ENTER with me now into the exciting and furtive world of Mark Penn, international man of intrigue. Penn is the top consultant for Hillary Clinton, a job for which his firm has so far been paid around $11m. But that’s just Penn’s cover –– he works for this thing called the “Clinton campaign” in much the same way that James Bond works for “Universal Exports”. After all, the Clinton campaign is, by its nature, ephemeral. Even if it’s more successful than most people now imagine it will be, it can last only until November.

And so the $11m assignment is really an afterthought. Penn’s actual job is chief executive of the grandly named PR giant Burson-Marsteller Worldwide. And if you thought that overseeing the “messaging” of a presidential campaign might be fulltime work –– well, how naive can you be, really?

Because last Monday, you see, Penn found time to meet Colombia’s ambassador to the United States. The South American nation hired Penn’s firm to help the Colombian trade deal — which was signed by the two countries’ presidents in 2006 — win congressional approval.

You might think that with his candidate currently campaigning in a very anti-free trade state, Pennsylvania, and with his candidate having made a big stink last month over supposed trade hypocrisy on Barack Obama’s part when an adviser to his campaign had similar contacts with Canadian officials, Penn would have thought twice about doing this. But again you would just be showing that you don’t understand how the big leagues operate. Penn’s not going to be able to live forever on that $11m, you know.

Last year, it was revealed that Burson-Marsteller operated an aggressive union-busting programme, a big no-no in Democratic circles; Penn claimed he wasn’t personally involved in that end of the business. We wouldn’t have known about this meeting unless the Wall Street Journal had found it. Penn admitted that it was “an error in judgment” and huffed that “it will not be repeated”. The first statement is true, if fantastically understated, while the second is indelibly true: on Saturday, Colombia fired Burson-Marsteller.

A union coalition called Change to Win is now demanding that Clinton fire Penn. “We have questioned Penn’s role in the Clinton campaign in the past for his representation of union-busting employers ... Penn [previously] said there was a wall between him and his firm’s representation of union busters,” Change to Win executive director Greg Tarpinian told the Guardian’s Elana Schor last week.

It’s beyond being an open secret that Penn — his two distinguishing characteristics are that he is personally about as conservative as one can be while still calling oneself a Democrat, and that it is putting it kindly to call him socially awkward — has few friends in the Clinton campaign. Many, I’m sure, didn’t want him running things in the first place, and many probably think (quite correctly) that he was being very greedy by not taking a leave of absence from B-M while running the campaign.

But there are two people who appear ready to stand by Penn, hell or high water, and they are the two who matter: Bill and Hillary Clinton. Penn joined Bill Clinton in the mid-90s, after the early woes (gays in the military, healthcare), and he kept the president on the ideological middle ground. He did the same for Hillary while overseeing her 2000 Senate campaign. In the course of these experiences, both Clintons came to swear by Penn’s advice. They saw his gift for numbers and demographic analysis, but they failed to grasp his obvious weak point.

Pennism is a kind of Democratic politics that one could argue was right for an era of conservative dominance: take few risks, and move as far to the centre and even right as possible so you couldn’t be labelled soft on defence or wobbly on support for the free market.

But George Bush and Karl Rove have seen to it that, after Iraq and Katrina and the US attorneys scandal and now a real-life recession, we are no longer in an era of conservative dominance. We’re not in an era of liberal dominance either, of course, but we are in a place where, for the first time in a very long time, conservatism has discredited itself, and more Americans are open to progressive alternatives. This was apparent to anyone paying attention in Sept 2005, after the tragedy of New Orleans.

But it wasn’t apparent to Penn. And by extension we can conclude it wasn’t apparent to the Clintons either (revealing, considering Bill’s alleged political genius). Hillary’s refusal to renounce her vote in support of the Iraq war — a refusal that I have no doubt was based on Penn’s advice, on the grounds that she had to continue to show she could be “tough” on foreign policy — was a disaster for her, as was the vote itself. If, in a few weeks’ time, we’re writing Clinton campaign post-mortems, her handling of Iraq will be deservedly high on the list of errata, and it was classic Pennism.

We should watch over the next few days and see if the Colombia meeting stays in the news. So far, the Obama campaign hasn’t exploited it; but if it does, maybe Clinton will be forced to cash in Penn. But even if that happens it will have happened far too late. If the Clintons had truly grasped the political moment we’re in, they’d have given Penn his papers a year ago.

—The Guardian, London

“I believe … that man is an entirely historical formation obtained through coercion” — Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison

COULD the fundamentalist stranglehold in the tribal areas be weakening?

In a gruesome departure from the tried and trusted method of execution, last month a qazi in Mohmand Agency ordered a couple found ‘guilty’ of adultery to be stoned to death. The sentence, said to have been carried out on March 31, marks a shift in the type of violence used by Islamist extremists to hammer home their demand for submission. This suggests, paradoxically, that the hegemony of radical religious ideology is under threat, if not actually waning.

Power functions on the basis of norms that are enforced through officially sanctioned violence. A state stamps its authority on citizens in part by criminalising certain behaviour. Crime and punishment, the norm and the punitive measure, work in tandem to control the individual. The same principles apply in the case of territories such as Fata, where ruling elites have long been in the process of establishing a state within a state, apparently with some success.

Dictatorship or democracy, secular state or theocracy, governments and ruling elites are free to criminalise anything under the sun — adultery, fornication, blasphemy, jaywalking, nose-picking. That, after all, is what the rule of law permits, what the rule of law signifies. But for the majority of citizens to acquiesce to laws, and thereby to the state’s authority, certain conditions are necessary. Due process must be observed in the prosecution of offences: the state must be seen to be impartial. More importantly, those found guilty must be punished in a manner that is viewed by the majority to be both proportionate and clinical. The benchmark for proportionality may differ, depending on culture or tradition. To deviate from the standard itself, however, is to turn punishment into terror.

If law bolsters authority, terror delegitimises power. Conversely, power exercised without legitimacy must necessarily resort to terror. Whether in the context of the state’s coercive machinery or a cabal of tribal elders, for authority to enjoy legitimacy, the populace need not freely agree. What is needed is merely for power to be seen as acceptable. In other words, for power to be exercised legitimately, what is required is a healthy dose of hegemony.

It may be useful here to recall that hegemony in the Gramscian sense is not coercive force alone but a combination of force and consent. It is primarily a condition of acquiescence to power, acceptance of power, not the brute exercise of domination. Hegemony is born of consent and requires consent to continue functioning.

Gramsci wrote that ‘mass adhesion’ to an ideology was itself a test of the legitimacy and relevance of a particular mode of thinking. For him, arbitrary ideological formations were destined to be eliminated by ‘historical competition’. Gramsci was of course not examining militant Islamist ideology but his arguments are equally valid in this new context. For above and beyond matters of faith, extremism of the kind seemingly flourishing in Fata is nothing more — or less — than an attempt to establish and maintain hegemony.

What Gramsci described as a ‘crisis of authority’ is engendered by changes in society. As people become less attached to traditional ideologies, the ruling class loses its consensus. “[T]he old is dying and the new cannot be born,” Gramsci wrote, and “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” It is in such cases, with hegemony rapidly disappearing, that the dominant class will resort to extreme measures.

The processes of change are all around us, we are said to live in an age of globalisation. Although we tend to think of this as a uniquely late-20th-century phenomenon, the theory itself is hardly new. Far from it.

Marx foresaw the development of a global consumerist culture when he wrote, famously, of constantly expanding markets and the impulse of the bourgeoisie to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere”. He understood that production and consumption would take on a ‘cosmopolitan’ character, that this transformation would be fuelled by global communications. These processes are inevitable.

It is in large part this inevitability that Islamist militants across the globe are challenging. But instead of mounting their resistance with the aid of socialist discourse, as was done by thinkers such as Shariati, today’s movements in the Muslim world require that their adherents conform to a radically different ideological formulation.

This too is by no means a unique feature of our particular moment in history. Gramsci spoke of a struggle between ‘two conformisms’ when traditional ruling elites begin to lose their stranglehold over society. In this struggle for hegemony, threatened elites are likely to demonstrate reactionary and conservative tendencies because “the particular form of civilisation, culture and morality which they represented is decomposing”.

The key element in this formulation is that traditional ideologies and forms of authority are weakening.

There is a reason why ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ is proscribed in civilised nations. For the state to exercise power legitimately, its power must at the very least be seen to be rational. Barbaric punishments do little else than titillate audiences and establish the state firmly in the role of aggressor. This, obviously, is not a formula for the smooth functioning of civil society nor, for that matter, does it bode well for the future of state (or quasi-state) hegemony. A tyrannical state is a weak state, a tribal leadership that terrorises its own people is a leadership that is rapidly losing its moral authority.

So what does this mean for people such as Shano from Mohmand Agency and Daulat Khan Malikdeenkhel of Bara, the two most recent victims of the death squads in Fata? For them, clearly, the brave new globalised world did not come soon enough. n

PAKISTAN’S political class is abuzz with talk of re-establishing the ‘supremacy of parliament’, which appears to mean stripping the presidency of its substantive powers, restoring the sacked judges of the superior courts and undoing the constitutional tinkering of the last eight years. Once this is done, we are told, parliament will be the pre-eminent institution in the state for the first time since 1973.

The politicians are wrong. While the three-pronged approach is necessary for parliamentary supremacy, it is far from sufficient. Reversing the encroachments on the rights and responsibilities of parliament and the judicature will do nothing to address the threat to parliamentary supremacy emanating from the military-bureaucratic axis.

The Musharraf era was only the latest manifestation in a tradition of dual governance that dates back to the East India Company: government by consensus in ‘normal’ times; authoritarianism in ‘extraordinary’ times. Pakistanis have seen this many times before: bureaucratic dominance stretching from Ghulam Muhammad to Ghulam Ishaq Khan and military dominance stretching from Ayub Khan to Pervez Musharraf.

Ultimately, none of these personalities were moved by the letter or the spirit of the Pakistani constitution. Instead, each was following a tradition that began in 1786 when the governor of the East India Company was empowered to act on his own responsibility in respect of situations “whereby the interests of the Company, or the safety or tranquillity of the British possessions in India, or any part thereof, are or may in the judgment of the Governor-General be essentially affected”.

It is no coincidence that the ‘national interest’ and ‘protection of public property and life’ — invoked each time there has been a takeover of the executive in Pakistan — echo the Company’s ‘interests’ and ‘safety or tranquillity of British possessions’. Pakistan’s authoritarian rulers — the real threat to parliamentary supremacy — have simply followed an unbroken chain of ‘residual autocracy’ or vice-regal authority that has spanned the centuries and was enshrined in Pakistan’s first, ‘temporary’ constitution, the Indian Independence Act, 1947.

It may be anathema to Pakistani liberals, but the first Pakistani leader to don the mantle of an authoritarian ruler was none other than Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The Quaid was hardly averse to trampling on provincial rights. Jinnah introduced Section 92A in the Independence Act, which empowered him to declare governor’s rule in the provinces. And when Jinnah clashed with the chief ministers of the NWFP and Sindh, the latter were soon ousted.

This history is important because the nine years it took to draw up a constitution also saw the military-bureaucracy alliance consolidate its control over the nascent state of Pakistan. The real threat to parliamentary supremacy has been and is this military-bureaucracy alliance that came of age in a constitutional milieu steeped in the vice-regal logic that governance is simply too important to be left to parliament alone.

Only when the vestiges of this alliance are removed will parliamentary supremacy become a reality. Parliamentarians interested in doing so would do well to read Ayesha Jalal’s The State of Martial Rule, a book-length exposition of the emergence of the all-powerful alliance. While Ms Jalal does not offer a silver bullet, her scholarly insights into the birth of that alliance provide valuable clues to crafting a successful strategy of rollback.

First, tensions between the centre and the provinces as well as between the provinces must be resolved. Kalabagh, periodic Baloch insurgencies, Pashtun and Sindhi sub-nationalism are the well-known emotive issues, but equally important to province-centre and inter-provincial relations are national finance awards, the Irsa water accords and royalties.

The new government has a broad-based mandate, but it remains to be seen how much political capital the key players will be willing to spend to settle issues of resource distribution. Militating against a settlement is the fact that while the status quo may make everyone unhappy, it has the virtue of being a known position.

Second, politicians need to dwell on the meaning of, ‘physician, heal thyself.’ The parties must deepen and widen their democratic roots. Dispiritingly, the biggest players — the PPP and PML-N — are silent on intra-party democracy and appear content to rely on an increasingly ethnically split vote bank.

Third, the military-bureaucracy’s control of foreign policy must be wrested away. The trouble is there is no obvious way to assert parliament’s will over the presidency, the foreign office and GHQ in this area. Adopting a populist foreign policy is a tempting route that parliament must resist — otherwise the first casualty would be the ‘war on terror’, a war that is as much Pakistan’s as it is the United States’.

The fourth measure that must be taken is perhaps the most vexing. In the years leading up to independence, the ‘babel of tongues’ that is Pakistan was lashed together with an appeal to Islam as the lowest common denominator. After independence, the Objectives Resolution gave the country a contradictory, vague ideology based on Islam.

Since then that ideology has been used as a stick to beat anyone asking probing questions about identity and culture. The consequences of placing Islam rather than Pakistan at the centre of the discourse on national identity were not hard to fathom. Gen Zia’s ‘Islamisation’ drive was an inevitable consequence of a state structure steeped in authoritarianism in periodic search of legitimacy.

Today, politicians serve up platitudes about the rights of minorities, but when Makhdoom Amin Fahim queried the sense in requiring a non-Muslim MNA to take an oath to uphold an ‘Islamic ideology which is the basis for the creation of Pakistan’ he was criticised for his ‘ill-timed’ remark.

Re-orienting the state’s ideology will require the revocation of discriminatory laws, cleansing textbooks of hate, softening public rhetoric, stepping back from the abyss of the jihad culture, and taking cultural cues from countries on our eastern rather than western borders.

Working their way down this laundry list, politicians will undoubtedly blanch. They are happier trumpeting their own, easier three-point agenda for supremacy. However, if the 1973 Constitution really did make parliament ‘supreme’, why have 19 of the 35 years since its promulgation been spent under authoritarian regimes?

Yet this fairytale of parliamentary supremacy will be fanned by at least one group — the military-bureaucracy alliance itself. Why? Because as it waits in the wings for the next ‘extraordinary’ moment, the greatest gift it could receive is the perception that it no longer exists.

cyril.a@gmail.com