Home >> South Asia >> India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal

     Email   Print 

Back To The Troika In Pakistan?

Ahmed Quraishi - 2/12/2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—The anti-Musharraf, one-point agenda driving Pakistani politicians and their parties can hardly resolve the challenges facing the Pakistani state today. If Mr. Musharraf is a source of tension, those clamoring to replace him hardly evoke any confidence in their ability to meet Pakistan’s multilayered domestic and external tests post-Feb.18 election.

Less than two weeks to the ballot, Pakistan ’s political parties remain ill prepared to deal with the twin problems of an inherently flawed political system and a hostile regional environment aggravated by United States policy blunders in the region.

As U.S. pundits become increasingly louder in peddling absurd theories about the breakup of Pakistan – an idea feverishly and exclusively promoted these days by the American media – Pakistani officials notice an unusual increase in efforts to destabilize Pakistan originating from an Afghanistan under U.S. control.

In the past three years, the entire Pakistani border region with Afghanistan has seen the mushrooming of shadowy religious groups and, in at least one case, a shadowy terrorist group with an ethnic cover, that insist on fighting the Pakistani state. This is in sharp contrast to the Afghan Taliban who have never acted beyond Afghan borders even when Pakistan supposedly turned into an enemy.

With an effective security and intelligence blockade of these shadowy groups from the Pakistani side, there is little doubt that these terrorist groups are receiving support from the Afghan side to sustain a costly war against an organized military. This environment has even emboldened the Indian military to discard traditional caution and allow its naval chief to make an unusual public statement about Indian reservations on the Sino-Pakistani Gwadar port.

In this environment, Pakistan ’s Feb. 18 election might release some of the bottled domestic political tension. This is what makes it a welcome exercise. But going by past experience, there is little to indicate that this will necessarily stabilize Pakistani politics.

If anything, the post-election jockeying for power is expected to increase domestic instability. Even if President Musharraf resigns, as some of his critics want to see him do, the instability will persist because a peaceful rotation of power is not part of the tradition of the Pakistani political parties. The specter of that kind of instability is worrisome because it could compromise the capability of the Pakistani state to effectively meet the external challenge. This is more so when foreign players are eager to interfere in Pakistani affairs.

There is little doubt that a sizable portion of the blame for today’s messy domestic politics rests with President Musharraf. But not for the common reasons propounded by his political opponents, domestic and foreign. A bigger disappointment for many ordinary Pakistanis who have been exhausted by decades of messy and pointless Pakistani politics is that, during his first term as a powerful president, Mr. Musharraf failed to introduce bold reforms into a flawed political system.

This single oversight appears to threaten his fairly good record on the economy and foreign policy. The Economist noted on Jan. 24 that Pakistan continues to have the best performing stock market in Asia since the start of 2008 despite “reeling from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto” and the resulting political confusion.

This proves two things: One, that Pakistan ’s real problem is a flawed political system overshadowing the country’s potential in other areas, and, two, that this system is hampering Pakistan ’s long term stability.

The cracks in the Pakistani political system will become more visible after the elections with a newly elected prime minister completing the de facto Pakistani troika, i.e. the president, the prime minister, and the army chief. This troika has long been responsible for a weak and quarreling executive branch of the Pakistani state.

In this context, the Pakistani military needs to maintain a covert political role despite the welcome step of withdrawal from an overt one. The nation’s political parties and national politics are institutionally weak and, realistically speaking, there is apparently no option but to follow a gradual path toward full democracy, if a strong Pakistani state is to be maintained.

Moreover, the inherent weaknesses of Pakistan ’s political system make it a candidate for a re-play of the chaos that Russia witnessed following the unbridled political liberalization of President Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Those chaos necessitated a reversal of some democratic freedoms under President Putin, which became necessary to re-strengthen the Russian state, arrest the fears of disintegration, and curb foreign interference that grows when the state appears to be weak.

All these genuine concerns make it imperative that Pakistan ’s political and military leadership not lose sight of the real problem in today’s Pakistan , and that is a flawed political system where executive power is divided and where political and democratic traditions are messy and weak, for the time being at least.

For a medium-sized regional power and a promising emerging market, Pakistan ’s weak political system conveys the wrong message not just to the world but also to our friends who are worried at our inability to manage our domestic affairs. This message can change with a bold restructuring of the Pakistani political system to remove weaknesses and give it an effective democratic public image.