Two recent tweets by veteran journalists captured a mood of deep disillusionment in Pakistan’s media circles. Nusrat Javeed wrote that after “50 years of sacrificing everything for journalism,” chasing truths and exposing lies, he had become “utterly disillusioned with every single politician” because “they’re all the same.” Absar Alam responded that after “35 years of sacrificing everything for journalism,” he had reached the same conclusion.

I have a great deal of respect for these gentlemen. They have both paid a price for their views, at a time when others in the profession benefited from proximity to power, enjoying the privileges, wealth, and lifestyles that often accompany access to influential circles. Some accumulated substantial assets at home and abroad. Their frustration with politicians is therefore understandable. Pakistan’s political history has repeatedly disappointed those who expected leaders to rise above narrow interests and transform the country.

But the more important question is not why politicians have disappointed. That requires no great insight; history has answered it repeatedly. The real question is why, after decades of covering Pakistan’s politics, so much of the commentariat continues to misunderstand how power actually works.

The answer is uncomfortable: many confused access with understanding. Being close to politicians, generals, judges, and decision-makers does not automatically translate into an understanding of institutions, incentives, or political economy. It requires a lot of serious work, intellectual heavy lifting. Too many analysed politics through personalities rather than systems, through rivalries rather than structures, and through who was winning the latest power struggle rather than why the same patterns kept repeating.

They repeatedly mistook anti-establishment postures for democratic transformation, electoral victories for real progress, and changes in political alliances for changes in the underlying order. Each new actor was presented as the answer. Each eventually became part of the same cycle. The faces changed. The slogans changed. The system endured.

For decades, Pakistan’s political discourse has been a theatre of personalities rather than a serious debate about institutions. We search for saviours instead of studying systems, celebrate access instead of demanding understanding, and reduce complex national failures to the rise and fall of individual leaders.

One politician becomes the embodiment of hope; another becomes the villain responsible for everything that has gone wrong. One is declared the guardian of democracy; another its mortal enemy.

Yet beneath this endless cycle of political worship and political vilification lie the real questions that rarely receive attention: Who controls incentives? Why does the state reward patronage over productivity? Why have institutions remained weak? Why has Pakistan failed to replicate the economic transformation achieved by so many Asian countries?

The consequences are visible. While countries across Asia used the last three decades to expand exports, build human capital, improve governance, and raise living standards, Pakistan remained trapped in repeated cycles of debt, instability, low investment, and elite competition for control of the state.

We spent decades debating who should rule while paying far too little attention to how the country should be governed. For years, I have written about the role of the establishment in Pakistan. In May 1992, I wrote in Newsline magazine about what the failure of democratic forces to provide an agenda of change could lead to:

“Will Pakistan become a battleground for xenophobic ethnicism, religious fundamentalism, and eco-medievalism, or will the secular and democratic forces be able to prevent the explosion that this combustible convergence of forces may cause, if not in 1992, then perhaps in 2001?”

Where I differ sharply from much of the media and commentariat, however, is in their reading of Pakistan’s political class since the 1990s. A convenient myth has taken hold: that if democracy had not been repeatedly interrupted, Pakistan would have been on a fundamentally different........

© The Friday Times