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How the ‘deep state’ gamed the system
Article:
- Zorawar Daulet Singh, fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, analyse that democratization in Pakistan would eventually transform the geopolitics of the sub-continent.
Important facts:
2. Uninterrupted democracy for the past decade has inspired hope that Pakistan is changing.
3. The peaceful transition to a new electoral force represented by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf is seen as further proof of an evolving system where civilian politicians are emerging from the shadow of an army-dominated state.
4. Since civilian politics do not have any apparent stake in confronting India, democratisaton in Pakistan would eventually transform the geopolitics of the sub-continent.
5. Pakistan’s tryst with democracy has always been a complicated affair.
6.Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan is the closest we can trace to a genuine civilian advantage over the military structure.
7.The Pakistan army in the 1980s consciously cultivated a new network of politicians to counterbalance the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).
8.Imran Khan should be viewed as another strategic investment by the deep state that dislodged the erstwhile two-party structure monopolised by the Pakistan Muslim League (N) and the PPP.
9. If an assertive civilian political elite could send the Pakistan army back to its barracks, Indian policymakers would welcome and even encourage that trend.
10. But any hypothesised civil-military struggle rests on two fundamental assumptions.
11. The civilian elite must be genuinely committed to re-defining Pakistan’s identity towards a more positive nationhood.
12. It is presumed that the army cannot game the civil-military system or successfully neutralize any challenge to its authority or rival conceptions of the national interest.
13. October 2017 Gallup survey found that 82% of Pakistanis trusted their army more than any other political institutions even as a majority (68%) welcomed democracy as a political system.
14. Such favourable ratings would quickly disappear with martial rule, as the army discovered first-hand during the Pervez Musharraf years.
15. On the civilian side, there is no evidence to claim a defiant struggle with the military establishment is in the Pakistani politician’s conception of her or his own interests.
16. Pakistani scholar Ayesha Siddiqa’s thesis of a symbiotic military-civilian relationship where politicians rarely question the primacy and vanguard role of the army and both groups collectively profit from the systematic plundering of the economy remains more plausible than ever before.
17. The recent election in Pakistan suggests a more sophisticated system – has come into being whereby the military establishment, has promoted an alternative framework so that there is a ‘buffer’ between the army and society.
18. The political parties and civilian elite seem to have embraced their role in this metamorphosis of Pakistan’s “managed” or “guided” democracy.
