L'enfer, c'est les Australiens

Australia's foreign minister Steven Smith is very concerned about recent events in Pakistan, in particular the attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team.

"This was very much an existentialist threat to Pakistan itself," commented Mr Smith.

The Pakistani authorities are reportedly on the lookout for gitanes and gauloises being smuggled in to the country's beret-wearing maniacs.

Hat-tip

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Pakistan and semi-presidentialism

Pakistan's constitutional setup is somewhat interesting. Executive power lies with a prime minister who is responsible to a parliament, but the country also boasts a powerful presidency. The president can sack the prime minister and call elections, and is also head of the country's armed forces. Crucially, perhaps, it is not the prime minister but the president who controls Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

The Pakistani president is not directly elected. Rather, it is the country's parliament who elect the president. This makes Pakistan a bit of a taxonomical anomaly. It is not semi-presidential, because every definition of semi-presidentialism requires the president to be popularly elected. But it seems problematic to think of the country as a parliamentary system, given the power over parliament exercised by the president*. And while the powers of Pakistan's appointed president are perhaps unusually high, the country is not unique in having an unelected president who is a serious player in the country's politics. Off the top of my head, the Czech Republic, Israel, and (to an extent) Italy spring to mind as countries where the president is appointed by parliament but plays more than a purely ceremonial part in national politics.

Definitions of semi-presidentialism focus on the direct election of the president**. This leads to the lumping together of countries with powerful activist presidents and ones where the president has a purely symbolic role. This is not necessarily that problematic, as you can then go on to ask interesting questions about why one directly elected president is powerless while another is the centre of their country's politics. But maybe in another way it misses something. Power is surely the currency of politics, and what makes semi-presidential systems interesting is the (real or potential) presence of two loci of power. By focusing on how presidents are appointed, semi-presidentialists look at one type of dual-executive set-up but ignore others. This does seem problematic, as you can end up analytically separating political systems that end up closely resembling each other.

If I was in the business of further academic research, one thing I would consider looking at would be some kind of comparison of presidents in countries where they are elected and countries where they are appointed by parliament. One thing I have picked up is that there has been relatively little academic research on appointed presidencies, even where these are players in their countries' politics, and this strikes me as an obvious gap that needs filling.


*this is aside from Pakistan's status as a country of questionable democratic credentials, where real power is exercised by a variety of entrenched yet dysfunctional elites immune from electoral accountability

**and their being faced by a prime minister responsible to parliament, obv.

Pakistan: The Lolz Continue

Asif Ali Zardari has today been elected president of Pakistan. Zardari is head of the Pakistan People's Party and, famously, the widower of Benazir Bhutto. He is also a man who has attracted numerous accusations of corruption. The Pakistani presidency is a powerful office, with control of the armed forces and the country's nuclear arsenal, as well as direct responsibility for the tribal areas that border Afghanistan and the power to sack the prime minister and dissolve parliament. Pakistan's president is not directly elected, but chosen by the country's parliament (where Zardari's party currently has a majority) when the post falls vacant.

Zardari's decision to appoint himself to the top job has caused the governing coalition to break. Nawaz Sharif, leader of the smaller Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz party wanted a compromise candidate, but Zardari ignored him and Sharif took the PML-N out of government. Zardari's party can govern without the PML-N, but the rupture is unfortunate, as it represents the breaking of the pro-democracy coalition that eased dictator Pervez Musharaf from power.

Since leaving the government, Sharif has suddenly found himself facing an indictment on corruption charges. No one is convinced by claims that the timing is purely coincidental. Like many Pakistani politicians, Sharif's hands may well have dipped into the till from time to time, but his indictment now is plainly an attempt by Zardari to crush a potentially dangerous rival. Zardari is fortunate in that he is covered by an amnesty issued by Musharaf for all corruption charges against him and Benazir Bhutto. The legality of this amnesty is questionable, but the comedy supreme court appointed by Musharaf remains in office. While in government, Sharif had campaigned for the reinstatement of the supreme court illegally sacked by Musharaf. Zardari was careful to block this move, lest the judges strike down his amnesty. So now Zardari is coasting to the top job in Pakistani politics, immune from investigation of his shady past, while corruption charges bury his rival.

Zardari is apparently considered sound on the War on Terror, so it is unlikely that any harsh words will come his way from Washington.

Pakistani Judges, part two

In an earlier post I mentioned tensions within the Pakistani government on the reinstatement of judges sacked last year by President Musharraf (see: Pakistani Judges). Now the BBC reports that the ruling coalition has split over reinstatement of the judges. The smaller PML-N party, led by Nawaz Sharif, is leaving the government. Sharif has demanded that the judges be fully reinstated with all their old powers. The larger PPP party, led by Asif Zardari, says that it is happy to reinstate the judges, but wants their powers limited.

Just before Musharraf sacked the judges, they were due to rule on two issues. One was the constitutionality of Musharraf's election, but the other was an amnesty that the general had given to Zardari. Zardari has long had a reputation for shadiness, and it hard to see his actions now as anything other than an attempt to prevent himself from facing another round of corruption charges. Sharif in the past has sometimes come across as a bit of a clown, but current events allow him to portray himself credibly as a man of lofty principles.

Pakistani Judges

The BBC has an interesting article on the recent reinstatement of senior judges in Pakistan: Saga of restoring Pakistani judges

As you know, when Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, staged his autogolpe last year, he illegally sacked a load of senior judges, for fear that they might rule that his unconstitutional acts were unconstitutional. He replaced these judges with some lickspittle toady judges who could be relied upon to give convenient verdicts. Musharraf's autogolpe ultimately failed - although he remains in office as president, effective power now seems to lie with the coalition government of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PPP-N). This issue of reinstating the sacked judges has become a source of tension within the government. Nawaz Sharif, head of the PML-N, has taken a hard line, demanding that the sacked judges be reinstated and that the quisling judges who took their jobs be themselves sacked. The PPP (led by Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gillani, meanwhile, has taken a more cautious line, arguing that the reinstatement of the judges should take place in the context of a general reform of the judiciary, and that the judges who took the sacked judges' jobs should merely revert to their former positions.

A compromise between the coalition partners seems to have been reached - the judges will be reinstated later this month, and the ones Musharraf promoted will take up their old jobs. However, there are still stormy waters ahead. The incumbent judges could try to keep their flash jobs by ruling against the reinstatement of their predecessors. There is also the theoretical possibility that Musharraf could invoke his constitutional powers to sack the government, in order to prevent the return of judges who might well rule that his continued holding of the presidency is unconstitutional; this is however unlikely, given his total lack of credibility and the government's recent electoral mandate.

One final exciting thing about all this is that the reinstatement of the judges could mean that everything that happened since they were sacked occurred in a legal void, with pretty much everything happening since Musharraf declared his state of emergency being up for legal challenge.

Pakistan: Lolcountry

Just over a week ago, Pervez Musharraf decided to once more tear up Pakistan's consitution. Even before that I had been pondering why Pakistan is such an unsuccessful country, largely triggered by discussions of its progress since independence in articles commenting on it being 50 years since the British left it and India. India, on the other hand, seems to have done pretty well, at least when compared to Pakistan. OK, so India does have its problems (grinding poverty and communal tensions spring to mind), but Pakistan has these problems and a load of crazy other ones as well. I am thinking of things like Pakistan's inability to embed democratic rule, and its having an army that sees itself as having a divine right to intervene politically whenever it feels like it. Or the country's venal and shortsighted political elite. Or the country's secret service (the ISI), who seem to run their own separate foreign policy only tangentially related to the official policies of the state's notional leaders. Or the state's general inability to see its writ run through large tracts of the country.

And so on. Pakistan seems particularly unsuccessful in the world of high international politics, managing to get stuffed out of it in at least two wars with its larger neighbour. One might, of course, see these outcomes as being largely inevitable, given the balance of resources between the two countries, but the Pakistani military went into both of these struggles expecting to triumph. Failure in the second of these saw Pakistan lose more than half of its population to Bangladesh.

In contrast, India has actual achievements to point to since it became independent. It has managed to run itself constitutionally, with its army never intruding itself into politics in the manner of Pakistan's generals. In recent years it has even become a major force in the world economy, and I think it has managed to make progress in the area of poverty reduction. The state as an institution suffers from a lot of the problems that afflict states elsewhere, but it does not seem from this distance to be so completely chaotic as that of Pakistan.

So, why has India succeeded, albeit modestly, while Pakistan has failed? The two countries would have had similar starting conditions, being both large heavily populated multi-ethnic societies. Perhaps the organising principles of the two countries are significant, with India being set up as a secular country containing people of various religions and cultural backgrounds, while Pakistan was intended as a Muslim state (or a state for Muslims). One could argue that shared religion is actually a weak glue with which to hold a society together, contrary to what the likes of Samuel Huntington would say. Or maybe there are other material factors of which I am unaware.

On current events in particular… before Musharraf's latest autogolpe, there was an interesting article in the London Review of Books on Pakistan by Tariq Ali ("Pakistan at Sixty"). Ali is the kind of leftist writer whose work you have to be careful with, but I was very struck by some of the points he made. Over the last year, the Pakistani regime has had some face-offs with Jihadi Islamists, and also with members of the legal profession, following an earlier attempt to remove the Chief Justice from office. Contrary to what you might assume, however, it was the attempt to crack down on judicial freedom that excited the most public reaction in Pakistan, with the legal profession spearheading mass demonstrations in many Pakistani cities. The lawyers have been at the forefront of attempts to stop Musharraf's latest plot, with Pakistan's lazy politicians largely following in the rear but nevertheless finding themselves swept into the strugge by public outrage. This is perhaps a hopeful sign, in a country where lawyers have previously been only too happy to roll over whenever it suited their military rulers.