NOTHING in human affairs is perfect, and there is room for improvement in every situation. The same goes for governance. Constitutional amendments and some of the laws are intended to further improve it. In our own experience, projects have also been launched to improve the bureaucracy, which is obviously an essential element in governance; the objective being to make it less wasteful, more efficient, and honest.

Numerous commissions and committees have studied the existing situation and proposed improvements. But governance has deteriorated, not improved, over the years. The findings of these commissions have in effect been ignored.

Soon after its advent, the Musharraf regime established the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) to devise, and then oversee, agencies and instruments for enhancing governmental effectiveness. It came up with a local government system that incorporated elements of Ayub Khan’s “basic democracies.” The NRB has not been in the news lately. I assume it is still around, and that contrary to normal practice it is working away quietly.

The government has recently established still another agency whose mission appears to be similar to that of the NRB. Called the National Commission for Government Reform (NCGR), it is to consist of 11 members five of whom will be serving or retired civil servants, three federal or provincial ministers, and two drawn from the corporate sector. Ishrat Husain, former governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, will be its head.

Writing in this newspaper (July 9, 2006), Mr Husain tells us that the commission will report once every three months to a “steering committee,” co-chaired by the president and the prime minister and including the four provincial chief ministers. This committee will consult the central and provincial cabinets, higher civil servants, politicians, and “nazims” regarding the commission’s recommendations. Once it has approved them, they will be deemed to have been approved by governments at all levels.

He says also that his commission will watch the filtering down to the masses of the prosperity to be generated by economic growth and, in the same connection, it will want to make public officials responsive to the common man’s needs. But apparently, it will not be concerned with the political dimension of governance. This omission may render its enterprise barren, for politics and administration are inextricably linked. The commission wants to make the bureaucracy both efficient and responsive. The quest for efficiency may require modernisation of equipment, change in methods and procedures, simplification of work flow (skipping unnecessary stops on the way up or down), delegation of authority and responsibility, and mitigation, if not elimination, of corruption. Installation of newer equipment, methods, and procedure does not require a lot more than a modest amount of training. Delegation of authority and eradication of corruption are the more intractable problems.

Delegation involves parting with authority. In the context of our long-standing and deeply entrenched tradition of centralisation, higher officials are not really willing to let go of any part of the authority they have. Since authority and responsibility go together, lower-ranking officials are not inclined to exercise even the authority the law has given them, because they do not wish to take responsibility for decisions except in the most mundane and routine matters. These inclinations result from attitudes of mind, not from structural or procedural design. NCGR cannot deal with them.

Responsiveness is a public official’s disposition to be helpful to the citizen who has approached him, consider his request sympathetically, allow him that to which he is entitled under the law, and do it promptly. Let me provide a couple of illustrations. Let us suppose that I miscalculated my income tax liability and sent the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) an amount in excess of that which was due. What will happen? The IRS will most likely detect my error and send me a cheque for the excess amount.

Suppose I need the figure for the property tax I paid three years ago. I will call the taxation department in my town government, a clerk will ask me to stay on the line, and she will give me the needed information in a few minutes. If my son has misplaced his birth certificate and wants an authenticated copy, all he has to do is to write to the chief clerk in the government of the town where he was born and in a few days he will receive his certificate, sealed and signed, in the mail.

Public officials in Pakistan do not normally act in this manner. Want of responsiveness on their part results from certain attitudes of mind engendered by our culture, especially the culture of governance. Those in positions of authority, even if minor, believe that to govern is to order others around, dominate and control them. The proposition that governing means serving the people and promoting their interest is frequently applauded from the public platform, but it forms no part of the operational ethos of our public officials. There is nothing the NCGR can do about it.

Bureaucratic corruption has existed in all ages and places in varying degrees and still does. It was, for the most part, limited to lower-ranking officials, in certain departments (e.g., police, revenue, irrigation, public works) more than in others. It has been on the increase in Pakistan since independence, and it is now said to be pervasive, afflicting all levels and all departments. Several reasons for this development come to mind. First, we are accustomed to thinking in terms of the individual and his interest, and notions such as the “public,” public domain, and public interest have been foreign to our thinking through much of our historical experience.

We got acquainted with these notions during British rule, but their hold on our motivation loosened after its termination. In our own native tradition stealing from the state and its government has never been considered particularly reprehensible; certainly not as much as stealing, let us say, from an individual.

What about situations in which a public official demands a bribe from a citizen who wants nothing more than that to which he is entitled under the law? It is his duty to meet the citizens demand, and the state pays him for doing just that. But he tells the citizen that he will not do his duty unless the latter also pays him a certain amount in cash or kind. He reasons that everybody else is acting the same way, and further that the salary the state gives him does not allow him the standard of living to which he is entitled. The state has put him in a position where he must take bribes!

Cost of living in Pakistan has increased enormously in recent years. Deterioration of public education has aggravated an average person’s problem of making the ends meet. Families that would have sent their children to public schools without giving it a second thought 20 years ago are now sending them to private schools that charge frightfully high tuition fees.

A very large part of a middle-ranking official’s salary will go towards paying these fees if two of his children are attending private schools and he will not be left with enough to meet his other legitimate needs.

Higher echelons in the administrative hierarchy were relatively untouched by corruption in the old days. Now corruption has reached them also. Frugality is not an operational value in these circles; ostentatious living in the drive to “keep us with the Joneses” is the rule here. The inclination to corruption at this level feeds partly on corruption among the ruling politicians. It is a well-known fact that many of them made tons of money unlawfully between 1977 and 1999. One cannot be certain that none are doing likewise now.

Graft and nepotism are not the only ways in which ruling politicians break the law. General Pervez Musharraf, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, Sheikh Rashid, and some of their other associates may be exercising self-restraint in the matter of acquiring dirty money. But if they were to require public officials to rig elections to their advantage, they would be committing as gross a violation of the law as taking bribes. If officials are asked to break the law relating to elections to advantage their political bosses, they will, without a doubt, feel free to break laws for their own benefit, including the one that forbids bribery.

I should like to say a word about centralisation and devolution. Mr Ishrat Husain sees the recently established local government system as a reform measure. That is a misinterpretation.

Considering that the central government has appropriated a directing role in relation to these institutions, at the same time that it has watered down the provincial government’s traditional authority over them, the so-called devolution works as still another move to further enlarge its authority, which is already abundant.

Note also that devolution remains mere window dressing until local governments get the authority to levy taxes and raise revenues to meet their normal expenses, without having to look to the provincial or the central government for grants-in-aid.

The president, the prime minister, politicians who lead the ruling coalitions, and leaders of the opposition parties, all of them, proclaim the desirability, indeed the vital necessity, of introducing and implementing a greater measure of provincial autonomy. Yet, no actual move is being made towards that end in spite of the fact that the smaller units in the federation are in turmoil over this issue.

Mr Ishrat Husain wants to reform governance to maintain a high GDP growth rate. Where, and whose, growth would it be if Pakistan were reduced to chaos? Those who appointed Mr Husain to his present office may have it in their power, if they also have the requisite wisdom, to pull the country away from the brink, but it is not given to him or his commission to save Pakistan from accelerating political decay.

Governance in Pakistan cannot be reformed unless its political system in its various dimensions is reformed also. That is a subject to which I may turn next Sunday.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US.
Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

PRESIDENT Musharraf’s message to India that stalling the peace process in reaction to the Mumbai train bombings would amount to playing into the hands of terrorists should be readily endorsed, even by those political and religious elements in both countries who ordinarily question the wisdom of his policies and the legitimacy of his government.

After half a century of tension and wars, the leaders of public opinion, the people at large, intellectuals, economists and clerics, etc., all stand convinced that the Kashmir dispute can be settled only through negotiations. More convinced than others is General Musharraf himself who, as army commander, made a last desperate attempt to settle it by military conquest some years ago.

Musharraf’s adventure turned out to be a double whammy for Pakistan. A triumphant India became more intransigent and Kargil a cactus hedge between the civil authority and armed forces of the country. Pakistan’s position in Kashmir is further weakened by a growing awareness that the UN’s 55-year-old resolutions on self-determination in Kashmir are non-binding. So much so that even our closest friends refuse to mediate or help and, instead, counsel a bilateral settlement through negotiations. There remain but a handful of ideologists and jihadis who still dream of annexing Kashmir through conquest or plebiscite.

It is difficult to blame India for postponing the scheduled talks in the wake of the Mumbai massacre. As The Economist noted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s first instinct was to call for calm and restraint rather than to point an accusatory finger at Pakistan. But since then almost every newspaper of the world has been instinctively naming, albeit without evidence, Pakistan’s jihadi outfits, chiefly Lashkar-i- Taiba, as prime suspects in the bombings. The world media can’t be blamed either. The suspicions that the suicide bombers involved in the London bombings a year ago had links with Pakistan were not unfounded.

That Pakistan had been training jihadists or terrorists (the world refuses to distinguish one from the other) to fight in Afghanistan and later in Kashmir is an undeniable fact. Their training camps may have been closed down and official patronage withdrawn but they are still breeding. The recent massacre in Karachi’s Nishtar Park despite security precautions could not have been perpetrated by an individual fanatic. It had all the ingredients of an attack planned and executed by a militant organisation. Otherwise, the investigators and the enquiry tribunal couldn’t have been groping in the dark several weeks after the incident.

The targeted murders of people belonging to all denominations — Sunni, Shia, Ahmadi — at regular intervals also appear more the work of terrorists than fanatics. Allama Hasan Turabi was not the kind of man to arouse feelings of hatred or revenge among his sectarian adversaries.

It would be futile for the government to deny the existence of terrorist groups when our own people die at their hands every other day. Nor can we justifiably ask others, as we have India, to provide “solid proof” of their involvement when our own victims and investigators cannot. The government and the opposition both have to recognise the existence of terror as an organised force before dealing with it. The lashkars, sipahs and hizbs will not cease to operate just because they have been banned.

Terrorism in Pakistan can be traced to Afghanistan when the Mujahideen and intelligence agencies worked together closely under American tutelage to expel the Soviets and to demolish their puppet regime. The links then forged are believed to endure with the fleeing Mujahideen regrouping as terrorists once their legitimate mission ended. Pakistan now has to make a deliberate effort to convince the world that it is not using its intelligence agencies for purposes contrary to their charter and that they do not run a parallel government.

It is also time for Pakistan to extricate itself from the Afghan quagmire. Historically, Afghanistan and Pakistan have never been sincere friends, they aren’t now nor possibly can be in the foreseeable future. India in the past has commanded influence both in Afghan society and government. It was natural for that influence to grow after the Taliban.

Pakistan should not be seeking strategic depth in Afghanistan any longer but keeping a watch on the unmarked frontier without being too sensitive about the loyalty of the tribes straddling or living close to it. Traditionally, some among them have been dealing with the government in Kabul without causing much worry to Pakistan.

Pakistan is a part of South Asia and that is where its future lies. It can be a connecting link with Central and Western Asia but cannot integrate with their economy or culture. Pakistan and Bangladesh have both established their separate identities on the subcontinent long enough not to fear domination by India as they did when the British were departing. Viewed even from the standpoint of religion, 500 million Muslims inhabiting the three countries in almost equal numbers, can and should be able to stand up to any challenge from Hinduism to their faith and culture.

Whenever Pakistan is suspected or directly accused of terrorism by India, it exposes the Muslims there to the risk of retaliation. For days they have lived under shadow of fear after the Mumbai bombing and in places like Gujarat they still do. The Mumbai investigators feel convinced that the seven train bombings were so perfectly coordinated that a local organisation, very likely the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), collaborated with other militants, wherever they came from.

Time has passed by Pakistan while it remains bogged down in schism and terror. Shahid Javed Burki noted in this paper earlier in the week that in the sixties Pakistan was held out as a model of economic success. Today, 40 years later, it is fighting the image of being a failed state. There is no room for any more visions, experiments or personal ambitions. In an age of regional trading blocs and oil cartels we have to seek our fortune in South Asia and not in Central Asia or in the Middle East.

A South Asian detente which one day might culminate into a South Asian union on the lines of Asean would assuredly bring peace and security to Kashmir which have eluded its inhabitants for half a century because of India’s military occupation and Pakistan’s ill-conceived interventions. Musharraf’s natural allies in achieving this aim would be the secular elements of Sindh, Balochistan and the NWFP and the liberals of Punjab and Karachi. Paradoxically they are his sworn enemies. If he must cut a deal for the 2007 elections it should be with them.