ARROGANCE in a government, regime or an individual is often due to a sense of insecurity or a lack of confidence. Is that what we are seeing in the Musharraf government?

The government is not weak. It is the opposition that is weak. The government is not going anywhere for the time being because it is led by the army chief and is supported by the military. It has a party backing it that is composed of politicians eager to please. Yet it appears to be beset with a lack of confidence, induced perhaps by the general perception that whatever its accomplishments in the economic field, it has made no progress in the areas of political and social development. It has a serious problem of credibility, and if there is enough realisation of this among those in the government, then a sense of frustration is inevitable.

However, instead of addressing the reasons for the lack of credibility, which seems now to be permeating the ranks even of its loyalists, the government gives an appearance of being unconcerned and takes recourse to hiding behind a couldn’t-care-less attitude. It’s reaction to two more or less similar developments brings this out clearly.

When the opposition said its legislators would resign if the government tried to get General Musharraf reelected as president by the existing assemblies, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain or some other PML bigwigs retorted by declaring: Well, let them resign. We will hold byelections. Or words to that effect. Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi added his own bit, asserting that they would elect the general as president not for one term but for two terms — and in uniform, to boot.

This is the height of arrogance. Instead of saying that they regretted the opposition’s stand at a time when no decision had been taken on the president’s election and would meet its representatives trying to remove misunderstandings, government spokespersons rode the high horse. ‘We will hold byelections,’ they said in a tone reminiscent of the disastrous days of 1971 when Gen Yahya had decided to hold byelections in place of the forcibly disqualified Awami League legislators (and in which, to their shameful discredit, many political parties had agreed to take part). The message from the government to the opposition in effect was ‘we don’t need you’.

But last week when the MQM submitted the resignations of its ministers and ministers of state to the president’s military secretary (why him, as a matter of curiosity?), the government went into a tizzy. It never told the MQM to ‘go to the devil, we will appoint new ministers,’ as it had done in the case of the opposition. Instead, the prime minister and his political trouble-shooter came down to Karachi to mollify the MQM and the president was reportedly in touch with the Muttahida boss living in self-exile in London.

Pride was swallowed and steps for reconciliation initiated. The explanation is of course simple. The government depends on the MQM for crucial support in the artificially created set-up that it has created; it doesn’t need the ARD opposition consisting of the two largest parties of the country.

The MQM has 19 seats in the National Assembly, 42 in the provincial assembly of Sindh and two now in the Azad Kashmir assembly. It has three federal ministers and one minister of state and seven ministers in the Sindh government, where it is in coalition with the PML-Q. The PPP has 59 members in the 168-seat Sindh Assembly even after the military’s engineered defections, 16 more than the MQM. Even when it threatened to withdraw its ministers from the government, the Muttahida was careful to say it fully backed General Musharraf and his policies, presumably including his policy in Balochistan which it had previously criticised. It can get away with its pressure tactics — if prudence demands that the word blackmailing be avoided — because the government requires its support both at the centre and in Sindh to avoid doing a deal with the PML-N and the PPP.

For its own sake, the MQM should be quite worried about the nature of an alliance where it has to periodically talk of resignations or withdrawal from the government to get a hearing for its complaints and demands. It can hardly be described as a harmonious alliance, but then of course the MQM gets its own mileage out of it. Its bargaining position has been strengthened by the ARD-MMA joint move to bring a no-confidence motion against the government in the National Assembly, which may pose no immediate threat but which has a certain element of unpredictability about it.

Early this week, there was some stiffening of the government spine, but whether it can afford to altogether dump the MQM is not clear. It was reported on Thursday morning that misunderstandings between the government and the MQM had been sorted out, and the resignations of the party’s ministers would not be accepted. But the alliance came under its greatest strain as a result of the latest episode and the refusal of an MQM delegation to attend a meeting with the president — an action for which reportedly it later had to express its regrets. It’s about time the party learned the wisdom of that excellent axiom that you shouldn’t bite off more than you can chew. It could be as guilty of acting arrogantly as the government and in the process it may be overestimating its value: some of the unpopularity of the Musharraf government must also surely have rubbed off on it as well.

Apart from arrogance, self-delusion is also a common failing in governments that are not confident of their true representative character. They begin to believe what they want to believe. A small instance was provided the other day by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in a television interview. Asked whether he would again stand for election, Mr Aziz said certainly, by all means. Will he again become prime minister? That will depend on the party, whose decisions were supreme. Mr Aziz talked as if he was a seasoned politician nursing a traditional constituency. He has probably forgotten the circumstances in which he was allotted constituencies and the way he was elected.

He is also being extremely naive, or hypocritical, when he wants us to believe that decisions are actually taken by the party or that the latter is the supreme decision-making body in government. Why say things like this when you know they will not be credible?

Quite frankly, the government is floundering from one crisis to another, and is bent on tackling each on a day-to-day basis. It is thus missing the bigger picture. It is unmindful of the damage to its standing that it has suffered in the public eye from the Steel Mills’ privatisation botch-up or such seemingly small but vital steps towards holding the government accountable as the Sindh High Court’s notice to the provincial chief of Military Intelligence to appear in court and inform it of the whereabouts of three missing Baloch politicians.

The existing situation cannot last without bringing even greater damage on the government. Its political managers, instead of persisting in their dismissive mindset towards all criticism, quite a bit of which is well meaning, should be working to bring about some kind of a national reconciliation. This is the only way to proceed towards general elections in an atmosphere of relative calm and try to steady the wobbling ship of state.

How even those who were responsible for crafting the present system including several individuals who were its ardent advocates, sense the danger that looms ahead is seen in the letter written by them to Gen Musharraf that has been much commented upon in the press although it has received no adequate reply from the government. The letter from generals, bureaucrats and academics has not evoked much of a public response because of the credentials of some of those signing it; these gentlemen, like the government they are now criticising, lack credibility. But the points they have outlined deserve a serious hearing.

One of the signatories of the letter, Gen Tanvir Naqvi, is the author of the new local government system. It is quite likely that he still considers his system to represent what Gen Musharraf calls the “essence of democracy”. But has Gen Naqvi in comfortable retirement ever wondered at what he has done to governance by decimating the civil services? The inability of the new local governments to deal with the aftermath of such calamities as last year’s devastating earthquake in the north or the more recent rains in Punjab and Sindh, particularly Karachi, should have come as a shock to him.

Perhaps better response systems were in place in the old civil service-run system. The present nazims appear to be more interested in politicking and in initiating showpiece projects rather than trying to seek true empowerment for local government and in pressing the centre to provide them with the wherewithal to cope with civil problems and emergencies.

A CENTRAL claim of the Bush administration’s foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism. So what do you do when you get a democratically elected terrorist organisation? Ignore the contradiction. Pretend it doesn’t exist.

In the past few weeks there has been something utterly surreal about the US continuing to allow the Israeli military to pummel Hezbollah, and kill women and children along the way, while insisting that Washington’s purpose is to strengthen the legitimate, democratic government of Lebanon.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, has been calling desperately for the one thing that the US and Israel have refused: an immediate ceasefire. And Hezbollah, which the US and Britain characterise as a terrorist organisation, is itself an important part of that democratically elected government.

So we must do everything for that democratically elected government except what it asks. We know best what is good for them. Whoever said democracy meant letting the people themselves decide? As Lebanon’s special envoy, Tarek Mitri, told PBS, America’s publicly funded broadcaster, on Tuesday: “You can’t support a government while you’re allowing its country to be ruined.”

Meanwhile, Hamas is not allowed to operate as the democratically elected government of the Palestinians. The Palestinian people spoke. But they got it wrong. They must have been misinformed. They must think again.

Of course there’s a real dilemma here. Just because Hamas and Hezbollah competed and did well in elections, that doesn’t mean you must accept everything they stand for. Both are Janus-faced movements, as was IRA/Sinn Fein. Engaging with Hezbollah-as-Sinn Fein or Hamas-as-Sinn Fein doesn’t mean tolerating the terrorist activities of Hezbollah-as-IRA or Hamas-as-IRA. Up to a point, you can fight the terrorist side while encouraging the political side. In fact, the name of the game is precisely to shift their calculus of self-interest towards peaceful politics, by increasing both the costs of violence and the benefits of participation.

But transitions from the politics of violence to democratic compromise are always messy. They involve negotiating with terrorists, letting some past wrongs go unpunished and accepting that a movement’s militant rhetoric may lag behind the more pragmatic reality of its position. Everything, in fact, that the US practised in its relations with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which it initially characterised — with reason — as “without any questions, a terrorist group”.

Two diametrically opposite conclusions may be drawn from these first strange fruits of democratisation in the Middle East. One is to say that the whole Bush agenda of supporting democratisation in the Arab and Islamic world was misguided from the start — the product of a naive, missionary-cowboy approach to international politics. It destabilises. It brings terrorists and extremists to power.

The cure is worse than the disease. So let’s get back to seasoned old “realism”. Let’s not try to transform these countries or expect them to be more like us, but take them as they are. Let’s pursue our national interests — security, trade, energy — with whatever allies we can find. Stability comes first.

This is the default position of much European diplomacy. It’s the wisdom of Jacques Chirac. Curiously enough, it’s also where some of the European left ends up — taken there by its opposition to “war for democracy” a la Bush and Blair, or simply by the kneejerk “If Bush is for it, we must be against it”. But following the American debate closely over the past weeks, I find that opposition to the democratisation agenda is also growing inside the US.

There has always been a Republican “realist” position, associated with figures such as Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to Bush Sr. After Iraq, and this latest imbroglio, it could regain the upper hand in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. It could win out on the other side of American politics too. If one looks at the foreign-policy debate among Democrats, one finds a strong strain of such “realism” — though tagged with “progressive”.

The argument that the US should pull back from this poisonous world, look to its own economic interests and find allies wherever it can appeals to a significant part of the Democratic electorate. For many Democrats, the fact that the current president has identified himself so strongly with the promotion of democracy is another reason for being sceptical about the promotion of democracy. If democratising the Middle East means Iraq, Hezbollah and Hamas, better not try it.

I believe this is precisely the wrong conclusion to draw. In the long run, the growth of liberal democracies is the best hope for the wider Middle East. It’s the best hope of modernisation, which the Arab world desperately needs; of addressing the root causes of Islamist terrorism, inasmuch as they lie in those countries rather than among Muslims living in the West; and of enabling Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, Kurds and Turks to live side by side without war. But it will be a long march.

We know from elsewhere that the intermediate period of transition to democracy can be a dangerous time, that it can actually increase the danger of violence, especially in countries divided along ethnic and religious lines, and where you rush to the party-political competition for power without first having a functioning state with well-defined borders, a near-monopoly of force, the rule of law, independent media and a strong civil society. That’s what happened in the former Yugoslavia. That’s what’s been happening, in different ways, in Palestine, in Lebanon and in Iraq. Full, liberal democracy contributes to peace; partial, half-baked democratisation can increase the danger of war.

What we in the community of established liberal democracies should do is not abandon the pursuit of democratisation but refine it. Recognise that only in exceptional circumstances (such as post-war Germany and Japan) do democracies grow from under military occupation, and that the purpose of building democracy does not justify military intervention. Accept that, as the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji wrote in the New York Times, it’s better for people to find their own paths to freedom, and our job is to support them.

Learn from experience that well-defined borders, the rule of law and independent media are as important as an election — and may need to precede it. That along the way you have to negotiate with nasty people and regimes, such as Syria and Iran. And that, in this dirty, complicated world, advocates of armed struggle — terrorists, if you will — can become democratic leaders. Like Menachem Begin. Like Gerry Adams. Like Nelson Mandela.

So let’s not throw out the democratisation baby with the Bush bathwater. There’s a seriously good idea there. It just needs to be a lot better executed, and with patience for the long haul. The right conclusion is strange but true: a little democracy is a dangerous thing — so let’s have more of it. —Dawn/Guardian Service