Courtesy Daily Times, 25 January 2009

Pakistan ka Tasavvur

By Stephen Philip Cohen; Translated into Urdu by Shafiqur Rehman Mian; Vanguard Books Lahore 2008; Pp358

Shafiqur Rehman has competently rendered into Urdu Stephen Cohen’s 2004 book The Idea of Pakistan. This will the first book of its kind in Urdu because of Cohen’s well known habit of looking at his subjects from new angles of inquiry.

Stephen Cohen grasped Pakistan from the right end of the stick; he wrote about the Pakistan army first. He is different from other writers on Pakistan today because he shuns mere cataloguing of facts. He develops insights, theorises on the basis of multiple versions of reality felt in Pakistan, and focuses on personalities in order to define them. The last bit he does to account for the wisdom that where state institutions are weak men drive political evolution.

He reads the literature on Pakistan he thinks provides the most innovative approach to a problematic state but delves into journalistic coverage to lend intimacy of immediate detail to his writing. His ‘scenario’-building is saved from obsolescence because he doesn’t rely on just one scenario. Yet his tone is magisterial enough to breed confidence in the reader.

In 1985, in his book on the Pakistan army (available in Urdu and Chinese too), Cohen had warned that Pakistan might become ‘its own worst enemy’ and repeat the 1971 blunder that broke it apart. He now returns to the theme in his final chapters but builds scenarios about Pakistan that could avert another failure. The book is rich in insights on what the Pakistanis think their state is destined to be and what the state of Pakistan is actually like.

He tackles the ‘failure’ theme too which tends to be subjective and could only be discussed in the light of what Pakistanis see as failure: failure to live up to its ‘mission statement’; failure of the national vision to realise the ‘idea of Pakistan’; failure to recover economically after 1971; failure of the ‘moderate oligarchy’ to preside efficiently over the country’s governance; failure of the state to survive a catastrophe in the shape of a nuclear war, Islamic revolution and ethnic conflict.

Cohen has seen the army take over in Pakistan in the past and is too chastened by that to easily fall for the argument given today in favour of General Musharraf’s rule. He notes that Huntington in the 1969 book Political Order in Changing Societies had called General Ayub a great legislator and had compared him to Solon and Lycurgus, cast in the mould of Rousseau and Plato.

He notes also that Fareed Zakaria in his 2003 book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad had the same kind of assessment of the role of General Musharraf. Yet he doesn’t dismiss what is happening in post-9/11 Pakistan out of hand, like the black-and-white debaters of democracy in Pakistan today. In all his ‘survival’ scenarios he posits normalisation of relations with India as a pivot and rejects Islamists in power through the medium of democracy.

One work that has significantly informed Cohen’s approach is Ian Talbot’s book Pakistan: a Modern History (1998) where Talbot says that Pakistan’s survival would rest on its ability to exercise ‘prudence and self-reliance, dignity and compassion, and the inclusion of marginalised groups such as women, minorities, and the rural and urban poor’.

Cohen thinks that Pakistan’s oligarchic establishment would most probably continue in power in the future but it could be subverted by ‘another war with India, the growth of radical Islamist groups, the loss of American and even Chinese support, the failure to come to grips with Pakistan’s social and educational problems, a series of assassinations of senior Pakistani officials, or the revival of ethnic and regional separatism’. And, ironically, loss of confidence in the idea of Pakistan; in other words, a collapse of national consensus.

The establishment in Pakistan has got into the habit of negotiating concessions with the world by pointing a gun to its own head. Yet the terrorists might dry up and America might lose interest if they can’t be arrested and handed over any more; and there is a limit to Pakistan exploiting its geostrategic location ($7 billion in American aid under Musharraf) and holding it forth as a threat to its existence rather than a factor of permanent economic advantage.

Cohen thinks that if Musharraf is killed, another army officer thinking more or less like him would come to power but he would jiggle his policies just a little while yielding the presidency to ‘phlegmatic’ Soomro. But the fundamental impediments like corruption, incompetence and a broken tax and revenue collection system might keep pushing back all efforts at keeping Pakistan afloat even with foreign help.

General Musharraf is good on foreign policy but not so good on the domestic front. He is indecisive and ambiguous because he agrees with all kinds of interlocutors, fundamentalist ands liberal alike, which moves no one to stand behind him squarely as he carries out his reforms. His insistence on ‘national interest’ — a term the political scientists have rejected for being completely inchoate — makes no dent in the declining national consensus.

His TINA (there is no alternative) holds together because of the support of a ‘dozen or so generals, as did the power of every Pakistani leader since the 1950s’. The people of Pakistan want democracy but they also welcome military interventions after being disappointed by flawed democracy, as happened in the decade of the 1990s. If Pakistan has to return to democracy conclusively, the army-civilian relationship must be redefined and that can happen only after India and Pakistan have sorted out the Kashmir problem and their ‘larger conflict’.

If Pakistan has to survive it will have to decide if its Islamic character is to impinge on its democratic aspirations or not. If it moves forward as intellectually muddled as now, it will not be able to secure itself against being dismantled. Already, India and Bangladesh have overtaken it economically; more time lost would complicate the problem of survival. Also, Pakistan’s oligarchic establishment, which is like nothing that India and Bangladesh have, must study the Bangladesh model where the army has been sent home and the political parties have agreed to hold elections under a caretaker government.

Cohen’s recipe for political stability on the order of Bangladesh may not appeal to some readers but it does go to root of the problem. He thinks that ‘a series of traumas to the state, on the one hand, or a lengthy spell of democracy, on the other, and an accommodation with India, might leave Pakistan resembling Bangladesh in some essential ways’.

Cohen believes that a military-civilian redefinition of roles has to be achieved, otherwise the country will move decisively to authoritarianism whose inklings the people saw in the democratic interregnum of the 1990s. To a question he asked a class of students in Pakistan in 2000, the reply was they wanted Jinnah for their leader but fell silent when asked which living leader was most like Jinnah. The class agreed that Pakistan needed a Nelson Mandela, but there was a large number who said they liked Saddam because he was defying the US; there was praise for Imam Khomeini too for the same reason, in addition to domestic stringency under Islam.

Cohen sees Pakistan rapidly acquiring ‘an Arab view of the United States’ which it links to the Jews in the Middle East and the Hindus of India in the neighbourhood — a double whammy of a challenge constructed to obviate even thinking of addressing it. Pakistan will continue to be a national security state, threatened with backwardness in the face of a dynamic of change it cannot yet cope with.