Daily Times

November 14 marked the birthday of a woman whom I consider no less than a mother, Fauzia Wahab, a two-time PPP parliamentarian and former information secretary of the party. The reason why I consider her as a mother is because she was the person who motivated me to write letters to editors, blogs, and potentially have my contributions published in newspapers. Belonging to rural Sindh and equipped with a degree in medicine, I landed a job at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad. I met her in Islamabad when she came for a check up at PIMS and I showed her my interest in writing on social issues. Unlike the general perception of politicians being arrogant, she listened to me and guided me. I would show her my pieces and she would comment on how to improve them further. She would treat me like a son and I would call her ammi (mother) out of affection. That is my personal reason for adoring the lady, whose life was cut short by a botched surgery. However, there are more things our readers should know about a middle class lady achieving what many others cannot.

She was a single mother who brought up four children after her husband died of a heart attack in 1993. Having no assets but equipped with a solid education, she joined the corporate sector and then entered her real passion: politics. Her story is one that leaves a listener inspired. Shaheed Benazir Bhutto plucked her out of nowhere to contest the 1997 general elections and then appointed her to head the human rights cell of the PPP. In those difficult times of witch-hunting by the

Along with the mobilisation of political support, political threats are one of the two basic instruments politicians use to exercise their power. Yet, there is no systematic investigation analysing if political threats actually help politicians maintain any power. Imran Khan filled this gap by addressing the simultaneous relationship between survival and political threats by sending out a protest call for November 30. The results are eagerly awaited but evidence reveals that such political threats certainly decrease the likelihood of a politician’s survival. Political threats are often thought to be the main instrument politicians use to retain pressure and authorities have been consistently found to feel threats more intensively than simple sit-ins. However, there is little comparative evidence studying whether political bullying actually works. Imran Khan argues that nonviolent and regular protests are time dependent and are becoming less effective without political threats, while his successful rallies in Punjab and Sindh essentially serve to reinforce the contrary evidence. Imran has to believe that a massive turnout at his public rallies confirms that political terror only increases the likelihood of violent and irregular exits and he has to instead remain focused on rules that are effective in establishing nonviolent regular exits.

Scholars in international relations have long given threat perception a central role in theories of war. At almost the same time, scholars in international relations schooled in political psychology began to explore threat ‘perception’ and ‘misperception’, paying careful attention to the variance between what political leaders perceive as threatening and what the evidence of intentions and capabilities suggest about conflict resolution. I examine in this contribution as a political psychologist that Imran Khan does often threaten verbally and also uses non-verbal signals to communicate the seriousness of his intent to punish undesirable behaviour he finds annoying in others. He may withdraw his party’s legislators from parliament and drive his political decisions to contested borders but finally, in politics, the accumulation of parliamentary power is only perceived as threatening by others, even if that is not its principal purpose.

Central to my rationalist account of threat perception for the planned November 30 protest is the argument that Imran Khan can now see the dying logic behind his overextended sit-ins and perceives it as a threat to his own and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf’s (PTI’s) political survival. He is marching to political war because he does not have complete information. Privately held information creates uncertainty and in this context, his PTI aides have at times an incentive to misrepresent information about their capabilities and their intentions. This unconscious or conscious misrepresentation of information from his associates and the consequent difficulty in establishing the credibility of the ‘third umpire’s’ signals is an important part of the story of PTI’s crisis escalation and political war.

Closely related are ‘status dilemmas’, which help explain the current political behaviour of the PTI and PML-N. A status dilemma occurs when two political parties would be satisfied with their status if they had perfect information about each other’s political agendas. Without this kind of information, one set of leaders may perceive that its status is being challenged even when it is not. Imran Khan has hence decided to take action to reassert his status, an action which the PML-N as the sitting government will perceive as threatening. And so the spiral begins.

A third set of variables that have shaped threat perception by Imran Khan and the PTI are the structural attributes of the political system. Organisational and bureaucratic politics has produced pathologies where Imran Khan has rightly pointed towards the problems in ways that increase his importance and pushes hard for solutions that will advance the national interest. These demands to protect the national interest can generate and benefit the PTI from either a heightened or reduced level of political threat. Those who seek to draw resources — for example, those bureaucrats, generals and politicians that are responsible for corruption — prevent change and tend to manage the response by pushing for lower threat assessments. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these kinds of politics operate in Pakistan even during peace and without crises. Despite Imran’s attempts to extract national perspectives and limit parochial and political threat perception, he still appears politically naïve in challenging the diseased status quo without the oxygen of constitutional amendments.

A second, quite different explanation emphasises that leaders may send distorted signals because they are attempting to cover weakness. Imran may be speaking to multiple constituencies simultaneously and therefore have an incentive to extract either their sympathies or their votes or both. Benazir Bhutto did so when, constrained by her concern about death threats, she decided to acknowledge publicly that she had received death threats from then President Musharraf and a former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief. She therefore faced enormous difficulty in making her political comments accessible to the voters before the elections. These difficulties led voters to set aside the question of accuracy for PPP leaders on abandoning the systematic process of electing their party leadership, and to focus rather on patterns of sympathy and grievance under different circumstances. Are certain kinds of politicians, situations, or crises associated with particular patterns of threat perception?

I look at the perceptions of intentions and capabilities as the core elements of political threat assessment. It is these two elements, the capabilities and intentions of politicians, which have long been at the centre of political threat assessment. Neither category is unproblematic. Intentions assume purposeful behaviour and Imran Khan has demonstrated that he is not always aware of his preferences and that his preferences may not be stable over time. Capabilities are often difficult to assess. There are obvious and easily counted assets in assessing military capabilities, for example, but less tangible factors such as morale, motivation, loyalty, and leadership are more difficult to assess. Imran has all of them in abundance but he has to remain consistent to make a permanent statement.

The evidence shows that the foxes do much better at short-term forecasting within their broad domain of expertise than do hedgehogs. The worst performers are hedgehogs who make long-term predictions, usually with considerable confidence. Hedgehogs are generally people with strong needs for structure and closure, who are most likely to discount and dismiss inconsistent evidence when it contradicts their preconceptions. The more knowledge hedgehogs have, the better equipped they are to defend against inconsistency. Foxes are sceptical of deductive approaches, more likely to qualify analogies by looking for disconfirming information, more open to competing arguments, more prone to synthesise arguments, more detached, and, not surprisingly, more likely to admit they were in error in their threat assessment. The hallmark of the foxes is their more balanced assessments and style of thinking about the world. Politics is often the art of knowing how to outfox the opposition and the PML-N at this stage certainly gets credit for pushing the inspirational PTI hedgehog to protest.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com

PML-N government of 1997-1999 and later living through the Pervez Musharraf era, she highlighted the plight of victimisation of her party. It is ironic that she obtained a chance to reach parliament on the women’s seats introduced by a military dictator. Coupled with the media revolution, she, along with female parliamentarians like Sherry Rehman, Shehnaz Wazir Ali, Nafisa Shah, Shazia Atta Ma