Hiding In Plain Sight: The Not-So-Deep Reality Of The Deep State

In 2020, a friend, settled in the US, quipped that never had he heard so many Pakistanis (in the US) use the words “deep state” as much as they had been doing during the November 2020 US presidential elections. The elections were won by the Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden. My friend clarified that the mentioned term was being used mostly by those Pakistani-Americans who voted for Trump.

Even though exit polls published by the New York Times showed that while 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, many of these included Pakistanis who believed Trump was ‘good’ for Imran Khan’s coalition government in Pakistan. On the other hand, throughout Khan’s regime (August 2018 - April 2022), the opposition parties had insisted that certain state institutions had installed Khan through an ‘engineered’ election and were using him as a ‘puppet.’

Pakistan has had a history of state institutions — especially the military, usually in cahoots with the judiciary — that influence 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” mentioned by Pakistani-Americans during discussions on the now erstwhile Imran Khan government in Pakistan. The term “deep state,” that is still often aired by Trump supporters, was proliferated by the defeated president himself, who was accusing the ‘American deep state’ of engineering his election defeat.

Of course, being the archetypal populist, Trump provided no evidence whatsoever of this, and was largely sounding like a conspiracy theorist. The difference between the US and Pakistan in this context is the fact that there is now enough evidence in Pakistan to build a well-substantiated history of certain non-electoral institutions of the state and their overt involvement in influencing political matters outside of their constitutional obligations. But interestingly, after the military establishment decided to distance itself from a fumbling regime headed by Khan who seemed to lack any political self-awareness, his supporters have come out on social media to accuse the military of betrayal.

While a majority of Asians had cast their vote for Biden (63%), up to 31% of them voted for Trump. According to my friend, many of these included Pakistanis who believed Trump was ‘good’ for Imran Khan’s coalition government in Pakistan

They have also begun to use the term deep state (for the military), even though for years they had praised the same military, claiming it was patriotic and entirely lovable. During Khan’s tenure as PM, those who dared to criticise the military for interfering in politics were – figuratively speaking – put to the sword. Now the same sword is being wielded against the former patriots and the lovable. There is irony as well as (unintentional) self-parody in all this.

So: what really is deep state? In a 10 April 2017 essay for JSTOR Daily, the scholar Matthew Wills writes that the term is a translation of the Turkish phrase,”derin devlet.” On 10 February 2010, author and academic Ryan Gingeras wrote 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.

For Trump, any state or government institution which stalled any of his orders, was working for a deep state

Gingeras wrote that clandestine forces were recruited from paramilitary groups 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.

Dexter Filkins in a March 2012 article for The New Yorker wrote that the former PM of Turkey (now president), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was extremely nervous when he was first elected as PM in 2003. He believed that since he was a candidate of an (albeit ‘moderate’) Islamist 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 Islamist 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 a 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 is now being done rather unabashedly. It was always justified by the courts and the militaries as being a ‘necessary’ step taken to curtail ‘political chaos.’ But now the interfering state institutions use social and electronic media to generate support for their (political) actions. Again, there is nothing clandestine about all this. There has always been ‘a state within a state’ in most modern nation-states.

In 2020, the then 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 deeper malaise. According to his narrative, the state within the state, which is not quite hidden anymore, is now facing a challenge from within and/or from an above.

This narrative has been usurped by Imran Khan and his party after their government was ousted in April 2022 through a no-confidence vote. Yet, whereas Nawaz – and, to a certain extent, the co-chairperson of the PPP, Asif Zardari – had criticised the military establishment in a more subtle manner, Khan’s crusade against his former mentors and makers has threatened to cross certain well-defined ‘red lines.’

His followers have jumped in. These include those who once swore their undying love for and faith in the military, but are now running Twitter trends that directly attack the institution in general, and its chief in particular. There is an all-round lack of self-awareness within Khan’s party and its supporters, because both Nawaz and Zardari did not go for broke in their criticism, whereas Khan is.

No matter how popular he has become after his ouster, especially among the urban middle-classes, it will be tough for him to resolve the issues that he has compounded between himself and the military. He forgets that decisions taken by the military are not dependent on a single high-ranking individual.

In 2020, the then 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 deeper malaise

The decision to prop up Khan and aid his rise was an institutional decision, and so was the decision to cede ground to the opposition parties so that they could oust him. The military has a group mind. Its presence in Pakistani politics is overt and not as covert as what is often understood as the deep state. In fact, I will briefly demonstrate that the sinister ring given to the term 'deep state' is a political ploy.

Does the US have a deep state that, as Trump believed, helped Biden hijack the 2020 election? In the 27 January 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, 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 stalled any of his orders, was 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 by 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.”

Now, by using the term ‘deep state,’ Khan and his followers are alluding that deep, dark forces are at work to remove him from the political scene

In his 2016 book, The Deep State, the American author and former 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. Its operators mainly act in the light of day. One can now say the same for the military establishment in Pakistan.

Its political manoeuvres hide in plain sight and can be seen in the light of day. Therefore, the military, too, can be affected by a lapse of political self-awareness. This lacking means that one fails to gauge even a semblance of what one’s political actions might trigger. This moment for the military establishment came when, as an institution, it went ahead and, rather overtly, shaped the rise of Khan – when many of his critics were warning that he was a ‘loose cannon.’

Now, by using the term ‘deep state,’ Khan and his followers are alluding that deep, dark forces are at work to remove him from the political scene. As I argued earlier, there is really nothing clandestine about what is understood as a deep state. Its actions are in the open because it wants to impose the fact that it will do anything to 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 they can just give in and get on the same page just to survive. This is common in most developing countries.

But what if the government starts to see some of its own elements in league with the so-called deep state, as Trump saw it? Or when a party that has lost power sees the removal as a conspiracy weaved by the deep state, as Khan does?

I’m afraid this is then nothing more than either a delusion, or a cynical ploy to blame something sinister, intangible and largely imaginary, for one’s own failures.