What is stopping the prime minister?

In an English daily this week, the estimable Dr Moeed Yusuf wrote about the need to question our congratulatory rhetoric about the resilience of Pakistani democracy, and ask serious questions about a “rotten” system that he believes, as currently configured, simply cannot deliver.
Dr Yusuf is not alone and he is also not entirely wrong. The current system is in fact, as he notes, configured in a manner that is prejudicial to transformative change favouring anyone but the elite. Incentives are aligned in a manner that ensures perpetual rent-seeking, patronage, and nepotism – not just among the elite, but all the way down to the poorest and most vulnerable. This is why the most intelligent political observers in the country gauged early on that if Imran Khan and his party opened their doors to people like Pervez Khattak and Jahangir Tareen, then incapacity to deliver transformative change would follow soon after.
The Peshawar attack stirred the national discourse for a few days, but not much longer. This week, some ugly scenes outside the Army Public School were followed by an even uglier failure by Imran Khan to recognise the national mood. He and his party will recover, this is a sacred covenant undertaken by the prime minister. The PM is knee-deep in a steaming pile of acronyms (PAS, DMG, SG, OMG, ECNEC, MOF, FPSC etc) he chooses to sustain and nourish. Principally, this means that no matter how many times Imran Khan’s vanity knocks the PTI down, the opposition to PM Sharif will never quite be knocked out.
Meanwhile, the cribbing about the ‘boys’ seems to be diminishing. This is the problem with narratives built on raw emotion, and no rigour. For two or three weeks, we wailed and wailed and wailed about military courts. Now the wailing has stopped, and since that one big space has been ceded, we’ve moved onto more interesting stories, rather than questioning why and how the military keeps creating and occupying, more and more of the legitimacy to run our security and foreign policies, as well as our internal law and order situation.
Of course, among those that doth protest about civilian-military imbalance, a vocal segment are those who have had the foresight to have predicted all along that Pakistan’s religious identity is a great complicating factor for the country’s governance. Many such folks are reassured by the khakis becoming increasingly intolerant of the tumours they have allowed to grow both in the nether regions of Pakistan, and in the rotund and misshapen beer-belly known as the Islamabad Capital Territory. Rumours of an impending banning of the JuD and whispers that COAS Raheel Sharif got ornery about the Hizbul Tahrir on his visit to the UK all portend some truth to the claims of a bold new ‘strategic clarity’ stripping away the burqa-cloaked piety of our age-old addiction to strategic depth.
Still, we should be very sceptical – both of the degree to which the captains of this Titanic have changed course, and of the ISPR’s hard-sell of national unity and strategic clarity. Sure, the right wing of this country flirted with sanity for a while, as Sirajul Haq and Maulana Fazlur Rehman tried to negotiate the difficult terrain of being Islamists while also trying to divorce Al-Qaeda and the Taliban respectively. But there’s nothing quite like a bunch of free-speech extremists six thousand kilometres from Lal Masjid to galvanise the entire right wing.
All the actors in this play fit Dr Yusuf’s description of the alignment of interests and incentives in the direction of the elite and away from reform. I suspect, however, that there is a small degree of oversimplification that muddies the waters here.
The religious elite, the military elite, the political elite, and the various permanent state elite, be they among the judiciary or the bureaucracy, all crave legitimacy. Unlike say democracy, which is complicated by process, language and history, legitimacy doesn’t always depend on formal correctness. What the military is doing today, both on the hard front of killing bad guys and on the soft front of slick musical and video productions, is an example of how within the broad confines of a broken system, the quest for legitimacy produces greater competence than otherwise possible or probable.
The effectiveness of the military’s public relations wing, the ISPR, is a slow-growth story whose potency we are now witnessing. The seeds probably got planted in the Musharraf era, but the groundwork truly took a pace of its own under Kayani, with the talented Athar Abbas leading the charge. Democrats like me will continue to yelp about the vast gulf of quality between trained diplomats at the Foreign Office (who don’t, can’t and won’t use social media), and the untrained PR experts at the GHQ (who use it to full effect for both domestic legitimacy and international relations). It doesn’t matter how much we writhe in democratic agony. The military is a seeker and finder of legitimacy, hook or crook be damned.
The systems-level analysis that leads to hopelessness among democrats not willing to suspend reason and linearity is fine. But it misses a critical factor. Leadership is as important, and maybe more important, than institutional coherence and linear accountability. The dysfunction of our non-military institutions is not ingrained with permanence. When we assume that politicians or bureaucrats or judges are incapable of being cajoled into reform without large-scale, long-route, procedurally perfect democracy, we are ignoring the potency of leadership.
The military has figured out how to influence and drive the national discourse in pretty quick time. Try not to forget how recently it has tasted embarrassments in the domestic and international discourse (Musharraf’s resignation, judges restoration, Abbottabad, Admiral Mullen, Raymond Davis, Salala). Remember also that its rehabilitation is not because of events like Peshawar, but despite them. It is clearly now doing some things right – beyond just PR.
This is reform. It hasn’t been pretty, and no reasonable observer should breathe a sigh of relief just yet. They continue to occupy more public space than they should. And the fight against violent extremism is inter-generational, but there are signs that they get it. Yet five years ago, there were no such signs.
A lot of this is down to leadership. And a lot of the leaders are people whose names we don’t know – it isn’t always the top man that moves the entire agenda.
The prime minister has to realise that history keeps handing him new leases on life for a reason. History is aching to be touched, to be held, to be embraced by Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif. Not only is he uniquely positioned to lead and win the struggle against violent extremism, he can also transform how the Pakistani economy, state and society see themselves. And that is the beginning to real change with regards to how these entities are seen across the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that no matter how many times history calls, the prime minister won’t pick up the phone. It can’t be because he lacks intellect, or vision – because he has both in spades. Surely, it can’t be because he is restricted by business interests, because his extended family is all set for a couple of generations.
What then, prevents the prime minister from ISPR-ing Pakistan into a better country?
What prevents him getting angry that his government seems paralysed while some majors and colonels at the GHQ spin the national discourse to their hearts’ content?
What prevents him from seizing history with reckless abandon, embracing it, and giving it the kiss of life? The same kiss that history keeps rewarding him with, over and over, and over again.
What prevents PM Sharif from leading boldly and reacting strongly to the incompetence that subverts our democracy from within and without?

The writer is an analyst and commentator.