The Friday Times: Najam Sethi’s Editorial
President Asif Zardari is working overtime to stitch up his alliances so that his government can withstand any conspiracy, singly or in cahoots with one another, by the army or judiciary or PMLN or PTI to dethrone the PPP. Maulana Fazal ur Rahman’s JUI is being appropriately appeased in the Senate and National Assembly, ditto Altaf Hussain’s MQM by amendments in the Local Bodies system in Karachi and Hyderabad, the Balochistan government by new packages of goodies and the ANP by dragging FATA into the domain of the political parties. Mr Zardari is also playing the Seraiki card to woo linguistic sentiment and political ambitions in southern Punjab in order to offset the loss of Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a key political player in the region. Rather cunningly, too, via Hussain Haqqani, his sharp Ambassador in Washington, Mr Zardari is leveraging with the US by letting it negotiate with GHQ over the net worth of the strategic or transactional dimensions of the US-Pak relationship whereby each actor is venting its anger, alienation and frustration directly and bluntly with the other.
On the other side of the equation, Mr Imran Khan is feverishly trying to assemble a party organization that can sink roots and compete effectively with the PPP and PMLN in the next elections. His strategy is dependent on getting the army and judiciary to throw out the PPP, prop up a caretaker government that can knock out the PPP-PMLN leadership via a new NAB and Chief Election Commissioner as well as take the hard and unpopular economic decisions that are required to put Pakistan on the rails again. Once the decks are swept by an unrepresentative regime that doesn’t have to worry about what the masses are saying, an election can be called to enable the PTI to romp home in style.
Naturally, Mr Nawaz Sharif isn’t sitting idly by. He wants an early election to stop the PPP from sweeping the Senate elections in March 2012 and the PTI from getting time and space in which to get its act together and snatch a critical slice of the PMLN vote bank. He wants the judiciary to challenge the PPP and PMLQ and erode their credibility but is totally opposed to any covert or overt alliance between the judiciary and army for regime change as demanded by Imran Khan because he fears it could widen the net to trap him too. Barring a handful, he is also actively wooing all those Leaguers who either strayed or who were excluded from the PMLN fold during the Musharraf years. This includes the Like Minded Group and doesn’t exclude the Clean Tareen Group.
Meanwhile, the superior judiciary and army are honing their own agendas. The judiciary is constantly trying to compel the executive to do its bidding so that it can enlarge the scope of its writ and strike when the iron is hot. GHQ is biding its time because it is unsure of how the deteriorating US-Pak matrix might trigger domestic convulsions and compel the military to either seize the domestic initiative in an upfront manner or scurry behind the coattails of the civilian regime.
Each anti-PPP political player is hoping that something, anything, might precipitate a situation that leads to regime change at a time that suits its interests and ambitions. A single spark – power shortages, inflation, natural calamity, assassination, institutional gridlock or confrontation – could light a prairie fire of discontent. More probably, an outrageous unilateral interventionist act by the US – like the OBL Abbottabad raid or boots on ground in Waziristan – would provoke a media driven wave of revulsion and anger against the US and also, more pointedly, against the Zardari regime for its abject helplessness. The sentiment that would sweep the country would compel all the domestic players to scramble and exploit openings for their narrow party political or institutional interests rather than band together and build a national consensus that indirectly bails out the Zardari regime.
If Pakistan proposes, how will the US depose?
The US-Pak relationship is purely transactional now. Washington has linked assistance to the Pakistani military’s “performance” in aid of the US mission in the region. The new yardstick is joint-ops cooperation against Al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network, enhancement of drone strikes and abolition of restrictions on the American civilian, intelligence and military footprint in Pakistan. Most of these conditions are unacceptable to GHQ. With General David Petraeus in charge of the CIA and Leon Panetta at the Pentagon, Congress at its wits end about spending cuts, foreign aid and taxpayers scarce dollars, and President Obama increasingly jumpy about his electoral prospects, matters are bound to flare up between the two erstwhile allies when they try and crank up their mutually antagonistic goals.
The tail has always wagged the dog in Pakistan. Will it be different this time? Will it denote paradigm change in the future or paradigm reinforcement as in the past?