Faustian Bargains

By William B Milam, "ANALYSIS: Mixed signals again?" - Daily Times - Lahore, Pakistan
Wednesday, March 4, 2009

The so-called “peace deals” that have been tried in the tribal areas have been serious flops. One reason, I suspect, though perhaps not the only one, is that the insurgents in FATA are “Leninist” by nature.

Will the real Pakistan please stand up? I was about to devote my Daily Times space this week to the celebrated and controversial “peace” deal in Swat.

I consider this deal, and all the recent similar deals, as simply another in a very long line of Faustian Bargains with Islamists that Pakistani political leaders have made since the country’s creation over 61 years ago.

These bargains have seemed to me, going back to the Objectives Resolution of 1949 which started it all, to have been motivated by a desire to avoid direct political confrontation with the Islamist political parties, and a generally misplaced confidence that the Islamists can ultimately be controlled by the moderate politicians.

I have written often about this tendency of Pakistani political leaders to retreat to Faustian Bargains because a perusal of Pakistan’s political and social history fails to show that these bargains have ever led to positive results.

It is an unrelenting record of large or small deleterious effects on Pakistani society or politics. But how can I ignore the stories in Sunday’s US newspapers quoting Pakistan Army spokesmen that the Frontier Corps has achieved almost complete victory over the Taliban in Bajaur and Malakand? Which signal is definitive as to the question of how Pakistan will defend against the existential threat that challenges the state?

Is a military solution the real direction of Pakistani policy vis-à-vis the insurgency within its borders, and will the predominant tool of Pakistani counter-insurgency policy to be the fist of the military? Or will Faustian Bargains be the flavour of the future, and incomplete and halfway political solutions be the way that Pakistan tries to beat back those elements dedicated to ensuring its failure?

Neither the military nor the political approach has worked very well so far, or lent much credibility to the various governments’ efforts to halt the progressive erosion of their writ in the areas west of the Indus.

The military efforts to push back against the extremists appear at times to have been pursued in a half-hearted way. Outsiders, until recently, have not had the sense that the military, the civilian government, or the public believes that the existential threat is serious enough to warrant the resource or the human cost that a military solution would entail. Clearly, the political deal that has been struck between the ANP government of the NWFP and the Taliban in Swat follows a hallowed, if not very successful, Pakistani tradition.

The so-called “peace deals” that have been tried in the tribal areas have been serious flops. One reason, I suspect, though perhaps not the only one, is that the insurgents in FATA are “Leninist” by nature. It was Lenin who formulated the political strategy and tactics that extremists everywhere use.

Like the Bolsheviks that Lenin led, the Pakistani insurgents view themselves as an avant-garde of dedicated professional revolutionaries and will use any method to increase their power and erode that of the state. Since revolutionaries are always a small minority, making deals to advance their cause is basic to a Leninist strategy. In other words, they can’t be trusted to hold up their end of any deal.

Yet, historically, it is the “peace deals”, the Faustian Bargains, that have appealed to Pakistani political leaders, civilian or military. When in doubt, try a Faustian Bargain has seemed to be the motto of Pakistani politicians dealing with Islamist opposition of any variety or stripe.

The term comes from the Faust legend, which has been dramatised in drama, most notably by Goethe and Thomas Mann, and in Opera by Gounod. The legend depicts the attempt of Dr Faustus to know the unknowable through a bargain with Satan.

The political definition is less dramatic and usually refers to an unviable political deal between two diametrically opposed political forces for short-term political gain which neither side has any intention of carrying out in the long-term. This practice goes back to the very beginnings of the state of Pakistan when Liaquat Ali Khan, Jinnah’s close collaborator and successor, authored the Objectives Resolution in 1949 to get a deal with the religious parties on the first constitution.

That may seem like a long-term political aim, but the only long-term thing about that constitution was the amount of time it took to get approval — nine years after independence and seven years after the deal. In fact, the 1956 constitution was pretty short-term, lasting only two years before the first army takeover.

But Faustian Bargains have been tried occasionally in a broader context, as ways to build a stronger central government. Though this would probably fall into the category of an unforeseen consequence, attempts to use religion in this way could have led to a more democratic society.

Ayub Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leaders with more ambitious imaginations, tried Faustian Bargains of a more systemic nature to achieve what really would have been radical departures from the religious-centred political systems of Pakistan’s early days. Both leaders wanted to break the power of religious leaders, mainly the Sufi Pirs, over their followers, the mass of Pakistani citizens, and thus increase the ability of the government to communicate directly with the people.

Ayub tried to use the Pirs as middlemen to the government, mediating in a sense between the government and the people instead of between God and the people. Bhutto tried to connect the government to the Sufi Shrines, in other words to eliminate the Pirs as the middlemen between him and the people.

The Faustian Bargain that Ayub and Bhutto made was to identify themselves and their parties with Islam. Their aim was to use Islam for their political objectives and keep politically active religious leaders out of politics.

Using Islam, the Sufi Pirs, and their shrines was a way to prove their Islamic credentials and, they thought, the cachet to bring down the Sufi Pirs. But they could not do what was really necessary: remove the Pirs’ religious authority and still retain those Islamic credentials. And the Pirs’ power of mediation could not be removed as long as they retained their religious authority.

Bhutto, of course, is responsible for a series of Faustian Bargains that may have tipped the scales toward the country’s slide since then away from Jinnah’s vision of a homeland for Muslims and other South Asian minorities and toward an Islamic state.

In the struggle to put together the 1973 Constitution, he and the PPP gave in to several Islamist demands, including that the offices of president and vice president could only be held by Muslims (one of the criteria of an Islamic state). During the Bhutto period, he and the PPP also yielded on the Islamist pressure to declare the Ahmadiyya sect non-Muslim, and to enact prohibition to try to buy their support.

No need to go further into the history of Faustian Bargains between Pakistan’s political leaders and Islamists and Islamic religious parties. It is basically a story of continued drift toward an Islamic state, a long-range objective that the Islamists have clearly had in mind since 1940.

It is a story of single-mindedness slowly eclipsing politicians who seem, sometimes, not to have based their governing philosophies on bedrock principles, and are willing to compromise almost on anything to achieve important, if short-term, political objectives. (Would Pakistan have been any different if Liaquat Ali Khan had refused to compromise on Jinnah’s vision of the Pakistani nation?)

Compromise is one of the foundations of a democratic system, but all the players must believe in it and practice it. When there is a force that does not, democracy can be perverted, viz. Germany in the 1930s.

William B Milam is a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington and a former US Ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh.