An article in the New York Times on Friday focused on the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, the ‘silver-tongued’ former journalist Husain Haqqani, who is quoted as being among the smartest diplomats around. We've been here before, with Maleeha Lodi, another silver-tongued former journalist also getting rave reviews when she was the Pakistan envoy in Washington and London. Pakistan's career diplomats are no slouches either, and have often been more than a match for their Indian counterparts, themselves no push-overs.
The same can be said for Pakistan's generals — smart, professional, committed, and brilliant at playing the Pentagon to get their objectives served. But it must be a cursed country which needs such outstanding diplomats (what lies do they have to peddle skillfully?), and which offers the army as the best career option for bright and ambitious youngsters. Between the two, Pakistan may well succeed in leading the United States on yet another merry dance, as it has done since the days of Field Marshall Ayub Khan in the 1950s. But what good will it do Pakistan, and where has all that cleverness and subterfuge got the country? A healthier system would have technologists (and not just stealers and peddlers of nuclear secrets), engineers, managers, doctors, university professors and others being preferred role models.
India suffers from a similar problem. Our diplomats are excellent in multilateral conferences, quarrelling over every comma in complicated treaties — and just as much as they exasperate their counterparts, they become heroes in the media when they return home after bloody conference battles (remember how Murasoli Maran was lionised for his equivalent of Custer's last stand, at the start of the Doha Round of trade talks). As in Hermann Hesse's Nobel-winning Magister Ludi, this game becomes an end in itself and a substitute for the groundwork that has to be done elsewhere in the system. Recall how we negotiated long and hard for opening up western textile markets, in the Uruguay Round. But 13 years later, our textile exporters are not the ones who have benefited; their Chinese and Bangladeshi counterparts have done much better and walked away with markets.
Indians who have travelled to East Asia have often been struck by one question: How do people who seem to have less native intelligence than Indians (less easy mastery of mathematics, less articulate than the argumentative Indian, less quick on the uptake) end up with more ordered, more progressive societies than chaotic India? Many answers are possible, but one must surely be that there is more ‘we’ than ‘I’, a greater sense of what is good for the collective, and an easier willingness to opt for what is practical and sensible. The problem manifests itself at all levels, from the cooperative housing society to the panchayat and all the way up to national-level politics.
It could be a South Asian genus, but India at least has managed to retain its focus on what is good for the man in the street (admittedly with limited success in terms of results) — perhaps as a result of its democratic roots. Pakistan, in comparison, thinks of what is good for the state, and that is not the same thing at all. Because a state dominated by generals and diplomats will look at the Taliban as a tool to be used on a transnational chess board, whereas politicians will see that the vast majority do not vote for radical Islamists. In the end, such a state bites its own people, and that is Pakistan's fate today as its army fights what is acquiring the characteristics of a civil war. That it can manage to get American money and arms to achieve this end result will be seen as a triumph by the players of the game; and that is, of course, the problem too.