Citation:
Date Published:
Oct 7, 2001Abstract:
As the international community reflects on the forms and magnitude of the assistance that can be rendered to Pakistan, it is worth pondering how a country that has been one of the world's largest recipients of foreign financial aid—nearly $58 billion from 1960-98, the third-highest of any country—still finds itself in such a beleaguered and impoverished state. In particular, the international community has to grapple with the reality that the very institution whose help is critical in efforts to break the power of terrorists groups in South Asia, the Pakistani military, is also deeply responsible for creating and nurturing these groups. The role of the Pakistani army is central not only to the well being of Pakistan's citizens, and to the region. It is also critical to stopping the global spread of terrorism.
Pakistan's current economic, political and social fragility is primarily the result of the country's history as a beneficiary of geostrategic rents—from the U.S. during the 1950s and `60s, and again in the '80s; from the Middle East, especially in the '70s and '80s; and from China in the '90s. These substantial rents have shaped the country's political economy and its institutions. And they have underpinned the continued preeminence of the Pakistani military even as militaries in most other developing countries have gone back to the barracks.
The consequences have been devastating. Internally, Pakistan's institutions have atrophied, which has in turn provided the justification for the military to maintain its monopoly on power. Gen. Pervez Musharraf has promised to return the country to full democracy with provincial and federal elections in October 2002. And yet there is ample evidence to suggest that the proposed power devolution, carried out via constitutional reforms, will actually marginalize secular political parties and the civilian bureaucracy, thereby allowing the army an even wider role in the country's political future.
Moreover, the military's hegemonic role has had a negative effect on the nation's economy. The military has claimed a disproportionate fraction of the country's modest resources while expenditures on health, education and business development programs have suffered. Even today, military expenditures are twice that of the latter, in a country that has one of the weakest indicators of human development.
Another consequence stems from the chronic quest for legitimacy that authoritarian regimes need to retain power. Pakistan's military has used two instruments to shore up its domestic support. First, beginning with President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq in the early '80s, the military cultivated the Islamic religious establishment using religious parties to outflank their mainstream counterparts. This Faustian bargain resulted in the rapid growth of Islamic schools, the madraasas, with financial support from Saudi Arabia, which was eager to enlarge the influence of Wahabist Islam and the Islamicization of the Pakistani military and society. The weakening of secular political parties further justified the military establishment's grip on political power.
The second instrument of the military government's legitimacy comes from the perennial tension with India. The need to "protect the integrity of Pakistan" against the alleged wily machinations of India has always been a handy tool to whip up nationalist sentiment and justify the military's hold on power. The May 1999 Kargil invasion, engineered by Gen. Musharraf even as the country's own civilian government was engaged in a dialogue with its Indian counterpart, ensured that dialogue was still-born and the military's hegemony unchallenged.
But even if the Pakistani security establishment's bleeding of India in Kashmir can be justified by India's actions, it is Afghanistan, much more than India, that has suffered egregiously from the Pakistani military's actions. Driven by its obsession with India, the Pakistani military sought to create a client state in Afghanistan in its quest for "strategic depth," and thereby build a staging area from which to infiltrate Kashmir.
From funding, logistics and indirect military support, the Pakistani military intervened in Afghanistan's affairs to a degree that even the superpowers rarely managed during the Cold War. Although the ultimate rationale of the Pakistani security establishment's involvement in Afghanistan has been India, the net result was to further hasten the destruction of the country begun by the Soviets.
A third instrument of control has been the military's contention that it is a protector of Muslims throughout South Asia. This claim is made by an institution that was responsible for one of the world's worst slaughters of Muslims in the last century—at least half a million people in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971.
Western, and in particular American policy makers and media, have long been apologists for the Pakistani army. Nevertheless, though the strategic calculations of the Cold War have given way to the tactical imperatives of the current Afghan campaign, this alone cannot justify blind support for the military, nor glossing over the long-term consequences of that support for Pakistan and the region, and the West itself.
There can be no doubt that given Pakistan's importance on the global stage and its current weaknesses, the country both needs and deserves considerable and sustained international financial assistance. But in doing so, there should be a clear target for the aid: a country and its people. The international community must ensure that, unlike the foreign assistance offered to Pakistan in the 1980s, new resources don't simply help to further strengthen the very institution that has been at the root of the country's—and increasingly the region's—problems.
Proposals to cut Pakistan's debt servicing and reschedule the debt are basically steps in the right direction. However, unless the resulting savings are channeled toward sharply increasing social expenditures on human capital development and poverty-oriented programs, they will serve little more than to further entrench the military regime. It is not surprising that during his recent visit to Washington, Gen. Musharraf was more interested in securing the release of a package of F-16 fighter jets from the Bush administration than in obtaining aid for his country's devastated education system.
External assistance should therefore be contingent on curbing military expenditures (which continue to be one of the highest in the world) as well as funding for the madraasas that serve as jihadi prep schools (although it should be emphasized that many madraasas are simply parochial schools and not training grounds for zealots). However, these initiatives will also require the cooperation of "moderate" Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose citizens are an important source of funds not only in Pakistan, but also in other parts of South and Southeast Asia.
The manner in which the international community helps Pakistan will have broader implications as it grapples to assist other weak, undemocratic states. Unfortunately, for much of the past half-century, foreign aid has too often served as the palatable cover for what were essentially bribes to friendly regimes to secure their cooperation than as resources whose intent was the long term political and economic development of a country and its people. In the process, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent with little to show for it; regimes that have caused untold misery to their people in a variety of contexts have been entrenched; donor institutions have been seriously discredited. This is a lesson American policy makers should heed in helping Pakistan to secure a promising future for its 140 million people.