Beyond flag waving

Pakistan marked March 23, its national day, with the usual flag waving and a grand military parade. The March 1940 resolution that laid the foundation for the country was visionary and inspired the hope for an independent Muslim nation which was realized by the creation of Pakistan. While the country has come a long way and shown remarkable resilience in the face of formidable odds, today people are short on optimism about the future and the vision of its founding fathers remains unfulfilled.

The challenges facing Pakistan are daunting at a time when the country is in a deeply polarized and fractured state. Political instability, economic fragility and a surge in security threats confront the ruling elite with tough choices. These challenges have resulted in large part from unlearnt lessons from Pakistan’s troubled political past. Several lessons have not been learned but four have been especially consequential for the country’s fate and fortunes. 

The first is antagonistic and confrontational politics that have marred its democracy and exacted such a high price for the country’s stability. This has involved bitter feuds and power struggles between political leaders and parties. The paradigm of war has guided political conduct with opponents seen, not as competitors, but enemies in a terminal conflict to be eliminated from the political scene. What have essentially been intra-elite squabbles — over power and patronage, not policy – became fatal distractions from governance and meeting public needs. Lost in the noise of toxic politics was serious consideration of policy issues critical to the country’s future. It also created an atmosphere inimical to the generation of new ideas.

The repeatedly ignored lesson was that compromise and consensus were essential to achieve civilian supremacy and strengthen democracy. Also disregarded was the risk that endless power tussles would open space for the military to acquire a bigger role and ultimately seize control of the political system. Moreover, there were always political parties ready to encourage military interventions to remove their opponents.

The spirit of March 1940 ought to go beyond cheering tanks and planes to learning these key lessons and resolutely addressing enduring challenges that have prevented the country from realizing its promising potential. 

Maleeha Lodhi

This raises unlearnt lesson two, relating to the military’s role in politics. Pakistan has spent over 30 years of its existence under direct military rule and since 2018 under hybrid ‘democracy’, in which the military has had an expansive role in governance.

Despite widespread public respect for the military in its professional role, its political interventions have lacked popular legitimacy. The lesson from long bouts of military rule is that these constitutional transgressions neither found public acceptance nor delivered what they promised — political stability and economic progress. This also applies to the present hybrid system. The lesson of the hybrid experience, that further skewed the civil-military balance and involved democratic regression, is that it is inherently unable to provide coherent and effective governance. The record of the post-2018 hybrid arrangement shows it built neither economic nor political stability. The lesson to learn is that continuing this ‘model’ will not yield an outcome different from the past.

The third unlearnt lesson is that without wide-ranging reforms to address its long-standing structural economic problems, Pakistan cannot escape from the trap of chronic fiscal deficits, balance-of-payments crises, high inflation and macroeconomic instability, which have necessitated repeated financial bailouts. The reliance on outsiders — friendly countries and the IMF — for bailouts has been a short-term fix, not a solution. It has also become an addiction. For decades, dysfunctional economic management by both civilian and military governments resisted reform and evaded mobilizing adequate domestic resources. Instead, resorting to heavy borrowing at home and abroad mired Pakistan in unsustainable debt and perpetual financial crises. The country’s foreign alignments were leveraged to secure economic assistance or extract geopolitical rent to deal with financial imbalances. 

This approach has now run its course. The old way of managing public finances is no longer tenable. The structural sources of persisting financial imbalances have to be tackled if Pakistan is to find a sustainable path to growth and prosperity. That means dealing with the narrow and inequitable tax regime, limited export base, energy sector’s circular debt, bankrupt public-sector enterprises, heavy regulatory burden and low savings and investment.

The fourth lesson has to do with the failure to in­­­vest in human capital. This has left the country with deteriorating human development indicators. It has meant 40 percent of Pakistanis are still illiterate, 26 million school-age children are out of school, 40 percent people live in poverty while health indicators, including malnutrition levels, remain grim. It also means Pakistan is sleep walking to a disaster with far reaching ramifications for its stability and ignoring the ineluctable reality that economic growth and progress is not possible without investing in its people. 

The spirit of March 1940 ought to go beyond cheering tanks and planes to learning these key lessons and resolutely addressing enduring challenges that have prevented the country from realizing its promising potential. This is what its people want and deserve. 

– Maleeha Lodhi is a former Pakistani ambassador to the US, UK & UN. She posts on X with @LodhiMaleeha