It’s been an unexpectedly tumultuous year for Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. The general elections were controversially postponed. General Pervez Musharraf was ousted after nine years. Asif Zardari became a powerful president. Mr Zardari and Nawaz Sharif didn’t come to blows. Despite a long drawn out and powerful lawyers’ movement, the former Chief Justice Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry is still whistling in the dark.
Good news: Democracy has been restored. The media is alive and kicking. Most of the judges are back in the saddle. There are coalition governments at the centre and in the provinces. The federal government has taken ownership of the war on terror from the Pakistan army. It has not galloped headlong into a political confrontation with the PMLN in Punjab. Trade with India has opened up. The ISI’s political wing has been disbanded and some unduly hawkish and controversial generals sent packing. The economy’s bleeding has been plugged. The IMF is back in business with relatively soft conditionalities. Relations between the US administration and the Zardari government are excellent. The US has pledged to give up to US$1.5 billion a year as financial assistance to Pakistan for ten years for help in the war against terror.
Bad news: Most Pakistanis are still reluctant to accept the war against terror as their war and not just America’s war. The writ of the state has seriously eroded in FATA and the tribal areas where the Taliban are rampant. The marriage between the PPP and PMLN has still not been consummated. Relations with India have plummeted to dangerous levels following the Mumbai attack. The ISI is back in the news as the allegedly hidden hand behind Mumbai. The economy is still in the doldrums because foreign investment hasn’t picked up and the rupee has been devalued by about 30 per cent. There are strains between the PPP and PMLN, between the PPP and army, between the PPP and media, between the PPP and lawyers’ movement, and between Washington and the Pak army over doing “more” or less against the Taliban in FATA.
Forecast: Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry will not be restored because he would be Nawaz Sharif’s ally against Mr Zardari in the political battle ahead. The PPP and PMLN will clash in Punjab soon, probably before the Senate elections in March. A fight between the media and the PPP government is also on the cards. The media doesn’t support the government’s war against terror. It disapproves of its relationship with the US and the IMF. It hyped up anti-India war hysteria while the government was trying to cool things down. Worse, the government perceives some powerful media elements as being personally hard on Mr Zardari and soft on Mr Sharif.
The PPP government’s relations with the Pakistan army could be further strained. The khakis think Mr Zardari is suspiciously “soft” on Washington and New Delhi. They too deny any link with the Mumbai carnage through non-state actors. But the PPP government is not so sanguine, especially since the arrest and interrogation of two Lashkar-e-Tayba activists who are reported to be “singing”. Indeed, some PPP-ites actually believe that rogue agency elements have done a Kargil on Mr Zardari after his unilateral opening of trade with India and blithe reversal of Pakistan’s long standing First-Strike position. Certainly, the Mumbai attack has served to refocus attention on the simmering disputes between India and Pakistan, especially Kashmir, and established their link with the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and FATA. First, there is the Pakistan army’s threat to withdraw troops from FATA in the west and shift them to the border with India in the east at a time when the incoming Obama administration in Washington is committed to moving 20,000 extra troops to Afghanistan and is exhorting the Pakistan army to “do more”. Second, the Obama administration’s loud thinking about the need for a high powered regional envoy to resolve the inter-Afghanistan, Pakistan and India disputes has been given a fillip (much to the anger and discomfort of status-quo India) by the post-Mumbai war rhetoric between the two nuclear armed neighbours who are fighting intelligence-agency non-state actor proxy wars in Quetta, Kashmir and Kabul which have thrown a spanner in the American works in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Therefore Pakistan’s political outlook for 2009 is not good. The regional cauldron is going to bubble with deadly great game politics involving a superpower and a regional hegemon. If relations with India deteriorate because of another big terrorist attack, or if American drone attacks increase significantly, the PPP government will be destabilized. Domestically, there will be little or no national consensus among the key stakeholders – media, opposition, army and government – on how to handle the situation. Meanwhile, the Al-Qaeda-Taliban-Jihadi network may be expected to join hands with rogue elements from the agencies to create anarchy and chaos. Political assassinations are on the cards. The economy will hunker down in cowardice. Rising urban middle-class unemployment and falling income-alienation will aggravate an environment of outraged religious nationalism. If Pakistan’s army and PPP government cannot or will not jointly contain and mediate these pressures properly, more than just their corporate or political interests will suffer immeasurably.