[lbo-talk] Pakistan and its Future

Politicus E. epoliticus at gmail.com
Thu Apr 16 05:55:12 PDT 2009


A blog that I often read, playfully entitled Pass the Roti on the Left Hand Side, had an interesting entry regarding Pakistan. It was written by one who goes by the name of Dr. Anonymous in response to Wajiha Ahmed. (Ahmed had a guest post on a blog called Sepia Mutiny, popular with the liberal stratum of the S. Asian diaspora in the U.S. See http://tinyurl.com/cjh82w ).

Here is Dr. Anonymous (21 March 2009):

Wajiha Ahmed recently wrote a refreshing post on Pakistan on Sepia Mutiny.
> Here are the two key points for me:
>
> [1] democracy is not an event, it is a process.
> [2] a structural reality: prolonged military rule (for more, read Ayesha
> Siddiqa’s Military Inc or Ayesha Jalal’s Democracy and Authoritarianism).
>
> If these two items are taken together, they effectively capture the problem
> that Pakistan's polity faces - how do you go from a political system and
> economy dominated by and increasingly suffused by various parts of the
> military / military bureaucracy / other non-elected institutions to one that
> is liberal or social democratic? I would guess that in practice, this will
> HAVE to involve some resurgent democratic Pakistani populism in order to
> stretch its roots down from the lawyers/"civil society" to shop owners, etc.
> to become stable and socially embedded enough. And as with many other
> places, this could speak through the language and discourse of Islam, as
> much as we might hope that it would not.
>
> But this is a guess - the devil is in the details. I don't understand the
> social structure of Pakistan well enough, nor how it interacts with
> Pakistan's politics. I don't know what the divisions within the military as
> an institution are like today and how these can be exploited (e.g. perhaps
> akin to the BDR mutiny in Bangladesh - though I don't know enough about that
> either). But I do know enough to know that in Pakistan, often surface level
> phenomenon-- for example "civilian rule" in the 1990s that was completely
> under the control of the military--are deceptive if the underlying forces
> are not revealed. Siddiqa's book does this to some extent as does Jalal.
> I would also recommend Ian Talbott, Christophe Jaffrelot, Hamza Alavi,
> among others.
>
> Moreover, the most important point that is rarely considered in discussing
> "Pakistan's" problems is that the conditions and events that would lead to a
> more democratic system have to be allowed by external forces like the U.S.
> and Europe. In the past, because of Pakistan's lack of power (autonomy) and
> the legitimacy problem its governments face internally, the industrialised
> world has been able to consistently foster conditions that would make a
> democratic transition virtually impossible. You can read about its
> beginnings in a book by Jalal or an essay by her in South Asia and World
> Capitalism, ed Sugata Bose or in some of Hamza Alavi's work, for example.
> This is very different from China or India.
>
> As a result, the more outsiders and outside elites focus on "Islamism" or
> Afghanistan/NW or "terrorism" in their discussions of Pakistan, the more
> they make it unlikely that they will pursue policies that will allow a
> successful democratic upheaval or a prolonged democratic movement as partly
> occurred in Iran or British India or in Pakistan in the 1960s, to take just
> a couple of examples.
>
> Will the U.S. government and the media tolerate a democratised state with a
> subservient-enough military that controls its internal territory even less
> than now? Will they tolerate an islamized democracy? In the near term, it's
> hard for me to imagine though it is possible - the world is changing. Or
> will the swings between nominally civilian and actual military rule continue
> along the present path continue while the military increases its dominance
> over society? This seems easier to imagine, but harder to vouch for
> morally or even analytically since, as we know, past performance is not
> always indicative of future results.

Pass the Roti on the Left Hand side lives at passtheroti.com.



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