It's very simple.
Hoodhboy types firstly use the mirage of liberal democracy. History has extremely few examples of parliamentary democracies delivering development to unstable, poor states like Pakistan.
Asia's biggest success stories (China, which has the largest GDP by far, and Singapore, which has the highest GDP per capita) are both illiberal. China is a one-party state that does not implement political equality and egalitarianism. It is the economic, tech, education leader of Asia and may soon surpass the US in key R&D, if it hasn't already. Singapore was authoritarian and Lee Kuan Yew, the Cambridge-education visionary, knew that meritocracy was the real key to success, not liberal democracy. He hugely curtailed the rights and privileges of opposition politicians, throwing many in jail on flimsy charges and not allowing serious criticism. The result: Singapore, despite being poor, small, and lacking any meaningful natural resources, has a higher GDP per capita today than its colonial master, Britain.
Crucially, the Western states have had a set of very specific circumstances since WWII that have allowed the flourishing of the principles that Hoodhboy-types want. They built themselves up through extractive wealth from the colonies and slave labor, are geographically blessed, and are part of defense pacts like the NATO bloc --- women and black people couldn't even vote in the US for the first few hundred years of its history! Their neighbors are generally friendly and they have achieved basic levels of education, healthcare, etc., for their people. In short, they have a surplus of power and security that allows liberal democracy to work as intended. There are prerequisites to things like totally free speech and individual liberty. Developing nations have not achieved them.
Adrian Woolbridge, an Oxford historian and editor of The Economist, also points to the fact that it is NOT the presence of a strong democracy or parliamentary representation, etc., that guarantees development, growth, and progress. It is the presence of meritocracy.
Finally, Hoodhboy types are wholly ignorant of genuine security threats. Make peace with India sounds like a great utopian dream, but India is ruled by a rabid supremacist ideology and they will continue to kill your people as the deterrence deficit increases. Peace is achieved through strength, deterrence, and denial. Without deterrence, as every single realist international relations thinker will tell you, there can be no stability and therefore peace. Especially when there's an asymmetry in power dynamics, like we have with India, deterrence MUST take hold at ALL levels of the threat escalation ladder (e.g., from proxy warfare at the low end to MAD at the strategic level). It currently does not. There is no conception of peace without achieving this first. But, of course, libs don't get it.
In short, Hoodhboy's arguments, while parroting some of the pet themes of Western liberalism, are wholly devoid of any merit given Pakistan's context. He should also recall that the West doesn't actually give a SHIT about any one of this. They are happy to sell billions in arms to Saudi Arabia, a repressive monarchy with zero democracy, and the CIA has an illustrious history of removing democratically-elected leaders to appoint dictatorial pawns. This is in declassified documents; not vague conspiracy theories. It is also these same liberal democracies who happily cheer the Israeli occupation of Palestine and India's occupation of J&K despite blatant, obvious oppression and violence. The same ones who will attack Iraq for literally no reason, and nobody gets punished for it. The same ones who use black sites around the world to torture prisoners, many of whom were held with no evidence! And then they lecture us. And they convince libtards that this system can deliver development to a country like ours? It cannot.
Western concepts of human rights are weaponized and used as tools of control, not genuine demands. This is why the democratic West never invades Saudi Arabia to 'free the people' and give them democracy, nor does it free the Palestinians from a UNSC-recognized occupation that the Human Rights Watch/Amnesty essentially calls an apartheid. Both get lavish US weaponry. Finally, the US has less democracy than Pakistan (even constitutionally): no member of the cabinet (minister equivalent, if you will) needs to be elected. The US President is free to appoint technocrats and competent people to head each institution. In Pakistan, they need to be MNAs. How can this system work when most MNAs have zero competence to run anything and are just populist clowns? Finally, much of US policy is made by unelected power elites, like the NSC staff. These are some of the biggest nat sec and foreign policy decisions, and no elected member is involved with them.
If you are still unconvinced, we can agree to disagree
Much better essayists than I have totally dismantled the myth of liberal democracy in some of the world's top publications:
“The Liberal Order Is the Incubator for Authoritarianism”: A Conversation with Pankaj Mishra | Los Angeles Review of Books
Francis Wade speaks to Pankaj Mishra about how the discourse of liberalism and human rights is fatally infected with imperialist histories.lareviewofbooks.org
The Disappearance of the Spiritual Thinker - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
How can Western intellectuals have so much blood on their hands? Pankaj Mishra blames an ideologically driven faith in our ability to control history.tricycle.org
You Can Only See Liberalism From the Bottom
Why Pankaj Mishra sees the ideology’s limits more clearly than its most powerful fans.foreignpolicy.com
The Liberal Establishment Is ‘a Stranger to Self-Examination’
A conversation with Pankaj Mishra about Biden’s closer-than-expected victory, the sterile state of mainstream intellectual culture, and his new book Bland Fanatics.www.thenation.com
Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past
The essays in “Bland Fanatics” trace today’s crises to a long history of violent colonial oppression.newrepublic.com
Bland Fanatics by Pankaj Mishra review – 'Anglo-American delusions'
Versus Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson ... a set of essays from a writer who excels at calling out intellectual vapidities but now needs to ask new questionswww.theguardian.com
@SQ8 @SaadH @313ghazi @Bravo6ix
Unfortunately, I don't have enough energy and time to answer your long post.
Yes, dictators like Stalin and Mao also brought a lot of progress at cost of human rights. But this is not right.
And it is unfair to call that all democratic countries looted in order to prosper.
We also have the example of Japan and Germany and South Korea who didn't loot any country, but followed the Secular Democratic system, and still got huge progress.
Dictatorship in China will become a problem for whole world one day. Singapore never allowed others to get citizenship off Singapore.
Heck, even Modi is on way to bring development and progress to India, nevertheless, at cost of worsening condition of Muslim community and getting full control of Indian held Kashmir.
And the last point is, the objections by the writer upon Imran Khan had nothing to do with all this.
