General Pervez Musharraf has had a most productive month. He has personally ordered action in the tragic case of a young woman who was killed for the dubious honour of a landed family and ordered action, a gesture that has instilled hope among the downtrodden women of rural Pakistan and been widely lauded at home and abroad. He has nudged the government of prime minister Zafarullah Jamali to announce a unilateral ceasefire along the LoC and in Siachin and built on the Indo-Pak peace impetus by unilaterally giving up the Pakistani position against unconditional over-flight rights to India, thereby ensuring a successful restoration of travel and people to people links between the two countries as well as a relatively friction-free SAARC summit early January. And he has ticked off the Pakistan Cricket Board for stupidly sidelining PTV in the current One Day Cricket Series between Pakistan and New Zealand which had so outraged cricket fans across the country. It’s amazing how one sensible, rational and straight-thinking person in authority can take so many good decisions so naturally and effortlessly when hundreds of lumbering civil servants and thundering politicians continue to make the state and country ungovernable.
But we are not so sanguine about a quick and appropriate resolution of the issues bedeviling political stability. General Musharraf believes that the logjam over the LFO will be resolved soon. This, he claims, will usher in stability. We beg to disagree.
General Musharraf’s confidence is based on certain assumptions: that the MMA wants to do a “live and let live” deal with him; that the only stumbling block in this is the question of when he will give up his powers as army chief; that, under his benign and watchful guidance, the PMLQ and MMA can then jointly steer the country into the promised liberal, moderate and enlightened land; and that while all these great developments are taking place, the PPP and PMLN and their leaders can be safely and rightly relegated to the scrap heap of history. Some of these assumptions are patently unwarranted.
The MMA certainly doesn’t want to live and let live with General Musharraf. He is, in the mullah worldview, “an American agent who is bent on selling out to the enemies of Islam and Pakistan”. Indeed, they would probably distribute sweets and kneel in thanksgiving prayer if something untoward were to happen to General Musharraf. How can he expect to make a good deal with them? The uniform is the only stumbling block in their path. Once it goes, they will be free and ready to contrive a deadlock between parliament and president that triggers a constitutional crisis in which the system that Mr Musharraf would have contrived by cooperating with them will collapse like a house of cards, along with him. Similarly, once power is back in their hands, it is inconceivable that the PMLQ and MMA will jointly strive to achieve the state of “enlightened moderation” and “international assimilation” that is so critical in General Musharraf’s vision of the “new Pakistan”. The members of the MMA are overt fundos while most of the members of the PMLQ are covert fundos. Remember, not one of them last month had the wisdom or courage to table a resolution in parliament against the “honour killing” of women even as General Musharraf was gritting his teeth in anguish over the plight of one wretched woman who fell victim to this accursed practice. Is this assembly of PMLQ and MMA more likely to make war or peace with India? Is this combination of those who opposed the creation of Pakistan and those who have always been handmaidens to dictators likely to lead us to the promised land of stable and thriving democracy?
Finally, we need to ask all of them, including General Musharraf, how they intend to put the genies of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif back in the bottle? For how long can these two be kept out? How can any national political system be stable and boast longevity if it does not include them or their representatives? One cannot hope that the problem will go away by pretending that the two leaders don’t exist.
General Musharraf constantly talks of how the PPP and PMLN always have a “personal”, rather than a national, angle and agenda on everything and how they are taking orders from “outside”. Both objections are facile: if BB and NS could return to Pakistan, the PPP and PMLN would take their orders from the “inside”; and all factors suggest that the PPP would be a natural and stable ally of General Musharraf if his “personal” hostility to BB could be removed from the equation. General Zia, it may be recalled, had one “personal” problem that he couldn’t shake off in ten years. General Musharraf has acquired two.
The MMA has crippled parliament. It is threatening long marches and sit-ins while General Musharraf is all powerful as army chief and president. Imagine what the mullahs will do when he is no longer army chief. For starters, he might be advised to consult former presidents Ishaq Khan and Farooq Leghari and former army chiefs Waheed Kakar and Jehangir Karamat.