The End of Imran Khan's Revolution

 

Imran Khan Interview

 

Imran Khan alone is not to blame

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

PAKISTAN’S mad rush towards the cliff edge and its evident proclivity for collective suicide deserves a diagnosis, followed by therapy. Contrary to what some may want to believe, this pathological condition is not one man’s fault and it didn’t develop suddenly. To help comprehend this, for a moment imagine the state as a vehicle with passengers. It is equipped with a steering mechanism, outer body, wheels, engine and fuel tank.

Politics is the steering mechanism. Whoever sits behind the wheel can choose the destination, speed up, or slow down. Choosing a driver from among the occupants requires civility, particularly when traveling along a dangerous ravine’s edge. If the language turns foul, and respect is replaced with anger and venom, animal emotions take over.

Imran Khan started the rot in 2014 when, perched atop his container, he hurled loaded abuse upon his political opponents. Following the Panama exposé of 2016, he accused them — quite plausibly in my opinion — of using their official positions for self-enrichment. How else could they explain their immense wealth? For years, he has had no names for them except chor and daku.

But the shoe is now on the other foot and Khan’s enemies have turned out no less vindictive, abusive and unprincipled. They have recorded and made public his recent intimate conversations with a young female, dragged in the matter of his out-of-wedlock daughter, and exposed the shenanigans of his close supporters.

More seriously, they have presented plausible evidence that Mr Clean swindled billions in the Al Qadir and Toshakhana cases. Which is blacker: the pot or the kettle? Take your pick.

Everyone knows politics is dirty business everywhere. Just look at the antics of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s corrupt former prime minister. But if a vehicle’s occupants include calm, trustworthy adjudicators, the worst is still avoidable. Sadly Pakistan is not so blessed; its higher judiciary has split along partisan lines.

The outer body is the army, made for shielding occupants from what lies outside. But it has repeatedly intruded into the vehicle’s interior, seeking to pick the driver. Free-and-fair elections are not acceptable. Last November, months after the Army-Khan romance soured, outgoing army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa confessed that for seven decades the army had “unconstitutionally interfered in politics”.

But a simple mea culpa isn’t enough. Running the economy or making DHAs is also not the army’s job. Officers are not trained for running airlines, sugar mills, fertiliser factories, or insurance and advertising companies. Special exemptions and loopholes have legalised tax evasion and put civilian competitors at a disadvantage.

A decisive role in national politics, whether covert or overt, was sought for personal enrichment of individuals. It had nothing to do with national security.

While Khan has focused solely on the army’s efforts to dislodge him, his violent supporters supplement these accusations by disputing its unearned privileges. When they stormed the GHQ in Rawalpindi, attacked an ISI facility in Pindi, and set ablaze the corps commander’s house in Lahore, they did the unimaginable. But, piquing everyone’s curiosity, no tanks confronted the enraged mobs. No self-defence was visible on social media videos. The bemused Baloch ask, ‘What if an army facility had been attacked in Quetta or Gwadar?’ Would there be carpet bombing? Artillery barrages?

The wheels that keep any economy going are business and trade. Pakistanis are generally very good at this. Their keen sense for profits leads them to excel in real-estate development, mining, retailing, hoteliering, and franchising fast-food chains. But this cleverness carries over to evading taxes, and so Pakistan has the lowest tax-to-GDP ratio among South Asian countries.

The law appears powerless to change this. When a trader routinely falsifies his income tax return, all guilt is quickly expiated by donating a dollop of cash to a madressah, mosque, or hospital. In February, the pious men of Markazi Tanzeem Tajiran (Central Organisation of Traders) threatened a countrywide protest movement to forestall any attempt to collect taxes. The government backed off.

The engine, of course, is what makes the wheels of an economy turn. Developing countries use available technologies for import substitution and for producing some exportables. A strong engine can climb mountains, pull through natural disasters such as the 2022 monster flood, or survive Covid-19 and events like the Ukraine war. A weak one relies on friends in the neighbourhood — China, Saudi Arabia, and UAE — to push it up the hill. By dialling three letters — I/M/F — it can summon a tow-truck company.

The weakness of the Pakistani engine is normally explained away by various excuses — inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment, state-heavy enterprises, excessive bureaucracy, fiscal mismanagement, or whatever. But if truth be told, the poverty of our human resources is what really matters.

For proof, look at China in the 1980s, which had more problems than Pakistan but which had an educated, hard-working citizenry. Economists say that these qualities, especially within the Chinese diaspora of the 1990s, fuelled the Chinese miracle.

The fuel, finally, is the human brain. When appropriately educated and trained, it is voraciously consumed by every economic engine. Pakistan is at its very weakest here. Small resource allocation for education is just a tenth of the problem.

More importantly, draconian social control through schools and an ideology-centred curriculum cripples young minds at the very outset, crushing independent thought and reasoning abilities. Leaders of both PTI and PDM agree that this must never change. Hence Pakistani children have — and will continue to have — inferior skills and poorer learning attitudes compared to kids in China, Korea, or even India.

The prognosis: it is hard to see much good coming out of a screeching catfight between rapacious rivals thirsting for power and revenge. None have a positive agenda for the country.

While the much-feared second breakup of Pakistan is not going to happen, the downward descent will accelerate as the poor starve, cities become increasingly unlivable, and the rich flee westwards. Whether or not elections happen in October and Khan rises from the ashes doesn’t matter. To fix what has gone wrong over 75 years is what’s important.

The Wishful Thinking of Diaspora Pakistanis Reveals A Clandestine Truth About Pakistani Politics

Pakistan is financially, politically, and philosophically bankrupt. What it needs is a new paradigm: a truly people powered government by Arsalan Malik in The Friday Times 

 


In recent months, I have had several conversations with my fellow diaspora Pakistanis in the US about the dumpster fire that is Pakistani politics and economy. To my incredulous amazement, many of them still support the artist formerly known as the “Kaptaan.” Imran Khan continues to have a firm hold on the imagination of these diaspora Pakistanis.

To wit, a very successful, and intelligent Pakistani finance professional told me “IK is the only person who will stand up to the military and save Pakistan from default.” Never mind that IK was a construct of the military in the first place (indeed the overwhelming majority of Pakistani politicians are) and was unable to bring it to heel when he tried during his first unsuccessful term as PM. Pakistanis who think this way although passionate and well meaning, seem to be in-denial of the fact that a large part of the reason we are facing default is because of the fuel subsidies Khan revived a few days before his ouster. Those subsidies further depleted the Treasury at a critical time and effectively tore up the IMF agreement. It made no economic sense and was an act of pure pique to sabotage the subsequent government and curry favor with the masses. This was not the act of a leader who puts his country’s interests before his own. The successive government had to reverse this but the damage was already done. This is the same sort of irrationally misplaced good will that afflicts Trump supporters, who still think he will “drain the swamp” when, in actuality he moved the swamp to DC with him after his election. Just like Trump supporters are convinced he is the answer, many Pakistanis still think that IK will somehow save the Pakistani economy. This is a defensive retreat into fantasy in the face of the unpalatable reality that IK is perhaps even more narcissistic and incompetent than the other inept and feckless fools who have tried and failed to run Pakistan.

Another group of less sophisticated expats think that IK will be successful because “he is not corrupt and is not looking to enrich himself” as opposed to the shamelessly kleptocratic Bhutto/Zardari and Sharif clans. True, IK may not be corrupt but a person is known by the company he keeps. In IK’s case, this consists of the same corrupt, bandwagon careerists in bed with the military who have been a blight on Pakistan’s iniquitous politics ever since its inception. They continued to loot the country in cahoots with the military, under his watch and then abandoned him as soon as the going got tough and he ended up on the wrong side of the military establishment.

However, what both of these Pakistani expat types get right is that if elections were held tomorrow, IK would sweep to victory. He is doubtlessly the most popular politician in the country and has activated and vitalized countless numbers of young people who would not have been otherwise interested in politics. At the same time, he has unwittingly exposed the real puppet masters of Pakistan – its insatiable and pretorian military – and focused the ire of the masses against the top men in khaki behind the curtain for the first time in Pakistan’s history.

IK’s supporters have legitimate grievances against the failed ruling class and establishment elite, and see Imran as their last best hope. This is similar to the effect that Bernie Sanders has had on American millennials and Gen Z. The difference is that Bernie Sanders actually has a progressive, pro-worker, truly populist policy agenda. IK is an inept, incompetent, socially conservative, right-wing populist figure. He is a cult leader, whose track record proves that he cares for his ego much more than he cares for the country. We can be sure that, if accepted back in the fold by the military establishment, instead of confronting it, he will turn out to be even more compliant, because like all narcissists he cares more about power and assuring his own ascendancy and legacy.

Also, unlike Bernie, his politics excludes a class analysis of the problems that afflict Pakistan. Pakistan is at a crossroads. Instead of looking for solutions in another authoritarian strong man and the same old neoliberal policies, the answer to Pakistan’s travails lies in returning power to the working class people of the country, through, for example, the local grassroots organization of truly leftist and socialist political parties like the Mazdoor-Kisaan Party, the Awami Khalq Party, and the Awami Worker’s Party. No one who belongs to the elite that IK belongs to, which includes myself and my friend in finance by the way, can be expected to fix Pakistan.

Pakistan is financially, politically, and philosophically bankrupt. What it needs is a new paradigm: a truly people powered government, led by leaders from the working class, a la Lula in Brazil, that will have the mandate of a super majority of the people to enact progressive policies like raising the taxes on real estate speculation which is the most secure and profitable form of investment for Pakistan’s elites. Such a movement will also institute much needed land reforms to break up antediluvian and anachronistic agricultural monopolies. It will invest in the health and education of the working people of Pakistan instead of F-16s and it will confront the neoliberal institutions that have a stranglehold on Pakistan’s economy by, for example, reversing the disastrous terms of business with the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) which are the central reason for recurring power shortages resulting in an untold number of work days lost, and loss of profitability of private enterprises, and has plunged Pakistan into darkness and creeping de-industrialization.

True change only takes place when millions of working people demand it and when they demand justice. Then, the people at the top have no choice but to respond. In the end, the only force that will save Pakistan are the people of Pakistan, not the military, not the elite, not the businessmen, not the neoliberal economists or a cult of personality but the working-class people of the country. Otherwise, like all Potemkin villages, it will fall apart.

There was no intent to arrest Imran Khan

 

The Dead Cat Strategy - A Good Way to Overcome Poor Performance

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

On January 27, 2022, former prime minister Imran Khan alleged that the co-chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Asif Ali Zardari, had hired assassins to kill him.

Outside Khan’s hardcore group of followers, very few treated the allegation with any seriousness, even though, understandably, the PPP was not amused. Ever since his ouster in April last year, Khan has been churning out one bizarre claim after another in his daily addresses and press talks.

Of course, being a classic populist in the mould of Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Khan hardly ever provides any compelling evidence to back his allegations. Like his populist contemporaries, he too is more interested in remaining in the news and in Twitter trends. The other reason is to deflect the media’s attention away from the plethora of scandals involving his immediate family, his party personnel and himself.

These scandals have begun to engulf him, now that he doesn’t have the kind of protection that he once enjoyed from the military establishment and the judiciary when he was PM. The scandals have dented his self-styled image of being ‘incorruptible’.

By delivering speeches almost on a daily basis that are studded with sensationalist claims and allegations, Khan is using what has come to be known as the ‘dead cat strategy’ or ‘deadcatting’. Both these terms were first floated in 2013. They are derived from a theory of a political strategist who has a history of working for right-wing parties. This is also the reason why deadcatting is often seen as a strategy that has mostly been applied by right-wing politicians and contemporary populists.
 
Both the terms are associated with the Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby. Crosby strategised the British populist Boris Johnson’s campaign for the 2008 London mayoral election that Johnson won. Crosby was first appointed by Johnson’s Conservative Party (CP) during the 2005 parliamentary elections, which the party lost.

But after working successfully with Johnson during the 2008 mayoral election, Crosby became the CP’s central strategist. In a 2013 article for the Daily Telegraph, Johnson excitedly explained Crosby’s strategy. He wrote that one of Crosby’s tactics included, (figuratively speaking) throwing a dead cat on a dining table on which people sat talking about an issue that was detrimental to the interests of a politician. So, once they see the dead cat, their attention is drawn away from the issue and towards the dead cat. Now the dead cat becomes the issue.

‘Dead cat issues’ are thus sensationalist, formed to draw the people’s and the media’s attention away from the issues that have become increasingly problematic for a politician. Johnson continued to apply this strategy when he was appointed PM in 2019. As PM, he went on deploying dead cat issues to divert the media’s attention away from the many holes that he kept digging and falling into.

But deadcatting has its limits. There are but so many dead cats one can throw on the dining table. In 2022, becoming increasingly controversial, Johnson was forced to step down as PM by his own party. The media had stopped talking about dead cats.

In 2019, the populist president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López held a press conference to announce that he had written letters to the Pope and the Spanish government, demanding that they should apologise for invading Mexico… 500 years ago. This out-of-the-blue declaration surprised many. Why was a president who had vowed to resolve Mexico’s many problems, now suddenly talking about a 500-year-old invasion?

According to the British political journalist and author Andrew Scott, López had made a sizeable number of promises, which included introducing widespread land reforms, poverty alleviation and the elimination of Mexico’s deadly drug mafias. Failing to deliver on any of the promises, López deployed the dead cat strategy. The ploy was absurd, but it did catch the media’s attention.

However, not everyone was impressed by the president’s ‘bold’ initiative to get the Pope and the Spanish government to deliver an apology for a centuries-old invasion of Mexico, whose main victims were the country’s indigenous Indian communities. The famous Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa suggested that the letters should have been delivered to López himself, because he had done absolutely nothing to better the conditions of the impoverished Indian communities, except churn out populist slogans and display meaningless stunts.

In the early 1980s, when India’s Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) was largely a fringe far-right Hindu nationalist outfit that had no mentionable economic programme, it started to encourage groups who had begun to plan building a temple on the site of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya. The BJP turned the mosque into a ‘national issue’.

This was BJP’s dead cat that provided it mainstream traction. And so are the claims by the current BJP government, which uses these to keep the media’s attention focused on the so-called existentialist ‘threat’ to India from Pakistan and by India’s Muslims.

Imran Khan has been deadcatting ever since his government started to unravel from 2020 onwards. Some of the favourite dead cats of Pakistani politicians are ‘issues’ of morality and faith. As a PM who was struggling to deliver the grandiose promises that he had made, and facing increasing criticism, Khan decided to declare himself as the leading crusader against Islamophobia.

He started to write letters to the United Nations and other leaders of the ‘Muslim ummah’, urging them to facilitate his idea of formulating a blasphemy law which could be applied internationally. His ministers jumped in, claiming that he was fighting an international ‘jihad’ against Islamophobes and should be hailed for this.

When this dead cat could not distract the media enough, Khan threw in a bigger dead feline, by claiming that the US was conspiring to oust him from power. After being shown the door by a no-confidence-motion in the parliament, he’s been tossing dead cats with increasing frequency.

Recently, one also saw the current finance minister, Ishaq Dar, deploy the dead cat strategy after being castigated by the media for failing to stabilise the economy. He had been brought in as a miracle worker, but his performance has been rather dismal.

Being a Pakistani, he of course began to tweet verses from Islam’s holy scriptures, indirectly suggesting that the failing economy was due to the mysterious ways of cosmic forces. Ironically, rather than diverting attention, this dead cat ended up magnifying his failings.

The Pakistan Political Quagmire

 

The strange case of the cricket match that helped fund Imran Khan’s political rise

 Simon Clark in The FT 

At the height of his success, the Pakistani tycoon Arif Naqvi invited cricket superstar Imran Khan and hundreds of bankers, lawyers and investors to his walled country estate in the Oxfordshire village of Wootton for weekends of sport and drinking. The host was the founder of the Dubai-based Abraaj Group, then one of the largest private equity firms operating in emerging markets, with billions of dollars under management. 

At the “Wootton T20 Cup”, over which Naqvi presided from 2010 to 2012, the main event was a cricket tournament between teams with invented names: the Peshawar Perverts or the Faisalabad Fothermuckers. They played on an immaculate pitch amid 14 acres of formal gardens and parkland at Wootton Place, Naqvi’s 17th-century residence. Veteran cricket commentator Henry Blofeld attended along with expert umpires and film crews. 

“You can choose to play in order to impress or make a fool of yourself, or alternatively just to be an innocent bystander,” Naqvi wrote in an invitation to the event. The guests were asked to pay between £2,000 and £2,500 each to attend, with the money going to unspecified “philanthropic causes”, Naqvi said. 

It is the type of charity fundraiser repeated up and down the UK every summer. What makes it unusual is that the ultimate benefactor was a political party in Pakistan. The fees were paid to Wootton Cricket Ltd, which, despite the name, was in fact a Cayman Islands-incorporated company owned by Naqvi and the money was being used to bankroll Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Khan’s political party. Funds poured into Wootton Cricket from companies and individuals, including at least £2mn from a United Arab Emirates government minister who is also a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family. 

Pakistan forbids foreign nationals and companies from funding political parties, but Abraaj emails and internal documents seen by the Financial Times, including a bank statement covering the period between February 28 and May 30 2013 for a Wootton Cricket account in the UAE, show that both companies and foreign nationals as well as citizens of Pakistan sent millions of dollars to Wootton Cricket — before money was transferred from the account to Pakistan for the PTI. 

The funding of the party is at the centre of a years-long investigation by the Election Commission of Pakistan, an inquiry that has taken on even greater importance as Khan — who lost office in April — plots a political comeback. 

But back in 2013, Khan — a World Cup-winning cricket captain — was riding a wave of popular support and campaigning to upend Pakistan’s politics on an anti-corruption ticket. He presented himself to the electorate as a democratic reformer — born in Pakistan and with experience of living in the west — who could break the hold of the political family dynasties that had dominated the country for decades. 

Although Khan lost the 2013 general election to longtime rival Nawaz Sharif, his party became the third largest in the National Assembly. Naqvi’s star was also rising. His private equity firm was expanding and winning new investors. He became a regular fixture at World Economic Forum meetings in Davos. 

In July 2017, Pakistan’s Supreme Court removed Sharif from office over corruption allegations. Khan won the election in July 2018. As prime minister he became increasingly critical of the west, praising Afghanistan’s Taliban when US forces withdrew in 2021, and visiting Vladimir Putin in Moscow on the day Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February. 

The Election Commission of Pakistan has been investigating the funding of the PTI for more than seven years. In January, the ECP’s scrutiny committee issued a damning report in which it said the PTI received funding from foreign nationals and companies and accused it of under-reporting funds and concealing dozens of bank accounts. Wootton Cricket was named in the report, but Naqvi wasn’t identified as its owner. 

In April, Khan stood down after losing a parliamentary vote of no confidence, triggered in part by rising inflation. He has accused the US of orchestrating the vote and is now attempting to stage a political return to contest a general election due to take place by October 2023. 

That re-election effort means that although the Naqvi funding took place almost a decade ago, the controversy around it, and the final findings of the election commission, are likely to be at the forefront of Pakistan politics for some time. 

While it has previously been reported that Naqvi funded Khan’s party, the ultimate source of the money has never before been disclosed. Wootton Cricket’s bank statement shows it received $1.3mn on March 14 2013 from Abraaj Investment Management Ltd, the fund management unit of Naqvi’s private equity firm, boosting the account’s previous balance of $5,431. Later the same day, $1.3mn was transferred from the account directly to a PTI bank account in Pakistan. Abraaj expensed the cost to a holding company through which it controlled K-Electric, the power provider to Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. 

A further $2mn flowed into the Wootton Cricket account in April 2013 from Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak al-Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family, government minister and chair of Pakistan’s Bank Alfalah, according to the bank statement and a copy of the Swift transfer details. 

Naqvi then exchanged emails with a colleague about transferring $1.2mn more to the PTI. Six days after the $2mn arrived in the Wootton Cricket bank account, Naqvi transferred $1.2mn from it to Pakistan in two instalments. Rafique Lakhani, the senior Abraaj executive responsible for managing cash flow, wrote in an email to Naqvi that the transfers were intended for the PTI. Sheikh Nahyan didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

“Like other populists, Khan is made of Teflon,” says Uzair Younus, director of the Pakistan initiative at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group. “But his opponents will try to use the foreign funding controversy to weaken the argument that he is not corrupt,” he adds, and to encourage the election commission to “punish him and his party”. 

A useful ally 

Naqvi, 62, was born into a Karachi business family. After studying at the London School of Economics he spent the 1990s working in Saudi Arabia and Dubai and started Abraaj in 2002, building it into an investment powerhouse. With offices in Dubai, London, New York and across Asia, Africa and Latin America, the company raised billions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the US administration of Barack Obama, the British and French governments and other investors. 

Well-connected, Naqvi liked to impress. John Kerry — a speaker at one Abraaj event — was approached by the company about working with it after he served as US secretary of state. Naqvi met Britain’s Prince Charles and was active in one of his charities, the British Asian Trust. He was a board member of the UN Global Compact, which advises the UN secretary-general, and sat alongside former Nissan chair Carlos Ghosn on the board of the Interpol Foundation, which raises funds for the global police organisation. 

In Washington he was seen as a useful ally. The Obama administration pledged $150mn to an Abraaj fund investing in Middle Eastern companies: a press release said that the partnership would help turn the US president’s promise to improve economic relations with Islamic nations into a reality. Some even saw him as a possible future political leader in Pakistan, which he once described as “a country not known for transparency”, before adding that Abraaj “did everything by the book” during its control of K-Electric. 

“We avoided every single point where you would have had to come into contact with government — even though you were a utility — and have to pay someone something,” he said. 

K-Electric was Abraaj’s single largest investment. But as the private equity firm ran into financial difficulties in 2016, Naqvi struck a deal to sell control of the power company to Chinese state-controlled Shanghai Electric Power for $1.77bn. Political approval for the deal in Pakistan was important and Naqvi lobbied the governments of both Sharif and Khan for backing. In 2016, he authorised a $20mn payment for Pakistan politicians to gain their support, according to US public prosecutors who later charged him with fraud, theft and attempted bribery. 

The payment was allegedly intended for Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shehbaz, who replaced Khan as prime minister in April. The brothers have denied any knowledge of the matter. In January 2017, Naqvi hosted a dinner for Nawaz Sharif at Davos. After Khan became prime minister, Naqvi met him. While in office Khan criticised officials for delaying the sale of K-Electric but the deal has still not been completed. 

Abraaj collapsed in 2018 after investors including the Gates Foundation started investigating whether the company was misusing money in a fund intended to buy and build hospitals across Africa and Asia. Abraaj said it was managing assets of about $14bn at the time. In 2019, US prosecutors indicted Naqvi and five of his former colleagues. Two former Abraaj executives have since pleaded guilty. Naqvi denies the charges. 

Naqvi was arrested at London’s Heathrow airport in April 2019 after returning from Pakistan and faces up to 291 years in jail if found guilty of the US charges. Khan’s telephone number was included on a list of contacts he handed to police — a fact mentioned by lawyers representing the US government during Naqvi’s extradition trial in London. 

His appeal against extradition to the US is expected to conclude later this year. But he has had to pay £15mn for bail and has hefty ongoing legal expenses. Wootton Place was sold to a hedge fund manager in 2020 for £12.25mn. Naqvi and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on this story. 

Moving money around 

In 2012 Khan visited Wootton Place. In a written response to questions from the FT, the former cricketer said he had gone to “a fundraising event which was attended by many PTI supporters”. Blofeld, the cricket commentator, recalls that Khan “was persuaded to take the field” at Wootton. “It was extraordinary to see how he still had the knack of bowling those fast inswingers,” he says. 

Naqvi, a self-described cricket purist, provided the bats, balls, osteopaths, masseurs, food, accommodation and clothing. He literally wrote the rules for the matches. Ball tampering — banned in cricket — was permitted in matches at Wootton because “it is important to encourage innovation and experimentation in cricket, as what is considered illegal today may be de rigueur tomorrow,” Naqvi once wrote to guests. 

It was a critical time for Khan to gather funds ahead of the election scheduled for May 2013, and Naqvi worked closely with other Pakistani businessmen to raise money for his campaign. The largest entry in Wootton Cricket’s bank account in the months before the election was the $2mn from Sheikh Nahyan, now the UAE’s minister for tolerance. He is also an investor in Pakistan. 

After Lakhani, the Abraaj executive responsible for cash flow, told Naqvi in an email that the sheikh’s money had arrived, Naqvi replied that he should send “1.2 million to PTI”. In another email to Lakhani after the sheikh’s money entered the Wootton Cricket account Naqvi wrote: “do not tell anyone where funds are coming from, ie who is contributing”. 

“Sure sir,” Lakhani responded. He wrote that he would transfer $1.2mn from Wootton Cricket to the PTI’s account in Pakistan. Then after considering sending the funds to the PTI via Naqvi’s personal account, Lakhani proposed sending the money in two instalments to a personal account for businessman Tariq Shafi in Karachi and an account for an entity called the Insaf Trust in Lahore. Although the ownership of the Insaf Trust is unclear, the emails state that the final destination was the PTI. “Don’t eff this up rafiq,” Naqvi wrote in another email. 

On May 6 2013, Wootton Cricket transferred a total of $1.2mn to Shafi and the Insaf Trust. Lakhani wrote in an email to Naqvi that the transfers were for the PTI. Khan confirmed that Shafi donated to the PTI. “It is for Tariq Shafi to answer as to from where he received this money,” Khan said in response to the FT. Shafi didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

‘Prohibited funding took place’ 

The ECP investigation into the funding of Khan’s party was triggered when Akbar S Babar, who helped establish the PTI, filed a complaint in December 2014. Although thousands of Pakistanis worldwide sent money for the PTI, Babar insists that “prohibited funding took place”. 

In his written response, Khan said that neither he nor his party was aware of Abraaj providing $1.3mn through Wootton Cricket. He also said he was “not aware” of the PTI receiving any funds that originated from Sheikh Nahyan. “Arif Naqvi has given a statement which was filed before the Election Commission also, not denied by anyone, that the money came from donations during a cricket match and the money as collected by him was sent through his company Wootton Cricket,” Khan wrote. 

Khan said he was waiting for the verdict of the election commission’s investigation. “It will not be appropriate to prejudge PTI.” 

In its January report, the election commission said Wootton Cricket had transferred $2.12mn to the PTI but didn’t reveal the original source of the money. Naqvi has acknowledged his ownership of Wootton Cricket and denied any wrongdoing. In a statement, he told the election commission that: “I have not collected any fund from any person of non-Pakistani origin, company [public or private] or any other  

The bank statement for Wootton Cricket tells a different story. It shows that Naqvi transferred three instalments directly to the PTI in 2013 adding up to a total of $2.12mn. The largest was the $1.3mn from Abraaj which company documents show was transferred to Wootton Cricket but charged to its holding company for K-Electric. 

The impact of the scandal could yet hit Khan’s re-election ambitions. In July he renewed his call for an early poll after the PTI won a critical victory in by-elections in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province. On Twitter, he called the Election Commission of Pakistan “totally biased”. 

At the same time prime minister Shehbaz Sharif has urged the commission to publish its verdict in the PTI case, saying that the delays caused by political infighting had given Khan “a free pass despite his repeated & shameless attacks on state institutions”. 

Yet the Atlantic Council’s Younus says that Khan’s loyal supporters won’t be moved whatever the outcome. They “do not and will not care. In fact, Khan may claim that the story is further evidence that foreign powers are leveraging global media to conspire against him.” 

For Babar, who helped found the PTI, the controversy is proof that Khan has fallen short of the ideals they set out to champion in politics. “He had the opportunity of a lifetime and he blew it,” Babar says. “Our cause was reform, change — introduce the values in our politics that we espoused publicly.” Instead, he says, “[Khan’s] morality compass in a political sense went haywire”.

Frankenstein's Monster

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn 

Illustration by Abro


The phrase ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ has come to mean an ambitious (and even unnatural) creation which not only becomes a threat to society, and to itself, but also to those who created it.

The term is derived from an 1818 novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. In it, a brilliant scientist Dr Frankenstein discovers a way to infuse life into lifeless matter. He creates a humanoid, expecting him to be pure in emotion and thought. The creation tries to fit into society, but fails. After realising his failure, his immense yearning to be accepted mutates and turns into rage. He violently turns against society, and against his creator who abandons him.

Modern political commentators have often used the phrase ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ to describe powerful elites sculpting forces or individuals who could execute their political agendas. But the creations often mutate and turn against their creators. Their rage can also damage whole societies.

The intentions of Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein were ‘noble’. The scientist wanted to create the ‘perfect man’ who could be taught morality through reason and whose core emotion was to be compassion. But the creation’s core emotion became an intense desire to be loved by society. Once the creation failed to conjure this, the desire to be loved became an uncontrollable urge to hate those who refused to love him.

In his 1987 book Frankenstein’s Shadow, Chris Baldick writes that one of the things Shelly’s monster represented was the mob during the 1789 French Revolution. The principles of the Age of Enlightenment — reason, logic, science — had noble intentions i.e. to rid society of superstition and the totalitarian hold of the Church and the monarchy. But when these principles were manifested through revolutionary action, they became monstrous.

They took the shape of mobs going on a killing spree, negating everything that the Enlightenment stood for. If Enlightenment philosophers created the Revolution, the uprising dismembered their philosophies. The philosophers wanted to create rational individuals, but ended up giving birth to irrational mobs, mindlessly demolishing institutions and individuals.

Some historians have explained Marxism as a noble idea (seeking to create economic equality), but one which gave birth to totalitarian figures such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot. They turned into ‘monsters’.

Same is the case with Hitler. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot’s creation was shaped by Marxism’s idea of establishing a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Hitler’s monstrosity on the other hand, was shaped by an assortment of 19th century racist theories and myths circulating in Europe.

It is easier to find noble intentions in Enlightenment philosophies and in Marxism, but not so in racist ideas. However, Nazism explained itself as a struggle to revive a noble Germanic past that was full of purity and honour, but was disfigured by ‘non-Aryan’ races and ideologies. After realising that the world at large was refusing to recognise this, Hitler sought to destroy the world. He ended up destroying Germany and himself.

Of course, a multitude of economic and political factors also contributed to creating these ‘monsters’. The rise of Ruhollah Khomeini was shaped by the manner in which the economic interests of Iran’s ‘petit bourgeois’ and Iran’s heterogeneous commercial class (the ‘bazaaris’) were impacted by the Shah of Iran’s ‘modernisation’ programmes.

Khomeini was moulded by this class as a messiah. Other anti-Shah forces, such as the Marxists and secular democrats, went along. Liberals and many Marxists invested a lot of their revolutionary energy in propping up Khomeini.

After the Revolution, Khomeini expected them to ‘understand’ his Islamist route to vanquish American capitalism as well as Soviet communism. When the understanding wasn’t forthcoming, he launched a ferocious attack on his former non-Islamist allies. In 1988 alone, over 20,000 Marxists and liberals were executed by the Khomeini dictatorship.

In the 1980s, the Afghan Mujahideen were engineered as ‘freedom fighters’ by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. US President Ronald Reagan said that, to the Afghan Muslims, the Mujahideen were what the heroes of the 18th century American Revolution were to the Americans. The anti-Soviet Islamist militants were bolstered by billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to fight a ‘just war’ against Soviet atheism in Afghanistan.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the same leaders who were invited to the White House and glorified as forces who were ‘saving Islam’ (and the world) from communism, began to be seen as nihilists. In turn, the leaders who had romanced the US as a ‘Christian brother’ helping them fight atheism, became their enemy number one.

Like Shelly’s monster who couldn’t find acceptance, former pro-US Islamists went on a rampage, killing thousands in their compulsion to hunt down their creator.

In 2011, Pakistan’s military establishment began to create a politician who they believed would vanquish the country’s old mainstream political parties, and become the establishment’s civilian vessel. This wasn’t the first time the establishment did this. However, this time, a lot more resources were invested.

Imran Khan, who had been leading an insignificant little party since 1995, was provided enough resources to suddenly manage to gather thousands of people at his rallies, and gain constant air time on popular TV news channels as well as a sympathetic ear by the judiciary.

This despite the fact that he was a political novice. His understanding of history and politics was a curious potpourri of contemporary Islamist ideas, illiberal nationalism, a drawing-room-view of Pakistani society, and a muddled postmodernist understanding of imperialism. Yet, he was diligently propped up by at least three generals, various ISI chiefs and TV channels. Then in 2018, an election was manipulated to put him in power.

But as PM, he was an abject failure. He was only interested in being admired and accepted as a legitimate saviour of the nation and the ummah. Everything else was to wait.

Dismayed by his performance and utter lack of political tact, his creators withdrew their support. Within months after this, he was ousted by a no-confidence vote. Feeling betrayed, he is now on the streets claiming that sinister anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan forces engineered his ouster. In his obsession to denounce those who created him, and plunge the country into political chaos, it is likely that he just might be damaging his chances of ever being a viable political option again.

The Death of The Intellect

Nadeem Paracha in The Dawn


One point that supporters of Prime Minister Imran Khan really like to assert is that, “he is a self-made man.” They insist that the country should be led by people like him and not by those who were ‘born into wealth and power.’

According to the American historian Richard Hofstadter, such views are largely aired by the middle-classes. To Hofstadter, this view also has an element of ‘anti-intellectualism.’ In his 1963 book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter writes that, as the middle-class manages to attain political influence, it develops a strong dislike for what it sees as a ‘political elite.’ But since this elite has more access to better avenues of education, the middle-class also develops an anti-intellectual attitude, insisting that, as a ruler, a self-made man is better than a better educated man.

Khan’s core support comes from Pakistan’s middle-classes. And even though he graduated from the prestigious Oxford University, he is more articulate when speaking about cricket — a sport that once turned him into a star — than about anything related to what he is supposed to be addressing as the country’s prime minister.

But many of his supporters do not have a problem with this, especially in contrast to his equally well-educated opponents, Bilawal Bhutto and Maryam Nawaz, who sound a lot more articulate in matters of politics. To Khan’s supporters, these two are from ‘dynastic elites’ who cannot relate to the sentiments of the ‘common people’ like a self-made man can.

It’s another matter that Khan is not the kind of self-made man that his supporters would like people to believe. He came from a well-to-do family that had roots in the country’s military-bureaucracy establishment. He went to prestigious educational institutions and spent most his youth as a socialite in London. Indeed, whereas the Bhutto and Sharif offsprings were born in wealth and power which is aiding their climb in politics, Khan’s political ambitions were carefully nurtured by the military-establishment.  

Nevertheless, perhaps conscious of the fact that his personality is not suited to support an intellectual bent, Khan has positioned himself as a self-made man who appeals to the ways of the ‘common people.’ He doesn’t.

For example, wearing the national dress and using common everyday Urdu lingo does not cut it anymore. It did when the former PM Z.A. Bhutto did the same. But years after his demise in 1979, such ‘populist’ antics have become a worn-out cliche. The difference between the two is that Bhutto was a bonafide intellectual. Even his idea to present himself as a ‘people’s man’ was born from a rigorous intellectual scheme. However, Khan does appeal to that particular middle-class disposition that Hofstadter was writing about.

When he attempts to sound profound, his views usually appear to be a mishmash of theories of certain Islamic and so-called ‘post-colonial’ scholars. The result is rhetoric that actually ends up smacking of anti-intellectualism.

So what is anti-intellectualism? It is understood to be a view that is hostile to intellectuals. According to Walter E. Houghton, in the 1952 edition of the Journal of History of Ideas, the term’s first known usage dates back to 1881 in England, when science and ideas such as the ‘separation of religion and the state’, and the ‘supremacy of reason’ had gained momentum.

This triggered resentment in certain sections of the British society who began to suspect that intellectuals were formulating these ideas to undermine the importance of theology and long-held traditions.

According to the American historian Robert D. Cross, as populism started to become a major theme in American politics in the early 20th century, some mainstream politicians politicised anti-intellectualism as a way to portray themselves as men of the people. For example, US presidents Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and Woodward Wilson (1913-1921) insisted that ‘character was more important than intellect.’

Across the 20th century, the politicised strand of anti-intellectualism was active in various regions. Communist regimes in China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia systematically eliminated intellectuals after describing them as remnants of overthrown bourgeoisie cultures. In Germany, the far-right intelligentsia differentiated between ‘passive intellectuals’ and ‘active intellectuals.’ Apparently, the passive intellectuals were abstract and thus useless whereas the active ones were ‘men of action.’ Hundreds of so-called passive intellectuals were harassed, exiled or killed in Nazi Germany.

In the 1950s, intellectuals in the US began to be suspected by firebrand members of the Republican Party of serving the interests of communist Russia. In former East Pakistan, hundreds of intellectuals were violently targeted for supporting Bengali nationalism.

But whereas these forms of anti-intellectualism were emerging from established political forces from both the left and the right, according to the American historian of science Michael Shermer, a more curious idea of anti-intellectualism began to develop within Western academia.

In the September 1, 2017 issue of Scientific American, Shermer writes that this was because ‘postmodernism’ had begun to ‘hijack’ various academic disciplines in the 1990s.

Postmodernism emerged in the 20th century as a critique of modernism. It derided modernism as a destructive force that had used its ideas of secularism, democracy, economic progress, science and reason as tools of subjugation. Shermer writes that, by the 1990s, postmodernism was positing that there was no objective truth and that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression. This is when even the celebrated leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky began to warn that postmodernism had turned anti-science.

‘Post-colonialism’ or the critique of the remnants of Western colonialism was very much a product of postmodernism as well. Oliver Lovesey in his book The Postcolonial Intellectual and the historian Arif Dirlik in the 1994 issue of The Critical Inquiry, take to task post-colonialism as a discipline now populated by non-white groups of academics who found themselves in positions of privilege in Western universities.

Lovesey quotes the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek as saying, “Post-colonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.”

Imran Khan is a classic example of how postmodernism and post-colonialism have become cynical anti-intellectual pursuits. Khan often reminds us that social and economic progress should not be undertaken to please the West because that smacks of a colonial mindset.

So, as his regime presides over a nosediving economy and severe political polarisation, the PM was recently reported (in the January 22 issue of The Friday Times) as discussing with his ministers whether he should mandate the wearing of the dupatta by all women TV anchors. Go figure.

An 'extraordinary' situation in Pakistan

 

Poisoned Chalice

by Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

Nawaz Sharif is reportedly at death’s door. He has been treated in a most inhumane and callous manner while in custody. This is a thrice-elected prime minister who voluntarily returned from London and went to prison. This is a man who was kept in jail while his wife was dying in London. This is a man who has been convicted by the Supreme Court on the thread of a loose definition of “assets” in an unauthorized reference dictionary in the prejudicial context of “Sicilian Mafia”. This is a man who has been convicted by a judge who was blackmailed to get his conviction. This is a man who has resolutely resisted the various offerings of the Establishment to leave Pakistan and quit politics. His crime: he ran afoul of the Establishment by mistaking the elected office of prime minister for the font of power in Pakistan. Worse, he refused to learn and repent.

---Also watch

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Popular opinion holds that Imran Khan is personally responsible for Nawaz Sharif’s deteriorating health. His government has tightened the screws by withdrawing all manner of decent prison and medical facilities befitting an ex-prime minister. Yet when a reporter recently confronted Mr Khan with this perception, “he threw his arms up with a bewildered look on his face: ‘Am I the doctor? Am I the court’?” The reporter added that shortly thereafter Mr Khan called up the Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar and ordered him to arrange a meeting between Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Mariam. A day earlier, Mariam’s request for such a meeting had been denied by a NAB accountability court. Clearly, Mr Khan has answered his own questions.

Mr Khan also told reporters that there was a “foreign hand” behind Maulana Fazal ur Rahman’s long march and dharna. Incredibly enough, he pointed a finger at India! If he had hinted at another foreign power with which the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam and its leader has had traditional religious relations, he might have been less incredible. But how could he have summoned up the courage to bite the hand that feeds him?

The Maulana is still talking tough. But suspicions have arisen about his aims and objectives. It has been reported that he met Establishment Big Wigs recently and was told flatly that there would be no minus-Imran solution and that there might be other “minuses” amongst politicians. Curiously, opposition party activists are being arrested daily even as Mr Khan has belatedly allowed the dharma to proceed to Islamabad. The Establishment has reportedly told the Maulana that his dharna should be short and peaceful, otherwise it would do its “constitutional duty” to protect the “lawful” government. This is in sharp contrast to what it did during Mr Khan’s long drawn out dharna.
The fate of Nawaz Sharif hangs in the balance. Some “connected” journalists are claiming that both father and daughter will be allowed to go to London without an NRO because Nawaz is precariously ill and the Establishment doesn’t want his blood on their hands – they are still reaping the political backlash from the assassinations of two Bhuttos. The popular mood in the Punjab – the recruiting ground and bulwark of the Establishment – has palpably turned against it. This is unprecedented.

We – people and institutions – are all drinking from a poisoned chalice. Imran Khan is guzzling from the poisoned chalice of a rigged election. The people are choking on the poisoned chalice of the IMF. The opposition parties and leaders are swallowing from the poisoned chalice of their corruptions and commissions. The Establishment is gulping from the poisoned chalice of its regional adventures and internal interventions. The judiciary is swigging from the poisoned chalice of its great betrayal of the lawyers’ movement.

This need not have been the case. Only six years ago, we witnessed a peaceful transfer of power, the second consecutive handing over of the baton from one elected government to the next. The judiciary gave hope with its newly grown spine courtesy the successful lawyers’ movement. The media, though raucous, was reverberating with the din of democracy. Nawaz Sharif’s government was making regional alliances and reaching out to neighbours. The 18th Amendment had devolved power to the provinces, fulfilling a long-standing demand of Pakistan’s alienated ethnic populations. This was in the natural order of things: the system growing, changing, adapting, on the road to cleansing itself.

But these very changes threatened to whittle down the power of Pakistan’s deep state. The latter’s response was concerted and fierce. We all know what happened thereafter but it is deeply ironical that we are once again desperate for the reprieves that were all within grasp only a few years ago – peace at home and goodwill abroad, relief from international punitive actions, a buoyant economy, a developing democracy worthy of respect. We cannot upturn the natural order of things and expect to come up trumps again and again. Our chalices will remain poisoned until we purge ourselves.

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The spectre of partition haunts India and Pakistan

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times







As the month of December inches forward to herald a new year, we might pause to reflect on some issues that continue to pose existential problems for us as a nation.

The Federal Censor Board has not yet cleared a film on the life of famed writer Saadat Hasan Manto by Nandita Das, a renowned peace activist and producer/director in India. Apparently, the Censor Board is concerned about how some aspects of the “Partition” are depicted in the film. The sad ironies in this matter should not be missed. In India, too, the film was not selected for screening in an International Film Festival in Mumbai, despite being shown at the Film Festivals in Cannes and Toronto, because of sensitivities about “Partition”. Apparently, if Indians are inclined to object when Hindus are shown to rape and slaughter Muslims, Pakistanis are wont to protest when Muslims are depicted in much the same communal light. The bigger irony is that in both countries, Manto is celebrated by the writers and artists of the subcontinent as a great short story writer whose humanity soared above communal or ideological motives because he situated it in the agony, rage and sadness of both sides of the divide during the months leading to the “Partition”. The biggest irony is that Manto was persecuted and prosecuted for the same original sin in the “Purana Pakistan” of the 1950s for which he is posthumously paying the price in “Naya Pakistan”, despite being honoured with a Nishan-e-Imtiaz by the PPP government in 2012. It seems that, seventy years later, both countries are still trapped in the trauma of the “Partition” and constantly seek ways and means to reinforce its memory in our new generations instead of “moving on” to create fresh spaces for mutual welfare and growth.

Pakistan was itself “partitioned” in December 1971 with the bloody birth of Bangladesh. Unfortunately, most Pakistani writing on the subject is still focused on the role of India in the military debacle instead of the role of its own Punjabi civil-military oligarchy in creating the economic and political conditions that led to the acute alienation of East Pakistani Bengalis. In India, the same moment is rung up as an occasion to savour the Pakistani army’s “humiliating” surrender while in Dhaka it is time again to fuel rage against Pakistan for the “genocide” in 1971 and demand an “apology” and “reparations” for it. The collective hostile imagination of the “Partition” continues to sour the quest for peace in South Asia.

Tragically, however, Pakistan continues to be the most adversely affected country by the consequences of the original Partition. Its attempt to seize Kashmir from India – to redress a gross inequity of the division – by force shortly after independence sowed the seeds of a continuing confrontation that has crippled us politically, economically and socially. Enveloped in anxiety, fear and rage, we have ended up creating a “national-security state” that has, in the name of supreme national interest, trampled on civil freedoms, curtailed provincial autonomies, manufactured violent non-state actors, thwarted political leaders, fashioned parties, engineered anti-democratic political systems and dissembled “political Islam” as a legitimizing force for itself. This state continues to hog the budget and restricts regional development connectivity for “security” reasons. It constantly straitjackets the space for cultural freedom and social advancement. In short, it has stalled the development of a vibrant, pluralistic society at peace with itself and with the rest of the world.

The Taliban attack on the Army Public School in December 2014 in which over 149 children were martyred is another grim reminder of some of the painful consequences of the path taken by our national security state. The Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani offshoot are a direct consequence of our regional security policies centered on the “threat” from India. While the Afghans were given safe havens, the Pakistani Taliban were mollycoddled with one peace deal after another even as they were attacking girls’ schools and assassinating civilians with impunity. It is only after they attacked the APS that the national security state finally girded up its loins to go after them with a vengeance. Those who fled to Afghanistan have now become proxies against Pakistan in the new great game unfolding in the region.

This December we also should also expect a final denouement against the two mainstream parties of the country for whom most Pakistanis voted in the last elections. The PMLN leaders, Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif, are already shackled, and more troubles are in store for the PPP’s leader Asif Ali Zardari. To be sure, both parties and leaders are partly responsible for their tribulations. Each governed callously in turns. Each joined hands with the Miltablishment to undermine the other and erode the credibility of the democratic system. Now they are lined up to pay for their sins.

Unfortunately, however, the most enduring legacy of the Partition, the national security state, that has re-engineered the political system yet again, has put all its eggs in Imran Khan’s basket. But he is fumbling and stumbling, leaving us wondering about our options in case he drops the ball.

Imran Khan - The first 100 days

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times






Prime Minister Imran Khan is being hauled over the coals for failing to match words with deeds in his first 100 days in office. Indeed, he has made a laughing stock of himself by justifying 19 controversial decisions and 35 U-Turns so far as tactical policy befitting “great leaders” like Hitler and Napoleon. Since he wittingly proposed the 100-day yardstick to measure his government’s performance, he has only himself to blame for this media onslaught.

The most urgent item on PM Imran Khan’s agenda is related to the crisis in the economy manifested by a yawning gap in the balance of payments, falling forex reserves and a plummeting rupee. As opposition leader, he had thundered endlessly against crawling to the IMF or foreign countries for financial bailouts. Instead, he had pinned his hopes on billions in donations from overseas Pakistanis and tens of billions from unearthing black money stashed abroad. The problem arose when, after assuming office, he persisted in his delusionary approach, and the situation went from bad to worse. When his finance minister, Asad Umar, dared to baulk, he was forced to eat his words. It was only when the army chief, General Qamar Bajwa, “launched” himself purposefully that Imran Khan reluctantly packed his achkan, dragged himself off to Saudi Arabia and China with bowl in hand, and Asad Umar sat down to engage the IMF, both making a bald-faced virtue out of necessity.

But even this belated dawning of “wisdom” has failed to yield the desired results. China is not even ready to reveal the nature of its help. The Saudis have made an insignificant deposit that doesn’t tally with the tall expectations of government. And the IMF delegation has returned to Washington without any commitment, leaving the PM and his FM wringing their hands in despair.

The second item related to the efficient and honest functioning of government. On that score, there is even more confusion and contradiction. Parliament cannot function properly without consensual committees to steer legal reforms and oversee public accounts. But the hounding of the opposition parties at the behest of the interior ministry and civil-military “agencies” directed by Imran Khan himself has log-jammed the core committees. Worse, the PM’s intent to run Punjab from Bani Gala via a weak chief minister in a sea of cunning contenders for power like the Punjab Governor and the Speaker of the Provincial Assembly, has deadlocked the bureaucracy and administration. The rapid postings and transfers of high and low officials at one power broker’s behest or another’s has led to lack of direction and motivation.

The third agenda item is foreign policy. Here, too, the government’s stumbling is embarrassing. When the need of the hour is to keep the American beast at bay so that it doesn’t waylay the IMF on its way to Pakistan or lean on the Saudis to put pressure on us, Imran Khan has tried to win cheap brownie points at home by counter-tweeting President Trump. On the Afghanistan front, the war of words and proxy terrorism continues unabated even as Islamabad vows to be part of the solution rather than the problem.

Now Pakistan’s reopening of the Kartarpur corridor to the Sikh shrine of Baba Guru Nanak is being billed as some sort of “peace breakthrough” in Indo-Pak relations. It is nothing of the sort. Like the IMF, China and Saudi Arabia “openings”, this initiative comes courtesy General Bajwa whose bear hug of Indian cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu at Imran Khan’s oath taking ceremony in Islamabad put Indian PM Narendra Modi and Punjab state CM Amarinder Singh in a tight corner. Neither politician’s prospects are too bright in the forthcoming elections in Punjab state next year. Therefore, they have reluctantly yielded to the Pakistani proposal only to curry favour with tens of millions of devout Sikhs. It is a tactical and short term concession as the hard, anti-Pakistan statements from Amarinder Singh and the Indian FM Sushma Swaraj, coupled with PM Modi’s refusal to attend the SAARC summit for the third year running, prove. Indeed, even as the Kartarpur protocol was being signed, proxy terrorists were taking a toll at the Chinese Consulate in Karachi, SP Tahir Dawar’s murdered body was being handed over to the Pak authorities at the Afghan border, suicide bombers were striking in the lower Orakzai Agency and India’s brutal repression in Held Kashmir showed no sign of abating.

On the Pakistan side, too, General Bajwa’s initiative is tactical, aimed only at reducing current Indian hostility – in the form of armed conflict along the LoC and proxy terrorism across the country – that destabilizes Pakistan and makes Imran Khan’s job of focusing on government difficult. This is the same Miltablishment that winked at the Labaiq Ya Rasul Allah during Nawaz Sharif’s time and crushed it in Imran Khan’s, the same that kicked Nawaz out for wanting to promote peace with India and is propping up Imran now at Kartarpur.

The Miltablishment has put all its eggs in Imran Khan’s basket. It will take more than 100 days of incompetence to shake its faith in their chosen man.

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Bombs or Bread?

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times 16 Nov 2018









As we all know, the civil-military relationship in Nawaz Sharif’s time was severely strained. Among the factors often cited are Mr Sharif’s dogged pursuit of ex-army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, for the treasonable coup of 1999; his rush to “befriend” the hawkish Indian PM, Narendra Modi, without clearing the tactics and strategy with the Miltablishment; the “misuse” of the Pakistan-based jihadis in the proxy war with India, that led to the altercation reported in “Dawnleaks”; and Mr Sharif’s refusal to give the Miltablishment a seat at the roundtable determining CPEC projects and contracts.

But in a recent TV interview, Ishaq Dar, the ex-PMLN Finance Minister, has made a startling admission. He alluded to the issue of increasing defense budgets as the most significant area of conflict between the PMLN government and the Miltablishment. It appears that the Miltablishment wanted “more” money for new weapons systems because of the rising security threat from India but the PMLN government was strapped for funds and declined to do the needful.

The “Defense Budget” remains a sore point with every elected civilian government. At one time, it hovered around 30% of all budgetary expenditures and became grist for critics’ mills. So the Musharraf government cunningly took out military pensions from the Defense Budget and clubbed them with government expenditures, thereby reducing its weight as a percentage of budget expenditures and making it more palatable. When Coalition Fund Support from the US kicked in during the war against terrorism in FATA, it was also toted up outside the ambit of the Defense Budget. It has now become normal practice to post an increase of approximately 10 percent every year over actual expenditures for defense in the preceding year whilst beefing up the defense spending in supplementary budgets during the rest of the year, in effect giving the military much more than a 10% increase. The low levels of budgetary revenue collection and consequent government expenditures have also made defense budgets look overly inflated in percentage terms, especially in relation to India.

The security concerns of the Pak military have increased manifold for three main reasons. First, the aggressive nature of the Modi regime with its constant threat of “strategic strikes” across the LoC and its support of proxy war against Pakistan from non-state actors based in Afghanistan. Second, the perennial threat from its Cold Start Doctrine, now baptized afresh as Pro-Active Operations. Third, India is shopping for advanced weapons systems, the foremost being its proposed purchase of the Russian S-400 Triumf long-range, anti-missile system for over US$5.5 billion which is viewed in Islamabad as a major new threat. Now India has commissioned its first indigenously built nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant, armed with a 750km range submarine launched missile fitted with a nuclear warhead. Both these acquisitions are going to compel Pakistan to seek expensive equivalent systems to redress the security imbalance.

In other words, the Pakistan military will want lots more money going forward. The problem is that Pakistan’s economy has been failing and increasingly unable to bear this burden. Therefore, the choice of “bombs or bread” is bound to echo ever more furiously in the corridors of power, leading to renewed strains in civil-military relations and political instability that will in turn hamstring economic development and further strain the budget. When will this vicious circle end to create space for poverty alleviation, education, health, human resource development, etc.?

By definition, a “national security state” like Pakistan with a “permanent” and powerful enemy on its border like India requires a high level of defense preparedness. This is testified by the four wars, countless border skirmishes, and reciprocal proxy-terrorisms between the two in the last 70 years. Ostensibly, the root cause is the unresolved dispute over Kashmir. But we need to ask and answer some pertinent questions here.

How have many countries resolved similar border and territorial disputes in modern times without resorting to wars and proxy-terrorism? Which of the two is the originator of the wars in the subcontinent, regardless of the political provocation by the other? Why has the nuclearisation of the subcontinent spurred the conventional arms race instead of freezing it as originally argued? Who is hurting the most from this arms race, not just in financial terms but also in the cost to representative democracy of an overbearing political-military industrial complex that has created violent non-state actors at home to retain its political hegemony? Why is such a national security state unable to fully exploit Pakistan’s strategic location at the crossroads of three civilisations and markets – South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle-East – instead of replacing the yoke of one declining super power by that of another rising one? Why do we subscribe to the notion of a permanent enemy instead of a permanent peace in the national interest?

The USSR put a man in space and built over 10,000 nuclear bombs but couldn’t put enough bread on its shelves to feed its people. The arms race destroyed it. There are lessons in this for Pakistan.

Lessons for all from the great Tarek Fatah

Good Luck Imran!

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times







The Miltablishment, Judiciary, ECP and Media – “pillars of the state” – are entitled to pat one another on the back for successfully putting Imran Khan in office. Their task became doubly difficult after Nawaz Sharif defied expectations to return to the country and court arrest, triggering sympathy votes in Punjab that threatened to derail their carefully laid plans.

The opposition parties are rightly crying foul. They have demanded the resignation of the CEC and his associates for facilitating the theft of the general elections. The ECP’s explanation about the mysterious breakdown of the RTS system – denied by NADRA which put the system in place and monitored it — and the extraordinary delays in announcing the results hasn’t washed. Nor is it easy to stomach the fact that in many constituencies the lead of the winner is less than the number of rejected votes. The sharp rebuke from the ECP confirms a decidedly partisan sentiment in its ranks.

Clearly, those who thought that unprecedented pre-poll rigging would suffice to get “suitable results” were wrong. A last-minute intervention was necessitated in the dead of night on Election Day when the numbers seemed to be going awry. But that’s not the end of the story.

The “Independents” are now being corralled and branded. Small fry like the GDA, PMLQ, MQM, BAP, TLYRA, etc are being offered “sweetners” while the PPP is being whipped into submission. Asif Zardari, Feryal Talpur,Owais Tappi, Yousaf Raza Gillani, and a clutch of other Zardari cronies and PPP leaders have been read out the Riot Act by NAB and FIA: Cooperate or Else.

Still, it’s going to be a long haul for Imran Khan and Associates. The bare victories in Islamabad and Lahore will be buffeted every day for the next five years. Indeed, the project of putting Imran Khan in office will have to be updated by a project to keep him in office. Amidst this, the core objective of “Tabdeeli” will be very difficult to achieve.

For starters, Imran Khan will need help in assembling his teams in KPK, Punjab and Islamabad so that the core objective is kept firmly in mind. The refusal to appoint Pervez Khattak as CM of KPK suggests that the Miltablishment will retain veto power over critical appointments. The buzzwords in these quarters are “Neat, Clean and Obedient”. But a contradiction between means and ends is already palpable. The PTI has been stuffed with dirty “lotas” and traditional, status quo “electables” to bring Imran into office and keep him there by a carrot-and-stick policy. But “Tabdeeli” requires motivated ideologues to sacrifice self-interest and support hard decisions. The current intraparty spat over the CMships of KPK and Balochistan, or the resistance faced by Not-so-Neat-And-Clean Aleem Khan, or the visible power struggle between Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Jehangir Tareen for the coveted CMship of Punjab, is just the tip of the iceberg. The notion of public service or duty – central to the requirement of “Tabdeeli” — is alien to these folks.

The celebratory fireworks on the day Imran Khan is sworn in as Prime Minister will be followed by a different display of fire power. The Miltablishment, which has been tarred in the public imagination by its blunt political intrusions of late, may withdraw behind the curtain and let the “elected” government take responsibility for its actions. That would give the media and judiciary scope to redress their failing credibility by taking the government to task. Indeed, neither pillar of the state can afford to be pro-government for its own sake – the media for its commercial interests and the judiciary for its independence from the executive. This is bound to put several spanners in the works.

As if this isn’t enough, the job of putting the economy on track will provoke howls of protest from the very classes that have voted for Imran Khan. Currency depreciation will fuel inflation. Reduction in budgetary deficits will curtail public expenditures, consumer demand and employment. Plugging the balance of payments gap by curtailing imports and capital transfers will restrict commercial activity (SBP has already banned imports on open account save for essential raw materials). Increasing tax rates will be unpopular. Provincial bureaucracies and politicians will fight tooth and nail over any attempt to reverse the last NFC Award that flushed them with money, no less than any attempt to devolve power and funds to local governments, which are the preferred nurseries of the Miltablishment for nurturing “neat and clean and obedient” politicians.

The Miltablishment will also expect Imran Khan to exploit his “star” status to manage foreign policy productively. But it would be naïve to expect the two key players that impinge on us, India and the US, to overnight repose trust in him so long as he remains a proxy. The problem is that if Khan tries to cut loose from his key benefactor in pursuit of his own vision, he will feel the heat just like Nawaz Sharif did.

Good luck to Imran Khan!

On Imran Khan's Rigged Victory

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Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

Before the elections, every political party (except PTI), every foreign newspaper and every independent journalist had concluded that The Aliens, Khalai Makhluk, Agriculture Department, Miltablishment, Whatever, had conclusively pre-rigged the elections in an unprecedented manner. A day after the elections, every political party (except PTI), every foreign newspaper and every independent journalist has confirmed the finding. Before the elections, the Miltablishment, Supreme Court and Media were on trial. After the elections, the Election Commission of Pakistan has joined them in the dock.

The ECP claims that “the Remote Transmission System (RTS) broke down, hence the announcement of results was delayed by a few hours.” Was the RTS deliberately glitched because the Agriculture Department panicked when the opposition began to weigh in and something had to be done to get things back on track? Even if it was an unforeseen breakdown, this does not explain why the polling agents were kicked out while the votes were being tabulated or why such lengthy delays ensued.

In the next year or so, we should expect scores of petitions to be filed wherever the margin of PTI’s victory is less than 10,000 or thereabouts. Thousands of bags will be opened and hundreds of thousands of ballots recounted and thumbprints matched. Thousands of Form 45 will be scrutinized. But none of this huffing and puffing will bring Imran Khan’s house down because he is protected and propped up by the Miltablishment.

Imran Khan will be Prime Minister, he will choose the next President of Pakistan and the PTI will rule in Islamabad, KP and possibly even in Punjab while mounting stiff opposition to the PPP in Sindh. Why was such a sweeping victory required of it? What should we expect in the new Pakistan?

To be fair, Imran Khan cannot be denied his fair share of the voter, especially among the new youth, urbanising white-collar middle-class and rich. His prospects became brighter after he started to enroll “electables” regardless of the colour of their money or character. Equally, the PMLN, whatever its self-righteous claims or principles, was well and truly on a suicidal path. But electoral engineering on such a large scale was still necessary to provide legitimacy for a constitutional and political overhaul. What’s on the cards?

A State of Emergency could be imposed under the garb of financial necessity pinned to the alleged misdeeds of the previous regimes. The numbers in parliament will not be too difficult to get. Such an Emergency would restrict fundamental rights and pave the way for a witch hunt of political and media opponents in order to satisfy the bloodlust of the winners (IK has said he won’t do that), protect them from any potential buffeting by a disgruntled opposition and detract criticism from unpopular policy decisions or incompetent and corrupt mismanagement. If that happens, we should expect NAB, FIA, FBR and IB to get hyper active after all state institutions are brought on the same page.

The constitution may also be targeted for amendment. The 18th Amendment, for starters, has become irksome because it shaves the federal pool — which is required to pay for increasing defense expenditures and pensions— by devolving financial resources to the provinces. A need may also be felt to reduce the size and strength of Punjab in the scheme of things, especially since the development of a critical fissure in the historical pro-Miltablishment character of the province. Plans remain on the anvil to carve it up into three or more “units” that are politically more “manageable”.

But the “new dream team” that is lining up to run the “new Pakistan” will not find it easy going. The economy needs more than a shot in the arm. Hard times are upon us and the very middle-classes and rich that have catapulted Imran Khan to office will have to pay the price of their convictions. The value of their rupee is going to fall, so their everyday needs will become expensive; they will have to pay more indirect taxes and duties; and IMF structural reforms will dampen infrastructural growth and employment. This will give grist to the opposition, media and judiciary to stand up and create hurdles in his path.

Admittedly, the Miltablishment has stitched up an extraordinary political dispensation in difficult times. But, unlike Nawaz, the person they have chosen to lead it is strong-willed and unpredictable. In fact, Nawaz was eminently pliant. Yet, after a while, he felt compelled, given the nature of power, to try and be his own man. But this was unacceptable and he had to pay the price for even thinking such rash thoughts. Imran Khan, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish. He may have embraced the Miltablishment as a tactical move but sooner rather than later he will begin to challenge the conventional wisdom of the national security state handed down to him. That’s when all bets will be off.

Meanwhile, let us not spoil their honeymoon with grudging digs and pin pricks.