Independence days are occasions for introspection. Pakistan’s conflict- and turbulence-prone history means that August 14 stands out annually for reflections on the wrong turns and poor judgement calls of the past. This navel-gazing can extend over the whole month.
However, in many ways, August matches December as the nation’s month for introspection, with the latter marked as the saddest on Pakistan’s political calendar for suffering the greatest setback that can befall a nation—its break-up—in December 1971. December also stands out because it animates the national security challenge that Pakistan confronts. It was on December 27, 2007 that Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. On December 16, 2014, Pakistan witnessed its most horrific terrorist attack on a school in Peshawar. These ghosts remain largely unburied, as is evidenced by the daily threat posed by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the persisting ambiguity surrounding the interface between Pakistan’s state agencies and terrorist outfits.
Nevertheless, August has a special quality in Pakistan, just as it does in India, and therefore invokes a special kind of analysis.
The past 3-4 years have been exceptionally stressful for our neighbour. Major natural disasters, pronounced economic distress amid a near insolvency and debt default scenario, a national security crisis with mounting terrorist attacks and growing political protests in the insurgency-prone region of Baluchistan and the tribal areas—all these have regularly hit the headlines for the past few years.
This internal turmoil is matched by a nightmarish external environment with a marked deterioration in many principal relationships. Bad India-Pakistan relations are hardly new. But the long slump since 2016 and the further dip since 2019 mean that the relationship is in its longest ever downturn in its current phase—even including those associated with the 1965 and 1971 wars.
With Afghanistan, the triumphalism that originally accompanied the Taliban victory in August 2021 has dissipated quickly into the new reality of a broken relationship with the Taliban regime in Kabul and a resurgent TTP at home. With Iran, its many subterranean differences flared into an open conflict in January this year with drone and missile attacks in both directions; the divisions have been papered over, but the gulf remains—reflecting the sub-optimal nature of Iran-Pakistan relations.
Relations with the US, too, have been stagnating at a low plateau since at least 2018. Other old and reliable partners such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms have rebalanced their position with respect to India-Pakistan issues and moved to more equidistant postures, which Pakistan views as a negative development. In all this, China remains a stable ally and invaluable external partner. Yet, for a country like Pakistan, on the whole this is a somewhat gloomy external situation.
This combination of external and internal negativities is summarised as Pakistan’s polycrisis. It’s not as if any situation the nation confronts today is novel. What is unusual about the present conjuncture is how the different crisis elements—political, economic, security-related and external—are converging at the same time.
If this sense of crisis preoccupies many Pakistanis, much of the day-to-day discussion in the country gets focused on what has been a central feature for virtually its entire lifespan—the civil-military relations. What currently illustrates and animates the civil-military dissonance is that former Prime Minister Imran Khan is in jail—he completed a year behind bars earlier this August. That this has often been a full term in office for elected governments underlines the point that the Pakistan military has a propensity to meddle in the political process, and thereby imparts to it a fundamental fragility.
This month’s events in Bangladesh have converged with introspection about Pakistan’s crisis-prone underperformance syndrome. In the past few years, there has been much angst about Pakistan’s trajectory, since comparisons with Bangladesh showed how glaring the contrasts had become. The juxtaposition is in many ways natural, given that the two were part of the same country till half a century ago.
In 1971, East Pakistan’s population was larger than the western wing’s. This demographic difference lay at the root of the political polarisation that ultimately broke up the country. Bangladesh has since successfully curbed its population growth, while Pakistan has not—it still has one of the highest population growth rates in the world. On a range of other economic and social indicators including per capita income, Bangladesh has outperformed Pakistan—for instance, its garments exports alone are greater than Pakistan’s total exports.
So what explains Pakistan’s predicaments? Some argue that at their root are questions of identity and how a state founded on the basis of religious denomination is insufficiently equipped to manage a range of challenges and diversities that Pakistan has been presented with before and after 1971.
In other perspectives, Pakistan’s present and future developments are compromised by its geopolitical ambitions and insecurities. Its revisionist postures on Kashmir predisposes Pakistan to a conflict-prone and suboptimal relationship with India to its east. Given the difference in size and other asymmetries, this more or less condemns Pakistan to living in a state of insecurity vis-a-vis India. The pursuit of equally flawed policies of strategic depth vis-a-vis Afghanistan creates permanent insecurities and conflict on its western borders. In brief, Pakistan’s structural problems can be traced back to its foreign policy and geopolitical approaches.
Yet others find the real trigger in the overbearing political role of its military, which has been a characteristic feature of Pakistan since the 1950s. French writer Voltaire’s expression about 18th-century Germany—“where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state”—could also have been written for modern-day Pakistan. The Pakistan Army has imparted to government policies the tendency to adopt excessively securitised approaches to the problems confronting the country. In the process, each of these problems has been further accentuated and amplified.
On every independence day, many in Pakistan have posed the question whether the role of the military will get curbed in some manner in the future, enabling a more balanced civil-military equation to emerge. So far, these hopes have been belied.
T C A Raghavan
Former High Commissioner to Pakistan and author of The People Next Door: The Curious History of India-Pakistan Relations
(Views are personal)
