Pakistan: A Decade of Ayub

Abstract

Ten years ago, on the night of October 7, Pakistan's unstable parliamentary government was toppled in a bloodless coup d'etat. Since 1958 the country's political fortunes have been largely the product of the will, purposes and imagination of the leader of the October cabal, General-later Field Marshal and President-Mohammad Ayub Khan. For a decade Ayub has seen himself as a stern tutor for a divided and undisciplined people. In his 1967 memoirs he pictured himself as an indigenous populist, intent on both rejecting false westernization and avoiding traditionalist obscuratism. The constitution which he delivered to his people in 1962 is based on the notion that there is no maj ority in the country that could support a coherent program of modernization and that therefore purposive government requires some insulation from the ever-changing whims of parochial factions. Majorities, for Ayub, grow in the modernization process as the result of development; they are not its root support. For almost half of its twenty-one years, Ayub's leadership has given Pakistan relative political stability and a coherent public policy. With unsuspected entrepreneurial boldness and large amounts of foreign aid, Pakistan's developers have earned a grudging world's praise. And after years as a near client state of the United States, Pakistan's foreign policy managers have created an unprecedented posture of friendship and multiple alignment with Washington, Peking and Moscow. For all of these impressive successes, however, Pakistan at the end of Ayub's first decade remains what it was at the beginning: a politically divided, economically poor, and militarily vulnerable state. Since the September War of 1965, Pakistan has been in crisis. The war disorganized the development process, led to the disruption of aid and trade, unhinged the delicate alliance system being evolved with Washington, and brought into the open many latent political forces that had been smothered in the decentralized rural politics of basic democracy. A doubling of defense expenditures coincided with two poor crop years, 1966 and 1967, and reduced foreign assistance. The year 1968 opened with more systemic strains than any Pakistan had faced since the 1958 coup.