Opinion | Pakistan: Poised On A Knife’s Edge – News18

Last Updated:November 29, 2024, 17:46 IST

The recent incidents have shown that any fig leaf of pretence that Pakistan had as a parliamentary democracy has also been done away with

Pakistan has always been a strange country, if one could even ever call it that. Conjured out of thin air in the clerical Deobandi schools of western UP in the 1930s, infused with a fake sense of history and entitlement conjured in the Aligarh Muslim University around the same time, midwifed by the British for geostrategic interests of their own in the 1940s, and assiduously pampered by the Americans as their periscope into the USSR during the 1950s, this artificial nation-state received two more fortuitous leases on life: first, due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and second, because of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre Twin Towers in New York City.

In each case, Pakistan received huge amounts of money from America (read US deep state) that was neatly stashed away by the generals who have ruled the country since 1957. This money has been funnelled into either a massive $100 billion business empire within Pakistan or into lavish residences, primarily in London. Despite being a nation of approximately 236 million people, Pakistan effectively serves the interests of only around 70 elite families who dominate its institutions.

Pakistan is well known as an army with a country attached. Governance, if one can refer to it by this name, has consisted of the army toying with puppet groups, purporting to be political parties and fomenting tribal divisions. This circus has been interspersed with bouts of outright martial law. Civilian prime ministers have been selected by the army, rather than being elected in a normal procedure that is followed by other democracies.

Only the US deep state calls Pakistan a democracy and much of the recent chaos and turmoil is the outcome of the latest experiment that this unfortunate country tried with democracy in February 2024. Whatever be the ills and idiosyncrasies of Imran Khan (and there are many), it is practically acknowledged that the election was stolen from undoubtedly the most popular politician in Pakistan, even as he has languished in various prisons since May 2023.

In such a scenario, the common people have remained wretchedly poor (and getting poorer with relentless inflation), and anyone with the slightest ability and capacity to do so has emigrated. The problems of the country are gigantic. It is overpopulated, and its main agricultural lifeline—the Sindhu River—is hopelessly silted, leaving the country prone to disastrous flooding. A primarily agricultural country, it does not have the capability of feeding its own people.

It has been in a precarious situation economically for a decade as the clientelist and rentier doles from America (and lately China) have practically dried up. As a consequence, it has settled over the last two years at a very low level of economic equilibrium, at an enormous cost to the common man. It practically exists today at the whim of the IMF, (read US deep state) and the Democratic Party in that country.

Culturally, Pakistan is fractured by deep fault lines among its four provinces—Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and Baluchistan. These provinces differ vastly in size, population, and resources, with Punjab dominating the country. This dominance is deeply resented by the inhabitants of the other three provinces, who fear Punjab, especially as the army elite is predominantly drawn from there.

At the time of Partition, these provinces shared little in common except for being Muslim-majority and geographically contiguous—hardly a workable criterion for the formation of a new country. The parallels with the erstwhile Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, two other artificial creations of the West, are all too apparent. Neither of these two creations lasted longer than 70 years. Are the bells tolling for Pakistan?

The economic, social, cultural and ethnic contradictions are too many. The only factor that kept this show going was American money. American interest in Pakistan has, however, dwindled in the past few years. The Chinese also probably feel that Pakistan is not paisa vasool, not that their interest in Pakistan went beyond the Port of Gwadar and the road connecting it to the Trans-Karakoram highway, which is now practically a dead issue. Their secondary objective was to use Pakistan as an irritant against India, another strategy that has proven largely ineffective given India’s growing stature and China’s own economic woes and tensions with America.

Both America and China are probably exploring the possibility of limiting their labours to small zones of interest where local elites can be negotiated with, through outposts, mercenaries, and quasi-colonies.

Science tells us that unstable, multivariate and unpredictable systems go from what one deems complex to what is referred to as chaotic. A complex system is affected by many factors but the interplay between these factors is often understandable, once one recognises that the system is complex.

To use an analogy from international affairs, the present Ukraine war is a complex system as it involves primarily Russia and Ukraine, but the involvement of America, Europe and even India and the Middle East is palpable. If the war involved exclusively Russia and Ukraine, one would call it a simple system. However, many other countries are involved and so it becomes a complex system. But after two years, the Ukraine matter is largely predictable to all the actors. The only unknown now is how the war will end, but even here, one appreciates that it will be through negotiations between two men—Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

A chaotic system on the other hand is highly dynamic, unlike a complex system that is largely static. Dynamical means that the system is highly sensitive to initial conditions, which means that small changes in the starting state can lead to vastly different outcomes over time. Translating into layman’s terms, whether an agitation begins in Baluchistan or KP can lead to widely different consequences for Pakistan —one scenario might lead to the country’s breakup, while the other might not.

In other words, even minute differences in input can lead to significant changes in the system’s evolution. Scientifically, chaos is not synonymous with randomness but rather it reflects deterministic unpredictability.

Pakistan today is still deterministic and not random. It will evolve over the next few months according to specific rules, but these rules are not known to anyone including the Pakistanis and their patrons. The specific rules in this case could be that there might be some negotiation between the two implacable enemies, Imran Khan and the army. But since we do not know when and how these negotiations will happen, the behaviour appears random. Complexity has become chaotic.

At the time of writing, the PTI, Imran Khan’s party, has marched towards Islamabad demanding his release, claiming his life is at risk if he remains in jail any longer. However, the army cannot afford to release Khan, knowing that once freed, he would relentlessly target them. After all, the army remains Pakistan’s oldest and most stable institution.

Hushed whispers in and around Rawalpindi also suggest that the army is indeed a divided house, which is far more faction-ridden than ever before. If there is no army, there is no Pakistan, so what kind of country does Khan hope to preside over? Would it be a fragmented hotchpotch of regions governed by warlords, essentially a departure from the nation-state concept where the American-imposed rules-based order provided us with clear political boundaries, crossed only with passports and visas?

The protesters, largely Pashtuns from KP, briefly held protests at D-Chowk square but were dispersed after brutal gunfire from the police and army, resulting in an unknown number of casualties—anywhere between 5 and 50, with dozens killed and scores injured. The red line has been crossed—an army firing on its own civilian population, peacefully marching in protest, is unprecedented. The most recent parallels can be drawn to the Czarist police shooting innocent civilians in Petrograd in 1906 and the Tiananmen Square incident in China in 1989. In the former case, a violent regime change occurred within a decade. In the latter, a brutal dictatorship held firm and made a socio-political contract with the people, though this now shows signs of fraying at the edges.

The recent incidents have shown that any fig leaf of pretence that Pakistan had as a parliamentary democracy has also been done away with. The silence from America is deafening. The US deep state opted for a regime change in Bangladesh with far less provocation. Clearly, Pakistan was always a “very special” client state. Now, the situation has reached a breaking point.

The PTI (representing the will of the common people) has come up against the army (representing the will of the moneyed elites since 1947). Both sides find themselves in an untenable, maximalist position, always an undesirable situation in a limited war. The PTI wants Khan to be released, something the army will never agree to as it would lead to him pushing for fresh elections, galvanising cadres and possibly even becoming the Prime Minister, after which, he may try to cut the army to size (unthinkable for the army). The army finds the status quo favourable as it allows it to continue its hegemony, even if it means that the “country” is reduced to penury and lawlessness.

To a disinterested observer, there does not seem to be a meeting point where both sides can negotiate and compromise to come to an agreeable solution. A former ambassador of Pakistan to the US and the UK, and also the country’s permanent representative to the UN, mentioned in a recent podcast that the time for negotiation has passed. What will happen next in this unpredictable chaotic system? The trust of the people in the army was already low, thanks to Khan. However, it is completely shattered and crushed now due to the unprecedented act of the army firing on its own people. For example, past people-led movements in Baluchistan, Sindh and East Pakistan, which were dismissed by the army (and possibly middle-of-the-road Punjabis) as lies and propaganda, also assume salience given the army’s recent actions in Islamabad.

The ingredients are ripe for a conflagration, ushering in a chaotic regime with unpredictable outcomes, with the next six months crucial in determining its fate as a post-WW2 nation-state. When the bare minimum position for either side is a maximalist position for the other, it results in a binary view of the world. And in such a view, all bets are off.

Pakistan today satisfies all the scientific conditions for chaotic behaviour. While it is deterministic and not random, it exhibits unpredictable behaviour due to its sensitivity to initial conditions and nonlinearity. These are riveting times for it and its neighbours. Whether borders, de facto or de jure, will undergo revisions in this part of the world is more a question of when than if.

Gautam Desiraju is in the Indian Institute of Science and UPES Dehradun. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.