes in a Pakistani prison on corruption charges, and she herself faces arrest if she returns from exile. Bhutto's attempt to register as a candidate for the October parliamentary elections was quashed by the election tribunal of the Sindh High Court. Under these conditions, any political comeback appears unlikely.

A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

A more compelling analysis of Pakistan's institutional weaknesses and the capricious behavior of most of its leaders can be found in Jones' Pakistan: Eye of the Storm. This work leavens the historical record with investigative reportage and thoughtful judgments about Pakistan's likely future. Jones relies less on anecdotes than does Weaver, as he seeks to unravel the key historical and political strands that have brought the country to its current plight.

His deft summary of the historical forces that have contributed to the current disaster will sound familiar to South Asia specialists. But Jones is good at connecting historical evidence to contemporary developments. For example, in a superb and unsparing chapter on the army's role, he shows how Pakistan's military rulers have not only usurped political power but have distorted the country's priorities and sustained unremitting hostility toward India. These dictators have also managed to siphon off substantial economic resources, even while accusing Pakistan's civilian politicians of being the ones who have raided the treasury. (Look at the country's annual budgets, more than a third of which goes to the military, and it should become clear who has done the bulk of the raiding.) Shielded from most criticism and scrutiny, furthermore, the army has pursued flawed strategies to wrest Kashmir from India. To this end, it has repeatedly made overly optimistic assessments of its own prowess, uncritically assumed the reliability of potential allies, and routinely underestimated India's military tenacity and political resolve. These decision-making pathologies have cost Pakistan dearly in both blood and treasure while bringing it no closer to dislodging its enemy from Kashmir.