BANGLADESH AND PAKISTAN— Flirting with Failure in South Asia: William B. Milam

The Hindu, BOOK REVIEW

Dysfunctional governance
First-hand perspective of the inner working of two of the most troubled South Asian states

M.K.Bhadrakumar
BANGLADESH AND PAKISTAN— Flirting with Failure in South Asia: William B. Milam; Hurst, Foundations Books, 4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 895.
Ambassador William B. Milam was just awakening from a slumber during a family reunion in Sacremento when he received a call from his deputy chief of mission in the American embassy in Islamabad. “Pack your bags,” she said, “you have to come back; there has been an Army coup in the last hour.” The date was October 12, 1999.
On July 4, 1977, at the residence of the U.S. Ambassador in Islamabad, at the Independence Day reception, the embassy’s political counsellor asked General Zia ul Haq, the Pakistani Army Chief, if he would be available the next day for a meeting. Zia replied with a straight face that he was completely tied up the next day. He wasn’t bluffing. On July 5, he led the coup d’état ousting Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s civilian government.
Ringside view
The two incidents are worth recounting to underscore how strategic pundits in India often harbour exaggerated notions of the extent of U.S. influence on the Pakistani military. But Milam’s book Bangladesh and Pakistan: Flirting with failure in South Asia is a riveting work for other reasons, too. He had a unique ringside view of South Asian politics having served as the American ambassador in Dacca and Islamabad. His tour of duty in Bangladesh and Pakistan coincided with tumultuous periods in the political history of the two countries—when mass agitations forced General Ershad out of power in 1990 and when democracy gave way to another decade of military rule in Pakistan in 1977.
Most certainly, Milam had enough stuff to author two or three books but he chose an innovative route of attempting an interpretative analysis of Bangladesh and Pakistan, comparing and contrasting the two countries with regard to their chronic political instability characterised by democratic episodes separated by periods of military intervention. He uses several recurring motifs in this fascinating study but what makes the book extremely contemporaneous is its focus on religion—the role and impact of Islam on political, economic and social development. Broadly speaking, Milam believes that the great majority of Muslims in Bangladesh and Pakistan—and indeed in the whole of South Asia—do not accept the larger part of the Islamist retrogressive agenda, and most certainly reject Jihadis “who wish to achieve it by revolutionary, Leninist methods.”
Jihadi culture
Indeed, most South Asian Muslims seek to live in prosperous, democratic, and modern Islamic countries. But he is less sanguine about Pakistan, where Islamist influence has grown steadily since 1972 when “slowly and almost surreptiously”, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto capitulated on making Islam the state religion. Islamisation became institutionalised under Zia and, alas, the process continued even during the elected regimes of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in the 1990s, though for different reasons.
Milam expresses concern over the increasing jihadi culture in Pakistan, with “potentially disastrous unforeseen consequence.” But he does not view in crisis proportions the rapid accretion of Islamist influence in Bangladesh. Though political development followed an almost identical path on the surface in Bangladesh and Pakistan between 1972 and 1990, Milam counts as critical difference such factors as the traditional Bengali tolerance and diversity as well as the attachment to constitutionalism and democracy, and rapid social development. The result is that there is little empirical evidence of the depth or breadth of support for Islamism among people in the rural areas. “It is easy to conclude that, like a thorn in the foot, Islamism is an unnatural addition to the Bangladeshi polity that can be easily removed when governments become more efficient and effective.”
A particularly engrossing part of the book is the comparison that Milam offers apropos the political legacy of the two Zias—Ziaur Rehman and Zia ul Haq—which also underscores the crucial difference in the political economies of the two countries and their future prospects of political evolution. Milam has high praise for Ziaur Rehman’s legacy as a “democratic leader”—his even-handed enforcement of the law, his social and economic development policy, his foreign policy as a pragmatic nationalist, his reintroduction of the multiparty system. “He was that rare apparition—the benign despot.”
Pernicious legacy
But, in sharp contrast, he is unsparing in his criticism of the pernicious legacy of Zia ul Haq—and of General Pervez Musharraf who followed his predecessor’s footsteps. “The tentacles of the army reached deeper and deeper into the fabric of Pakistani society under Zia, and this trend has continued in subsequent governments, and expanded again in the Musharraf regime.” The result is a Praetorian state, which cannot cope with Pakistan’s multiplying troubles. Meantime, the Taliban challenge deepens. “The key is whether the army’s mindset will evolve toward a role that accepts civilian sovereignty.”
In an epilogue to the book on the likely directions of Pakistani politics in the post-Musharraf era, Milam reveals his masterly grasp of the fault lines in Pakistani politics. Surveying the election of Asif Ali Zardari as president, he offers the following prognosis: “A highly unstable coalition at the centre in Islamabad, and a powerful PML-N riding high, if not in actual control, in Punjab is a volatile mixture that probably cannot stand the test of time… Another election may be called, but one wonders whether it would be definitive, or, as in the 1990s, if it would merely usher in a series of elections in which weak and divided governments come to power but cannot make difficult decisions, in part because the politicians always put their interests to the fore.”
The author could foresee that Zardari’s freedom of action would be circumscribed by an “ambiguous relationship with an inscrutable army” as well as political threats from Sharif who, once he consolidated in Punjab, would “wait for the right time to pounce.”
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