Daily Times

Albert Einstein had a definition for insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Fifteen years after the coup that brought former President Pervez Musharraf to power, this has become uniquely applicable to Pakistan. It seems that no matter how hard we try, we cannot shed the messiah complex that feeds a desire for strong military men to do vague things like ‘take charge’ and ‘sort everyone out’. It is built on several erroneous and self-defeating perceptions, among them that the ‘masses’ are not ‘ready’ for democracy, that we as a nation require a ‘stick’ to keep us in line, and that individual ‘strongmen’ can effect institutional change. We have a terrible self-image that from the country’s entrenched economic and power elites has trickled down to the masses far more consistently than the so-called benefits of finance- and capital-based economic models euphemistically called the ‘free market’. Pakistan’s tortured political past is a reflection of our tortured national soul and every military intervention is the equivalent of Romanesque self-flagellation.

Pakistan has been run directly by the military for half of its existence and indirectly for most of the other half. Arguments for military rule stem from a negative self-image. However, the arguments against it are premised in historical facts. In 1971, 13 years of military rule ended with civil war and the break-up of the country. Pakistan began 1977 as a relatively poor but progressive country with no particular history of violent militancy and ended 1988 awash with foreign militants and arms, discriminatory and violent religious laws, and the machinery for creating brainwashed Islamist warriors. In 1998 Pakistan was a country with limited diplomatic credibility and some sectarian violence, but thanks to a duplicitous dual policy on the Taliban, ended up in 2008 as an international pariah that is assumed to have a hidden agenda in diplomatic affairs, and with rampant terrorism.

In fact the main outcome of Pakistan’s military governments has been retardation of the political process, so much so that our national discourse is being hijacked by an ex-cricketer with fascist tendencies and a cleric with overtly fascist aims. A controlled and edited national discourse has in fact fed the negative traits of historical ignorance, lack of civic ethics, and cultural or religious intolerance that are cited as reasons for military interventions. It is a vicious cycle: military governments control information and disseminate propaganda to solidify or justify their rule, but those practices create more ignorance. Legitimacy is a consistent problem for military governments in Pakistan: even after being established initially, with the passage of a certain period of time the question raises its head again. This is inevitable in a country that is ethnically and economically diverse and can only be (temporarily) postponed by creating partnerships with non-military political forces, leading to two outcomes. The first is a parliamentary coterie of politicians who will support the military dictator in his role as a civilian head of state, i.e. a ‘King’s party’. Ziaul Haq had Muhammad Junejo in a non-party parliament and after Pervez Musharraf’s judicially mandated period of three years as Chief Executive came to an end, he was forced to do the same in 2002, first through a presidential referendum widely panned as fixed, and then by holding elections that returned a showcase parliament, allowing him to become president. The other outcome is establishing local bodies of some form, like Ayub Khan’s Basic Democracies or Musharraf’s nazim (mayoral) system. The intelligentsia blames civilian governments for routinely undoing the framework of local government, even when it is genuinely helpful to people; however this also occurs because so many politicians have been fostered within a military mindset that autocracy is second nature to them. The intelligentsia on the other hand has through opportunism and lack of principle abetted every change of government when it was in its own interest to do so, notwithstanding its momentary and fleeting support for democracy. In a country where the people who are meant to be principled are so fickle, is it any wonder that 15 years after the 1999 coup, the lessons that should have been learnt have yet to be fully absorbed? *