Pakistan's Paralysis

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 5, 1999 | by Smith Hempstone

Pakistan's troubled past presages a difficult future as old problems compound new ones.

Pakistan was pulled early and half formed from the womb of history. A half-century after its bloody and chaotic 1947 birth, most of its old problems remain unsolved and a few new ones -- demographic and environmental -- have arisen.

In his closely written account, Pakistan: A Modern History (St. Martin's Press, 435 pp), British historian Ian Talbot attributes many of the country's present woes to the legacy of imperialism. Indeed, London consolidated its power in Northwest India (which was to become West Pakistan) little more than a century ago, much later than the rest of India, and did so largely for reasons of security rather than commerce.

Northwest India's role was to act as a shield for the subcontinent against Russian, Chinese and Afghan expansionism. While the rest of India was slowly industrializing and developing democratic institutions, the Northwest -- twice the size of California -- remained patriarchal and feudal. An agricultural slum in which considerations of law and order took preference over political and human rights, the region served as a recruiting ground for India's 500,000-man army.

This penchant for viceregalism has persisted to the present day, leaving Pakistan a garrison state blighted by a low level of literacy (about 30 percent) and the absence of women's rights. More ominous, given the recent demographic explosion, is the country's inability to feed its people. Of India's industrial base, Pakistan inherited only 10 percent after partition in 1947.

Pakistan's independence date was moved up 14 months by Lord Louis Mountbatten, India's last viceroy (whose wife was having an affair with the Indian leader, Jawaharlal Nehru). The result was a British policy of divide and skedaddle that virtually assured a bloody exchange in which millions of people lost their homes and hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Hindus lost their lives.

The death of Muhammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's exhausted architect and political leader, after scarcely a year of independence left the new nation in confusion. Real power remained, as it does today, in the hands of two institutions -- the army and the bureaucracy -- supported by their allies among the 22 feudal landowners who dominated industry, banking and insurance.

The locus of power was in West Pakistan. Although East Pakistan was the more populous of the two wings, 304 of 308 army officers from the rank of lieutenant colonel and up were from the West in 1955, and 688 of 730 elite posts in the federal bureaucracy were held by Westerners (mainly Punjabis). Such disparities led (with Indian support) to the tragic dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971, when the East wing seceded to form Bangladesh.

Pakistan has been ruled for much of its existence by three soldier-presidents. While economic gains were made under all three, none was able to come to grips with the problem of Pakistan's identity: The state is solidly Muslim, but Pakistani Islam is a cloak of many colors. Its disparate peoples, each speaking its own language, had only once been ruled together--under the British Raj.

Civilian presidents and prime ministers, notably the brilliant Zulfigar Ali Bhutto (judicially murdered by Zia) and his Harvard-educated daughter, Benazir, raised great expectations that inevitably were dashed upon the enduring rocks of despotism, corruption and mismanagement. No Pakistani prime minister since 1988 has completed his term in office (four served in 1993 alone, a year in which 164 former legislators were listed by the government as active in the drug trade).

Kept afloat only by hundreds of millions of dollars in Western aid, Pakistan will have a food import bill in excess of $2.3 billion in 1999. In the next century, it will become the world's third most populous country (with 350 million people). It is the only nuclear power where the penalty for blasphemy is death. Urinating in public brings a year at hard labor.

Talbot's well-researched book is a must for anyone who hopes to understand South Asia and its problems. The presence of no fewer than 27 Pakistani political parties does not make it any easier to follow the tortured course of democracy in Pakistan.

Smith Hempstone, a former ambassador to Kenya, is the author of Rogue Ambassador: An African Memoir.