Recent years have been tumultuous in Pakistan’s politics. Even by the standards of the country’s tortuous history and its record of instability, the turmoil and political turbulence that has been witnessed in the post-2018 years is unprecedented.

New fault lines were added to more longstanding ones, generating challenges, both complex and daunting. For the first time, Pakistan confronted a polycrisis — several crises that converged to reinforce each other and create an overall challenge tougher to deal with than any single crisis.

A political crisis, often with constitutional implications, raged through much of these years, the economic crisis in 2020-2024 was the most severe Pakistan ever experienced, the worst climate-induced floods in the country’s history tested national resilience in 2022, and a resurgence of terrorist violence revived threats to security.

Meanwhile, governance challenges multiplied. They included daunting problems of solvency, mounting energy and water shortages, climate change, and an increasing youth bulge in an environment of economic stagnation. But never before did the country confront these problems in such a divided and fractured state.

How did Pakistan get here?

Pakistan confronts many complex and daunting challenges, and various political, constitutional, economic, security, geopolitical, demographic, ecological and governance crises currently plague the country. The collection of essays Pakistan: Search for Stability, published by the Oxford University Press, takes stock of these issues. In her piece, former ambassador and political analyst Maleeha Lodhi explores the longstanding fault lines on which these challenges have been superimposed. Eos presents, with permission, an excerpt from the book…

A HISTORY OF CRISES

Lurching from crisis to crisis, the country has, over the decades, lacked a stable and predictable environment to solve the country’s growing problems. It has not been able to establish a viable political order or evolve a political consensus on strategic priorities that could be translated into policy.

It is not experimentation with political systems — parliamentary, presidential — that is responsible for its elusive quest for political stability. Presidential systems were, in any case, a façade for military rule and little more than vain efforts to ‘civilianise’ political interventions by the army.

Most of Pakistan’s political history has been about governance failures and missed opportunities. Political instability has been endemic, with the country alternating between military interventions and civilian rule. Reforms that could have transformed the country and placed its economy on a sustained high-growth trajectory were repeatedly postponed, as they would have threatened the ruling elite’s privileges and hold on power.

Complicating the quest to address persistent economic, governance and security challenges was the impact of global and regional geopolitics, which drove the country’s rulers to constantly focus outside rather than deal purposefully with festering domestic problems. External overreach and internal underreach became a repetitive pattern.

History, it has famously been said, often repeats itself as tragedy. This has also been the case in Pakistan. Current challenges have been superimposed on a long-familiar set of fault lines. First, then, a review of those that have persisted through the decades.

There are six mostly overlapping major ones that have shaped the political landscape and contributed to the country’s chronic instability: 1) unstable civil-military relations and the power imbalance between political and non-political institutions; 2) a political culture of clientelist politics; 3) the reliance by an oligarchic elite on ‘borrowed’ economic growth and overseas bailouts to address the country’s chronic financial crises and its resistance to reform; 4) uneasy or confrontational relations between the centre and provinces; 5) the interplay between efforts to ‘leverage’ geography in pursuit of national security and foreign policy goals and the role and interests of outside powers; and 6) the appeasement of the religious right and tolerance of militant outfits.

CIVIL-MILITARY IMBALANCE

The military’s preeminence in the country owed itself to managing the bloody and turbulent aftermath of Partition and early hostilities with India, especially over Jammu and Kashmir. Impelled by the chaotic birth of a new country, the imbalance was also rooted in the colonial legacy that gave primacy to order over everything else. This meant that the ‘steel frame’ of civil-military state institutions easily established their dominance over weak political institutions.

Pakistan’s party of independence, the Muslim League, did not have a strong and popular leader to steer the newly independent nation, because Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah died so soon after Partition. As the League’s leadership in the early years came predominantly from India, it could not compete with indigenous political elites without enlisting the support of the civil-military bureaucracy. This involved the military early in the country’s politics.

The army coup d’état of 1958 marked a decisive political shift, which created the precedence of the military’s overt intervention in politics, and paved the way for the subsequent take-overs. This was accompanied by the use of state resources to manipulate the political process, which was deployed with great frequency under Gen Ziaul Haq and again in the Gen Pervez Musharraf era.

Long periods of military rule also thwarted the evolution of parties and other political institutions, further reinforcing the power asymmetry. The military’s dominance was also encouraged by security concerns driven by an unbroken cycle of tension, conflict and confrontation with India.

The primacy of unelected institutions over representative organs of state left Parliament weak and subservient to the executive. Parliamentary subordination to a powerful executive had its roots in the weak representative credentials of the legislature in Pakistan’s early years.

With no popularly or directed elected legislature until the 1970 polls, the assemblies that functioned between 1947 and 1970 were elected by a restricted franchise, a fact that denuded parliament of real legitimacy and authority. This also cast the evolving structure of the state into a lasting mould. That, in turn, retarded the development of party structures and organisation.

The army coup d’état of 1958 marked a decisive political shift, which created the precedence of the military’s overt intervention in politics, and paved the way for the subsequent take-overs. This was accompanied by the use of state resources to manipulate the political process, which was deployed with great frequency under Gen Ziaul Haq and again in the Gen Pervez Musharraf era.

PATRONAGE POLITICS

The second fault line is the persisting nature of Pakistan’s politics, which pivots around patronage and operates principally on the basis of patron-client relations that tie politics to rural and urban influentials and kinship groups rather than to citizens.

What is known as ‘clientelism’ has long been a hallmark of Pakistan’s politics. This is often defined in social science literature as one that involves the exchange of material favours for political support among actors of unequal status. Patronage-based politics practised by elected and military governments alike relied on working networks of influential political families, kinship groups and biradaries to maintain them in power.

In this, politics and governance are more about leveraging the spoils system than framing policies. Political contests are rarely about public issues, but reflect a tussle over the privileges and resources that power offers. Political competition, then, is mostly about securing access to state resources and distributing them among supporters.

With parties becoming extensions of personalities and influential families, the focus is not issue-based politics, but what promotes or cements ‘clientelist’ networks of support and bolsters their privileged positions. With the rare exception of the early 1970s — which saw great ideological debates during an intensely populist phase in Pakistan’s politics — much of politics over the decades has displayed clientelist features.

AN OLIGARCHIC ELITE

The third fault line has been the most consequential to Pakistan’s fate and fortunes. This is an oligarchical elite’s reliance on borrowing, bailouts and an overvalued exchange rate to address the country’s chronic financial crises, and its resistance to mobilise domestic resources and raise taxes. Pakistan has one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios in the world, which has been the source of all its fiscal problems.

The enigma of successive governments living beyond their means can only be explained by a power elite averse to measures it perceives as threatening its economic and political interests. This has contributed to miring Pakistan in perpetual financial crises, with almost every past government acting in a fiscally irresponsible way and leaving the economy in worse shape for its successor to manage.

The failure to raise enough domestic resources, along with low levels of savings and investment, meant that successive governments, since the 1980s, have run huge deficits in national expenditure and on the external account. The twin deficits of the budget and balance of payments were financed by printing more currency notes, external borrowing and other inflow of funds from abroad, including remittances from overseas Pakistanis.

It also left the country living from one International Monetary Fund (IMF) tranche to another. It first sought IMF financing in 1958 and, since then, has had 23 Fund programmes, several of which it failed to complete.

Meanwhile, bank borrowing at home served as an immensely regressive measure, because it translated into forced transfer of savings to the government from people least able to bear the burden of inflation, the most pernicious tax on the poor.

Economic management that relied on borrowing permitted the country’s rulers to avoid and postpone much needed structural reforms, including tax reform, which could have placed the economy on a viable, self-reliant path. Instead, this led to an excessive rise in debt and landed Pakistan in a classic debt trap, which it is mired in today.

CENTRE-PROVINCE CONFRONTATION

The fourth fault line concerns troubled and unstable relations between the centre and provinces, which has punctuated the country’s political history since its inception. The confluence between the country’s ethnic diversity and the provincial configuration — with Punjab more populous than the other three provinces put together — underscored the need to make federalism a reality, not just a constitutional precept.

The failure to work a federal arrangement was writ large in the rise of the Bengali separatist movement that culminated in the break-up of Pakistan in 1971.

The 1973 Constitution, a consensus document, assured provincial autonomy and enjoined reciprocal obligations between the federal units. But this was observed more in its breach than in its adherence. It resulted in an insurgency in Balochistan in the 1970s and 2000s. The dismissal of provincial governments in Balochistan and NWFP in 1973, run by parties opposed to Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, set an unfortunate tradition of centre-province confrontations. This repeatedly tested the country’s unity.

The notion that reciprocal obligations between the centre and provinces are more than a constitutional principle and have to be fulfilled by both sides is still not readily or widely accepted. The increasingly regionalised nature of election outcomes from the 1990s onwards meant that, usually, parties that formed governments at the centre were different from those that constituted several provincial governments.

This should have urged efforts to establish smooth and cooperative centre-province relations. But this did not happen, making it an enduring fault line in Pakistan’s polity.

THE TYRANNY OF GEOGRAPHY

Fault line five concerns Pakistan’s much-celebrated geostrategic location and how this intersected with big power interests and global geopolitics to shape its foreign alignments. 

Pakistan’s internal political evolution and foreign policy was greatly influenced by its enduring quest for security. The shadow of an overbearing and hostile eastern neighbour and contested borders bequeathed by colonialism were the two key factors that accentuated the country’s insecurity.

The unresolved dispute over Kashmir — the cause of two of three wars with India and many crises (1990, 1998, 2001 and 2009) — was among the principal sources of tensions between Pakistan and India over the decades. On the western frontier, the border with Afghanistan demarcated as the Durand Line by the British became the basis, first, of irredentist claims by successive governments in Kabul and, then, an insecure and unstable frontier, after the rise and spread of violent extremism in the post-1980 period.

If the tyranny of geography imposed heavy burdens, the ill-thought policies pursued by successive governments exacerbated the situation. Moreover, the security preoccupation skewed the civil-military balance, which had ramifications for the internal configuration of power. These included fostering a highly centralised state structure, counterposed between weak political institutions in a society wracked by provincial and ethnic tensions.

Other consequences followed. The strategy that was crafted to deal with India was to seek extra-regional alignments to counter-balance its power, apart from occasional adventurist forays, such as provoking the Kargil conflict. It was this external balancing paradigm that drove Pakistan to forge Cold War alliances with the US-led Western coalition that was then looking for allies in the battle against communism.

Three times, Pakistan assumed a ‘frontline’ role to help the West pursue its objectives, on the basis of the strategic premise that this would help to mitigate its chronic sense of insecurity. But superpower intrusion into the region injected its own dynamics, plunging Pakistan into the vortex of regional conflict and rivalries.

The unanticipated consequences of Pakistan’s Cold War engagements, and especially its role in the anti-Soviet Afghan war, were sweeping and devastating. These blowback effects became enduring aspects of the domestic landscape, exacerbating governance challenges. The most toxic fallout was the growth of religious extremism and the advent of militancy in the country.

There was another consequence. The economic and military assistance received through various phases of the country’s alignments with the US-led West created an official mindset of dependence. This set up perverse incentives for domestic reform. It also yielded an approach that looked outside to deal with mounting problems and address the sources of the country’s internal weakness.

The foreign policy of successive governments intersected with their economic management to produce an outcome in which the country increasingly pursued rent-seeking relationships with big powers, relying on aid and borrowing rather than finding a viable path to economic growth and development by relying on itself.

In earlier decades, Pakistan’s Cold War alliance with the West offered policymakers the means to finance deficits with soft loans. Governments found the way to avoid reforms, raise sufficient revenue or tax themselves or their support base. Dependence on external resources to finance both development and consumption was thus both encouraged and enabled by the availability of concessional assistance as a consequence of the country’s foreign alignments.

Cold War assistance accompanied Pakistan’s close alliance with the US, cemented in the 1950s by military pacts. Then, in the 1980s, Western aid flowed as strategic payback for Pakistan’s pivotal role in resisting and rolling back the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. 9/11 again turned Pakistan into a frontline state and increased its strategic importance for Washington, which mobilised international efforts to provide financial resources and IMF financing for budgetary support as well as debt restructuring, to ease Islamabad’s economic problems.

In recent years, reliance on the West has been replaced by dependence on close strategic ally China, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, who provided financial help to bail out the country from economic and liquidity crises. Roll-over of loans and placing deposits in the central bank to shore up foreign exchange reserves have been among the ways this has been done.

This again underlines the intersection of foreign alignments and financial help to overcome economic crises. The habit of depending on others became so deeply entrenched in the country’s political culture that there was little, if any, questioning of this among the ruling elite, who routinely visited Gulf capitals to seek financial help.

MIXING RELIGION WITH POLITICS

The sixth fault line relates to how the managers of the state dealt, over the years, with the demands of the Religious Right, frequently succumbing to their pressure. This ended up increasing their political weight and leverage. 

No doubt, questions about the role of religion in the state and society were rooted in the very origin of Pakistan, but its secular founders envisioned the country as a Muslim-majority state. This vision was contested by religious parties and a significant section of the clergy.

Some of their demands that were accommodated by various governments found expression in the Hudood Ordinance, the Law of evidence, blasphemy laws, declaration of the Ahmadiyya community as non-Muslims, the Zina ordinance and the establishment of the Islamic Ideology Council, charged with ascertaining if laws adopted were contrary to Islam. Nevertheless, the poor showing of religious parties in successive elections helped the overall secular operation of the state through much of its history.

Religious parties wielded disproportionate political influence when they were allied to the state or enjoyed the patronage of military governments. Moreover, various governments used religion to mobilise the public behind certain goals, which elevated their role in national life. This unleashed unintended dynamics and became a source of division rather than unity.

But as historian Ayesha Jalal has pointed out, for the first three decades or more of its existence, Pakistan functioned as a moderate, liberal state, with religion ‘kept in check’ in state affairs. This changed under Gen Ziaul Haq, as he embarked upon a self-assigned mission to ‘Islamise’ the country, including its legal and educational system.

Zia fused politics and religion in using Islam to legitimate his rule. These policies set off a host of deleterious effects that polarised society along religious and sectarian lines. Combined with the effects of the Afghan war, this spawned extremism and saw the birth of militant groups. The state’s use of some of these groups to advance foreign policy goals was to haunt and challenge Pakistan for years to come.

Despite the efforts of Gen Musharaf to roll back several aspects of Zia’s legacy, the pattern continued under subsequent governments of either showing a lack of firmness towards, or appeasing, extremist groups. 

Whether it involved dithering in the face of street protests by a proscribed group in recent years, or entering into negotiations with the outlawed militant group the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2021, governments sought to meet such challenges by flawed policies that only compounded the problem.

The author is a former ambassador of Pakistan to the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Nations and has previously edited Pakistan: Beyond the Crisis State (Hurst, 2011)

This is a slightly modified version of an extract from the chapter ‘Faultlines and Governance Failures’ from the book Pakistan: Search for Stability, edited by the author and published in Pakistan by Oxford University Press. It has been excerpted with permission from the editor and the publisher

Header image: Illustration by Sarah Durrani

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 14th, 2024