bout de papier, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2011) — Fall/Winter 2011 // Automne/Hiver 2011, pp. 43–44
WILL THE LONG MARCH TO
DEMOCRACY IN PAKISTAN
FINALLY SUCCEED? by Sheila Fruman,
Peaceworks No. 73, issued by the US
Institute of Peace, 2011; PAKISTAN, A
HARD COUNTRY, by Anatol Lieven,
Allen Lane (Penguin Books), 2011, 560 pp.
$42.00.
to the country (and even for Pakistanis), never mind for those trying to make sense of events from afar. Fortunately two new publications have appeared that help: Sheila Fruman’s Will The Long March to Democracy in Pakistan Finally Succeed?, Peaceworks No. 73, issued by the US Institute of Peace, and Anatol Lieven’s authoritative Pakistan, a Hard Country, Allen Lane (Penguin Books). Both were published in 2011.
The reason for dealing with both publications in a single review is simple: they complement one another very well, and both are based on intense and extensive personal experience. Sheila Fruman, a Canadian, was Country Director for the National Democratic Institute from 2006— 10 (see her article on Balochistan in Vol. 25, N° 4 of bout). She was a “participant-observer” in the historic transition from General Musharraf’s military and authoritarian rule to today’s flawed democratic rule. Anatol Lieven is Professor of Reviewed by Stuart Hughes
International Relations and Terrorism Studies at King’s College, London, and a former journalist with The Times who worked in Pakistan. He combines the analytical skills of one with the powers of observation of the other to produce the best comprehensive primer written to date (in this reader’s opinion) on the history, nature, structure and function of Pakistani politics.
Sheila Fruman offers a succinct review of the events and dynamics that led to Musharraf’s fall and the worrisome shortcomings of the government of democratically elected President Asif Zardari. She explains that the core issue is not so much the lurching from democratic governance to military rule and back again. Rather, it is the continuous erosion and thwarting of democratic institution building by a succession of military rulers (some elected civilian leaders had similarly authoritarian ways).
That destructive process has marked Pakistani politics almost from its inception; military rule in Pakistan is sometimes overt, often covert, but always above full civilian accountability. Pakistan today is no different: the Inter Services Intelligence agency (the IST) is accountable to the Chief of Army Staff, the military continue to control key parts of the national agenda including relations with India, and Parliamentary oversight over the enormous military budget remains far more notional than real.
Fruman concludes with some 44 recommendations for change. These focus on civil-military relations (asserting civilian control), government (to address social, economic and security ills), Parliament (capacity-building, effectiveness, and transparency), political parties (from feudal, personality-driven entities to democratic and representative organizations), civil society (to buttress democratic institutionality), the media (to help ensure transparency, accountability and fair play), and the international donor community (to harness long term support for democratic institutionality and bring Pakistan into the fold of 21st century democracies). This manifesto for reform offers another promise: to transform Pakistan into a country that has taken charge of its future to become an exporter of international stability and security. It is, in short, a blueprint for an engaged foreign policy for Pakistan.
Anatol Lieven’s achievement is of a different nature, which does not mean his book would be my first choice for bedside reading! His central argument is that the West’s inability to understand how Pakistan functions does not make it a “failed state”. In nearly 500 pages of closely argued text he takes us through intersecting dimensions of a surprisingly resilient country: the land, its people and its history (including the role of Islam); the structures of governance including justice, religion, the military and politics (including the critical and misunderstood role of patronage); the widely varied character of the provinces, notably Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber- Pahktunkhwa (formerly the NWFP); and the key issue of the day — prospects for gaining control of the Pakistani Taliban and reorienting them toward more constructive behaviour.
Central to his thesis is that Pakistan is “Janus faced”. In other words, “…many of the same features of Pakistan’s state and government which are responsible for holding Islamist extremism in check are at one and the same time responsible for holding back Pakistan’s social, economic and political development.” Arguably, the ISI — seen as deeply duplicitous by many in the West — is a perfect case in point in the military sector. It helps track down Al-Qaeda operatives with the US in the collective fight against terrorism while being seen to play patron to some of the most brutal insurgent groups in Afghanistan. Given “the growing conviction that the West is going to fail in Afghanistan and eventually withdraw leaving anarchy and civil war behind”, for some key Pakistani decision makers, the same insurgents that attack American and allied troops (including Pakistani) are seen as important allies in containing chaos on Pakistan’s western borders, not to mention the need to thwart much-dreaded Indian influence.
Lieven also looks well into the future. Barring the highly unlikely event that the US and/or India should invade Pakistan and precipitate its disintegration, he argues that “if it eventually collapses, it will not be Islamist extremism but climate change —an especially grim threat in the whole of South Asia — that finishes it off.’ In short, Pakistan without the Indus is like Egypt without the Nile. He also warns that the wide “instinctive, gut sympathy” the Taliban and extremist groups enjoy in Pakistan runs deep “not because of Islamist extremism, but because of Muslim nationalism and bitter hostility to the US role in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan’s region in particular”. Neither issue is susceptible to quick fixes.
Lieven then narrows the focus and brings his concerns home: that countries with large Pakistani diasporas (the UK and Canada to name two) need to develop forward-thinking, long term and genuinely engaged policies toward Pakistan and the region or risk being sideswiped in domestic politics long after the ability to influence events in the region is lost. In other words, in hindsight the chapter “closed” by the withdrawal of Canadian and other troops from Afghanistan may prove to have been an opening chapter of a much broader drama. To prepare for what seems likely to follow, we could do worse than start with a careful reading of Lieven’s “Pakistan” and consider Fruman’s ambitious blueprint (www usip org/files/resources/Democracy_in_Pakistan.pdf).
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2011) — Fall/Winter 2011 // Automne/Hiver 2011, pp. 43–44. Read the rest of this issue →
