Economic, Political Pressures Strain Pakistan’s Civil Society

It was a difficult week for Pakistan. One day after Pakistani national Mir Aimal Kasi was convicted of killing two CIA employees in Virginia, four Americans were killed in Karachi in an act of presumed retribution; and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, also a Pakistani national, was convicted in New York of conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center. When Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright arrives in Islamabad today, she will enter a country enveloped in political uncertainty and economic distress, where civil society is having a hard time coping with pressures far beyond its control.

Indeed, it has been a difficult year in Pakistan. Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif, elected with a large majority nine months ago, is struggling with a weak economy, increasing lawlessness, which has led to hundreds of deaths, and his party’s surprising lack of political direction. Primed to recover under Sharif’s business-oriented leadership, the economy has instead continued its decline, buffeted by contradictory fiscal policies, a fragile place in the international economy and the corrosive effects of assumed corruptions, large and small. Sharif’s financial managers are trying to cope with massive, decade-old external debt (much of it to pay for past military expenses) while his political advisors contemplate a future defined by a soaring birthrate and declining resources.

The government’s portfolio is unenviable, but Sharif’s scattershot policies have been paradoxical and occasionally inexplicable. His policies--alternately strident and timid, and often reactive--evade Pakistan’s most critical problems. He has dallied in the realm of media politics, banning so-called foreign influences from state-owned TV, and dabbled at the edges of social concerns.

Some efforts have exacerbated problems rather than solved them. Sharif’s response to terrorism was to establish speedy trial courts. When these were roundly denounced by the regular judiciary, the government initiated a vitriolic campaign against the dissenting Supreme Court chief justice. In a 71-day standoff, Sharif and Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah tussled publicly about judicial independence, the legality of government-sponsored constitutional amendments and the constitutional powers of the executive. Lawyers went on strike; courts were closed. Parliament was convened to decry judicial activism and pundits predicted the end of elected government. Only the tacit threat of military intervention forced Sharif back from his artificial precipice.

In this saga of judicial wrangling, the government misread public sentiment. Pakistanis have made it clear that they want social violence and division to end, they want the state to solve these problems, and they know that designer punishments, often used for political vendetta, are not the answer. Current events prove the point: While the prime minister battled the chief justice, sectarian political parties, both Shia and Sunni, were engaged in daily retributive killing sprees across Punjab province and the mercantile center of Karachi.

Although Pakistan’s governments decry violence, they willingly ignore a central fact: Sectarian parties have been tolerated, if not supported, by the political establishment for almost two decades. Empowered by Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq’s military government in the 1980s, they provide manpower and ideological sustenance for causes dear to the ruling classes. The same small, radical parties that engage in local violence also fund insurgencies in Kashmir and the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. The Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Ansar, cited by Washington for provoking terror in Kashmir, is alleged to have murdered Americans in Karachi. When one Karachi-based religious school, which has trained half of the Taliban’s militantly Sunni inner circle, was attacked two weeks ago, the message to the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan should have been clear.

Thus, it was no surprise that on Oct. 10, the day Queen Elizabeth visited Lahore to commemorate Pakistan’s 50th anniversary, Justice Arif Iqbal Hussain Bhatti was assassinated while the queen’s entourage traveled past the High Court. Almost three years ago, in a judgment noted for simplicity and grace under fire, Bhatti acquitted two Christians of blasphemy charges. The highly publicized case against them was instigated with the help of radical Sunni parties that are now suspects in Bhatti’s shooting. When politics invades religion, legality becomes merely emblematic. Bhatti’s murder, a trenchant symbol of Pakistan’s political erosion, largely ignored by the political establishment, shows just how tragic that decline has become.

Pakistan is seized by the ambivalences of its past. Its politics are held hostage to institutional weaknesses that have dominated its landscape for half a century: unresolved conflicts over the role of religion in society, democracy in the polity, the state in the economy and the military in the state. Each of these domestic vulnerabilities translates into a fragile, retrospective foreign policy that, in turn, fuels local frailties.

Adventurism in Afghanistan is both a cause and a consequence of Zia’s brand of U.S.-supported ideological politics; insurgency in Kashmir is a result of similarly misguided attempts to broaden the scope of Pakistani power without building a secure economic base; deep sectarian and class divisions have established a firm footing for local violence and mischief abroad. Neither state institutions nor their governors have cared to transform the style of politics to remove the fetters that bind Pakistan to its old weaknesses.

Can these political patterns change? Certainly, necessarily, critically--but not easily. Nonetheless, this is the question Albright must now ask. For altered U.S. attitudes can help revise the formulas of power and politics that have laced Pakistan to its past and kept its external relationships unbalanced.

Pakistan and the United States still define their relationship around old Cold War concerns: Pakistan’s nuclear program; continuing Indo-Pakistani rivalry; the depressing detritus of Afghanistan’s disintegration; terrorism and narcotics traffic that emanate from Pakistan and its neighbors, and the return of Pakistan’s payments for undelivered F-16 aircraft.

To this old agenda, ritual answers have long been choreographed by the same actors who set the agenda. But while Pakistan’s military-intelligence services and political elites have devoted their energies to maintaining the status quo, the state they serve has failed to serve its people. As a result, the agenda is self-defeating, and so is the frustrating and contentious U.S.-Pakistani relationship.

Neither traditional Cold War alliance politics nor an us-vs.-them diplomacy has borne fruit: Not one issue on the Cold War agenda has moved toward solution. The primary concerns of Pakistan’s citizens, including their diminishing voice in affairs of state, remain outside the ambit of diplomatic discourse.

A new realism is needed, one that places democratic principles and human-rights protections at the center of U.S.-Pakistani relations. Democratic behavior, not merely rhetoric, must rule the day if any policies, economic, political or foreign, are to be implemented honestly and effectively. Pakistan cannot afford to remain internally divided, and the United States cannot afford to have Pakistan remain weak. Pakistan itself, its aspirations and needs, must be at the heart of future U.S.-Pakistani discussions if a relationship is to have any meaning.

Without principled stands against the decline of civility, no policies with, or toward, Pakistan will succeed. With them, however, both the United States and Pakistan have a chance to move, sympathetically if not synchronously, toward the next century.