Acountry in Pakistan’s position—domestic insurrection, angry neighbours, economic fragility, deep corruption—needs a strong government with a clear view of the realities. Ex-president Pervez Musharraf tried to provide this, and failed. He was, to my view, one of the better Third-World military dictators, with what appeared an honest, patriotic commitment to steering his country towards safety and a legitimate constitutional order. But in the end he either could not or would not take the ruthless measures necessary to defeat the Islamist insurgencies in the North-West Frontier and Baluchistan, resolve the Kashmir issue with India, remove restraints on enterprise, and defeat bureaucratic pilfering.
Let history judge, and in the meanwhile I think the answer is probably, “could not.” Musharraf could neither command the unambiguous loyalty of the country’s only truly national institution—the army—nor persuade his countrymen, and the self-serving political elites, of the urgency of the crises Pakistan is facing. “Could not” because Pakistan cannot be unified around any principle other than the Islamic identity with which she set out from her founding; and because the military is progressively abandoning its own balancing secular ideals, and is now infiltrated with officers who think the Shariah provides all the answers.
But if “could not” is the answer, Pakistan is doomed. The corrupt politicians, playing to their respective ethnic constituencies, failed to provide any national direction before; and the current party leaders are by no means a new generation. Nawaz Sharif could manage nothing beyond nuclear brinkmanship and economic fiasco, in his previous terms as prime minister; and Asif Zardari—the widower of Benazir Bhutto, and “Mister Ten Percent” in her own last corrupt administration—makes Mr. Sharif look almost competent and respectable.
They are both now principally concerned with the complicated business of reinstating Supreme Court judges who had been dismissed by Musharraf for political grandstanding—in such a way as to prevent either party leader from having to face the consequences of previous criminal convictions. It is their only remaining common interest.
For the last few months they had had one more—getting rid of Musharraf, by orchestrating some kind of impeachment proceeding. They seemed genuinely surprised when the unpopular Musharraf resigned, and are now scrambling to appoint a new president who will agree to ignore the extraordinary powers that Musharraf had arrogated to the office. And there’s the rub: for both would ideally like to have that power.
“Democracy” is of course a very pretty thing, in the abstract, but in Pakistan as in so many other countries lacking constitutional continuities (including several in Europe), it easily degenerates into clan warfare. Which would be well if the country had nothing better to do than watch a (potentially violent) soap opera unfold.
Pakistan’s case is, in an especially advanced form, also that of other Muslim countries whose boundaries were drawn by the retreating European powers, a couple of generations ago. They share, in that sense, the problem of sub-Saharan Africa; they are “modern” nation states erected on alien European principles over foundations of mud or sand, lacking the bond of tribal homogeneity.
What makes the Muslim countries different, besides the presence of vast oil fields under several of them, is the siren call of Islam from a mostly imagined past. For peoples suddenly yanked from ancient customary arrangements of village and tribe into the squalid urban glitz of contemporary Mammon, the craving for moral order is very powerful. But Islam can provide no historical model for a modern nation state, only empires; and when it does try, we get the Taliban.
The only alternative to this appears to be the slow, soul-destroying slog towards a secular and deracinated modernity. Nations like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, have made that leap in stages; but they had the benefit of ethnic homogeneity. India, more remarkably, seems to be making it without. Pakistan has the disadvantage of having rejected the Indian model, without having a workable alternative.
Meanwhile we, in the West, have a serious problem with international Islamist terrorism, and as we discovered on Sept. 11, 2001, it requires that we intrude into the sanctuaries of al-Qaeda, in the remotest ungovernable districts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir. We cannot simply leave that problem to resolve itself, nor practically hope of any success without the active cooperation of every regional government.
If Pakistan cannot hold together, our problem must necessarily grow very large. Predictably, Pakistan’s terrorists are now celebrating Musharraf’s departure with a bombing spree.
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