I often see myself as sort of the David Brooks of Sepia Mutiny - a soft contrarian vs. the general political clime here. So, I was surprised to see Abhi’s take on Pakistan. There aren’t too many issues out there where Abhi & I tend to agree rather than disagree and it appears that Pakistan is one such situation. (On the other hand, I don’t think the ACLU does enough for the NRA )

In our politically-correct, post-modern world, criticism of government flows easily, criticism of the “governed”, not enough

My underlying reason for taking a “looks bad, but I’ll wait and see” attitude towards Mushie rather than condeming him outright was perhaps best spelled out in a seminal Foreign Affairs article by desi-pundit Fareed Zakaria. Well before he broke onto the public consciousness with a famous Newsweek cover piece, and before he was for the Iraq war, then against its execution, then for it again, Zakaria coined the phrase “Illiberal Democracy” to describe situations where serving the “will of the people” is’nt exactly a Good Thing -

THE AMERICAN diplomat Richard Holbrooke pondered a problem on the eve of the September 1996 elections in Bosnia, which were meant to restore civic life to that ravaged country. “Suppose the election was declared free and fair,” he said, and those elected are “racists, fascists, separatists, who are publicly opposed to [peace and reintegration]. That is the dilemma.” Indeed it is, not just in the former Yugoslavia, but increasingly around the world. Democratically elected regimes, often ones that have been reelected or reaffirmed through referenda, are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights and freedoms. From Peru to the Palestinian Authority, from Sierra Leone to Slovakia, from Pakistan to the Philippines, we see the rise of a disturbing phenomenon in international life — illiberal democracy.

It’s important to note that the “liberalism” that Zakaria speaks of here is more in the traditional sense of “classical liberalism” rather than “Democrat politics” or progressivism. Still, what Zakaria vividly illustrated & teased out was the role of one of the most important “invisible hands” underlying the historical development of Democracy; in short, for most of history, the productive, peaceful, tolerant culture & society came before the democracy.

Sans those precepts, the naked pursuit of Democracy - so the argument goes - becomes a sort of Cargo Cult pursued by well intentioned, often outside reformers with potentially tragic results. In an incorrigibly tribal or sectarian context, elections can merely result in one group gaining the bludgeon of state power to loot the assets and trample the rights of another.

Before Zakaria, the Founding Fathers famously used the aphorism “Tyranny of the Majority” and the diktat “People Get the Government They Deserve” to describe exactly such a breakdown. The implication is that in our politically-correct, post-modern world, while criticism of the government flows easily from our lips, perhaps criticism of the “governed” doesn’t flow quite enough. [Lets not get into Iraq for now…]

In the spirit that most of life’s choices aren’t between “Good and Bad” but rather between “Bad and Worse”, if you are at real risk of having an “illiberal democracy”, then often your alternative isn’t “substantive democracy” but instead a “liberal tyrant”. In fact, one could argue that most democracies in history have had at least one or 2 “benevolent dictators” responsible for leading a country into a modern liberalism before the populace was quite ready.

American liberalism was imported from Britain prior to democracy.The Brits had their Victorian mores well before full democracy. Japan had its Meiji. Singapore its Yew. Turkey its Ataturk. South Korea for most of its modern, 20th century life, was a quasi-military dictatorship with Taiwan following a nearly identical path. The path is rarely straight and narrow, of course, Russia had its Peter the Great and a several modernizing czars before Leninism and Stalinism. China, in its own way, is arguably in the midst of a long liberalism process initiated tragically by Mao. Napolean in France is inseparable from the horrors of the revolution; still, military exploits aside, he was also an unabashed social liberalizer and modernizer and actually welcomed by some of the conquered downtrodden as a liberator. And so on….

Against this backdrop, one of the many things that made the American Experiment so unique was that the cultural precepts of liberalism were wholesale imported from Britain practically on day one prior to creation of the state. In America, the cultural amnesia created by the long arc of history for other nations was reinforced here by a voyage across the seas. One of those great intellectual history “what if’s?” is to try and guess what would have happened had the US had been colonized in force 100 years before the UK had been infected by the Scottish Enlightenment or what if the 13 colonies had been dominated by the Spanish rather than the Brits. (Alternately, without the organization and scientific knowledge of the Scots / Brits - could it have been?)

So, is Musharraf potentially such a “liberalizing tyrant”? In a separate piece, Zakaria argues “yes” -

There is a simple story line: Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has abused his authority; he faces massive street protests and should be nudged out in favor of a civilian government. It’s a tempting view. Musharraf is a dictator, and his regime has not been wholly committed to fighting Islamic radicals. The Taliban has reconstituted itself in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and Al Qaeda’s top leaders appear to be ensconced along its border. If there is a central front in the war on terror, it is not in Iraq but in Pakistan.

Now, the complications. Musharraf has, on the whole, been a modernizing force in Pakistan. When he took power in 1999, the country was racing toward ruin with economic stagnation, corruption, religious extremism and political chaos. It had become a rogue state, allied to the Taliban and addicted to a large-scale terror operation against neighboring India. Musharraf restored order, broke with the Islamists and put in place the most modern and secular regime in three decades. Under him the economy has boomed, with growth last year at 8 percent.

Just like the (bulk of) the Saudi government is considered more liberal than the population as a whole (the urbane latte-shops of Riyadh perhaps excluded); so too is the (bulk of) Musharaff’s regime probably more liberal than the population as a whole (similarly, with urbane quarters of Karachi and Lahore excepted). Every modern democracy at one point seemed like Lord of the Flies writ large

Does that mean that Pakistan is doomed to an autocratic state? No. Although Bush usually gets quoted here in derision, he is correct that in every society that is now a successful democracy, there was a point where it too appeared incorrigibly backward, sectarian and more like Lord of the Flies writ large than adult civil society. In Ceasar’s time, for example, the Brits were barbarians and Gregory Clark’s Farewell to Alms expends much effort trying to figure out how they later”crossed the chasm” into an industrially productive culture.

So where and how do the ‘adults’ emerge in Pakistan? I don’t know. It is worth noting, however, that you can’t become one without at least a few growing pains and heartbreaks along the way. Suicide bombing (and the entire conceptual baggage train from idealogues to bomb maker) will only stop once the Pakistani’s themselves master the internal processes to channel man’s need to make a statement into alternate, more productive economic and political pursuits. “Yeh Hum Naheen” shows Pakistani’s telling each other, in their own words what isn’t the way; part II is the message about what the alternate way is.

The process, of course is critically important to Americans and the world at large. We can (sometimes) help by opening a door, not blocking one by accident, and so on but they ultimately must walk through it. How a nation deals with the ajudication of power between political rivals intra-state (concession speeches post elections vs. suicide bombs) is perhaps the single best predictor of how it deals with differences inter-state.