The Friday Times: Najam Sethi’s Editorial
Several unresolved issues are crowding the run-up to general elections later this year or early next year. But two in particular deserve special attention. The first is Pakistan’s troubled relationship with the US. The second is the PPP’s standoff with the Supreme Court. The contenders in both can be characterized as “frenemies”, meaning “friendly enemies”. Both issues have the capacity to derail the political system in the country if relations are not mended quickly.
Pakistan has finally unblocked GLOC supplies to Afghanistan. But the inordinate delay has taken a toll. There is scorn for Pakistan’s bumbling civilian leaders in the White House and Congress while the Pentagon and CIA, traditional friends of the Pakistan military, are seething with rage at its lack of cooperation. Things have come to such a pass that Congress is about to pass a bill declaring the Haqqani network a terrorist organization. This means that Pakistan could be declared a state-sponsor of terrorism for aiding and abetting the Haqqani network. The consequences of such a determination – cut-off in US military and economic aid followed by global trade and financial sanctions — could be catastrophic for Pakistan. It would slowly strangulate its economy and isolate it in the international community like North Korea and Iran. The former is a ruthless dictatorship and its leaders don’t much care for the welfare of their people, the latter is post-revolution society that is thrashing about in a dwindling pool of oil revenues. But both are fairly homogenous in religious and ethnic terms and are thereby able to stave off internal political fissures that could destablise them. Pakistan does not have such “luxuries”. It is already unraveling at a furious pace and will not be able to withstand any external shock like this.
The core issue is the shape of Afghanistan in the future. The US and the world are unanimous in insisting that the Taliban will not be allowed to rule in Kabul. The world believes that if Pakistan had not “hosted” the Taliban, they would have been militarily “degraded” and politically accommodated as one rather then the exclusive stakeholder in Kabul. The world’s problem with Pakistan’s military stems from its refusal to help the world achieve it. This bridge has to be built and crossed by the US and Pakistan jointly.
Pakistan fears that a non-Taliban regime in Kabul would be pro-India and unfriendly to Pakistan. But this formulation is based on two erroneous assumptions: that India will remain an eternal enemy; and that the Taliban are friends of Pakistan. But India is a permanent enemy only because Pakistan has thus willed it so far. That is changing. There is a consensus in the country now across the political divide that we need to build permanent peace with India. In other words, the thinking is that conflict resolution with India should follow rather than precede the building of mutual trust and interdependence. That is why Pakistan is knocking down trade and travel barriers. So if India is not fated to remain a permanent enemy and Pakistan is finally destined to uphold its permanent interests, there should be a paradigmatic adjustment in its Afghan strategy. Similarly, the Taliban have been shown to be anti-everything that the people of Pakistan stand for – democracy, human rights, economic growth, institutional justice, parliament, elections, accountability, free media and market, global integration. And over 40,000 Pakistanis have died at their terrorist hands in the last few years. Should they come to power in Kabul, they will set the whole region aflame.
The confrontation between the SC and the government is also deeply problematic. The SC has sent one prime minister packing and is poised to dismiss another. This is not a political tradition that any country would want to enshrine. It is dividing the nation into political camps and may precipitate a crisis that would encourage the military to step into the fray. The PPP has another six months to go at the most before the people will call it to accountability at the altar of the polls. Far better to allow that to happen than to hound it into renewed martyrdom. Either the SC should let the next elected government decide the matter of writing that damned letter to the Swiss authorities or the SC should do so itself. If this government is derailed, domestic politics will go into a vicious spin and the outstanding matter of quickly fixing the US-Pak relationship will be lost by default.
The SC’s populism is wilting on the vine. It is perceived to be one-sided, dogmatic, and uncaring because its focus is only on the PPP government, because the issue of writing a letter to the Swiss authorities against President Asif Zardari is legally controversial and because the superior judges have done nothing at all to redress the mounting everyday problems of the people with the lower judiciary.
The sooner Pakistan’s civil-military establishment reads the writing on the wall, the better.