The Pakistani Spectator

It is difficult to determine just how much ‘outrage’ the Kerry-Lugar Bill is generating outside the media, blathering politicians, the armed forces and the chattering classes generally. A canter through the TV channels would suggest that we teeter on the verge of revolution, such is the public dismay at the contents of a bill that is American in origin, has not yet been signed into law by the US President, and whose contents remain a mystery to the majority of the population who are illiterate anyway. How many of us have read the Kerry-Lugar Bill in its entirety? (I have; worthy but dull like most legislation.) And why have we got ourselves in such a lather about it anyway…is our sovereignty – and anybody care to give me a definition of ’sovereignty’ – so compromised by it, are Blackwater (…or Xe or Xi or Pi) poised to take over the country, why does the President smile so much and is there anywhere that I can buy sugar for Rs40 a kilo?

To the ordinary mortal such as myself the principal problem with the Kerry-Lugar Bill seems to be that it puts in writing what had previously been a tacit understanding, and that the nod-wink-handshake way of doing business with Pakistan is now a thing of the past. It also seems to signal a sea-change in the way that America does business with us in a far wider sense. It is still a transactional document and there is very much the sense that we are having a finger wagged at us, but there are some subtle shifts. The American financial relationship with us hitherto has largely been focused on the military at the expense of development and infrastructure. The US has supported assorted unsavoury military dictatorships around the world – including ours – over the last 50 years in support of its own global hegemony, but the world is changing and America has to change with it. The priorities and preoccupations of the Bush years are not all the same as those of Obama.

After 9/11, the American foreign policy, not only in Pakistan but in many other countries as well, has become hugely unpopular. The Obama presidency is seeking to change the course of the American ship of state — change course, not turn around, please note. America needs to re-brand itself, restore some of the confidence and popularity it once enjoyed, create ’signature’ projects that polish its image and mollify its critics. In the case of the Kerry-Lugar Bill that means a marked shift in priorities, towards civilian projects and with an emphasis on bolstering governance and the democratic institutions.

Understandably, the military are less than delighted with this turn of events. They have enjoyed a pre-eminence for the entire life of the nation, have directly governed it for more than half that life and indirectly governed it for the rest. There is no sense that the military is or ever has been accountable to civilian bodies as it is in other democratic states, the military budgets are never published and are minimally discussed in the legislature. The Defence Ministry is little more than a front-of-house billboard and the armed forces conduct their business out of sight of civilian bureaucrats. All of the avenues of accountability have been closed off. Once again this is a state of affairs arrived at by the consistent failure of civilian governments and the civil service to deliver the goods to the population – the most recent evidence for this being the yet-unresolved ’sugar crisis’ that was the product of a cabal of mill-owners who were also politicians fixing the markets to their own advantage – hardly the stuff of emerging democracy and unlikely to impress the military establishment as an example of what the civilians can do if left to their own devices.

The military has, over the years, colonised parts of civil space – banking and housing to name but two – and has a very different relationship with the nation than does the military elsewhere. It is because of the weakness of civilian governance that it has been able to do this; and if America now seeks to back a civilian dispensation against the long-established trend of backing the military then tension is inevitable at every point of contact between the two – a tension now exploited to the full by the polarised political parties who themselves are now busy with backchannel negotiations to ensure their own place at the front of the queue if the military decide to move the pieces around on the board again.

What the Kerry-Lugar Bill begins to do is redefine and reshape the relationship between the military and civil institutions, and military and civil-political reaction to it has generated more heat than it has light. It is not difficult to see such a move as a direct challenge to our sovereignty, a Trojan horse within which is hidden the seeds and agents of yet more micro-management of Pakistan by an external player. It is not difficult to interpret the wording of the bill in such a way as to see that there is a desire to influence, however indirectly, the internal dynamics of our governance and the civil/military relationship; and the bill will have been drafted in a detailed knowledge built up over many years of the personalities and institutions on which it will impact. It presents difficulties to the ‘establishment’ and the military like in that it may be a challenge to the status quo that has prevailed whatever the government in power – khaki or feudal.

At the end of the day as a past senior law officer said on a private TV channel on Wednesday night that “beggars can’t be choosers”. If we go cap-in-hand anywhere in the world seeking money with a track-record for corruption and lack of transparency such as ours then there are going to be conditionalities. We are always going to have that kind of transactional relationship with any donor no matter how ‘friendly’ – and a past ambassador to both London and Washington Maleeha Lodhi has said several times that there are no permanent friends in international political relationships. We are not friends with America, nor they with us. We are not friends with any of the countries making up the Friends of Democratic Pakistan group. We have a relationship with them that is determined by mutual interest, not by whether we like one-another or not. The Americans may dislike and despise us as we dislike and despise them, but being true friends is not the way to do diplomatic business. America has an interest in sustaining us not because it wants to see happy smiling Pakistani faces painted with American flags across CNN and Fox News, but because it suits their wider geopolitical agenda and regional interests. $1.7 billion a year for the next few years is, frankly, peanuts. Loose change. We may not like picking it up but we don’t have much choice in the matter – short of walking away from it completely. The Kerry-Lugar Bill is not yet signed, and we need to take a deep breath, count to ten and gently exhale before we paint ourselves into a corner. Again.