GENERAL PERVEZ MUSHARRAF HAS two problems on his hands. He would like to think that they are not related. And he is hoping he can solve them any old way he likes. But he is mistaken on both counts. The two problems are organically related, they have the potential to uproot him from power and they can destabilise Pakistan immeasurably.
Problem #1 is the Legal Framework Order. It has come to haunt General Musharraf. But this is not what he anticipated. Indeed, when he unfurled the LFO in August 2002 he was asked what he would do if the next parliament midwifed by him refused to accept it. His curt answer was: “Either I will stay or parliament will stay”.
Clearly, that option is a non-starter in the current circumstances. If General Musharraf sacks parliament, he will be admitting that his system was seriously flawed in the first place. He might also provoke a destabilising backlash on the streets triggered by the MMA-PPP-PML-N combined opposition that could adversely impact his pet economic reforms as well as raise serious international concerns about the longer-term stability of Pakistan. It is an option General Musharraf should not consider because it would undermine his credibility on all fronts and make him dispensable from many points of interest in time to come.
Problem #2 is India. He still cannot get a handle on it. In 1999 he staged Kargil and knocked out the peace summit in Lahore earlier. Then in 2000 he set preconditions for talks with India: talk about the core issue of Kashmir or no talks. He said much the same thing at Agra in early 2001 and was nonplussed when the Indians sprang a pre-condition of their own: stop cross border “terrorism” or no talks.
The dialogue was then abandoned because cross-border infiltration from Pakistan based on the jihadis was an element of state policy aimed at dragging India to the negotiating table to discuss and resolve the core issue of Kashmir to Pakistan’s maximum satisfaction. There was thus no readiness to consider putting a lid on the jihad before sitting down at the table to discuss the “core issue” of Kashmir, let alone all other issues including Kashmir, which is a different framework altogether.
Then came 9/11. It was required of Pakistan that a lid be put on the pro-Taliban, pro-Al-Qaeda elements who were also anti-India. Therefore problems arose for General Musharraf’s India policy when these same anti-India jihadis were told to lie low vis a vis Kashmir. However, like the Taliban, they were autonomous, they had agendas of their own and they refused to obey him. To prove this point, they created problems for the general by attacking civilian targets in Srinagar in October 2001 and then again in New Delhi in December. This prompted India to mobilise troops and threaten war. But Washington intervened and prompted General Musharraf in January 2002 to promise to gag the jihadis and stop “the export of terrorism” from Pakistan.
However, the attempt was short-lived. India refused to de-escalate pending further evidence of Pakistani goodwill and determined to go ahead with elections in Kashmir. Alarmed at the possibility of becoming irrelevant, the jihadi tap was turned on again in the summer in order to thwart New Delhi’s purpose. But the elections were relatively successful and India was emboldened to shrug off Pakistani provocations. It also realised that its policy of physically threatening Pakistan to comply had begun to yield diminishing returns. So it demobilised its troops from the border in October 2002.
General Musharraf could not have asked for a more opportune reprieve. He was in the middle of organising the elections in Pakistan and he needed a free hand to “fix” them, without having to worry about any Indian adventures on his flanks. Accordingly, he saw the opportunity to defuse the Indian threat by stressing his repeated offer of talks “anywhere, anytime”. But the Indians anticipated the unfurling of America’s pre-emptive doctrine of intervention in 2003. And they seized it to try and link “Pakistani sponsored terrorism” with the military right to strike against it.
General Musharraf’s response has been two-fold following the war in Iraq: he has continued to spar with the Indians, verbal threat for verbal threat and missile test for missile test. But he has now upped his earlier offer of conditional, core-Kashmir related talks “anywhere, anytime” to “a composite dialogue, anywhere, anytime, unconditionally”. This is music to the ears of the international community. The move has pressurised New Delhi into trying to formulate an appropriate response so that it doesn’t look like the warmonger and spoiler in the region. Hence Mr Vajpayee’s rather ambiguous “hand of friendship” offer last week to General Musharraf.
Under the circumstances, General Musharraf, the Pakistan army, the institutions of the state of Pakistan and the elements of its civil society have now arrived at a historic crossroads. If, as General Musharraf has indicated, he were to embark on an unconditional and composite dialogue with Mr Vajpayee without focussing on the core Kashmir dispute, he would, in effect, be reversing a ten-year establishment policy that has stressed the primacy of the Kashmir dispute in any dialogue with India. But more significantly, if General Musharraf were indeed sincere and serious in about-turning Kashmir policy like Taliban policy and putting “Pakistan-first”, rather than just buying time tactically and risking the wrath of the international community strategically in time to come, one fundamental question would arise: how would he expect to sell such a policy to the jihadis, the religious parties and neo-conservatives with whom his army establishment has made common cause since the time of General Zia ul Haq against the more liberal and/or “peace-with-India” parties like the PPP, PML-N, ANP, etc? Will these right-wing groups and parties calmly fold up and go back into the bottle on the orders of General Musharraf? Or will they assert their autonomous agendas in and out of parliament and target him as “enemy #1”?
This challenge brings General Musharraf squarely back to the beginning. In order to take a firm grip of, and exploit, the peace and democracy dividend at home and abroad as required in the new global order, he has now got to abandon the establishment’s alliance with the neo-conservative and religious forces in the country because they threaten domestic upheaval and regional stability. But such a course of action also requires that he build an establishment alliance with the liberal and secular parties that have been left out in the cold since the 1980s.
It is at this point of reckoning that the two problems faced by General Musharraf today begin to critically interact. If he decides to enforce the unadulterated LFO by sacking or suspending parliament, he will alienate not just the resurgent MMA but also the PPP and the other non-religious parties and compel them to join hands with his real and new-institutional adversaries. But that will destabilise him not just at home but also externally since it will preclude an alliance with the non-religious parties in building relations with the West and selling peace with India. On the other hand, if he is still keen on wooing the religious parties and doing a deal with them on the LFO, he will also have to do business with them on the domestic and external fronts to the exclusion of the liberal, mainstream parties, which will make it impossible for him to normalise with India and do business with the West.
The time has therefore come for General Musharraf to overcome his personal prejudices against the PPP in particular and the PML-N and ANP in general, and start building an establishment-institutional alliance with them to the exclusion of the MMA and the jihadis. This is not the time to try and drive a wedge within the MMA and play games with them. This is the time to pry the PPP and PML-N apart from the MMA and do a deal with them that shunts the MMA into the cold. Indeed, only the PPP and the mainstream parties can put the genie of the MMA back in the bottle by dealing with it politically and reclaiming the electoral space usurped by it.
Therefore the answer to the developing crisis does not lie in choosing between parliament and General Musharraf. If parliament goes, instability will follow and General Musharraf won’t last long. But if instability leads to the ouster of General Musharraf, parliament will surely go with him. In either case, Pakistan will be the loser. The answer is that both General Musharraf and this parliament have to stay. This can happen only if General Musharraf is persuaded of the necessity of legitimising a new direction for Pakistan at home and abroad from this very parliament on the basis of a new configuration and alliance of democratic and mainstream forces in and out of parliament. The tail of our foreign policy has wagged the dog of our domestic policy for too long. It is time to put things in their natural order.
General Musharraf’s road map is cut out for him. He should cement an alliance with the mainstream parties, bring them into government, and get them to muster a constitutional amendment in parliament legalising a “package-deal LFO” which gives him a secure and legitimate civilian presidential term and allows him to eventually hand-pick a new army chief who shares the new vision.
That is the only way out. All other routes lead to dead ends for General Musharraf personally, the army institutionally and Pakistan regionally and globally.