Wednesday, March 16, 2005

EDITORIAL: Public Policy versus Public Good

In Pakistan, public policy and public opinion have never been as divorced from each
other as they are today. Much of the unhappiness among Pakistanis emanates from
this policy “drift” away from what the people at large would like to see happening. At
the intellectual level, discussions are difficult to hold objectively because reflections
of mass dissatisfaction regularly trespass into the discourse. An otherwise “objective”
analyst will allow himself to become derailed because his ear is cocked to what the
“public” feels about the subject he is discussing. The mismatch between what the
government does and what the people want is so great that a new rhetoric of
standing equidistant from policy and public passions has become fashionable among
people who should be rendering useful advice.

Good-governance theories tell us that the state must rule on the basis of a “social
contract”, and the governments elected by the people must deliver what the people
want. But the truth is that not even dictators are free of the burden of bringing to
fruition the dreams of the masses among whom they seek acceptance. If one were to
judge the present government’s policies in the light of this principle then it is doing
everything “wrong”. The people of Pakistan generally hate the United States. They
see that the government has become America’s major ally in foreign policy and is
acting against the interests of the Muslims as “Ummah” and as Pakistanis. This anti-
Americanism may have a variety of leftwing and rightwing origins, but it is
widespread despite President Musharraf’s frequent policy justifications.

Two other foreign policy postures originate from the “American connection”: the
policy on Afghanistan after 9/11 and the policy of normalisation with India. The first
gave the clerical alliance, the MMA, its new vote bank among the Pushtuns as well as
two governments in the Pushtun-dominated provinces. It has also given the two
mainstream parties, the PPPP and the PMLN, their main ammunition against the
government. It is not only the violation of democracy they protest; both decry the
way President Musharraf kowtowed to the diktat of Washington after 9/11. The two
parties may have followed the same course if they had been in government but both
have accused the present government of “lait gayay” (prostration) before the United
States as a way of getting even with General Musharraf for keeping them out of the
political loop. A similar though softer opposition rhetoric exists in the case of
Islamabad’s India policy.

The people’s “cultural” verdict has of course been in favour of President Musharraf’s
policy, but any discussion of issues brings us right back to the “mismatch”. Few
believe that the articulated policy of resolving the bilateral disputes in general and
the Kashmir dispute in particular will succeed the way it is being pursued. Similarly,
there is the “transnational” feeling that the “Ummah” is being constantly violated by
rumours of Pakistan collaborating with the US in punishing Iran after supinely
accepting the way the Americans have destroyed Iraq after Afghanistan.

The mismatch on internal policies is the ricochet effect of foreign policy which
dominates the Pakistani mind and leads to a poor understanding of conditions at
home, especially in the sphere of economics. That the Arab states are siding with the
US offends the Arab public, but that doesn’t matter because there is no democracy
there. In Europe, that fact that after defying the US at the United Nations Security
Council, France went right back with the approval of Germany to give a Security
Council mandate to the American troops in Iraq in 2004, doesn’t bother the
European citizen too much because foreign policy is not normally an electoral issue
there. But in Pakistan a great deal is still tied to foreign policy. The “mismatch” and
the heat it produces can be attributed to the general Third World feeling which the
Pakistani public also shares: that policy should be honour-based and not made
subservient to foreign powers.

But the fact is that in practical politics no policy can be honour-based, otherwise the
weak state would constantly be insulted. The big powers make global policy and the
weaker states adjust to it in such a way that they benefit from it. A lack of supple
response to what happens at the global level may harm the state beyond repair. A
state that listens too carefully to public passions and ignores its own raison d’etat will
come to grief. Indeed, a less than powerful state simply cannot afford to be
internationally isolated through a pursuit of policies popular at home. That is why in
Pakistan, when a series of “sovereign” but isolationist policies were followed for over
a decade, the blowback came with the start of the millennium from its Afghan and
Kashmir policies, and the condition of cooperating with the global consensus aimed
at forcibly ending Pakistan’s isolationism. Can a state endure international isolation?
Yes, if it is powerful like the United States, but even then one can’t rule out some
price the superpower might have to pay for its current globally unpopular actions.
But no, if the state is weak as in Pakistan.

Some tough “conditions” of living in today’s world were always there even though
they were “somewhat” postponed for half a century by the Cold War. Economic
policy belongs in this “condition”. The Pakistani people have never approved of the
“anti-people” economic policies which governments in Islamabad have been
compelled to adopt. Foreign policy actions today are equally unpopular. But going by
the popular consensus will certainly hurt the public interest in the long run. The MMA
slogan of “better a day of living like a lion than a hundred years of living like a
jackal” is simply not helpful. *

EDITORIAL: Public Policy versus Public Good VIEW: A Middle East review—
Munir Attaullah VIEW: Demilitarising US-Pak ties —Ahmad Faruqui
COMMENT: Implications of the demise of UN Kashmir resolutions —Ijaz Hussain
THE WAY IT WAS0: Cows and buckets —Mian Ijaz Ul Hassan DEVELOPING
PAKISTAN:Public sector accountability—Miguel Loureiro LETTERS: ZAHOOR'S
CARTOON: