A year of living on the edge

Even by the standards of Pakistan's volatile political history, 2009 was a year of turmoil and disarray, with governance in a shambles for much of the year and the embattled country lurching rudderless to confront one challenge after another. In a year that generated more gloom than hope, the leadership void was the defining theme.

At year-end, Pakistan plunged into deep political uncertainty in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that declared the National Reconciliation Ordinance ultra vires of the Constitution. The note of defiance struck by the government – despite declarations to the contrary – and its efforts to whip up Sindhi provincial sentiment promised a perfect storm of trouble ahead, raising the spectre of a prolonged gridlock in governance and a clash between a dysfunctional executive and the newly empowered judiciary.

The divided political reaction to the latest display of judicial activism encouraged the PPP-led government to insinuate "selective justice" and play victim in an effort to obfuscate the public debate about the accountability of elected officials. Meanwhile, the apex court's verdict elicited criticism from an unexpected quarter – prominent liberals who argued that the court had taken a step too far, grounding its judgement on reasoning that encroached on the domain of other state institutions.

In a year of judicial activism, critics depicted the Supreme Court's actions ranging from striking down the NRO, inquiring into loan write-offs, determining the price of sugar and questioning the pricing of petroleum products as evidence of populist grandstanding and injudicious overreach.

While the political manoeuvring that followed the NRO judgment reflected the Zardari-led government's efforts to rally support it also betrayed its deep insecurity. This lack of confidence revealed itself during 2009 in the president's continual reading of criticism as conspiracy. It was also exemplified by President's Zardari's combative speech on the second anniversary of Benazir Bhutto's assassination.

These actions left the country in the midst of a profound sense of foreboding about the future. An uneasy calm prevailed at the dawn of the new decade. The prospect of a jittery government distracted by the aftershocks of the NRO verdict triggered widespread public fears about instability at a time of unparalleled challenges for the country.

The public mood grew progressively glum in the context of the government's lacklustre performance and its singular lack of public-policy initiatives. By mid-2009, the despondent public mood was reflected in a number of opinion polls. The Pew organisation found 89 per cent of Pakistanis were dissatisfied with the way things were going – up sharply from two years ago. A poll conducted by the International Republican Institute recorded similar findings: 84 per cent of the people polled saw the country headed in the wrong direction.

If the government failed to provide leadership, the enigma of a political opposition unable or unwilling to fill this vacuum – not by destabilising the coalition but providing a clear policy direction – seemed even more baffling. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif remained the country's most popular leader according to opinion surveys. But the PML-N's pronounced reluctance to play the role of a vigorous and thoughtful opposition, staking out positions on pivotal issues, hurt his public-approval ratings and attracted criticism that the party remained trapped in the past. Even so, the party lost no opportunity to remind Zardari of his broken promises on scrapping the 17th Amendment.

The year went down as the deadliest in Pakistan's history. A record number of bombings shook the country, casualties among civilians and security personnel shot to a new high, as did IED explosions and suicide attacks. 2009 saw one- third of all terrorist-related violence recorded since 2001. This took the number of people killed in terrorist-related violence in the past decade to an estimated 25,000.

Much of the violence represented a bloody backlash to the military assaults undertaken in Swat and South Waziristan – the country's biggest airborne counterinsurgency operation and ground offensive, respectively. These actions showed the government's resolve to fight militancy and the military's capacity to act decisively. While they re-established the government's writ and drove out the Taliban, the wave of terrorist reprisals that engulfed the country warned of the scale of the challenge ahead.

The operations made remarkable gains in the "clear" phase. Swat and Malakand saw the return in record time of tens of thousands of displaced people. But the fate of the "hold and build" phase remained open to question, while the tardy and inadequate government response to post-conflict stabilisation in Swat raised doubts about the sustainability of the security gains that had been attained.

At the close of the year the military operation had expanded to Orakzai and Khyber, but concerns about whether the militants had been dispersed rather than defeated suggested that Pakistan's counterinsurgency efforts would be a long haul.

The danger that these efforts could be jeopardised and the army overstretched by the demands of the new regional strategy announced by President Obama became a key question as the New Year approached. The military escalation signalled by Washington's troop surge and the expansion in drone-launched missile strikes in the tribal areas heightened fears of further destabilisation of the country. Islamabad's concerns and anxieties were conveyed to Washington during its strategy review, but the enunciation of the new policy left Pakistan facing the predicament of maintaining stable ties with the US while preserving its vital interests.

And this at a time when the trust deficit between the two nations seemed to widen rather than diminish. This was amply illustrated by the furore in Pakistan over the Kerry-Lugar Bill. The enhanced assistance came gift-wrapped with conditionalities that many Pakistanis saw as gratuitous meddling in their internal affairs and as an infringement of national sovereignty.

The strains evident during 2009 in an increasingly tenuous relationship suggested that the year ahead would see ties being tested by a number of issues: approaches to stabilising Afghanistan, dealing with North Waziristan, the evolving Washington-Delhi-Kabul nexus and Washington's aversion to engaging with the sources of Pakistan-India tensions.

Among the few bright spots in the otherwise bleak political landscape was the 7th National Finance Commission Award agreed between the elected representatives of the four provinces. This reflected a consensus that had eluded the country for close to two decades and was made possible by the spirit of democratic accommodation shown by all the provincial leaders, especially the chief minister of the Punjab.

The most consequential development of 2009 was the reinstatement of the chief justice in March, which marked the triumph of the two-year campaign for the rule of law waged by the legal community, civil society and the opposition. This turned Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry into a symbol of the popular yearning for an independent judiciary. It also changed the political equation in the country by establishing the judiciary as an independent power base.

Economic management continued to fall short of the challenge at hand. It assumed the form of seeking more external financing to address the symptoms of the country's deep-seated economic problems. This meant continuity with an inglorious tradition of not using the fiscal space provided by external resources to decisively attack the causes of the structural imbalances: low revenue, narrow tax base and budget and balance-of-payments deficits.

There was no qualitative break with a strategy of over-reliance on external financing by creating the means or culture for enhanced domestic resource mobilisation. A "stabilisation" or crisis-management strategy shorn of any long-term policy to address structural problems exposed an unsustainable approach that increased foreign liabilities and merely postponed rather than resolved the crisis of macroeconomic imbalances.

The security situation and the global slowdown cast a long shadow over the fragile economy. Economic woes were compounded by the power crisis, not of the government's making, but one it sought to partially – and controversially – address through the rental power projects.

In a setting of economic drift and political gloom the most memorable – and uplifting – moment of the year came with the cricket team's spectacular Twenty20 win. But even then there was no escape from a grim reality. Asked why the national team had been on such a long losing streak, ex-captain Yunus Khan succinctly summed up the national state of play: "How can cricket be stable in Pakistan, when nothing else is?"

Copyrights The News Newspaper 31-12-2009