Pakistan: As the old is dying, a new struggles to be born

First published at Dawn.

There are a few unique moments in global history when multiple crises, accumulated over a long period of time, express themselves simultaneously with an unprecedented intensity. Such a ‘polycrisis’ combines to form a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling order, highlighting the repressed deficiencies that undergird its apparent stability.

One example of such a moment is the crisis of the global colonial order in the late 19th century, where the scramble for colonies created intense antagonisms between the great European powers of the time. This inter-imperialist rivalry culminated in two World Wars, the rise of fascism, communism and anti-colonial movements, and the emergence of the United States (US) as the primary hegemon in the global order.

The world is now entering another such period of a great transition, with the slow decline of the US and the rapid rise of China. This historical tendency is exacerbated by the polycrisis that involves climate change, economic disintegration, global debt crises, and the emergence of a lethal war industry that combine to undermine the stability of the current order.

An important element of such great transitions is the loss of ideological certainties, with old narratives losing their appeal and being replaced by new ideas, as is being witnessed in the crisis of liberal democracies and the rise of the far-right (and, at times, far-left) parties/figures across the world.

Third World countries such as Pakistan are incorporated into these larger structural tensions that are tearing apart the world today. Beyond the dizzying pace of breaking news, we must decipher the breakdown of the political, economic and ideological anchors that have fallen apart and thrown the Pakistani state into an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy.

A time of transition

The multiple hybrid regimes, the rigged elections, the controlled media and a subservient parliament are all failing to cover-up the instability that haunts the present dispensation, demonstrating the intensity of the challenge faced by those who would want a return to ‘normalcy.’

One of the key elements of a crisis of legitimacy is that it destabilises conventional measures through which a crisis is often averted, producing a state of emergency where the past becomes a poor guide to resolve a radically novel situation.

My contention is that the current political, economic and social crisis engulfing Pakistan is part of long-term historical trends, both global and specific to our own history, that are now maturing into a full blown existential threat to our polity. The grievances have accumulated over time, exacerbated by the ruthless exploitation by the ruling elites and their refusal to follow any legal frameworks that may restrain their power.

On the other hand, the changing geopolitical situation, as well as the declining global economy, has meant that there is very little possibility of a bailout by Western powers. The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) versus the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) drama, and the fissures in the judiciary, military and the media, are reflective of this larger breakdown of structures that once sustained the ruling dispensation.

Moreover, while Imran Khan represents the crisis in its most potent, disruptive element, our tragedy is compounded by the fact that neither he, nor any other political force, has emerged that can present an alternative vision to move beyond the punishing stagnation afflicting our society. The crisis of imagination makes our predicament all the more painful.

We are then living through the ‘End Times’ of a journey that contained much promise, but was derailed by despair, greed and short-sightedness. To discern this fall, the multiple crises of political economy, ideology and political leadership have to be understood in their historical formation that are now combining to impose a permanent form of destabilisation in our system.

The collapse of a rentier economy

The roots of Pakistan’s economic crisis lay in the fateful decisions made by our political elites in the 1950s. Pakistan’s independence occurred at a heightening moment of Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. American author and journalist William Blum, in his fantastic book titled Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, explains how the “bipolar world”, split between the capitalist and the socialist camps, did not reflect the actual power imbalance that existed between the two sides.

The Soviet Union had suffered enormous destruction during the Second World War, including the death of 27 million people, as it fought against a punishing Nazi military occupation. On the other hand, the US did not see its mainland get attacked by war, emerging as the primary industrial power (50 percent of global industrial production) and became the primary creditor of the world.

This imbalance explains why the US aggressively thwarted any left-wing movement in Europe and across the colonial world while the Soviet Union maintained, contrary to the Western narrative, a minimalist interventionist position. This was a time of high prestige for left-wing movements, as they had played a pivotal role in anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles.

Thus, the US, with the aid of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), embarked upon a ruthless campaign of subjugating mass movements in the name of ‘fighting communism’, a crusade that led them to attack or destabilise countries as distinct as Italy, Korea, Angola, Guatemala, Syria, the Phillipines and a host of other countries in the 1950s.

The historian Christopher Simpson meticulously shows how the US camp did not consist of ‘liberal democrats’ but often involved former Nazi sympathisers who were given respectability by the US to fight the “communist threat” in Europe.

In the Third World, this alliance of the ‘free world’ was secured through an alliance with conservative forces that often denounced the more emancipatory ideals of the anti-colonial struggles. The key pillar of this alliance was the military, a conservative force that became the vanguard in the fight against socialism.

The US developed special relations with military officers in countries as diverse as South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and a host of other developing countries. In other words, developmental funds to these countries were tied to their participation in America’s war against communism, which often meant brutal repression at home.

Pakistan’s ruling elites, always anxious of their place in popular politics, made a Faustian pact with Washington by joining the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in 1954 and the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) in 1955, sealing the country’s fate for decades to come.

Pakistan’s incorporation into the global order as a client state meant a surrender of a sovereign path of development for the country. Pakistan’s economic growth was now permanently tied to its relationship with Washington, with massive aid flows generating impressive growth in the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s. Incidentally, all these growth spurts were experienced under military regimes, solidifying the legitimacy of the institution and strangling the prospects of a democratic polity.

Pakistan’s pre-eminent social scientist Hamza Alavi described this expanding power of the coercive apparatuses by calling Pakistan an “overdeveloped state”, where a “military-bureaucratic oligarchy” controlled the levers of power. The power of the landed and industrial elites was secured through the military that used its role as the primary mediator of imperialist rents to cement its hegemony on the political scene.

The impressive growth stories under military regimes veiled a darker reality. Our economic engine was not fuelled by a long term vision for industrial growth, but was linked to perpetual wars in the region in

which we were expected to participate as proxies. In the 1960s, anchoring Pakistan into the anti-communist camp and wiping out Leftist elements in the nascent postcolonial state was central to the CIA’s strategy for the region.

Not only were Leftist organisations repressed, including the tragic murder of the Communist Party of Pakistan’s secretary general Hassan Nasir, democrats from across the spectrum were declared traitors to the federation, putting in place a tradition that continues to haunt us.

One of the most famous ‘traitors’ of this era was ‘Mother of the Nation’ Fatima Jinnah, who challenged Gen Ayub Khan’s dictatorship and suffered an electoral defeat in a presidential election widely believed to be rigged.

Digging the hole deeper

This tendency of centralisation of state authority and the demonisation of opponents was further strengthened under Gen Ziaul Haq, whose draconian repression of political activists, including the judicial murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, stands out as a particularly brutal period.

To compound the problem, the aid flows to Pakistan were tied to the military junta’s commitment to fighting a US-sponsored Afghan jihad, turning the country into a bastion of right-wing militants from across the Muslim world.

The economic boom during the Zia regime was linked to the construction of this jihadi infrastructure, an infrastructure geared towards war, destruction and bigotry, which wrecked Afghanistan and Pakistan while fuelling conflicts across the region. Less than two decades later, Gen Pervez Musharraf’s economic success was also tied to imperialist rents, this time to dismantle this jihadi infrastructure.

The obverse side of this development model was not only economic inequality, but the recurrent collapse that we faced whenever we were abandoned by Washington. Ayub’s development model, built on extreme forms of class and regional inequality, experienced its slow demise when the US pulled its support after the Pakistan-India war in 1965.

The deteriorating economic situation led to riots across Pakistan in 1968-1969, an unexpected victory of anti-establishment forces in the 1970 elections, and a brutal military operation that ended in the dismemberment of Pakistan, concluding the “Decade of Development” with nothing to show but blood and tears.

The same pattern was repeated in the case of Zia and Musharraf regimes. In both cases, America’s diminishing interest in Afghanistan meant an abrupt drying up of resources for Pakistani governments. While Washington became involved in wars elsewhere, the Afghan wars crippled our polity, leading to a rise in religious extremism, prompting repeated internal military operations, and causing the deaths of at least 70,000 Pakistani citizens, including political leaders.

This boom and bust cycle has created a strong consuming class that has benefitted from this rent-seeking behaviour of the state. Yet, the parasitic nature of our elites can be gauged from the fact that their lifestyles are comparable to their counterparts in places such as India, South Korea etc while being decades behind them in industrial/economic output. Instead, their wealth was owed to their links to the Pakistani state, which in turn depended on borrowed money from the US as part of providing its territory and services for America’s proxy wars in the region.

My contention is that this arrangement has come to a definitive end. The US is no longer an industrial power that can give cheap loans to its client states. With a military budget of US$883 billion and a declining industrial base, its ability to demolish far exceeds its ability to reconstruct, as witnessed in a series of wars across the Middle East.

On the other hand, China’s model is geared towards trade and boosting industrial productivity, an enterprise that our rent-seeking elites are singularly incapable of undertaking, as demonstrated by the botched results of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

It is no wonder that abandonment by the US is leading to outbursts by the political leadership, with Imran Khan claiming that his government was overthrown by the US, while Ishaq Dar recently claimed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was punishing Pakistan for geostrategic reasons.

This angst is nothing but the painful withdrawal symptoms of a state addicted to proxy wars and the dollars associated with them. The result is an impossible debt burden that continues to get worse, with over 50 percent of our budget geared towards debt servicing. Instead of debating any reforms, the ruling elites are using the state to impose the costs of their own debt-fuelled lifestyles on to the public through increasing taxation.

Today, the political economy of Pakistan appears akin to what American political scientist Jodi Dean has described as “neo-feudalism”, a system where the rich increasingly impose rents upon society to feed their luxurious lifestyles. In other words, we are witnessing the end of citizenship and the emergence of a new kind of mass serfdom, with all the authoritarianism and militarised control such a tendency entails.

Ideological disarray

The state’s narrative about the ideology of Pakistan is also increasingly viewed with cynicism by an ever-growing section of society. As the American professor of history David Gilmartin has suggested, the Pakistan Movement was always an eclectic mix of Muslim nationalism and more mundane local realities that included social categories such as caste, region, language etc.

In other words, the universalising narrative of the state as an Islamic polity had to contend with historical differences, particularly the question of different nationalities/ linguistic groups that constitute Pakistan. This tension was felt in the early years, with conflicts raging in the peripheries during Jinnah’s own lifetime, including severe hostilities and riots, from the erstwhile North Western Frontier Province (NWFP, now Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) to Dhaka in East Pakistan.

Such tensions were not unique to Pakistan, since most postcolonial national states had to engage with different ethno-national groups to create a unity of purpose. Yet, Pakistan’s fateful decision to join the US camp hastened the centralisation of the state with the excessive power of the military, which viewed assertion of ethnic difference as a negation of the idea of Pakistan.

It was not long before nationalist aspirations were also dubbed as ‘communism’, so that the great anti-communist crusade could be invoked to stifle dissent internally. The tragedy of 1971, where for the first time in human history, a majority population separated from a minority, did not soften the centralising tendencies of the state, as a brutal operation was launched in Balochistan in 1974 to defend the ‘integrity’ of the country.

Similarly, large sections of the Pakhtun population have grown under the shadow of US-sponsored proxy wars fought by the Pakistan state. The militarisation of everyday life, as well as the devastation caused by endless wars, has become an integral part of Baloch and Pakhtun identity.

Unfortunately, constitutional movements — such as the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) and the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) — have also been labelled as ‘traitors’, thus making any compromise increasingly difficult. The vacuum is resulting in the emergence of terrorist organisations, such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA)*, that seek to exploit the ethnic cleavages in the country in order to push the region into a vortex of ethnic hate and bigotry.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that the state no longer even has a monopoly over political Islam. The state’s policy of waging jihad was part of a cynical world view of a rentier state rather than being reflective of any deep ideological commitment. As a result, jihadi and other religious forces have taken the initiative away from the state, often dictating Islam to the state rather than being dictated by it.

Gen Musharraf’s compliance in the US-led War on Terror, allowing drone strikes on Pakistani territory, and conducting military operations against religious groups, has hollowed out the state’s claim to be the primary representative of religion, depriving it of a key ideological cement to discipline populations.

The final frontier for the state was its monopoly over ‘Pakistaniat’, an elusive category that has intense emotional appeal for large sections of society. In that realm, PTI and Khan have decisively displaced the military as the primary expression of nationhood in mainland Pakistan.

For decades, the establishment projected Khan as a political alternative in whom the modernist, corporate aspirations of society coalesce with more traditional virtues of piety and personal integrity. After alienating political leaders from the peripheries and the mainstream, Khan was the final line of defence for the state.

Yet, in a bizarrely whimsical manner, the establishment switched sides, hoping that the military’s historical core support base would abandon PTI. Instead, they moved with the PTI, making Khan the embodiment of ‘Pakistani nationalism.’ Consequently, the state no longer has a monopoly over religion or nationalism, while also struggling to fend off intensifying challenges from ethno-nationalist forces.

Is there a beginning after the end?

Adeel Malik, a scholar at the University of Oxford, has recently published some groundbreaking research on the social transformations occurring in society. Access to social media, university education and new employment opportunities have combined to reduce the influence of traditional power brokers across large parts of Pakistan. This fundamental shift has weakened old political parties that garnered their support from these patronage networks.

Such weakness is amplified by the fact that these parties have been targeted by the establishment for decades but have failed to develop any adequate vision for national politics. The result is that their primary politics now revolve around keeping one individual out of power, a task for which they are ready to jettison long-held principles of constitutionalism that they espoused in the past. In other words, they have been reduced to pure negativity, without a clear vision for what they offer to society.

Khan, on the other hand, represents the spirit of the time, insofar as these new social groups are more willing to coalesce around him. Yet, his stint in power was marred by the fact that he and his party offered precious little in terms of new ideas for Pakistan’s political economy. IMF conditionalities, bulldozing bills in the parliament (similar to what we recently witnessed with the clumsy attempt to pass the 26th Constitutional Amendment Bill), helplessness in front of rent-seeking elites while using severe repression against opponents, and very little discussion on redistribution of economic power were the hallmarks of his brief stint in power.

Even today, PTI’s strength remains its ability to harness the anger of the people through the production of a catchy narrative that feeds into the anxieties and aspirations of people. But a narrative is different from ideology, since the former can be moulded anytime to suit the particular audience one is addressing, while ideology requires a consistency of principles over an extended period of time.

This is why we hear very little from PTI in terms of a concrete vision for the future and a lot on how the current dispensation is a hopeless failure. Consequently, we have entered a stage of revolutionary aesthetics that veil a deep conservatism, an intensification of tactical manoeuvres but without any strategic horizons, and an increasing anger towards the status quo without any proposals for an alternative social contract.

What we are then witnessing in these multiple crises is the culmination of an order that began in the 1950s — a status quo that was propped up by foreign powers to do their bidding in the region, a political economy addicted to war, rents and excessive consumption, a failure to innovate, and a refusal to incorporate difference.

It is resulting in the dismantling of ideological underpinnings of the ruling order and a deep political disorientation, exemplified by the lack of imagination exhibited by political parties. In other words, the old order has lost its raison d’etre, and the instability we witness today is a symptom of a deeper crisis that signals the end of a historical epoch.

In moments of great transitions, repetition of old clichés is not possible. A crisis of imagination often turns into a crisis of adequate language itself. To answer the new questions we are confronted with, we must first be willing to situate ourselves in the novelty that stares us in the face.

There is no going back to becoming a client state for the US, just like there is little possibility of sustaining a rent-seeking economy that seeks to sacrifice the future of millions of children to sustain luxuries for the few. The spectre of ethnic hatred and religious extremism are no longer peripheral concerns but are becoming existential threats for our society.

One must remember that after every end, there is a new beginning. The moment is pregnant with extreme danger and unprecedented opportunities. The task of intellectuals in Pakistan is no longer to regurgitate clichés learnt from the West. Certainties have collapsed everywhere, and what we require are bold new ideas that can help us chart our journey anew in this transformed world.

In that sense, despite the tragic situation, there is an opportunity to rethink history and propose a new social contract around issues deemed taboo. Such ideas must be boldly generated and propagated to find new anchorage for Pakistan in the current moment.

The world is out of joint, and to seek illusions instead of truth in such moments will be a great abdication of intellectual responsibility. Our biggest failure will be if we continue to comfort ourselves with the belief that things will go back to a ‘normal’ equilibrium at some point.

The costs of failure are too high for us to remain comfortable in our illusions.

Ammar Ali Jan is a historian, academic and political organiser. He is the founder and general secretary of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party. 

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  Editor's note: The labelling of the Balochistan Liberation Army as a “terrorist” organisation is a point of debate on the Pakistani left, with some sections rejecting this characterisation.