Now that Prime Minister Imran Khan is done with his ‘historic’ speech at the United Nations General Assembly, he is back to the problem of governing Pakistan.
That problem is becoming more problematic every day.
In football, the goalie can kick the ball long and high and clear a large part of the field, but the real game is played on the ground. That’s the contest, every inch of the ground, for possession of the ball. It’s sweaty, it’s gritty and it requires stamina, deft manoeuvring and, yes, team coordination.
There are always brief moments when luck either plays to someone’s advantage or just passes him by.
In the run-up to the 2018 elections, Khan repeatedly kicked the ball long and high. Since he was not the government, he could do that. Seeing the ball in flight is an impressive sight. It denotes two things: criticism of those who are dealing with the grime, the sweat and the contest on the ground, and promises of Eden without the serpent’s slithery, manipulative presence.
Khan got his chance in 2018 to translate promises into reality. How has he fared?
Let’s first consider what he offered. The previous governments — Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz — comprised dynastic rule by robbers. They and their nepotistic affiliates looted the country and landed the economy in dire straits. The buzzword was corruption. Bureaucracy was tainted; police were black-and-tan thugs; political compromises had injected poison into the veins of body politic; rules were made and broken at will and arbitrarily; merit was defenestrated and close associates were given sinecures and power.
In short, we were dealing with an arbitrary culture of power.
All this were to change when Khan rose to power.
Except, in real life, there’s invariably a gap between the desirable and the doable, the wishes and is-es.
Structuralists know this.
There’s no tabula rasa. No one begins with a clean slate because the past, for good or bad, impacts the present. There’s no easy way out, there’s no Open Sesame; it’s hard slog.
None, except his starry-eyed audience, expected miracles. Perhaps he could at least set the direction. But to think that there would be such discrepancy, and growing, between promises and performance? The economy continues to be a mess, the team change, notwithstanding. Revenues are falling, rhetoric aside. Growth has deliberately been arrested. Corruption continues and, predictably, rents have increased with the takers citing rupee devaluation and greater risk factor for higher rents.
Nepotism continues with a number of Khan’s close associates exercising power without holding official positions. Bureaucracy, despite noises for reform, happily fields its Sir Humphrey Applebys. Accountability has become the byword for vengeance and political vendetta. Cabinet shuffles and reshuffles — rumour has it that yet another is on the cards — see the same faces continue with different portfolios, as if Joker A who couldn’t do Job X will miraculously perform in Job Y.
Why is this? One reason should be obvious and is less complicated. Khan spent more time kicking the ball long and high than studying the ground and its grime. He could never build a team. Add to this the detritus that was dumped on him because without relics from other parties — yes, the same parties he fulminated against — he could not be where he is. We are told that’s pragmatism. To realise the ideal, we need to sometime do that which might not be savoury. The problem with this argument is that it acknowledges the tyranny of structures but continues to pay homage to ‘change’. The world has seen much misery because of the hell of good intentions.
But there’s another problem, more complicated. There are no good intentions, only organisational and political interests. Since it is now an open secret how this dispensation was crafted, by whom and to what end, we get into the problem of how large-scale bureaucratic organisations think and operate.
Mercifully, there’s a big corpus of literature to inform anyone interested in studying the Phenomenon which subsumes many phenomena within the larger construct.
Political scientist Graham T Allison presented three models in his study of the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of them relates to organisation theory. He was drawing on an earlier work, Organisations, by James March and Herbert Simon. Government actions are not the outcome of individual choices but organisational inputs.
To encapsulate: Organisations factor problems into different parts. This means they deal with them not holistically but non-simultaneously; organisations ‘satisfice’ rather than optimising; they deal with problems using known, standard processes. This limits choices because they deal with uncertainty by making decisions rather than resorting to finding alternatives; these multiple processes are generally not in harmony, and therefore, may not add up to a strategic picture.
It’s about the immediate and the operational rather than about the larger picture. Morton Halperin in his Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (both the earlier and the 2006 editions) discusses how government politics impacts foreign and national security policies.
“Government agencies, departments, and individuals all have certain interests to preserve and promote. Those priorities, and the conflicts they sometimes spark, heavily influence the formulation and implementation of foreign policy [as also any other policy]. A decision that looks like an orchestrated attempt to influence another country may in fact represent a shaky compromise between rival elements within the U.S. government.”
These points are also raised by Scott D Sagan in his paper, “The Perils of Proliferation: Organisation Theory, Deterrence Theory, and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons” for International Security. Sagan argues that “Organisations, by necessity, develop routines to coordinate action among different units: standard operating procedures and organisational rules, not individually reasoned decisions, therefore govern much behaviour.”
They “often accept the first option that is minimally satisfying.” This makes organisations “myopic”, which throws up the problem of “biased searches” because “instead of surveying the entire environment for information, organisation members … [focus] only on specific areas stemming from their past experience, recent training, and current responsibility.”
Suffering from “‘goal displacement’, [organisations] often become fixated on the operational means to the ends and lose focus on the overall objectives”. March and Simon argued that “the world tends to be perceived by the organisation members in terms of the particular concepts that are reflected in the organisation’s vocabulary. The particular categories it employs are reified, and become, for members of the organisation, attributes of the world rather than mere conventions.”
But an even bigger problem is that “complex organisations commonly have multiple conflicting goals and the process by which objectives are chosen and pursued is intensely political. Such a political perspective … [serves] the narrow interests of some units within the organisation, even if the actions appear ‘systematically stupid’ from the leadership’s over- all perspective.” In other words, “Organisations are not simply tools in the hands of higher level authorities, but are groups of self-interested and competitive sub-units and actors”.
This, then, is the landscape in which Khan is operating. The bargain is Faustian. If you get X to help you get the Iron Throne, X demands his pound of flesh. And if X is an organisation with both organisational and political interests, then you get the problem(s) cited above.
That, combined with incompetence of the type we are witnessing in the Punjab and generally, leads to the stasis that is obvious to everyone except the hardcore Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf partisan.
Corollary: dynamism is not about kicking the ball long and high but fighting for it on the ground.
The writer is a former News Editor of
The Friday Times and reluctantly tweets @ejazhaider
That problem is becoming more problematic every day.
In football, the goalie can kick the ball long and high and clear a large part of the field, but the real game is played on the ground. That’s the contest, every inch of the ground, for possession of the ball. It’s sweaty, it’s gritty and it requires stamina, deft manoeuvring and, yes, team coordination.
There are always brief moments when luck either plays to someone’s advantage or just passes him by.
In the run-up to the 2018 elections, Khan repeatedly kicked the ball long and high. Since he was not the government, he could do that. Seeing the ball in flight is an impressive sight. It denotes two things: criticism of those who are dealing with the grime, the sweat and the contest on the ground, and promises of Eden without the serpent’s slithery, manipulative presence.
Khan got his chance in 2018 to translate promises into reality. How has he fared?
Let’s first consider what he offered. The previous governments — Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz — comprised dynastic rule by robbers. They and their nepotistic affiliates looted the country and landed the economy in dire straits. The buzzword was corruption. Bureaucracy was tainted; police were black-and-tan thugs; political compromises had injected poison into the veins of body politic; rules were made and broken at will and arbitrarily; merit was defenestrated and close associates were given sinecures and power.
In short, we were dealing with an arbitrary culture of power.
All this were to change when Khan rose to power.
Except, in real life, there’s invariably a gap between the desirable and the doable, the wishes and is-es.
Structuralists know this.
There’s no tabula rasa. No one begins with a clean slate because the past, for good or bad, impacts the present. There’s no easy way out, there’s no Open Sesame; it’s hard slog.
None, except his starry-eyed audience, expected miracles. Perhaps he could at least set the direction. But to think that there would be such discrepancy, and growing, between promises and performance? The economy continues to be a mess, the team change, notwithstanding. Revenues are falling, rhetoric aside. Growth has deliberately been arrested. Corruption continues and, predictably, rents have increased with the takers citing rupee devaluation and greater risk factor for higher rents.
Nepotism continues with a number of Khan’s close associates exercising power without holding official positions. Bureaucracy, despite noises for reform, happily fields its Sir Humphrey Applebys. Accountability has become the byword for vengeance and political vendetta. Cabinet shuffles and reshuffles — rumour has it that yet another is on the cards — see the same faces continue with different portfolios, as if Joker A who couldn’t do Job X will miraculously perform in Job Y.
Why is this? One reason should be obvious and is less complicated. Khan spent more time kicking the ball long and high than studying the ground and its grime. He could never build a team. Add to this the detritus that was dumped on him because without relics from other parties — yes, the same parties he fulminated against — he could not be where he is. We are told that’s pragmatism. To realise the ideal, we need to sometime do that which might not be savoury. The problem with this argument is that it acknowledges the tyranny of structures but continues to pay homage to ‘change’. The world has seen much misery because of the hell of good intentions.
But there’s another problem, more complicated. There are no good intentions, only organisational and political interests. Since it is now an open secret how this dispensation was crafted, by whom and to what end, we get into the problem of how large-scale bureaucratic organisations think and operate.
Mercifully, there’s a big corpus of literature to inform anyone interested in studying the Phenomenon which subsumes many phenomena within the larger construct.
Political scientist Graham T Allison presented three models in his study of the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of them relates to organisation theory. He was drawing on an earlier work, Organisations, by James March and Herbert Simon. Government actions are not the outcome of individual choices but organisational inputs.
To encapsulate: Organisations factor problems into different parts. This means they deal with them not holistically but non-simultaneously; organisations ‘satisfice’ rather than optimising; they deal with problems using known, standard processes. This limits choices because they deal with uncertainty by making decisions rather than resorting to finding alternatives; these multiple processes are generally not in harmony, and therefore, may not add up to a strategic picture.
It’s about the immediate and the operational rather than about the larger picture. Morton Halperin in his Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (both the earlier and the 2006 editions) discusses how government politics impacts foreign and national security policies.
“Government agencies, departments, and individuals all have certain interests to preserve and promote. Those priorities, and the conflicts they sometimes spark, heavily influence the formulation and implementation of foreign policy [as also any other policy]. A decision that looks like an orchestrated attempt to influence another country may in fact represent a shaky compromise between rival elements within the U.S. government.”
These points are also raised by Scott D Sagan in his paper, “The Perils of Proliferation: Organisation Theory, Deterrence Theory, and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons” for International Security. Sagan argues that “Organisations, by necessity, develop routines to coordinate action among different units: standard operating procedures and organisational rules, not individually reasoned decisions, therefore govern much behaviour.”
They “often accept the first option that is minimally satisfying.” This makes organisations “myopic”, which throws up the problem of “biased searches” because “instead of surveying the entire environment for information, organisation members … [focus] only on specific areas stemming from their past experience, recent training, and current responsibility.”
Suffering from “‘goal displacement’, [organisations] often become fixated on the operational means to the ends and lose focus on the overall objectives”. March and Simon argued that “the world tends to be perceived by the organisation members in terms of the particular concepts that are reflected in the organisation’s vocabulary. The particular categories it employs are reified, and become, for members of the organisation, attributes of the world rather than mere conventions.”
But an even bigger problem is that “complex organisations commonly have multiple conflicting goals and the process by which objectives are chosen and pursued is intensely political. Such a political perspective … [serves] the narrow interests of some units within the organisation, even if the actions appear ‘systematically stupid’ from the leadership’s over- all perspective.” In other words, “Organisations are not simply tools in the hands of higher level authorities, but are groups of self-interested and competitive sub-units and actors”.
This, then, is the landscape in which Khan is operating. The bargain is Faustian. If you get X to help you get the Iron Throne, X demands his pound of flesh. And if X is an organisation with both organisational and political interests, then you get the problem(s) cited above.
That, combined with incompetence of the type we are witnessing in the Punjab and generally, leads to the stasis that is obvious to everyone except the hardcore Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf partisan.
Corollary: dynamism is not about kicking the ball long and high but fighting for it on the ground.
The writer is a former News Editor of
The Friday Times and reluctantly tweets @ejazhaider