Pakistan has, once again, descended into chaos. The past decade has seen the country struggle with disruptive street politics, a collapsing economy and the growing distrust of its patrons in Beijing and Washington. Now, with the detention of its most popular politician, it is hard to see how it will recover stability for another 10 years at least.
In any other country, former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan’s arrest last week would have been considered the most dramatic event of the decade. Khan, who had successfully evaded a similar fate earlier this year, turned up at court to answer some corruption allegations. Paramilitary forces broke a window to get to him and take him into custody — for a whole other set of corruption allegations.
All this is happening amid renewed concerns over the sustainability of the nation’s sovereign debt. Moody’s Investors Service on Monday last week said that Pakistan could default without an IMF bailout and added that its financing options beyond next month were uncertain.
Yet there is little attention to spare in Pakistan for its financial peril. All eyes are on Khan instead, who was handed over to the country’s anti-corruption tribunal, the National Accountability Bureau, before being released by the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the army has been deployed after riots erupted across the nation. We do not know how bad they are, because the Internet has also been shut down in much of the country. We do know that police cars and stations, a Radio Pakistan office and Lahore’s bus system — associated in the public mind with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who took credit for expanding it — were targets of arson.
However, so were a model Pakistan Air Force jet, army installations in the garrison city of Rawalpindi and even the house of the senior military officer in Lahore once owned by Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah. There is no doubt in the protesters’ minds of who is to blame for Khan’s arrest: Pakistan’s military, which has run the country openly and from the shadows for most of its independent history.
We do not know the truth of the many corruption allegations against Khan. The one he was arrested for involves Pakistan’s largest construction magnate, who was supposed to hand over ￡190 million (US$237.22 million) to the treasury, but was allowed to use it to pay down his tax debt instead. The government has accused Khan of receiving “donations” for one of his university projects as a payoff.
However, unfortunately, the facts of this or other cases do not matter. Khan’s supporters will argue that his troubles are all because the military wants him out. That is undeniably true.
However, it is equally undeniable that the military wanted him in first. Khan’s two decades in the political wilderness only ended when the army put its massive thumb on the electoral scales in 2018, jailing and intimidating Khan’s opponents, and ushering him into the prime minister’s office.
That it is the National Accountability Bureau being used against Khan is particularly telling, since it was originally set up by former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to “put the fear of God” into Pakistan’s political elite. It was, most recently, used to go after the military’s previous public enemy No. 1, former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif, as well as his brother, Shehbaz Sharif. The military succeeded in pushing Nawaz Sharif out of politics to get Khan in; and now it has made peace with his brother, to push Khan out. They have used the bureau, the media and even judges to keep Pakistan’s politicians under control.
Today’s army chiefs have learned from Musharraf’s failures. He launched a coup against Nawaz Sharif in 1999, only to lose power a decade later and end up being prosecuted himself, eventually dying in exile in Dubai in February. As a consequence, the army has replaced direct rule with subservient institutions as a method of control. Military power in the 21st century is not about coups, but about ensuring that the various organs of the establishment, from courts to the media to the public sector, do your bidding.
Pakistan’s institutions were never that strong anyway; the military was, famously, the only thing in the country that worked. Now that it has turned every other institution to its service, it is not surprising that many Pakistanis have no time for normal democratic norms and want a populist ruler instead. Khan would dearly like to be that populist ruler. Would you prefer a civilian authoritarian or a military that rules through subversion of the public sphere? Those seem to be the only two options on offer for Pakistan today.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
In an article published in Newsweek on Monday last week, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged China to retake territories it lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. “If it is really for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t China take back Russia?” Lai asked, referring to territories lost in 1858 and 1860. The territories once made up the two flanks of northern Manchuria. Once ceded to Russia, they became part of the Russian far east. Claims since then have been made that China and Russia settled the disputes in the 1990s through the 2000s and that “China
Trips to the Kenting Peninsula in Pingtung County have dredged up a lot of public debate and furor, with many complaints about how expensive and unreasonable lodging is. Some people even call it a tourist “butchering ground.” Many local business owners stake claims to beach areas by setting up parasols and driving away people who do not rent them. The managing authority for the area — Kenting National Park — has long ignored the issue. Ultimately, this has affected the willingness of domestic travelers to go there, causing tourist numbers to plummet. In 2008, Taiwan opened the door to Chinese tourists and in
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Thursday was handcuffed and escorted by police to the Taipei Detention Center, after the Taipei District Court ordered that he be detained and held incommunicado for suspected corruption during his tenure as Taipei mayor. The ruling reversed an earlier decision by the same court on Monday last week that ordered Ko’s release without bail. That decision was appealed by prosecutors on Wednesday, leading the High Court to conclude that Ko had been “actively involved” in the alleged corruption and it ordered the district court to hold a second detention hearing. Video clips
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) arrest is a significant development. He could have become president or vice president on a shared TPP-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) ticket and could have stood again in 2028. If he is found guilty, there would be little chance of that, but what of his party? What about the third force in Taiwanese politics? What does this mean for the disenfranchised young people who he attracted, and what does it mean for his ambitious and ideologically fickle right-hand man, TPP caucus leader Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌)? Ko and Huang have been appealing to that
RSS