by ASAD RAHIM KHAN
Writing on how to live one’s life, American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘Shallow men believe in luck… strong men believe in cause and effect’. Because empires are built on entitlement, so America never tires of hearing about the strong, silent type. It might also be what endeared Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first despot, to the West. Conservative historian Niall Ferguson somehow got it right: Ayub was the ultimate ally, “his English perfect, his regime secular albeit undemocratic, his commitment to the alliance demonstrated by his willingness to let American U-2s fly from Pakistani airbases”.
Blind to the effects of becoming a vassal for Washington, Pakistani uncles point to those fading photographs — ticker tape parades in New York and horse rides with Jackie Kennedy — as signs of our former glory.
And why not? After losing the Quaid and enduring a decade of slimy civil servants, Pakistanis were starved for a white knight. “He is tall, majestic, and utterly handsome,” reads the Pakistan Annual from 1961. “So good-looking, indeed, that Hollywood could film him with credit from any angle” (the author was Zulfi Bhutto).
This was of its time. Dashing dictators were coddled everywhere in the 1960s, because the Cold War was only ever fought in hot countries. Democracy, on the other hand, was meant for cooler lands. “We are not like the people of the temperate zones,” said Ayub. “We are too hot-blooded and undisciplined to run an orderly parliamentary democracy.” But even so many years later, the field marshal’s legacy is misunderstood — the fact that the ruling PTI would play his visuals at an election rally is a case in point. This requires correction, if only because obscuring our past has meant wasting our present.
Firstly, progress: the Ayub era is dubbed the decade of development, though this was a desperate slogan from 1968, when the regime was already dying. Development was for the idle rich; the majority of Pakistanis suffered an absolute decline in living standards. Per capita consumption of food-grain fell, as did real wages in industry. Foreign aid mutated from grants into loans, and debt servicing as a percentage of foreign exchange shot up from 4 per cent in 1960 to 34pc by 1971.
Some of this might have worked, if Pakistan’s industrial elite wasn’t also so vile. Instead, Ayub’s patronage saw the rise of a rent-seeking cartel class that continues to thrive today in new forms — unproductive vultures in sugar and auto and wheat flour. ‘22 families’ was a cliché in the 1960s; it is a lived nightmare now.
Even Ayub’s inarguable achievements — the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance and the Indus Waters Treaty — were overshadowed by the big-ticket proposals he never attempted seriously: land reform and population planning.
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