PAKISTAN: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND POST-2000 DEVELOPMENTS----6

However, it was Bhutto’s resistance to renewed superpower pressure that more probably led to

his downfall, and eventual execution. With a new military partner, General Zia-ul-Haq, in place

by 1977, the efforts to destabilize Afghan neutrality led to the Soviet military invasion in 1979.

The subsequent ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan through American sponsored armed resistance, and its

related induction of an Islamic ‘ideology’ for Pakistan through military fiat and newly arisen

religious ‘fundamentalism’, has made it more problematical for an impoverished people to

normalize their economic and political environment. The price of a freedom with no bloodletting

for eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet republics was paid with over a million dead in Afghanistan,

and with Pakistan awash with drugs, arms and religious militancy, apart from the burden of

sustaining over three million refugees. While Pakistan’s growth rate of around 6% in the 1980s

was the highest in a painfully slow growing south Asian region, much of this was induced by

workers remittances and foreign loans, rather than enhancements in industrial productivity or

any significant diversification away from the focus on cotton textiles.

With the anti-Soviet agenda achieved, the intensity of geo-strategic attention on Pakistan

waned. After Zia’s timely demise in an air crash in 1988, Pakistan returned for the next decade

to civilian governments. None of the four governments in this period, two each of Benazir Bhutto

and Nawaz Sharif, were allowed to complete their tenures, till military rule was again

reestablished in 1999. Coincidentally, the return to a compliant military regime was followed by

another war in Afghanistan two years later. Significantly, from being one of the largest

programmes in the 1980s, United States foreign assistance was virtually eliminated in the

period of civilian democracy in the 1990s. Pakistan even suffered sanctions after it conducted a

nuclear test in response to India’s in 1998.

This period witnessed an economic downturn, in which the growth rate for once went below that

of India, and both fiscal deficits and foreign debt rose to unsustainable levels. Political

uncertainty discouraged investment, while rapid population expansion virtually negated real