The recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, striking down a previous agreement that granted immunity from prosecution for corruption to thousands of bureaucrats and politicians, was greeted with cheers by Pakistanis, both in the streets of Karachi and amongst the diaspora in London, but with discomfort in the West.
More astute analysts, however, are concerned that the Supreme Court ruling doesn’t herald a step forward, but rather a descent back into the tussle of recriminations and accusations that have long characterized Pakistani politics. Worse, it threatens to distract national attention from far more pressing problems.
The court struck down the National Reconciliation Order (NRO) that was passed in 2007 under Western-backed President Musharraf and was billed at the time as a step towards restoring Pakistan to multiparty democracy. Although political players of all parties benefited from the deal, observers saw it largely as a compromise aimed at enabling the return to Pakistan of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Pakistan’s current president, Asif Ali Zardari.
After Mrs. Bhutto was assassinated in December 2007, a wave of sympathy for her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) helped Zardari take over de facto leadership of the PPP and the presidency of the country in quick succession. But Zardari hardly enjoyed a honeymoon with voters or, for that matter, even his own party leadership. Lacking what some would term the demagogic charisma of his late wife or father-in-law, Zardari was hardly Obama-esque.
His reputation as Mr. Ten Percent—earned by his penchant for demanding bribes while serving as his wife’s minister for investment and minister for the environment in the mid-1990s—won him many enemies and, along with his appointments of cronies to top government and party posts, grated on members of the PPP itself.
Upon taking office, Zardari’s reluctance to restore the popular and respected ousted Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry—widely seen as a last-ditch attempt to avoid prosecution for corruption—further eroded what little support he did enjoy. Only after mass, nation-wide protests did Zardari eventually relent and agree to the restoration of the chief justice to his office.
The repeal of the NRO, then, comes as a long-awaited victory for many sections of Pakistani society, from secular middle-class civil society activists to mullahs fed up with Zardari’s poor record and aggravated by his repeated evasion of corruption charges.
The concern, however, is that on a deeper level, the hoopla over the NRO shows just how much Pakistan’s political life is stagnating.
For decades, politics in Pakistan has revolved around personality rather than policy, with accusations of corruption as the weapon of choice. Throughout the 1990s, the ouster of one government after another was abetted by the accusations of opposition parties, and the equally cynical use of “accountability” courts and investigations against former government officials among the opposition. The military’s considerably longer record of rule also bears the hallmark of witch-hunts for corrupt officials.
Paraphrasing Marx, corruption is the opiate of Pakistan’s masses.
Pakistan’s remarkably free media establishment only feeds the national obsession with corruption. GEO, Pakistan’s most popular independent TV network, has been reporting almost exclusively on the NRO story since it broke, and even on the far too few “normal” news days, corruption themes dominate many of the on-air discussions and satires.
The myopic nature of the national obsession with corruption is, of course, absurd. While one man’s brazen plundering of a poor country’s coffers (Zardari’s wealth has been estimated as high as $1.5 billion) offends sensibilities, as a practical matter, the daily, grass-roots corruption at the level of ordinary private citizens in the form of tax evasion and other such acts is just as much of a problem.
With suicide bombings now a regular occurrence in Pakistan’s major cities, an economy in permanent crisis mode, and a population that, incredibly, falls even further into poverty with each passing year, Pakistan’s national obsession with corruption comes at its own peril.
Until there is a shift in discourse—and national attention—away from corruption witch-hunts and other sensational issues toward more substantive and pressing matters, it is unclear how Pakistan will emerge from the permanent crisis mode it has been living in for decades.
Ironically, the war against terror, poverty, and Pakistan’s other ills will not be won exclusively on the battlefields of Waziristan or in anti-corruption courtrooms, but in serious discussions about policy. Existing political parties bear some responsibility for the failure to debate policy proposals—as does the much-praised independent media, which only fans the nation’s obsession with corruption.
However, there are a few political players who have shown a remarkable ability and willingness to look beyond the politics-as-corruption-witch-hunt: the Islamists. The question now is whether the mainstream political parties will rise to this challenge.
The future of Pakistan hangs in the balance.
Hassan Malik is a PhD candidate in international history at Harvard University and previously worked in investment banking for J.P. Morgan and Troika Dialog in New York and Moscow after graduating from the University of Chicago. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, he has lived in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, Malaysia, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.