Why Imran Khan loves Dar Sahib

Pakistanis have a lot to be angry about. Our country is run poorly. Sometimes, so poorly that many of us believe that the only way it could be run this poorly is if someone was going out of their way to hurt the country. But because we are rational people, for the most part, it is hard to understand why those running Pakistan would go out of their way to hurt the country.

Enter malign self-interest. Many of us then conclude that the people running Pakistan go out of their way to hurt the country because they benefit from this pain through financial gain.

Now, this is not a particularly sophisticated thought exercise, and we know that it is also not a particularly unique phenomenon. The rightward shift in the American Deep South is informed by the same kind of contempt for liberal East- and West-coast elites, that we reserve for all wealthy politicians. In Europe, frustrated middle and lower middle class folks can blame the influx of Muslim immigrants for their respective countries’ fiscal dysfunctions. In Pakistan, we don’t have immigrants, but we do have Afghan refugees and steadily dwindling numbers of many religious minority communities.

The fact that some of our dysfunctions are not unique does not excuse our inability to deal with them. In most European or North American countries, social inequities and fiscal irresponsibility do not result in unpredictable spikes of violence, and a general anxiety about the absence of rule of law. In our country, small mistakes can sometimes produce very big repercussions. So when Ishaq Dar, the Sharif family accountant and Pakistan’s chief loan and grant negotiator claims that the petrol crisis is a conspiracy against democracy he is doing what most of us do when faced with something that he cannot understand – because he himself is part of the problem, whilst being certain that he is not just part of the solution, but the very solution itself.

To understand the petrol crisis, or the judicial commission crisis, or the general crisis of governance in Pakistan, one has to close one’s eyes and picture flow charts and schematic diagrams. Go ahead. Close your eyes.

Now breathe deeply.

Imagine there is no Mubasher Lucman. Imagine there is no jhankar music accompanying your nightly news flash about Katrina Kaif’s eyelash, or an imminent stock market crash, or the PSO’s crisis of cash, or that truck driver whose driving is rash, or the lingering smell from the truck of hash.

Close your eyes and breathe deeply. And imagine two simple things. First, a very large and substantial ego. Second, a much larger set of networks and organisations, full of people, all scared, mostly ill-equipped and almost entirely unaccountable.

Now. Breathe deeply again. Imagine now that this large ego floats above the ground, not as high as an Airbus A380, but high enough to seem like it is levitating.

This ego hovers menacingly above an architecture on the ground that is defined by incompetence and dysfunction.

People run one way, then another. They are asked to jump, and they say how high. Then they walk away. And someone else comes in and is asked to jump. And they start to kneel, because they didn’t get the memo.

The large ego hovering above all this dysfunction did not create the dysfunction, and is certain that he is the only reason anything at all has any chance of happening.

The infrastructure of non-delivery, the dysfunction, the corruption, the complete brokenness of the non-system below lies there, sometimes convulsing under the weight of its own brokenness. Sometimes because Barry and Narry get together to kick it while it is down (yes, let’s do that. Let’s call Narendra Modi, Narry – the great brown hope for American job growth).

Within the smog of dysfunction, some entrepreneurial geniuses figure out how to game the system. Some choose to game the system to deliver big, beautiful things to their country. There are civil servants behind the establishment of metrobus lines in less than 12 months. These are some heroic, crazy people, notwithstanding their association with the PAS/DMG social class.

Others choose to game the system to get postings of their choice. The Foreign Office has been reduced to a joke by such enterprising geniuses. So have secretary level positions at the provincial government departments. So have the police’s DPO postings across the country. Among these geniuses, some just want to be in locations they prefer for family reasons, and others choose to be in places where making the extra buck or two is a little easier.

Through it all, you have to keep your eyes close and imagine that the large, bloated ego hovering above all of this is looking down in contempt. Unless of course the dysfunction, or the entrepreneurial spirit is being deployed in service of the ego.

Think of the legendary Salman Faruqi, possibly the greatest DMG officer that ever lived. His indispensability was real. This was not a product of rent-seeking or sycophancy. At least not exclusively. Faruqi’s genius, and his utility was that he did the stuff that allowed that hovering ego to seem competent and compassionate. He did the stuff that got his bosses the accolades. He did it throughout his career, and along the ride, he established the capacity to read and relate to the system so well, partly because he built the system, that he did it after his bureaucratic career as well.

Last week, Ishaq Dar’s ego could not possibly have fathomed the fact that his ego in and of itself is responsible for that dysfunction that he sneers at contemptuously. He sees conspiracy because he cannot see the cancerous impact of his style of management on the capacity of the civilian governments of Pakistan to function normally. He sees dysfunction at the petroleum ministry, the shipping ministry, global prices, local corruption, indeed, he sees dysfunction anywhere and everywhere he looks because looking at the mirror is inconvenient, and counterintuitive.

Since we have our eyes closed and we are breathing deeply, we can see more than Dar Sahib can.

The petrol crisis isn’t the first crisis on Dar’s watch, and it won’t be the last. The enterprising officers of the PAS/DMG have spent three generations centralising financial control of the state within the Finance Division. The only exception to their control is national security spending. Ishaq Dar is not Ishaq Dar. He is Shaukat ‘Smile’ Aziz, Shaukat ‘MNA Waghaira’ Tareen, Abdul Hafeez ‘PM Me Please’ Shaikh. Go back as far as you want to go, the minister offinance of every government in Pakistan loves his secretary, and the secretary and his men love their minister back. They have fiscally hijacked Pakistani taxpayers into a state of intoxicated delirium. Pakistani leaders, like Pervez Musharraf, Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif all like to feel like they are in control of the purse strings. So they hire finance ministers that can control the flow of money used by the Pakistani state.

A rents-based economy, in which there are roughly 200 million participants, cannot bear the tensions and pressures that such intimate and direct control produces on the non-system. Extractive, colonial civil service structures like Pakistan’s that are ‘look-up and dance’ in structure, cannot look down to navel-gaze or even to pull handbrakes when necessary. The Pakistani state and society are hard-wired into suicidal behaviour because incentives are aligned to keep the system driving off the cliff. Cats have nine lives, but the Pakistani non-system has a seemingly infinite supply of lives.

There is no long-route, slow accountability mechanism that can fix this. Only real leadership can. This is why, no matter how poor Imran Khan’s judgement may be, he will continue to pose an existential threat to the Sharif family. Because too many Pakistanis have given up hope that PM Sharif can ever be that leader who breaks what’s already broken and rebuilds it all. And of those Pakistanis, no one has any options other than closing their eyes, breathing deeply, and letting Imran Khan drive.