analysis: Does predictability equal stability? —William B Milam

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analysis: Does predictability equal stability? —William B Milam

I hope that both parties, and all their leaders, understand better how to predict crises and employ the democratic art of compromise long before they become toxic. That would be the beginning of wisdom and a learning experience from which we could all take hope for the future

I have friends who believe that the nature and timing of political crises in Pakistan are inherently predictable, and history will unerringly predict the outcome. I belong to a more sceptical school of thought which suspects that political stability is only loosely connected with the predictability of political events and behaviour because different exogenous and endogenous elements are always present.

This is, in a vague and fuzzy way, a further extrapolation of the Uncertainty Principle as I apply it to politics. The Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics says that the position and momentum (or velocity) of a particle or wave cannot both be precisely determined at the same time. My uncertainty principle of politics says that the positions of political leaders and the direction in which they are heading cannot both be specified at the same time. Perhaps the current crisis is a good example.

It would be foolish to take this extrapolation too far. But it is interesting to note that many of those who dispute Heisenberg’s principle do so because they believe in a deterministic reality in which there is no uncertainty and much predictability. It seems to me that those who equate political stability with predictability are of the same deterministic mindset.

Here I am on a Sunday afternoon writing a piece that will not appear until Wednesday about a political crisis in which events are already moving so fast than I can barely keep up. The latest headlines just available on the internet scream that the government has agreed to restore the chief justice. That would seem to me to be one of the main parts of a deal. But between now and the three days that will race past before you, the reader, see this piece, any number of twists and turns are likely.

I assume that in such a deal, all parties will get some of what they want. The lawyers appear to have just got what they want, restoration of the rest of the judges. Yesterday it was reported that the government agreed to what the PMLN wanted, a pledge to file a plea to the court against the disqualification of the Sharif brothers. All that remains to know is what the government, or at least President Zardari, got. He would have wanted, I presume, a promise that the CJ would not go after him and the NRO. A deal with these basic elements would defuse the crisis. It would not necessarily solve the basic rift between the two sides. As Yogi Berra said, “it ain’t over till its over.”

One thing we can say for certain: this crisis was completely predictable. From the moment the stillborn idea of a coalition government of the two major parties, the PPP and the PMLN, sank from view about a year ago, there were few observers who would have wagered even a few pennies against the probability that a struggle over control of the federal government would take place.

The history is compelling. Whenever one of the two major parties controls Punjab while the other controls the federal government, crisis seems inevitable. Certainly, the prime cause that brought down Benazir Bhutto’s coalition government that lasted only two years, from 1988 to 1990, was the intense struggle with Nawaz Sharif’s IJI in Punjab. Neither side seemed at all interested in trying to find areas of common ground; confrontation was the flavour of the day between the two.

Clearly, the IJI, which included Islamic and Islamist parties, would have had trouble supporting some of the PPP platform. Possibly, the military backers of the IJI warned it off cooperation. But why Bhutto chose to pursue the struggle rather than try to co-opt and work with Sharif and his provincial government is not clear. The consequences, beyond the precedent, were deleterious. Bhutto reached out to an unnatural ally — the army — in ways that allowed it to strengthen its grip on foreign and security policy and bolstered its inclination to muster and use jihadis to fight a proxy war in Kashmir.

It seems strange that Bhutto’s widower, President Zardari, confronted the same conundrum and failed for a year to be guided by the history of his wife’s failure. Stranger still is the supreme irony that, of all the political leaders of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, given his own record of battles with the Supreme Court, has become the poster boy for judicial independence, while Zardari and the PPP appear to oppose it. (How ironic that Aitzaz Ahsan appears to have joined forces with Sharif.) Though his support for the lawyers may strike us as incongruous, even tardy, Sharif has consistently seen their movement as a way to undermine the PPP government. Surely a crisis as predictable as this could have been defused months ago with a more flexible approach on the part of the PPP.

History pointed to another “soft” army intervention, and the odds are that this is what has turned the tide. In 1993, the army stayed behind a democratic curtain but dictated the compromise on the constitutional standoff between Sharif and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan (both would resign and an election would be held). This conflict came from another activist period of the Supreme Court. The president (put up to it by the army, perhaps) had tried to exercise the authority he thought he had been given by Zia-ul Haq’s 8th Amendment and dismiss Sharif and his government. The Supreme Court overruled him.

In the 1993 case, and some others of the early post-Zia years, the courts may have jumped ahead of the political curve. The 1993 precedent led many of us to suspect that the army would do it again. However, the motivations for the army’s actions in 1993 have never been clear: did it intervene to settle the dispute or just to preserve the 8th Amendment? And did the unforeseen consequence of that soft intervention — another round of PPP government under Benazir Bhutto — leave a lasting impression on the army leadership?

Thus while the predictability of this present crisis gave us a clue as to how it would be resolved, that solution was not inevitable. The army is too recently out of power, and charred from the experience, to be ready to even threaten direct intervention. There is too much on its plate in FATA and the Frontier. And Pakistanis spoke rather loudly only a year ago in rejecting the army’s predominant political role over the last nine years. ‘Soft’ intervention was the only alternative, but was the army even up to that? We will learn this later on, I suppose. It would have been a treat to be the fly on the wall at the various meetings that the army chief had with the various political leaders over the past few days.

One can only imagine that those conversations would have differed greatly from the ones held with Sharif and other leaders 16 years ago. With the PMLN is riding the crest of a popular wave — pro-judicial independence, pro-democracy by inference — the army might not have been in quite the dominant position it was back then. Does that mean civilian leaders have more clout over affairs or only that this is a bad time to be ordering civilians around? Is the army anxious to not offend Nawaz Sharif, given his known history of challenging the army’s political power? Is Sharif’s apparently more accomodationist posture vis-à-vis the extremist challenge to the writ of the state of concern to the army? That would be a good sign too.

The answers to these questions will become known over the next few months. In the meantime, I hope the news which has prompted the feeling of relief I have is not premature. I will not be able to rewrite this again. More importantly, I hope that both parties, and all their leaders, understand better how to predict crises and employ the democratic art of compromise long before they become toxic. That would be the beginning of wisdom and a learning experience from which we could all take hope for the future. If not, keep this piece around for the next crisis.

William B Milam is a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington and a former US Ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh


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