Pakistan in Media

Editorial, The News International, Pakistan
Sunday, May 17, 2009
It has been said that Pakistan is impossible to govern, it can only be managed. The situation in Swat, multi-layered and complex, can be seen in management terms and the application of that old but tried and true tool – the SWOT analysis – be brought to bear. SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats is an analytic tool usually used in a business context, but its use has broadened into the social-sector, the military and aspects of governance over the last thirty years. The model is flawed by its inherent subjectivity but it can be a useful indicator of 'the Big Picture.' The Swat valley used to be a successful business. It was run by a family of relatively benevolent feudals who presided over various arms of the business – tourism, politics, religious and cultural affairs – and turned a healthy profit. Today the enterprise lies in ruins, its workers driven out by a group of Luddites who have smashed the machinery of development and prosperity and peaceful coexistence. Turning the business around, back into stability and profitability, will require a finesse rarely seen in either business or governance in Pakistan – difficult but not impossible.

The greatest strength of Swat are its people. They are the human capital, the repository of institutional memory and skill-sets who are currently dispersed, disempowered and demoralized. They represent the largest opportunity that the government has to its hand – and at the same time the greatest threat. The opportunity that the government has is to win the 'hearts and minds' battle, and moreover to win it from a position of weakness. It will not have escaped the notice of the displaced populace that the reason for their displacement is a failure, in large part, of governance. Large populations tend to remember, for generations, who it was that did wrong unto them – think 'colonialism' for instance. But the government hand is strengthened in the short-term by the anger that the populace feels towards the Luddites who smashed the engines that powered their success. This will be a window of opportunity that is only open for as long as the people believe that the government really is committed to righting their many wrongs; and if they close it because the government fails to credibly address at least some of those wrongs then the likelihood of it opening again for a generation is remote. Short-term, the people represent a threat. It will be mitigated if the same calibre of response is made to their needs as was made to the victims of the '05 'quake. Failure is not an option, because to fail hands victory to the Luddites who will then have at their disposal a populace so enfeebled as to be unable to resist them.

And what of the Luddites themselves? The government has in the last two days offered a deal to them – but is it a deal they would want or, indeed, need? For the Luddites the option of laying down their arms may not be attractive, but dying for a cause – is. Despite having overwhelming firepower and numerical superiority the army is being stretched to defeat these wreckers of lives and futures, and even if they physically drive them out the threat represented by their ideas remains strong. Iconoclasts in the system are like a virus, and this is a virus that has learned to make the human-to-human jump.

What of the army itself, for the first time engaged in hard and protracted war-fighting with the Luddites? It has threats and opportunities aplenty to manage, with the biggest threat being not losing but failing to win decisively, and the biggest opportunity being the restoration of morale and dignity to a much-battered institution. The test is probably going to come at Mingora, and it will be a test of political will as well as military competence. The great weakness of the politicians is that they tend to be poor managers, forever bogged down with petty internal disputes and the turf-wars that go with their calling. The management trick that they have to pull off – and they do not have long to do it in, a fortnight, perhaps – is to convert threats to opportunities and find the strength that can only come from the unity that has mostly eluded them down the decades. The Swat SWOT says 'get this wrong and you lose…game set and match'. Get it right and you can win games that are yet to be played.