A crumbling triumvirate?

By Mosharraf Zaidi

Ever since Notification Gate, speculation about the health and longevity of the ruling triumvirate has been in overdrive. For many, even those with great experience and credibility, an abandonment of analytical rigour in favour of this expanded game of Chinese whispers on speed is too much to resist.

There is good reason for this. The key decisions that produced Notification Gate are beyond the realm of the analytical or cerebral. When key decision-makers choose to abandon reason, those whose jobs it is to understand, analyse and make judgements about decisions will naturally turn to informants and occupants of inner circles to try to enrich their own understanding of who said what, where, when and why.

The speculative game in Islamabad, however justified, does have a fatal limitation though. Does it actually matter what the outcomes from all this excitement really are? The weakness of any single member of the triumvirate may spell the end of that member’s time at the top, or it may spell the end of this triumvirate, but is the equation for which institutions rule this country, how this rule is exercised, and the outcomes that this ruling elite nexus produces for Pakistan and Pakistanis really about to change?

The PTI may replace PM Khan; PM Khan may replace members of the PTI; other powers that be may arrange for PM Khan to be removed; or other powers themselves may be removed – but do these short-term, temporal changes in names and faces make a difference? Put another way: the stench emitted by raw sewage, or a rotten egg, or fish gone bad are all different – but are these differences much more than that of degree? Don’t they all stink?

Thus the elite compact in Pakistan. The post Notification Gate next iteration of the ruling elite nexus may be one in which all the names and faces are the same, or in which some of the names and faces are the same, or in which none of the names and faces are the same. But which institutions rule this country, how this rule is exercised, and the outcomes that this ruling elite nexus produces for Pakistan and Pakistanis do not seem to be headed for much change.

The reason that the existing ‘status quo’ will survive – whatever happens to the members of the current ruling triumvirate – is that this status quo largely serves the interests of those that currently enjoy power in Pakistan. For many, it is the civil-military disequilibrium that defines the status quo, but this disequilibrium does not have a very substantive track record in disrupting the elite compact in Pakistan. In fact, one might even argue that this disequilibrium offers a unique and very effective venting mechanism for tensions and conflicts within a wider and more inclusive elite compact in which civilian political leaders are junior partners in sustaining and perpetuating the overall system of unchallenged privilege, unmolested extraction, unaccountable power and untaxed wealth.

There is little gained by attempting to document the extent to which elite privilege in Pakistan is unchallenged, or the extent to which rents are extracted by the elite with not a peep of protest, or the quantum of unaccountable power enjoyed by those within the ruling elites’ capture mechanism that dare to push to the envelope, or in terms of pure untaxed wealth in the country. All four of the metrics are well established, and the only arguments that members of the elite make are when they are specifically included in a list of beneficiaries of this elite compact.

The current tug of war within the triumvirate or the growing tug of war for inclusion in the triumvirate are a lot of fun in a culture where entertainment based on fictional accounts has trouble competing with the brute appeal of circus-mimicking reality. But there is a substantial cost to these preferences. This paper’s founding editor Dr Maliha Lodhi recently wrote about the global trends within which all of the Notification Gate drama and its fallout have taken place. It is important to explore those themes further and localise what they mean for Pakistan.

The intensifying China-US competition is the defining geopolitical cleavage of the times – and it has implications for almost every single global issue that matters for Pakistan. There are seven that are of particular importance. The first is the corrosion of multilateralism, the second is the impact of climate change, the third is the constriction of global free trade, the fourth is international terrorism, the fifth is the rise of populism (domestically and internationally), the sixth is the ‘sovereignty’ of Big Tech and the seventh is the mobility of talent.

All seven of these themes have profound implications for Pakistan, and the intensity of these implications is magnified because Pakistan operates in an interesting (but not entirely unique) space in which it is reasonably close to the China-US competition. How Pakistan makes choices is important because each one of these seven themes shapes the degree to which Pakistan can tackle the challenge of a demographic grenade that exploded two decades ago, and whose shrapnel is still in the air.

The ruling party has recently made some comical efforts to outsource its incompetence by attributing the wave of inflationary pressure felt by ordinary Pakistanis to global factors. The comedy in this is not that the government was wrong – global commodity prices, especially oil, have shot up dramatically in the last year. And the global supply chain slowdown is certainly not in any way associated with how Islamabad behaves. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that for Pakistan to have secured Saudi Arabia’s support in mitigating the global economic trends is nothing short of brilliant diplomacy for which none of the three members of the triumvirate have received the credit that they deserve. So why then have the government efforts to blame inflation on exogenous factors been received so poorly by nearly the entire spectrum of the discourse?

The reason it all seems so comical and incompetent is because of the context in which this all is taking place. The ruling elite in this country have resorted to the lowbrow, cheap tricks section of the misgovernance handbook by engaging in shenanigans like Notification Gate. The questions that emerge from the corrosion of multilateralism, the impact of climate change, the constriction of global free trade, international terrorism, the rise of populism, the ‘sovereignty’ of Big Tech and the mobility of talent demand much more than such shenanigans. But these seven themes themselves serve to mitigate against the instinct toward such effort. Populism in particular is driving countries with much more robust democratic traditions and technocratic skill (like India) down a rabbit hole of public policy stupidity. Does Pakistan really have a chance at the one thing that, for all its tactical failures and the miseries of its people, it has successfully done to date? Can Pakistan hold its ground in the world?

Scant and contested as the claim may be, Pakistani strategic sovereignty, which is really just code for the unchallenged privilege, unmolested extraction, unaccountable power and untaxed wealth of the Pakistani elite, has survived some very heady challenges. Ironically, its resilience to external challenges seems to make it resistant to internal change. Enter the surrender to the TLP on GT Road and the TTP in Khost.

Pakistanis that are pro-reform and anti-elite compact face a tension. Is a republic that sustains an unjust and unequal elite compact worth saving? The current triumvirate’s self immolation (entertaining as it may be) is therefore merely a footnote. The wider question is whether there is any reasonable path to the disruption of the elite compact that does not include sleepovers with the TLP, TTP and others of their ilk. Pakistan’s elite lack the capability to grapple with such questions.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.