The October 30th air-strike on a madrassah-Taliban training camp in Bajaur in which over 80 persons were killed raises many questions. It also points to the increasingly contradictory and untenable position of General Pervez Musharraf’s policies at home and abroad.
Despite the conflicting and agonized statements of the army spokesman that the operation was conducted entirely by Pakistani forces on the basis of its own intelligence, the truth is different. The Americans monitored the madrassah with their spy planes, provided aerial evidence to the Pakistanis of terrorist training and told them to take out the camp, or they would do it themselves. The Pakistanis were caught on the horns of a dilemma. They were about to sign a peace agreement with tribal bigwigs in the area along the lines of the earlier one in North Waziristan but the tribesmen were clearly double-crossing them as they have done in Waziristan. If the Pakistanis had ignored the American evidence and pressed ahead with a dubious agreement with the Bajaur tribesmen, the Americans would have taken matters into their own hands and bombed the camp anyway. The domestic blowback of that would have been disastrous. It would also have strained the US-Pak relationship and wiped out the “successes” notched up by General Musharraf during his recent trip to the US.
The other way out was to try and coordinate an air strike with the Americans – who have the intelligence and the firepower – but make it look like an exclusive Pakistani army operation that could be defended on the basis of tribal treachery. Unfortunately, however, the Pakistani helicopter gunships arrived on the scene some minutes after the Americans had already bombed out the site and been debited by the tribesmen for it. In the event, the military objective was achieved but the political mission of minimizing the political fallout has been botched.
Tragically, this development was on the cards. The Americans had voiced grave concern about the Waziristan deal which might have protected the Pakistani army from the mischief of pro-Taliban tribesmen but actually enabled them to target NATO forces in Afghanistan with relative impunity. Another such agreement in Bajaur would have greatly annoyed NATO. The course finally adopted by both sides is also not surprising. When General Musharraf was asked at a press conference in Washington last month how he would react in a situation in which the Americans rather than the Pakistanis had the intelligence and the firepower to combat terrorist or Taliban camps in Pakistan’s tribal areas, he could only muster the response that a “joint strategy” would be chalked out but the action on the ground would be conducted exclusively by Pakistani forces. This is exactly what they tried to do last Monday. The problem is that General Musharraf is being crushed between the immovable tribesmen and the irresistible Americans.
Much the same dilemma confronts General Musharraf on the political front. He wants to amend the Hudood laws, the reform is important to him because he is seen by “enlightened moderates” at home and abroad as all bluster and no action. But he has failed to achieve his objective because his own PMLQ party is not on board. The PMLQ fears that if the amendment is enacted as desired, the MMA will resign from the assemblies in protest and cash in on the right-wing religious backlash against General Musharraf &Co. In this situation, the PMLQ would become mince meat for the PPP, PMLN and MMA in the next general elections. This would be contrary to the scenario that brought the PMLQ to power in the 2002 elections and enabled it to rule by sharing power with the MMA and blocking out the PPP.
We reiterate: General Musharraf means well but his political policies are downright opportunistic. He is constantly at sea, juggling one interest against another, because his strategic goal is misplaced and untenable. He wants to survive long enough to institutionalize the role of the army in politics. But that is the problem and not the solution. His goal should be to reverse the army’s past policies and withdraw it from politics. It is the army’s national security policies and obsessions that continue to undermine the development of a democratic, moderate and consensus based Pakistani civil society at peace with itself, with its neighbours and with the rest of the world. Now Pakistan’s militarized polity is crumbling under the weight of radical religious revivalism, rabid anti-Westernism, incipient separatism, regional conflagration, political disenfranchisement and popular disgruntlement.
In the run up to the Pakistani and American general elections next year, President Musharraf and President Bush will certainly reap the whirlwind of what they have sown. But while President Bush and the Republicans will bite the dust, America’s democratic system will bail the American people out. What happens in Pakistan under a military man who refuses to build a national consensus under a democratic and accountable system, however, could be altogether different. A free election would spell the end of General Musharraf and the military’s domination while a rigged one would provoke popular hostility at home and abroad and eventually lead to the same result.