seventy-one.124
In late 2007, I. A. Rehman, once a major newspaper editor and now a highly
respected member of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, shared his mixed
feelings about that incredible expansion.125 He observed that Pakistan’s media
outlets provided an enormous megaphone to a new crop of untrained, often
irresponsible, reporters and pundits. This new wave swamped an old guard of
editors and reporters with its no-holds-barred style. It broke taboos by show-
ing graphic images and broadcasting confrontational debates, quite similar to
the way Al Jazeera revolutionized news programming in the Arab world. At
the time, the trend was more likely to raise an unpredictable ruckus than to
inspire reasoned debate, but if the media started to take its role more seriously,
the future might look brighter.
Later in his tenure, Musharraf himself lamented that a media that owed
its relatively greater freedom to him had turned so harshly critical of his gov-
ernment. The real turning point came as his regime faltered and he tried to
turn off the media as a means to silence his critics. On March 16, 2007,
Musharraf attempted to shut down broadcasts by GeoTV – Pakistan’s most
popular Urdu-language broadcaster – by ordering local police to fire teargas
into its Islamabad studio. The move failed. Geo defied the government and
was soon back on the air. As the political crisis escalated, the regime and pri-
vate broadcasters played a game of cat and mouse; each time the government
ordered new limits on broadcasts, the news networks attempted to flout or
circumvent them. When Pakistani cable networks were turned off, GeoTV and
another independent network broadcast by satellite. When satellite dish sales
were banned, the networks streamed programming on the Internet.126
Eventually, for several weeks in November 2007, it looked as if the author-
itarian power of the military-led state would win out. The Musharraf regime
finally prevailed upon the United Arab Emirates to shutter the last two broad-
casters that had until then escaped Islamabad’s reach. At that point, e-mail
lists, blogs, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Facebook groups, and text mes-
sages filled the vacuum, spreading news to anyone within earshot of a computer
account or cell phone (which is to say nearly everyone in the entire country,
since over 40 percent of Pakistanis owned cell phones by 2006).127
With the help of new communications technologies and the ingenuity of Pak-
istani protesters, the news media could no longer be completely fettered, even by
a very determined military regime. That moment was a historic breakthrough
124 Muhammad Atif Khan, “The Mediatization of Politics in Pakistan: A Structural Analysis,”
Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, 1, no. 1 (2009), p. 33.
125 Author conversation with I. A. Rehman, September 17, 2007, Washington, DC.
126 Huma Yusuf, “Old and New Media: Converging during the Pakistan Emergency (March
2007–February 2008),” MIT Center for Civic Media, p. 9.
127 Yusuf, “Old and New Media,” p. 13.
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No Exit from Pakistan
for Pakistan; the media became a power to be reckoned with, not silenced.
Musharraf did not immediately appreciate this, nor did his civilian successor,
Asif Ali Zardari, who also attempted to shutter GeoTV early in his presidency
and later temporarily banned, multiple times, Facebook and YouTube.128 Yet
the reality is that Pakistan’s media environment now favors a new breed of
politicians whose goal is to exploit the power of the media, not to control
it. In today’s Pakistan, the news will probably get out, one way or another.
This is not to say that Pakistan’s government or security services won’t ever
try to crack down again, but only that they will have to be very committed
and willing to pay a high cost, both in terms of public outrage and economic
disruption, to silence the media for very long.
The power of the media may one day enable Khan – or another simi-
larly savvy politician – to beat the entrenched patronage networks that have
dominated national elections for so long. After that, the question is whether
Pakistan’s media might also help reformers implement their idealistic agendas.
Can the media improve the quality of political debate, or will it remain the rau-
cous and irresponsible force that I. A. Rehman observed in 2007, more prone to
destructive sensationalism than anything else? Unfortunately, many journalists
in Pakistan today are still part of the problem. They lament that the industry
is thoroughly corrupt and that some prominent news editors expect reporters
to earn their livings through extortion or trading in privileged information.129
Such stories are disillusioning, but there is at least some reason for hope.
Members of the media and some citizen groups have attempted to start various
forms of nongovernmental regulation. In early 2012, the group Citizens for
Free and Responsible Media launched an Internet and letter campaign against
a morning show that purported to film raids on Pakistani parks, where young
men and women were socializing against the wishes of their conservative fam-
ilies. The protest forced the network to cancel the show, fire its host, and
admit that the raids were faked in the first place.130 The quality of Pakistani
journalism may also improve over time, since “there has been an explosion of
journalism programs at university level, meaning more qualified workers will
be entering the industry.”131 That training has been supplemented by various
exchange programs meant to introduce Pakistani journalists to American and
other international counterparts.132
128 Michael Kugelman, “Pakistan’s Pugnacious Press,” Foreign Policy, March 22, 2012, http://af pak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/22/pakistans_pugnacious_press.
129 Author conversation with Pakistani journalists, Islamabad, May 16, 2012.
130 Malik Siraj Akbar, “Sensational Shows Imperil the Future of Pakistan’s Fledgling Broadcast Media,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/malik-siraj-akbar/sensational-shows-imperil_b_1336819.html?view=print&comm_ref=false.
131 Huma Yusuf quoted in Akbar, “Sensational Shows Imperil the Future of Pakistan’s Fledgling Broadcast Media.”
132 On exchange programs, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/seminars-and-journalism-fellow ships/journalism-fellowships/pakistan-us-journalists-exchange.
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The Four Faces of Pakistan
65
The media has relished its role as a government watchdog, if perhaps too
gleefully and indiscriminately for the taste of the last ruling coalition in Islam-
abad. Although the civilian politicians have suffered the worst abuses at the
hands of pundits and columnists, even the military came under fire from the
media in 2011 after the U.S. raid on bin Laden’s compound. As journalists
explained in Islamabad just one week after the raid, the shock and humilia-
tion – first that bin Laden was discovered so deep inside Pakistani territory,
second that he was killed by American SEALs, and both without the appar-
ent knowledge of Pakistan’s armed forces – was too much for even some of
the most “pro-military” television journalists to bear. They vented, publicly,
in ways that once would have been impossible. One such Pakistani television
anchor, Kamran Khan, told his viewers, “We had the belief that our defense
was impenetrable, but look what has happened. Such a massive intrusion and
it went undetected.”133
Unfortunately, even though the media’s criticism of government has given its
politicians fits, it has yet to make them discernibly better at running the country.
For its part, the military has responded to the media with a combination of
genuine outreach, some shrewd propaganda, and a heavy dose of intimidation.
The latter, along with the threat of violence posed by militants, helps to explain
why in 2013 the group Reporters without Borders ranked Pakistan 159th out
of 179 nations in press freedom.134
Stepping back, it is clear that change is afoot in Pakistan, but it still has a
long way to go. The positive potential of Pakistan’s youth, its urbanizing middle
class, and the media may turn out to be huge. Still, it may be no match for
Pakistan’s terribly powerful web of entrenched interests, all heavily invested
in defending the status quo. Even inside Imran Khan’s PTI, an organization
energized by the theme of reform and change, it would be hard to bet on the
idealistic youth wing beating out the likes of Hamid Gul or Shireen Mazari, both
of whom have also enjoyed long-standing ties to the cricket star and his party.
Debating Pakistan’s Prospects
Pakistan’s future portrait is likely to be a composite sketch with features
drawn from each of its four faces. But which features will be most prominent?
Pakistan has an abundance of dynamic forces that have already rendered parts
of its landscape unrecognizable to its founding generation. The single greatest
challenge to contemplating Pakistan’s future is that the country is pregnant
with possibilities. Twenty years from now Pakistan will have 85 million more
people than it does today. In other words, to its nearly 200 million citizens
133 Jane Perlez, “Pakistani Army, Shaken by Raid, Faces New Scrutiny,” New York Times, May 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/world/asia/05pakistan.html.
134 Press Freedom Index 2013, Reporters without Borders, Paris, France, http://fr.rsf.org/IMG/
pdf/classement 2013 gb-bd.pdf.
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No Exit from Pakistan
Pakistan will add a population equivalent to the size of today’s Iran. By mid-
century, Pakistan is likely to be home to over 300 million people. That would be
over ten times its number at independence in 1947. Those figures alone should
offer some perspective about the nature and scale of the changes Pakistan could
experience.
Yet there are also important enduring features in Pakistani society that
Jinnah and his contemporaries would find familiar, if not necessarily attractive.
The core question is how these forces stack up against one another, and how
their interplay will shape Pakistan’s future. The current scholarly debate over
this question breaks down into four camps. Some argue that Pakistan’s status
quo forces – the feudals and the army – will continue to dominate, producing
relative stability for years to come. A second camp, however, sees those same
status quo forces as fundamentally destabilizing because they block necessary
reforms. A third camp is similarly convinced of potential for social and political
instability, but instead of blaming the weakness of the status quo it focuses on
the strength of rising challengers, especially Pakistan’s violent extremists. And
a final camp suggests that change is brewing, but it will be more reformist than
revolutionary.135
The preeminent example of the first perspective is found in Anatol Lieven’s
magisterial review of Pakistan’s state and society. Lieven writes that the “highly
conservative, archaic, even sometimes quite inert and somnolent” Pakistan is
most likely to shrug off the competing forces of modernization and change and
then “roll over and go back to sleep.”136
Lieven cautions that Pakistan is a “hard country,” immunized to most
threats of revolution because the basic building blocks of its society –
those immensely powerful kinship networks that bind individuals to their
families and communities – “so far have changed with glacial slowness.” Pak-
istan is less susceptible to change, for the better or the worse, than we think.
In the second camp in the debate is John Schmidt, who served as the U.S.
political counselor in Islamabad from 1998 to 2001. Schmidt turns Lieven’s
argument on its head. He argues that the roots of Pakistan’s present instability
are to be found in its “feudal political establishment.”137 Far from seeing the
status quo as a source of stability, as Lieven would have it, Schmidt stresses
that the ineptitude, warped outlook, and corruption inherent in Pakistan’s
135 There is growing literature on Pakistan’s possible futures. In particular, see Stephen P.
Cohen, The Future of Pakistan (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2011); Michael F. Oppenheimer and Rorry Daniels, “Pakistan 2020,” CGA Scenarios No. 7, NYU Center for Global Affairs (Fall 2011), http://www.scps.nyu.edu/export/sites/scps/pdf/global-affairs/
pakistan-2020-scenarios.pdf; and Jonathan Paris, “Prospects for Pakistan,” Legatum Institute (January 2010), http://www.li.com/attachments/ProspectsForPakistan.pdf.
136 Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), pp. 29, 16.
137 John R. Schmidt, “The Unravelling of Pakistan,” Survival, 51, no. 3 (June/July 2009), p. 29.
See also John R. Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
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The Four Faces of Pakistan
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traditional political culture props open the door to the extremists. “Resistant
to change, disposed to muddle through, inclined to blame others for their prob-
lems and single-mindedly determined to preserve their narrow class interests
even as their world is collapsing around them, [Pakistan’s elites] are leading
their country along a short road to chaos,” he warns darkly.138
Fearing that Pakistan is playing with fire as it faces “a dangerous and fluid
moment” in its history, veteran Washington Post reporter Pamela Consta-
ble takes up the third position in the debate.139 Unlike Schmidt and Lieven,
who focus on Pakistan’s repressive continuity, Constable is more concerned
about the forces of change. Her reporting from the region over more than a
decade is marked by a focus on the everyday lives of Pakistanis. It leads her
to observe that some recent trends in Pakistani society – such as the “new
phenomenon of grassroots leaders and women becoming involved in poli-
tics” – are beneficial.140 Yet on balance she worries that positive reforms are
being swamped by “the growing violent threat and the popular appeal of rad-
ical Islam.”141 Unless Pakistan’s political and military leaders more effectively
grapple with the profound changes sweeping Pakistani society, Constable con-
cludes that “they may be condemning a new generation of Pakistanis to make
bricks, mop floors, or put on suicide vests.”142
Finally, Maleeha Lodhi, the former Pakistani ambassador to the United
States, takes up the case for a less pessimistic outlook. Lodhi argues that con-
structive – rather than destructive – change is quite possible in Pakistan. She
admits that the country faces significant obstacles, but it “may yet escape its dif-
ficult first sixty-three years, resolve its problems, and re-imagine its future.”143
Pakistan’s urban, barely bourgeois classes could redirect the energies of an
existing political party or coalesce behind an entirely new organization. Either
way, Lodhi concludes that it would be a mistake to minimize their power or
overlook their potential to improve the quality of Pakistan’s government and
pave the way to a brighter future.
Clearly, even for people who know it well, Pakistan can look as if it is stand-
ing still or heading in opposite directions, with radically different implications
for its people and the rest of the world. Each of these perspectives actually
captures an important truth about Pakistan’s present as well as clues to fore-
seeing its deeply uncertain future.
Lieven is right that Pakistan changes slowly, that important aspects of the
society look remarkably like they did decades or even centuries ago. This
is an important corrective to the hyperventilating newspaper headlines and
138 Schmidt, “The Unravelling,” p. 51.
Daniel S Markey Page 15