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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

For those people who haven't studied Pakistan extensively, the army has always run things, the politicians are just the thin veneer of pretense at democracy as a public face.

The Army and the military forces in general are the people who really control the country.

Pakistan makes a public show of having a parliamentary democracy with elected MPs and such but it's all a farce.

Doesn't particularly matter whether Bhutto, Zardari, Nawaz Sharif, Imran Khan or anyone else.

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To be fair, they do have "a parliamentary democracy with elected MPs". It's just that those elected MPs have some fairly strict limits on what they are allowed to govern (anything that does not involve the military, which in Pakistan is not a lot).

Of course it doesn't help that the elected MPs have almost exclusively belonged to the same class of robber barons, Imran Khan being one notable exception.

Pakistan actually has a pretty vibrant and critical media, in contrast to (other) military dictatorships. They have a lot of great political satire (that, again, stops short of criticizing the military).

So it stops short of criticizing the actual power? That does seem like it can be better than other countries, but it can only be so much if the actual power is u touchable.

Well from time to time they make it pretty explicit too – like under Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, or Musharraf. About 30-odd of Pakistan's 75 years as an independent country have been explicitly under military dictatorships.

None of their civilian governments have lasted an entire term.

Pretty damning.

That isn't correct since 2008. Two have:

• 2008-13 PPP-led coalition government, which transferred power to the

• 2013-18 PML(N) government, which transferred power to the

• 2018-22 PTI (Khan's party) government, which was ousted in its penultimate year by a vote of no-confidence in the National Assembly.

0. zardari inherits power after his wife's assassination

1. PPP-led coalition government ousted in scandal of zardari's corruption. "mister ten percent", etc

2. nawaz sharif government ousted in scandal of nawaz sharif corruption (maybe that choice of microsoft word fonts in the faked documents for luxury UK real estate was not the best idea ever).

3. people finally "elected" khan

4. khan loses power in parliamentary no confidence vote

none of those are exactly what an outsider would consider to be the normal and orderly transfer of power in an electoral system

Sure, but I am arguing the strictly technical definition of terms completed by and power transferred between civilian governments.

My own opinion: democracy is hardly a boolean value -- these transfers, faulty and flawed as they may be, did legitimize civilian rule in the public eye.

I think the claim that was being made was that no prime minister has completed a term in office.(5 years)

For your first bullet, the prime minister was kicked out after just over 4 years.

For your second bullet, the prime minister was kicked out after just over 4 years.

For the third bullet, Imran Khan didn't even last 4 years.

I am well-aware (I live here!) but that is an entirely different claim, and is indeed unfortunately a higher standard Pakistani politics has not yet met.

Also, Khan made the mistake of signing a weapons deal with russia, I think literally 24 hours before Russia invaded ukraine. Within a week he was pushed out of power despite being wildly popular both domestically and internationally. It's not provable, but sure looks like a Very Popular politician being ousted via fast was regime change and he was being made an example to other leaders looking to make unapproved arms deals. I can't make any claims but if you look closely at what happened, the timing, it does not look great.

Of much more practical and immediate concern is the Pakistani military's long standing and increasingly deep technical cooperation with China.

Khan has a large populist support base but it's not exactly accurate to say he's wildly popular, a huge amount of people from Lahore and Punjab and the power base of elites supporting Nawaz Sharif and his friends are deeply opposed to him. They've spent lots of money on political opposition.

And then there's all the Sindhi Bhutto and PPP supporters who don't like him either. He has maybe 45-50% support.

Speaking as an Indian, Sub continent politics is totally messed up. India realised in the immediate events after Independence. Democracy won't survive if feudalism exists along side. It wasn't even that much of a difficult thing to understand, if you are a bonded labor under a feudal you pretty much do what the feudal says, and given the overall socio-economic situation of such places feudals would win anyway(Only feudals have the influence and money to even fight the elections). Though India abolished absentee landlordism, feudalism nevertheless continues. And even till date significant politics of India runs through political dynasties(former and current feudals).

Add to this religion, every few years there is some popular majoritarian religious trend, often loaded with settling scores with the minorities for some imagined victimhood, some battle some king who belonged to your religion lost 800 years back, these are 'pride' related emotional issues on which masses vote. No one cares about education, or improving general standard of living.

Add to this caste, regional and linguistic reasons.

Democracy is mostly a sham even without fixing, because masses don't vote for their own good. To think of democracy in the sub continent, people vote to hurt others than to help themselves. A vote is mostly a downvote in many ways.

Not just that, he publicly made claims like "the US thinks they can control us and make our decisions for us, but they can't". Just a couple days after that, he started having problems with parliamentary support, that eventually led to him being ousted.

I would argue that it does matter because the will of the masses is an extraordinarily powerful force and provoking them by ousting someone universally loved like Khan (heck I am a huge Khan fan and wish we had politicians like that in the USA!) can cause huge societal waves.

But I do agree with you, having the pleasure to know some upper class Pakistanis, that the military is the basis of the government.

"the army has always run things"

sounds like Turkia but like 40 years ago

And Egypt. And a bunch of countries in Asia.

When you have more guns than money, you get military dictatorship. When you have more money than guns, you get oligarchy.

Sure, but if you have more holy books than guns or money, you get a theocracy.

How's that different for USA? Do you believe Biden has power?

American programs of "war on drugs" and "war on terror" has done a great job of making sure most of their client states are run by beefed up security forces behind a thin veneer of democracy.

The US's involvement in Pakistan is much older and historical than the war on drugs/terror. They were flying U2s out of Peshawar in the 1960s. For a while, Chuck Yeager (yes, that Chuck Yeager) was the US military representative directly to the Pakistani military.

Yes. It doesn't invalidate what I said.

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