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PAKISTAN has seen hard times before. However, the present-day level of public cynicism and frustration is exceptional. This could be because of the visibility factor.

Images of public anger on the streets are projected at a new national level by a forceful media. Protests and demands that earlier used to be local, perishable news are now in-your-face national news.

But it would be wrong to say that Pakistan’s real challenges boil down to this uni-dimensional analysis. Serious assessments can’t be based on the pretension that the country has seen it all before, and will, eventually, come out of it as before.

With slight exaggeration, it can be said that Pakistan has never experienced so many fundamental crises erupt simultaneously. These crises involve those of state security, of government efficiency, of opposition or alternative leadership, and of the national economy. Take the crisis of state security first. This covers the entire gamut of defence and security matters, internal as well as external. For all the effort, resources, sacrifices and national pain that have gone into stabilising Fata, peace remains elusive as ever.

The threat of a large-size spectacular attack on any of Pakistan’s core security installations emanating from this troubled part looms large. In areas where militancy has been physically eliminated, the next phase — that of development and transfer of power to civilian authorities is — nowhere in sight. That is why the army’s presence in these areas increasingly looks like a permanent feature in the near term.

This has implications. It stretches limited forces and resources across the eastern and western borders. Guarding urban areas against urban terrorism nibbles away the remaining strength. The army is deployed across Pakistan, which for a cash-strapped security state is not sustainable.

Afghanistan’s turmoil and India’s aggressive diplomacy underpinned by Washington, continue to play up the establishment’s conventional fears of being placed in a nutcracker situation. On top of it all is Washington’s little-carrot-long-stick approach towards Pakistan which to date has not been met with an adequate response by Islamabad. One day it is confrontation, the next cooperation. One day Pakistan is defined as an arsonist, the next as a firefighter.

This high degree of unpredictability upstages any long-term security planning and uses up all decision-making energies in tackling daily issues.

This security crisis with grave implications for Pakistan’s future is unfolding at a time of appalling government performance. The entire country has been turned into a chessboard of moves for short-term political gains even if the cost of these is to be paid in sweat and innocent blood. Karachi’s events typify the government’s preference for politicking over serious governance. Interior Minister Rehman Malik’s attribution of Karachi’s killing spree to domestic feuds involving jilted lovers and estranged wives is a snapshot of how trivial matters of life and death have become for policy planners.

A persistent stalemate with the Supreme Court on a raft of issues has blocked all roads dealing with long-term challenges of providing speedy justice to the millions still toiling to get their complaints addressed.

In the energy and petroleum sector, large-scale and daily protests over inadequate supplies have gone on without leading to a tangible policy-based response. Economic management remains a classic case of poor imagination applied poorly. All reasonable men, including the former State Bank governor and chief economist, have found the handling of the economy to be scandalous and a slur too costly for them to carry on their careers.

Generally, this environment is tailor-made for the emergence of a strong opposition, one that could build on government folly and powerfully project an alternative vision not for inspiration alone but also for promoting faith in the future.

The PML seems to have lost its thinking cap — that is if it ever had one on. It has been hopelessly confused about its political strategy allowing the government a free hand to get away with everything. Being in power in Punjab has added to its confusion: it does not want to derail an arrangement it is a direct beneficiary of. The Sharifs’ judgment in handling opposition affairs has been faulty, which is why even as an opposition to a poorly performing government they have not been able to expand their challenge to include other parties.

Other alternatives are inchoate and incoherent. Imran Khan’s on-again off-again politics of agitation has not panned out as a force of change. He stands out as an opposition leader but his celebrity stands in the way of cobbling together a broad-based alliance that could systematically express national frustrations and provide hope. For now he seems happy playing the alone-against-Rome character, glorious but ineffective. This makes the field of opposition politics rather barren — a unique setting considering how fertile the government’s ineptitude is.

Vaulting over all these crises is the widespread fear of an economic meltdown. So far the country has defied the basic law of economic gravity that borrowed money runs out fast, but the system is teetering on the brink.

The chaos in economic planning is compounded by a complete absence of any home-grown strategy to stabilise the microeconomic and macroeconomic fronts. With foreign aid drying up, the government spending way beyond its earnings and lawlessnesss driving capital out, there is a real chance of the economy sputtering to a complete halt. The social consequences of that are too obvious to require elaboration. Already graphs indicating money-driven crime — kidnapping for ransom, armed burglaries, car theft, murders for property etc — have exceeded all previous records.

If the economy does not turn the corner, urban centres might become the hubs of desperate gangs ready to disrupt life in affluent neighbourhoods.
Gated streets and armies of private security guards that are a common sight in even moderately upscale areas these days point to this eventuality.

However, even more worrying than these crises is that no one in the seat of power is willing to admit that they exist in a full-blown form. Such talk is dismissed as bunkum. That is the real problem — and the mother of all crises.