The Term Deep State Is A Cynical Ploy To Blame Something Sinister For One’s Own Failures
By Nadeem F. Paracha
15 Nov 2020
A friend,
settled in the US, recently quipped that never has he heard so many Pakistanis
(in the US) use the word ‘deep state’ as much as they have been doing since the
recently concluded US presidential elections. The elections were won by the
Democratic Party nominee John Biden. My friend clarified that the mentioned
term was being used mostly by those Pakistani-Americans who actually voted for
Trump.
Illustration by Abro
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Even though
exit polls published by the New York Times show that a majority of Asians had
cast their vote for Biden (63 percent), up to 31 percent of them voted for Trump.
According to my friend, a majority of these included Pakistanis who believed
Trump was good for the current coalition government in Pakistan being led by PM
Imran Khan’s centre-right PTI.
The
opposition parties in Pakistan have increasingly insisted that certain state
institutions installed Khan ‘through an engineered election’ in 2018, and was
using him as a ‘puppet.’
Read: Nawaz
accuses security establishment of orchestrating his ouster, bringing Imran to
power
Pakistan
has had a history of state institutions influencing political outcomes in the
country, sometimes through direct interventions and sometimes by influencing
the outcome of elections. This is why my friend was sounding sarcastic, because
he added that not once did he hear the term deep state from American-Pakistanis
(who voted for Trump) during discussions on the current political arrangement
in Pakistan. The term deep state, now being aired so frequently by Trump
supporters, was proliferated by the defeated president himself, who is accusing
the ‘American deep state’ of engineering his election defeat.
So far
Trump has provided no evidence whatsoever of this and is largely sounding like
an archetypal conspiracy theorist. The difference between the US and Pakistan
in this context is the fact that there is now enough evidence in the latter
country to build a substantiated history of the state’s overt involvement in
influencing political matters outside of its constitutional obligations. So
what really is deep state?
In an April
10, 2017 essay for JSTOR Daily, the scholar Matthew Wills writes that the term
is a translation of the Turkish phrase, derin devlet. In February 10, 2010,
author and academic Ryan Gingeras writes in the same online publication that
deep state generally refers to a kind of a parallel system of government in
which unofficial or unacknowledged individuals play important roles in
implementing state policy. According to Gingeras the idea of a deep state can
be traced to the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire.
Gingeras
writes that clandestine forces were recruited from paramilitary and criminal
elements by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the party that ousted
the Ottomans in 1923. Across much of the 20th century, opponents of the CUP
claimed that the party had established a clandestine network of military
officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed anyone thought
to pose a threat to the secular order established in Turkey by Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk.
The term
deep state means a very different thing in countries such as Pakistan. But when
President Donald Trump uses it in the context of the US, he often does it as a
ploy to deflect attention from his own failures
Dexter
Filkins in a March 2012 article for The New Yorker writes that the former PM of
Turkey (now president), Recep Erdogan, was extremely nervous when he was first
elected as PM in 2003, because he believed that since he was a candidate of an
(albeit ‘moderate’) Islamic party, Turkey’s ‘deep state’ would never allow him
to rule. But no such thing happened. His party has continued to win elections
since the early 2000s and the only coup attempt that his government faced in
2016, according to Erdogan’s own admission, was mounted by a faction of the
military influenced by a clandestine Islamic group.
There is
nothing secretive about how, after 1923, the Turkish military continued to
directly and indirectly interfere in Turkish politics, and the country’s
judiciary and bureaucracy were committed to secure Kamal’s secular Turkish
republic. For this military rule, military-backed candidates, and
constitutional courts were used. But there were no hidden agendas, as such,
even though men such as Erdogan believed that shadowy forces were at work and
would topple him. Interestingly, all talk of deep state vanished from his
rhetoric once he consolidated his power.
So what
does this imply? In many countries, certain powerful state institutions do
interfere in political processes, but increasingly, it’s being done rather
unabashedly. It was always justified as a ‘necessary step taken to curtail
political chaos’, but now the interfering state institutions use social and
electronic media to generate support for its actions in this regard. Again,
there is nothing clandestine about all this. There has always been ‘a state
within a state’ in most modern nation-states.
Recently,
the Pakistani opposition leader Nawaz Sharif used the phrase ‘state above the
state.’ This is probably because he knows that the knowledge of Pakistan having
a state within a state is now common, and he would be saying nothing new. So he
wanted to point towards a much deeper malaise. According to his narrative, the
state within the state, which is not quite hidden anymore, is now facing a
challenge from within.
But what
about the US? Does it have a deep state that, as Trump believes, helped Biden
hijack the 2020 election? In the January 27, 2020 edition of the Business
Insider, the American academic Rebecca Gordon writes that the idea of a
sinister deep state in the US, popularised by Trump across his presidency, is
somewhat different than how it is understood in most other countries. According
to Gordon, “rather than referring to a parallel system of government operating
outside official channels, for Trump the deep state is the government.”
For Trump,
any state or government institution which stalls any of his orders, is working
for a deep state. To him elements within America’s domestic and international
intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and CIA, were also working for the deep
state. In November 2019, the former deputy director of the CIA, John
McLaughlin, was amused about Trump’s constant usage of the phrase. In a radio
interview McLaughlin said, “There is no ‘deep state.’ What people think of as
the ‘deep state’ is just the American civil service, social security, the
people who fix the roads, health and human services.”
In his 2016
book, "The Deep State", the American author and a former Republican
US Congressional aide Mike Lofgren wrote that the deep state was not some
secret, conspiratorial cabal. It is a state within a state that is hiding in
plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.
As I argued
earlier, there is really nothing clandestine about what is understood as deep
state. Its actions are in the open because it wants to impose the fact that it
will secure its interests in a political arrangement. Governments negotiate a
space for themselves with the state as long as that space is not overtly
violated by state institutions in an unconstitutional manner. If and when it
is, the government has constitutional tools to push the state back as much as
it can, or just give in and get on the same page just to survive. This is
common in most countries.
But what if
the government starts to see its own elements in league with the so-called deep
state, as Trump saw it? I’m afraid this is then nothing more than either a
delusion, or simply a cynical ploy to blame something sinister, intangible and
largely imaginary, for one’s own failures.
Original Headline: DEMONS OF THE DEEP STATE
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan