WRITING in the 1960s and 1970s, the Marxist sociologist Hamza Alavi produced a seminal account of what he called the “overdeveloped post-colonial state,” arguing that the dominance of the military in Pakistan was the result of two related tendencies: the colonial emphasis on developing a strong coercive and administrative state apparatus at the expense of representative, democratic politics, and the inability of the different factions of the ruling class — namely the national bourgeoisie, the metropolitan bourgeoisie, and the feudal elite — to assert their dominance over state and society.

Echoing some of these themes, Ayesha Jalal has done pioneering work on the political economy of defence in Pakistan, suggesting that the military’s preeminent position in the country can be explained by understanding how its cultivation of close ties with the United States in the context of the Cold War, coupled with the notion that India poses an ever-present “threat” to Pakistan, has facilitated and justified the receipt of large amounts of military aid, as well as huge amounts of budgetary expenditure on the armed forces.

These ideas have been built upon and developed further by writers like Stephen Cohen and Hasan Askari Rizvi and in the past decade alone, a number of new books have been written that have greatly enriched our understanding of the military and politics in Pakistan. For example, Ayesha Siddiqa’s Military Inc. has outlined the Pakistani military’s tremendous economic and corporate interests, and Aqil Shah’s The Army and Democracy has highlighted how the military’s worldview is constructed, internalised, and used to formulate policy and engage in politics.

A similar yet different strand within the literature has focused on the military and its relationship with militant Islam, with writers like Ahmed Rashid, Mariam Abou-Zahab, and Husain Haqqani (among many, many others) tracing the history of Pakistan’s involvement with militant groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir. This scholarship has been produced in the context of another deeply mined area within the literature, namely work that has been done on the construction of Pakistan’s national narrative and identity, and the way in which Islam has been used to legitimise the state and its policies, exclude particular communities, and serve as a means through which to exert control over the populace. While less has been said about Pakistan’s failure to democratise, all of the themes mentioned above have repeatedly been invoked to explain the country’s counter-intuitive political trajectory; elite dominance, colonial legacies, ethnic cleavages, sectarian tensions, military interference, the cynicism of external actors, the failings of the country’s political leadership, and economic under-development, all have been put forward as a means through which to make sense of contemporary Pakistan.

The preceding overview of some of the work that has been done on Pakistan is not meant to provide a comprehensive look at scholarship on this country, nor does it do justice to the many different subjects, areas and approaches that have been covered in the literature. Instead, it simply helps to highlight how a lot of new books being written on Pakistan simply end up covering material and areas of inquiry that have already been examined at length. While many of these books do sometimes throw up fresh insights or include new pieces of information, and while there certainly is some value to presenting existing knowledge in a format more accessible to laypersons, it is often the case that much of this comes across as a retreading of the same old debates and points of view.

Professor T. V. Paul’s The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World is a relatively ambitious book in that it seeks to apply a well-developed social scientific framework to understand the failure of state and institution-building in Pakistan. Drawing on work that has been done on Europe and the South East Asian developmental states, Paul argues that Pakistan’s travails can, to a very large extent, be explained by its “geostrategic curse”; like countries suffering from the resource curse, whose ability to generate revenues through the sale of minerals like oil impedes the development of domestic taxation and governmental accountability, Pakistan’s reliance on, and relatively constant access to, foreign aid has led to the development of an insular ruling elite that has little incentive to initiate the types of reform that could make the country more democratic, egalitarian, and accountable.

The existence of this “curse” is supplemented by the presence of a strong military apparatus that has, for different historical reasons, managed to dominate the state, monopolise the national security narrative, and make use of Islam as a means through which to justify its external actions (particularly with regards to India) as well as its internal attempts at national integration.

This is all well and good, and there is considerable promise in the idea that the work of scholars like Charles Tilly and Michael Mann could be used to inform and enrich our understanding of Pakistan’s institutional development. However, while the book’s theoretical starting point is interesting, its application ends up going over very familiar territory. We are told the story of how the “threat” from India has been used to prop up the military’s political and strategic agenda, and how the definition of the nation in terms of Islam has, over time, eliminated the space for more progressive political forces while simultaneously creating an environment in which militants, trained and nurtured for use in Afghanistan and Kashmir, continue to exert tremendous influence in Pakistan.

The history of Pakistan’s transactional relationship with the United States is also retold, emphasising both the corrosive effect of military aid and the often duplicitous nature of the interactions between the two states. Reference is also made to other regional players like China and Saudi Arabia, and the way in which their support for Pakistan has also contributed towards strengthening the power and position of the elites in charge of Pakistan’s domestic and external policy orientations.

However, when it comes to outlining how these external factors have impinged on Pakistan’s internal development, The Warrior State provides a rather superficial analysis of what has been going on. While it correctly identifies some of the main reasons why the military is so powerful in Pakistan, it shares a weakness found in many similar exemplars of the genre when it fails to properly account for the diversity and heterogeneity of the different actors involved in the politics of the country. For example, the book constantly refers to the “elite” as being in charge of Pakistan but never really explains who these people are. At times, it seems as if this term is used to refer exclusively to the military elite, in which case it makes sense to ask why more attention is not paid to civilian actors. Indeed, while the failings of Pakistan’s civilian leadership are invoked at one point as a potential explanation for the military’s dominance, little is said about the way in which episodes of authoritarian rule have undermined the capacity of civilian actors to pose a credible threat to the military establishment. The narrative in The Warrior State is one that almost seems to treat civilian politics as being completely separate from the activities of the military, implying that greater political will or activism from within the civilian political order would be sufficient to overturn the legacy of decades of military control.

While this is not necessarily untrue, it overlooks the structural linkages between the military elite and civilian politicians, as explained by scholars like Hamza Alavi, and the way in which the institutional framework of politics in Pakistan has arguably been shaped to reward the military’s collaborators while undermining the development of broader, more progressive democratic forces.

There are other areas of domestic politics in which a lack of conceptual clarity becomes evident. Pakistan is repeatedly referred to as a “semi-feudal” state with no attempt being made to define exactly what this means. After all, it could reasonably be argued that Pakistan was never ‘feudal’ in the classical European sense and that even if it was, “semi-feudal” is an inaccurate characterisation of an economy that is thoroughly capitalist. If the argument is, instead, that “semi-feudal” means landlord-dominated, this would also be incorrect, not only due to the rise of non-landed economic and political interests, but also because of the fusion of an increasingly capitalist agrarian economy with traditional, urban capitalist interests.

The problem is compounded when looking at Paul’s treatment of civil society and the middle class; while acknowledging work that has shown how middle classes can often play counterproductive roles when it comes to promoting democratisation, Paul nonetheless suggests that it is these people, as well as capitalist elites, who hold the key to reform in Pakistan through political parties and social mobilisation. Without getting into what the middle class might be in Pakistan (itself an incredibly complex and difficult question to answer), Paul’s faith in the democratising power of these actors stems from the evident belief that Pakistan’s “semi-feudal” power structure constrains institutional and political reform.

This is not an entirely incorrect idea to hold, except that it could also be argued that middle and capitalist classes in Pakistan are already part of the established political order and are as in-vested in the status quo as the landed and military elites; indeed, this is an argument that has been borne out by studies on patron-client politics in Pakistan, particularly in the countryside where upwardly mobile agrarian entrepreneurs and capitalist farmers have become an integral part of the political order. Similar patterns can be seen in urban Pakistan, where organised networks of rent-seeking and patronage have come to incorporate the middle classes over time.

While Paul is right to suggest that movements and activism will have a role to play in bringing about reform in Pakistan, the actors he places his faith in are unlikely to bring about the kind of fundamental social and economic transformation this country needs. It might make more sense to speak of mobilising the working classes, but they remain absent from The Warrior State’s narrative.

The most interesting and insightful section of The Warrior State is the chapter in which Paul compares Pakistan to countries with similar histories of military control and concerns over national security. Through an examination of the cases of Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Taiwan, and South Korea, Paul demonstrates how the presence of entrenched military and civilian elites, a divisive national narrative rooted in a narrow interpretation of Islam, and an inability to link national security to economic development, have prevented Pakistan from emulating successful developmental states as well as those that have, in recent years, managed to rein in powerful militaries. Given the usefulness of these comparisons, it would have been good to devote a greater amount of space to them with a view towards unpicking the different opportunities and potentialities for progressive change in Pakistan.

The Warrior State does a good job of identifying the causes that underpin the military’s dominance in Pakistan. Its definition of the problem as being the result of a “geostrategic curse” is a good way to understand the deleterious effect foreign aid has had on domestic politics in Pakistan, and it is also correct to highlight how paranoia vis-à-vis India has perpetuated the country’s skewed political economy of defence. The book is also right to highlight how the fusion of a narrow, doctrinaire interpretation of Islam with politics and national identity in Pakistan has been divisive and damaging, leading to problems with militancy and national integration, not least of all due to the presence of organisations, in alliance with the military establishment, that continue to operate with impunity.

The only problem with much of this is that it has already been said, sometimes repeatedly. Furthermore, Paul’s proposed solutions are nebulously conceived and not fully fleshed out. The Warrior State does a good job of presenting a large amount of information in a form that is easily accessible and will undoubtedly be of great benefit to those just starting to learn about Pakistan. Its comparative section and its discussion of how state-building in Pakistan differs from other parts of the world are also very interesting. However, the book ultimately fails to provide any truly unique or fresh perspectives on Pakistan, and does little to bring us closer to navigating a path out of the problems the country currently faces.

The reviewer is Assistant Professor of Political Science at LUMS.

The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World

(POLITICS)

By T. V. Paul

Oxford University Press, Karachi

ISBN 978-0-519-940135-2

265pp.