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The incompetent state and Pakistani paralysis - Mosharraf Zaidi
To talk or to fight. This silly mantra has consumed most of the oxygen in the public debate around what to do with the challenge laid down to Pakistan by the TTP. It is a silly mantra that wrongly focuses the debate on a symptom, allowing us to continue to ignore the disease.
The TTP is a symptom of an incompetent state. The longer we leave the Pakistani state be, the worse will be the accumulation of Pakistani problems. As it stands, the Pakistani state is incapable of either talking down the TTP successfully, or fighting it into submission. Winners win, no matter what route they take to the podium. Losers complain about the difficulties of competing. Listen and watch Pakistan carefully. Which do we resemble?
Yet round and round we keep going on the misery-go-round. The masterful jestery of Pakistani interior ministers continues, as Chaudhry Nisar does his best to unseat Rehman Malik from our imaginations. After a couple of particularly brutal weeks of bloodletting by the TTP, instead of defining a way forward, Chaudhry Nisar reframes the debate and takes us back to square one. It is a dance that the PML-N is beginning to perfect with frustrating regularity.
This paralysis is the new normal. Pakistan bounces recklessly between two extremes. One extreme? Wanting to destroy, demolish and kill our way to peace. The other? Wanting to pillow talk irreconcilable murderers into submission. This false and dangerous binary fundamentally ignores the depth and breadth of the challenge the TTP represents.
The beating heart that drives the growth and confidence of the TTP is the limp and impotent Pakistani state. This isn’t a metaphorical allusion to the inability of the state to do the basic things that states should do. It is a literal one. The Pakistani state, literally, has been beaten into weak and blind submission. If this was a boxing match, the referee would have signalled an end to the fight long ago.
Pakistan and what it represents are better, bigger and more beautiful than anything the TTP and its friends will ever amount to, but boxing matches are as much about the light in the eye of the fighter as they are about the capacity of a fighter to get up off the mat. Each passing month since the 2013 election has dimmed the light and confirmed the weakness of the Pakistani state to the TTP (and to every other manner of terrorist, criminal, kidnapper, thief, smuggler and crony capitalist).
When people and organisations seek social, economic or political power at the expense of the Pakistani people, they know that nothing stands between them and that power. The bulwark of protection, the Pakistani state, is out of order. Its incompetence is legendary.
Not convinced? Take a closer look. The state is the sum total of the structures enacted by the people to serve them: our government, our courts, our parliament, our policemen, our lady health workers, our teachers, our national airline, our electricity grid, our hospitals, our roads, our railways, our highways, and our military. These are the building blocks of the state. On sum, would anyone in their right mind argue the incompetence of the state?
The incompetent state cannot fight a war, much less win it. But incompetent states cannot conduct hold ‘talks’ or conduct ‘dialogue’ with enduring success either, much less convince the enemy that there is a better way to engage with politics than killing innocent people.
Here are some other qualities of this kind of state that many of us may recognise. The incompetent state rolls over for corrupt politicians, and corrupt bureaucrats (think plot bonanzas and single source privatisation of profit-making entities). It cannot come up with new ideas on how to solve a liquidity problem, so it keeps trying 40-year-olds that have failed over and over and over again (think failed IMF programs). It cannot find CEOs for state-owned enterprises, and it cannot run those enterprises for a profit despite their monopoly status (think PIA, Railways, Pakistan Steel, and Wapda). It cannot get people to show up to work, and it cannot maintain quality (think of the state of education and health). It cannot honour those that give their lives for the motherland, and it cannot protect the living from deaths they do not deserve (think of the over 7,000 security personnel martyred in this conflict, and the thousands more innocent civilians killed).
The incompetent state allows weak, facile and sycophantic men and women to pose as experts at the expense of patriots with integrity and competence. Such a state allows leaders that are susceptible to flattery to surround themselves with nothing but praise, and inoculate them completely from the brutal truth.
And most of all, the incompetent state deliberately misrepresents an existential challenge that requires wholesale reform, as a temporal challenge that can be solved with either ‘talks’ or an ‘operation’.
As far as the violent extremist problem goes, Pakistan must not only face and defeat the TTP and the LeJ, but also put some thought into how it will neutralise all the groups in Pakistan that employ violence, within and beyond our borders. Having the Haqqani Network and the Jamaat-ud-Dawa define your relations with other countries, against your will, is not exactly the sign of a healthy, coherent, modern nation-state. So the issue isn’t just the TTP. It is all shades of groups that want to share the republic’s monopoly over violence.
Of course, this clarity is unavailable in an environment in which darbari civil servants are the only voices of influence. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may be on leave from parliament, but surely he hasn’t forgotten the shoulders of the Pakistanis that carried him back to the PM House. The people did not elect an octogenarian cabal of former civil servants that have 50-year-long records of failures as policy men. They elected a politician capable of delivering real change.
The Pakistani state today is a massive, unwieldy and dangerous edifice pretending to have the capacity to do things. Our civil servants are unprepared for the roles they are assigned, and the wholesale incompetence we’ve allowed to creep into the services has now metastasized into systemic paralysis. That is the real reason we keep veering from ‘talks’ to ‘operations’ and back again. It is easier to do this dance than to actually talk, or to actually conduct operations.
Three of the basic elements of a state’s ability to do things are fiscal, political and administrative. Pakistan has trouble paying its bills – this we know. Pakistan does not have coherent political will when it comes to the TTP – with far too many media and social leaders still confused about which century they are living in. But both the fiscal and political gaps can be plugged – US payments such as the Coalition Support Funds and IMF loans ensure fiscal survival for the time being, and politically, the all-parties conference is at least a start.
The real challenge is Pakistan’s administrative capacity to do things. The current configuration of human resource availability to the state cannot save Pakistan, but it may well sink it. Dramatic civil service reform is desperately required. But in the House of Sharif, where nothing exists without the oxygen provided by retired CSP and serving DMG officers, can such dramatic civil service reform be even conceived of?
Unfortunately for Pakistan, the answer to that question is a resounding no.
To talk or to fight. This silly mantra has consumed most of the oxygen in the public debate around what to do with the challenge laid down to Pakistan by the TTP. It is a silly mantra that wrongly focuses the debate on a symptom, allowing us to continue to ignore the disease.
The TTP is a symptom of an incompetent state. The longer we leave the Pakistani state be, the worse will be the accumulation of Pakistani problems. As it stands, the Pakistani state is incapable of either talking down the TTP successfully, or fighting it into submission. Winners win, no matter what route they take to the podium. Losers complain about the difficulties of competing. Listen and watch Pakistan carefully. Which do we resemble?
Yet round and round we keep going on the misery-go-round. The masterful jestery of Pakistani interior ministers continues, as Chaudhry Nisar does his best to unseat Rehman Malik from our imaginations. After a couple of particularly brutal weeks of bloodletting by the TTP, instead of defining a way forward, Chaudhry Nisar reframes the debate and takes us back to square one. It is a dance that the PML-N is beginning to perfect with frustrating regularity.
This paralysis is the new normal. Pakistan bounces recklessly between two extremes. One extreme? Wanting to destroy, demolish and kill our way to peace. The other? Wanting to pillow talk irreconcilable murderers into submission. This false and dangerous binary fundamentally ignores the depth and breadth of the challenge the TTP represents.
The beating heart that drives the growth and confidence of the TTP is the limp and impotent Pakistani state. This isn’t a metaphorical allusion to the inability of the state to do the basic things that states should do. It is a literal one. The Pakistani state, literally, has been beaten into weak and blind submission. If this was a boxing match, the referee would have signalled an end to the fight long ago.
Pakistan and what it represents are better, bigger and more beautiful than anything the TTP and its friends will ever amount to, but boxing matches are as much about the light in the eye of the fighter as they are about the capacity of a fighter to get up off the mat. Each passing month since the 2013 election has dimmed the light and confirmed the weakness of the Pakistani state to the TTP (and to every other manner of terrorist, criminal, kidnapper, thief, smuggler and crony capitalist).
When people and organisations seek social, economic or political power at the expense of the Pakistani people, they know that nothing stands between them and that power. The bulwark of protection, the Pakistani state, is out of order. Its incompetence is legendary.
Not convinced? Take a closer look. The state is the sum total of the structures enacted by the people to serve them: our government, our courts, our parliament, our policemen, our lady health workers, our teachers, our national airline, our electricity grid, our hospitals, our roads, our railways, our highways, and our military. These are the building blocks of the state. On sum, would anyone in their right mind argue the incompetence of the state?
The incompetent state cannot fight a war, much less win it. But incompetent states cannot conduct hold ‘talks’ or conduct ‘dialogue’ with enduring success either, much less convince the enemy that there is a better way to engage with politics than killing innocent people.
Here are some other qualities of this kind of state that many of us may recognise. The incompetent state rolls over for corrupt politicians, and corrupt bureaucrats (think plot bonanzas and single source privatisation of profit-making entities). It cannot come up with new ideas on how to solve a liquidity problem, so it keeps trying 40-year-olds that have failed over and over and over again (think failed IMF programs). It cannot find CEOs for state-owned enterprises, and it cannot run those enterprises for a profit despite their monopoly status (think PIA, Railways, Pakistan Steel, and Wapda). It cannot get people to show up to work, and it cannot maintain quality (think of the state of education and health). It cannot honour those that give their lives for the motherland, and it cannot protect the living from deaths they do not deserve (think of the over 7,000 security personnel martyred in this conflict, and the thousands more innocent civilians killed).
The incompetent state allows weak, facile and sycophantic men and women to pose as experts at the expense of patriots with integrity and competence. Such a state allows leaders that are susceptible to flattery to surround themselves with nothing but praise, and inoculate them completely from the brutal truth.
And most of all, the incompetent state deliberately misrepresents an existential challenge that requires wholesale reform, as a temporal challenge that can be solved with either ‘talks’ or an ‘operation’.
As far as the violent extremist problem goes, Pakistan must not only face and defeat the TTP and the LeJ, but also put some thought into how it will neutralise all the groups in Pakistan that employ violence, within and beyond our borders. Having the Haqqani Network and the Jamaat-ud-Dawa define your relations with other countries, against your will, is not exactly the sign of a healthy, coherent, modern nation-state. So the issue isn’t just the TTP. It is all shades of groups that want to share the republic’s monopoly over violence.
Of course, this clarity is unavailable in an environment in which darbari civil servants are the only voices of influence. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may be on leave from parliament, but surely he hasn’t forgotten the shoulders of the Pakistanis that carried him back to the PM House. The people did not elect an octogenarian cabal of former civil servants that have 50-year-long records of failures as policy men. They elected a politician capable of delivering real change.
The Pakistani state today is a massive, unwieldy and dangerous edifice pretending to have the capacity to do things. Our civil servants are unprepared for the roles they are assigned, and the wholesale incompetence we’ve allowed to creep into the services has now metastasized into systemic paralysis. That is the real reason we keep veering from ‘talks’ to ‘operations’ and back again. It is easier to do this dance than to actually talk, or to actually conduct operations.
Three of the basic elements of a state’s ability to do things are fiscal, political and administrative. Pakistan has trouble paying its bills – this we know. Pakistan does not have coherent political will when it comes to the TTP – with far too many media and social leaders still confused about which century they are living in. But both the fiscal and political gaps can be plugged – US payments such as the Coalition Support Funds and IMF loans ensure fiscal survival for the time being, and politically, the all-parties conference is at least a start.
The real challenge is Pakistan’s administrative capacity to do things. The current configuration of human resource availability to the state cannot save Pakistan, but it may well sink it. Dramatic civil service reform is desperately required. But in the House of Sharif, where nothing exists without the oxygen provided by retired CSP and serving DMG officers, can such dramatic civil service reform be even conceived of?
Unfortunately for Pakistan, the answer to that question is a resounding no.
