Random Variable

n+1 has an essay by S. Abbas Raza defending Musharraf’s dictatorship of Pakistan (via 3 Quarks Daily).

A military dictatorship is a military dictatorship, and a democracy is a democracy. And the latter is always automatically better than the former. It is safer to agree with this statement and to look at every particular complex political situation through the lens of this cliché than to risk having one’s liberal-democratic credentials questioned. But as a friend of mine once remarked, “All arguments for democracy in Pakistan are theoretical. For dictatorships, the greatest argument is the actual experience of Pakistani democracies.” Very similarly, another friend recently commented that “There are of course no theoretical arguments for a dictatorship, only practical ones.” In the case of Pakistan, the last two civilian democratic governments were sham democracies, and while I by no means support everything Pervez Musharraf has done, especially recently, there are various things for which his government deserves praise. Moreover, while George W. Bush may have gotten almost everything else wrong, his Pakistan policy has been basically sound.

There is no doubt that Nawaz Sharif’s rule was corrupt to the core. The question is whether or not the military should turn the situation around by staying in power for 8 years. The National Accountability Board hasn’t done nearly enough, and Musharraf’s devolution plan has handed power into the landed elites.

One can’t but help that we’ve been here before with Ayub Khan, another military reformer that delivered a whole lot of growth to Pakistan without building the institutions to keep civilian rule.

There is an argument that Pinochet, for example, delivered so much economic growth as to make his dictatorship untenable-in a free market economy, no one needs a repressive army. Does that mean we should have more free market dictators elsewhere? Surely not…

In a recent essay I chose to write for my politics class on democracy in Pakistan I got incredibly stuck as I ran from the past to the present. My conclusion is that it’s too early to say if democracy will endure in Pakistan. What a cop out!