PAKISTAN is often called an ungovernable state. Obama refers to it as a disastrously dysfunctional state which will take decades to stabilise. Optimists may argue that even this represents progress given that a decade ago many were (wrongly) calling it a failed state. Cynics may rightly find his view ironic given that US policies, especially its support to dictators, have played a major role in making Pakistan what it is today. But it is true too that the primary blame for its current problems of un-governability lies with its own elites over the ages.

Un-governability is a situation where state institutions fail to manage societal needs, challenges and problems, leading to poor quality public services, intense power struggles, unnatural power transitions, high crime and/or insurgencies. In extreme cases, it causes collapse, as in Yemen and Syria.

This outcome in developing states is often due to unfavourable structural traits. Many were created artificially by colonial powers and did not represent cohesive nations but disparate groups having little in common and often riven with historical conflicts. Education levels were low, causing shortages of competent politicians and bureaucrats. Also low were taxation avenues to raise adequate state revenues to run an efficient and welfare-oriented state, along the lines of the seductive but elusive model of Western ones. In such cases, problems of un-governability and eventual collapse were inevitable, as in Chad, Somalia and South Sudan.

Pakistan is afflicted with high levels of un-governability.

However, there are countries where the situation is not so structurally unfavourable but where state institutions deliberately or unint­entionally cause the rise of un-govern­abi­lity problems and conflicts that they them­sel­ves later struggle to resolve. This sce­nario more accurately describes Pakistan. It was not a colonial construct but the result of a free­dom movement whose leaders participa­ted in dra­wing its borders. However, one can fairly ques­tion the extent to which its people then were a cohesive nation. There was a small well-educated middle class capable of providing efficient politicians and bureau­crats. The agricultural and services sectors provided scope for generating sufficient tax revenues.

Yet, today Pakistan is afflicted with high levels of un-governability, including poor quality public services, intense power struggles, unnatural power transitions, high crime and insurgencies. These problems almost all derive from the short-sighted and self-serving policies adopted by both civilian and military rulers which have led to national outcomes which they themselves struggle to control. Many such policies were even sold as being critical for protecting the national interest, with the latter being defined narrowly in terms of national honour, limited insti­tutional interests or strategic manoeuvres against hostile states. But such policies eventually backfired to disastrously affect genuine national interest defined as the welfare of the majority of people.

Such policies have been particularly common under dictatorships. Thus, the top-down political and economic Ayubian model was initially sold as a prerequisite for fast growth and did produce fast growth for a few years but eventually led to the 1971 fiasco. The ‘jihad’ under Zia was presented as crucial to defeating Soviet designs against Pakistan and ensured Zia’s survival for 11 years but its downside still haunts Pakistan today. Musharraf’s duplicitous policies towards the Afghan Taliban and tacit support for the MMA and MQM, while ensuring his own survival for nine years, were the root cause of the troubles today in Fata, Balochistan and Karachi. Politicians have made their own contributions to the mess. Their incompetence, corruption and short-sightedness have been directly responsible for the poor quality of services, crime and political instability. Of late, the state has shown some resolve to control these problems, but only those ones which were threatening to tear the country apart. There is little appetite to resolve problems which create enormous difficulties for people, but without threatening security.

So the core policies of almost all civilian and military leaders have undermined long-term national interest. As a believer in structural causes, I do not see this long chain of harmful leaders as being the result of luck or external conspiracies, but rather as the outcome of the structural features of Pakistani society such as ethnic tensions, low education and income, unequal distribution of power, etc.

This means that while structural conditions in Pakistan are not so poor as to cause collapse, they are still unfavourable enough to cause long bouts of political instability, economic slump and social ills. Nor are these structural traits about to vanish suddenly due to the mirages that many believe in eg, Panama trials, electoral reforms, CPEC, dictatorship, technocracy and khilafat. Thus, Pakistan’s transition from this situation will be a slow, long process as structural societal traits change slowly.

The writer is a political and development economist and heads INSPIRING Pakistan, a progressive policy institute.

murtazaniaz@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, June 21th, 2016