This article is part of a series titled “Is There A Way Forward For Pakistan?”. Read more about the series here.
Pakistan stands not just on the brink of an economic disaster today but also faces an imminent meltdown of its state institutions. With each passing day, the Pakistani state looks increasingly dysfunctional. While there is an elected coalition government at the helm, the country appears rudderless. The parliament has been rendered ineffective and irrelevant by the largest opposition party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) of former prime minister (PM) Imran Khan, staying out of the National Assembly.
Unwilling to enter a dialogue with the government, Imran Khan has been calling for fresh elections, since his ouster through a vote of no-confidence in April last year. The PTI chief had a very public falling out with his patron, the former Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa in November 2021, eventually leading up to Khan’s ouster. The rancor between the two has by leaps and bounds since, with Khan dragging General Bajwa over the coals daily. The President of Pakistan, Dr. Arif Alvi – a PTI partisan – has locked horns with the country’s Chief Elections Commissioner (CEC) over the dates for provincial elections that come due in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and the Punjab provinces, after the PTI dissolved the two assemblies. After the president, the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SC) jumped into the fray over the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) dithering and ordered various authorities to fix the dates. But in the process, the SC, and especially the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) made a very controversial public spectacle of itself. Four SC judges openly dissociated themselves from the CJP, effectively expressing their distrust in how he is presiding over the highest court of the land. The development was highly unusual but not unprecedented. In 1997, a majority of SC judges had rebelled against the then CJP, albeit for different reasons.
What is unprecedented though are the palpable divisions in the army brass. The Pakistan army, arguably the most powerful entity in the country, has been an extremely disciplined outfit. Technically, a department of the ministry of defense, the army sees itself as an institution in the Pakistani state structure, which has always acted in unison to preserve its institutional interests. And for all practical purposes, the army is the chief and chief the army. While the decision-making is collective, the COAS is the face of the army’s unbridled power. But when the army decided upon the controlled demolition of its failed hybrid regime experiment, wherein it ruled jointly with Imran Khan, the brass, especially General Bajwa faced criticism from the officer class. In the end, the army went through with dismantling its Imran Khan project but in the process discovered itself to be a divided house. The incumbent COAS, General Syed Asim Munir, whose appointment Imran Khan had cast aspersions over, hasn’t been heard from much. While this could be him keeping in line with the army’s proclamation that it intends to remain neutral in the political matters or a more plausible scenario where the COAS hasn’t consolidated his authority.
Decades of army patronage have helped Imran Khan create not just a devoted public following but also a sizeable following within the civil bureaucracy, judiciary and, above all, the armed forces. The odious potion disparaging traditional politics and politicians, which the army had helped him peddle, was also consumed by its own. Capitalizing on his support in the army rank and file, Imran Khan has continued with his relentless assault on the former COAS Bajwa. Large sections of media, which previously parroted only the official army line, have sided with Imran Khan, drawing some notable but ineffective reprimand orchestrated by the current brass. And case after case, the superior judiciary, which has been the army’s handmaiden for the better part of the country’s existence, has given Imran Khan a kid glove treatment, indicating either a nod from a section of the brass or trying to chart its own course absent a directive from the army. Pakistan is, in effect, a house divided against itself. Add to this volatile mix a resurgence of the home-grown Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorists, and disaster in near future is writ large.
Most, if not all, the factors contributing to the morass Pakistan finds itself in today, are of the army’s making over the past 65 years, and should be put into perspective, when looking for a way out. While Pakistan was founded on the basis of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Two-Nation Theory, as a country for the Muslims of India, not much else about the direction the new state would take was clear. Jinnah, who passed away after year of the country’s founding, was not much of a writer and didn’t leave any written treatise about the national, constitutional, and economic orientation of the nascent state. His thoughts and vision were expressed mostly in his speeches and correspondence. Jinnah’s actions and views – often self-contradictory — were meticulously archived by Jinnah and his associates, but have been interpreted, unsurprisingly, by his detractors and admirers according to their own political, religious or ideological leanings.
In the absence of a clear roadmap, this makes his legacy infinitely negotiable and thus problematic to derive legitimacy from. The debates in the first Constitutional Assembly clearly show that politicians such as Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Ghaffar Khan and Bhupendra Kumar Datta et al had presciently called for the new state to be a pluralistic and progressive democratic federation of the diverse religio-ethno-national entities it included. Suhrawardy even warned that limiting trade ties with India and levying tariffs on exports would have dire economic consequences. But most importantly, he suggested replacing the Muslim League (ML) with what he called a Pakistan Nationalist League.
On the other hand, Jinnah’s close associates like the first PM Liaquat Ali Khan and scores of clergymen the founding father had gathered in his ML and in the assembly, proposed an Islamic identity for the state, and prevailed. But the bickering ML leaders, large numbers of whom had no electoral base in Pakistan, quickly lost political ground to a combination of the civil-military bureaucracy, out of which the army eventually prevailed.
After the partition of India, Pakistan inherited about one-third of its military and under one-fifth of its population and revenue sources. Being the largest organized entity in the new country’s chaotic polity, the army not only grabbed power in 1958 but also clearly enunciated its vision for the new state based on “Islamic ideology”. The military establishment anointed itself the guardian of not just the physical frontiers of Pakistan but also of the ‘ideological frontiers’ and smeared as anti-Islam and traitor, anyone who would challenge that notion. The usurper junta desperately needed a fortifying cement for the multi-ethnic state that would not just hold the various ethno-national entities in the two wings together but also legitimize and consolidate the military’s controlling position. The army made a conscious decision to transform Pakistan into an ideological, national security state as against a democratic, pluralist nation-state championed by politicians like Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, whom the military had toppled and disparaged. Field Marshal Ayub Khan codified, in writing that the supra-ethnic Pakistani identity was to be Islamic in ideology and anti-India in military orientation, while its economic model would be a quasi-market economy literally financed by the US and western aid. To peddle its version of nation-building without any opposition, the junta cracked down on both the free press and political opposition.
All militaries, however, are uniquely ill-trained professionally and intellectually to rule the complex civilian societies, multi-ethnic states and modern governments, and invariably fall back on civilian collaborators. Discussing this design flaw in the militaries world over, Samuel Finer points out in The Man on Horseback: the role of the military in politics, that “politically the armed forces suffer from two crippling weaknesses, which preclude them, save in exceptional cases and for brief periods of time, from running without civilian collaboration and openly in their own name … one weakness is the armed forces’ technical inability to administer any but the most primitive community. The second is their lack of legitimacy: that is to say their lack of moral title to rule”. And this has rung true in case of every army dictator who has ruled Pakistan.
After an initial rule purely by the junta, Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf, all brought in a coterie of pliant civilians to run the government. Every single Pakistani dictator resorted to coercing and coopting the superior judiciary, introducing some aberration into the constitution and/or manipulating the parliament to give legitimacy to their rule. From elections heist to fraudulent presidential referenda, from sham devolution of governance to local bodies to raising or appropriating political parties, from martial law to presidential rule, and from a tutelary role to a hybrid regime, the army has tried every trick in the book cling on to power. And predictably the playbook has not changed one bit since the first martial law.
Decades of constant meddling in the political process, tampering with the constitution, and manipulation of the state institutions, however, has had catastrophic consequences. Perpetual political engineering by the army has not just stunted the natural evolution of the state institutions but has made them disfigured and dysfunctional. Visualizing the smaller nations like the Baloch, through the national security lens rather than an equitable rights-based approach, and consequently unleashing a dirty war on them has pushed them to alienation and militancy. Additionally, the army’s use of jihadist proxies to prosecute its warped foreign policy has had bloody domestic blowback in the form of groups like the TTP that have been unleashing terror at home for over a decade-and-a-half.
The military, which is also the country’s leading business enterprise, however, has a vested interest as an economic class that it seeks to secure and perpetuate. It benefits immensely from fomenting discord with Pakistan’s neighbors as that helps it not only retain its preeminent position as the arbiter of national interest and security but a direct beneficiary of the domestic defense budget allocations and foreign military aid.
Perpetual political engineering by the army has not just stunted the natural evolution of the state institutions but has made them disfigured and dysfunctional.
The national security state façade is built at the expense of economic growth and diverts resources from health, education and social welfare sectors and tramples upon civil liberties and provincial autonomy. But while the army would seek to preserve its powerful position in Pakistan’s polity, the virulent mutations it has introduced into the state structures over the past decades, and especially during its hybrid regime experiment with Imran Khan, have compounded exponentially. The rot in the organs of the state is deeper than anyone thought, and it has put their viability into question. A fundamental reason that had kept the army’s four martial law regimes and a near-uninterrupted tutelary status afloat was the largesse received primarily from the US as an ally during the Cold War and the so-called War on Terror, to a lesser extent from Saudi Arabia and Gulf Sheikhdoms for mercenary duties, and later on from China for serving as a client counterweight to India. With the windfall from all these patrons effectively drying out over the past several years, the ugliness of the praetorian ventures has been laid bare. The tiff between Imran Khan and General Bajwa came to light after their bickering over the appointment of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) director, but it truly had started over the country’s coffers drying up when the international gravy train came to a grinding halt.
The situation as it stands today is untenable. Pakistan looks down an economic and political abyss. Problems are myriad and solutions far and few between. It would take a herculean effort on part of the political parties to first come together to take stock and then bring the public at large, onboard to understand the gravity of the complex the crises the country is in. The political effort would have to be geared towards demanding of army to put its money where its mouth is. The army has proclaimed that it has decided to stay neutral and not meddle in the political affairs.
But that is not enough. Both the former army chief, General Bajwa and his ex-chief spook, Lt. General Faiz Hameed have confessed to violating the constitution and installing their blue-eyed boy Imran Khan in the high office. Before that, the duo had the orchestrated, in connivance with the superior judiciary, the disqualification of the erstwhile PM Nawaz Sharif on cooked-up corruption charges. In addition to that, their hands are smeared with the blood of the Baloch and illegal detentions of the Pashtun nationalists. The army could show the veracity of its words by bringing the two to book. The chances are, however, slim to none that anything of the sort would transpire. On the contrary, the army might actually go back on its word and consider an overt intervention if it decides that its institutional imperatives to preserve and perpetuate its preeminence demand such a drastic move.
Samuel Finer has discussed that a military putsch is generally a function of and an interplay between an army’s disposition to intervene vis-à-vis the opportunity existing on the ground for such intervention. Pakistan’s history has shown that its army has always maintained a relentless disposition and readiness to intervene. It has seized the opportunity when one popped up or manufactured one if none existed. The current political instability is reminiscent of the 1976-77 bitter feuding between the then PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the opposition parties, which culminated in General Ziaul Haq taking full advantage of the chaos and imposing martial law. While the economic viability and international acceptance of a martial law regime today would be questionable and make such intervention less likely, it might serve to consolidate the incumbent COAS’ rather precarious position within the brass and rally the army behind him. Another wild card is the judiciary, which while appearing to side with Imran Khan currently, may eventually cast its lot with the army when push comes to shove.
The politicians, especially those in the coalition, have to put their house in order to preempt and stymie any adventurism. To bring Pakistan back from the brink requires a political will and capacity of the Himalayan proportions, which the incumbent civilian dispensation seems to lack. It would, however, behoove them to at least try to build a consensus for a new charter of democracy that calls for holding the previous putschists and their collaborators among the judiciary, bureaucracy, and politicians accountable.
There are already calls from the senior coalition partner Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) to court-martial the former ISI chief, General Faiz Hameed, and proceeding against the complicit judges. But as General Hameed has himself declared, he was but an operative – albeit a powerful one – in a grand institutional scheme authored by the top brass and commissioned by General Bajwa. Instead of punitive measures against him, the political leadership should call for a truth and reconciliation effort, the forum for which should be the parliament. But that would require a massive political heavy lifting and vigorous narrative-building, for which the current government does not have the intellectual bandwidth and institutional wherewithal. There does not appear to be any organic grassroots effort on the horizon either that would hold the civil and military elite’s feet to the fire. Sections of the intelligentsia have made the clarion call, but absent a political response to it, prospects of bringing Pakistan back from the brink are dim.
The writer is a Pakistani-American columnist and commentator. He tweets @mazdaki.
 of former prime minister (PM) Imran Khan, staying out of the National Assembly.){kind=link}