Again, Who Do We Do Business with in Pakistan?

The crassly cynical political developments in Pakistan, epitomized by the Memogate scandal, befit a banana republic. The Army is accusing the Head of State of acting against national security by seeking to conspire with the US to curb its power. In a move without parallel anywhere the Army Chief has approached the Pakistani Supreme Court to investigate the matter. The former Pakistani Ambassador to Washington is lodged in the Prime Minsiter’s Residence for fear that he may either be physically eliminated by the military or coerced into signing some statement under duress. The Prime Minister inveighs against the army for acting as a “state within a state” and castigates its action to approach the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. The Army in turn warns the Prime Minister of the potentially grievous consequences for the country of his affirmation. During all these shenanigans, President Zardari makes sudden peregrinations to Dubai timed with the perceived threat to his personal security.

These bizarre developments call into question the soft assumptions underlying our policy towards Pakistan. Can we work on a meaningful agenda with a country in such serious internal disarray? Unless Pakistan is internally stable, we cannot really have stable India-Pakistan ties. The animosity in Pakistan towards India is institutionalized, and therefore, for any durable improvement in relations with India to occur, a broad institutional consensus is necessary, not dramatic civil-military wrangles.

We can do business with Prime Minister Gilani only if he is in control of government business in Pakistan. Can we realistically overcome the trust deficit with a country whose Supreme Court calls its Prime Minister a dishonest man? For us he may be a man of peace, but his government is not at peace with the military which oversees relations with major external powers. Gilani’s writ on India can hardly run if it is not respected internally by the Pakistani army. In persisting with a dialogue with Pakistan, with substantive concessions to keep it going despite Pakistani recalcitrance on issues we consider vital, we may have wanted to strengthen the hands of the civilian government against the Pakistani military, but the latest stand-off between the two reveals the continuing structural fragility of the civil-military equation in Pakistan.

The institutional quarrels in Pakistan are a product of tensions unleashed by its steady slide towards state failure, even if Pakistani interlocutors put a facile, self-convincing gloss on conditions in the country. It is not enough that Pakistan has the capacity to teeter on somehow, leveraging to its advantage US fears about the possible collapse of this large nuclear armed Islamic country, China’s strategic commitment to it in which countering India is a vital element, and Saudi Arabia’s religious solidarity. Pakistan has to start behaving as a normal, law-abiding country at ease with itself. It must cease using terrorism as an instrument of state policy and recognize the toxic linkage between the terrorist problem ravaging the country internally and the military’s long-standing patronage of terror outfits to achieve its external goals. Even now the Pakistani establishment believes that terrorism in Pakistan is a product of America’s misguided pressure on it for stepped-up cooperation to combat the religious extremists and that it can be controlled if the US were to behave with greater restraint in the region. The implication here is that the terrorist backlash is not on account of the support extended to anti-Indian jihadi groups.

In sum, the current political crisis in Pakistan complicates the US end-game in Afghanistan which needs a constructive Pakistani role, whether by way of helping control cross-border insurgency, negotiations with the Taliban or intelligence cooperation etc. The Americans, frustrated by the ineptitude of the civilian government, had made General Kayani larger- than-life, and now this mistake has rebounded on them. The Pakistan military, in a bid to recover its lost prestige is largely responsible for whipping up anti-US public passions in Pakistan. Looking ahead, political assertiveness by the military is likely to benefit the jihadi groups and oxygenate religious extremism in the country. Pakistani inchoate democracy will remain under stress, with the prospects of real peace with India, always uncertain, becoming even more elusive.

Published in The Asian Age 15^th January 2012