Given General Pervez Musharraf’s rising unpopularity, many people want to know when the army high command will ask him to quit and hand over power to the civilians. But few have paused to ask if this is at all possible in the current circumstances. Indeed, the opposite may well be true – that, far from having to watch over his shoulder for possible dissent in the army high command, General Musharraf is so comfortable with the corps commanders and they with him that they jointly do not countenance any reduction in his clout even after he quits as army chief and becomes a civilian president.
General Musharraf has appointed General Ashfaq Kiyani as COAS-designate but has evidently not become a lame duck COAS himself. This is unprecedented. In the first instance, no COAS has ever made such a move. Indeed, the only time a COAS-designate was appointed months ahead of the retirement of his chief was when General Asif Nawaz was nominated as such in April 1991 while COAS General Aslam Beg was still four months from retirement. In the event, this move by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan effectively stopped General Beg from nursing his ambition to take over.
Furthermore, General Musharraf’s insistence that he will quit as army chief after he becomes president even before the general elections are held is significant. If he were weak or tottering, surely he would cling to his uniform instead of voluntarily taking it off. In fact, if he has had the audacity to impose a mini-martial law and flout domestic and world opinion, the only explanation is that the army high command is solidly behind him. This is vouchsafed by his statement that even as a civilian president he expects to retain the support of the Pakistan army. What is the source of his confidence?
One factor may be the personal loyalty of the corps commanders and intelligence chiefs who have been handpicked by him. Another may be the fact that they may look up to him because they are all so junior to him. But this is stressing non-institutional factors in the most institutional body in the country, one that shunts officers out of the decision-making loop the day they are retired. So we should not make too much of these things. A more realistic explanation is that the current army high command, for the first time in history, is deeply apprehensive of the internal -security dangers faced by the Pakistani state rather than the external ones which they have been trained to confront. These include the seizure of large swathes of Pakistani territory by Talibanised elements, insurgency in Balochistan, Al-Qaida inspired Islamist terrorism, simmering jihadism and the presence of American-Coalition troops in Afghanistan. In the first four cases, the attack is against the Pakistan military as the guarantor of the state’s integrity while in the last case the threat is to the state’s sovereignty.
In this unprecedented “failing state” syndrome, the army as state-guarantor is not inclined to brook too many “democratic” or “civilian” solutions in view of two factors: the dismal performance of the civilians in the past, and the certainty of divisive, fractured and ineffectual politics in the future. Hence there is an institutional consensus that the military must remain in the driving seat even as it shows regard for a formal transfer of power to the civilians. It is in this context that the army as an institution seeks a strong presidency presided over by a retired army chief-commando who has played a key role in moulding its “enlightened-moderate vision” for “saving” Pakistan from implosion.
This analysis suggests that attempts to find an “exit strategy” for General Musharraf via an internal military or judicial coup against him in the expectation that it will pave the way to a functioning civilian democracy may not bear immediate fruit. We should not forget that the 1999 coup against Nawaz Sharif was carried out by the army high command and not by General Musharraf. Similarly, General Musharraf’s presidential bid in 2007 may also be at the behest of the military as an institution. This is what General Musharraf may have meant when he said he wanted to “bring the army in so that it could be kept out”, an allusion to the Turkish model but without its overtly secular trimmings and based on “nation-saving” rather than nation-building. And this is why it may no longer be a question of Musharraf minus Sharif or Musharraf plus Bhutto. In the current situation, this translates into meaning that the military wants to retreat behind the scenes while propping up Mr Musharraf as a powerful president acting on its (read Pakistan’s) behalf in a civilianized political system.
Is this tenable? Or can the civilians band together and thwart the military? Will a transition to a civil-military partnership suit Pakistan’s immediate purposes or is confrontation between civilians and the military the need of the hour? Is the state failing? Can an unaccountable and strong military save it or should we place our faith in a divided and weak civil-political society? These questions need to be pondered by all players both as tactics and strategy in the short and long term interests of Pakistan.