139 Pamela Constable, Playing with Fire (New York: Random House, 2011), p. xii.
140 Constable, Playing with Fire, p. xx.
141 Constable, Playing with Fire, p. xii.
142 Constable, Playing with Fire, p. xx.
143 Lodhi, Beyond the Crisis State, p. 2.
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No Exit from Pakistan
magazine articles that have too often predicted Pakistan’s imminent collapse.
Yet in his search for continuity, Lieven underestimates the ways in which the
inherent corruption of Pakistan’s establishment makes it vulnerable. That is
Schmidt’s essential contribution; Pakistan’s traditional powerbrokers have been
weakened by time, not strengthened. More troubling, as Constable describes,
they now face challengers who are at once more popular and more violent
than in the past. However, all is not lost. Lodhi’s call to arms suggests that if
Pakistani reformers are effectively mobilized, they still have a chance to alter
Pakistan’s unsettling trends.
These important insights help to frame the following three conclusions about
Pakistan’s trajectory.
(1) Revolution and state failure are unlikely in Pakistan . . . at least for now.
One of the most frequent questions Americans ask about Pakistan is whether
it might suffer an Iran-style revolution or surrender to a Somalia-like col-
lapse. This is not especially surprising, since if you look at any of the lists of
“fragile” or “failing” states, Pakistan usually shows up near the top in bright
red.144
As this chapter shows, all of the standard warning signs are there. Pakistan
suffers from ethnic and sectarian conflicts, state corruption, internal insur-
gency, a history of turbulent politics, and a troubled economy.145 Its ruling
governments are usually ineffective when it comes to meeting the basic needs
of the country’s people. Even when civilian politicians are nominally in charge,
their popular legitimacy is weakened because their parties are run like corrupt
family dynasties, not democracies.146 In Islamabad, governments come and go,
but nearly all are what scholars of international development might call “lim-
ited access orders,” where the rich and powerful use the state mainly to make
sure that they stay rich and powerful, and everyone else suffers.147
However, even though Pakistan is vulnerable to failure and revolution, we
have not seen it . . . yet. The reason is twofold. First, Pakistan’s ruling elites and its army are still strong enough to resist revolutionary change or a dramatic
collapse. They still have a finger in every pie, even those, like Imran Khan’s
PTI, that claim to be dedicated to change.
Second, even though Pakistan’s media is growing more outspoken and its
activists successfully took to the streets to bring down the Musharraf regime,
144 ”The Failed States Index 2011,” Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/
06/17/2011 failed states index interactive map and rankings.
145 These are very close to Jack Goldstone’s five “pathways to state failure” in Jack A. Goldstone,
“Pathways to State Failure,” Conflict Management and Peace Science, 25 (2008), p. 288.
146 Jack Goldstone, one of the world’s foremost experts on revolution and state failure, argues that effectiveness and legitimacy (or the perception of justice) are the two factors that make a state prone to revolution. See Jack A. Goldstone, “Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science, 4 (2001), p. 148.
147 On “limited access orders,” see Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012).
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The Four Faces of Pakistan
69
the country still lacks a “transmission belt” to channel the grievances felt by
many of its people into effective political action. The best example of this came
in 2010, when epic floods inundated a fifth of the country and displaced tens
of millions of Pakistanis from their homes. Many foreign observers worried
institutions of the state and society would finally come undone by the stress.
In fact, nothing of the sort happened. Part of the explanation has to be that
the Pakistanis who suffered most from the floods were also disproportionately
poor and incapable of turning their desperate needs into political action. As
has been the case for decades, they suffered in silence, with little effect on the
country’s politics.
As long as Pakistan’s status quo has its staunch defenders and most everyone
else lacks the ability to rise up in opposition, Pakistan will muddle along as it
has for decades. Slowly but surely, however, both of these conditions appear
to be changing. Traditional elites face a welter of new challenges and threats.
Opposition forces are finding new resources and tools to help them mobilize.
One day, perhaps even within the next few years, Pakistan’s balance could
tip unexpectedly, as it did in Tunisia when in late December 2010 a young
fruit seller set himself on fire in protest against the government and sparked a
successful revolution. If that happens, many of the other prerequisites for rev-
olutionary change, or even for state collapse, will be found in abundance. One
revealing indicator of this is that many of Pakistan’s wealthiest citizens have
prepared quick exit plans. They have purchased homes and secured citizen-
ship abroad, from Dubai and Malaysia to the United Kingdom and Canada.
If and when they rush to the exits, Washington should brace for the ugly
consequences.
(2) Pakistan is already vulnerable to nightmarish scenarios, even if they are
not likely to result in revolution or state collapse.
Pakistan is a country of crises. Even if it finds a way to pull out of its gradual
downward slide, it will remain vulnerable to horrible acts of terrorism and
violence. Pakistan’s terrorists could once again provoke deadly confrontations
with India, or even with the United States. Historic ties between Pakistan’s
security services and groups like LeT, the “insider threat” posed by outfits
like HuT, and the continual growth of its nuclear arsenal mean that every day
without a new crisis is a fortunate one for Pakistan.
Three weeks after the U.S. raid on bin Laden’s compound, a very different
sort of raid took place in Karachi. A small group of terrorist commandos
attacked the Mehran naval base. They held out for over fifteen hours, killed
thirteen personnel, and destroyed two of Pakistan’s U.S.-supplied P-3 Orion
patrol planes. The attack bore all the hallmarks of an inside job. Numerous
eyewitnesses said the raiders appeared to know the compound and may have
been wearing navy uniforms. Subsequent investigations linked
the raid to al-
Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. A former Navy commando, terminated from
service in 2003, was arrested for providing support to the raiding party.
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No Exit from Pakistan
The point of this story is not, as some would have it, that Pakistan’s nuclear
installations are easy targets for the terrorists. By all accounts, those installa-
tions are far better protected than Mehran was. Moreover, it is a far easier
thing to destroy a couple of planes than to make off with a nuclear weapon.
The point is that the terrorist cancer has clearly taken root in parts of
Pakistan’s military. If it is permitted to spread, then the chances of a far more
dangerous outcome, like the gradual theft of small amounts of fissile material
or the successful assassination of Pakistan’s top political and military leader-
ship, become immeasurably higher. When characters like Hafiz Saeed, Hamid
Gul, and Sami ul Haq appear together at public rallies, they appear to enjoy
at least the tacit support of the state. Such developments offer too little con-
fidence in Pakistan’s ability to ward off the entire range of insider threats it
faces.148
(3) To achieve their goals, reformers need to think beyond Pakistan’s borders.
Looking to the potential for constructive change, it is clear that any successful
reform of Pakistan will require a great deal of hard work by Pakistanis them-
selves. The country is too vast and complicated to be “fixed” from the outside
in. However, even well-intentioned Pakistani reformers will face enormous
obstacles and could use a helping hand. Their countrymen with the deepest
pockets – the ones most capable of paying for improvements in education or
the nation’s physical infrastructure – are also the most heavily invested in per-
petuating business as usual. And the nation’s most powerful institutions – the
military and intelligence services – also prefer to maintain the status quo and
to protect their privileges and autonomy.
To break the logjam, reformers will need allies from beyond their borders,
at least at the outset. In time, they may be able to extract a greater share
of resources from inside Pakistan, if only because collecting taxes from an
expanding economic base should be easier than squeezing revenues from an
economy in crisis.
This is not to say that Pakistan should continue to depend upon foreign
assistance and loans. That may be a necessary stopgap, but the better way
to think about Pakistan’s economic opportunity is to more effectively realize
its geographic potential. Situated between India, China, and the energy-rich
lands of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, Pakistan is naturally positioned
to benefit from freer trade and investments in corridors that would improve,
for instance, the flow of fossil fuels across Asia from west and north to east
and south. China is the easiest regional target for securing greater investments
in the Pakistani economy, but India offers the greatest untapped potential for
trade and business collaboration.
148 For a catalogue of many “insider threats” over the past two decades, see Imtiaz Gul, “Jihadis in the Ranks,” Newsline, September 28, 2012, http://www.newslinemagazine.com/2012/09/
cover-story-jihadis-in-the-ranks/.
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The Four Faces of Pakistan
71
For reform-minded Pakistanis, the goal in any of these ventures would be
to structure new economic relationships in ways that provide jobs and expand
tax revenues so that even if Pakistan’s rich and powerful continue to take a
healthy cut, there is more left over for everyone else. These are not easy tasks,
but they at least hint at how Pakistan’s reformers might team up with foreign
allies – possibly even with the United States – to achieve a better future for
Pakistan.
Unfortunately, that potential remains a long way off. Today’s advocates of
reform, including politicians like Imran Khan, often sound decidedly parochial,
sometimes even xenophobic, when they discuss solutions to Pakistan’s
problems. For its part, Washington often finds itself in bed with many of
Pakistan’s least reform-minded leaders, from the feudal elites to the mili-
tary. This reflects a reasonable American fear of change and instability inside
Pakistan. But to the extent that the United States influences Pakistan’s future,
that prophecy could be a self-fulfilling one. In other words, if the United States
keeps picking the sides it has chosen for the past sixty years, it will do little to
help potential reformers and far more to support the kind of repression that
fuels a revolutionary backlash.
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3
Why Do They Hate Us?
Since Pakistan’s founding in 1947, its relationship with the United States has
gone through extreme highs and lows. Pakistanis often talk of American swings
from alliance to abandonment.1 If the post-9/11 period of cooperation runs its
course and ends in estrangement or conflict, it would only reinforce that long-
standing pattern and lend credence to the idea that Washington and Islamabad
are incapable of building a lasting foundation for any sort of mutually beneficial
relationship.
Part of the problem between the United States and Pakistan throughout the
first five decades of their interaction was that both sides failed to value the
relationship on its own terms.2 In its cooperation with many other states,
the United States often sees inherent value in trade, cultural affinities, or a
shared worldview. In cooperation with Pakistan, on the other hand, Washing-
ton tended to focus on external goals, such as containing communism, opening
secret talks with Beijing, or arming the Afghan mujahedeen. American leaders
saw Pakistan as but a pawn in the broader geopolitical chess match.
Over its entire history, Pakistan kept its eyes trained on India. Pakistan
always valued Washington’s assistance as an external balancer in the regional
competition against its larger neighbor, with which it had split in the violent
Partition of 1947 after years of political infighting among the top leaders of
the movement that ejected British rule from the subcontinent. Whenever the
1 Long time South Asia hands Teresita and Howard Schaffer use the evocative metaphor of marriages and divorces in describing the ups and downs of the relationship. See Howard B.
Schaffer and Teresita C. Schaffer, How Pakistan Negotiates with the United States: Riding the Roller Coaster (Washington: United States Institute of Peace, 2011).
2 See especially Dennis Kux, The United
States and Pakistan, 1947–2000: Disenchanted Allies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) and Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), both of which serve as essential sources for this chapter.
72
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Why Do They Hate Us?
73
United States was unhelpful in this respect, Pakistan sought other – often much
riskier – solutions, such as arming and training militant groups and expanding
its nuclear arsenal.
The upshot of this unhappy history is that for each side, disagreements have
been layered one upon the next. In Pakistan, the experience of dealing with the
United States has bred alienation, anger, and in some cases, hatred. All threaten
prospects for a constructive relationship. Whether military or civilian, ruling
regimes in Islamabad now face a public that doubts the benefit of cooperation
with Washington. American officials stationed in Pakistan face debilitating
security threats, and they also confront the more mundane challenge of living
and working in a society that tends to view the United States with hostility.
Stunning majorities – usually over 75 percent – of Pakistanis have unfavorable
views of the United States.3
pakistan’s three strands of anti-americanism
Three types of anti-Americanism define Pakistani perspectives today.4 The first,
what might be called a “liberal anti-Americanism,” is primarily a reaction to
Washington’s all-too-cozy relations with Pakistan’s military. Now a minority
view, the perspective remains rooted in the left of Pakistan’s political spectrum.
Its origins date to the earliest phase of cooperation between the United States
and Pakistan’s army-dominated state. This perspective was again on prominent
display during the waning days of the Musharraf regime, when Pakistani civil-
ian politicians and liberal activists accused the United States of serially coddling
military dictators.
The second strand of “nationalist anti-Americanism” comes from the center-
right, and reflects a sense that partnership with the United States has never