The current turmoil is unprecedented, but its roots lie in the country’s founding ideology.The conflict between Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan and the Army seems to have come to a head after building for more than a year. On Tuesday, a throng of black-helmeted paramilitary forces arrested the 70-year-old Mr. Khan on corruption charges, setting off dramatic protests that threaten to destabilize the nuclear-armed nation of 230 million. On Thursday the Supreme Court declared Mr. Khan’s arrest unlawful but said he should remain for now at a police guest house under court supervision. It’s still unclear whether Mr. Khan will walk free, but this week’s events have already triggered unprecedented turmoil in Pakistan. On Tuesday, for the first time in the country’s history, civilian protesters breached the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi. In Lahore, pro-Khan mobs looted the official residence of the powerful army corps commander. In Peshawar, rioters attacked the provincial assembly and set fire to the regional headquarters of Radio Pakistan, the state broadcaster. At least eight people have died in clashes between protesters and authorities. Mr. Khan’s supporters have also rallied in London, New York and Toronto to demand his release. So far, neither the coalition government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif nor the army—which is widely believed to be calling the shots—shows any signs of yielding. On Wednesday police arrested senior members of Mr. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party. Authorities have severely restricted access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, robbing the PTI of its most effective means of communication and mobilization. The immediate question is obvious: Will the army, which has dominated the country’s politics for most of its history, succeed in squelching Mr. Khan’s determined bid to regain power? The former prime minister, a charismatic populist with a large following, has so far refused to bend under pressure. The repercussions of their contest will dominate Pakistan’s domestic politics and influence its relations with, among others, the U.S., the Gulf countries and India. Ideally, the crisis would force Pakistan to correct its broader self-destructive trajectory. Though this week’s chaos puts a particularly fine point on it, the country has long struggled with the lethal combination of a stagnating economy, rising religious fundamentalism and an outsize military that it can’t afford. Though Pakistan is only the world’s 42nd-largest economy, it boasts the sixth-largest military. The country won’t be able to pull itself back from the brink unless its leaders question the ideas that brought it to its current calamity. There’s a template of sorts in Bangladesh, which broke away from Pakistan in 1971 to become an independent nation. Once derided by Henry Kissinger as a “basket case,” over the past two decades Bangladesh has quietly proven naysayers wrong. It has emerged as one of the world’s largest garment exporters, developed close economic and diplomatic relations with India, and firmly subordinated its army to civilian power. In 1999 Bangladesh had a per capita income of about $400, slightly lower than Pakistan’s ($420). By 2021, Bangladesh’s per capita income of $2,460 was more than 60% higher than Pakistan’s. Nearly three-quarters of Bangladeshi women are literate, compared with less than half of Pakistani women. Manufacturing—an important measure of a poor country’s ability to boost productivity by moving workers from farms to factories—accounts for 21% of Bangladesh’s economy compared with only 12% in Pakistan. Bangladesh’s foreign-exchange reserves of about $30 billion are almost seven times as large as Pakistan’s.
That Pakistan lags behind what was once the poorer half of the country speaks to more than a failure of specific policies. The big difference is how each country conceives of itself. Pakistan’s problems go back to a founding ideology rooted in arguments used to carve a Muslim-majority homeland from British India, argues former Pakistani ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani in his 2018 book, “Reimagining Pakistan.” The country “decided to base itself as an independent state on the same grounds that it had sought its creation,” he writes. “Islamic nationalism, pan Islamism and competing with ‘Hindu India’ superseded” a more pragmatic approach that embraced “the ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences” of Pakistanis while also pursuing their material interests.
In Mr. Haqqani’s telling, Pakistan has clung to a counterproductive ideology, championed most fiercely by the military, that includes “militarism, radical Islamist ideology, perennial conflict with India, dependence on external support, and refusal to recognize ethnic identities and religious pluralism.” Mr. Khan’s confrontation with the army may have set off the current conflagration, but the roots lie in a worldview that prevents Pakistani leaders from pursuing more-practical policies such as economic modernization and peace with India.
Mr. Khan’s supporters see his beef with army Chief Gen. Asim Munir as proof that Mr. Khan is the only politician capable of pressing a reset button on Pakistan. But if you examine his record and rhetoric, the opposite picture emerges. Mr. Khan represents a curious blend of traditional Pakistani pan-Islamism with Oxbridge leftist anti-Americanism. He may portray himself as a revolutionary figure, but in a deeper sense he embodies the dying gasps of the old order. It will fall on either a different civilian leader or a more enlightened military leadership to alter the country’s course.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/imran-khan-the-army-and-pakistans-perennial-crisis-tehreek-e-insaaf-imran-khan-shehbaz-sharif-fa368a18
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