I am nearing the end of a week’s rest and recuperation at an undisclosed location in the Cayman Islands, but Pakistan’s Summer from Hell is still going strong.
Things were tough enough during my stay. On my way in from the airport in Karachi, traffic was unusually light. Roving gangs of armed thugs were roaming through the city, pillaging gas stations. The police force was laughably overwhelmed; the only gas stations that stayed open had battalions of private security. Meanwhile, up to 100 people died there in violence between the organized gangs of criminals known in that unhappy city as political parties, schools and businesses are closed in fear, and tens of thousands of families already living at the margins of existence are losing their daily wages until peace returns. One night during my visit a vicious goon threw a hand grenade into a group of worshipers performing their evening prayers in a Karachi mosque; nothing in this city is sacred anymore.
In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known as the Northwest Frontier Province, and currently on the front line of the COFKATGWOT (the currently nameless Conflict Formerly Known As The Global War On Terror) assassins killed the son of a prominent official and Safwat Ghayyur, the Commandant of the Frontier Constabulary. Three million people became homeless in the early stages of the flood; since then monsoon rains continue to inundate the highlands, and successive flood crests is move inexorably down river, spreading devastation through the Punjab and overspreading the country’s most valuable and productive agricultural land across both Punjab and Sindh.
The economy is unraveling. During my stay in Karachi, the country’s commercial center, banks were unable to process payments because their staff, fearful of violence and facing the total collapse of the transit system, could not get to work. Paychecks aren’t being cut and millions of workers have not gotten their July paychecks. That is nothing new for the country’s journalists. Many media companies have, I am told, been caught in a cash squeeze as a result of heavy tax assessments and have fallen weeks or even months behind on their payroll. The floods disrupted transport across the country; worse, they are wiping out crops in the rich, low lying bottom land next to the rivers. Fruit and vegetable shortages will be showing up soon, driving up prices and worsening an inflationary spiral that has already forced the central bank to raise rates — and led the government to raise controlled prices on goods like sugar. Cotton production is likely to fall by up to 20% even as warehoused stocks of cotton and wheat were destroyed by the floods; a lot of Pakistanis will be going hungry in coming months. Not the best time for a budget cut, but with tax revenue falling as the disasters unwind, the government is planning major cuts in development and social spending.
Meanwhile, foreign investors, reading about the succession of horrors, are staying away in droves. Floods, Taliban, some of the most appalling corruption anywhere in the world, anarchy and chaos in the streets: who needs it? There are plenty of safer places to put your money.
It is hard to exaggerate the eye-popping incompetence displayed by some government officials and politicians in the face of these disasters. The country’s president ran off to the UK where a lavish party was planned for his son: first things first, after all. And as I was preparing to leave the country a newspaper story in the Tribune reported that a Pakistani trade delegation has just returned empty handed from a mission to Moscow. The designated head of the delegation for some reason wasn’t cleared for the trip; the delegation then dissolved into vain and petty disputes over who should be in charge. (Dysfunctional and petty posturing over minor points of precedence is a mainstay of Pakistani politics.) The Russians were insulted; no agreements were reached. The delegation returned empty handed. A journalist at a dinner told me that the ‘black box’ from the recent plane crash that killed 152 people near Islamabad failed to leave the country on schedule because a member of the air safety authority insisted on accompanying the black box to Paris — and the official’s visa hadn’t come through yet.
The rot doesn’t just affect the high ranking officials. A story in the Nation reports that police in a number of stations across Lahore have simply turned off the station telephone lines. Too many calls from too many citizens asking for help; it was disturbing the well earned rest of the cops. There are stories of “ghost schools” in rural areas: salaries are paid, but no teachers appear for work.
Pakistanis live with levels of incompetence, chicanery and fraud in government that would have Americans assembling in lynch mobs. From the presidential palace to the cop on the beat, public servants routinely neglect and abuse their responsibilities in this country in ways that would be sensationally scandalous in any well developed, well functioning state. The intolerable is the normal here, accepting the unacceptable a way of life. There are wonderful people in this country: honest journalists, able and patriotic civil servants, idealistic reformers, committed educators, incorruptible officials civilian and military, brilliant novelists, daring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers. But somehow the dough doesn’t rise. Something, or several somethings, don’t seem to work.
Sit down with any number of Pakistanis and ask what’s wrong and you will be in for a fascinating, rich and informed discussion and debate about whose fault it is and where the wrong turnings were taken. The military, the US, the British, Partition, the loss of Kashmir, the loss of Bangladesh, this prime minister, that prime minister, Islam, secularism, India, the Punjab, the Sindh: there are almost as many theories of Pakistan’s crises as there are symptoms. Some come from the lunatic fringe: the American-Jewish plot to crush Pakistan precisely because it is the key to the global Islamic resurgence, for example. Others come with thick forests of documentation, argued with passionate conviction by people who have invested lifetimes into developing a comprehensive theory of Pakistan. Yet the reality seems more complex than any theory, and none of the theories I’ve heard offer much hope for quick change.
Two theories common among westerners don’t make sense to me: that Pakistanis suffer from too much nationalism and religion. Too much chauvinism and bigotry, perhaps, but at least among the nation’s elites both genuine love of country and sincere religious faith seem in short supply. A 21st century country that can’t be bothered to educate its own children and permits abuses like bonded labor on a mass scale can hardly be said to be nationalist in any meaningful sense; a culture where so many officials high and low operate with this level of corruption and neglect of the public good cannot be called religious. In both cases there may be an obsession with the outer symbols of nationalism and religion (flags and beards), but the immense gap between aspiration and reality suggests that there is something hollow about the way too many (though certainly not all) Pakistani elites embrace these two value systems. A nationalist revival that saw elite Pakistanis making genuine sacrifices to educate the poor, assure equality before the law for all the country’s citizens, build up the national infrastructure and drive corrupt and incompetent officials and politicians from public life would be a very good thing. So would the kind of religious revival that inspired public officials to refrain from taking bribes.
Pakistan is not the world’s only country where the best and the brightest spend long hours debating what when wrong and whose fault it was. Egyptians, Argentines, Italians, Serbs: there are lots of countries out there where diagnosing the wrong turns in the road is a national hobby. Different Pakistanis have different theories, and most of them involve the US, though in different ways. Military types attack the US as an unfaithful ally and blame Pakistan’s steady loss of influence and power vis a vis archrival India as the consequence of American betrayals. Some democrats in Pakistan blame the US for preferring military government to democratic rule.
It’s not all about us. Some of the people I met with told me that the idea of Pakistan itself was a dreadful mistake: that it would have been smarter for the Muslims of British India to insist on constitutional guarantees for minority rights in an undivided India. Outside the Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, many people resented the concept of Pakistan as a vehicle for Punjabi domination of the rest. Others thought that the concept of Pakistan was fine, but that the idealistic vision of the nation’s founding father Ali Jinnah has been betrayed.
What Pakistan probably needs most is the one thing it won’t get: a vacation from history. A front line state in the COFKATGWOT, in the Cold War, and in the Ind0-Pak confrontation going back to Partition, Pakistan could use a couple of decades of geopolitical irrelevance and obscurity to settle down comfortably in its own skin, develop its institutions and resolve basic questions about its identity. This isn’t going to happen; the war in Afghanistan isn’t going to end quickly, India isn’t going away, and the shadow of the US-Iranian confrontation hangs over the region’s prospects.
Meanwhile on top of its geopolitical issues and its unresolved domestic questions, the country is now struggling with the worst floods in its history. Millions of mostly illiterate people already on the verge of destitution are facing the loss of their homes, their farm animals and their only possessions. This is a time when the United States needs to stand up and be counted on the side of Pakistan’s people. Every dime of government and private aid, every helicopter rescue mission, every bundle of food, every piece of medical equipment and every dosage of lifesaving drugs conveys and important message about the kind of people we are and the kind of world we want to build.