Pakistan’s instability syndrome and a suffering region
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Political instability symbolized by every day protests, sit-ins, attacks on police stations, military checkpoints and ghastly acts of militancy has afflicted the country’s body politics for too long to lend to any easy solutions. There are two reasons that explain this syndrome: the intra-elite conflict, and the management of politics by Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. Each is the cause and effect of the other.
The fifth-largest country in the world armed with nuclear weapons is in a continuous state of turmoil and has been for decades with limited periods of order and economic growth. By glancing through any newspaper any day, one reads stories after stories that give the impression of a political war zone. In just over a week, we have seen deadly terror attacks in Bannu, a southern district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, and a few days after, a peaceful rally of political parties demanding an end to violence and military operations being violently attacked, resulting in one known death and tens of injuries. For a week, a religious outfit captured the Faizabad interchange at the junction of the twin cities of Islamabad-Rawalpindi for the third time, leaving with a third agreement in hand and on its own terms.
With such incidents becoming routine fodder of news channels and also flashing on social media with more twisted angles, society at large lives in fear, anxiety, and with intense political uncertainty. It doesn’t help when sharp-tongued spokespersons of parties specializing in hate-mongering demonize political opponents on a daily basis, adding more fuel to a deadly polarization.
The weak legitimacy of Pakistan’s present government hurts the efforts of every country in the region in their own counter-terrorism strategies.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
The country presents a true picture of political disorder, being on the brink, a rudderless ship on the rough seas while those on board stand at war with one another, oblivious to hitting a rock and sinking, as everybody goes down.
Pakistan’s political elite have a long history of infightings, criminalizing political differences, often resorting to the registration of false cases in different districts and provinces for the same offense to make the lives of rivals as terrible as possible. This time, the largest and most popular party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) and its top leaders are facing perhaps the worst kind of political victimization. But this is part of a political game plan aimed at destroying the party by all means necessary-- legal, and illegal.
The effects of political confrontation are on the rise, and the three state institutions— the Election Commission, the judiciary, and the military- are constantly under attack, eroding public trust in them.
The failure of Pakistan’s ruling classes to develop a consensus on fundamental rules and to abide by them and the establishment’s role in managing politics continue to be the root cause of the instability that provides social and physical space to militants and terror groups that are proliferating in Central and South-West Asia.
The weak legitimacy of Pakistan’s present government and its strong-armed tactics to suppress dissent and opposition directly hurt the efforts of every country in the region in their own counter-terrorism strategies. It is too obvious to see that instability and weak states are to terrorism what oxygen is to the fire. We have also seen that the troubles in the Afghanistan-Pakistan political landscape don’t remain confined here, as the militant groups have transnational connections. Pakistan can serve its interests better and that of the region too, by addressing its multiple internal conflicts.
- Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).
