Somewhere in the back of western minds, there is the idea of history as progress-progress towards a consensual, democratic model of politics. All around the world, countries seem to be stumbling towards that end: through communism and out the other side in eastern Europe and Russia, through military dictatorship in Latin America, through a variety of autocracies in Asia.
That may be how it looks from the outside. For those of us stuck in the middle of this process, it is not so clear in what direction things are, or should be, going.
Here in Pakistan, people did not know what to think when President Farrooq Leghari booted out Benazir Bhutto's government and ordered fresh elections for 3rd February. There was general relief that a government regarded as the most corrupt in the country's history had gone. But there was also frustration because people assumed that another round of elections would return the same old faces.
There have been three elections since 1988 when General Zia ul Haq died in an unexplained air crash. Each democratically elected government has lasted a couple of months longer than its predecessor. But each has been more wayward and corrupt than the last. The current caretaker finance minister, Shahid Javed Burki, on leave of absence from the World Bank, estimates that nearly $12 billion, or about 25 per cent of annual GDP was siphoned off during Bhutto's tenure. He says that the country is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Reserves fell to one week's import bill last November and international donors refused to lend any more money to the Bhutto regime. Can the country afford such a stiff bill for democracy?
Those who are prepared to think, rather than to despair, see two ways out. The first is to try to make democracy work better; the second is to try something a little different.
On the first approach, the principal problem with the system is, it is agreed, corruption. Members of the government seem to regard it as their right to stash away as much cash as possible. During Bhutto's tenure, we began to compare the country to the Philippines of the Marcos era.
Pakistanis speculate at length about why corruption has become so serious: maybe it is an inevitable stage on the long road to that shining goal, clean, reliable democracy; maybe it proves that our society, which operates through personal connections, not through rules and institutions, is quite unsuited to that model. Still, we can at least try to do something about it. The interim government should have made it its prime objective to show the powerful that corruption will be punished.
That was, indeed, the public's main hope of Leghari. They thought that he would launch a crusade against corruption and make heads roll before ordering elections. But no such thing has happened. Indeed, most of the old crooks have been allowed to contest the election. Leghari says that if he had introduced some real accountability, he would have provoked a boycott of the elections by the two major parties. Inexplicably, however, he has spurned the idea of holding a referendum to determine what the public really wants-accountability or elections.
Leghari has opted instead for the second way out-try something a little different. He has set up an advisory body, the Council for Defence and National Security (CDNS), to keep wayward prime ministers in check. The CDNS will comprise the president, the prime minister, the foreign minister, the defence minister, the finance minister, the three chiefs of the armed forces and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee.
The philosophy behind this body is simple enough. At present, the president has the constitutional power to dismiss an elected government for large scale misdemeanours. But this has failed to deliver results because each dismissed government has been replaced by a yet more irresponsible one. By restricting the power of the elected government, the president hopes to prevent problems from erupting into full-blown crises.
Some civilians are upset at the prospect of sharing power with the armed forces, even in an advisory capacity. Others say that the western democratic model has failed in Pakistan, and that we must look to the experience of other parts of the world to see what works. This model of power sharing with the military has been used in Turkey and Indonesia. Many argue, plausibly, that those countries, which have chosen a middle road between military rule and democracy, have been governed more successfully than Pakistan, which since it was created 50 years ago has shuttled chaotically between the two. This argument appeals to the growing Islamist camp, which is suspicious of anything from the west.
Those of us who believe in democracy find the idea of retreating from it worrying. Yet many of us also feel that our country is close to degenerating into anarchy. We desperately need a period of calm and order; and maybe if we take a few steps back from democracy we may find a comfortable place to settle down.
