Failed state? What failed state?

Daily Times, May 4, 2006
EDITORIAL: Failed state? What failed state?

The American journal Foreign Policy has drawn up its annual list of what it calls “failed states” and has placed Pakistan ninth in the top 10 failed states. Just as Pakistan was claiming it had come out of its economic crisis and was about to begin its return to full-fledged democracy with another general election, it has plunged from 34th position last year to 9th this year. Pakistan was told after 1998 that it was a failed or failing state because it didn’t have money to buy its imports for more than a few weeks. But after 9/11, it got out of a foreign policy bind that was dragging it down and is no longer an isolated state awaiting its doom. Needless to say, it is always insulting to hear that the state you are living in is doomed to “failure”.

Being placed next to some countries in Africa whose population would migrate to Pakistan given a chance is not a pleasant experience. We have joined the top ten — Sudan, Congo, Ivory Coast, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Chad, Somalia, Haiti, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — from our earlier more palatable position because of Pakistan’s “inability to police the tribal areas, the devastating earthquake of October 2005 and the rise in ethnic tensions”. When we were 34th last year the tribal areas in Pakistan were still “uncontrolled” — in fact they have been uncontrolled since the very inception of Pakistan — and ethnic violence peaked in the first half of the 1990s and is no longer there today. As for the 2005 earthquake — incidentally the biggest in the history of the region — Pakistan has done 100 times better than the states that tried to cope with the tsunami earlier the same year — and, might one say, better than the US after Katrina.

The journal has listed 12 factors as determinants of its study. They are: “mounting demographic pressures; massive movement of refugees and internally displaced peoples; legacy of vengeance-seeking group grievance; chronic and sustained human flight; uneven economic development along group lines; sharp and/or severe economic decline; criminalisation and de-legitimisation of the state; progressive deterioration of public services; widespread violation of human rights; security apparatus as state within a state; rise of factionalised elites; and intervention of other states or external actors”. These elements are present in many Third World states that are listed below Pakistan and there will be no dearth of experts in Pakistan who will prove the list wrong.

The “failed state” list should not become an additional factor in our general mood of pessimism, nor should we go into our familiar mode of denial linking the list to a Jewish conspiracy and accusing America of actually wishing the Muslims dead. Like many other states much lower down on the list, Pakistan has its problems, the foremost being its inability to sustain a democratic functional order. It has some “permanent” flaws of the state whose removal it has been postponing so far. These perennial defects may have nothing to do with an absence of democracy but might impinge on the attention of the political parties when they return to power in Islamabad without General Pervez Musharraf. They pertain to the nature of Pakistani religious-nationalism, its dependence on a conflictual model of relations to fulfil its revisionist objectives, and the vast territories where the writ of the state has not been applied in 59 years.

Pakistan’s largest province Balochistan, forming over 40 percent of the state’s territory, is without a proper policing system. The Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure are in place but there are no police stations in 95 percent of the territory and therefore no proper system to redress the grievances of the citizens deprived of their rights. The next “buffer area” that Pakistan has retained includes the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), an area of about 27,000 square miles with a population of over three million living in seven “agencies” the size of one-third of the NWFP but without any law that could give them recourse to the Supreme Court of Pakistan or the parliament in Islamabad. The president rules there through the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) framed on the jirga-based concept of tribal revenge. Add to this the 850-kilometre long katcha area in Sindh, from Kashmore to the sea, where the dacoits live and which remains “no go” for the police, and you have more than half of Pakistan without proper writ of the law.

Pakistan has reached the point of a necessary strategic paradigm shift in its history. A conflictual model no longer suits its territorial dispensation, given its outlets to the adjacent regions. It no longer needs “strategic depth” to confront anyone; instead, it needs to become alive to the prospects of transit trade across its “narrow” territory. But before that it must exercise control over the territory it owns. Far from ending up as a failed state, it may be the only state in the region with a bright future if — and this is the big IF — the army and political parties can effect functional and stable rules of the game. *