A Reason For Change

On October 21, 1805 in a gentle swell, off the western end of Gibraltar, the ships of the Royal Navy spotted the combined fleet of French and Spanish warships sailing out of Cadiz. The combined Franco-Spaniard fleet was sailing in support of Napoleon Bonparte, who had amassed his Grandé Armeé for the invasion of Great Britain and the fleet was required to destroy the Royal Navy and thus, make Bonaparte’s conquest of Britain easy. Seeing the French and Spanish fleet

emerge, Vice Admiral Lord Horitio Nelson would issue his order of the day telling the British fleet that, “England expects that every man will do his duty”, as the Royal Navy led by H.M.S. Victory and Royal Sovereign sailed towards enemy fleet. During the battle, Nelson’s officers would be relentless in their pursuit of the enemy and would repeatedly grapple with the opposition. After the battle, which was fought near a small bay on the Spanish coast called Trafalgar, was over, the enemy fleet was sinking. The British were successful that day, because they realized that on their efforts depended the future of England and they remained doggedly at their posts and every man in the British fleet did his duty that day.

Nearly two hundred years later, in 2002, a group identifying itself with the restoration of Pakistan’s national sovereignty would murder a Wall Street Journal reporter by the name of Daniel Pearl. Pearl had come to Karachi, from Mumbai India,where he was the Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief, to investigate a possible connection between Richard Reed, the Shoebomber, and Al-Qaeda. After only three weeks of arriving in Karachi, he would go to meet a person, who had

promised to point his search in the right directions. A few days later, Pearl’s managing editor in New York, would receive an email with pictures of Pearl handcuffed and with, what looked an Italian 9mm Bretta pointed towards his head. Shortly there after, a mass manhunt, the largest in Pakistan’s history would begin to locate and free Pearl. In the course of the investigations, which had would be joined by the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation, a suspect by the name of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh would be arrested. Omar Sheikh would proclaim, in his first appearance in a court, that Pearl was dead, but the Pakistani police and the Americans would discount his claim.

A few weeks later, as the nation of Pakistan was getting ready to celebrate Eid-ul-Azha, it would be greeted by the news, and videotape showing, that Pearl was beheaded by his captors. Daniel Pearl would leave behind a wife, Marianne, who was seven months pregnant. Pearl’s cold-blooded murder, because there is no

other way to describe it, would bring forth a howl of indignation from across the world and even from Pakistanis, who would question how Pearl’s senseless murder would facilitate the restoration of Pakistan’s sovereignty. A few days later, Marianne Pearl in an interview with CNN’s Chris Burns would share her thoughts and in doing so, would laud the role played by the Pakistani law enforcement agencies. She would say, in the course of the interview, that Pakistanis did everything possible, but were seriously handicapped by a lack of proper resources. Marianne would also say that Pakistan should not give up its efforts, but should continue to search for her husband’s killers.

The Pakistani press would highlight her interview, in its publications and news, and suggest that Marianne was had given Pakistan a stamp of approval absolving it from blame in the murder of her husband, Daniel Pearl. What is really interesting about Marianne Pearl’s interview with CNN is not what she said, but rather what she implied. Even though Marianne took the onus away from Pakistan and did not excuse it, the Pakistani media seems to have ignored the real inference of her remarks. Pakistani media seems to think that Marianne was satisfied with the manner in which the investigation was conducted. Even though individual investigating officers showed ingenuity in unmasking the tracks of her husband’s killers, the Pakistani media has sought to rationalize the lack of result in Pearl’s murder as a lack of police resources. It is only natural to rationalize an incomprehensive act, but sadly when the rationalization of poor police resources is offered as the cause of the investigation’s failure, it amounts to a justification of why the outcome could not have been otherwise. Rationalizing Pearl’s murder as a result of poor resources of Karachi, and in toto Pakistan’s, law enforcement agencies begs the question as to why those police resources proved inadequate to save Pearl’s life.

There is a very fine dichotomy between rationalization and the reason why the killers of Pearl could not be apprehended. Pakistani press, and the officialdom, seems to be of the opinion that the rationalization offers a justification for why the investigation failed, but it does not seem inclined to ask the question as to why the police force in Karachi was so ill equipped in the first place. The reason seems to suggest that law and order in Karachi was never the state’s or the province’s first priority.

Karachi was, once, a vibrant and cosmopolitan city of Pakistan, but it became a battleground for sectarian and political blood feuds similar to what Beirut once used to resemble. Successive political governments would use the lawlessness in Karachi to further their own political ambitions or to keep their opponents politically unsettled. Karachi, which was the commercial center and gateway to Pakistan, was allowed to slip into anarchy, with the result that Karachi’s image of a break down of civilian society would become a metaphor for Pakistan in the international lexicon.

This begs the question as to what is the real function of the law enforcement agencies in Pakistan. Pakistan, upon independence from Great Britain, inherited a colonial legacy in the guise of its law enforcement agencies and the primary function of those agencies was not the prevention of crime, but to maintain a political and administrative control over the population. The British used the police more as administrative aid in expediting their rule over India than as a mechanism for combating crime. The successive governments employed Pakistani police, after independence, for this end; that is to maintain political pressure on their opponents.

Therefore, Pakistani law enforcement agencies became a part of the state’s coercive powers and their utilization was more politically motivated than anything else.

Also, the greatest rallying force in politics is the cry, which appeals to fear. Nothing unifies a group more than its identification with fear; fear of the unknown. The slide of Karachi into political abyss of fear, hate and confusion offered the politicians of Pakistan a rationalization to justify their lack of political solutions to the country’s many varied problems. All politics may be local, as the truism suggests, but it is based on the perception of a reality and not necessarily on the reality of a perception. Whatever the reality of a political or economic or a social grievance might have been in Karachi, its exploitation and repeated incantations created the impression that it was a tangible problem. The mea culpa in Pearl’s murder is that state of Pakistan tolerated and even, in some instances, encouraged the prevailing anarchy in Karachi and since there was no political will to tackle the problem in any meaningful way, the problem was allowed to fester and mutate into a host of

situations, which could be politically utilized.

Consequently, law and order was never a serious priority in Karachi, or for that matter Pakistan, because had the writ of the state been restored in Pakistan, the politicians would have been held accountable for their lack of a political vision. Also, the oldest rule in politics is that in order to ensure one perpetuation of power, it is necessary to validate one’s stay in power and that is done through the political expediency of creating a crisis, or a problem, and then claiming that one has the solution for it’s resolution.

Pakistani politicians have been, historically speaking, brilliant in their mediocrity and two most enduring political slogans in Pakistan are the Kashmiri issue and the law and order issue with a caveat to corruption added as an after thought. The state of affairs, which Pearl found, when he arrived in Karachi, was direct result of the politicians using Karachi as a political pawn to advance their own interests, but in a more real sense because of their inability to institutionalize political dissent in Pakistan. In this the armed forces of Pakistan also share responsibility in the degeneration of political development in Pakistan. Pakistani politics, throughout its history, has been politically engineered so many times that it has come to resemble a political Frankenstein and it was only a matter of time that it would turn on its creator: the politicians, the military and the state of Pakistan and grow beyond their power to control it.

It was this political engineering, which has been the historic bane of Pakistan’s lack of a credible democracy, but in a larger sense the failure of democracy in Pakistan can be safely attributed to two facts.

One is the lack of political intolerance towards a dissenting opinion, which is different from the orthodoxy of the majority and the second is the inability of the political forces in Pakistan to share power in an equitable manner. Democracy is the art of the compromise and it will only flourish in an environment, where there exists an atmosphere of a social, economic and politically pluralistic tolerance. The kind of pluralistic environment, needed by a democracy, does not exist in Pakistan, because the right to political power in Pakistan is predicated on the feudal concept of timocracy; a Greek term that means the right to political office/power based on the notions of wealth and personal property. The symbiosis of feudalism and political power in Pakistan is akin to the relation between the feudal master and his serf in Pakistan: total unquestioned power autocratically wielded.

This notion of a political power based on the timocratic values autocratically wielded, is the reason why Pakistan oscillates between civilian and military rule. As mentioned earlier, Pakistan’s political development never managed to instill a sense of institutional dissent in its deliberations. The hazardous nature of Pakistani politics is not related to a lack of dissent, but to an institutional failure in Pakistani politics to effectively manage that political dissent. Pakistan could not develop a meaningful system of “checks and balances” to make sure that there exists a separation of powers and no branch of the government could usurp power, because the system of checks and balances is not based on the notions of a political system open to debate- dissent. Also, the nature of Pakistani politics, which is based on the notions of feudal contract between the master and his serf, prevents dissent and does not tolerate it.

This institutional failure originates from a need to insure the transfer of political power in an orderly and efficient manner. There is dissent in the Pakistani politics, but not in the sense of the western democratic tradition. The major difference between Pakistani politics and their western counterparts is in the levels of institutional moderation in their politics. Whereas, western democratic traditions are based on the premise of trouble free transfers of political power through consensus, Pakistani politics are notorious for their lack of consensus in peacefully transferring power from one political group to another. The notion of political dissent in Pakistan is not based on the ideas of tolerance and compromise, but in a confrontational approach, which shuns political consensus.

This drawback of the Pakistani politics breeds an inability to encourage consensus, in the political discourse, and eventually leads to a situation in, which politics become confrontational and inflexible to the idea of a compromise. It is at this stage that Pakistan’s failure to improvise a system, which ensures a smooth transfer of power from one entity to another, becomes its most brilliant political disappointment. Consequently, the lack of democratic ideals in Pakistan is not due to a denial of political dissent, but because of a need for a democratic mechanism to institutionalize dissent in Pakistani politics. It is the lack of an effective method to institutionalize dissent, which prompts the military to break the political stalemate by intervening in politics and dismissing governments by the fiat of a military necessity.

In other words, the military is the “political bridge”, which facilitates the transfer of power between political interests in the Pakistan. The military is forced, by intent or compulsion, to enter the political fray, because the politics of the country have assumed a degree of diminishing returns. Once the military intervenes, it tries to fashion a system, which it can leave in place, once it vacates power, which will prevent a similar situation from arising in the future. The problem, arising from military interventions, is the military’s institutional approach towards solving a political problem. There is an old saying, which suggests that a military mind always prepares for the last war. When the Pakistani armed forces tailor the politics to avoid a future crisis, they are creating a system designed to prevent mistakes in the past and in

this sense, the newly engineered system is completely unprepared to deal with the political requirements for the future, which like a bad circular argument eventually forces the military to continually enter politics and dismiss the civilian governments.

This raises another issue and that is Pakistani political institutions, maybe due to their own past record or colonial experience, are distrustful of the public and have a patronizing attitude, which suggests that they invariably know what is best for the public’s interest. Since Pakistani politics does not trust and does not care for the opinion of the public, in general, politics in Pakistan does not have a democratic tenor, and cannot have one unless both the civilian and military governments realize that the best corrective method, politically speaking, is the judgment of the people and that judgment should be expressed through elections allowing the incumbent governments to serve out their terms instead of pre-maturely ending them through coup d’ états. The end result of this process of not allowing the elected governments to serve out their terms exposes another weakness in Pakistani politics and that is the notion of accountability.

Accountability, in Pakistani politics, cannot be achieved if governments are changed through political means other than elections. The past experience of Pakistani politics is that it is the military, which instills a particular government and then dismisses it, only to replace it with another one. In a cynical sense, it can be said that Pakistani politics is the continuation of military rule interspersed by elected governments. In this sense, the politicians are not responsible to the electorate and because of this, they usually have no reason to be receptive to public’s concerns. Neither is the military accessible to public accountibility, because it always manages

to have a “get out of jail” card in the shape of the incumbent government it leaves behind in power. A lack of political accountability in Pakistan encourages the perception of exclusivity and this in turn breeds a sense of contempt for democratic values of dissent and accountability by making the governments in Pakistan feel that they are not accountable for their actions, while in office.

The idea of accountability should not only be limited to civilian and military governments, but should also be extended to the nation’s powerful bureaucracy. Contrary to the popular perception, the real power in Pakistani politics is the bureaucracy, because while the civilian and military governments may come and go, the bureaucracy always remains in power. The bureaucracy escapes accountability in Pakistan, because it is the real “king maker” and neither the civilian or military government will go against it, because that simply would mean undermining their own political power base. The bureaucracy knows this as the Achilles Heel of Pakistan’s military and civilian rulers and its gambit of resisting the political agenda of governments, hereby creating the impression that the government is inefficient, always works to make the governments cower in front of its institutional interests.

In this sense, the bedrock of accountability in Pakistan has to be judicial system and system needs to be made independent from politics and thus, allowing it to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities. There is not much to say on this, suffice to suggest its importance in the democratic process, because if this ever happens in Pakistan, it will be a major step towards a social and legal revolution in Pakistan. Social in the sense that justice will not be exclusive anymore to the timocratic values in Pakistan and this in turn will revolutionize the legal system in Pakistan by ending the existing sense of legal exclusivity in Pakistan by making justice blind to the dictates of power and the influence of money.

This is, where the Nelsonian command asking English sailors to do their duty becomes important as far as Pakistan is concerned. When Nelson gave his order, the unsaid implication of his order was that every sailor in the British fleet would be held accountable for his actions. Accountability is what the present government of Pervaiz Musharraf has to enforce and it is in many ways, but ironically not because of its own choice in the matter. Musharraf’s change of heart and his consigning the Islamic jehadis and militants as persona non gratas was the result of the American ultimatum after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Musharraf and, in a large sense, the Pakistani military and Pakistan is being held responsible for its actions in the past. Pakistan had to reconsider its policies vis-à-vis the Taliban and militants in Pakistan and in admitting their corrosive influence on Pakistan’s social, economic and political life, the military was held accountable for its past actions.

Through the reversal of its policies and support of the militants and the Taliban, it admitted its responsibility. The military in Pakistan was forced to account for its past misdeeds under the duress of an international pressure and repudiate its erring ways.

In the wake of Daniel Pearl’s murder, allegations have been raised that the military’s intelligence, the Inter Service Intelligence (I.S.I), was some how linked with his murder. There is no sense in debating this question, whether it was connected or not, because this disagreement can only be settled if the I.S.I itself settles the argument by opening itself and its secrets and is held accountable for its past actions. As long as the international pressure keeps the Musharraf government accountable for its actions, the Musharraf’s government should hold the politicians and the bureaucrats in Pakistan responsible for their actions. The best way the government can do this is by creating a sense of social justice, where by there is no exclusivity in the nation and everyone is considered as under the law and not above it. This existing sense of exclusivity further needs to be eroded by ending the systems and traditions of separation in Pakistan.

The Musharraf government took a step in the right direction, when it abolished the separate electorates in favor of a joint one and now it needs to go a step further and end the blasphemy laws in the nation and the political and religious apartheid of various groups in Pakistan by removing the political distinctions imposed on them and making them feel inclusive in the political, economic and social life of the country. The government needs to abolish the quota system of preferential treatment for the provinces in jobs, political considerations and provincial rights. The government needs to reverse the elder Bhutto’s folly by denationalizing the economy and allowing the market forces to determine the scope of investment and the direction of the economy in Pakistan.

Musharraf’s government must, like Nelson’s captains, be relentless in its pursuit of social justice in Pakistan. It should not tolerate any exclusivity in Pakistan, because it is the principle of exclusivity, be it social, economic, or political, which breeds intolerance and sustains it.

Above all else, it needs to learn the lesson that people, when left to their own judgment, are the best corrective check and balance in any political system and public’s common sense will be more influential in bringing a sense of accountability in politics than any attempts by the military. It should trust in the people’s judgment and it should not labor under the impression that true democracy in Pakistan will come from the grass roots. What it needs to understand is that true democracy may well spring from a grass roots level, by that proverbial democratic grass also needs a fertile soil in which to grow and thrive. This government can ensure that Pakistan has a fertile democratic soil by implementing a program of social justice, which will eventually led to economic reforms and these economic reforms will, gradually, translate into sustainable political changes in the country based on the resourcefulness and the self-interest of the Pakistani people to succeed in all the endeavors of

life.