N SATHIYA MOORTHY
Commentator, India
For years if not decades now, some Indian analysts have dubbed neighbouring Pakistan as a ‘failed state’ or a ‘fragile state’. It owes mostly to their prejudices, which stood exposed sooner, and they too have stopped using the pejorative / adjective as frequently as earlier. In comparison, western analysts and scholars have been more circumspect in the matter, their views influenced both by academic discourses in the matter and also the given-day’s perception of their governments, based on Pakistan’s geo-strategic utility to them and their allies over the immediate term.
An academic definition of a ‘failed State’ — and there are many with minor alterations – is of a nation that has ‘dis-integrated to a point where basic conditions and responsibilities of a sovereign government no longer function properly’. A State can also fail ‘if the government loses its legitimacy even if it is performing its functions properly’.
Accordingly, a failed State is defined by the ‘loss of control of its territory or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force’. It can become one if there is ‘erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions’ or ‘inability to provide public services’ or ‘inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community’.
Needless to point out, these are western definitions, and are wide enough to provide for various possibilities so as to tag their various adversaries accordingly at the time of their choosing. Or, so it seems. Yet, no nation has been declared a ‘failed State’ by any other, implying that all those conditions, or at least a majority of them, need to be met for a nation to be declared a ‘failed State’.
No covenant
It is also unclear if the UN or any other body could declare a nation as a ‘failed State’, as there is no international convention or such other covenant, for fixing the authority and responsibility for such branding. There is hence no set procedure for anyone to tick off boxes in a detailed questionnaire to arrive at a conclusion, whether convincing or otherwise.
With the result, the branding of a nation or a people as a ‘failed State’ is a geo-political and geo-strategic attempt to run down a fellow-nation in the comity, without having to defend the decision. For, even an academic attempt of the kind would require to flow from a process where academic rigour counts the most – at times, more than the facts on the ground that could be touched, felt and also perceived.
Thus, over the past several years, the international media and strategic analysts writing for them have dubbed Somalia a ‘failed State’, from time to time. Much of it recur whenever there is a dramatic spike in the Indian Ocean piracy attributed to pirates, supposedly based in Somalia or belonging to Somalia. Both are often one and the same.
At the same time, when Yugoslavia, an artificial creation after the Second World War, threatened to break up, and whatever remained the ‘central authority’ tried to stop it through military means, its leaders were tried by the International Court of Criminal Justice (ICCJ). It thus became clear that a nation-State should attempt to stop or stall disintegration only at the risk of losing out on all fronts and grounds, if someone more powerful – and they always are – choses to do so.
Such discrepancies galore. Those instances would roll out of the closet if there is a comprehensive study of ‘failed States’ on the one hand, and States that are all but dead but remain in the reckoning as a full-fledged nation-State only because no one had tagged or branded it as such, for narrow political reasons.
Thus, Afghanistan under ‘foreign occupation’ with a puppet government, whose authority did not cross capital Kabul, escaped the branding whereas the native Taliban rule that is ‘all pervasive’ (!) risks such a tag. Both, however, are for good reasons, if one looks beyond it as more than an academic exercise.
How to name it
There is once again the 21st century western norm of ‘my failed State and your failed State’ just as they have devised ‘my terrorist and your terrorist’, to fix a nation. By such an approach, Pakistan, because it lost sovereignty over its eastern wing with the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, is typically a ‘failed State’. Yet, the residual areas, which used to be the western wing and still constitute Pakistan as a nation-State, are alive and active. How does someone name it – failed, failing, or neither?
Yet, there is the question of the central authority not doing enough or not having enough to offer all the existing services to its population, even if not enhance them in quality and quantity. Pakistan today does not have fuel to electrify homes that had got used to the services. For the same reason, the nation’s Railways has come to a grinding halt, according to news reports. There are such other shortages, where fuel is the main ingredient, in manufacturing and services sectors.
The government is also reported to have sold properties in the US, not that the realised amount would have gone to meet a year’s national budget or fuel imports. Does it all make Pakistan a ‘failed State’ just now?
Flowing from this construct is a real-life situation when such problems fade away, possibly over the short, medium or long terms. Again, it is theoretical: Will the tag be then removed? If so, who will remove it, and how? Is it just as it was conferred the title, by some faceless persons sitting in cubby-holes of newsrooms or analysts’ desks? Or, who are they?
Following ‘illegal orders’
The reasons are not far to seek. In another South Asian nation, Sri Lanka, the year 2022 witnessed shortages of every kind, in everything, and people were denied train and bus services, food and medicines, owing to fuel shortage. Of course, this became a reality owing to a shortage of American dollars that nations other than the US have to earn while the latter had to only print. An unfair system, yes, a system that continues to rule the world.
What more, in Sri Lanka, there were nation-wide mass protests that forced the exit of the government of the day. Fearing for personal safety, President Gotabaya Rajapksa first fled the country and then quit, formally, officially.
Lately, there are unsubstantiated accusations that the top brass of the nation’s armed forces might have colluded with ‘external players’, nations and their intelligence agencies, to extend silent support to the protestors. At least, there is some evidence that the leadership of the armed forces might not have passed on instructions from the President, who was/is the supreme commander, down the line, to settle the situation before it went out of hand.
The question would still have arisen, both legally and morally, if the armed forces should have followed ‘illegal orders’ that also purportedly violated international human rights norms and conventions, whose colours again keep changing, depending on the target-nation and the targeted leadership. Anyway, in the end, despite ticking off most boxes, Sri Lanka was never considered a failed or failing State anytime during the mass protests or thereafter.
Responsibility to Protect
It was not the case with some other nations, where the UN’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) dictum was employed to ensure international intervention of one kind or the other. Long before the UN adopted the dictum and the spirit and conditions that went with it, India had employed the R2P in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, but to different outcomes.
Pakistan has escaped international odium, though at the height of the 20-year-long, failed American military presence in neighbouring Afghanistan, the US Air
Force bombed many Pakistani areas, purportedly targeting terrorists belonging to Al Qaeda and Taliban. The precision-targeting of Osama bin-Laden in Abbottabad is well documented to be repeated in detail.
In the immediate South Asian context and neighbourhood, every other nation other than India, seems ready to be tagged a ‘failed State’ as per western academic definitions, now or a lil’ later, for reasons that could be attributed with retrospective effect. Apart from Afghanistan, Myanmar is one nation that may have been branded as a ‘failed State’, very long ago and very many times over the past decades, and at least once since the military coup of 2020.
Yet, they all have a central authority with which the international community has contacts and contracts, from whichever part of the world they come from and whatever be their ideological moorings. Hence, a central authority, whose writ runs substantially if not wholly, may be the defining clause. Pakistan has nothing to fear in context, as despite one too many mass protests and long marches, both sponsored and spearheaded by the political Opposition of the day, over the past decades, the central authority has remained.
Did ‘democratisation’ and smooth power-transfer help, unlike when the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto rigged the 1977 elections – and paid for it with his authority first and later life, when the armed forces under Gen Zia-ul-Haq found him too inconvenient and too ambitious at the same time? Is it also why, despite the current political uncertainty bordering on inevitable calamity, the armed forces are not sticking their necks out, beyond a point? Definitely, they do not want to have the resources to clean up the economic mess, and would want the politicos to take the full blame for it, and step in, if they still have to.
Deep State syndrome
Yet, none of it justifies Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism against India, which has now become seasonal rather than being all-weather, but it still remains. Also, as is often said, while other nations have armed forces, in Pakistan, the armed forces have a nation. Ask every democratically-elected Prime Minister of the nation who has been deposed – again, democratically (!) — they would say how the army played foul.
The latest to join the list is Imran Khan, who did not have to say much against the armed forces when he became Prime Minister or was enjoying his honeymoon with them – more than with his voters. That is only one side of the story.
Looking from outside, especially from the neighbourhood Indian perspective, the question is slightly modified: Does the army in Pakistan own the ISI or is it the other way round? Yes, prima facie, the former is the truth, but the Pakistani ‘Deep State’ has characteristics that put the ISI as an institution on the top of the conventional armed forces.
After a point, the distinctions disappear, or at times stand out, as the case maybe. Thus, nations like the US seem to believe that Pakistan’s armed forces, through the incumbent chief of staff of the army, control politics and political administration. They have no hesitation talking to the generals over the head of the popular government, in Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Washington or elsewhere, as the case may be.
Greater bother
For India, the ISI is a greater bother as on the conventional war-front, Pindi too seems to have acknowledged the superior fire-power and past victories of their Indian counterparts. That also supports the argument that the Pakistani armed forces control and use the ISI to target India through cross-border terrorism and support for ‘separatist militant terrorists’ inside India.
New Delhi however has refused to yield to suggestions that it should engage the Pakistani generals, either through its army top-brass or diplomatic corps based in Islamabad. On that score, as with India’s overall China policy, there is a kind of consistency in the Indian approach, independent of parties, purported ideologies or leaderships at power in Delhi.
Just now, Pakistan is caught between the economic crisis, where the Chinese friend has been hesitant in bailing out the country beyond all red-lines, and the emerging problems with the Taliban. Recently, an Afghan Minister tweeted a vintage picture of the Pakistan army’s surrender in the Bangladesh War as if to mock the Islamabad-Rawalpindi combo, in response to a threat to target them for terrorist incidents in Pakistan.
Where India is not there
That is where the West wants Pakistan to be vis a vis Afghanistan, and that is where Pakistan has to be seen being in, if Islamabad has to get economic aid from the West and the West-controlled international financial institutions. The reception that Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto received in Washington and Berlin late last year, especially the former, should be indicative of what was in store.
Suffice is to point out that through the past decades until the US decided to withdraw from the Afghan theatre, and executed it some time later, successive American Presidents had underwritten Pakistan’s wayward expenses, and told Congress that the huge spending was all required to secure their own homeland, and/or to serve America’s geo-strategic interest in the region, viz an expansionist China. Though Zia did dub President Jimmy Carter’s aid offer as ‘peanuts’ and got caught in live-microphones.
India is not in the game, yes, but that could also mean that New Delhi might soon see a slow-paced US approach to its complaints against Pakistan on terrorism front, in furtherance of the larger all-American ‘supreme national self-interest’, now and later. Which also means that no one is going to declare that Pakistan is a ‘failed State’, whatever the reason and whatever the ground condition(s).