Informed choice is not a matter that can be delegated to people who are not only not informed but for the most part cannot be informed even if you wanted to because the basic channels for information transmission are denied to them. Most of the electorate is illiterate to begin with and to add insult to injury, meaningful debate concerning the issues is entirely non-existent in the mass media. In the absence of substantial policy choices, it all boils down to names and faces. In every nook and cranny of the country, one comes face to face with huge billboards with the faces of people with names—never mind what they represent or what their accomplishments are.

This is bound to sound terrifically elitist. That is a pity, really. If the mere recognition of the distinction between illiterates and literates is perceived as elitist, things have come to a very sorry pass indeed. The fact is that in India the majority of the people would not be able to reason out whom to vote for and for which reasons. The majority are only capable of recognizing a face if it is associated with a name. It is a Pavlovian response to the stimulus of the Gandhi name in a significant percentage of the population. Which is why grown men and women with real world experience line up behind any Tom (Antonia), Dick (Raul), or Harry (figure this one out yourself) who have as much familiarity with governance as I have of the intimate personal habits of the Ming emperors of China.

The name matters over all else. And not just in India. All around India. A military dictator gets bumped off in one of those run of the mill coups, and his widow becomes the new ruler. She then gets bumped off, and her son gets to be the new boss. Bangladesh—check. Sri Lanka—check. India—check. Pakistan—check.

I do suppose you know where I am heading, don’t you? Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfi, gets hanged by a military dictator. Dictator gets bumped off (airplane crash) and Benazir gets to be the boss for a bit. She steals and mismanages and is replaced by sundry other corrupt politicians. In due course, dictator X takes over. Some more mismanagement and it is time for an election. Name brand enters the race. Bumped off before too long. Faster and heavier action than you see in a one-day cricket match. Scramble to get a new face with the same name. OK, here’s this guy. Name: Bilawal, son of Benazir Bhutto. OK, he’s the new leader of the party that wants to rule the state of Pakistan.

Now, let’s be clear. Pakistan is a third world desperately poor failed state whose hand to mouth existence depends on handouts from the US, China and charity from a gang of Islamic despots with pots of oil wealth. But come on. A 19-year old guy? Surely you are kidding. He has barely mastered the technique of jerking off to girlie magazines and knows as much about matters of state as he does about quantum mechanics.

But then, it is par for the course around here neck of the woods. Au pairs, airline pilots, retarded bureaucrats, rural illiterate housewives, movie actors, gangsters, crooks, scamsters—they all get to play the boss. So what is so astonishing about a 19-year old Oxford undergrad becoming the leader of a party that aims to rule Pakistan? Nothing remarkable at all. The cargo will surely arrive from the US, China, and those fine Arabic states—as long as the right incantations are made about democracy.

One cannot escape the fact that the US is the world’s reigning hegemon. Nothing much of any significance happens around the world is not in some way affected by what the US does. No large nation or a confederation of nations is immune from US influence to some extent, whether it be India, China, or the EU. But when it comes to small impoverished dependent nations, the US is the ultimate dispenser of their destinies. Pakistan is what the US wants it to be, and Pakistan does what the US wants it to do.

For most of its existence as a nation, Pakistan has been a dictatorship. It could not be a democracy because India is a democracy (for whatever it is worth.) Here’s what I mean. India is a large country and for historical and cultural reasons, it took the path of being a democracy. Large democracies are hard for foreign powers to control — unless of course foreign powers are somehow able to install their own agents at the highest levels of political power. Although there have been reports of some Indian leaders being CIA agents, for the large part the Indian leaders are homegrown and are not traitors. Indian leaders may be misguided and ignorant but they are not traitors. Exhibit A in this context is Mr Jawahar Lal Nehru.

Nehru’s ignorance and misapprehension of the world actually plays a very significant role in the story that I am telling. At the time of India’s political independence from colonial rule, Nehru decided that India must be non-aligned. That was a silly idea to begin with but in an amazing display of doublethink aligned India with the USSR. The USSR was militarily powerful but was a socialist state doomed to fail as socialism eventually does. The US was clearly miffed that India was not going to be its client state and being a democracy could not be directly controlled. Pakistan provided the required indirect control that the US sought over India. Not just the US, but China also recognized the utility of Pakistan as an instrument for torturing India.

It is interesting to imagine how it would have turned out if Nehru had not being mesmerized by socialism and non-alignment, and had instead aligned India with the Western powers and market economics. Perhaps India could have been a developed economy. But let’s leave that counterfactual aside for the moment.

Even a small democratic country is hard to control — whether externally or internally — because the democratic political process is sluggish and sticky. Dictatorships, in contrast, are quick in their ability to implement dictates from up on high. Pakistan therefore had to be a dictatorship. As it happened, the military was clearly able and willing to step up to the plate and dictate. The circumstances were right. Culturally, Pakistan was (and still is) a feudal society. The top brass in the military have feudal backgrounds and took easily to the role of controlling the serfs. As long as the military was powerful, the country was under control. Now, it does not require a very powerful military to control a very poor population. Western control could still be imposed through a cooperative dictator with a military armed with rifles and bazookas. What was really needed though was a military powerful enough to pose a challenge to India’s military.

So here’s the story. The US could not have India as an allay because Nehru decided the USSR was the one to follow. The US therefore could not allow India to become developed and powerful. So it needed Pakistan to be the instrument to use against India. Therefore Pakistan had to be dictatorship. The Pakistani military obliged and for its rewards, not only does it rule the country, but it also gets to play with very powerful weapons that the US gives away as aid. Every time Pakistani army is at the brink of defeat in one of its declared 1000-year jihads against India, the US quickly intervenes and saves the Pakistani military butt. Since Sept 11, 2001, the US has given $10 billion or so as aid (all but one billion of which was for weapons.) All that military aid is clearly not meant for use against the Taliban (which are all Pakistan’s children raised through US aid in the first place.) India is the only logical target of the weapons that the Pakistani military acquires.

Based on that model, let me see what I believe is going to happen. Musharraf seems to be losing control. Will he leave? Yes, if the US can find a replacement for him; no, otherwise. The US is thinking. Here’s the NY Times (Nov 15th):

In meetings on Wednesday, officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon huddled to decide what message Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte would deliver to General Musharraf — and perhaps more important, to Pakistan’s generals — when he arrives in Islamabad on Friday.

Administration officials say they still hope that Mr. Negroponte can salvage the fractured arranged marriage between General Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. But in Pakistan, foreign diplomats and aides to both leaders said the chances of a deal between the leaders were evaporating 11 days after General Musharraf declared de facto martial law.

If Negroponte finds a nice pliant military general to replace Musharraf, Musharraf is out. There are other combinations too. If Bhutto and Musharraf as a team are willing to take orders from the US (as Musharraf has done so far, and presumably Bhutto and Sharif did during their tenure), then Musharraf will continue as president till the sham elections in January. Currently he has signaled to his US bosses that he is willing to continue to dance to their tunes by claiming that he will step down as the military chief by December.

The problem is that Musharraf is no longer the one powerful person he was earlier. It is always good to have to deal with one dictator. It gets messy when you have to deal with a coalition of less powerful persons. Still, what is the US to do? It can club together a team consisting of Musharraf, a politician (Bhutto), and one general and see that they are all on the same page in their oath of allegiance to the US. To the common people of Pakistan, there are three A’s that matter: America, Army, and Allah. To the rulers of Pakistan, only one A matters.

America matters to Pakistan because the very existence of Pakistan has been entirely dependent on America. Without the billions in military aid, Pakistan would never have dared to go on its military misadventures against India. Its internal strife would have torn it into smaller states by now. Without the US’s tacit acquiescence, Pakistan would have never been able to acquire nuclear bomb-making technology. Pakistan is the dog that barks courageously at the shackled elephant. It cannot continue its proxy way against India in Kashmir without US support. If the US wanted, it could over a 3-minute call from Washington DC to Islamabad end Pakistan’s involvement in Kashmir. But that is not what the US wants. The US wants that India continue to spend obscene amounts on weapons. It ensure that by arming Pakistan for free. (See my piece “Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games.”)

I am a pacifist. I don’t like violence and dislike all ideologies that are violent and that promote their ideology through death and destruction. Power that flows out of the barrel of a gun is awesome to behold but it is contemptible and inhuman. The more military power the US projects around the world, the more reasonable people hold it in contempt. My love for the US is only second to my love for India. But I have intense dislike for its foreign policies and what that foreign policy does to the poor and the wretched of the world.

I have written before about what the world owes to the US. The US can really be the greatest force for good in the world. But it isn’t. I think it isn’t because it is controlled by the logic of war and the military-industrial complex that controls power in the US. It could invent great things that could make humanity prosper and live decent lives all across the world. But instead, it spends $2 trillion (a number beyond mortal conception) on a needless war in Iraq. Just see this graph — the Cost of War — for getting a perspective on how much that is and what it spends on other things.

In the end, what happens in Pakistan is of vital interest to India. It will never become so destabilized so as to entirely collapse as a state; but it will never actually be anything other than a dictatorship constantly being propped up by the US because that is what the US wants it to be. The names of the generals will change but not the tune to which they dance.

[See also: The Dollar Auction Continues.]