Pakistan is once again embroiled in controversies. The past decade has seen the country struggle with divisive street politics, a crumbling economy and a growing distrust of its patrons in Beijing and Washington. Now, with the detention of its most popular politician, it is hard to see how it will achieve stability for at least the next 10 years.
In any other country, Pakistan is caught between the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan and Sena Khan last week, in what would have been considered the most dramatic event of the decade. Khan, who earlier this year successfully escaped a similar fate, appeared in court to answer some of the corruption charges. Paramilitary forces broke a window to meet him and detain him – for a whole set of corruption charges. All this is happening amid renewed concerns over the sustainability of the country’s sovereign debt. Moody’s Investors Service said on Monday that Pakistan could default without an International Monetary Fund bailout and warned that its financing options after June were uncertain.
Yet in Pakistan its financial crisis is not given much attention. All eyes are instead on Khan, who has now been handed over to the country’s anti-corruption tribunal, the National Accountability Bureau. Meanwhile, the army has been deployed after riots broke out in the nuclear-armed nation of 240 million people. We don’t know how bad they are, as the internet has also been shut down in most parts of the country. We know that police cars and stations, a Radio Pakistan office, and Lahore’s bus system – associated in the public mind with the current prime minister, Shahbaz Sharif, who took credit for expanding it – were the targets of arson.
But a model jet of the Pakistan Air Force, an army installation in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, and even a senior military officer’s home in Lahore were owned by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. There is no doubt in the minds of protesters about who is to blame for Khan’s arrest: Pakistan’s military, which has run the country openly and from the shadows for most of its independent history.
We do not know the truth of the many allegations of corruption against Khan. Those for which he was arrested included Pakistan’s biggest construction magnate, who had to hand over 190 million GBP to the exchequer, but was allowed to use it to pay off his tax debt. The government has accused Khan of receiving “donations” as payment for one of his university projects.
Unfortunately, however, the facts of this or other matters do not matter. Khan’s supporters will argue that all his troubles are because the army wants him out. And this is undeniably true. However, it is equally undeniable that the military wanted him first. Khan’s two decades in the political jungle ended only when the military put its big thumb on the electoral scales in 2018, jailing and intimidating Khan’s opponents and ushering him into the prime minister’s office.
It is particularly telling that the National Accountability Bureau is being used against Khan, as it was originally set up by Pervez Musharraf, a former military dictator, to instill “the fear of God” into Pakistan’s political elite. And it was, until recently, used to go after the army’s previous Public Enemy No. 1, former PM Nawaz Sharif, as well as his brother, the current PM. The army succeeded in getting Nawaz Sharif out of politics to get Khan; And now they have made peace. They have used NAB, media and even judges to keep Pakistan’s politicians under control to get their brother, Khan out.
Today’s army chiefs have learned from Musharraf’s failures. He led a coup against Nawaz Sharif in 1999, only to lose power a decade later and was himself prosecuted, eventually dying in exile in Dubai in February. As a result, the military has replaced direct rule with subordinate institutions as a method of control. Military power in the 21st century is not about coups, but about ensuring that the various organs of the establishment, from the courts to the media and the public sector, obey you.
Pakistan’s institutions were never that strong anyway; The military, famously, was the only thing in the country that worked. Now that it has put every other institution in its service, it is not surprising that many Pakistanis have no time for normal democratic norms, and want populist rulers instead. Imran Khan would love to be that populist ruler. Would you prefer a civilian authoritarian or a military that rules by sabotaging the public sphere? It seems that these are the only two options left with Pakistan today.
This column does not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is the author of “Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy”.
The text of this story is published from a wire agency feed without any modification. Only the headline has been changed.
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