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.
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