How to hold a grand national dialogue
Opinion
The writer is an analyst and commentator.
A grand national dialogue is an urgent imperative because the institutional arrangements designed to serve the people of Pakistan have now become so heavily burdened with the animus of individual and group interests that they are no longer working.
Parliament’s functioning is compromised, to say the least. The judiciary’s hard-won independence and stature has been undermined by scandal and recriminations. The executive can tweet, but it struggles to get things done. The bureaucracy (as an institutional mechanism) is almost completely incapable of operating outside of the ‘rules of business’ that protect individual and occupational group interests at the expense of the Pakistani people. Most worryingly of all, the military, one that has secured peace for this country after more than a decade-long conflict with violent extremists, is seen as politically partisan.