In a revelatory interview with Voice of America, Pakistan’s Minister for Science and Technology, Fawad Chaudhry, exposed major rifts between senior party leaders in Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government, including the induction of non-elected members in the cabinet. Chaudhry asserted that Khan and his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), has miserably failed to live up to its promises of introducing systematic reforms to improve the country’s political system and make it more autonomous and professional.
According to a recent survey by Gallup, the Prime Minister’s utter mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic has levelled a massive hit to his approval ratings. The survey concludes: “The percentage of Pakistanis who believe that the current PTI government’s performance up to this point in its tenure is worse than that of the previous government has increased from 35 per cent in December 2018 to 59 per cent in February 2020.”
The past few months in Pakistan have seen the deepening of not just a healthcare crisis, but the emergence of a political disaster as well. The PTI administration has been unable to satiate the demands of or retain the support of its coalition partners, most notably leading to the exit of Sardar Akhtar Mengal, the Chief of the Balochistan National Party (BNP-M). Mengal has now joined the opposition Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI-F) and said that the main reason for his departure was the lack of funding being provided towards Balochistan’s development projects. He has stated that, despite his party having four seats in the National Assembly, he “regretted the diminishing role” of the Assembly in real policymaking, going further to compare the state of parliamentary affairs to that of the speaker’s corner in London’s Hyde Park where “members vent their frustration through their speeches but nobody is listening to them seriously.”
Pakistani political analysts have warned that other parties allied to the PTI are likely to use the political vacuum left behind party infighting and Khan’s top aide Jahangir Tareen—who fled the country after being sidelined for a wheat corruption scandal—to become more aggressive in leveraging their bargaining powers with the PTI, whose very existence now depends on them. The PTI only has 156 seats in a parliamentary house of 341, so negotiations with smaller parties to maintain their support must be made with haste.
But the most glaring failure of Khan’s governance so far—not including the looming healthcare crisis, economic crisis, and various national security and foreign policy crises vis-à-vis India, the Afghan peace process, and balancing American and Chinese pressures—has been his blatancy in giving more power to the military in political processes. In April, he appointed Lt. Gen. (retd.) Asim Saleem Bajwa, former head of the military’s information wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) as his special information advisor on broadcasting and media. Key portfolio holders in Khan’s cabinet, such as federal ministers in charge of Commerce, Finance, Railways, Defence Production, Institutional Reforms, and the Interior, are also people with military links. Further, the chief secretaries of four provinces, including Balochistan and Punjab, are ex-military personnel.
The political presence of military officials has irked Pakistani citizenry for decades, and these frustrations were only exacerbated as Khan handed over the management of the public health crisis to senior officials from the military.
The role of the armed forces in Pakistani politics has changed since the restoration of democratic practices after General Parvez Musharraf’s ousting in 2008. As analysed by Saeed Shafqat, Founding Director of the Forman Christian (College) University’s Centre for Public Policy and Governance, military elites after Musharraf had to restrategize and reassess their relationship with civilian democratic leadership to reach a point of adopting a ‘deference’ policy, where they publicly supported the political process. Simultaneously, however, the military has continued to expand its presence in local defence services, businesses, and industries.
The reason that the country’s military was able to easily infiltrate the civilian world without much political criticism, Shafqat notes, is because “despite having a large army, it has been unable to maintain unity of command and a considerable degree of coherence in its top echelons.” This is also why, even though the lower tiers of the army have attempted coups several times, they have been unsuccessful due to the top breaches of command giving unequivocal support to the army chief. In the past few years, the ‘oneness’ of the army to stand by its ideals and prove strong leadership has afforded it a certain level of credibility among its citizenry. However, as intentions to once again replace civilian leadership become more visible, mistrust of the military is growing once more.
With the exception of the Kargil conflict, the army has been involved on the ground in combating issues of internal disorder since 1979, especially in Quetta and Karachi, where the armed forces have expanded their policing responsibilities to include paramilitary forces and similar border patrolling agencies. In addition to their counterinsurgency and counterterrorism functions, the armed forces are also involved in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping functions and have expanded their presence in the management of businesses, industries, commerce, and real estate. This has slowly led to the building of a military-hegemonic system that runs in tandem with the party-based representative system. Put simply, Islamabad’s elections have always been influenced extensively by the military, thereby shifting thegovernment’s focus away from questions of good governance and parliamentary reforms. Rather, past administrations have been bogged down with trying to ascertain their own autonomy in the political sphere and have worked towards either maintaining, or trying to break away from, the status quo of the military-hegemony.
Further, Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) laid the grounds for a dominant party system between 1971 and 1977, which was followed by Muhammad Khan Junejo’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML) up to 1988 and most recently, the Nawaz Sharif-led PML-N. All these governments focused on establishing their own power by suppressing opposition parties and excluding them completely from political dialogue. Resultantly, a credible opposition-government relationship was unable to evolve in the general political discourse of the country, spare for attempts to resuscitate the same by Asif Ali Zardari from 2008 to 2013. Due to this lack of policy-based oppositional rhetoric in Pakistani politics, civilian leadership has been unable to sustain itself without the looming presence of the military. Till date, parties are driven by personalities rather than developmental manifestos or policy goals. And the ruling party and its opposition are usually divided, instead of united, in their stances towards a military presence in politics.
Therefore, Khan’s practices of appointing senior military officials in his ministry, while alienating the opposition, is a predictable, yet fragile attempt at countering Sharif’s anti-military stance. This is especially important as Khan is struggling to strike a balance in his own leadership, particularly in the face of the pandemic. His policies so far have been unable to address the main issues plaguing the country’s politico-economic realm, and the loss of support from allied parties as well as members of the PTI have left the PM with little choice but to cede to military intervention, else he risks getting replaced by the opposition.
A defining style of the Pakistani military-hegemonic system has also been to perceive India as an existential threat and blame all of its failures as malicious attempts by India. Khan has echoed these sentiments very strongly during his tenure, with his multiple attempts at turning the international community against India at the UN Security Council (UNSC). In the past few days, he has attempted to blame an attack on the Karachi Stock Exchange on forces from New Delhi, despite the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) claiming responsibility for the attack.
This is starkly contradictory to Khan’s political actions before he was elected. The PTI was known for its protests and dharnas after the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, where Sharif’s PML-N government showed its incompetency at using parliamentary processes to resolve national security issues. Khan also conducted extra-parliamentary protests demanding the normalization of ties with India. A US Congressional report found that the military had lent its support to Khan and his party members by way of a ‘soft coup’ that led to the ousting of PML-N, mainly due to disagreements between Sharif and armed forces leaders. The complete reversal of Khan’s stance towards India could be seen as a way to appease military powers now involved in his government.
Khan had also promised robust counterterrorism measures during his electoral campaigns, but recently made headlines calling Osama bin Laden a ‘martyr’. A few days after these comments, the US State Department also released a report alleging that Pakistan continues to “serve as a safe haven for regionally focused terrorist groups”. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international terror-financing watchdog, is also set to examine Islamabad in October since their timely review was postponed due to the pandemic. Religious minorities have also continued to face severe brutality under Khan’s leadership. Instead of tackling these pertinent issues head-on, Khan has been found rejecting the existence of radical Islam as a concept, publicly acknowledging that the state was involved in training Afghan jihadist groups, while also insisting that the country is “no longer a safe haven” for terrorism. Alice Wells, the outgoing US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, has also said that while Khan’s counter-terrorism efforts since the 2019 Pulwama incident are significant, they are reversible unless he follows up with stricter action.
Therefore, the plunge in public support for Khan isn’t just based on a few pitfalls of his governance but is rather a snowballed effect based on his severe lack of leadership in addressing the basic concerns of Pakistani citizenry—healthcare, the economy, fear of a military rule, and terrorism. The former cricketer has also illustrated that resolve and ideas are not enough to topple the existing hegemonies and extra-parliamentary political forces in Pakistan.
But the problems Pakistan faces today predate Khan’s leadership. Previous governments, with leaders of political lineage, have also systematically failed to create long-lasting democratic reforms. What Islamabad needs is a long and sustained resistance, with strong and unified civilian leadership that is unbothered by power politics, to allow for systemic reforms that can separate the armed forces from political decision-making processes. But given the current state of affairs that are further empowering the military, this may as well be a far-reaching dream.
Image Source: Deccan Herald
Imran Khan’s Failed Governance: Incompetence or the Pakistani Status Quo?
July 1, 2020
