As the title of this post suggests, The Idea of Pakistan is intended primarily as a guide to the political, social, and economic makeup of the country, its major political actors (the military, the Establishment, the Islamists), and the future trends and issues that the Pakistani and American leadership confront when making policy. Each of these topics are capable of sustaining multiple books of their own (and have), but Cohen's ability to provide a comprehensive briefing on each subject makes this a valuable introductory resource for readers new to the country. Since this information is presented categorically rather than chronologically, it can be at times difficult to hold all the factors operating at a particular point in time in your mind when reading on a different section, but Cohen compensates for this fairly well by starting off the book with an account of Pakistan's history from the struggles of Partition and the founding of the state to the coup that installed Pervez Musharraf in 1999, then going deeper in the subsequent chapters.
A well-balanced book (hey, this is the Brookings Institute we're talking about here), Cohen offers what are in my view key assessments on the following subjects (not, it should be noted, an exhaustive list):
Politics in Pakistan
- Pakistan has historically been ruled by a small and informal Establishment oligarchy of senior military, civil service, judiciary, and social elites. They are united by their determination to perpetuate their exlcusive leadership, their view that Pakistan must defend itself militarily against an Indian threat, their disinterest in meaningful representative democracy, and their general disdain for Islamic fundamentalism as anything other than a useful mobilizing tool.
- Regular Army intervention has seriously distorted and hampered the development of any democratic institutions and has left Pakistan with a severe shortage of qualified politicians with the experience necessary for effective governance of the country. Political parties are highly personalistic, split and reform with high frequency, and subject to regular manipulation by the military. Politicians are viewed (with some good reason) as ineffective, corrupt, and incapable of defending Pakistan, and when the Army feels its perogatives are not being sufficiently respected, it intervenes and throws out the government, despite an equal absence of governing ability within the ranks of the junta. There is a high level of institutional cohesion within the military establishment and little chance that it will cede real power to politicians or other forces in society any time soon.
Division and separatism
- Punjab is the dominant province and its people the most populous and powerful ethnic group within Pakistan, a fact which provokes considerable resentment amongst other provinces and groups. Separatist sentiments are particularly prevalent in the NWFP and Baluchistan, and Sindhis nurse grievances against the Mohajir and Punjabi populations encroaching on their province. This article by Professor Haqqani (who was a member of the Jamaat Islami student movement in his youth, who knew?) offers another look at divisions within Pakistan, describing many of the same phenomena that Cohen reports.
- A new system implemented by Musharraf to empower local-level individual administrators — the "Nazims" — through the direct allocation of funds from the central authorities is intended to weaken the autonomy of the provinces by skipping over that level of government, with the added benefit of stifling the growth of local political parties. It has enjoyed considerable success, giving nazims considerable free rein but also keeping them firmly dependent on the central government — the system is also a big source of corruption.
Islam
- Islam and Pakistan's identity as a state initially founded for British India's minority Muslim population has created a profound debate over the extent to which Pakistan should be an Islamic (ruled in according to sharia law) versus simply a Muslim society. An Islamist takeover of Pakistan, while not something to be wholly discounted in the long-term, is unlikely in the immediate near-term future. The MMA coalition of Islamist parties' electoral victories in the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan was primarily a reaction to rising anti-Americanism on the part of the Pashtuns, and while alarming for the prospect it raises of the marriage between ethnic separatist movements and political Islam, does not represent a broad enough base of popular support for the Islamist program to challenge the more "secular" mainstream on the national level. The MMA and the Islamists, Cohen argues, are in fact being used as a "King's Party" by the military and its ISI to prop up Musharraf's rule, marginalizing mainstream parties which are viewed as much more threatening. It's worth cautioning, however, as Cohen does, that despite the Army's complacency there is potential for blowback here. (Cohen has much more to say in particular on the subject of Islam throughout the book than I summarize here; my notes on the earlier portions of the book were way too skimpy.)
Education
- Pakistan is well into its second decade of serious, wide-scale educational collapse. The "professors and poets" that President Zia ul-Haq saw as contemptuous and threatening to his rule are now nearly extinct. The atrophying of Pakistan's educational system has had a profoundly negative impact on its social capital and is matched by a similar decline in other health and welfare services. While the privileged children of the Pakistani Establishment can still find some form of quality education in private English-language schools, the public schooling system is seriously underfunded, its teachers untrained, corrupt, or incompetent, and the madrassa (plural: madaris, but that's the first time I've ever actually seen anyone use that) is often the only chance for the rural poor to obtain schooling for their children. Madrassa graduates are untrained in science, economics, or any of the skills necessary to function in modern society, and the explosion of surplus seminary graduates means there is now a sizeable chunk of society with a vested interest in the Islamization of Pakistani politics and society, since they generally have few other relevant skills outside rote memorization of the Quran.
- Primary and secondary education within Pakistan is especially bad, and its university system is not much better. (If you didn't catch them earlier via Sepoy, see these two op-eds in Dawn by Pervez Hoodbhoy for an indictment of tertiary education as it currently stands in the country, and a few recommendations for meaningful reform). Although India in its early years suffered from a similar lack of attention to basic primary education, provincial-level governments did devote resources to it, and at the national level the focus on building up strong universities left the country and its many graduates well poised to compete in the global market. Pakistan has enjoyed no similar success. There are just over 100,000 college and university students in Pakistan, in contrast to Iran's 700,000 (in a country with half Pakistan's population). Even Bangladesh manages over 878,000 students enrolled.
- There is no important political constituency in Pakistan with a vested interest in improving public education. The Army lacks the strategic imagination to appreciate the value of an educated populace (its own system for the training of military cadres and technocrats is enough for its purposes), and the political Establishment has no ambition to extend its privileges to the general public. Less than 25% of Pakistan's workforce is literate, with obvious negative implications for its ability to add value to goods that might be produced for export.
- NGOs and foreign sources are already heavily present in maintained what remains of Pakistan's education system — 76% of its budget comes from outside aid. Although the temptation for Westerners observing the madari phenomenon is frequently to demand "reforms" and the reining in of militant Islamist teachers (as Ashley Tellis does in this Washington Quarterly piece [pdf]), Cohen argues that such efforts are misguided.
As one Pakistani official who has studied the madaris noted, "If you give them access to the Internet, they'll only surf the radical websites." The strategy should be to support the kind of education that will contribute to a broader view of the world and prepare graduates for real-world employment. As for the mullahs, again the strategy ... should be to strengthen the moderates and the state system of education, not to "go after [the Islamists] hard, which would only make them martyrs."
Professor Haqqani has made similar arguments on the resiliency of the madrassas in class previously, and does so in his article on the madrassas from Foreign Policy 2002, reproduced here, as well.
American policies
- The Islamist presence in Pakistan offers Musharaff and other Establishment oligarchs their primary bargaining chip with the West (protraying themselves as the only thing standing against the Talibanization of Pakistan, and the only ones capable of tracking down Al Qaeda), which means warnings from Pakistan about the risk of collapse in the face of Islamists should be taken with some grain of salt — particularly when those warnings are being used as an excuse to delay meaningful reform. Pakistan's strategy, as Cohen evocatively describes it, is that of a man "negotiating with a gun to his own head", and Americans should be cautious. Musharraf's value under the TINA argument — "There Is No Alternative" — should not be overstated.
- American policies towards Pakistan have frequently been characterized by cycles of short-term engagement and withdrawal, with little heed to the long-term systemic problems that plague the country. The Pakistan Establishment and the military have taken a similar attitude towards the development of the country's economic and social capital, preferring to focus on an existential security threat from India, as manifested particularly in the region of Kashmir. The future is now here on a lot of these issues, and American engagement post 9-11 should not be limited solely to issues of terrorism and nuclear proliferation (as obviously as important as those two areas are for US-Pakistani relations).
Cohen concludes the book with a number of projected possible futures for Pakistan and a more in-depth survey of potential American policy options than I've mentioned here in this post. As a summary briefing on Pakistan and its many problems, it was a very good resource, and I'd recommend it highly to anyone interested in the subject.