Pakistan’s history has been marred by a seemingly endless game of musical chairs between civilian, military and hybrid regimes. All different arrangements of power have remarkably produced similar outcomes. The endless cycle of experimentation with these arrangements of power have only led to familiar cycles of institutional conflict, policy discontinuity and economic crisis. It brings to mind often used definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Perhaps Pakistan’s problem then, is not simply who occupies the chairs, but the game they are all playing.

After nearly eight decades, the recurrence of broadly similar outcomes under different regimes suggest that the problem may lie deeper than the type of regime. Military governments have promised stability and reform. Civilian governments have promised democracy and development. Hybrid arrangements have promised the supposed advantages of both. Yet Pakistan repeatedly returns to political confrontation, institutional interference, policy discontinuity, weak investment, fiscal stress and another search for a new political formula.

Game theory offers another way of understanding this puzzle. Developed in its modern form by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern and later transformed by John Nash, game theory studies situations in which the outcome for one player depends not merely on what that player does, but on what others are expected to do. Its unsettling insight is that rational behaviour by individual actors can produce an outcome that is irrational for everyone collectively.

Pakistan increasingly looks like such a game. Consider its principal players: political parties and their leaders, the military establishment, civil bureaucracy, judiciary and lawyers, media, economic elites and, ultimately, citizens. Each has interests it seeks to protect, risks it tries to avoid and expectations about how the other players will behave. Political parties seek office and survival. Individual politicians worry that losing power could mean not merely opposition but prosecution, exclusion or political extinction. The military seeks national security, institutional autonomy and influence over areas it regards as strategically vital. Bureaucrats value career security and discretion. Judges protect judicial authority and independence. Media organizations need audiences, advertising, access and freedom to operate. Businesses seek profits and predictable rules but may also benefit from protection or preferential access. Citizens want security, prosperity, justice and public services but face enormous difficulties acting collectively.

The critical point is that none of these actors chooses its strategy independently. A political party contemplating institutional restraint must ask whether its opponents will show the same restraint and how may the military establishment react. The military considering withdrawal from politics must ask whether civilian leaders will govern effectively and respect what it regards as vital national security interests. Politicians considering an end to establishment patronage wonder whether their competitors will secretly continue seeking it. A bureaucrat contemplating resistance to political interference must calculate whether doing so will earn protection or an undesirable transfer. A media organization deciding how aggressively to challenge powerful interests must consider whether competitors willing to cooperate will gain access and commercial advantage.

As such, this begins to resemble the famous prisoner’s dilemma. Two players would both benefit from cooperation, but each fears that cooperating while the other defects will leave it worse off. Consequently, both defect and reach an outcome inferior to what cooperation could have produced. Pakistan’s political parties repeatedly face something similar. All major parties would benefit from credible elections, predictable transfers of power and........

© The Friday Times