(TFT Oct 15-21, 1999 Vol-XI No.33 — Editorial)
Saviours?
Two weeks ago, we asked “whether some sort of political change was in the air” and answered that “if change is to come, good or bad, it must originate from the direction of GHQ or the PM’s house”
(TFT Editorial, “Optional leaders or policies?”, September 30th). And that is what happened on the fateful day of October 12. A civilian coup against the military leadership was launched from the PM’s house and thwarted by GHQ in a counter-coup. The story of events leading up to the two coups is worth recapitulating, if only to gauge what lies ahead.
General Pervaiz Musharraf, it may be recalled, was handpicked by Nawaz Sharif as COAS after General Jehangir Karamat was sacked last year for decrying the lack of a consultative process of governance. Then, disregarding criticism, General Musharraf went out of his way to prop up Mr Sharif’s government — from ordering the army to unearth ghost schools and carry out a long overdue census to manning military courts and running WAPDA. He did so because he sincerely believed that his efforts were aimed at enhancing national security and “nation-building”.
But some months ago, following the enforced withdrawal of Pakistani troops from Kargil under American pressure, the chummy relationship between the PM and COAS began to sour. As the Kargil episode increasingly came to called the “Kargil misadventure”, Mr Sharif decided to pass the buck to the army and get General Musharraf to take the rap for it. Indeed, speculation was rife at the time that Mr Sharif’s Intelligence Agencies had bugged conversations between the COAS and CGS and passed on the tapes to New Delhi as “proof” of Mr Sharif’s “innocence” in the matter. Irked, the COAS was compelled to publicly assert that “everybody was on board” re Kargil. Relations between the two deteriorated when the COAS announced that “there would be no unilateral withdrawal from Kargil” even as Mr Sharif was making plans to rush to Washington and surrender unilaterally, an event which led to much demoralisation and anger within the armed forces.
Matters now took an ugly turn. Even as General Musharraf was rushing from pillar to post, exhorting his troops to keep their morale high, Mr Sharif was secretly sowing the seeds of division in the upper echelons of the armed forces. Rumours were floated to suggest that the COAS had not taken his colleagues, including the Air Chief and the Navy Chief as well as several Corps Commanders, into confidence, the idea being to undermine the authority of the COAS and sow dissension within the ranks.
For Mr Sharif, it was a tried and tested strategy — weaken an opponent by creating tensions and misunderstandings between his colleagues and him, isolate him and then destroy him. That was how Mr Sharif had contrived the ouster of the chief justice of the supreme court, Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, in 1997. Now the strategy was swiftly executed once again and at least two corps commanders (General Saleem Haider in Mangla and General Tariq Pervez in Quetta) along with the DG-ISI, General Khawaja Ziauddin, were egged on to flout the authority of the COAS and challenge his views at home and abroad, in private and in public. The stage was set for a coup against the army high command by Mr Sharif which would begin with the sacking of General Musharraf.
But General Musharraf was not blind to goings-on in the PM House. So he moved to protect his flanks and consolidate his home base. General Saleem Haider was transferred from a command position at Mangla to a staff position at GHQ on September 20 and General Tauqir Zia, a loyalist, appointed to head the critical corps. Then, on October 10th, General Tariq Pervez was sacked by the COAS, as a warning to other generals that dissent at the behest of the PM or at the alter of personal ambition would not be tolerated. The dye was cast. The COAS was ready to thwart any attempt to remove him from his command and purge his senior colleagues. Shortly thereafter, he made the confident statement that he “would complete his tenure”, suggesting that the prime minister would not, or could not, remove him.
However, disregarding the obvious “moves” by the COAS to “protect” himself, Mr Sharif made bold to put his plan into action. General Musharraf was confirmed as Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, so that he would be lulled into a false sense of security. Then Mr Sharif waited for the COAS to go to Sri Lanka on official business before striking.
Mr Sharif’s trip to the UAE when the COAS was in Sri Lanka came out of the blue. It was not on any agenda. Nor could one fathom what Mr Sharif urgently needed to discuss with the Emir of the UAE. But the composition of the PM’s entourage was the giveaway. What was the need to take the DG-ISI with him? Why were Mushahid Hussain and Pervez Rashid, head honchos of media disinformation, members of the select entourage? What was Nazir Naji, the PM’s speech writer, doing in the UAE along with the PM? There were no press conferences or speeches or briefings. Clearly, all were together to put the finishing touches to a coup against the army high command away from the prying eyes and ears of Military Intelligence.
The evidence of October 12 confirms this. Mr Sharif went to Multan, ostensibly for a routine, scheduled public meeting, to give the impression of “business as usual”. Then the civilian coup was launched, shortly after General Musharraf’s PIA flight took off from Sri Lanka and he was out of contact with GHQ. Pakistan TV in Islamabad was “occupied” at 5 pm by Pervez Rashid and a contingent of the police. The announcement of General Musharraf’s sacking, as well as the appointment of General Ziauddin, followed. General Ziauddin is then reported to have called up the CGS, General Aziz, to inform him that he was on his way to GHQ to take charge. When he was politely rebuffed on the plea that GHQ wanted to wait for General Musharraf to arrive and relinquish charge, the counter-plan went into operation. The pilot of the PIA flight carrying the COAS to Karachi was radioed by Chairman PIA Khaqan Abbasi to divert the Airbus to Nawabshah where a special plane and a police escort was waiting to arrest and transport the COAS to Islamabad. When the pilot protested that the airstrip at Nawabshah could not accommodate the Airbus, he was ordered to fly to Dubai. When the pilot said he did not have sufficient fuel to do so, he was ordered to go to Islamabad. Then General Musharraf intervened and ordered the pilot to land at Karachi and discovered that a coup against him was in the process of unravelling.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Corps Commander Pindi had sent a contingent to stop the PTV authorities from broadcasting news of the sacking of General Musharraf and the appointment of General Ziauddin as the new army chief. But the small contingent was overpowered by a force led by the PM’s military secretary and the PTV broadcasts were resumed. This compelled GHQ to despatch a stronger force and rout the erstwhile coupmakers. Troops loyal to General Musharraf had already sealed the PM and his close associates in the PM House and elsewhere by the time General Musharraf landed in Islamabad and assumed full operational charge. Then the corps commanders went into session to determine how to deal with the situation, eventually declaring that the Sharif government had been “dismissed” (by whom, it was not said) and that the Chairman JCSC and COAS (not CMLA), General Pervaiz Musharraf, would address the nation in due course.
The facts are clear enough. General Musharraf is not an innate, politically ambitious, coup-maker. The sincerity in his short but emphatic four minute address to the nation on October 13 rings true, every word of it. Mr Sharif, on the other hand, clearly tried to over-reach himself once too often and failed. Indeed, he seemed to have been finally emboldened in his recklessness by the statement of support from the Clinton administration in Washington warning the army not to carry out a coup some weeks ago!
It is also clear that a majority of the people of Pakistan had had enough of the Sharifs and their hangers-on. They were repressive, deceitful, corrupt, incompetent and dangerous. Not too many tears are going to be shed at the passing of their rogue regime. And as for democracy, it died in Pakistan when the supreme court was stormed and the judiciary humiliated and undermined, when parliament was gagged, when provincial governments were arbitrarily removed, when the press was attacked, when the bureaucracy was politicised, when all checks and balances on the power of the prime minister were systematically removed and the sword of the impending Shariah Bill was waved to scare away conscientious dissenters. If a formal burial of this long-decaying corpse was ordered on the day of the successful counter-coup, does it matter?
It matters in one sense. All other things being equal, democracy is still the least objectionable system of the lot. But there are democracies and democracies. Indeed, there are as many forms and types of democracy as there are countries. Nor do elections constitute the be-all and end-all of democracy. Apart from a number of Western countries with history on their side, most new nations cannot demonstrate uninterrupted periods of successful democratic practise. Nor is democracy an end unto itself. Indeed, it is meant to be a means to desireable ends like security, stability, prosperity, creativity. So where does that take us?
We have had ten years of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Each regime has been worse than its predecessor. Neither has given us security, stability, prosperity. Indeed, we have become worse off on all these fronts with each passing year. That is why our loss of faith in the electoral system is now reflected in diminishing turnouts at the polls and an increasing resort to arms to fulfill our needs or overcome our frustrations and alienation. Therefore another round of sham elections with the same “leaders” and candidates is the last thing we need.
Most Pakistanis are desperate for an “interim arrangement” which will hold across-the-board accountability and set the new rules of the game to include the many demands of good governance before the political system is opened up a couple of years down the line for a fuller form of representative federal democracy. This is a do-able formula. But certain conditions are attached to it. The “caretakers” must be transparently above-board and competent. They must be prepared to take hard decisions without fear or favour. They must have the moral authority to lead from the front so that no one may cast a stone at them. And they must demonstrate the collective courage and wisdom to reverse course on a number of disastrous domestic and foreign policy adventures.
General Pervaiz Musharraf and his colleagues have unwittingly arrived at a critical juncture of Pakistani history. Everything around them smacks of failure on a grand scale. If they can deliver a significant portion of a new agenda to restructure and revamp Pakistan, history will remember them as the saviours of Quaid i Azam’s dream. If they can’t — for whatever reasons — the implosion will engulf them as surely as it will all of us.
(TFT Oct 22-28, 1999 Vol-XI No.34 — Editorial)
Proof of the pudding…
The radical reform agenda announced by COAS General Pervez Musharraf on October 17 is: (1) Rebuild national confidence and morale (2) strengthen the federation by removing inter-provincial disharmony and restore national cohesion (3) Revive the economy and restore investors’ confidence (4) Ensure law and order and dispense speedy justice (5) Depoliticise state institutions (6) Devolve power to the grass roots level (7) Hold across-the-board accountability.
This is a tall order. It cannot be accomplished in a few years, least of all without the continuous and creative involvement of the finest representatives of civil society. But a beginning can be made.
General Musharraf’s objectives are laudable. But the General has not discovered them in a flash of inspiration. In fact, these objectives have long been formulated by concerned Pakistanis as core issues in the debate of reforming and revitalising Pakistan. More significantly, they form the very yardstick by which the people of Pakistan have already condemned and rejected Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif and by which General Musharraf’s regime will also inevitably be measured. Therefore let us get some things straight.
- The new regime has got off to a fair start. This is not because of any intrinsic merit in it. Far from it. The international environment is hostile to military take-overs, as demonstrated by the Commonwealth and the European Union. But it has got the critical benefit of doubt from Washington only because (a) the people of Pakistan have shed no tears for the departed “sham-democratic” government of Nawaz Sharif (b) the people of Pakistan have afforded legitimacy to the new regime because they have high expectations of it. From this it follows that if domestic support withers on the vine because the Generals are unable to deliver, they will find themselves in a tight corner at home and abroad.
- The Generals have initially been slow to take and announce decisions. This hasn’t hurt their domestic credibility so far for two good reasons: (a) because they were “reluctant coup-makers”, there was no premeditated plan of action (b) because they wish to avoid blundering into the political thicket, they have treaded with deliberation and care. But the regime’s spokesmen must not flog this argument too far. Betrayed time and again by their leaders, Pakistanis have become innately suspicious and cynical of long-winded promises and excuses. They want action and they want it fast. If cynicism and loss of faith begins to set into the public, it will be very difficult to reverse.
(3) The means and ends of the new regime must be consistent with each other. For instance, if ruthless, across-the-board accountability is to be carried, the chosen mechanism must be demonstrably efficient and equitable. This would imply that since the existing judicial system is notoriously inefficient, biased and politicised, and since “due process” as practised here is ridiculously slow, it simply cannot be used in its current discredited form to carry out accountability. By the same criterion, those who are to sit in judgment over others must first offer themselves for public scrutiny. In this context, it may be noted that the existing Ehtesab Benches of the High Courts, apart from being controversial, have delivered just one decision in two years, despite the current law which prescribes a maximum time limit of three months.
(4) The reform agenda is tough and unremitting because Pakistan “has hit rock bottom”. It will require more than “a prayer for vision, wisdom and courage” by a brave General to be fulfilled. Let alone soldiers, the best political strategists, statesmen, thinkers and technocrats on offer will not be able to avoid costly mistakes. Therefore General Pervez Musharraf and his colleagues would be advised to give their regime a full-fledged civilian-technocratic face as early as possible and retreat into the background. In this way the army can be shielded from criticism when things go wrong while it enjoys kudos for all the good things done by “its” government.
(5) Certain international opinions and concerns cannot be disregarded. That is why the new regime has retained the fig leaf of “democracy” and “legality” by “suspending” the national and provincial parliaments and keeping the constitution in temporary “abeyance”. That is why General Musharraf has appended the rather innocuous title of “Chief Executive” to himself instead of calling a spade and spade and becoming a CMLA. And that is why Mr Rafiq Tarar has been retained as President of Pakistan. But surely the Generals don’t think they can fob off the international community thus without concretely addressing some of its more serious and outstanding concerns like nuclear and missile proliferation, a broad-based government in Afghanistan and regional peace as soon as possible?
Pakistan, as General Musharraf candidly admits, has “hit rock bottom and is at a crossroads”. This is no mean verdict — lesser mortals have been imprisoned for saying much the same thing. Now it’s time to put the diagnosis behind and get on with the prescriptions. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating of it.
(TFT Oct 29-04 Nov, 1999 Vol-XI No.35 — Editorial)
The only short-term option
The recent appointments at the very top have, by and large, escaped scrutiny in the press. Opportunists apart, the most generous explanation for this may be that, given General Pervez Musharraf’s palpable sincerity, no one wants to start picking bones with him from day-One, rather than any candidate’s outstanding qualification for the job. Nonetheless, some non-personal remarks may be relevant for the record.
Clearly, no hard criterion seems to have been followed in the process of selection. The CE has reposed his confidence in certain professionals who have served the governments of General Zia ul Haq, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif with or without credit. Nor has he cared too much about the past or present political affiliations of some members of his team, preferring instead to pay greater attention to their perceived strengths in other areas. We are also struck by some unbiased and fairly widespread comment on the general-make up of General Musharraf’s team so far: with the odd exception to prove the rule, most of the faces have a status-quo halo about them, with fairly stolid reputations to boot. Nor, it seems, has each and every candidate been picked on the basis of the management criterion of “the right man for the right job at the right time”. How this motley crowd will cope with the dynamic reform agenda promised by General Musharraf therefore remains to be seen.
Fortunately, however, the fog has been lifted for those of us who were wondering about the role of an NSC in a military dispensation when a Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and a Cabinet, both headed by General Musharraf, are in existence already. Now we know. The current NSC is as much a showcase of sorts as a precursor of institutional innovation in time to come.
That said, let us be clear about the nature of the agenda before Pakistan in the aftermath of Nawaz Sharif’s reckless rule. This non-personal agenda has two aspects, the internal and the external. The popular view that internal reform must be instantly carried out is likely to be disabused because there is no such thing as an “economic jumpstart”. People will have to face greater hardships before the beneficial effects of a change of government begin to filter through. This is so for a variety of reasons: the industrial sector is linked to the loans crisis and is subject to a deep rooted bout of general mismanagement, inefficiency and corruption. Nor has a creeping devaluation of the rupee in the past helped boost the country’s exports. Indeed, economic experts have discovered that Pakistan’s predominantly agriculture-related exports do not much respond to moderate changes in price. The trade and confidence gap has therefore widened and brought the rupee under a sort of “historic” pressure that won’t slacken. The crisis may therefore intensify before it is resolved by our new stewards.
Equally, the process of accountability or Ehtesab will take much longer than people think, not least because the most publicised item of Ehtesab remains the crisis of default. But it may not be possible (or desirable) to forcibly recover the total amount (over Rs 200 bn) from loan-defaulters. In fact, utmost care needs to be exercised so that the loan defaulter issue does not adversely affect domestic business confidence in the same manner as the IPP issue vis a vis international trust.
This brings us to the external aspect of the new government’s agenda. It is wrong to assume that, after the ouster of the Nawaz Sharif government, Pakistan’s dependence on external factors will diminish immediately. For that to happen, Pakistan will have to look after its external affairs more carefully and more honestly than Nawaz Sharif and his cronies did. What has been lost is trust. The international backlash against events that took place under Nawaz Sharif cannot be shrugged away. This backlash, which has directly benefited India, will have to be analysed and tackled cooly and dispassionately rather than with cries of hurt pride and injustice. Pakistan needs to recreate its image in the eyes of the world. It must demonstrate that its market is willing to trade with the world and honour its contracts.
There are definite gains or losses to be made on the foreign policy front. Can we get rid of the cobwebs of the ‘Made in Pakistan’ charade let loose under Nawaz Sharif? An aggressive posture based on the delusion of righteousness will not do. It should be remembered that the world’s reaction against the suspension of democracy in Pakistan is informed by more understanding than in the case of martial laws imposed during the Cold War era.
Equally, proper reform in the internal order will register well with the world. The warlike situation created within the country by legally indeterminate organisations fighting covert wars must be defused. Foreign policy debacles triggered by these wars and the damage done by them to civil society in Pakistan have scared our neighbourhood and the world. Our national economy will not respond to any reform unless the rumour of war ends and the resultant environment of peace liberates domestic and foreign investment. This is the short-term option available to Pakistan.
(TFT Nov 05-11, 1999 Vol-XI No.36 — Editorial)
Old paradigms, new paradoxes
General Pervez Musharraf’s first press conference went down well. The General is a likeable personality because he “talks straight” and doesn’t try to be “extra-clever” or indulge in “political doublespeak’. But hark the mutterings: “Where are the policies?”, they were impatient to know. “Why, the General seems to be enjoying himself”, they were wont to quip [democrats think this is an ominous sign]. Clearly, the regime must not make a virtue out of necessity by flogging the argument that the Generals were unprepared for government because they didn’t want to carry out a coup.
Then there is the question of sincerity. General Musharraf and his colleagues are obviously sincere. But sincerity begins to lose its value when it is self-assuredly offered as an alternative to good policies or becomes an excuse to justify inefficiency or inactivity. Nawaz Sharif, it may recalled, was overflowing with much the same milk of sincerity in early 1997 and look where it left him stranded in the end.
General Musharraf says that his interim arrangement is aimed at facilitating Pakistan’s return to “true” institutional democracy. He says that because he knows that the international conditionality of democracy jibes with the aspirations of the people at home. It follows therefore that this is one fiat of the international order that should be accepted at the cost of the traditional doctrine of state sovereignty. The latter, as we know, has taken a beating in our day not so much because of global imperialism as because of the compulsions of the national economy.
Pakistan has been dependent on external assistance for its economic survival for the past decade because its economy has always been more plugged into multilateral financial organisations than most others. Therefore, if Pakistan wants to sort out the distortions in its economic management and enforce urgent macro-economic reforms in the national economy, its linkage with its creditors will become even more critical. That is why economic experts in Pakistan are agreed that the country needs breathing space in which to obtain all possible concessions from its creditors before it can start putting its own house in order.
Since the external dimension is organically linked to the internal one, the Commonwealth and EU delegations which have visited Pakistan to determine if the new government is well-meaning in its resolve to return the country to democracy should not be taken as instruments of “interference”. They have taken full stock of public opinion in Pakistan and realise that the country needs a period of correction. Their insistence that the government give a time-frame for the restoration of democracy too should not be taken as a hostile gesture. The truth is that in Pakistan all the long martial laws in the past have abused their pledge of interim governance. Therefore the government’s inability to give a time-frame for the restoration of true democracy should be presented to the West as an unavoidable handicap, not as a hostile rejoinder.
China’s example is instructive. It is a strong state with a global status. But it has confronted “Western interference” with wisdom rather than hostility. The Chinese President has not only promised democratic freedoms in China, he has also pledged that China will ratify the CTBT. As against this, our foreign policy spokesmen say that “the CTBT is more or less dead”. This betrays ignorance of the CTBT agenda in European, Canadian and Japanese capitals and is hardly the way for Pakistan to negotiate breathing time.
In fact, the dependence of the new government on the financial goodwill of the West will increase as it tries to grasp some domestic nettles. The total domestic support it is now getting for shaking down the loan-defaulters will plunge once finance minister Shaukat Aziz gears up to extend the tax net and force the market place to cough up the taxes. Therefore negotiating entry into the CTBT and fixing some of the bad laws that violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at this stage could bestow sufficient international respect and credibility on the new government to counter the domestic backlash which is sure to come.
In fact, it is in the domain of foreign policy, rather than economic policy, that Pakistan can obtain immediate results. It can switch off some of the aggressive fronts it has been using as instruments of legitimisation at home. It can accept more frankly the loosening up of its internal order in the service of jehad in the neighbourhood, especially that related to covert wars against the US, Russia, China and Iran. Indeed, in order to get its market economy going and attract domestic and foreign investments it can cooperate with international opinion to normalise relations with India and defuse the warlike environment that hurts Pakistan and makes India look good.
The old paradigm has left Pakistan internationally isolated. The new paradox is that the pro-democracy generals will have to devote themselves to the task of reconstructing a new paradigm of international cooperation, participation and integration.
(TFT Dec 10-16, 1999 Vol-XI No.41 — Editorial)
Abundant sincerity, noticeable limitations
Mr Ijaz ul Haq, MNA, has recently offered General Pervez Musharraf a rather self-serving “formula” for the “restoration of democracy”. In effect, Mr Haq suggests that the assemblies should be restored; someone (Mr Haq?) from the PML should be given a perceptible nod by General Musharraf to lead a vote of no-confidence against Nawaz Sharif and get himself nominated as prime minister; then the national assembly and senate should indemnify the military’s various interventions (including locking up the Sharifs, Bhuttos and countless others), as well as authorise the establishment of a National Security Council which includes representatives of the armed forces and is headed by a president (General Musharraf?) with powers to sack governments (not assemblies) if they stray from the straight and narrow.
Despite Mr Haq’s vaulting ambition and non-entity status, the formula provides a road-map for the laudable objective of reviving constitutional democracy as quickly as possible. But there are many problems with this strategy. One, the current parliaments are thoroughly discredited, being chock a bloc with people who should have been disqualified from contesting the elections in the first place if we had had an independent and vigourous election commission. Two, these parliaments owe their existence to a trumped-up electoral-roll system gerrymandered by powerful vested interests in the past and a highly outdated system of constituency delimitation based on a population census taken twenty years ago. Three, such parliaments cannot be trusted because, more than other parliaments in Pakistani history, these have acted as immoral accomplices of Nawaz Sharif and Co by providing a “legal and constitutional” cover to their criminality. Finally, General Musharraf’s association with the ancien regime is likely to be a kiss of death since it will be interpreted by the people of Pakistan as a measure of status-quo weakness rather than as an act of bold wisdom, thereby militating against the popular sentiment that has afforded a degree of legitimacy to the new regime. No, far better to start afresh than to tie oneself to the dirty apron-strings of the past.
That said, it is still worth debating whether General Musharraf’s ambitious “agenda without a time-table” is based on realistic assumptions. And if it isn’t, what should be the contours of a preferred course of action?
General Musharraf has admitted that accountability of the corrupt could last “forever”. Apart from suggesting a definite criteria, the CE’s remarks imply a cut-off point beyond which accountability cannot be an excuse for delaying elections. But no one knows NAB’s criteria of corruption and accountability and its cut-off point. General Musharraf has also admitted that the economy is “much worse” than he feared. But he does not explain how long it will take him to “fix it”? He has now referred to “politicians” as “brothers”. But “brothers” Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Nawabzada Nasrullah, Ajmal Khattak and Ataullah Mengal, and “sister” Benazir Bhutto, are now all demanding an early election. Before long, “brothers” Imran Khan and Farooq Leghari may also become critical of the new regime and demand elections. How long can the “brotherhood” be put off?
General Musharraf seems to think that his personal “sincerity” and “courage” will suffice to “motivate” all manner of Pakistanis to give him the benefit of the doubt and make sacrifices for the good of the country, in the bargain propping up his regime for a few years at least. This may be wishful thinking. By and large, Pakistanis tend to be a cynical, suspicious, conspiratorial lot. Most people look at the NSC and various cabinets and conclude that the new regime is mired in a bureaucratic status quo. Others wonder aloud why there is a preponderance of “Urdu-speakers” in all the critical slots of government. Many scan the think-tanks to argue that the civilians are merely rubber-stamps for a government in which all the important decisions are being taken by the men in khaki, whether at the corps commanders level or in GHQ or in the ISI. Meanwhile, an uncomfortable number of people are saying that the regime is practising double-standards by targeting allegedly corrupt or errant businessmen, politicians and landlords while protecting allegedly corrupt or deviant civil-servants and generals. Meanwhile, hardly anyone thinks that Nawaz Sharif should be convicted in the hijacking case when so many better and more credible alternatives are available. And a few are even betting that this regime will be overtaken by another in due course.
On their own, these apprehensions may not amount to much. But taken in a clutch, such fears could eventually erode General Musharraf’s credibility. The critical point here is that if domestic legitimacy evaporates, the international community is likely to come down like a ton of bricks on Rawalpindi. In the event, the unsustainable contradictions in the regime’s “foreign policy-domestic economy paradigm” will come home to roost and lead to an implosion in Pakistan.
General Pervez Musharraf and his military colleagues must plan their strategic medium-term exit point even as they rush to develop their tactical short-term entry points into civil polity. This regime is abundantly sincere and fiercely motivated. But its limitations are becoming obvious and its shortcomings cannot be ignored.
(TFT Dec 17-23, 1999 Vol-XI No.42 — Editorial)
Reconciling with reality
Pakistan owes about US$ 35 billion to the international community. Has anyone wondered what would happen if, instead of constantly rescheduling Pakistan’s debt and injecting fresh loans into its coffers, the international community were to set up a body like NAB and empower it to hold Pakistan “accountable” for all its willful defaults? Or consider this. If the state of Pakistan is a most willful defaulter, the State Bank of Pakistan and the Central Board of Revenue are its right and left hand respectively. The former has willfully gobbled up billions of dollars in forex deposits belonging to Pakistanis while the latter owes at least Rs 30 billion in income and wealth tax refunds to the banking sector and tens of billions of rupees in rebates to domestic industry. But both have refused to cough up or make amends. Nor does the matter end here. State-owned corporations, including several belonging to the army’s “welfare” trusts, owe at least Rs 50 billion to the banks. Yet NAB has shown no particular inclination to haul them up and string them upside down.
We now understand that NAB will also tread ever so softly where accountability of the armed forces and judiciary is concerned. The justification for this approach apparently is that “both institutions have highly efficient and credible internal mechanisms for accountability” which obviate the necessity for NAB to step into any breach.
Unfortunately, this explanation doesn’t wash. With honourable exceptions, and present company excepted, many service chiefs in the past have not been able to shrug off perceptions of corruption or misdemeanour, whether from receipt of illegal kickbacks and commissions in major arms deals or through unjustified acquisition of state assets and privileges or through unauthorised receipts of payoffs in furtherance of unconstitutional political objectives. But not one service chief has ever been hauled up by the service concerned. The same applies to the judiciary whose reputation is no better than the civil and financial bureaucracy of the country. Yet the former couple will be allowed to go scot-free by NAB even as the latter are hauled over the coals.
We are all for “accountability”. Indeed, without accountability there can be no “true” democracy. But we are not sanguine about the nature and scope of accountability initiated by General Pervez Musharraf’s government, no matter how sincere and well-intentioned its motives.
There are at least five critical elements of any credible “Accountability”: (a) it should be a constitutionally viable process (b) which is institutional in nature, (c) even-handed in essence, (d) transparent in operation (e) and self-accountable in perception. How do the Accountability Ordinance and NAB fit this bill?
Rather badly, we fear. The draconian ordinance, which allows NAB to imprison alleged crooks for up to 90 days without provision of bail is likely to be struck down for violating fundamental constitutional rights. That will put paid to any claims which the law may confer to the actions of NAB in these troubled times. Nor, by definition, may any newly-created non-civilian organisation with such vast powers over civilians headed by a serving army general in extraordinary times claim any institutional longevity and legitimacy. Equally, the lack of any consistent, even-handed criteria in nabbing people is demonstrated both by the cavalier manner of selecting the first lot last month and the threats and arrests by NAB subsequently. Finally, there is no transparency in the selection or modus operandi of NAB’s investigating and prosecuting officers; nor is there any mechanism to hold NAB accountable for its own sins of omission and commission. After all, apart from General Amjad Hussain and an odd lieutenant or two whose personal integrity is beyond reproach, none of the other senior officers in NAB can be said to have irreproachable pasts or be beyond the pale of vested interests or personal prejudice. Indeed, not one of them has been “confirmed” in his or her arduous responsibility through a public scrutiny process which strips them bare before anointing them as public officials primus inter pares. That some of them worked for the notorious commission headed by Saifur Rehman has not disqualified them for the job. Nor are others sufficiently endowed with the professional expertise required, especially where complex financial and banking matters are concerned.
Let us make no bones about it. General Musharraf and his men in shining armour are no revolutionaries who stand apart from and above society. They are here for a short time and should cut their coat according to the cloth. They should put a few of the worst criminal offenders in each category in the power-bloc comprising soldiers, judges, politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, traders, bankers, landlords and press magnates—the “elites” to which General Pervez Musharraf referred—in prison as soon as possible and throw the key away. Then they should offer conditional amnesty and reconciliation to all the others in the melting pot so that we can start on a cleaner slate. The last thing General Musharraf needs is a state of confrontation between the head of NAB and the heads of various ministries who do not share his enthusiasm for “ruthless accountability”.
(TFT Dec 24-30, 1999 Vol-XI No.43 — Editorial)
Get on with it
There was an air of great expectation before General Pervez Musharraf unfurled his “Economic Revival Plan”. But there are no novel or quick-fix solutions in it. Indeed, many of the economic ideas which Mr Shaukat Aziz is tinkering with have been advocated before. Others have been abandoned because the social or political infrastructure for accomplishing them was found wanting. The most glaring omission, of course, is that of an overriding political philosophy aimed at restructuring and retooling the economy for self-sustainable growth in the future.
The economic debate in this country is conducted by free marketeering economists or their bureaucratic nemeses and rarely, if ever, by political economists. One conventional group doesn’t give a damn for the principles of equity, the other conventional group gives two hoots for the requirements of efficiency. One loves “supply side” incentives, the other is obsessed by “demand management”. Both are prisoners of conventional economic wisdom which may have succeeded in stable and democratic Western economies but has consistently floundered in unstable, authoritarian countries like Pakistan with highly iniquitous social structures and highly inefficient bureaucratic-capitalist environments.
In this context, two like-minded philosophical observations from two opposite ends of the philosophical tradition may shed some light on Pakistan’s current predicament. The first one was made by Karl Marx 150 years ago. Marx postulated that when “the social relations of production (class or power structures) become a fetter on the social forces of production (economy)” in any society, radical political remedies are needed to break out of economic stagnation and decline. The second was made less than 150 days ago when the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mohammad Khatemi, said that Iran’s economy would not be able to develop and grow until “democratic freedoms and laws” were established in civil society. Both are, in effect, saying the same thing, albeit in different historical contexts: that when certain social and political structures of power begin to throttle the inherent creativity and dynamism of human endeavour instead of facilitating them, a critical economic situation arises which requires an appropriate change in these relations and structures of power. What does this mean in concrete, contemporary terms?
Marx’s European context was clear enough. Feudal relations (of power and production) had to be abolished before the capitalist industrial revolution could take off. Khatemi’s context is equally succinct: the Iranian revolution’s rigid orthodoxy and authoritarianism (relations of production), which was once its propelling force, has now become a bureaucratic millstone around the neck of the economy (forces of production). Consequently, an enlargement of democratic freedoms and strengthening of civil society is required in order to unleash the creative enterprise of the people of Iran. What are the lessons for Pakistan?
The inefficient and iniquitous nature of Pakistan’s powerful landed gentry is adversely impacting on the agricultural and industrial economy of the country. Since bloody revolutions are out of fashion, and paper partitions of land have rendered radical land nationalisations and redistributions impossible, the state must tax the absentee landlord and subsidise the tiller-peasant. Progressive agricultural “income taxation” coupled with micro-credit extension and poverty alleviation programmes is one way to do this. Mr Aziz recognises this instinctively but shies away from immediately striking at the roots of rural stagnation. The simplest and most effective remedy is to levy a flat income tax rate of about Rs 750-1000 per acre per year, irrespective of the size of land holding or ownership and without any exemptions, collect Rs 25-50 billion through the patwari\tehsildar and put it all into a poverty alleviation and agricultural extension and training programme for the rural middle-class and poor, thereby unleashing the productive power of the self-interested direct producer.
The same approach is needed to break the other social fetters on the economy. The businessman-trader must be made to pay taxes. But the taxes cannot be extracted from him through a hostile, corrupt and rapacious tax-collecting bureaucracy. First, Mr Aziz must hold the tax collector accountable, simply the tax collecting laws and demonstrate the state’s bonafide by providing transparent and good government. Then he can rightfully stake a claim to the hard earned incomes of the business community. The other way round would be misplaced concreteness of the worst kind.
The organs of the state, too, must come clean and demonstrate their sincerity and purposefulness. This can be done by holding the bureaucracy accountable, by rightsizing the public sector, and by speeding up privatisation. General Musharraf’s decision to cut Rs 7 billion from the budget of the armed forces is a major step in the right direction.
Finally, and most critically, the Pakistani state needs to break the bonds of international debt by recasting its foreign relations to allow the economy to obtain breathing space for itself on the basis of a significant debt write-off. This requires a critical reassessment of our cold-war “national security” paradigm so that the health of the economy becomes an integral element of it rather than be cripplingly dependent upon it.
There is no time to be lost. There may never be a better opportunity to reinvent the lost idea of Pakistan.
(TFT Dec 31, 1999 to 06 Jan, 2000 Vol-XI No.44 — Editorial)
Anti-historic judgment
The recent judgment by the Supreme Court’s Shariah Appellate Bench (SAB) equating “interest” with “riba” and outlawing all interest-based finance systems as “un-Islamic” (and therefore unconstitutional) has many interesting, ironical and provocative dimensions. Before rushing into judgment, consider…
In 1991, the Federal Shariat Court (FSC), prodded by “Islamic ideologues” in Nawaz Sharif’s Islamic Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) parliament, judged “interest” to be “riba” and banned all interest-bearing transactions as un-Islamic and unconstitutional. The judgment embarrassed the Sharif government, which was then desperately trying to woo foreign investors, and compelled it to appeal before the SAB. But the appeal wasn’t pursued enthusiastically by Sharif or the judges and interminable delays set in. It was as though they had mutually agreed not to upset the business community or provoke the wrath of the Islamicists. This, despite the fact that the law required the SAB to deliver a judgment within six months at the outset.
Naturally enough, Benazir Bhutto or the judges did not show any interest in concluding the case in 1993-96. But after Sharif regained power in 1997, he soon effected a stunning U-turn. He packed the SAB with hardline “Islamic” judges and then withdrew his appeal against the 1991 judgment. He also determined that neither his family, nor his close political confidantes, would pay the accumulated “interest” on their own bank loans on the grounds that “interest” was “riba” and therefore un-Islamic and unconstitutional.
If it was remarkable that SAB should have continued with its deliberations without anyone explicitly arguing against the proposition, the timing of the judgment has also raised eyebrows. It comes at a particularly difficult time for the country and the new government. The former is crying out for foreign investment while the latter is desperate to project a modern and moderate face of Islam to the outside world. But the judgment pours cold water over such sincere endeavours. It seems to be urging the international community to shun Pakistan like the Plague. And it reinforces fears that Pakistan is headed for financial default and “failure” on an unprecedented scale.
It is equally astonishing that the judges should have so sanguinely assumed the mantle of modern-day economists and financial experts in setting out the explicit parameters of a new financial system. Indeed, one judge has actually implied that the lack of a true Islamic economic system is responsible for Pakistan’s economic travails. Why the western economy has been booming for over two centuries without an Islamic system is left unexplained. The directive to complete the desired “Islamic” restructuring of a complex financial system within a quick cut-off date is no less baffling.
The judges seem loath to accept other facts. A true “Islamic” economic system does not even exist in the most “favoured” Islamic nations of the world. There are three basic reasons for this: first, no nation, Islamic or otherwise, is an island — indeed, the globe is fast becoming one economic village; second, the western capitalist system sets the rules of the financial game and doesn’t accept dictation from anyone — to believe otherwise is to indulge in wishful thinking or fall victim to false pride.
There is a third fact, one of history, which is often overlooked by Islamic “scholars” averse to true ijtihad. At the time of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), the moneylenders were the rich and the borrowers were the poor. High rates of usury (riba) charged by the few moneylenders were therefore a direct cause of the impoverishment of the borrowers who were many. Therefore the Holy Qur’an took the side of the poor and oppressed masses when it banned “riba”. In today’s world, however, a majority of the “moneylenders” are (bank) “depositors” who come from middle or low income backgrounds whereas the (bank) borrowers are rich businessmen seeking funds for new investments. The roles have been reversed. The relatively poor lend their hard-earned money to banks for safekeeping and security while the relatively rich borrow money from the banks for enriching themselves further. Therefore, to equate the “riba” of yore with the “interest” of today would be to prohibit the depositors of today from securing the highest return on their savings and to encourage the borrowers (capitalists or landlords) of today to hold out for the lowest cost of capital. That would turn the logic of Allah’s injunctions on its head.
If much of what today goes under the name of “interest” is therefore not “riba”, this should not, of course, stop us from devising systems in which small-time borrowers are facilitated with subsidised interest rates or enabled to become partners in business through project-finance profit and loss schemes. Indeed, there are many explicit financial innovations and institutions which can be established in the periphery of the capitalist financial system to genuinely appease the more orthodox borrowers and lenders in the Islamic world. And many such have indeed come into existence all over the world. But until there is a surplus of capital over demand as well as a surplus of “true” Muslims over both false Muslims and infidels in the world, it would be best to ask the honourable judges to review their decision in the larger interest of the government, country and Ummah.
(TFT Jan 07-13, 2000 Vol-XI No.45 — Editorial)
Hard and soft options
We have heard of “rogue” states, “failed” states and “terrorist” states. Now we are informed that a state can be like a hard boiled egg, “hard” on the outside and “soft” on the inside. Like India, for example?
Indian hawks argue that their state is “soft” because it treated “Pakistani-trained hijackers” with kid gloves and did a “deal” with terrorists. A real, “hard” state like Israel or the USA would never have done that, they say, admonishing their own state.
Many Indians are also telling the world that the Pakistani state is a “rogue” state and a “terrorist” state both hopelessly rolled into one grand “failed” state.
All this is hogwash. If the Pakistani state has “failed” to adequately look after 100 million Pakistanis, as alleged by India, the Indian state has “failed” to take care of nearly 400 million Indians below the poverty line. If Pakistani exports of terrorism to Kashmir and Afghanistan are the rage, as charged by India, Indian exports of terrorism to Karachi and Sri Lanka are no laughing matter either. If Pakistani nuclear weapons are in rogue Islamic hands, Indian nuclear weapons are surely in fiendish Hindu clutches. If the Pakistani state opted for a “hard” crackdown in quelling separatism in East Pakistan or insurgency in Balochistan, the Indian state tore up the 1948 UN Resolutions on Kashmir, sent troops to annex Hyderabad and Junagarh, bombed the Mizos in Aizawi, stabbed Pakistan in Bangladesh, stormed the holiest Sikh shrines in Amritsar, invaded Sri Lanka, committed genocide in Kashmir and nuked Pokharan many times. If the Pakistani state spends US$ 2.75 billion beefing itself up, the Indian state weighs in at US$ 11 billion in “hard” military muscle every year. Finally, if the experience of non-Muslim minorities is anything to write about in Pakistan, ask the Muslims, Christians and untouchable castes how they feel under the heel of the saffron state in India.
Conspiracies notwithstanding, the facts of the current situation are also straightforward. The hijackers, whether Kashmiris or even Pakistanis, are an angry consequence of the historic and continuing injury perpetrated by India against Pakistan and Kashmir. Therefore the onus of responsibility, or the root cause of the problem in whichever form it manifests itself (war, armed insurgency or hijacking), lies squarely with India. Also, India’s refusal to negotiate with the hijackers in Amritsar or refuel the plane suggests that it wanted the plane to land in Lahore or crash over Pakistani territory, in both cases pinning responsibility on Islamabad.
This tactic fits India’s post-Kargil strategy like a glove: paint Pakistan as a “rogue” or “terrorist” state, condemn and isolate it internationally, drag it into a suicidal nuclear arms race and wait for it to implode as a “failed” state. How should Pakistan confront this Indian challenge?
Clearly, international perception and assistance should figure as a critical element in the strategic objectives of both states. But despite Pakistan’s outstanding tactical military victory in Kargil, or perhaps because of it, it is India which clinched a strategic diplomatic win in July by successfully portraying Pakistan as an “irresponsible” nuclear state given to adventurism. Pakistan also seems to have miscalculated on the strategic value of delinking its nuclear policy from that of India so that it might reap some autonomous dividends from it. The tit-for-tat nuclear tests in 1998 and the reluctance to negotiate a timely signature on the CTBT are prime examples of this lack of vision. What now?
India is insisting that Pakistan should pull its “terrorist” hand out of Kashmir before its new military government can be accorded “legitimacy” by means of a dialogue with New Delhi. The correct diplomatic response to this Indian precondition would be for Islamabad to offer unconditional talks to India in the perspective of the Lahore Summit last February. If India puts Kashmir on the table as it agreed to do in Lahore in February 99, well and good. But if it doesn’t, which is more than likely, the onus of a “failed” dialogue for regional peace will be on New Delhi and not Islamabad.
But Pakistan has done no such thing. Indeed, government spokesmen seem to be tripping over themselves reiterating that there will be no dialogue with India unless the “core” issue of Kashmir is discussed! India’s conditionality has thus been matched by Pakistan’s conditionality. There is no dialogue. But that is what India wants. Why should Pakistan hand it over to India on a platter?
Since 1947, India and Pakistan have jointly mined the region in action and reaction. The end result is a conventional arms race followed by nuclear proliferation. Every now and then some mine goes off, as in Kargil last June or the airplane hijacking more recently. Both countries are hurting. But let’s face it. Pakistan is economically weaker than India, it is also more dependent on international goodwill and largesse than India. So it is currently hurting more than India. Therefore, while the goalpost of national security may remain the same, the game plan needs to be urgently revised. We need to build a state that is “hard” on the inside and “soft” on the outside rather than the other way round.
(TFT Jan 14-20, 2000 Vol-XI No.46 — Editorial)
Yes sir, but no sir
As most countries queue up to enter the 21st century, some like India seem poised to leap ahead. Others, like Pakistan, are conspicuous for lagging behind. “Measured by any index”, explains one foreign analyst, “India is undoubtedly the preeminent and pivotal power in South Asia”. In contrast, another influential foreign strategic thinker is worried that Pakistan “faces the prospect of instability to the point of chaos”. How ironic. Not so long ago, Pakistan was billed in think tanks abroad as a “pivotal state” in South Asia even as India was reported to be stumbling into its most “dangerous decades”. What sort of signals are emanating from Pakistan to create such negative perceptions abroad?
Yesterday, Pakistan was acknowledged as the world’s fourth largest democracy, warts and all. Today, it has been shoved to the backwaters of Burma and beyond. Yesterday, it was applauded for its policy of nuclear restraint. Today, its nuclear threats and ambitions are the stuff of western nightmares. Yesterday, it seemed to bask in the sunshine of the Lahore peace summit. Today, it is scowling in the chill of Kargil. Yesterday, its civil society was admired for its uniformly moderate Muslim behaviour. Today, significant elements are openly espousing violent jihads not just against India but also against the United States and Russia while the organs of the state stand by in acquiescence. Yesterday, its state institutions were broadly secular and in conformity with those of the developed world. Today, some of them are overtly ideological and others are laying down unrealistic cut-off dates and criteria for “Islamisation”. No wonder Pakistan looks completely out of step with the global village.
Two concrete examples on two critical issues of peace and security demonstrate our confused meanderings in foreign policy and statecraft. In late 1998, the government of Pakistan announced that it had “delinked” its position on the CTBT from that of India and would consider signing the treaty as soon as the “coercive environment” of post-nuclear test sanctions had been lifted by the Unites States. Since the prime minister and the army chief seemed in agreement, the foreign minister and the foreign secretary were duly dispatched to Washington to start negotiations. In due course, the United States significantly diluted the Pressler amendment and cobbled a debt relief package of US$ 4 billion from the Paris and London Clubs to bail out Pakistan. But by late 1999, Pakistan’s position on the CTBT had suddenly become tenuous. Its new foreign minister was blowing hot and cold. And, like true weathercocks, certain serving and retired generals and foreign-office types had begun to argue against signing the CTBT. Indeed, the defining phrase of yesterday—“coercive environment”—has been replaced by the qualifying phrase of today—“developing consensus”—as the main hurdle pending a signature on the CTBT. In effect, any quest for a worthwhile tactical initiative on the CTBT seems to have been abandoned in favour of clutching at India’s coattails once again.
The second issue relates to Kashmir policy. Yesterday, Islamabad discreetly deprived Kashmir of its “core” issue status and relegated it to the “outstanding” level of less intractable problems. Today, Kashmir has become a “core” issue again. Yesterday, confidence-building measures and track-2 diplomacy vis a vis India were de rigueur in Islamabad. Today, we are posing strict conditionalities for a resumption of dialogue with New Delhi. It is as though we have determined to play on New Delhi’s wicket at all times.
The same sort of confusion and lack of clarity seems to mark domestic policy. Three months ago, both the Chief Executive and the Finance Minister assured us that the dispute with Hubco would be settled within 30 days so that foreign investor confidence would be restored. Ninety days later, however, the 30-day deadline remains unchanged. We were also warned that GST and agricultural income tax would not be delayed, come hell or high water. Now we are assured that the day of reckoning has been postponed for six months at least. Then NAB was supposed to hold everyone, high or low, accountable. Now the judiciary and the army have been accorded the honour of sacred cows. Loan defaulters were on the top of NAB’s hit list. Now they have been relegated to the bottom. Corrupt politicians were to be uprooted in the blinking of an eye. Alas, “white-collar” crime rarely leaves any tracks behind. The day after the military takeover, the ECL had bloated to over 5000 names. Now it has been reasonably pared down to more “manageable” proportions. The hijacking case against Nawaz Sharif was said to be cut and dried, that is why it was the first to be launched. Three months later, the charges against him have yet to be framed and the judges are becoming stroppy. Last month, there was no question of restoring the assemblies. This month, politics has been reaffirmed as the “art of the possible”.
Yes sir, we know patience is a virtue. Yes sir, we understand radical reforms can’t be wrought overnight. But sir, you will appreciate there is too much at stake for us to suspend judgment when evidence of political immaturity and lack of strategic thinking begins to litter the bleak landscape of our beloved country.
(TFT Jan 21-27, 2000 Vol-XI No.47 — Editorial)
Yes sir, but no sir
As most countries queue up to enter the 21st century, some like India seem poised to leap ahead. Others, like Pakistan, are conspicuous for lagging behind. “Measured by any index”, explains one foreign analyst, “India is undoubtedly the preeminent and pivotal power in South Asia”. In contrast, another influential foreign strategic thinker is worried that Pakistan “faces the prospect of instability to the point of chaos”. How ironic. Not so long ago, Pakistan was billed in think tanks abroad as a “pivotal state” in South Asia even as India was reported to be stumbling into its most “dangerous decades”. What sort of signals are emanating from Pakistan to create such negative perceptions abroad?
Yesterday, Pakistan was acknowledged as the world’s fourth largest democracy, warts and all. Today, it has been shoved to the backwaters of Burma and beyond. Yesterday, it was applauded for its policy of nuclear restraint. Today, its nuclear threats and ambitions are the stuff of western nightmares. Yesterday, it seemed to bask in the sunshine of the Lahore peace summit. Today, it is scowling in the chill of Kargil. Yesterday, its civil society was admired for its uniformly moderate Muslim behaviour. Today, significant elements are openly espousing violent jihads not just against India but also against the United States and Russia while the organs of the state stand by in acquiescence. Yesterday, its state institutions were broadly secular and in conformity with those of the developed world. Today, some of them are overtly ideological and others are laying down unrealistic cut-off dates and criteria for “Islamisation”. No wonder Pakistan looks completely out of step with the global village.
Two concrete examples on two critical issues of peace and security demonstrate our confused meanderings in foreign policy and statecraft. In late 1998, the government of Pakistan announced that it had “delinked” its position on the CTBT from that of India and would consider signing the treaty as soon as the “coercive environment” of post-nuclear test sanctions had been lifted by the Unites States. Since the prime minister and the army chief seemed in agreement, the foreign minister and the foreign secretary were duly dispatched to Washington to start negotiations. In due course, the United States significantly diluted the Pressler amendment and cobbled a debt relief package of US$ 4 billion from the Paris and London Clubs to bail out Pakistan. But by late 1999, Pakistan’s position on the CTBT had suddenly become tenuous. Its new foreign minister was blowing hot and cold. And, like true weathercocks, certain serving and retired generals and foreign-office types had begun to argue against signing the CTBT. Indeed, the defining phrase of yesterday—“coercive environment”—has been replaced by the qualifying phrase of today—“developing consensus”—as the main hurdle pending a signature on the CTBT. In effect, any quest for a worthwhile tactical initiative on the CTBT seems to have been abandoned in favour of clutching at India’s coattails once again.
The second issue relates to Kashmir policy. Yesterday, Islamabad discreetly deprived Kashmir of its “core” issue status and relegated it to the “outstanding” level of less intractable problems. Today, Kashmir has become a “core” issue again. Yesterday, confidence-building measures and track-2 diplomacy vis a vis India were de rigueur in Islamabad. Today, we are posing strict conditionalities for a resumption of dialogue with New Delhi. It is as though we have determined to play on New Delhi’s wicket at all times.
The same sort of confusion and lack of clarity seems to mark domestic policy. Three months ago, both the Chief Executive and the Finance Minister assured us that the dispute with Hubco would be settled within 30 days so that foreign investor confidence would be restored. Ninety days later, however, the 30-day deadline remains unchanged. We were also warned that GST and agricultural income tax would not be delayed, come hell or high water. Now we are assured that the day of reckoning has been postponed for six months at least. Then NAB was supposed to hold everyone, high or low, accountable. Now the judiciary and the army have been accorded the honour of sacred cows. Loan defaulters were on the top of NAB’s hit list. Now they have been relegated to the bottom. Corrupt politicians were to be uprooted in the blinking of an eye. Alas, “white-collar” crime rarely leaves any tracks behind. The day after the military takeover, the ECL had bloated to over 5000 names. Now it has been reasonably pared down to more “manageable” proportions. The hijacking case against Nawaz Sharif was said to be cut and dried, that is why it was the first to be launched. Three months later, the charges against him have yet to be framed and the judges are becoming stroppy. Last month, there was no question of restoring the assemblies. This month, politics has been reaffirmed as the “art of the possible”.
Yes sir, we know patience is a virtue. Yes sir, we understand radical reforms can’t be wrought overnight. But sir, you will appreciate there is too much at stake for us to suspend judgment when evidence of political immaturity and lack of strategic thinking begins to litter the bleak landscape of our beloved country.
(TFT Jan 28-03 Feb, 2000 Vol-XI No.48 — Editorial)
Evaluate performance
Following the military government’s decision January 26 to ask the judges of the Supreme Court, Federal Shariat Court and four High Courts to take a fresh oath of office swearing loyalty to the “new provisional order”, a number of judges have chosen to retire rather than stand to ceremony. Many among them were very good judges who did their profession proud. We are sorry to see them go.
Equally, however, several judges did not enjoy the best reputations in the business, while others were marked for overt political or ideological bias. Too many tears will not be shed for them. It is also significant that none of them had the courage to take up arms and punish the guilty when their holy shrine, the Supreme Court, was assaulted by violent mobs at the behest of the ruling party in 1997.
No matter. Good and bad alike, this was a matter of conscience and we should respect their decision as a matter of principle. Significantly, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Mr Saeeduzzaman Siddiqui, did the unprecedented and rather heroic thing by standing down.
Equally, however, those who have taken the oath have not done the dishonourable thing. Many among them are good and distinguished judges, no less than the best, just as the others are no worse than the worst, among their departing colleagues. Indeed, all of them have been as practically neutral as their predecessors were when the given order was abrogated, suspended, overthrown or replaced by similar military or quasi-civil dispensations in the past. In fact, at times like these, it is worth recalling that the judiciary in this country has never been chaste and there is no immutable or pristine yardstick against which it may be measured. Like political leaders and constitutionalism, it as emerged pockmarked from the debris of civil society in the aftermath of military-bureaucratic or autocratic-civilian interventions.
The real question is different. Why didn’t General Pervez Musharraf issue this critical order the day after he seized power instead of four months later? Every unemployed political pundit had offered this advice gratis but it was spurned by the high and mighty in Rawalpindi. However, now that there seemed no escape from it, given the tortuous web of legal niceties confronting the regime, we reckon that such political naivete is unbecoming a regime with such grand ambitions of transforming state and society.
In fact, we might take this opportunity to raise afresh certain other issues which are hanging fire and which could embarrass, possibly even derail, General Musharraf’s government in time to come.
First, you cannot have a clear-cut mission statement without a clear-cut timetable. The two are flip sides of the same coin. This suggests, at best, a blurred vision which could lead to false starts and dead ends, and, at worst, no vision at all, which would be tragic. It also implies a lack of confidence in being able to steer along the straight and narrow path to “true democracy”. The fact is that in this time and age a timetable would have imposed some necessary political discipline in Rawalpindi as well as removed some of the obstacles in the path of the government by the international community. Finally, it would have imbued the new dispensation with a degree of political certainty and assurance that would have revived confidence in the economy and country.
Two, conventional wisdom suggests that tough economic and political decisions should always be taken at the very beginning of a new regime when there is goodwill aplenty for it in society, or when everyone is in awe or fear of it. This is especially true of us, considering how many times we have been led up the garden path by adventurers, demagogues and democrats. Regrettably, this time-tested approach seems to have been abandoned in favour of one which naively proclaims sincerity and integrity above performance and consistency. The areas in which this strategic shortcoming is most marked are: economy, foreign policy and accountability. These are precisely those where expectations were at an all-time peak when the new regime seized power and where the greatest erosion has subsequently taken place.
Three, it is clear that this is a military government without even a credible civilian face to take responsibility for, or share the burden of, any mishaps which will inevitably follow. The decision-making centre is GHQ which constantly cues the federal and provincial cabinets as well as the NSC. If this arrangement had been on a strategic level, we would have learnt to live with it. But on a day-to-day basis, with GHQ’s powerful tentacles all over the provinces and districts via the Corps Commanders masquerading as “Monitors” and the various Governors and cabinets meekly acquiescing in matters big and small, the situation could become alarmingly self-perpetuating. There is no fall back position, no fall guys, no “alternative” advisors, no political (as opposed to military) strategists. The mind fairly boggles at the thought of a unprepared military junta with a leaky umbrella caught in the midst of a sudden downpour as it stumbles across a terrain splattered with land-mines.
General Musharraf should pause to evaluate the quality of advice he has received so far. There is too much at stake to remain smug any more.
(TFT Feb 04-10, 2000 Vol-XI No.49 — Editorial)
Entry and exit
Benazir Bhutto is la femme fatale, Kulsoom Nawaz Sharif is the reluctant debutante. They have finally made common cause because their spouses are up the creek without a paddle. So it behoves Mrs Sharif to suddenly condemn the “judicial murder” of Ms Bhutto’s father two decades ago (never mind that it was at the behest of a military dictator who was her husband’s mentor). Equally, it serves Ms Bhutto’s purpose to scream that a military dictator has no business holding popular civilian leaders accountable for anything, let alone murder (never mind that she danced a jig of joy when Nawaz Sharif was booted out). Of course, both ladies and their hangers-on seem oblivious of the irony of the situation.
The civilians played musical chairs from 1947 to 1958. They did not hold elections or give the country a democratic constitution. The then President Iskander Mirza handpicked General Ayub Khan as his defence minister, only to find himself being packed off by the good general shortly afterwards.
General Ayub handpicked Z A Bhutto to be his mercurial foreign minister and General Yahya Khan to be his Commander in Chief. But when the chips were down he found Bhutto leading the masses against him and General Yahya waiting in the wings to nudge him aside.
Bhutto rode into Islamabad on the backs of General Gul Hasan and Air Marshal Rahim Khan. Then he rudely shoved them away. Soon thereafter, he handpicked General Zia ul Haq to cover his flanks. But when he began to hound the civilian opposition to the wall, they implored Zia to save them from a fate worse than democracy. Zia was happy to oblige. In exchange, they legitimised his Majlis i Shura.
General Zia handpicked Mohammad Khan Junejo to be his puppet prime minister. But Junejo snubbed him not once but twice, over the Geneva Accords and the Ohjri disaster. So he had to go. In the event, Junejo’s sacrifice was a prelude to the Bahawalpur aircrash when Zia’s masters pulled the plug on him after he had served their purpose.
When democracy returned in 1988, General Hameed Gul and General Aslam Beg handpicked Nawaz Sharif to oppose Benazir Bhutto and paved the way for his (s)election as prime minister in 1990. Then General Beg began to spread his wings, compelling Nawaz to team up with CGS General Asif Nawaz and elbow him out. Later, when army chief General Asif Nawaz fell out with corps commander General Hameed Gul, Nawaz was quick to turn his back on his former mentor in favour of his latter ally.
The latter ally, of course, later became a foe. But when the foe died with his boots on, Nawaz seized on the opportunity to overpower his lord protector Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The two clawed at each other and went down fighting, the original sin having been committed when Ishaq Khan handpicked General Abdul Waheed as army chief. Barely six months later, however, General Waheed looked Ishaq Khan straight in the eye and gave him his marching orders. Poor Ishaq Khan. He was thrice done in by his handpicked men — by Nawaz in February 1993; by Nasim Hasan Shah, his darling supreme court chief justice, in May 1993; and finally by General Waheed in July 1993.
The same story continued. Benazir handpicked chief justice Sajjad Ali Shah and president Farooq Leghari. In due course, they joined hands to get rid of her and ended up, along with General Jehangir Karamat, in paving the way for Nawaz Sharif to return to power in 1997. But Mr Sharif could not rest until he had seen the back of all three of them in 1997-98. Of course, the final rub came when he was routed October 12, 1999, by the very general he had handpicked to replace General Karamat in 1998.
The conclusion is obvious. The civilians — whether politicians, bureaucrats or judges — have always stabbed one another in the back and invited the military to throw them out. To add insult to injury, they have always mistaken the institutional angel of death to be their handpicked guardian angel. The tragedy is all the greater since it apparently requires the hangman’s noose to remind them of their rights, duties and responsibilities not only to one another but also to the state and people of Pakistan. What then?
If the civilians have invited the generals in and paid an ignominious personal price for it, the unhappy fact remains that the generals have never known when to quit and have ended up forcing the country to pay a heavy price for their gung-ho-ism. The needless wars with India, the dismemberment of the country, the rise of violent narco-religious and ethnic mafias — all these can be laid at the door of the men in khaki. What now?
General Pervez Musharraf did not plan his entry into politics. Thank God for that. But history suggests that another tragedy could be in the offing for the country if he were led into believing by his handpicked men that he doesn’t need to plan his exit as soon as possible – notwithstanding la femme fatale and the reluctant debutante.
(TFT Feb 11-17, 2000 Vol-XI No.50 — Editorial)
More loyal than the PM
General Syed Amjad Hussain is getting warmer by the day. He has so far nabbed a former prime minister, a couple of former chief ministers, several former federal and provincial ministers and advisors, and a few former and currently suspended MNAs, MPAs and Senators. Most of these “elected representatives” or “politicians” are reputed to be crooks. All are being investigated for corruption, misdemeanour or misrule on a princely scale. In due course, many more of their ilk will probably meet the same fate at the hands of the good general. And when they get their comeuppance, not many tears will be shed over their political demise.
But what about accountability of the bureaucracy? The Civil Service of Pakistan was once the awe-inspiring “steel frame” of the state. But it has now become a rotting “branch” of government. Manifestly in the jug are two former principal secretaries to two prime ministers (an accused and an approver), a couple of former grade-22 federal secretaries and the odd Eng.Lit. policeman thrown in for good measure. But if truth be told, and man for man, the civil bureaucracy, high or low, has become as malevolent and malignant as its political masters. Why has this happened? Why didn’t the civil servant resist corruption in the post-colonial period as he had done in the colonial era?
Power is corrupting. But absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the colonial era, the bureaucracy was answerable and accountable to an immaculate colonial master. But when the powerful civil bureaucracy inherited Pakistan in 1947, it became its own lord and master and ruled the roost during the halcyon years of “licence-raj” from 1947 to 1968, the last decade in partnership with its armed brethren. Then came the “socialist” ’70s and “Islamic” ’80s when a demagogue and a hypocrite breathed fire and venom, forcing the bureaucracy to pay obeisance. This was climaxed by the glorious ’90s when the ravenous politicians befriended the bureaucracy, stormed the citadels of power and pillaged the coffers of the state. Hence the catch-all term: “politicisation of the bureaucracy”. Why didn’t the bureaucrats resist the politicians?
Apologists claim that they had no choice, that they were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t, that they went along with the politicians because they were not sufficiently anchored or institutionally safeguarded in the 1973 constitution. It is pointed out that the Government of India Act 1935 provided the civil servant with ample protection against arbitrary or illegal orders. That is why the bureaucracy could, and did, stand up to accountability in those times. Much the same was true of the 1956 constitution. But the 1973 constitution of Pakistan, unlike the earlier ones or the current constitution of India, was not terribly benevolent to the bureaucrat. In fact, as a matter of jurispolicy, it deliberately threw the civil servant at the mercy of the politician in power. There was, we are reminded, a method in Mr Bhutto’s madness: he was, after all, a budding Bonaparte (l’etat, c’est moi!) who had planned to rule for twenty years with the “help of the bureaucracy”. So the bureaucracy had to be bent or broken to do his bidding.
There is some truth in this line of argument. If the law and constitution had been more hospitable for the upright civil servant, perhaps some civil servants would have had the spine to defy immoral political authority and lived to tell the tale. And to that extent, perhaps the Chief Executive and his legal eagles can all put their heads together and make notes for the future. But such safeguards are only a necessary condition for survival on one’s feet. Their presence is not sufficient to thwart corruption just as their absence isn’t a recipe for misconduct.
Let us be candid. The bureaucrat is, after all, of the same breed as the rest of us. Like the rest of our “civil society”, and thanks to the hypocritical ideologues of our times, he too has progressively learnt to cloak immorality with piety and character with personality. It is immeasurably simpler and more rewarding to bend with the wind, to cling to the perks of power and privilege, to numb the conscience, than it is to seek refuge behind cheerless rules and regulations in the official wilderness of “special duty”.
The road-map is clear. If the constitution is to be amended to build job security for the civil servant so that he is able to resist corruption and arbitrary or discretionary power, it must also be amended to build deterrence so that he is punished if he succumbs to them. And if NAB is within its rights to nab the errant politician and inject a dose of deterrence into his successors, so too with the bureaucrat who has stooped to please such politicians. And just as it is necessary not merely to disqualify a corrupt politician from standing for public office but also to punish and dispossess him, so too is it imperative that we must disown and discard the bureaucrat who owes his loyalty to the government of the day rather than to the state.
(TFT Feb 18-24, 2000 Vol-XI No.51 — Editorial)
Breathing space required
Mr Shaukat Aziz, the finance minister, has managed to wrap up US$ 4 b in foreign debt rescheduling. He has also swapped three Pakistani Eurobonds worth US$ 608 million with a 10% six year bond (this is no mean achievement, considering the donor community wanted Pakistan to default on the bonds). It also seems that for the first time in several years the government may achieve its tax revenue target of Rs 360 billion or so by end-June. At the same time, exports, which have been stagnant in the last three years, have risen by about 8% during July 99-January 2000 compared to the same period last year. Inflation is down, interest rates have been reduced by 2%, privatisation is on the anvil, loan defaulters have coughed up Rs 12 billion, a good cotton crop of over 10 million bales has been harvested and the stock exchange has woken up from its deep slumber. Finally, General Zulfikar Ali, chairman Wapda, has chipped in by renegotiating tariff rates with all except two power producers, and thereby saved the country a billion dollars or so over the life of these projects. Not bad going, eh, in only 100 days?
Alas, if truth be told, the picture is not so rosy. Debt rescheduling was clinched by the Nawaz government in early 1999 and the Musharraf regime has simply put the finishing touches on it. The good cotton crop (and therefore the rise in textile exports) is, of course, due to Allah’s blessings rather than any great policy prescriptions by either government. Also, inflation is down not because of any prudent fiscal fix but because there is a recession in the economy. Finally, the duel between the Wapda chairman/finance ministry and the managements of Hubco/Kapco has scarred the economy for a long time to come.
Indeed, the fact is that the government’s economic performance could have been much better in the recent past if hard economic decisions had been taken and might be much worse in the near future if hard political decisions are not taken. For example, if the revamping of the tax structure, including the imposition of GST on retail trade and a tax on agricultural incomes, had been effected earlier, Mr Aziz might have been laughing all the way to the bank next June. Similarly, the delay in negotiating further assistance from the IMF, whether under the old Extended Structural Adjustment Facility/EFF programme or the new Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility, is not to be shrugged away simply in terms of a delayed “tranche” of US$ 280 million — it underlines some very basic and potentially crippling balance of payment and debt repayment problems which cast a deep shadow over our economic and political future. What do we mean by that?
Pakistan’s total domestic and foreign debt is now statistically equal to about 105% of its GDP. By itself, that means little, considering that some fairly affluent countries are equally up to their ears in debt. Nor is the burden of domestic debt, which is more than our foreign debt, bearing down too heavily upon us. When it becomes due for payment, we have the legislative and political freedom to simply replace it with a bigger, and sometimes more expensive, debt. But foreign debt is a different matter altogether. If we don’t pay it back on due date, or we are unable to have it rescheduled on mutually acceptable terms, we run the risk of defaulting on our loans and being declared “bankrupt”. And “financial bankruptcy” is no laughing matter for any country. It can lead to currency crash, runaway inflation, shortages, rationing, and great economic hardship followed by political turmoil and social upheaval. Countries which have actually slipped into default have taken a decade or two to recover from its ravages.
Pakistan has been teetering on the brink of financial default for many years because our foreign exchange earnings, whether through exports or inward capital remittances, have always been less than our foreign exchange expenditures, whether for imports or profit/dividend/debt repatriations. But no big deal was made of it because our international goodwill was sufficient to enable us to borrow afresh year after year not merely to plug the continuing gap between our imports and exports but also to repay outstanding foreign debt. In 1998, however, our goodwill ran out when we tested the nuclear bomb and alienated the international community. Faced with economic sanctions, and unable to repay our foreign loans because of inadequate reserves, we stumbled headlong into potential financial default.
Fortunately, however, we were able to avoid a fate worse than death when the international community relented and allowed us to reschedule over US$ 5 billion in debt due 1999-2001. It did so partly because it was persuaded that we had been pushed into nuclear testing by India and partly because we promised to address some of its outstanding concerns as soon as possible. How do we fare on all these fronts today?
Rather precariously, we fear. The balance of payments gap is threatening to hit US$ 6 billion in FY 2000, of which about US$ 2.5 billion will be on the current account and about US$ 3.5 billion on the capital account. The reason for such a large gap is the additional burden of US$ 1 billion on account of an unprecedented rise in the price of oil from US$ 14 per barrel to US$ 23 per barrel, falling inward remittances (thanks to the freeze on forex deposits necessitated by nuclear testing), a rising trade gap and negative foreign investment flows. Out of this, we have already rescheduled US$ 2.5 billion, leaving US$ 3.5 billion to be paid. In FY 2001, after the 1999 rescheduling has run out of steam, this net gap will have risen to about US$ 5 billion. Where are we going to find the money to close these gaps, year in and year out?
Privatisation is the answer, we are told, surely we can raise at least US$ 20 billion by selling the family silver. Rubbish. In the current circumstances in which leading domestic businessmen are either being put behind bars for loan defaults or evading taxes or are emigrating in the droves to more hospitable climes like Canada or Australia, it is wishful thinking to imagine that foreigners (clutching their local embassy’s “advisory” cautioning them about the pitfalls of venturing forth in Pakistan) will be lining up to grab the goodies.
Clearly, the goodwill of the international community in terms of fresh economic assistance to tide us over our restructuring problems will be the critical factor. And if this goodwill is not forthcoming, we will come face to face with financial default and everything that it entails. What is the way out?
We could, of course, tell the world that we are unable to pay our debts and it can go to hell for all we care. For various reasons, some angry people in this country actually advocate this route and are prepared to pay the price for it. But most of us would like to remain within the global village while restructuring our economy in such a way that in time to come economic dependency becomes a thing of the past and healthy balance of payment surpluses a matter of business as usual. How do we bring that about?
If Mr Shaukat Aziz is to go down in Pakistani history as the “economic man”, he must fight to get some medium-term economic “space” in which to set the economy right on its long-term path. The “space” he requires is freedom to manoeuvre radical reforms in the social, industrial, trading and agricultural sectors without being bogged down by shortage of foreign exchange to retool the economy or pay international debts. At the very least, he will require an international debt write-off or long-term rescheduling of another US$ 10 billion or so in the next couple of years in order to have elbow room to revamp the economy. How will he get this space?
This space can only be made available by our national security establishment on the basis of a review of our foreign policy options. Such a review should enable us to address pressing international concerns like nuclear proliferation, international terrorism and regional peace without jeopardising our national security so that significant debt rescheduling or write-offs can be claimed as a matter of our right as a responsible member of the international community. This is not an impossible task. Nor are there insuperable contradictions between our quest for security and the demands of regional peace. All it takes to devise an appropriate foreign policy strategy is to have the courage and vision to comprehend the role of the economy in national security and build its centrality into it. Any other status-quo strategy will be revealed, sooner or later, to be clever-by-half and plunge us into the jaws of international default and isolation, followed by domestic anarchy and upheaval. The sooner this is understood where it matters, the better. The time for huffing, and puffing and bluffing and blackmailing our way out of trouble has run out.
(TFT Feb 25-02 Mar, 2000 Vol-XI No.52 — Editorial)
Forewarned is forearmed
The next few months promise to be full of hardcore news. Several consequential developments are on the cards and each will have implications far beyond the predictable. Individually or together, they could propose a watershed or turning point in Pakistan’s post-nuclear political history. Therefore General Pervez Musharraf should be forewarned so that he is forearmed.
- The hijacking case against Nawaz Sharif in the anti-terrorist court in Karachi will come to a head soon. The prosecution has presented its material witnesses; the defense has cross-examined them; an explosive political statement from Mr Sharif is due; and then the judge will deliver his verdict. Several questions arise. Will the government try and postpone the hearings in the court until after President Bill Clinton has come and gone in end-March so that no embarrassing, democracy-related issues concerning the trial or verdict sour the atmosphere? If it does, a perception will be created that the government has obstructed the path of justice. That would be a plus point for Mr Sharif and a minus for General Musharraf. If it doesn’t, an anti-Sharif judgment will raise the political temperature in the country and risk a backlash in Washington that could strengthen the hands of those who are urging Mr Clinton not to visit Islamabad because that would amount to “legitimizing” the military overthrow of an elected regime.
- President Clinton has announced his trip to India next month. If he decides to give Pakistan a miss, it will be seen in this country as “sleeping with the enemy”. This would amount to a “mother of all betrayals”, the earlier betrayals of Pakistan being the American aid cut-off in 1990 and Washington’s refusal to supply the F-16s or return the US$ 658 million paid in hard cash for them nearly a decade ago. Coming on the heels of continuing American apathy towards the cause of the oppressed Muslims of the world — at first in Kashmir, then in Bosnia and now in Chechnya — this would be a perfect recipe for an anti-American, xenophobic backlash amongst the people and national security establishment of Pakistan. The conceivable consequences of this, both in the short and long-term, for Pakistan, India and America, could be horrendous. But if Mr Clinton does grace Pakistan with a visit, the logic of the talks between the Americans and Pakistanis, based on a vested appreciation of the problems which concern them, could lead to fresh difficulties, rather than urgent solutions, for one or both sides. If the Pakistani government concedes the American demand to rein in the jihadi forces fomenting trouble in Kashmir, or stamps down on Osama Bin Laden’s terrorism or agrees to effect a temporary freeze of the Kashmir issue along the Line of Control, the disgruntled politicians who are at the receiving end of the stick from the generals, and the jihadi forces who are straining at the leash, will jointly seize upon the opportunity to accuse them of wilting under American pressure and selling-out on Pakistan’s vital “national interests”. That would certainly strain the regime’s credibility among the people of Pakistan. But if Islamabad refuses to budge its ground unless the Kashmir issue is resolutely addressed by the American President, and if Mr Clinton is faced with having to chose between India or Pakistan, he is likely to go home wishing he’d never come to Pakistan in the first place (remember, the issue for him at the moment is not whether to visit Indiaor Pakistan but whether to visit Pakistan at all). In the event, US-Pak relations may be expected to deteriorate sooner or later and the debt-choked, dependent Pakistani economy will suffer greatly as a result.
- India is deadly earnest in undermining whatever little American goodwill or strategic interest there remains for Pakistan. It sees Mr Clinton’s visit as a perfect opportunity to rupture the US-Pak relationship. Mr Atal Vajpayee’s overt belligerence, coupled with talk in India’s hawkish think-tanks of the necessity of a “limited” war with Pakistan, suggests that RAW could get up to dirty tricks in the days and weeks leading up to Mr Clinton’s arrival in the sub-continent. But if New Delhi-conspired events collude to sabotage Mr Clinton’s visit to Pakistan, we may be sure that Islamabad will remain true to form and not hesitate to repay this generosity in kind. In the unfortunate event, however, it could be India which might reap the sympathy and Pakistan the hostility of the world community (as in Kargil), with adverse implications for the military regime in Islamabad. Similarly, if jihadi-inspired acts against American interests in Pakistan or elsewhere in the next few weeks should serve to stiffen Mr Clinton’s resolve to rain death and destruction upon them wherever they might be, the sole loser will be Pakistan since it remains in the eye of the Islamic storm brewing in the world.
We expect the military government in Islamabad to have done its homework and prepared plans to negate any eventuality in the coming days that could have an adverse impact on its credibility, legitimacy or longevity. But if this turns out to be a forlorn hope, we will derive no pleasure at all from saying, “we told you so”.
(TFT Mar 03-09, 2000 Vol-XII No.1 — Editorial)
Poverty of philosophy and philosophy of poverty
Poor Mr Abdul Sattar. Since the foreign minister began to advocate a pro-CTBT position, he has been variously rubbished as a “dove”, snubbed as an “opportunist” or branded a “traitor” by a pack of super-patriots spitting fire and venom at all the “lily-livered”, “weak-kneed”, “panic-prone”, “pessimistic”, “pusillanimous” “capitulationists” with “derivative”, “pro-West” mindsets who are in favour of signing the CTBT or negotiating a constructive dialogue with India and the Western powers not because of any intrinsic or intellectual conviction which they may have about the merits of the issues but because they are “agents” of “anti-Islamic imperialists and regional hegemonic powers” with “ulterior designs”. Phew! That is one helleva charge-sheet.
It is odd, however, that not one of our super-patriots, who stake monopolistic rights over received wisdom or political clairvoyance and are tilting at the windmills of the “enemies of the state”, has had the courage to look General Pervez Musharraf in the eye and tar him with the same brush. After all, it is hardly conceivable that Mr Sattar would utter a single word on foreign policy, including the CTBT, unless it perfectly reflected the position of his military masters.
Our super-patriots are a rather motley crew. They comprise leaders of so-called religious groups, a handful of retired generals, some former foreign-office types and a few judges — all of whom strut about as “expert-columnists”, “leading opinion-makers” or budding politicians. Included also are certain owner-editors of the press whose chummy relationship with the most venal and corrupt politicians of our time is no less reprehensible than their enthusiasm for rabid provincial sub-nationalism and sectarianism. Three decades ago, these people and others of their ilk had exhorted the military to crush the “treacherous” Bengalis of East Pakistan for demanding their constitutional rights. Two years ago, they blasted the opponents of tit-for-tat nuclear tests as “western agents”. Today, they are among the fiercest proponents of changing the status-quo in the region by the use of armed force, directly or by proxy. Under their command and control systems, policies of nuclear bravado would have precedence over nuclear ambiguity, strategies of nuclear defiance would overtake nuclear restraint and militant jihad would replace serious diplomacy. It is a heady mix.
This is a “confrontationist orthodoxy” that masquerades as a “national consensus”. It seeks to crush dissenting opinion by juxtaposing “patriotism” and “conspiracy theories” against the immutable logic of facts. It belittles intellectual adversaries as “renegades” from “Pan-Islamic nationalism” (a contradiction in terms) even as it cloaks its own intellectual poverty in the rage of passion or the pride of self-righteousness. Its discourse is couched in the thunderous language of the weak and the insecure rather than in the cold-blooded rationality of scientific knowledge.
The situation on the other side of the border has become no less bigoted or hysterical. A different sort of “national consensus” forged by resurgent Hindu extremists has determined to drag Pakistan into an arms race and try to crush it under its own weight — just the US$ 3 billion increase in New Delhi’s defense budget for next year is more than the total current defense budget of Islamabad (US$ 2.8 billion). But there is one critical difference between India and Pakistan’s defense strategy. India’s defense expenditure projections are based on a self-reliant and buoyant economy growing at above 7% per annum in the next few years, dynamic IT-led export growth (target US$ 50 billion in 2010) leading to huge balance of payments surpluses, solid forex reserves and multi-billion dollar inflows of foreign investment. Pakistan, on the other hand, will remain critically dependent on scarce foreign handouts to stave financial default on a year by year basis unless it puts its house in order. How then will a hard state with a soft core like Pakistan cope with a hard state with a hard core like India?
Our super-patriots have a brilliant answer. Kashmir must be liberated and India must be crushed before the conventional balance of economy and weapons becomes asymmetrical. That means that the jihad must be reinforced in Kashmir immediately. It also means that the jihad must be swiftly extended to other parts of India as a low-cost-high-efficiency method of undermining India’s state. This would entail a state of continuous military confrontation with India till death do us part. In other words, the arrival of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent is not to herald durable peace based on nuclear deterrence but nuclear destruction initiated by limited wars. Nuclearisation is to be used to change the status quo. If this is not the route to mutually-self-assured-destruction, we don’t know what is.
Our angry super-patriots won’t like our line of argument. It defies their nationalist yearning to avenge gross wrongdoing by India and immoral tilting by the western powers. But at the end of the day we must ask ourselves whether we want to provoke a suicidal nuclear holocaust in South Asia or try to negotiate a durable peace with our neighbour.
(TFT Mar 10-16, 2000 Vol-XII No.2 — Editorial)
Media management is futile
General Pervez Musharraf is apparently intrigued why the print media does not fully project public approval of his government’s many admirable policies. Wherever he goes, he says, people praise him for the good and sincere efforts of his team. Yet he does not see this sufficiently reflected in the newspapers. So the conclusion is that the government’s media-managers must be lacking in ability and should be replaced by a more hands-on team.
This conclusion is misplaced. In many areas, this government is not doing as well as it thinks it is, or as well as it promised to do. So if the press is not exactly gushing with praise, the government’s media-managers can hardly be blamed. Equally, if some people are wont to bow and scrape before Caesar, he must beware the sycophants rather than insist on recording and projecting their hypocrisy.
The truth is that, despite its many shortcomings (a military regime is, by definition, anathema to a free press), General Musharraf’s government is still getting a fair press. This is partly because the political opposition has done nothing to inspire the imagination of the press or rekindle the faith of the people so that it can claim the headlines all over again. It is also because the Musharraf government has not blundered in anything that it must be constantly whipped in public and made to atone for its sins. In other words, the opposition is not “good” enough and the government is not “bad” enough to make for exciting, catchy copy. What could be better news for any government than that, considering that the last thing the press or public would ever want is to reverse the order of things and make life dull and boring and unprofitable because readers would stop reading and newspapers would stop selling and everybody, especially the government, would suffer the consequences of being “good”.
It is not advisable to “persuade” the media to present a “positive” picture of the government. How this is done is reprehensible. Officers reputed for being “intrusive” can be pulled out of obscurity and re-employed to “bend” the news. Friendly “advice” can then become “emphatic” and “leveraged” with subtle punitive gestures or not-so-subtle blandishments. Side by side with this, a core group of “journalists” who are always on the take, can be inspired to lull the government into a false sense of well-being and security. But such “media-management” cannot endear General Musharraf and his comrades to the public. Consider.
General Ayub Khan also believed that his “popular” image was not sufficiently reflected in the press. Therefore “good coverage” was predicated on the Press & Publications Ordinance 1963 (PPO) along with section 124 of the Penal Code outlawing criticism of government. But when the “needful” was not forthcoming, his media experts came up with the brilliant device of creating the “good deed” which could be blazoned in the subjugated press. Hence the “Decade of Reforms and Development” was launched as an image-building exercise. But when the end came it was obvious that the people had seen through the charade.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto went one step further in his efforts to stamp his charismatic achievements on the minds of the people. He whipped the press into submission only to rue the day when it did not rise to his defense when he was sent to the gallows by a dictator. General Zia ul Haq exhorted the press to be “good Muslims” doing “good business”, failing which they were flogged and/or imprisoned. But when he dived to his doom a decade later, no one in the press mourned his passing. Then came the era of “good government” (not good governance) under Mohammad Khan Junejo and Benazir Bhutto when the press was freed from the shackles of the PPO and the “good deeds” of “sympathetic” journalists were rewarded with cheques and good relations with press owners were based on generous newsprint quotas, duty-free machinery imports and lucrative advertisement handouts. Unfortunately, however, the “image-building” of the media-experts had no impact on the popularity graph of the governments which remained low.
Nawaz Sharif’s media-management was the most instructive. He left no stone unturned to try and build a “positive” image. Indeed, his passion for “positive coverage” was so intense that unprecedented lollipops were offered to friendly journalists, columnists and press barons who sang paeans to him. Equally, criticism was stifled with an iron hand when journalists were kidnapped, beaten up and accused of sedition. Yet, at the end of the day, his home-spun media experts and friendly press barons could not prevent his fall. In fact, his foul media-management became the yardstick by which his democratic government was condemned in favour of an undemocratic one when General Musharraf seized power.
General Musharraf must never forget this. The truth is that without advising, inducing or coercing the press — “managing” it in short — he still has a far better public image than any democratic or military ruler has had so far. The tonic criticism his government receives in the press is good for it. In the final analysis, what matters is good policies and competent performance rather than hollow images or shallow propaganda. The people are not fools. They know how to distinguish one from the other.
(TFT Mar 17-23, 2000 Vol-XII No.3 — Editorial)
Interests Vs concerns
During a forthcoming five-day state visit to India, US President Bill Clinton will be wined and dined in style, along with his hot-shot entourage of cheque-book businessmen, powerful congressmen and influential cabinet members. Later, accompanied only with a handful of aides, he will “drop in” for a serious chat with General Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad on March 25. What is the significance of his trip to South Asia?
Given the frenetic lobbying by India and Pakistan in the last few weeks, New Delhi would have been thrilled if Mr Clinton had decided not to grace Pakistan with his presence at all. Equally, Islamabad would have been delighted if he had agreed to linger a bit longer when in town. But because both countries are locked in a fierce confrontation, each seeks to woo the sole superpower to the exclusion of the other. It is therefore understandable that each should try and put its own gloss on the American President’s visit to the region. Thus the Indian prime minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has openly voiced his “displeasure” over Mr Clinton’s decision to visit Pakistan, even if it is to be ever so brief. At the same time, several right and left-wing parties and groups in India championing an assortment of “anti-imperialist” slogans are busy chalking “Go Home Clinton” on the walls of their constituencies. Meanwhile, on the Pakistani side, our ever-vigilant PTV has trotted out its usual band of pundits to trumpet a “crushing defeat” of India. Indeed, our Chief Executive has gone so far as to claim that the American President’s decision to meet him for a round of talks is an endorsement of his military regime.
The American State Department insists it is nothing of the sort. In fact, senior US officials are at pains to differentiate engagement with a military regime from an endorsement of it. But perhaps it is just as well that another critical and realistic distinction — that between an American pursuit of mutually beneficial interests/advantage with India and an American expression of singularly worrying concerns/worries with Pakistan — has not been overtly made by Washington. If it had been articulated in this manner, the Pakistani establishment might have been more than circumspect and less than thrilled at the prospect of a grueling session with Mr Clinton.
Let us be candid. The fact is that the extended US-India discourse will focus on how to accommodate or expand India’s global economic integration and political outreach within the positive matrix of American interests or advantage. As opposed to this, the brief US-Pakistan negotiations will focus on how to restrain or limit Pakistan’s local economic disintegration and global political isolation within the negative matrix of American concerns or worries. In concrete terms this means that the United States’ budding relationship with India is set to explore the prospects of stimulating significant private American foreign investment in India, encouraging a multi-billion dollar Indian information-technology export thrust into the American silicon market and enabling India to build and flex a countervailing econo-military strategic presence vis-à-vis China. All these are mutually beneficial Indo-US interests.
On the other side, the United States’ waning relationship with Pakistan seeks to restore representative democracy in the country, curb the impulse of terrorism in its backyard, restrain its military exertions in Kashmir, limit its nuclear and missile arsenal and stop it from sliding into financial default, political unrest and social anarchy.
The basic reason for the American President’s trip to India and Pakistan is to foreclose accidental or pre-meditated armed conflict between the two countries (which could get out of hand and become a nuclear holocaust) so that the aims and objectives of American interests and concerns in the region are not undermined wittingly or otherwise by either or both sides.
It should also be clear to everyone, but especially to the Pakistanis, that President Clinton could never have conceived of a trip to South Asia without touching base in Pakistan, irrespective of the nature of our political regime. But despite themselves both India and Pakistan may well have strengthened the American agenda in South Asia. An elaborate charade of “will-he-won’t-he” has been played out. The net result is that for opposite reasons both India and Pakistan will now come under American pressure to get off their high horses, start talking to each other without pre-conditions, normalise relations and try to find peaceful bilateral solutions to their outstanding disputes.
The American President, it is said, has already become a lame duck. The Indian Prime Minister has lately out-hawked his Hindu colleagues. The Pakistan Chief Executive stands accused of bullish adventurism. On the face of it, this unlikely troika of ducks, hawks and bulls does not inspire confidence. But what the heck. This is a great challenge and a greater opportunity. India has a lot to gain and Pakistan has a lot to lose depending on how each responds to The Great Communicator.
(TFT Mar 24-30, 2000 Vol-XII No.4 — Editorial)
Rejectionism or Flexibility
In the unfolding South Asian scenario, the United States is walking the thin line of peace diplomacy between unrepentant neighbours India and Pakistan. Both countries have been treated to a sermon on non-proliferation. But this hasn’t cut ice with India; hence it may have little, if any, impact on Pakistan. They have also been urged to abandon the idea of a limited war, respect the “sanctity” of the line of control in Kashmir, and reduce tensions so that an accidental or premeditated nuclear holocaust can be avoided at all costs. If this advice, too, is shunned by India, Pakistan is not likely to make any unilateral concessions. Thus the prospects for peace between them don’t look good at all. In the event, how will each country fare?
India and the US have signed a “vision” statement. This reminds us of the “friendship” treaty between India and the USSR signed many decades ago that served to prop up India’s military-industrial complex for nearly four decades. If this futuristic “vision” is to be shared with the sole superpower of today, it will surely blossom into something much more significant than the “friendship” with the other superpower of yesterday. In time to come, India could get the full red carpet treatment: easier access to American goods and markets and whopping foreign investments in information technology, biotechnology, environmental protection and energy development. Indeed, President Bill Clinton has gone so far as to state that Washington supports India’s quest for leadership in this region.
Pakistan, on the other hand, will not be endorsed by the US. It will be advised to trim its jehad policy, clamp down on training camps that produce international terrorists and return to representative democracy as soon as possible. A tall order, indeed. India’s refusal to sit across the table with Pakistan is no help. And the poverty of the political landscape doesn’t inspire much hope in an early revival of democracy either. In the event, a political deadlock between Islamabad and Washington would lead to an economic chill between our ministry of finance and Western donor institutions and countries. The squeeze in Pakistan would, of course, be in stark contrast to the expansive mood in India.
Beyond the short-term South Asian scenario is the broader, medium-longer term Asian perspective. There is a growing but uncertain consensus against some of Washington’s global policies. India remains a “conscientious” objector to America’s “nuclear bullying”. Iran has repeatedly expressed its willingness to join Russia and China in opposition to American global hegemony — it has chafed under Washington’s sanctions and remains determined to continue participating in the anti-Israel campaign in Lebanon. Russia and China have opposed violations of state-sovereignty in the Balkans and in North Caucasia. And China is squarely facing the American challenge in the Asia-Pacific region where it adamantly opposes Taiwan’s independence. What is Washington’s response to all this?
It is a masterpiece of flexibility in the face of growing odds. India is in the process of being “disarmed” following President Bill Clinton’s recent visit. Trade agreements galore are being signed. Some of the post-nuclear test 1998 sanctions have been lifted and others will eventually fade away too. Mrs Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, has now signaled an apology of sorts to Iran over “mistakes” in US foreign policy in the past, not least support to Saddam Hussain during Iraq’s war with Iran. She has also announced a partial lifting of the sanctions imposed on Iran in 1995 and is ready to open talks on unfreezing major Iranian assets in the US. It all depends on Iran, she says. Meanwhile, the Iranian president and people are in a reformist mood to liberalise and open up their country to the world. So we may expect Iran and the US to improve ties in the years to come.
While Afghanistan and Pakistan find it difficult to accept US “engagement” on terrorism and non-proliferation respectively, Iran is already half-way there. It is a signatory to both the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). It has also kept clear of regional conflicts to its east and north. It has controlled its side of the Afghan jehad sufficiently to prevent any blow-backs, stayed out of the Azerbaijan-Armenian conflict even though the Azeris were fellow Shiites, and observed strict neutrality in the war in Chechnya in North Caucasia. In fact, its relations with the states of Central Asia have actually improved after the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 1994, allowing it pride of place in the grand regional consensus that includes Russia, the Central Asian states and China — a consensus that opposes Pakistan as the real power behind the Taliban. It is also in Central Asia that American and Iranian interests tend to coincide as a make-weight to Russia’s influence. Finally, Iran has mended fences somewhat with the Gulf Arabs who were forced to look to Iran for cooperation after Saddam Hussain attacked them in 1990.
Clearly, none of the opponents of American “hegemony” are immune to incentives and stimulants. India, in fact, is keen to “seduce” America into punishing Pakistan. China’s whopping trade surplus with the US also tempts it to cling to America’s One-China commitment without jumping the gun in Taiwan. With Iran now disavowing isolationalism, no one except Afghanistan and perhaps Pakistan seems to hanker for this way of life.
Nations which are not alive to regional changes in the offing or which refuse to adjust to them tend to minimise their range of strategic options. Instead, the advocates of defiance wear isolationism as a badge of courage, rebuking others for being weak-kneed in the face of hostile global forces. Certainly, this is the style in Kandahar. Is this the style which appeals to the Pakistani national security establishment and its apologists? If it is, we can only conclude that it springs from an unrealistic self-assessment and is driven by a presumption of collective wrath.
Since America’s positive initiatives with India and Iran (both more or less hostile to Pakistan) will surely intensify in time to come, it is imperative that Pakistan should break out of its defiant and rejectionist mode precisely at a moment of its greatest economic vulnerability. This is urgently required in the face of Islamabad’s intense confrontation with New Delhi and growing distance from Washington. What could be better than that its greatest asset – its nuclear capability – should now allow it to embrace statesmanship safely and enable it to adjust to new regional developments with a measure of maturity and flexibility like its neighbours to the east and west.
(TFT Mar 31-06 April, 2000 Vol-XII No.5 — Editorial)
Put Pakistan first
Last week President Bill Clinton spent five days in India gushing about the virtues of the “new” India and lauding its “leadership” role far beyond South Asia. But in Islamabad it looked as if Mr Clinton were treading on egg-shells in New Delhi after he was publicly rebuked by the Indian president for depicting South Asia as the “most dangerous place in the world”. This, of course, is the same India which was a pro-Soviet leader of the “non-aligned world” and a fierce US critic during the cold-war.
Mr Clinton then hopped over to neighbouring Pakistan where he spent five hours warning the Pakistanis not to support terrorism or violate the line of control with India. He lectured them about the risks of international “isolation” and the costs of becoming a “failed state”. In New Delhi it looked as if Mr Clinton had landed in Islamabad all guns blazing. This, of course, is the same Pakistan that was Washington’s “most allied ally” against the “communist menace” during the cold war.
Mr Clinton should have been more circumspect in Pakistan if he wasn’t inclined to be less one-sided in India. Our fear is that instead of promoting peace between two belligerent countries this sudden “shift” in American policy could spell more trouble in the region. India has been itching to give Pakistan a bloody nose since its military humiliation at the hands of the Pakistan army in Kargil last year. Might not Mr Clinton’s perceived policy “shift” in South Asia embolden resurgent India to provoke a conflict with prickly Pakistan? Was it wise to leave the region in this frame of mind?
It is, of course, perfectly understandable why Mr Clinton went to such lengths to convey the impression that it would not be “business as usual” with Pakistan’s new military regime. The US President had, after all, personally persuaded Mr Sharif last year to withdraw forces from Kargil, thereby triggering tensions between Mr Sharif and General Musharraf. But Washington also bore some responsibility for emboldening Mr Sharif to try and get rid of General Musharraf, thereby provoking a military coup. In fact, that is why during his talks with General Musharraf in Islamabad March 25, Mr Clinton pointedly sought assurances that Mr Sharif would not be “executed” by the military regime for any alleged crimes.
Mr Clinton was originally not sure that he should grace Pakistan with a visit at all. His advisors said that his presence in Islamabad might be construed as “legitimising” or “endorsing a military regime”, thereby reducing Western pressure for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan. But in the end it was thought better to engage a nuclear-armed military regime (which enjoyed a degree of popularity with Pakistanis) in a “constructive dialogue” than to ostracize or alienate it. Accordingly, strict protocol conditions were laid down by Washington.
President Clinton spent only five hours in Pakistan. He directly addressed the Pakistani people on TV rather than through a press conference or speech before an audience in the company of his military hosts; he was received at the airport by the country’s civilian foreign minister rather than by any top general; the country’s civilian president welcomed him at the Presidency in Islamabad; he “engaged” with General Musharraf and his civilian aides in the company of his own advisors and not alone.
The gist of Mr Clinton’s lecture to General Musharraf and the Pakistani nation was loud and clear. Pakistan must restore democracy quickly. It must disavow terrorist activities in India and respect the sanctity of the line of control in Kashmir. It must support the cause of nuclear-non-proliferation and sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It must hold an unconditional bilateral dialogue with India to resolve its outstanding disputes. It must channel scarce economic resources towards building prosperity rather than be drawn into an arms race with India. If it chose the right path, it would benefit from friendship with the United States. If it didn’t, it could end up being isolated internationally as a failed state. There was also a clear indication that in the event of conflict with India, Pakistan should not expect the US to side with it. Equally, the US would not agree to mediate the dispute between Pakistan and India over Kashmir without a nod from New Delhi. Was General Musharraf listening?
In a press conference after Mr Clinton’s departure, General Musharraf dilated upon his “exchange of views” with the American President. Pakistan, he said, had assured Mr Clinton that it would not export nuclear technology, know-how or fissile material. But he held out no promise on some of the other issues raised by the Americans. The CTBT would be signed only after a “national consensus” on it had been obtained. Pakistan had no leverage on the forces of Islamic jehad fighting in Kashmir but would try to “moderate” them provided India “reciprocated” with a dialogue on the “central” issue of Kashmir. Democracy would be restored in the country since he (General Musharraf) had “no desire to stay in power for too long” but no definite timetable could be given. Mr Sharif’s fate rested with the courts but he (General Musharraf) was not “personally vindictive”. Observers were quick to note that the general was unusually cautious and moderate during the press conference and went the extra mile to downplay the import of policy differences with the Americans while emphasising that his talks with President Clinton were held in a cordial and frank manner — there was even some banter about golfing handicaps, he told us.
More significantly, in a departure from his usually bristling references to the BJP government in India, General Musharraf said that he was ready to hold talks with India’s prime minister “anytime, anyplace”, adding however that Kashmir’s “centrality” in the Indo-Pak dialogue should not be undermined. This was in marked contrast to his earlier statements that there would be no talks with India unless the “core” issue of Kashmir was first resolved to the satisfaction of Pakistan. General Musharraf, it may be recalled, had earlier frowned on the dialogue between the prime ministers of India and Pakistan in Lahore in January 1999 when both sides agreed to put all their outstanding disputes, including Kashmir, on the table for discussion, without putting any pre-conditions about the resolution of any “core” dispute. Does this mean that General Musharraf has softened his stance toward India and is inclined to heed at least some elements of Mr Clinton’s advice?
General Musharraf has proceded on a visit to four South East Asian states. He has not yet ordered a review of foreign and domestic policies in the wake of the recent American “advice” he has received. Nor has he had time to brief his senior military colleagues of what, if anything, transpired behind the scenes during President Clinton’s stop-over in Islamabad. But there are some straws in the wind.
Seen in the context of General Musharraf’s press conference, a statement by Yussuf Bin Allawi Abdullah, the Foreign Minister –in-Waiting of Oman, who received Mr Clinton in Oman when he was en route to Syria, suggests that a dialogue between India and Pakistan may not be too far away. This is what he said: “President Clinton expressed his optimism over an adequate solution to the outstanding problems between India and Pakistan, in particular the problem of Kashmir”. Equally, a dash to New Delhi from Islamabad by Mr Rick Inderfurth, the American assistant secretary of state for South Asia, after the conclusion of Mr Clinton’s trip to Pakistan, has fueled speculation that some sort of peace initiatives between the two countries at the behest of the Americans cannot be ruled out. This could conceivably take the form of an immediate and marked reduction in Mujahideen attacks on civilian targets in Kashmir and unexplained bomb blasts elsewhere in India and a reciprocal reduction in the violation of human rights in Kashmir by India’s security forces and bomb blasts elsewhere in Pakistan. But there are bound to be many obstacles in this proposed thawing process.
Both countries have earlier raised stiff preconditions for a resumption of dialogue which will make any quick backtracking by both sides difficult. India has insisted that Pakistan should stop aiding and abetting cross border terrorism before it will agree to a dialogue even in terms of the framework of the Lahore Summit in 1999. Pakistan has insisted that India should publicly agree to focus on the Kashmir dispute before talks can begin. Neither side trusts the other – the Indians constantly refer to a “betrayal” over Kargil and the Pakistanis to Indian backtracking over Siachin in 1989 and promised discussions on Kashmir in 1997. The problem is accentuated by hawkish elements in the national security establishments of both countries who are against any dialogue at all. The hawks in Pakistan want to “bleed India dry in Kashmir” by encouraging the forces of Islamic jehad to infiltrate into Kashmir and conduct “suicide missions’ against India’ s security forces. The hawks in India want the Indian army to launch “hot pursuit” operations against the Mujahideen and destroy their training camps in Pakistan-controlled areas across the line of control. The months of April and May, when the snows melt and cross border operations are possible, are ideally suited for both countries’strategies. The logic of the situation is such that if a dialogue doesn’t start quickly enough and enable tempers to cool down, existing tensions on the line of control could provoke a wider military conflict. Of course, a losing or stalemated war with India would claim many political and military scalps in Pakistan and plunge the country into political turmoil and economic anarchy, with unforeseen consequences for the state.
As General Pervez Musharraf ponders a review of his difficult foreign policy options, he must contend with certain new developments on the home front. President Clinton’s firm demand for the restoration of electoral democracy has galvanised mainstream political parties to echo the same yearnings more forcefully. If these spill over into the streets, the government’s repressive measures will alienate world opinion. Also, a court decision regarding the fate of deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif is expected soon. If Mr Sharif is adjudged guilty of attempted hijacking, kidnapping and murder on October 12, 1999, and awarded the death sentence, there are bound to be strong protests from his party as well as the international community. That would create similar difficulties for General Musharraf. But if Mr Sharif is declared innocent, General Musharraf’s lawyers will have a hard time convincing the supreme court of Pakistan that his military coup was justified and that he cannot give a timetable for the restoration of democracy. Add to all that the announcement of a tough budget in May-June and we may be sure that political temperatures will rise in the country soon.
Following Mr Clinton’s warnings, the business community also seems to be increasingly persuaded that a military regime might not be good for business, especially if Washington is compelled to lean on the IMF and World Bank to withdraw critical financial assistance to the Pakistan government in the months ahead. Pakistan would tilt into financial default next year if the donor community abandoned Islamabad for one reason or another. Under the circumstances, how will General Musharraf’s military regime fare?
If President Clinton has been successful in persuading the military junta in Rawalpindi to recognise that the country is at a historic crossroads and that provocative, non-democratic, isolationist policies will spell serious trouble, there may be light at the end of the tunnel. But if the message hasn’t got through, or if attempts will be made to bluff our way through, General Musharraf would be advised to shun the over-confident hawks who have monopolised decision-making so far. However, if he is unable or unwilling to do that and change course perceptibly, the chances are that the political crisis of Pakistan will deepen and there could even be a limited military conflict with India. Since Pakistan cannot sustain a war stretched out over a few weeks, given its weak economy and international isolation, such a conflict would definitely derail General Pervez Musharraf and his regime. What might follow after that cannot be predicted. But if the war transcends nuclear blackmail into nuclear conflagration, the political, military, social and environmental consequences for the entire region would be cataclysmic.
Pakistan desperately needs some breathing space to sort itself out. We should put its internal stability and economic prosperity above everything else. We have said this many times before. But if Bill Clinton’s powerful voice was needed to bolster our arguments, we are glad he came to Islamabad.
(TFT April 07-13, 2000 Vol-XII No.6 — Editorial)
Start talking
Indo-Pak relations, as General Pervez Musharraf admits readily, have hit rock bottom. US-Pak relations are also down and out. The root cause is perceived to be Islamabad’s “aggressive posture on Kashmir”. Irrespective of the moral or legal merits of Islamabad’s case, we must ask whether such perceptions and policies are likely to promote the liberation of Kashmir or hurt the cause of Pakistan?
General Pervez Musharraf is talking of a dialogue with India’s leader “anytime, anywhere” provided Kashmir figures “centrally” in it. Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee says a return to the Lahore Process is conditional on the willingness of the Pakistani military government to stop “cross-border terrorism”. Pakistan says it is also ready to “moderate” the freedom fighters and give dialogue a chance to take off provided there is some “reciprocity” from India like a palpable improvement in its human rights record in the valley. But India is blocking this initiative, increasing its repression in the valley and threatening a “limited war” with Pakistan in “hot pursuit” of “Pakistan-sponsored militants” across the Line of Control. New Delhi’s continuing belligerence is obviously attributable to anger over Kargil followed by thumping support from the sole superpower in the world for its position on the Kashmir dispute.
Islamabad is therefore faced with an unprecedented dilemma: on the one hand, the armed struggle and the suicide missions of the Kashmiri freedom-fighters are beginning to inflict unacceptably high casualties on the Indian military forces stationed in Kashmir. Equally, the Indian army will be hard pressed to retain control over the Kargil heights and other strategic regions across the Line of Control in order to avoid a repetition of last May. Both factors will serve to engage a substantial chunk of India’s military might against highly mobile guerilla forces, thereby reducing the balance of conventional forces between the two countries’ armies across the international border to more manageable proportions for Pakistan. From this perspective, a continuation of the guerilla war in Kashmir is an anti-dote to any major adventure by the Indian army against Pakistan.
The other side of the coin is more persuasive. The greater the losses of India at the hands of Pakistan-inspired jehadi forces in Indian-held Kashmir, the greater the chances that New Delhi will be provoked into launching a war against Pakistan. This argument is strengthened by the fact that in the event of such a conflict, the international community led by Washington may be expected to support India as a victim, and condemn Pakistan as a sponsor, of “terrorism”. The fact that India’s robust and independent economy will also be able to better withstand the rigours and ravages of war and the international sanctions which follow than Pakistan’s dependent and crippled economy lends weight to this line of thinking. What considerations should prevail with policy makers in Islamabad when formulating Kashmir policy?
- Even if we accept the argument that the Islamic jehad serves to dampen rather than provoke India into launching a war with Pakistan, the strengthening of the diverse Islamic jihadi parties and revolutionary groups based in Pakistan — which are anti-democratic, anti-civil-society and anti-nation-state — for the purposes of the proposed liberation of Kashmir is bound to undermine Pakistan’s internal cohesion and political stability. Indeed, granting centre-stage to the Kashmir struggle by the mujahidin could signal a strengthening of the forces of Talibanisation in Pakistan just as similar succor to similar forces for similar purposes in Afghanistan has had a socially destabilising impact in Pakistan. Equally, since such groups lack a callibrated world view with regard to diplomatic gains or losses, their military successes in Kashmir would be proportionate to a decrease in the political leverage of Pakistan over them, as in Afghanistan. Indeed, in time to come, Kashmir could come to resemble Afghanistan, with all that that description entails.
- Even if the armed struggle of the mujahidin is constantly fueled, there is no possibility of a military liberation of Kashmir from the clutches of India without a full-fledged war. This is what happened when India tried to liberate Bangla Desh from Pakistan. And this is what is likely to happen if and when Pakistan tries to liberate Kashmir from India by force. The only problem is that, for reasons of a failing economy and lack of support from the international community, Pakistan will lose a fourth war with India just as it lost the third war with it.
- Even in the event of a limited war with India, the repercussions of a lost war on the armed forces and the state and the government and the economy and the civil-society of Pakistan are simply too horrendous to contemplate. It will hardly matter to us what is left of India after such a war. Of course, a nuclear holocaust, either through accident or design, would signal a crippling of India but the veritable demise of Pakistan.
For reasons such as these, it is imperative that General Musharraf should order a wide- ranging review of foreign policy, especially that relating to India and the USA. Our current political and military leaders should not be carried away by their own exuberance and plunge Pakistan into an unprecedented crisis as the equally well-intentioned General Yayha Khan did in 1971.
(TFT April 14-20, 2000 Vol-XII No.7 — Editorial)
Bad politics
The trial of Nawaz Sharif and six others for attempted hijacking, kidnapping, terrorism and murder was ill-conceived and unnecessary. Indeed, it can be argued that those who advised General Pervez Musharraf to embark upon this course of action did the military regime, and possibly the country, a great disservice.
If a guilty verdict in the trial was deemed necessary in order to eventually win legitimacy for the coup from the supreme court, what was the point of ordering the judges of the high courts and supreme court to take a fresh oath of office last month swearing loyalty to the new “provisional constitutional order?” In fact, if a fresh oath had been ordered the day after the coup, it would have been generally received in the rush of events as an inevitable follow-up on the coup and the international approbrium attached to it five months down the line after much trumpeting about the “independence” of the judiciary – could have been avoided, including the resignation of some judges and the need to initiate a hijacking case against Mr Sharif.
Alternatively, if the motivation of this case was not linked to the requirements of legitimacy for the coup, its only other purpose could have been to lock up Mr Sharif and throw away the key so that he could never again pose a political threat to the junta. But surely any one of a couple of dozen cases of corruption, loan default, tax evasion, misuse of powers, etc, in an Accountability Court could have sufficed to achieve that objective (a la Al Capone) in half the time it has taken for a decision in the hijacking case so far. Indeed, a swift conviction for corruption would have been received unreservedly by almost every Pakistani and his American aunt or Commonwealth uncle since everyone knows or believes that Mr Sharif was hugely corrupt, ran a venal administration and thoroughly deserved to be punished for such sins. In fact, Mr Sharif’s conviction for corruption would have relegated him to the same sphere of oblivion as Benazir Bhutto and encouraged both the mainstream political parties to regroup under credible alternative leaderships or enabled dissident groups within each to reach out to, or help create, a third significant party. Instead, the government’s abysmal handling of the hijacking case means that Mr Sharif is down but not yet out.
The harsh reality is that Nawaz Sharif’s fate will not be sealed until all his appeals have been rejected by the high court and the supreme court. Until then, at least, he will remain the leader of the Muslim League irrespective of what the more daring dissidents may say or do. And until then, the military regime will not be able to even think of, let alone define, a roadmap for the restoration of representative democracy. Of course, if Mr Sharif’s trial in the high court or supreme court is not perceived to be fair or transparent, public sympathy for him will rise in equal proportion to domestic and international aversion for the military regime. And an outright acquittal would naturally elevate him to the position of a born-again political leader who has been wronged. In the event, even the ripe corruption cases against Mr Sharif would begin to smell foul and General Pervez Musharraf would, like General Zia ul Haq before him, find himself riding a tiger. Since the country is still paying a heavy price for the Zia-Bhutto legacy, a confrontational Musharraf-Nawaz legacy could have horrendous political implications for the future (if Nawaz doesn’t go, Musharraf will have to go).
The Musharraf regime’s options are now clearly limited: it must either put paid to this case by affirming Mr Sharif’s conviction in the appeal courts and get on with the corruption cases against him; or it must drag this case along until a signed and sealed conviction on any corruption charge is firmly in hand. The worst thing that could happen from the government’s point of view and therefore from the point of view of when the generals can be persuaded to return to barracks would be for Mr Sharif to be acquitted in this case before he is convicted in a corruption case. That would undermine the perceived legitimacy of the corruption conviction, strengthen Mr Sharif’s credentials as a never-say-die leader and block the path of new general elections in which he or his staunch loyalists stand a good chance of coming to power.
If Mr Sharif’s conviction was received with frigid indifference by Pakistanis, General Pervez Musharraf’s regime is hamstrung by its desultory performance. This is not a stable equilibrium. It won’t last long. One protagonist or the other must eventually get the upper hand. This means that if the self-avowedly “sincere” generals don’t get their act together quickly, the publicly “discredited” politicians could band together with the alienated international community for a stinging come-back. That would make the generals more repressive and postpone the restoration of credible or “true” democracy. Who would want to contemplate the horrendous implications of this possibility?
(TFT April 21-27, 2000 Vol-XII No.8 — Editorial)
Maximal Vs Minimal Agendas
If General Pervez Musharraf’s coup was neither welcomed nor condemned by significant sections of domestic and international opinion, the fact is that certain quarters were deeply apprehensive (“the military’s record is bad…”) while others were quietly expectant (“the military can sweep the decks…”). In the event, however, everybody agreed that, sincerity notwithstanding (“the road to hell….”), the military regime would be judged by the quality of its performance.
Soon thereafter, General Musharraf unveiled his seven point blueprint to reinvent “true” democracy. If this merely confirmed apprehensions that a mission statement without a timetable or roadmap was a contradiction-in-terms and hence doomed to failure, it also raised expectations that his radical, social-democratic agenda was the answer to our myriad problems.
The first signs of political confusion or misplaced concreteness in Rawalpindi were manifest soon enough. The selection criteria for the various cabinets and the NSC raised apprehensions and dulled expectations. The favoured few were largely “non-controversial” but they were generally more stolid than solid. Certainly most could not be classified by any stretch of the imagination as do-ers or go-getters. Eyebrows were consequently raised. It was all very well for socially stigmatized candidates to be disregarded but people did wonder how the generals expected to make so many sizzling omelettes if they didn’t want to select people who knew how to break eggs? How did the generals expect to change the status quo without taking “controversial” decisions”?
Two opposite conclusions followed. General Musharraf was so hamstrung by status-quo opinion that he was unable or unwilling to chose an object-oriented (“right person for the job”) team. Alternatively, he deliberately chose men and women who would quietly acquiesce to policy decisions taken by hands-on generals in GHQ and ISI.
Six months down the line, it’s clear that GHQ is running the show and its civilian team, barring notable exceptions, is a fig leaf only for international respectability. But apprehensions are rising and expectations have plummeted. The public perceives a lacklustre performance by the generals. Fortunately, however, GHQ seems aware that something is amiss. An internal review has consequently been ordered. Should the composition of the civilian team be changed? Is the agenda lacking in some sense? How should the message be propagated?
We believe that the above questions are secondary to certain more fundamental questions which are being avoided. (1) Should the generals have adopted a hands-on approach in such adverse domestic and global circumstances instead of choosing a dynamic civilian prime minister and ordering him to assemble his teams and deliver within a certain timeframe, or else? This is the strategic approach that COAS General Abdul Waheed, ably backed by CGS General Farrukh Khan and DG-ISI General Javed Ashraf Qazi, adopted in 1993 with such excellent results. And this is the approach their counterparts of today have overconfidently spurned. (2) Should the generals have raised expectations by insisting on such a maximalist agenda and then found themselves misfiring on every cylinder? Once again, the minimal, do-able agenda of 1993 is instructive. (3) Shouldn’t a policy review emphasise the message as much as the medium? In other words, instead of focusing on how to get an imperfect message across, shouldn’t the generals be wondering on how to right the flawed message?
Pundits or ideologues will advise GHQ on the micro-management of politics and economics in order to consummate public expectations or revive flagging national morale. But all such well-intentioned advice would amount to missing the wood for the trees.
General Pervez Musharraf must recognise the basic limitations of his enterprise in this post-cold-war timeframe and democratic age. He should view matters in the context of his depleted and dependent domestic economy. He must comprehend the domestic implications of continuing regional tensions. He must dispassionately neutralise his powerful international opponents instead of plunging into a clash with them in a fit of rage. He must extract time from the international community in order to create the economic space for changing the political will of the people of Pakistan so that they can stand on their own feet and become self-reliant.
General Musharraf insists that he cannot give a time-frame for full democratic restoration because he doesn’t want his plans to be derailed by the obstructionists. But that is only because he has a maximalist agenda in mind. If he had a minimal agenda — get rid of 100 crooked politicians, create a new legal framework order and negotiate debt-rescheduling with the international community – he wouldn’t have to worry about giving a timetable at all. Indeed, the unfinished reform, accountability and good governance agenda could be taken up later via a powerful National Security Council and through the terms of the transfer of power to the elected representatives of the people after institutional checks and balances have been imposed on them.
Think about it General Musharraf. Do you want to risk being derailed in pursuit of a maximalist agenda instead of being anointed in extension of a minimal agenda?
(TFT April 28-04 May, 2000 Vol-XII No.9 — Editorial)
Truth and reconciliation?
Open any newspaper. Kulsoom Nawaz Sharif feigns piety, head covered, eyes down, hands cupped, she says she seeks only Allah’s justice. She mocks politics: “I am just a housewife, my husband is innocent, I don’t want to lead the Muslim League”. She taunts the generals: “My popularly elected husband was ousted by a retired and vindictive general, Nawaz Sharif tried to cement divisions in the army created by a gang of four”. She woos the international community: “Nawaz Sharif didn’t sanction Kargil”. She upbraids the press: “Stand up for our rights, Nawaz didn’t know what Saifur Rahman was doing”. She berates the judiciary: “The hijacking judgment was engineered”. And she insults the intelligence of the people of Pakistan: “Nawaz was not corrupt, he was a democrat, he had found a solution to the Kashmir problem”. Congratulations Begum Sahiba. You’ve come of age.
Across the seas, another woman whose husband is also in a Pakistani prison continues to brazen it out. Benazir Bhutto says she did not wrong while in power. Out of office, she mocks the law by being a fugitive from justice.
Despite the enormity of their sins, we can either exhort General Pervez Musharraf to track down Bhutto, Sharif et al and show no mercy. Or we can suggest an approach based on truth and reconciliation.
The first approach hasn’t yielded any dividends so far. Ms Bhutto was charged with corruption and misconduct and ousted in 1990 by the establishment. Her husband was imprisoned and her party hounded to the wall by Nawaz Sharif. But the people of Pakistan shrugged off these charges and brought her back to power in 1993. She was thrown out again in 1996, this time by her handpicked president. Her husband was again imprisoned but this time the couple was convicted by Nawaz Sharif for corruption. Yet her political party has made her chairperson for life, the press prints her utterances prominently and she could be a political force in less restricted circumstances.
Nawaz Sharif’s case is similar. He was ousted in 1993 by the establishment for creating a constitutional deadlock. His brother and father were imprisoned for corruption by Ms Bhutto. But the people of Pakistan voted him back into power with a vengeance in 1997. He was kicked out again last year, this time by his handpicked army chief. He and other family members are in prison. They face stiff penalties for hijacking, kidnapping, corruption, etc. Yet his political party sticks to him, the international community intercedes on his behalf, the press gives him front-page treatment and he would be a political force in less captive circumstances.
Both politicians have clearly betrayed the trust of the people. But they are not yet history. This may be because no new political leader has been able to spark the imagination of the people and sweep these two politicians aside in the battle for hearts and minds. But it is also because people are reluctant to repose unquestioning faith in the army’s ability to deliver the promised land. After all, if the two political parties have wallowed in corruption and incompetence, the third political party (the army) which has ruled Pakistan for half the time since independence has provoked three costly wars and presided over its dismemberment. Worse, the army seems to be floundering again and this has created misgivings about the fate of our state and civil society. International isolation, coupled with political and economic ineptitude, is no recipe for sustainable development or democracy.
Should we seek the goal of sustainable democracy rather than try to simply restore it? Instead of asking the third political party to crush the leaders of the other two, can we consider a process of national reconciliation among all three parties on the basis of truth? By truth we mean the truth of the allotment of evacuee property, the truth of Liaqat Ali Khan’s murder, the truth of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report, the truth of the trial of Z A Bhutto, the truth of the US$ 10 billion Afghan pipeline in the 1980s, the truth of the Ojri camp explosions, the truth of the F-16 and Mirage commissions, the truth of the Bahawalpur aircrash, the truth of the rigged 1990 elections, the truth of General Asif Nawaz’s death, the truth of the Motorway and Yellow cab kickbacks, the truth of the LDA/CDA plots, the truth of the Swiss bank accounts, the truth of the IPP tariffs, the truth of various privatisations and SRO revisions, the truth of the Surrey mansion, the truth of the Augusta submarines and French frigates, the truth of the Ukrainian tanks, the truth of the London flats, the truth of the defaulted bank loans and write-offs, the truth of the Kargil affair, etc.
If Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto and the many politicians, bureaucrats, judges, businessmen and generals who have plundered and wrecked our beloved country are ready to tell the truth, atone for their sins and agree to return Pakistan’s looted wealth, the people may reconcile with them. But if they persist in their great deception, they should all be hauled over the coals and no mercy should be shown to them.
(TFT May 05-11, 2000 Vol-XII No.10 — Editorial)
No time to lose
The proposals for a GST, an agricultural incomes tax and credible anti-smuggling measures have all been mooted for a long time. But nothing ever got off the ground because democratic governments were vulnerable to blackmail by vested interests. Thus Rs 200 billion in desperately needed revenues was lost every year, which is about equal to our annual foreign debt payments.
When General Pervez Musharraf rolled in, however, we were assured the day of reckoning had arrived. So we rejoiced in the expectation that necessary economic decisions would be swiftly taken in the national interest. Alas. The tax proposals were postponed for nine months, the “whitener” schemes were continuously extended, the agricultural income tax was banished to the committee room and the smugglers made bold to hawk their wares with impunity.
Last month, Gen (Retd) Moinuddin Haider, muttered “enough is enough” and bared his fangs. But the much flaunted “anti-weaponisation” drive soon petered out into an “anti-display” sop. The smugglers then engineered a “compromise” and the businessmen bamboozled an extension of the tax amnesty scheme. When will this hide-and-seek end?
Some people say the government must not open “too many fronts”, especially with the prickly business community whose shutter-clout has been the bane of many past governments. This argument is buttressed by economists who claim that attempts to raise additional tax revenues or cut government expenditures or downsize the public sector when the economy is barely limping along is bad economic policy and worse political management. Is this good advice?
In principle, of course, no government should open more adversarial fronts than it can safely handle at any time. So it is worrying that the government is battling the politicians, the businessmen, the smugglers, India and the regional and international community all at the same time. But more alarming is the fact that some people are advising General Musharraf to be soft where he should be tough and brazen where he should be circumspect. Which wicket should he choose to play on?
Third world governments — civil or military — derive their legitimacy and longevity from the support, understanding and encouragement of two basic sources of power: ordinary people at home (workers, peasants and the middle-classes) and extra-ordinary people abroad (the foreign diplomatic community and the independent international media). If ordinary people at home are with you but the international community is against you, as in Iraq, you are doomed. And if the international community is with you but ordinary people turn against you, as in Indonesia, you cannot be saved. Variations of this theme make the world go round or stop it in its tracks from time to time. What is our government’s situation?
On October 12 the international community was aghast at the military intervention. But ordinary Pakistanis were all for it. This dangerous imbalance had to be corrected forthwith: the support of ordinary people had to be consolidated and the potential hostility of the international community had to be quashed. How could this be done?
Pakistanis wanted swift accountability of corrupt people. A military government was ideally placed to provide this. But it couldn’t get its act together and amazingly found itself trapped in a web of bureaucratic and legal formalities. Then it lost credibility by excluding a swathe of corrupt people from the ambit of accountability.
Pakistanis wanted economic revival and self-reliant growth. This entailed raising revenues, cutting wasteful expenditures, privatising state white-elephants, retiring debt, and increasing the development budget. Instead, tough action against vested interests (tax evaders, loan defaulters, smugglers) to raise revenues was postponed. Military expenditures were increased. Development outlays were slashed. Accordingly, there were no buyers for state assets, borrowings had to increase and we were back begging before the international community.
Pakistanis wanted political stability and certainty. This meant that anti-people politicians like Nawaz Sharif should have been sorted out once and for all and as quickly as possible. It also required a definite timetable and roadmap for restoration of representative institutions. But the first task has been so mishandled that the second has been jeopardised.
On the other side, the international community, far from backing the military government, is threatening all sorts of sanctions and roadblocks. Its concerns over regional tensions and the rise of extremist religious mafias were spurned when our government legalised the export of jehad as an instrument of our foreign policy. Its hope for an early signature on the CTBT was dashed when the government opened up the emotional subject for irrational comment and partisan outrage. And its pleas for a swift timetable for democracy went by the board when the government sank deeper into the economic and political quagmire at home.
General Pervez Musharraf should reverse his priorities. There is a gaping hole in his government’s relationship with the international community where there was only a potential fissure to begin with. And the active support of Pakistanis for his government is fast becoming a baleful irritability. The good general should therefore salvage the situation by taking off his gloves against the thugs at home while allaying the fears of our friends abroad. There is no time to be lost.
(TFT May 12-18, 2000 Vol-XII No.11 — Editorial)
Stay the reformist course
It is at great cost that Pakistan’s Chief Executive General Pervez Musharraf tries to maintain his post-October popularity. He is compelled to ignore reality in his pursuit of popularity with the very elements whose pressure on Islamabad has brought Pakistan to this sorry pass.
Seeing the government becoming flaccid, the religious parties have ganged up on the question of the blasphemy law. Shopkeepers have raised the standard of revolt to protect the vast smuggling network that originates in Afghanistan and which depends on the continuation of Pakistan’s present Afghan policy. Corrupt politicians under pressure from the National Accountability Bureau are accusing the government of rights violations and calling in question its probity. Religious fanatics have killed 30 innocent Shia citizens since October 1999 to test the resolve of the government to extirpate sectarianism. The so-called jehadi militias are delivering “anticipatory” warnings against any shift in Pakistan’s Kashmir policy.
A part of the press has joined this chorus of protest. The citizens’ peace initiative with India begun by women on both sides of the border has now come under virulent attack. This is despite the fact that the women told the BJP government to abandon its policy of not talking to Pakistan over Kashmir. Pakistani women peace activists were able to enlist more Indian support for this stand than the Foreign Office could ever dream of getting. Will the government now stand aside while the fanatics use the press to prompt its activists to kill the leaders of Pakistan’s endangered civil society? General Musharraf should remember that this rabid reaction has been triggered by his own decision to hold a human rights convention in which he spoke out against honour killings and the targeting of religious minorities.
The general is faced with a predicament, and it stems from the government’s decision to uphold the old foreign policy. The opportunity of signing the CTBT was lost after the government decided to throw the matter open to public debate. Foreign minister Abdul Sattar, who supported the signing in the interests of the national economy, was allowed to be pilloried and discredited by a cabinet which remained coyly reticent over the issue.
We know what kind of lessons General Musharraf has gleaned from his trips abroad. We know what advice he was offered by Lew Kuan Yew of Singapore and the warnings he got from leaders in the Middle East and Africa. We know exactly where Pakistan stands internationally on the Kashmir policy it doesn’t want to change. General Musharraf knows all this too. He knows all too well about the international and regional forces which are uniting against Pakistan to counter the policy we are persisting with in Afghanistan. And the irony is that if the government thought it could placate the extremist elements nurtured by the state during the past decade of foreign policy adventurism, it now stands disabused. General Musharraf’s government is increasingly isolated, both at home and abroad.
This need not be the case. General Musharraf has only to read the newspapers to grasp who is challenging his government. Analysis will easily identify the elements arrayed against him and their connections to the policies that he has so far tried to defend. These elements are acting preemptively to prevent General Musharraf from becoming flexible in order to give the economy the breathing space it so desperately needs. They are questioning the government’s legitimacy in the hope that divisions within will deliver an even more isolationist leadership in Islamabad. Extremist forces in Pakistan need isolationism to stay alive. But Pakistan simply cannot afford isolationism. This is why General Musharraf must stay the reformist course and change the policies that have caused us to stand alone in the world.
We maintain that General Musharraf’s government is Pakistan’s best chance of shifting the destructive paradigm that has brought our country to the edge of the precipice. It is better placed to alter course than the political governments of the past whose leaders are discredited. The fact that it is not answerable to anyone is the present government’s strongest point. Its well-chosen members have the moral high ground to support a reformist overhaul of the state. The government must not heed the noise being made by elements whose appeasement has only brought it more difficulties. Instead it should listen to the voices of civil society which will support a genuinely reformist agenda. It is this path that will lead both Pakistan and the Musharraf government out of its costly isolation.
(TFT May 19-25, 2000 Vol-XII No.12 — Editorial)
Give us a break, please
The political temperature is rising. Last week was quite eventful. The next few weeks could prove more nettlesome. The military government continues to disappoint with false starts and empty threats. Consider.
The home minister is acquiring a reputation for bluster. The thunder of deweaponisation has been reduced to an ineffectual ban on display. You and I, dear reader, hapless as we are, tremble in anticipation of the general’s wrath as we scurry to bury our double-barreled family heirlooms. But the lashkars in Muridke, Azad Kashmir and the NWFP make bold to stick “Up Yours” in the gleaming barrels of their guns, rocket launchers and bazookas. Meanwhile, General Sahib has swiftly moved on to target the smugglers. Pay 60% duty or else, he wags his finger. Or else what, ask the smugglers in unison. Pay 20% duty or else, he scowls. Or else what, they chorus, warming to the theme. We won’t settle for anything less than Rs 50,000 a head, he sputters. Take Rs 10,000 or buzz off, they shrug. End of dialogue.
The chief executive has gone and done one better. He kicked off by praising Kamal Ataturk, the secular founder of modern Turkey. Just as we were beginning to nod approval, he was already clarifying that it was Ataturk the soldier who had impressed him so much rather than Ataturk the political leader. One statement from Qazi Hussain Ahmad, it seemed, was sufficient to chastise the well-meaning general. Meanwhile, the radical 7-point reformist agenda outlined in his opening speech has all but disappeared from the horizon. Instead we were offered the sop of a conference on human rights whose high point was a commitment to take the mischief out of the notorious blasphemy law. Just as we muttering that something was better than nothing, and thanking God that the general had been Man enough to call the mullahs’ bluff, the man stepped off his state-craft at the tarmac and uttered the fateful words: I take it back. A short, sorry sentence for General Musharraf. A giant, ungainly yank for the nation. A wretched watershed, an irretrievable precursor of worse to follow. It would have been far better for everyone if he had never taken the first halting step than for him to have halted in midway-house and beaten such a sorry retreat at the first sign of opposition from the God-fearing beards.
Not to be outdone, the chief justice of the supreme court has verily yorked us out. We are astonished to learn that General Pervez Musharraf did not usurp power by overthrowing the legitimately elected government of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. This leaves us wondering whether the verdict would have been the same if General Musharraf had not succeeded in his counter-attack. We are stunned to discover that Nawaz Sharif’s sacking of General Musharraf on the fateful afternoon of October 12, 1999, was “without legal effect” because it was “arbitrary”. This leaves us suspicious of the legality of General Jehnagir Karamat’s equally abrupt sacking a year earlier. We are shocked to observe that “there was no other way to remove a corrupt government except through the intervention of the armed forces”. This leaves us dumbfounded at the summary manner in which the petition challenging the 13th amendment (which got rid of the 8th amendment) was dispatched by the same court a couple of years ago. We are struck by the unprecedented audacity of the judgment which explicitly grants, nay encourages, General Musharraf to abrogate not just everyday provisions of the constitution but our very own sacred fundamental rights. We are overwhelmed by the thought that he may amend the constitution at will because the apex court has already granted him the right in advance rather than for him to be constrained by the thought of having to get all his actions indemnified at a later stage by the elected representatives of the people of Pakistan.
Thanks to the supreme court, General Musharraf has got 30 more months in which to deliver the promised land. The uncertainty about his regime’s legitimacy and longevity should no longer pull at his coattails. No great time-consuming court battles lie ahead to detract him from his job. He is all-powerful, the very embodiment of every budding reformer’s wildest, most passionate dreams. There is no room or excuse for failure any more. Why then does a clutch of generals protest that there is not time enough to accomplish the agenda at hand?
Let us get real. The regime’s first seven months have been painfully amateurish. Tall promises have been wrecked at the altar of weak resolve or lack of political vision. Foreign policy is up the creek. The economy is down in the dumps. Law and order is breaking down. The bureaucracy is alienated. The provinces are sulking. Big business wants to flee. Small business is up in arms. The mullahs are rampaging. The jehadis are smacking their lips. Ordinary folks are bewildered. Some neighbours are bristling with contempt. Others are seething with rage. Yet General Pervez Musharraf is sanguine that everything is under control, there is nothing to worry about. Have a heart, General. Give us a break, please.
(TFT May 26-01 June, 2000 Vol-XII No.13 — Editorial)
Don’t give in
Mr Omer Sailya, who is president of the All Pakistan Organisation of Small Traders and Cottage Industry (APOSTCI), is in a nasty mood. His furious denouncements are directed at the Central Board of Revenue, the Finance Ministry and the International Monetary Fund. He accuses them all of being “in cahoots with Western imperialism” to undermine Pakistan’s economy and society by enforcing a General Sales Tax on retail trade.
This is a self-serving tirade. The shopkeeper is not being asked to pay a penny of the proposed GST out of his own pocket. The GST is a Value-Added Tax on goods and services whose net burden – the difference between the amount of 15% GST paid by the shopkeeper on all purchases (imported or locally manufactured) minus the amount of 15% GST charged by the shopkeeper and received on all his sales from the consumer— falls on the final customer of goods or services. What is Mr Sailya’s problem then?
His problem is that he doesn’t want shopkeepers to keep and produce a record of all their purchases and sales – which will be required by the sales tax department in order to verify the right amount of net sales tax payable – because that would mean an open and shut case for the income tax department! In other words, once actual purchase and sale is recorded and known for GST purposes, the gross profit (which is the difference between the two) can be easily calculated and the scope for income tax evasion is significantly diminished. And that is why a retail GST is unacceptable to shopkeepers. They simply do not want to pay the full amount of income tax due.
This is a most inequitable status-quo. The vast salaried class pays its full burden of income tax because the employer deducts it from every salary and pays it to the government. Importers and manufacturers have also generally been dragged into the GST– Income Tax net. The landlord, too, may soon be expected to pay a land tax and income tax. Only half a million shopkeepers remain intransigent. If they could be persuaded to pay more income tax, the government would be richer by at least Rs 50 billion a year.
To Mr Sailya’s good fortune, most political parties, including the PPP, PML and JI, are backing him to the hilt. Indeed, the religious parties which have banded under the banner of the Milli Yakjheti Council in furtherance of their so-called 10-point “Islamic” agenda have gone out of their way to shower support on the traders. Meanwhile, the government seems unresolved about how to confront this mounting challenge to its writ.
The tacticians of the military regime thought they could neutralize the mullahs and protect their government’s flank by retreating over the proposed amendments to the procedures governing our blasphemy laws. But this has turned out to be a case of misplaced concreteness. Instead of being appeased, the mullahs are rampant. They are demanding more concessions – amongst other things, they want Friday to be the weekly holiday instead of Sunday and they want the Provisional Constitutional Order to include all the so-called “Islamic” provisions of the amended 1973 Constitution.
Of course, even a cursory glance at our political history by GHQ would have forewarned our Generals Know-All that whenever any government has conceded an inch to the mullahs, they have always come back to demand a yard. But Rawalpindi has been quick to announce reformist policies and quicker still to cancel them.
The mullahs will not rest until the state is subservient to them. Today they are unfairly targeting senior members of the cabinet as “secular agents of western imperialism”. Tomorrow they will go for the chief executive who has appointed such people. In fact, a stinging personal attack on General Pervez Musharraf has already been launched by Qazi Hussain Ahmad, prompting newspaper editors across the country to reach for their scissors and get rid of some of his more provocative remarks. What next? Will the generals abandon their announced reformist agenda because all the vested interests which have wrecked this country are threatening to gang up against them?
There are two principal contradictions in Pakistan’s make-up and everything else flows from them. The first contradiction relates to the sort of Islamic state we wish to be or become: one that is moderate and modern, espousing peaceful nation-state sovereignty; or the other that is extremist and orthodox, threatening violent extra-national jihads. We have to choose between these two models. Our choice should determine our attitude to the demands of vested interests. The second contradiction relates to our ability to become self-reliant and strong or remain dependent and weak. When every Pakistani pays his tax and corruption is rooted out, we will be a strong and self-reliant nation. When corruption is rampant and tax evaders threaten strikes, we will be weak and dependent on foreign powers and institutions for economic survival.
Hark, General Musharraf. All vested interests are paper tigers before a great reformer. If you stand and fight you will win. If you give in, you will have lost without a fight. Don’t give in if you want to rescue Quaid-e-Azam’s Pakistan.
(TFT June 02-08, 2000 Vol-XII No.14 — Editorial)
11 years of history in 11½ paras
TFT is eleven years old today. We had hoped to celebrate our tenth anniversary in May last year but were thwarted by Nawaz Sharif & Co who sought to silence us by putting our editor in prison. But this repressive strategy rebounded on Mr Sharif and our detractors. This was not due to any surfeit of courage on our part. It was the unflinching political and moral support of our loyal readers and fellow journalists here and abroad that laid Mr Sharif’s government low. It was they who moved heaven and earth to draw attention to our plight and compelled a fascist regime to back down.
When TFT was launched, everybody said a weekly, and that too in English, wouldn’t work. But it did. It caught the attention of top decision-makers in Pakistan and abroad and had an impact far beyond its circulation. We said it like it was, warts and all. And our readers urged us on, even when they were wont to wince occasionally. We used the English language to analyse, to clarify and to communicate, not to dither, obscure or flatter. And our readers nodded approval even when they thought us a trifle audacious. We weren’t afraid to stick our necks out in forecasting the mad rush of events. And our readers pondered gravely even when they didn’t agree with our prognosis. We were free and easy with unsolicited advice to every government, even as friends warned us that it would be misunderstood and foes ordered us to shut up or else.
It hasn’t been an easy journey because we have always believed that the truth is out there, the point is to go and get it. So we haven’t shied away from taking sides or striking out on our own in the continuing battle of ideas and policies in Pakistan. Obviously, this has not endeared us to many people with vested interests to defend, especially not to opportunist, corrupt or extremist political parties, groups or leaders who stand exposed. Consequently, we are the dubious recipients of some of the most colourful and contradictory labels in the business. Benazir Bhutto once accused TFT of sitting “in the lap of Nawaz Sharif”. Nawaz Sharif constantly rebuked TFT’s allegedly “pro-PPP” stance. Both leaders feared TFT as a “pro-army” paper even as TFT continued to challenge the army’s conventional views on national security issues. Dyed-in-the-wool liberals chided us for our hard-nosed critique of sham democracy while praetorian-types frowned on our relentless campaign on behalf of civil society and human rights.
We have also blithely broken the dog-eared rules of commercial journalism in the country –“if”, “but”, “however”, “on the one hand”, “on the other hand”– which are designed to make opinions and facts appear neutral and progressive even when they are partisan, reactionary or bigoted in reality. This has ensured perennial hostility, bordering on incitement to violence, from sections of the local press which either claim a monopoly over patriotism and ideology or have always sold themselves to the highest bidders. But we are not bothered by the green-eyed monsters or toothless dragons of our profession.
Our view of Pakistan’s history in the last decade as articulated in the pages of our organ at the time of its making in the flesh and blood can be summarised thus. We thought General Zia ul Haq’s “ideological” martial law was an unmitigated evil. We supported Benazir Bhutto in 1988 because she espoused democracy and human rights. But by 1990 we were disillusioned with the incompetent lady and her corrupt husband. So while we dilated upon the many conspiracies hatched by Ghulam Ishaq Khan, General Mirza Aslam Beg, General Hameed Gul, Altaf Hussain and Nawaz Sharif to undermine and eventually sack her government, we prayed that a new round of elections would deliver a better leadership even as we feared a “dimming of the lights of democracy” at the hands of the Islamic Jamhoori Ittehad.
We analysed the 1990 elections as the most rigged elections in Pakistani history. But we gave Mr Sharif a chance to outgrow his mentors and prove himself. When he flunked the test, we were ready to denounce him in 1992 for his blatant corruption and unholy alliance with the MQM in Sindh. This provoked Mr Sharif to order reprisals against TFT, the goon-squad being led by Brigadier (retd) Imtiaz Billa and DIG Punjab Rana Maqbool (both detained these days). Therefore we were not sorry to see the sacking of Mr Sharif by the President in 1993. However, after he was restored by the Supreme Court, we urged him for the sake of democracy and stability to make up with the President, failing which we warned that Justice Nasim Hasan Shah’s “historic’ judgment would not be able to bail him out.
When Benazir Bhutto returned to power in 1993, we were gullible enough to believe that she had learnt her lessons well and should be supported. But by mid-1995, we were disabused of this belief by the realisation that both husband and wife had happily embraced the political methodology of Sharif and become doubly corrupt. Relations were now strained. She accused TFT of seeking “to drive a wedge between her and President Farooq Leghari”. In response, we attacked her for undermining the judiciary led by Justice Sajjad Ali Shah.
After President Leghari sacked her in 1996, we urged him to postpone the elections and hold sweeping accountability of Bhutto, Sharif and other corrupt politicians, civil servants, generals and judges. But when he spurned our advice, we wondered in print whether he would have occasion to regret his decision.
When Sharif returned to power in 1997, he announced he was a much chastened and “sincere” political leader. So, like most Pakistanis, we decided to give him another chance. Alas. When he pounced on the 8th amendment, TFT was the sole exception to the national view editorialised in all the papers that this was “good riddance to bad rubbish”. We agreed that the amendment had been misused in the past. But we strongly feared that Sharif’s penchant for personal despotism could provoke another martial law. By end-1997, following the ouster of Leghari and Shah, we were wary of Sharif’s budding fascism. In 1998, we opposed Pakistan’s tit-for-tat nuclear testing, arguing that our security had not necessarily been enhanced by them. In 1999, however, we welcomed Sharif’s peace overtures to India but predicted that the Lahore process was likely to be derailed in the absence of a consensus in state and society over an abrupt change of tack. By May, our relentless criticism of the personal corruption of Sharif and Saif ur Rehman provoked them to detain our editor on trumped-up charges of sedition.
By the summer of 1999, TFT’s editorials had already pasted the epithet of a “historical watershed” on the Kargil adventure. Finally, in our editorial of 30th September, we feared that “change was in the air” and predicted that it would come from “Rawalpindi or Islamabad”. The rest, as they say, is current affairs rather than history.
We are deeply worried by the current situation. The civilians have let us down badly. But the army doesn’t seem to have many of the required answers. Neither is ready to face the complex situation squarely. Nobody is prepared to make any personal or institutional sacrifice for the country. In consequence, anti-Pakistan forces and tendencies are gathering strength.
May God have mercy on us all.
(TFT June 09-15, 2000 Vol-XII No.15 — Editorial)
Wrong cause, wrong effect
Islamabad has focused on the wrong causes in its analysis of what ails the state. The latest indicators of the Pakistani economy are proof of this fact. The growth rate continues to slump and the current rate at 4.5 per cent has only been made possible by a season of good crops. The manufacturing sector has actually grown at 1.6 per cent instead of the projected 5 per cent.
This means that there is no investment in the economy. In fact, investment has declined by 37 per cent since last year, which should make the government rethink the causes it assigned to the country’s economic decline. But there are no signs of a rethink and the government continues to read the signals wrong because the economy is not item number one on it’s agenda.
The government’s real agenda compels it to defy the world and to make concessions to retrograde elements within the country. This is done at the expense of the economy which seeks openings and linkages to the outside world with its exports entirely pegged to the European Union and the United States.
When the government retreated on the procedural amendment to the Blasphemy Law, and consigned the CTBT to the deepfreezer despite a consensus in the now-defunct parliament favouring its signing, it rejected international concerns. It also signalled a lack of will. This latter was seized upon by the religious right that pressed home the advantage by demanding a reiteration of the Shariah through the PCO, a retreat to Friday as the weekly holiday, and a tougher defiance of the international community. So while the government asserts state sovereignty with regard to a world that wishes to see Pakistan integrating with the global community, it is unable to establish the writ of the state viz a viz its challengers on the religious right. Where does this leave the economy which demands integration with the world?
When the leader of Pakistan’s trading community, Umar Sailya, links the misfortunes of his community to the presumed depredations of the IMF, he displays an opportumism that links up directly with the agenda of the religious right which sees the IMF as an agent of the anti-Islam West. The traders, like the maulvis, have drawn the conclusion that a generally retreating government can also be made to retreat on the documentation front. The interface between the traders and the religious parties has always been there but it now seems to have reached a decisive phase. The government perceived the linkage partially when it asserted that religious elements were being funded by out-of-work politicians. The PML’s opportunist decision to come out openly in support of the traders in their confrontation with the government is actually a reversion to the old bazaar-PML alliance in which the PML was funded by traders in return for immunity from taxation.
The government is responding shakily to the threat emerging from all the elements that seek its retreat. This is despite broad public support to the government’s drive to document the economy. Why does the government not draw strength from the majority opinion amongst the public? This opinion wants to see the nation state strengthened, its international isolation broken, and the economy integrated with the world. Is this at cross-purposes with the government’s real agenda? If it is not, then the government should demonstrate firmness in the face of opportunists and blackmailers. This is a crucial test of will for General Pervez Musharraf’s government.
Earlier, the test of will was flunked when the government did not enforce its decision to reform the seminaries by changing the syllabi taught there. The test of will was flunked when it postponed the day of reckoning for smugglers. Ditto with the Blasphemy Amendment and the CTBT issue. If the record is any indicator, the government will probably give up its recently announced intention of probing the jehadi militias as a non-issue.
It is fantasy to expect the economy to respond in such circumstances. If it is not placed above the national security agenda, the process of economic collapse which began with our nuclear tests in May 1998 will not be reversed. The international community has registered the effect of the submission of the government to the religious right. It now makes clear reference to the linkage of the Pakistani state with terrorism. It puts it diplomatically as a threat to Pakistan’s own security, but it is bracing for a possible decline of the country into an area of turmoil radiating threat to international security. The Central Asian States, Russia, the United States and China see Afghanistan as a region of chaos which recreates itself in areas contiguous to it. President Clinton is persuading Moscow to accept America’s National Missile Defence programme against “rogue” nuclear states. Who will qualify as such? Not India, which is perceived as an ally by the West. That leaves only Pakistan with its uncontrolled internal situation and its defiance of external advice.
When investors continue to respond negatively to Pakistan’s growing isolation and the rumour of war, not all the stimulants being offered by finance minister Shaukat Aziz can shore up the economy.
(TFT June 16-22, 2000 Vol-XII No.16 — Editorial)
Economic illusions vs political realities
Dr Ishrat Hussain, Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, claims that investment has declined by 37% in the last ten months, the manufacturing sector is virtually stagnant and exporters have under-invoiced to the tune of about US $ 700 million so far this year in anticipation of a devaluation of the rupee. Meanwhile, Mr Shaukat Aziz, the finance minister, is getting ready to bludgeon us with the mother of all budgets.
Unfortunately, the confused political and economic signals from Islamabad are not helping matters. Recently Dr Mahmud Ghazi, an exalted member of the National Security Council, triumphantly declared that the government would extirpate all riba (interest) by December 2000. Since the Minister for Religious Affairs is clueless about economics and finance, his enthusiastic pronouncements about “Islamisation” had the effect of stampeding many civil-military pensioners and widows (who depend on non-Islamic interest-bearing savings in capitalist banks for their sustenance) into the swelling ranks of angry traders and businessmen. This compelled the finance minister to say belatedly that the State Bank was busy preparing a report on how to abolish riba by end-June 2001 so that the required “Islamic” reforms to the banking system would not wipe out the hard-earned savings of the citizenry.
Not to be outdone, the interior minister General (retired) Moinuddin Haider, continues to blow hot and cold. His latest gaffe concerns a statement to The New York Times in which he advocated “a modern, moderate and secular Pakistan”. This was meant to take some of the international heat off Pakistan as a budding “terrorist state” encouraging extra-nation-state jehads. But the general has beaten a hasty retreat. “I never used the s-word”, he pleads, fending off an attack by mullahs and ideologues. And so it goes on. We are now given to understand that Friday instead of Sunday may be ordained as the weekly holiday. This is meant to be another sop to the mullahs, and to hell with the fact that the country reverted to Sunday in 1997 only because the domestic business community wanted to remain in the same trading time zone as its international counterparts.
What is the meaning of this? When will General Pervez Musharraf and his team-mates realise that the problem is not one of a failing economy but one of a failing polity? When will they understand that all the fine tuning of the budget will not lead to the promised land unless there is a basic change not only in the philosophy of how to collect revenues and from whom but also in the rationality of what to spend and on what? When will it dawn on them that foreign investors will not step into Pakistan until domestic investors stop fleeing the country? Indeed, why should “non-ideological” domestic and foreign capital venture into Pakistan when the country is booby-trapped with violent “jehads”, maverick “strategists” and crazed “ideologues”, when two antagonistic legal traditions run side by side sowing confusion, when the sanctity of sovereign guarantees and legal contracts is routinely violated by an unholy nexus between a corrupt corporate state sector and a feeble judiciary, when civil society is constantly being undermined and eroded by armed militias? The finance minister must demand reasonable answers from the military junta. If he doesn’t, his strategy will be doomed to failure.
Pakistan faces a crisis of state and society. The economic crisis which Mr Aziz seeks to resolve is an effect of this political and ideological state crisis and not a cause of it. That is why any attempt to fix the economy without first understanding and tackling the larger state crisis is not likely to yield long-term dividends. The generals would be advised to ponder some enduring facts.
The economy is in a deep recession because no one wants to invest. Investment is down not merely because of high interest rates and reduced government spending but essentially because of political uncertainty at home and threats of international isolation from abroad. These factors in turn are the effects of the military’s secret domestic motives and ambitious regional agendas which deny us the security and certainty of political democracy and the financial dividends of regional peace. Beyond these, some larger facts are worth recapitulating.
The prosperity of post-war Japan and Germany was built on the carcass of outmoded st3ate structures and defunct national security paradigms. The demise of the Soviet Union was predicated on an economic collapse derived from a costly arms race. The unprecedented prosperity of America in the post-cold war period is largely due to the peace dividend arising from a substantial reduction in the growth of military expenditures. India is growing at our Muslim rate of 6% growth while Pakistan is languishing at the Hindu rate of 3% growth — the one is threatening to transform wealth into power, the other impoverishment into weakness. The sooner General Pervez Musharraf swaps economic illusions for political realities, the better for all concerned.
(TFT June 23-29, 2000 Vol-XII No.17 — Editorial)
Heroic assumptions in the Budget
The government of General Pervez Musharraf has presented its first budget after claiming that it has pruned defence allocations for 2000-2001 by nearly Rs 10 billion. The government has also announced that it will not respond to India’s latest Prithvi testing. It has abolished wealth tax, given an annual bonus of Rs 2,000 to state-sector employees in the pay scale 1 to 16, allowed 80 percent reduction in income tax for people earning Rs 60,000 annually and staggered this reduction upwards till those who earn Rs 15,000 will get 50 percent reduction. The government has increased the share of the provinces in the federal divisible pool by 28 percent, subjected the assessment of presumptive taxation to advice from traders’ committees, pledged to make export-related refunds within one month and clear the outstanding Rs 10 billion refunds by end June. The budget has allocated Rs 21 billion for poverty alleviation and Rs 120 billion for the Annual Development Programme. It has reset the tax revenue target at Rs 351 billion, a whopping increase of nearly Rs 80 billion over the current year’s revised target. Federal taxes have been cut down to three and provincial taxes from 30 to only nine.
Critics say the government will find it difficult to meet its targets. The cut in the defence budget in real terms comes to much less if one factors in the low inflation rate at 4 percent, compared to the past around 10-12 percent, and if one accounts for the approximately Rs 26 billion transferred to the government’s expenditures side. In real terms therefore the defence budget may have gone up by 14 percent in monetary terms, testifying to a covert arms race with India. Experts continue to be sceptical about the ability of the government to revamp the taxation bureaucracy which will collect the sum of Rs 351 billion. If the growth rate is excepted to be no more than 4.5 percent, the additional collection will not be based on growth but on arm-twisting, which in itself is a heroic assumption considering the fact that the ground reality of corruption has not changed. Failure to collect an additional Rs 80 billion under low growth will cause the IMF to drag its feet and undermine the budget assumption of receiving Rs 178 billion from external sources. This large sum from the IMF, the ADB and Pakistan Development Forum is still conditional to Pakistan making fundamental foreign policy decisions which are nowhere in sight. The second round of debt-rescheduling in January 2001 is hardly certain, given the current submissive stance of the government to internal pressures.
Significantly, the government has slapped up to 70 paisa surcharge on diesel, kicking up transportation costs and the general price index. Add to that the expected hike in gas rates and the costs picture becomes more gloomy. It has increased the withholding tax by 1.5 percent, cut the profit on saving schemes also by 1.5 percent, and extended sales tax to the services sector. The economy may not respond to this positively and exports may actually decline, the boom in the textile sector may not repeat itself and the budget’s reliance on agriculture for growth may be misplaced. Given Pakistan’s very low foreign exchange reserves, crucial imports may come under pressure too. A general curtailment in the purchasing power of the population in the face of high costs and curtailment of savings will certainly affect revenue collection despite documentation. After the Budget refuses to balance, poverty alleviation and development programmes will surely be axed.
It will need a different Pakistan to execute the new budget. People are willing to respond to the amnesty scheme after sensing that the government has resolve. Shopkeepers hiding their stocks want the amnesty to be increased and extended beyond June to make their stocks “white”. The next step will be to effectively stop the influx of smuggled goods and meet the challenge of confronting powerful vested interests behind the racket. Unfortunately, the dispute with HUBCO has not been resolved so far, and WAPDA is bound to come under more pressure after the stoppage of subsidy to it. The HUBCO issue is a hurdle in the path of foreign investment and is still firmly in place. And it will require many more internal improvements, inclusive of law and order and the judiciary, to restore the investment climate in Pakistan.
Budget 2000-2001 is asking Pakistan to change its ways. The proverbial bullet was never really bitten in the past and the state was forced to nuclearise itself without having the flexibility of response needed to face off punitive global pressures. What we need is a strong government. There are many elements in our society who have enjoyed the bounties of a mal-functioning and “fudged” economy in the past and would now like to test General Musharraf’s resolve. Unfortunately, some ground has been ceded to these elements in the past months. More bending in the face of these people will adversely affect the enforcement of the new budget and damage the confidence of Pakistan’s foreign creditors without whose political support the economy can go into a payments default next year.
(TFT June 30-06 Jul, 2000 Vol-XII No.18 — Editorial)
Look before you leap
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague has rejected Pakistan’s case against India on the shooting down of an unarmed Pakistani naval plane in August 1999. The Court said it had no jurisdiction in the matter. This has surely embarrassed Pakistan’s Attorney-General, Aziz Munshi, who led the Pakistani team to The Hague. More significantly, India is crowing about a third victory (Kargil being the first and President Clinton’s trip being the second) in recent times and trying to fuel and extract mileage out of the perception that Pakistan is growing increasingly isolated in international affairs. In the meanwhile, a clear case of international gangsterism on India’s part has gone abegging.
Pakistan had a bloody good case. The debris of the plane that was shot down (the Atlantique) was found two kilometres inside Pakistan. There was visual proof that Indian helicopters had landed inside Pakistani territory to collect the debris as a ‘trophy’ for Mr Vajpayee. What was, however, not clear to the lay person was how the case would fare at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It was known that India would rely on the argument that the Court had no jurisdiction in such matters in view of the “optional clause” declaration announced many years ago which stopped the court from adjudging disputes between India and members of the Commonwealth. But it was Mr Munshi’s job to weigh the chances of getting a fair hearing for Pakistan at the ICJ and plan a strategy accordingly.
The ICJ, it may be noted, is a holdover from the League of Nations in the sense that it grants the right of exemption from international law to sovereign states. If a state doesn’t want to be adjudged, it simply has to say so in a declaration under Article 36. India’s 1974 declaration under this article claims exemption in disputes involving members of the Commonwealth. Clearly, therefore, Pakistan’s case had to be presented in such a way as to compel the Court to change its stance. Since its birth it has adjudicated only 58 cases, and these too have been mostly those referred to it by the United Nations. Pakistan was therefore going to the ICJ with the expectation that it would extract a “historic judgement” which would change the course of international law. Was this in any way justified?
Pakistan fielded an eight-member team. Mr Munshi was the only Pakistani lawyer among them. India had nine players, all lawyers and legal experts, including Indian and international personalities, with Indian Attorney-General Soli Sorabjee leading the team. The convention at the ICJ is that cases of jurisdiction are presented with the help of academic experts specialising in public international law theory. Professors of law have traditionally dominated the proceedings of the Court. But Mr Munshi’s professional bias inclined him to engage mostly lawyers, ignoring the academic side of the case. His choice of the lawyer Lauterpacht (not the famous father Lauterpacht but his much less talented son) was not uncontroversial. From the Indian side, there were not only five professors who put the Indian case effectively in the two days allotted to them, but some of them were Indians who knew the nuances of the case in the South Asian setting. In addition, the British lawyer-academic, Brownlie, representing India, had authored a well-received book on public international law that the judges of the ICJ were familiar with.
Pakistan had asked the Court to hold India guilty of violating international law and order it to cough over US$ 60 million as indemnity to cover the price of the plane as well the compensation paid to the 16 Pakistani personnel killed in the incident. But by losing the case, Pakistan has not only not collected cost from India but may have to bear the entire cost of the unsuccessful litigation. We understand that the panel of international lawyers has been paid rather hefty fees. The expenses of the ICJ hearing, which extended over four days in April, including the time spent by the judges and their aides on the case, will also have to be borne by the public exchequer in Pakistan. If the cost of the Indian side too has to be met by Pakistan, the total bill may swell quite steeply. This is certainly not good news for Pakistanis creaking under the burden of fresh taxes and stiff penalties in the new budget.
Mr Munshi has told the Voice of America that the case he has lost has been a ‘step forward’. We don’t understand how he can make this claim, unless of course he is using the same twisted logic used by every government so far in claiming that the cause of Kashmir has been highlighted whenever we have failed to get the United Nations to take note of it at the First Committee level.
The psychological fallout of the case will be negative. It will doubtless reinforce the feeling of international isolation in and out of Pakistan. We might have thought twice before rushing headlong into it.
(TFT Jul 07-13, 2000 Vol-XII No.19 — Editorial)
Turbulence in PML
The great PML leaders’ meeting in Islamabad on July 4 that was to decide Nawaz Sharif’s fate was a bit of a damp squib except that a group of 31 dissidents was able to voice its rejection of him as leader of the party in a press conference. This, despite the perception that any party headed by Mr Sharif could not possibly play any significant role in a future political set-up planned by an army high command headed by General Pervez Musharraf. And this, despite some plain talking by General Musharraf to Raja Zafar ul Haq a couple of days earlier. And all this, despite the rebel group led by Mian Azhar, Khurshid Kasuri, Fakhr Imam et al which has long agitated to knock out Mr Sharif and whose leader Mian Azhar was doubtless offered inducements by General Musharraf to shake off Mr Sharif.
There are several reasons for the continuing “unity” of the Muslim League. First, there is still no leader in the Muslim League who comes even remotely close to matching the popularity of Mr Sharif in the rank and file of the League as far as the party’s vote-bank is concerned. Certainly, Begum Kulsoom’s aggressive posturing has helped her husband retain his centrality in this vote-bank. But Mr Sharif’s refusal to bend before the men in khaki has also helped his personal cause immeasurably — bravery and martyrdom being significant elements in the mythology of charismatic leadership. Second, the regime’s inability to knock out Mr Sharif via the courts within the first month or two of his ouster has helped perpetuate the belief that perhaps he isn’t guilty of all the sins heaped at his door by General Musharraf. Third, the government’s avowed intention to “nab” many League leaders, including the Chaudhurys of Gujrat, has only served to harden their resolve not to abandon Mr Sharif in the expectation that safety lies in sinking or swimming together. Fourth, the army’s assault on the bazaar, a mainstay of Mr Sharif’s urban constituency, has evoked a wave of sympathy for their deposed leader and a matching revulsion for army rule. Finally, the military regime has earned few, if any, brownie points for its grandiose plans to revive the economy which continues to languish in no-man’s land. Indeed, the recurring flip-flops of the regime have already earned General Musharraf the unflattering epithet of CMLA — Cancel My Last Announcement!
On June 25, Nawaz Sharif played an all but masterful card. He announced the appointment of six new vice-presidents of the party in the provinces. All were young and second-rung leaders keen to support Mr Sharif’s ‘forward’ policies. The idea was to increase the strength of pro-Kulsoom vice-presidents in the central working committee to give Begum Sahiba the majority she needed to take the entire party along the path of confrontation. The tactic would have worked beautifully if he hadn’t overplayed his hand by appointing Saad Rafiq as Acting-Secretary General Punjab in place of Rana Nazir who has been ‘nabbed’. The League leadership, in particular Chaudhury Shujaat, reacted against this step by arguing that if the party president in jail (Nawaz Sharif) was not to be replaced by an acting president merely because NAB was proceeding against him, what was the unholy haste in deposing Rana Nazir? Doubtless, Chaudhury Sahib was wondering about his own fate in the PML in the eventuality of falling foul of NAB? That was sufficient to put paid to Begum Kulsoom’s efforts to take over the party.
There are three groupings in the PML today. The Chaudhurys, playing their cards well from behind the ‘consensual’ figure of Raja Zafar ul Haq, have emerged as the biggest faction in contact with other dissidents like Fakhr Imam and Mian Kasuri. The second faction is that of Mian Azhar who leads a group in Punjab clearly resolved to remove Nawaz Sharif from the leadership of the party. The third grouping is of course the loyalists led by Kulsoom Nawaz, greatly fortified by Nawaz Sharif’s power to make new appointments for the party from his prison cell. Out of the three, it was Mian Azhar’s faction that seemed isolated among the PML rank and file because of its radical stance, but General Musharraf has partly removed this weakness by meeting Mian Azhar the same day as Raja Zafar ul Haq. However, at the end of the day, the biggest grouping led by Raja Zafar-ul-Haq has decided not to oust Nawaz Sharif from the Presidentship of the PML for the time being. The sole reason for this is that any other route would have led to a bloody break-up of the party, with deleterious consequences for each of the three groups.
The Chaudhurys have been reassured by Raja Zafar ul Haq’s contact with General Musharraf. Raja Sahib in turn has strengthened his position as a “go-between” within the party. The Sharif faction led by Begum Kulsoom has also watered down its rhetoric against the Chaudhurys by apologising for Nawaz Sharif’s act of appointing vice presidents without consultation. Mian Sharif, who has so far stayed out of the PML fray, is also expected to become active as a ‘rebuking father’ to repair his son’s excesses. So we may expect the turbulence within the PML to continue without leading to a crash.
(TFT Jul 14-20, 2000 Vol-XII No.20 — Editorial)
The meaning of isolation
A French parliamentarian said in Islamabad the other day that Pakistan and India should not be allowed to become “isolated” if the issue of nuclear proliferation was to be addressed effectively by the West. The national press gratefully blazoned the statement in a headline saying: “France against isolating Pakistan”. That is a great leap of the imagination.
Unfortunately, the issue of isolation has become a kind of tit-for-tat debate in Pakistan. Some say that Pakistan is internationally isolated, others maintain it is not. Certainly, General Pervez Musharraf himself thinks that his international contacts are sufficiently firm to dispel any such “isolation”. But consider.
International isolation is a political term. It denotes the measure of a state’s ability to walk with the rest of the international community. There is no legal basis for this. In fact, if a nation is legally in the right but has not been able to lobby its cause successfully it is liable to fall victim to ‘moral inflexibility’, which nudges it to go its own way and thus become isolated. Nor is there anything ‘moral’ about the international system — the threat of international isolation is faced by all states, including the sole superpower, the United States, as for example in the matter of its National Missile Defence (NMD). Avoidance of isolation is thus the constant preoccupation of all states in relation to their national economies, which require unfettered access to markets, and bilateral disputes which require steady international support.
The fact is that defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) isolated both India and Pakistan in the past decade. The United States, which made the NPT its main foreign policy plank, was also threatened with isolation because of the defective enforcement of the Treaty, especially with regard to Israel’s defiance. But it succeeded in countering it by getting the member states to endorse it in perpetuity, thus isolating India and Pakistan further. After 1998, our nuclear tests took this isolation up another notch, and a UN Security Council resolution affirmed the sanctions placed on both countries. The CTBT was then offered as a way out of this isolation, but India and Pakistan failed to sign it, even as Israel was quick to take the opportunity of relieving some of the isolationist pressure on it by signing it.
Pakistan’s malfunctioning economy and its dependence on external factors made this isolation more punishing. But in the months following the nuclear tests, Pakistan adopted other policies that deepened its isolation. The fall of the civilian Nawaz Sharif government added intensity to this isolation. Meanwhile, despite its anti-West rhetoric on the nuclear issue, India has been able to take initiatives to lessen its isolation. It is perceived to have shown “restraint and maturity” on the Kargil provocation, it has drawn closer to the US and NATO, it has made reassuring noises about signing the CTBT and it has moved closer to Israel — a move that also checkmates Pakistan in the military sense. But Pakistan’s isolation today springs from its inability to negotiate international demands relating to its internal situation: human rights, terrorism, lack of democracy and the uncertainty that this state of affairs evokes about its nuclear ability and failure to “normalise” relations with India.
Breaking out of isolation is a challenge for both India and Pakistan; in fact, it is a kind of competition between the rival powers. But since Pakistan tends to ‘follow’ India instead of taking initiatives that would isolate India, its ability to develop international linkages has become severely curtailed. Indeed, the tendency to use its nuclear capability as an antidote to isolationism is a dangerous game. While the bomb helps in averting total international boycott, it must be accompanied with civilian initiatives to prevent it from being seen as a crude blackmailing device.
Political initiatives in a world that bristles with conditionalities often compel ‘isolated states’ to reach out to other such states. We must avoid this at all cost. If such relations have to be established, they must remain discreet and low-profile. Therefore the recent high-profile visit by a delegation from Burma led by a general of the junta that has cruelly suppressed democracy in that country was not good diplomacy. In this too Pakistan followed India, forgetting that India’s contacts with Burma have been low-profile and secret.
The lesson to be learnt is clear — in a world that is guided by politics rather than morality, it is important for states to remain flexible in their conduct of foreign policy. China’s conduct over the past decade in this regard is exemplary. State ‘sovereignty’ is an easy principle to resort to in order to ward off pressures from the international community, but without international support it means very little. The choice is ours. We can reduce our increasing isolation through a reasonable and flexible approach. Or we can exacerbate it by pinning our defiance on self-righteous anger.
(TFT Jul 21-27, 2000 Vol-XII No.21 — Editorial)
Fauji Jirga is nonsense
Mr Ajmal Khattak has called for the establishment of a “fauji jirga” comprising politicians, ulema and army officers, suggesting a lineage of power. Mr Khattak, it may be recalled, was recently ousted from the Awami National Party amidst ugly recriminations and is hard put to whip up a political consensus in Pakistan. His formula is therefore strictly opportunistic.
The army, of course, has always been the ghost of the banquet. As far as the politicians and ulema are concerned, they were one and the same thing because both were willing to contest elections and sit in parliaments. But that is no longer the case. The ulema are increasingly inclined to reject the electoral route. This means that the political parties may be an important ingredient of Mr Khattak’s potion but their role will be curtailed in the face of the other two ingredients whose agendas may clash with them.
Indeed, the ‘fauji jirga’ proposed by him is likely to feature political personalities of a certain unrepresentative stripe which may render it strictly unworkable. The PML rebels may be the only ones amenable to joining this ‘jirga’ without too many difficult conditionalties. But if representative politicians are chosen for the ‘jirga’ on the basis of their electoral strength, how will leaders like Mr Khattak gain entry?
It is also a kind of “defensive guarantee” to give parity to the ulema in this tripartite arrangement. The ulema will have to come from among the leaders of the jehadi organisations because the academic ulema and scholars have withered on the bough. It is also clear that the third party, the army, which is now envisaged as a permanent arbiter of the state, will impose officers into the “jirga” who will be primus inter pares rather than equal to the other two components.
The army is in power, full-stop. The ulema are also partly in power on the ground because of their armed militias and their contribution to the army’s crucial agenda of keeping the Kashmir issue alive. They exercise considerable coercive and ideological control over civil society. Their leverage on the government is far more palpable than that of the politicians. It is no surprise therefore that they have asserted their agenda very aggressively. They have rejected the NGO factor in the Musharraf government and have an economic programme that scares even the army with its radicalism. They want a change in foreign policy that even the hawkish establishment in Islamabad cannot implement. And all of them have announced their decision not to contest elections but to gain power on the basis of militant Islamic ideology. The politicians, in the meanwhile, are nowhere on this scene. Therefore an ill-balanced “jirga” will not work. But there is more to it.
The world of fatwas is riven with contradiction. There are those who have declared jehad on the United States and vowed to kill Americans and Europeans on sight. All of them have cursed the ‘shameless women’ of the NGOs and are united in their condemnation of the alleged “Qadiani-Jewish conspiracy” within the Musharraf government. Some of them want the Shia community to be declared non-Muslim. It is also more than likely that the ‘fauji jirga’, in order to be representative, will have a majority of Deobandi ulema and only a sprinkling of Barelvis, which will fuel sectarian divisions within the “jirga”.
The politicians are no less divided. While Nawaz Sharif controls the vote bank, there are parties in the Grand Democratic Alliance which refuse to have any truck with the PML and the PPP. These will demand that the PML and PPP should be punished with large-scale disqualifications as a precondition to joining the “jirga”. Similarly, a number of regional parties will extend their agitation in PONM with a programme that equally excludes the mainstream parties. In this scenario, there will then be only two parties left in the country to decide the fate of the state: the army and the ulema. But this alliance is doomed to failure. While both are allies in jehad, they differ in their approach to the political system. The army wants to re-establish guided electoral democracy in the country while the ulema want a more utopian order in which a Western-type representative system is simply not permitted. Add to this the confusion generated by constitutional provisions that favour the ulema but not the politicians, like the Council of Islamic Ideology and the Federal Shariat Court, and you have a situation that is primed to tilt in favour of anarchy.
Objectively speaking, Pakistan’s jehad policy and its internal adjustments militate against any form of good governance, especially in an economy that is dependent on external factors. But the Musharraf government could do worse by changing its present make-up and opting for the sort of “fauji jirja” advocated by Mr Khattak. The regime’s current agenda is far more benign than the one such changes might induce. If these are difficult days in which no policy seems to work, the military government should create the conditions for accountable, electoral, democratic civilian government as swiftly as possible and return to the barracks.
(TFT Jul 28-03 Aug, 2000 Vol-XII No.22 — Editorial)
Kashmir initiatives bubbling over
Political ferment in Indian-Held Kashmir is palpable. A few Kashmiri leaders were recently released from prison by the Indian authorities. Then there was talk in New Delhi about a dialogue with the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. This was upstaged by Farooq Abdullah’s radical proposals of “autonomy minus independence or independence minus secession”. Now comes a most significant initiative by the Hizbul Mujahidin, the leading guerilla group in the valley, trumping Abdullah’s hand by offering a conditional 3 month ceasefire in exchange for a three-way dialogue (India, Pakistan and the Kashmiris) on the future of Kashmir. What is going on?
Farooq Abdullah’s “autonomy” proposals envisage the territory of J&K to be administered under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution according to the Nehru-Sheikh Abullah agreement of 1952, giving only currency, defense and foreign affairs to New Delhi. The internal autonomy law would give administrative autonomy to Jammu and Ladakh from the Valley after readjusting some districts where Muslim populations would like to be a part of the Muslim-dominated Valley. These proposals were framed in the backdrop of the fact that the ‘special status’ of J&K under Article 370 is nothing more than a fib. From 1953 to 1989, New Delhi has amended the Indian Constitution 43 times to destroy the autonomy promised by Nehru to Sheikh Abdullah under Article 370. The territory has been ruled through governors who rigged elections and unleashed a reign of terror on the Muslims. These proposals have been denounced in India and Pakistan as American attempts to stake indirect claims on Kashmir.
Another recent development has brought about a matching Indo-Pak negative ‘consensus’ on Kashmir. The New York-based Asia Study Group (ASG) headed by ex-Kashmiri Farooq Kathwari has gone and discussed ASG’s own plan for Kashmir with Farooq Abdullah. His paper wants the Line of Control (LoC) frozen as an international border, the Valley more or less independent from India after giving Ladakh and Jammu virtual independence from the Valley. This harks back to the 1952 Owen Dixon plan of a regional plebiscite which presaged annexation of Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir by Pakistan, and annexation of Ladakh and Jammu by India, leaving the Valley to go whatever way it wanted. The Kathwari plan would have the Valley functioning as an ‘independent state without sovereignty’ guaranteed by India and Pakistan. The Indian rejectionists immediately called this an American plot to annex Kashmir for itself while Pakistani rejectionists have likewise denounced Farooq Abdullah’s latest “rebellion” against New Delhi as “nura kushti”.
Pakistan, unfortunately, doesn’t have a considered response to the question of “autonomy” in the Indian-held territory because of the hawkish public opinion built around the maximalist position that nothing short of a plebiscite under the UN resolutions would be acceptable. But because international opinion has been swinging away from the UN position, the jehad in Kashmir has come to be billed as Pakistan’s best bet to reestablish focus on the issue. This approach, in turn, has been undermined by the insistence of the international community that jihad is “terrorism”, which has allowed India to extract mileage from it.
Unfortunately there is no middle ground between the two extreme positions taken by India and Pakistan. Both rely on each other to perpetuate a conflict that the world wants resolved. Whenever some sort of middle ground is sought to be created through track-two diplomacy, it is attacked by pro-establishment forces on either side.
The current situation is that the two countries are unwilling to talk to each other. India says that Pakistan must first switch off ‘cross-border terrorism’. Pakistan attaches the ‘core-issue’ precondition of Kashmir to the talks. Until now, the international pressure on India to change its policy on Kashmir either by talking to the militants or allowing ‘autonomy close to independence’ to the Valley has been defused by Pakistan’s extreme stand-point, forcing the international community to choose the ‘lesser evil’ of India. Is a greater policy sophistication from the Pakistanis in the offing?
Following the election of pro-Pakistan politicians to the leadership of the Hurriyat Conference and the announcement of a “ceasefire” along the LoC by Pakistan some weeks ago comes the brilliant, Rawalpindi-sponsored ceasefire offer by the pro-Pakistan Hizbul Mujahidin. This will put a spoke in Farooq Abdullah’s wheels by shifting the focus away from Srinagar to New Delhi and Islamabad. It will also put pressure on India to respond in kind, both on the ground and in the diplomatic arena, to Pakistan’s demands for Kashmir-oriented talks between the two countries. If it is now backed by an official “approval” of sorts from Pakistan’s military regime, New Delhi will have a hard time refusing a Summit meeting between General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in the next month or so. If such a meeting serves to eventually “restore” the Lahore process while making progress on the core Kashmir issue, Islamabad can claim unprecedented policy success. But if the talks fail, India will be hard pressed to come up with some credible excuses or alternative policy prescriptions. In either case, Islamabad cannot be worse off than it is now.
(TFT Aug 04-10, 2000 Vol-XII No.23 — Editorial)
Next move, India
The Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) has offered a “conditional” ceasefire” to India: hold your fire and then hold unconditional talks with Pakistan, HM and the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) on the future of Kashmir and on peace in the region. On the other side, the BJP government is ready to talk to the HM and the APHC but not to Pakistan. Also, it insists that the talks with the two Kashmiri parties must be within the framework of the Indian constitution.
Not everyone in India agrees with the BJP’s initial response. Editorials in leading English-language newspapers in India have advised the BJP not to belabour the constitutionality or otherwise of the proposed exercise. In fact, the Congress-I, India’s leading opposition party, has recommended that talks with Pakistan should be initiated. Even Mr Farooq Abdullah in Srinagar has now supported the idea of an Indo-Pakistan dialogue.
On the face of it, this seems to suggest that there is some agreeable change in the ground reality in Kashmir. Coupled with General Pervez Musharraf’s unilateral ceasefire along the LoC, and his call for a resumption of the peace dialogue with India, this is a significant development. If the BJP government ignores or scuttles this diplomatic opening, it may find itself isolated in India and censured abroad. Indeed, the consequences of missing the bus on this occasion might be most unpleasant.
If the Indian government thinks that the change is owed to weakness in Pakistan, and that New Delhi can reap further unilateral dividends by simply waiting it out, it should think again. If the ceasefire offer is withdrawn, India is bound to face a far more intractable situation on the ground than it has experienced so far. As it is, its rejectionist attitude has already caused its client government in Srinagar led by Farooq Abdullah, to bend in favour of the APHC because the march of events is bringing the divided forces of Kashmir together again – APHC leader Mirwaiz Farooq’s visit to the house of chief minister Farooq Abdullah to condole the death of the latter’s mother is a pointer in this direction. Therefore the BJP, which kicked off the process by releasing several APHC leaders and asking for an abatement in “cross-border terrorism”, is now morally bound to move forward rather than recoil to the dark days of Governor’s Raj simply to leash Farooq Abdullah.
Is the change brought about by HM’s ceasefire more far-reaching than the orthodox forces on both sides of the border realise? In Pakistan the most die-hard advocates of jehad concede that HM is responsible for 60 percent of the Kashmir jehad and remains the mainstay of resistance inside Held Kashmir. This accounts for the support its ceasefire decision has been able to enlist from Mr Salahuddin, the HM chief based in Pakistan, despite the outrage among the other more radical outfits. Furthermore, the new leader of the APHC, Mr Gani Bhatt, has inclined to the stance taken by HM, followed by his Muslim Conference counterpart in Azad Kashmnir, the shrewd Sardar Abdul Qayyum. These facts lead to the conclusion that the stage might be more thoroughly set for a change in the status quo than many observers and activists realise. But how optimistic should one be?
The government of Pakistan has acted wisely by declaring that it will not interfere in the politics and policies of the jehadi forces in Kashmir. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine how, if the government of Pakistan was not behind the move, it could have actually rejected the HM ceasefire and then expected to remote-control 60 percent of the jehad from Islamabad. Interestingly enough, in an interview to TFT, Pakistan’s Jama’at-i Islami leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, has rejected the extreme policy prescription advocated and adopted by some leaders of the jehadi organisations. Although he too has rejected the HM ceasefire, his stance has become less intense and more cautious. Meanwhile, the extremist Deobandi outfit, Harkatul Mujahideen, has split, clearing the way to some extent for the return of the non-sectarian and relatively moderate Jama’at-i Islami to the fore.
If Pakistan is not yet ready to effect a change in its policy vis-a-vis Afghanistan by controlling terrorism at home, the implied pledge by General Pervez Musharraf to lower the temperature in Held Kashmir has certainly been fulfilled. That explains why the CP(M) and the Congress-I in India have responded by asking Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to talk to Pakistan even if that means talking to its military ruler.
Pakistan has always tended to imitate India and thereby harmed itself in the past. But what if this Pakistani-initiated move leaves India stranded on the back-foot? In the event, even if the world cannot bring itself to punish India, it can certainly offer some rewards to Pakistan, including bailout funds for Pakistan’s blighted economy.
The international community should jump into the breach offered by the HM ceasefire and compel India to see the wisdom of departing from old, unworkable policies. But it would be tragic if this window of opportunity is lost in the cynical world of cold-war strategists on both sides.
(TFT Aug 11-17, 2000 Vol-XII No.24 — Editorial)
Nawaz Sharif’s fate
The Pakistan Muslim League under Nawaz Sharif has experienced another potentially destabilising development — its imprisoned “leader” has issued orders that are flexible, vague and mysterious. The net result is greater confusion than cohesion in the party.
On July 30, the PML’s rank and file, mobilised by Kulsoom Nawaz and the ‘new’ young leadership coalesced around her, roughed up the two dissident leaders Mian Azhar and Fakhr Imam outside the Muslim League office. Inside the session, Mr Sharif’s statement did not mention Raja Zafar-ul-Haq who is in charge of the Coordination Committee of the party. Instead, a light-weight like Ahsan Iqbal was vaguely put in charge of the new mobilisation campaign desired by the leader. Furthermore, even as Raja Zafarul Haq’s clique was assuaged by allowing it to pursue “sincere” negotiations with the military government of General Pervez Musharraf, no effort was made to rein in the gung-ho faction led by Kulsoom Nawaz.
In the event, the PML’s July 30 meeting in Islamabad has put paid to the power of the dissidents. It has voted overwhelmingly for retaining Nawaz Sharif as president and refused to consider the dissident demand for an Acting President and fresh party elections. But this ambivalence, could, in fact, be a carefully cultivated one, containing the seeds of confrontation rather than reconciliation.
Nawaz Sharif certainly shocked most Leaguers by telling them that the PML would not take part in the coming local bodies elections. This means that Mr Sharif does not wish to grant legitimacy to the acts of the Musharraf government — the PML is, after all, best placed, at least in the majority province of Punjab, to win the non-party polls, the party machinery having primed itself for over a decade for exactly such an opportunity. He sees the induction into local government as a reduction of the momentum he wants to build up against his long prison sentence and the longer disqualification period he must suffer. He believes, quite rightly, that most Muslim Leaguers who end up supporting the new local institutions will inevitably come under their spell and forget him in the bargain.
The other message, that of joining the All-Parties Conference (APC) and the reference by name to Benazir Bhutto as part of the ‘democratic’ order, put off many loyalists and dissidents. This was to be expected. Mr Sharif has nurtured the PML(N) on a private hatred and public persecution of the PPP and its Bhutto-Zardari leadership. But the APC comprises parties who largely want the PML and PPP purged from the system before a National Government is set up to hold the next elections. The APC of August 6 in fact ended up destroying the one plank on which the PML was united: restoration of PML-dominated assemblies.
Obviously, Nawaz Sharif has only one thing on his mind — incarceration leading to political oblivion. Therefore he can only seek to build up pressure on the government to let him off the hook. This means that his PML must be arm-twisted to stay away from any process that might cool its passion for confrontation. Is he likely to succeed in his mission?
Certainly, the dissidents who wanted to topple Nawaz Sharif from the presidency of the PML have bitten the dust again. The PML has not only held together, newspaper surveys show that Mr Sharif is still the citizens’ choice for the party’s leadership. Why hasn’t the PML gone the way it has always gone in the past when challenged by the army?
The truth is that this time around there is no Nawaz Sharif in the second-rung leadership of the PML as there was when Mohammad Khan Junejo was removed by General Zia ul Haq. The truth also is that General Pervez Musharraf is no General Zia, ready, able and willing to publicly shower his blessings on the chosen replacement. And the truth is that if the party leadership has deep fissures, the dissidents barely have their own constituencies in hand, habituated as they are to linkages within the old Establishment. Finally, they are all at risk from the government’s accountability drive and any place outside the party fortress would be unsafe for them if and when NAB decides to prosecute them.
They say that time heals wounds. But time could equally widen the lacerations received by the PML. The loyalty Sharif is evoking in the party is the kind of loyalty he had striven for, not of principles but of personal benefit. But as he lives out his sentence in jail and even sits out the next election, this loyalty is sure to fade. And as his family’s ability to look after the loyalists diminishes (its cohesion is already damaged by Shahbaz Sharif’s conscientious dissent) the vested interests looking to him for survival are bound to latch on to other supports.
Nawaz Sharif may be a non-entity in the coming years. But he could find some solace in the fact that the years in the wilderness for him, as for Benazir Bhutto, may well prove intractable for Pakistan’s state and economy.
(TFT Aug 18-24, 2000 Vol-XII No.25 — Editorial)
Political calculus is wrong
Law minister Aziz Munshi wants to “purify politics”. He has promulgated an ordinance aimed at punishing convicted politicians from holding any party office. The message is that if the PML and PPP will not “cleanse” themselves of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, the government will do it for them by decree. But actually the Ordinance is an acknowledgement of the government’s failure to erase Mr Sharif and Ms Bhutto from the hearts and minds of their supporters.
Past experience suggests that this is a dubious strategy. Far from sharpening contradictions within the political arena, the Ordinance has served to make the 42-member APC more focused than before. Equally, the PML dissidents who have supported the Ordinance could find themselves terminally isolated if the Sharif lobby is able to make common cause with the PPP.
Under Article 63 of the Constitution persons convicted of cognisable offences cannot contest elections. Under the new Ordinance they can’t even hold office in their respective parties. If they do, they will be jailed for three years and fined. This means that Nawaz Sharif, who is already serving a “life” sentence, may get another three years if his party doesn’t remove him from the top position. The absurdity of this position suggests that the PML could be punished with a ban too. Under the Ordinance, if members of a banned party indulge in political activity, they too will be bunged in for three years and made to pay a fine. So the government now seems set to chase members of banned political parties as well. But what if the PML is banned for not ousting Nawaz Sharif and renames itself PMML or some such thing. After all, when the NAP was banned by an obliging judiciary under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1974, it was reborn as the ANP with the same leadership and thereafter remained an integral part of the national political scene.
Faced with various deadlines, the government’s impatience with the slow process of ‘natural purification’ in the PML after October 1999 has translated into a cavalier ordinance. That is why it has found no support in the press. The Supreme Court, where the affected parties have decided to challenge the Ordinance, will also find it difficult to reconcile the ban on politicians and parties with fundamental rights invested in the Constitution. The practical difficulties are no less daunting. Ms Bhutto, who is already disqualified, remains the PPP’s chairperson for life. She has escaped going to jail by staying out of Pakistan, somewhat like Altaf Hussain who has run the MQM from exile without fear of any alternative leadership. Thus a sagging PPP may return to centre-stage by simply refusing to remove her from chairmanship and then being chased from pillar to post by the government. Mr Sharif may also seem worse off because he is in for life, but this disadvantage too could be put to good use through a robust defiance of the Ordinance. From a corrupt and despotic erstwhile ruler he could still be transformed into a messiah, especially as more and more segments of society come under pressure from a failing economy which the generals’ glib whiz kids haven’t been able to revive. Finally, even if the parties decide to give in, removal from office doesn’t mean that affected politicians will lose their leadership positions. In fact, this may start a new trend of jailed or exiled political leaders in the country, discredit the electoral process and make it meaningless, as was proved by Altaf Hussain in Karachi and Sindh in 1993 and 1997.
When General Pervez Musharraf finally hands over power to the civilians, an elected parliament and prime minister is likely to threaten his ordinances. But if General Musharraf follows the route taken by General Zia ul Haq and compels the new parliament to indemnify his ordinances into a modern equivalent of the notorious 8th Amendment, the eventual fate of his amendment may not be too different from that of General Zia’s. The lesson is that you can’t undermine democracy under the pious impulse of purifying it. Laws imposed without political consensus tend to decay and become bad laws. And those who believe that disabling laws can be enforced to prevent military intervention should study the ‘intervention’ that took place under General Abdul Waheed in 1993 when both president Ghulam Ishaq Khan and prime minister Nawaz Sharif were forced to step down under the very 8th Amendment which was supposed to prevent such an intervention.
The latest Ordinance will not find popular approval. Far from being ‘purified’, the forthcoming local bodies polls may decline into a farce of ‘proxy’ elections in favour of absent and debarred politicians, thanks to the government’s growing number of “new” enemies especially in the marketplace. The fact is that the Musharraf regime has mishandled political matters by allying with the fundos on the one hand and on the other by failing to make a critical distinction between the liberal, democratic forces and their fascistic, corrupt leaders. That is why no number of well-intentioned decrees will set things right on the ground unless the military’s political calculus is set right.
(TFT Aug 25-31, 2000 Vol-XII No.26 — Editorial)
Politics by other means
General Pervez Musharraf has “revamped” the National Security Council (NSC) and unfurled his plan to “empower the people and make them masters of their own destiny”. What do these steps signify?
The idea of the NSC, with top military participation, standing “above” a cabinet of ministers, may be relevant in a “representative” civilian system that is hostage to authoritarian cultures, praetorian traditions and periodic coups. But in a hands-on military regime it makes no sense to have the NSC and a cabinet, both headed by the army chief and comprising civilians as well as serving and retired men in uniform. The post-coup NSC was particularly superfluous, given the conservative and timid demeanour of its civilian members. But matters became more complicated when a clique of “supergenerals” in GHQ/ISI, assisted by the corps commanders, actually began to call all the shots and made a mockery of provincial governors and cabinets. Has anything of significance changed in the recent NSC reshuffle?
No. Five civilian non-entities in the NSC have been shunted to advisory or cabinet positions, in effect making the trimmed NSC look like the Defence Committee of the Cabinet, with a military man rather than a civilian as its chief executive-head. Ridiculous. A “higher” body is looking like a “lower” limb of the cabinet, while real power still resides in the invisible, supergeneral kitchen-cabinet (from which even the wretched air and navy chiefs are excluded) which decides on strategic matters like the CTBT, Kashmir jihad, relations with America, India, Afghanistan and domestic political restructuring and reinventing.
General Musharraf’s “devolution” programme is more noteworthy. Promising to “revolutionise” state and society, the plan seems to have even stirred the restless souls of some of our more perspicacious commentators. But we need to be careful in rushing to judgment.
Yes, of course, the base of the proposed district government system will comprise directly elected men and women. But won’t the top two tiers consist largely of indirectly elected representatives who might be susceptible to all sorts of dubious pressures and unsavoury deals? If so, how would this be essentially different from the “basic democrats” and “local body politicians” so beloved of yesteryears’ military strongmen? Yes, of course, the ubiquitous 19 grade DC of the “steel-frame” will be no more. But won’t he be reinvented as a more powerful 20 grade DCO hailing from the same District Management Group controlled by Islamabad? Yes, of course, the most corrupt and inept party-political rascals will be excluded from the “non-party” polls. But won’t a further depoliticisation of the body politic exacerbate caste, ethnic, regional, sub-nationalist, religious and sectarian tensions in the country, much as the same sort of initiative by General Zia ul Haq did in the 1980s?
In the new system, the source of power will be the Nazims and not the councils. In the hierarchy of power, this will translate, in ascending order, into the Union Nazim, Tehsil Nazim, District Nazim, Provincial Governor, and the President of Pakistan. The scheme therefore seems set to achieve two objectives: it evolves into a presidential form of government without actually appearing to do so a la Ayub Khan; and it does away with the dyarchy of power created by the presidential powers under the scheme of the original 8th amendment. At the same time, the framers of the plan have tried to obviate the possibility of “divisive politics” by electing members through direct vote from single or multiple members constituencies — which seems like a first step towards some kind of a proportional representation system which, far from making the system democratic and efficient, may simply lead to a weakening of the two-party system as well as to a dilution of the powers of the legislative assemblies. The late Captain Liddel-Hart would be delighted by this “indirect strategic approach” to Presidential politics-in-the-making.
One last point. We know that good governance in Pakistan is precluded by debilitating client-patron relationships in given socio-economic structures. Does this scheme offer any radical solutions to this problem? No, it doesn’t. In fact, by putting undue emphasis on the Nazim or Mayor, and creating difficult procedures for his removal, it may tend to strengthen the office of the executive to which everything and everyone is likely to gravitate. So the checks and balances touted by the scheme could veritably wilt under this arrangement.
Let us be clear. The local government plan, the NSC, etc., are all inseparable elements of the political matrix adopted by the supergenerals of GHQ/ISI rather than political or security initiatives worthy in their own right. This leads us to an uneasy sense of déjà vu involving military coups, ousted prime ministers, banned parties, martyred politicians, thundering legatees and nervous generals atop runaway tigers. In the end, there is no stopping the relentless historical march towards unadorned civilian rule. Everything that can go wrong with contrary philosophies is likely to go wrong. Therefore General Musharraf might be advised to take a longer look at his grand plans to outlast himself.
(TFT Sep 01-07, 2000 Vol-XII No.27 — Editorial)
Hamoodur Rehman revisited
The Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report was “leaked” in order to embarrass the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf and remind us of the disastrous consequences of past military interventions. Obviously, the Report had been stashed away for encashment on a rainy day by someone who was once in high authority. But vested interests apart, an analysis of the Report suggests conclusions that are highly relevant and quite disturbing today.
We learn that an extended involvement of the army in politics and administration leads to corruption and undermines the military’s professional discipline and moral standards; that military actions cannot substitute for political settlements; that international isolation can have dire consequences. And so on. But a reading of the Report also leads to some very uncomfortable historical and contemporary speculations.
If the Report had been published in 1972 and if the international community had succeeded in establishing a permanent International Court for War Crimes, a number of Pakistani Army officers would have been indicted for atrocities in East Pakistan in 1971 on the basis of sections of the Report read with material evidence gathered by the NGOs and government of Bangladesh. But more crucially, the Pakistani Army would have been compelled to purge itself of its actions in East Pakistan, in the process nudging the Pakistani nation and state apparatus to try and purge themselves of false consciousness and mistaken identities. This issue is of critical significance today.
The Pakistani establishment’s refusal to publish the Report suggests that it has been scared of facing up to the spiritual and ideological crisis caused by the debacle of East Pakistan. That is why it has not been able to transcend or modify the slogans coined during the Pakistan Movement to incorporate new state realities and national interests (for example, the separate electorate system, which the Muslim League reinvented to counter the Hindu vote in East Pakistan in 1971, has today become a weapon to disenfranchise the minorities of West Pakistan and strengthen the fundamentalists). That is why the establishment has not yet grasped the real reason behind the “national security paradigm” that prevented political power from vesting in the majority population of East Pakistan. Indeed, that is why it has not yet understood the obsolescence of the same “national security paradigm” that has compelled the Pakistani armed forces to intervene in the political process time and again.
The Report should therefore lead concerned Pakistanis to ask the most critical questions of our time: What was the nature and extent of Mohajir-Punjabi chauvinism in the Pakistani state that led to a propagation of One-Unitism and the consequent alienation of the Bengalis? What was the ideological conception of the Pakistani state that created a certain civil-military equation that in turn sustained a distinct national security paradigm that eventually led to war and the dismemberment of Pakistan? Can an exclusivist ideology based on abstract and fiercely divergent conceptions of religion cement disparate sub-nationalities and tribes in the absence of vigourous socio-economic structures and democratic political systems? To what extent can the coercive apparatuses of the state be applied to force people and political parties to accept the national security paradigms of imagined ideological communities? Should democratic states be built around historically formed and secular nations or should religious nations be cobbled together in authoritarian states? How can we retain the notion of the ideological Pakistan state without succumbing to political anarchy, fundamentalism and war?
The military is back in the saddle. If its intervention sparked hopes that it might undertake reforms of state and society, these have proved largely misplaced. Indeed, the military’s desperate search for a new political system in which it can effectively articulate, defend and enhance a dog-eared conception of national security is deeply worrying. This implies that the army leadership has not learnt the right lessons from the East Pakistan debacle. Nor, it seems, is it interested in asking the complex questions about the sort of state that can guarantee both national security and socio-economic welfare, national sovereignty and global integration, nuclear might and regional peace. In fact, the army’s obsession with creating a uniform conception of the nation in its own immaculate image is unsatisfactory.
Of course, the army alone is not totally culpable. The landed elites, the civil service and the politicians have mocked the rule of law, federalism and constitutionalism throughout Pakistan’s history. The new element in the current scenario is the demand by the religious parties to stake the concept of jihad in the centre of “national power”. But since General Musharraf conceded this strategy, India has been dying to flex its muscle and the international community has looked away. The wheel seems to have come full circle.
Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto were ill-suited to construct the new Pakistani state. Will the supergenerals prove any better? The politicians were overly corrupt and opportunist. The supergenerals are overly sincere and rigid. None of the current wannabes has demonstrated the vision and courage to propose and construct a new Pakistan. Will we pause to consider the implications of the Hamoodur Rehman Report? Or shall we rush to prejudice again and brush it aside?
(TFT Sep 08-14, 2000 Vol-XII No.28 — Editorial)
Political economy of corruption
If Pakistani politicians and bureaucrats are perceived to be corrupt, allegations of US$ 1 billion in kickbacks and commissions in defence deals involving the army, air and navy chiefs have tarnished the armed forces. Worse, this theft was committed during a decade when the nation was exhorted to make “sacrifices” for the Kashmir jehad and piety was thrust down our throats through powerful religious militias supposedly fighting in the name of Allah.
During this time political governments fell like nine pins, accused of corruption, drug-trafficking and loan-gouging. But the more cruel fact is that the corruption in the khakis cut directly into the US$ 11 billion in foreign exchange deposits that disappeared from the State Bank of Pakistan and brought the national economy crashing down.
The corruption in the top echelons of the military suggests that its leadership had lost confidence in the functioning of the state and wanted to imitate the politicians. Since the defence budget cannot be scrutinised, the kick-backs were obtained without fear of being caught. Thus the naval and air chiefs were in cahoots with the politicians — one was allowed to sneak out of the country while the other retired gracefully and the officer who had ‘supported’ one of them in the GHQ was allowed to leave Pakistan and settle in Europe. The story is too long to encapsulate here.
Of course, corruption is incidental to all organisations in democracy and takes place in all states. After all, it was General Sundarji who ‘allowed’ Rajiv Gandhi to buy the price-inflated BOFORS guns. But it is only when the army gets deeply involved in it together with the civilians, while standing exempt from prosecution under the Constitution, that the matter becomes serious. That is why in the present circumstances the disclosure has not so much damaged the army leadership and embarrassed the Musharraf government as it has undermined the process of army-initiated accountability. The parallel is unavoidable with the PML ‘Ehtesab’ done by Nawaz Sharif under the personal charge of Saifur Rehman. Needless to say, NAB will lose its moral justification for conducting accountability unless it can freely go after the tainted officers and their agents.
But that may not be possible. The Musharraf regime seems to have become familiar with the realistic limits of its accountability drive. The judges and the army were unofficially left out of the NAB net because, it was argued, the state had to remain “functional” while accountability moved apace. But when the government tried to drag the madrassas into the accountability net, it discovered that that too was not possible for reasons of “state security” (the state of corruption in the jehad so passionately championed by the government is not hidden from anyone although the ‘qabza’ and other activities of extortion will not be printed out of fear of the warriors and the weakness of the writ of the state). Then the government decided to go after the smugglers, only to discover that its Afghanistan policy would come apart if the smuggling routes were forcibly plugged. Therefore the only thing left to do without endangering “military security” was to proceed against politicians and businessmen. Alas. Here too it has now come to realise that turning the screws on the trader and industrialist can endanger the state’s “economic security”.
The exit of General Syed Mohammad Amjad from the NAB HQ is a final confirmation of all these “considerations” and “compromises”. In the end, his sincerity, energy and integrity was his undoing. He made the fatal mistake of pursuing accountability as total war rather than as select deterrence.
Who isn’t corrupt in Pakistan? If we can’t answer that question to our satisfaction then what should we do to save the state from collapse? The panacea discovered in Pakistan last year was “ruthless accountability”. But before the year is out we have realised that accountability doesn’t fill the stomach or provide employment or deliver a bonanza of stolen dollars or is simply too dangerous to carry out for reasons of “national security”.
What should we do? Should we let the state die in its pursuit of accountability or look to the other factors endangering the state?
The real truth is that our foreign exchange reserves are down to 15 days of import payments and we can’t get the IMF to give us the clean bill of health required for foreign investment. The rupee has all but crashed. Domestic investment too has disappeared. According to one estimate, 120,000 people have fled Pakistan in the last one year, many of them talented citizens, thinking Pakistan is a sinking ship run by obstinate rulers who can’t take the life-line when it is thrown to them. The life-line is stamping down on the terrorism at home and curtailing the jehad abroad. The life-line is generally climbing down from the stance of confrontation with our neighbours and the international community.
The government must end its international isolation in order to give itself the economic breather it needs to set the internal scene in order. It will be time after that to sic all the corrupt people wherever they may be ensconced because then the state would be in a better condition to withstand the shock of it all.
(TFT Sep 15-21, 2000 Vol-XII No.29 — Editorial)
Good and bad moves
The last two weeks have been eventful. The PML rebels, headed by the Chaudhrys of Gujrat, were finally able to trump the Sharif faction in a show of strength based on the numbers game. This has prompted some people to ask whether the PML is ready for the plucking by General Pervez Musharraf.
Not to be outdone, the PPP has rallied behind Benazir Bhutto and confirmed her “chairperson for life” for the nth time. This has emboldened some people to claim that at least one province, Sindh, will forever remain out of General Musharraf’s grasp.
Meanwhile, General Musharraf has been busy tying and untying some knots of his own. Irrespective of how it is officially billed, the change of command at GHQ is most significant. General Mohammad Aziz, the former Chief of General Staff and now Corps Commander of Lahore, was one of the two coup-makers of last October, the other being the current head of the ISI, General Mahmood Ahmed. As a decisive and opinionated person, General Aziz’s stamp of authority was visible on all the major political, tactical and strategic decisions of the junta following the coup. Since many of those decisions have now come a cropper, people are right to expect a review of political policy and strategic direction in Rawalpindi. This view is strengthened by the exit of General Mohammad Amjad from the intoxicating heights of the NAB. Like General Aziz, his inflexibility stood in the way of real politik. The fact that both hard-line generals have been replaced by more amenable ones also suggests that General Musharraf is more his own man now than before. Will this lead to an improvement in the CE’s perception, performance and policy prescriptions?
Such expectations, if any, were not fulfilled during General Musharraf’s trip to the UN in New York last week. Apologists and official drum-beaters apart, his offer of a “no-war” pact to India and his readiness to meet the prime minister of India “for meaningful talks on Kashmir anywhere, any time etc” was neither new nor bold. The no-war offer, in particular, has been flogged by Pakistan since General Zia’s time and countered by India’s demand for a “no-first-strike” pact. India rejects the first because it thinks it would deprive it of conventional military leverage and Pakistan rejects the second because it thinks it would diminish its nuclear deterrent. But if General Musharraf had offered the second, India would not have been able to deny the first, and a genuinely bold breakthrough for peace in South Asia would have been credited to Pakistan’s Chief Executive.
Equally, or alternatively, if General Musharraf had given his blessings for an unconditional dialogue between New Delhi and the Hurriyat Conference/Hizbul Mujahidin in Kashmir, for the moment leaving aside the question of when (not if) Pakistan would insist on making it a trilateral exercise, the international community would have given him a standing ovation and put Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee in the dock. In the event, Mr Vajpayee’s appalling speech at the Asia Society in New York, in which he self-righteously condemned Pakistan, would have been roundly denounced, casting a shadow on his much-trumpeted official visit to the US. As it is, however, Pakistan’s cause has gone abegging once again, General Musharraf’s five minute angry flutter at the UN notwithstanding.
Finally, we have read and heard disquieting reports of General Musharraf’s encounter with the Pak-American press in New York. At one stage, we gather, the irritated General accused the “irresponsible press” of “taking money” to write “negative” stories about his government. Alas. How many times have we heard all this before! Nawaz Sharif alleged it and Benazir Bhutto bemoaned it all the while in power, even as they were dishing out tens of millions from slush funds to the perennial pro-government “lifafa journalists” on the payroll of the ministry of information. But out of power, they were always quick to laud the same “irresponsible” press and the same “negativist” journalists for their “courage”, “integrity” and “independence”. Nor should General Musharraf forget that the press and journalists he is quick to condemn and accuse today are the very ones who stood by him and gave him a degree of sorely-needed acceptability when he made his coup.
So we have a mixed bag of developments in the offing. If the Sharifs’ grip over the PML can be loosened without splintering the party and leading to a dangerous political vacuum in the Punjab, the way can be paved for a speedier return to stable civilian rule in one form or the other. But if Benazir Bhutto’s grip over the PPP cannot, General Musharraf runs the risk of deepening the fissures in the federation by sliding into an unacceptable “one-unitism” of the country.
On the other front, the GHQ shuffle augers well for potentially desirable changes in domestic and foreign policy. But General Musharraf’s increasing irritation with the independent press – sparked by officials who do not have the spine to tell him the truth about his failing policies and who seek to protect themselves from accusations of inept “media-management” – could unwittingly lead him into choppy waters, much as it did the prime minister he so wittingly ousted.
(TFT Sep 22-28, 2000 Vol-XII No.30 — Editorial)
What is the national interest?
Nearly a year ago, we, the press, told the world that the people of Pakistan welcomed a reprieve, even one ordered by the military, from the corrupt, incompetent and suffocating “democracy” of an elected prime minister. That view was supposed to express the “national interest”. Did we take the right perspective?
General Pervez Musharraf’s regime is treading on thin ice. It has offended mainstream political parties, religious minorities and ethnic communities. It has alienated businessmen and the liberal intelligentsia. It is isolated in the international community. The public has become cynical and prickly. Religious fanatics are running riot. Separatists are sprouting in Sindh and Balochistan. Foreign-inspired terrorists are grabbing the headlines. India is itching to trigger an implosion in our country. Worse, unaccountable corruption at the top echelons of the armed forces has all but denuded the military of whatever moral legitimacy it once enjoyed as a “national security institution” of the last resort. Should this government retain the confidence and goodwill of the independent press?
General Musharraf exhorts us to be “positive”. The economy is supposed to be picking up (wait for the IMF to bail us out); the people will be empowered shortly (one-unit will be back); Kashmir will be liberated through jihad (get ready for a fourth round with India). And so on. What is worrying is the good general’s sanguine belief that not only is he, as chief of the armed forces, the sole repository, interpreter and defender of the “national interest” but that if he should think it necessary to obfuscate or scatter the truth in pursuit of his interpretation of the “national interest”, the press should dutifully back him to the hilt. We beg to disagree.
Conceptions of the “national interest” may differ not only in time and space but also as amongst persons, groups, classes and institutions within the same time/space matrix. It all depends on the vested interests of who formulates the parameters of the national interest debate at any given time/space. For instance, the military coups of 1958 and 1977 were justified by the coup-makers and their supporters in terms of the country’s national interest at that particular juncture. Yet we are all now agreed that those coups turned out to be against the national interest. Similarly, the conflicts with India in 1965 and 1971 and 1999 were sold as serving the national interest. But when passions dried up in the face of defeat or dismemberment or catharsis, we were quick to decry the perpetrators as having acted against the national interest.
An editorial in a leading newspaper recently said that Kashmir should be put on a back burner while we concentrate on liberating our economy. Nonsense, berated a columnist in another newspaper, citing the national interest. Who is right? What constitutes the national interest?
Is it in the national interest that there should be ruthless, across-the-board accountability? No, as defender of the last resort, it is in the national interest to exempt the sacred cow of the armed forces. Is it in the national interest to protect the freedom of the press? No, it is in the national interest to spread and believe the government’s propaganda. Is it in the national interest to curtail the jihadi forces? No, it is in the national interest to export them far and wide across nation-state boundaries. Is it in the national interest to provide a timetable for unencumbered general elections as soon as possible? No, it is in the national interest to keep the politicians out for as long as possible. Is it in the national interest to fulfill IMF conditionalities so that Pakistan can be bailed out immediately? No, the national interest demands that we kick out the IMF and become self-reliant immediately. Was it in the national interest to postpone nuclear testing until the economy was strong enough to shrug off international censure? No, it was in the national interest to explode our bombs when we did even if we had to freeze forex accounts, face sanctions and cripple the economy. Is it in the national interest to negotiate a signing of the CTBT without tit-for-tatting India? No, it isn’t. And so on.
Clearly, no one has a monopoly on defining the “national interest”. Therefore no one can claim to be the fountainhead of “national security”. Notions of “patriotism” too may legitimately differ in complex situations. In fact the nation would be richer in thought and deed if these notions were not bandied about carelessly.
General Pervez Musharraf must not succumb to the arrogance of power, as many heads of government before him have done. Indeed, he would be a potential winner rather than a sure loser if he were to encourage and learn from, rather than gag and condemn, free debate, discussion and criticism in pursuit of the common good. God knows his sincerity has been flogged mercilessly by his errant advisors.
(TFT Sep 29-05 Oct, 2000 Vol-XII No.31 — Editorial)
Restore civilian rule
Mr Altaf Hussain is given to histrionics. It is a failsafe tactic designed for maximum, rather than best, political effect. This time he has called Pakistan unmentionable names and pronounced a revisionist history of independence in 1947. This outburst has angered some people and alarmed others. His separatist sentiments, delivered from a conference platform in London, were apparently shared by some “nationalist” leaders from the estranged “small” provinces, most notably Sardar Ataullah Khan Mengal and Mahmud Khan Achakzai of Balochistan.
Their rhetoric is not new. But their timing is another wake up call to rise and put an end to military rule. Having been denied national or provincial power, political leaders perceive only a remote possibility of capturing and consolidating local power via the district government elections scheduled to begin under the auspices of the military in December. What can one make of such political discontent?
Shortly after General Pervez Musharraf seized power, we lauded his radical 7 point agenda for the reform of state and society and urged him to get on with it. Indeed, we were inclined to support the “liberal” technicians who joined the new set-up in the hope that they would input into the decision-making matrix. Alas. We were victims of misplaced concreteness. Sincerity notwithstanding, the supergenerals are out of sync with reality while the “liberals” lack the courage of their convictions. Together, they have demonstrated little vision and even less strength to admit their failings. Indeed, they are beginning to display an ominous irritability with critical opinion, a sure sign of a faltering regime. Where do we go from here?
Many months ago, there was some talk of persuading the generals to “restore” the assemblies sans Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto and other “unacceptable” politicians. We denounced the idea, arguing that such a step would sabotage the reform agenda. But now that the same reform agenda has been injured by the supergenerals, we are in favour of a restoration of representative civilian rule immediately. If the khakis and their technocrats are as inadequate as the politicians they have ousted, and if they are as reluctant to hold their own accountable as them, then it is clearly better and safer to deal with the devil we know rather than the devil we don’t know. What reasonable and realistic formula should be advocated for a quick return to civilian rule?
Clearly, a safe and sound exit strategy has to be offered to General Musharraf, one that he may consider without losing sleep over the matter. Equally, the proposal must be aimed at full-fledged and representative civilian rule in the long rather than short term.
The first set of pre-conditions would entail the short-term disqualification or banishment of certain political leaders from the restored parliaments (partly for the safety and security of the outgoing players and partly for the credibility and efficiency of the incoming government), indemnification of the military coup and some of its ordinances by parliament and a significant, though not overarching or permanent, seat for the military in the formal hierarchy of power in the political system. On the other side, the new team must have sufficient leverage to vet and approve a revised plan for district government which meets with the approval of provincial parliaments as well as the power to review and revamp the whole gamut of foreign policy and political economy. Is this a tall order?
Perhaps. But we don’t have many choices. Neither self-righteous anger, nor bankrupt ideological sputterings, nor indeed idealistic rigidity or purity, will get us out of this grand mess. The need of the hour is for clean compromise, not cock-eyed opportunism, for a historical rapprochement with the hard reality of the post cold war imperative rather than a reckless spurning of it. Left to their own devices, neither the politicians nor the supergenerals can about-turn in the cul-de-sac of modern-day Pakistan. Together, however, they may just be able to shoulder and share the burden.
A couple of things remain. We have heard the frequent denouncement that “Pakistan has come to exist for the army rather than the other way around”. Rubbish. We must all acknowledge our role in the denouement of the state-nation and expect to share in the progress of the nation-state. We have also been regaled with the counter-view that if it wasn’t for the army, the fissiparous tendencies in Pakistan’s body-politic would tear it apart. Nonsense. The record shows that such cracks have developed or become deeper when the military has flexed its political muscle rather than when the civilians were bumbling along. A case in point is the recent desperate outpourings of Mr Altaf Hussain et al.
General Musharraf is a good commander of disciplined troops. But he is not cut out to be a good commander of anarchist civilians. The general is trained to win military battles. But the conduct of diplomacy by other than military means is not his cuppa tea. Confronted by a precarious political economy in which the efforts of his khaki comrades have drawn naught, he could do worse than surround himself with the raucous representatives of the people of Pakistan.
(TFT Oct 06-12, 2000 Vol-XII No.32 — Editorial)
Half-full or half-empty?
General Pervez Musharraf admits that the country is faced with “an ocean of problems”. Some we have apparently inherited from incompetent and corrupt administrations. Others may have more to do with perception than reality. But the blame for the pervasive mood of doom and gloom, he believes, should be laid at the door of “negativist”, “motivated”, “unscrupulous”, “corrupt” and “unpatriotic” journalists. Nonetheless, the good general is sanguine that his regime is bang on target and that all will turn out for the best, especially as regards the economy which is about to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes.
We will not quibble over shades of gray, lest we are accused of calling a “half-full” glass of water “half-empty”. So we are delighted to confirm that the revenue figures for the first three months of the current fiscal year (July-September) are not alarmingly off target. [Never mind that the target has been “revised” downward and never mind that in the nine months ending June 2000 both revenue and fiscal deficit figures were notoriously negative.] We are also over the moon with an export leap of over 15% in the last three months. [Never mind that Allah Mian chipped in with the best cotton harvest of the decade which propelled the textile sector to excel itself at the expense of the farmer, and never mind that the exchange rate has depreciated significantly, thereby making the export sector more profitable rather than more competitive, and never mind that some exporters have already exhausted their share of the six month quota in the first three months, which means that export performance may turn out to be a bit lacklustre in the next three months.]
There is more good news. The bumper wheat crop, Allah be praised, has relieved some pressure from our balance of trade. [Never mind that the soaring price of oil has negated that gain.] The rice crop, too, looks good enough for several hundred million dollars in desperately needed foreign exchange. [Never mind that we are stuck with about 800,000 tonnes from last year’s crop which the government didn’t export when the selling was right and which will now adversely impact the government’s ability to pick up and store the early Sindh crop, thereby alienating the Sindhi farmer.] Sugar is unfortunately in the dumps but that has apparently less to do with government policy than with the farmers’ switchover to other cash crops last year. [Never mind that a restrictive import policy has raised domestic sugar prices to more than three times international levels and enabled some sitting ministers to rake in windfall profits from their sugar mills, and never mind that in the absence of an appropriate industrial policy which raps the sugar industry, the people of Pakistan continue to fork over about Rs 50 billion in subsidies every year to 70 excessively privileged sugar mill owners in the country.]
The good news continues. The government is anticipating a grand sale of a few billion dollars worth of family silver. [Never mind that in dollar terms the assets are worth less today than last year, partly because of the 20% depreciation of the rupee since then and partly because foreign buyers are wont to balk at investing in a country whose negative rating is precariously close to that of failed states like Burma and Russia.] We must also thank our lucky stars that the government has finally arm-twisted Hubco and AES into biting the bullet and reducing their power rates, thereby saving the country tens of millions of dollars every year. [Never mind that the long drawn out dispute may have cost us hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign investment flows every year due to a loss of confidence in our ability or willingness to honour international contracts.]
The best news, however, comes once again from our honourable finance ministry. The IMF and World Bank, we are told, are dying to give us billions of dollars in hard cash. They are also desperate to reschedule our multi-billion dollar short-term debt. [Never mind that the Fund has publicly upbraided the harbinger of such news, and never mind that Fund officials tell us privately that Pakistan would be lucky to receive a very small disbursement before March next year, let alone the billions this year touted by our never-say-die technocrats.] Fortune also seems to be smiling on us at last –the proposed oil and gas pipeline between Iran and India is in the bag and should yield us over $ 700 million in royalties. [Never mind that the concerned minister has forgotten to clarify that this sum refers to the proposed life of the pipeline and works out to a maximum of $50 million a year, and never mind that unless Washington kisses and makes up with both Iran and Pakistan, no western financial institution will touch the project with a barge pole, and never mind that the project may take at least five years to complete after Washington has given approval.]
He who knows that he knows not is a wise man. If General Musharraf were to pull up his informants, he might edge closer to the truth. And we would not have to suffer fools gladly for his sake.
(TFT Oct 13-19, 2000 Vol-XII No.33 — Editorial)
Crown of thorns
Listening to General Pervez Musharraf in all his certainties, as we did at a recent press conference, one might say that if power flows from the barrel of a gun, better him than anyone else. Articulate and relaxed, he comes across a man who sincerely wants to do good by the nation. But even if he is the best face of this military regime, is he the man of the hour for the country?
General Musharraf seems inclined to marginalist empiricism in matters of strategic significance for state and society as opposed to the requirements of a sweeping historical approach. This means that he likes to count his blessings in the here and now. So we learn that the “downslide in the economy has been halted” because most economic indicators are “more positive than last year”. We are also informed that accountability is proceeding apace (167 court cases, 48 convictions), that Rs 25 billion has been recovered from bank loan defaulters and Rs 11 billion from tax evaders, and so on. All quite true and laudable “achievements”. But what is their impact and objectivity in the future?
Pakistan is beset with three fundamental strategic issues. First, neither Westminster democracy nor military rule seems to work for us. In the short-term this may be the fault of the democrats who have a tendency of slipping into dictatorship. But in the longer-term context, democracy seems to have been continuously interrupted or derailed by the shenanigans of the military so that it has not had a decent chance to rectify its shortcomings as a viable political system not merely in itself but also for itself.
Second, the economy is beset with two original sins and their negative blowback effects. The first original sin is the continuing gap between government revenues and expenditures, which entails blowback borrowings from the Pakistani public to fund the fiscal deficit instead of contributing to private investment. The second original sin is the gap in the balance of trade resulting from an excess of imports over exports, which entails blowback debt from the international community and makes us increasingly dependent.
Third, our foreign policy remains anchored in the negative matrix of India alone rather than reflecting the positive global outreach of the fifth most populous country in the world. The blowback effect of this is leading to a rapid degeneration of state and civil society. Has General Musharraf done anything to lead us out of these strategic traps?
Take the first issue. General Musharraf admits he was “pushed” by the democrats into derailing the democracy he had sworn to defend. In the event he should have found a way of restoring democracy as quickly as possible without tinkering with its essential federal structure. But he has done the opposite. Now he seeks to restructure the political system from top to bottom not just without the permission of the two main political parties of the country but at their expense. This will never work. Consensual structures, however clumsy or inefficient, tend to last, dictatorially propped-up ones, however neat or solid, are short-lived. The historical tide is pro-democracy and anti-dictatorship. Sooner or later, it will engulf this sort of handiwork. Not good.
Take the second issue. The military has flexed its muscle and government revenues should show a significant rise. Good. But on the other side of the equation, there is an unprecedented increase of 22.4% in defence expenditures —revised defence expenditures last year were Rs 134 billion after General Musharraf kindly transferred Rs 7 billion out of the military’s pocket to the Poverty Alleviation Fund; this year they are Rs 164 billion (Rs 138 billion in the defence budget plus Rs 26 billion in pensions shifted out of the defence budget into government expenditures). It is also bad economics to pin hopes of plugging the historical trade gap by restricting industrial imports and increasing primary commodity exports. In fact, the recent spurt in textile exports is more fortuitous than planned, based as it is on the first good cotton harvest in years. Good economics would encourage unimpeded flow of most foreign goods to provide a competitive environment for domestic industry and consumer alike while enlarging the base of human resource value-addition exportable surpluses. This paradigm shift is nowhere in sight because the education system is starved of funds. Not good.
Take the third issue. An India-centric foreign policy has led us into the arms of destabilising regional jehads, an arms race we cannot afford, an international isolation which renders us incapable of finding the breathing space to restructure our debt-ridden economy and an erosion of civil society, human rights and democratic norms at the hands of sectarian and fundamentalist militias. Not good.
It would be good if General Musharraf were to steer a path that realigns Pakistan’s economy with the prosperous countries of the world, which leads to a peace dividend in the region, which builds civil society and democracy at home. To do that he would have to transcend himself as a hawkish chief of the Pakistan army and become the statesmanlike leader of the Pakistani nation. Will he heed the call of national history or succumb to the lure of parochial power? As long as he dithers, he will wear a crown of thorns.
(TFT Oct 20-26, 2000 Vol-XII No.34 — Editorial)
Mid-way house
It doesn’t much matter whether Javed Jabbar resigned or was sacked. What matters is why he had to go. In fact, it may be worth asking why eleven other provincial and federal bigwigs before him threw in the towel and called it a day barely a year in government.
Apart from the lone provincial minister for health from Balochistan, Khadim Changezi, who was arrested last May for being a loan defaulter, all the others clearly had a grouse or two either against some overbearing general or some unpalatable government policy or decision. Sindh Governor (retd) Azim Daudpota departed on May 24, claiming differences over Kalabagh Dam policy. Later, however, he homed in to the truth when he complained that the Karachi corps commander, Lt General Usmani, had reduced him to a puppet governor by running the show. A couple of other Sindh ministers were also sent packing when they aired views contrary to military wisdom.
The case of the NWFP governor, Mohammad Shafiq, who resigned on August 13, is equally, if not more, interesting for the light that it sheds on the sort of views that are unpalatable to the generals. Once again differences over the Kalabagh Dam were cited. But once again, the truth was otherwise: he was forced to acquiesce by the local corps commander to a ban on cable television demanded by the fundos of the province. Which bring to mind the case of Derek Cyprian, the federal minister for minorities. A Christian who could not stomach the separate electorate system and the blasphemy law conceded to the fundos, he preferred to resign on August 16 rather than live with the life-long guilt of having betrayed his cause.
This brings us full circle to the case of the two information ministers — Shafqat Mahmud and Javed Jabbar — who “resigned” their provincial and federal portfolios respectively within two weeks of each other. Both claim they left for “personal reasons”. Since both are hale and hearty, this is more likely another way of saying that they would rather not reveal the truth. Discretion clearly being the better part of valour, who can blame them? General Pervez Musharraf has already sounded off about the corruption, negativism and lack of patriotism in the press. The last thing we want is a harangue that the better among his cabinet ministers are incompetent and lack motivation, for that would demoralise us and erode whatever little confidence is left in the military regime. Are other resignations in the offing?
We wouldn’t be surprised at all. General Zulfikar Ali Khan, the powerful WAPDA man, is being generous when he confines his remarks to the dismal formulae of the Finance Minister, Mr Shaukat Aziz. And vice versa, we’re sure. Nothing personal in all this, of course, but perceptions of the national interest differ radically. Another general in charge of the OGDC visibly scowls when mention is made of the intentions of the Privatisation Minister to sell the company in question. Elsewhere, the corps commanders’ zealous monitoring teams have become a power unto themselves, berating high and low bureaucrat alike, with the result that the sulking civil servant is bogged down in fear and loathing. What is going on?
It is clear that when the generals seized power, they quickly determined that an outright martial law would pose more problems than render solutions, especially since the international community would reject it out of hand. Equally, they were sure that they did not want to share power with the civilians since much of their agenda required “sorting out the civilians” in the first place. So a facile solution was wrought. The generals would call the shots and a band of timid civilian puppets masquerading as experts would provide a fig-leaf for international respectability. Thus it transpired that the federal and provincial cabinets and the National Security Council were more or less stocked with civilian non-entities while power began to revolve around the army chief’s favoured few in GHQ and ISI, devolving to the NAB on the one hand and the corps commanders’ monitoring teams on the other. Thus were governors and ministers made redundant and resentful and thus was a sham civilian set-up revealed to be a grand disorder in the eyes of the cynical public.
In theory, this seemed a neat arrangement. In practise, however, it is already splitting at the seams. This mishap should not have mattered because it did not seriously impinge on the reality of power. But the perception of a government at odds with itself created by the mishap has come home to roost. How can hapless civilians be blamed for bleating, true to form?
The so-called dyarchy of power is an unmitigated disaster. Every civilian resignation or sacking ostensibly for “personal reasons” will unleash a host of suspicions about motive, cause and effect, each of which will anger the supergenerals and exacerbate the divide between them and their civilian partners. Either they must have the guts to go it alone and take full responsibility for their actions or they must restore civilians to power. Clever-by-half mid-way houses are inherently unstable and fated to crumble.
(TFT Oct 27-02 Nov, 2000 Vol-XII No.35 — Editorial)
Image or reality?
The cartoon above shows two twice-elected prime ministers who have been convicted for corruption. One is in prison, the other is in exile. Both face stiff penalties. The picture reflects on one particularly dismal dimension of our political condition today. But does it “tarnish the image of Pakistan”? Should there be laws to punish those who, like our cartoonist, reflect the reality of Pakistan in images such as the one above?
These questions have acquired relevance since General Pervez Musharraf ordered the interior minister to investigate the “anti-Pakistan utterances of certain politicians” and draft a law to punish them for “tarnishing the image of Pakistan”. But before Mr Moinuddin Haider churns out such a law, he might pause to consider its potential scope for mischief. He might also review the current image of Pakistan.
Pakistan is not a pristine Islamic utopia whose image has been tarnished by the brush of heretical or unpatriotic opinion. In fact, Pakistan’s image is that of a backward, immoderate, indebted, poor, illiterate and undemocratic country ruled by rapacious civil and military elites which have not respected the rule of law or constitution even as they have desperately vied with each other to rule and rob the exchequer. The image is of a country where religious fanatics run amuck and kill one another; where religious schools feverishly manufacture jehadis to stir up trouble; where blood-curdling tribal vendettas and honour killings jostle for “Islamic” legitimacy along with edicts banning “interest” and fatwas outlawing video films and pop music; where non-Muslim minorities are accorded second-rate citizenship. Pakistan’s image is that of a country where few people pay any taxes and fewer still pay back their bank loans; where women are economically exploited and socially oppressed. And so on.
Dispassionate Pakistanis will agree that this unflattering composite image of their country is not far removed from reality. Should we then shoot the messenger for conveying the truth? Should we string up all those who demand a change in this reality? Indeed, does it matter whether, in this age of the internet and information revolution, the demand for change is made or the reality is reflected in a conference or seminar in Lahore or London or Delhi or Washington?
Let us face facts. The dream bequeathed by independence has since become a sour reality for many Pakistanis. If blame has to be apportioned and punitive measures applied for the tarnished reality of Pakistan, the target should be those who have robbed the country, those who have mocked the constitution and derailed democracy, those who have fanned the fires of ethnicity, obscurantism and sectarianism at home or waged war abroad, rather than those who agonise over the plight of their beloved country. The historic irony is that those who have blackened the name of Pakistan have often been the ones to advocate and promulgate laws to punish those who have dared to reveal the faces behind the masks.
One last question remains. Some people argue that while it is desirable to speak the truth and freely analyse our shortcomings at home, we should not wash our “dirty linen” in “public”. By this, they mean that we should not elaborate our societal faults or systemic failures before foreign audiences or in foreign lands.
This is a perfectly understandable, well-meaning view. It is based on certain inbred notions of nationalism or national pride generally prevalent in newly born countries. But the fact is that such views also reflect a country’s failure to channel diverse socio-political currents into the river of modern, democratic, nationhood and are therefore manifestations of a subconscious inferiority complex. That is why such notions have lost value in the West where the modern nation-state was born over 200 years ago and where efforts are now being made to transcend its narrow “sovereign” confines. Among the strengths of Western nation-states is the ability to publish and promote self-critical views in an institutionalised manner rather than frame laws to outlaw “subversive” ideas and thoughts.
Such views also smack of misplaced concreteness in today’s context. If it is alright to write a book or an article critical of certain “national” traits and shortcomings, and have it published and read abroad, why should the same ideas presented at a conference or seminar abroad provoke angry denunciations at home?
General Pervez Musharraf’s concerns about improving Pakistan’s image are justified. But he should know that in this day and age one cannot manufacture a country’s image at variance with its reality. So he must focus his efforts on changing the offending reality. He should also realise that there is no shortage of laws to deal with secessionists, criminals, flag-burners, spies and agents-provocateur. Therefore he must not fashion any new laws which lend themselves to human-rights abuse, curtail the freedom of the press or restrict fundamental rights such as freedom of speech and expression. If he does, he will be guilty of tarnishing Pakistan’s already frayed image.
(TFT Nov 03-09, 2000 Vol-XII No.36 — Editorial)
A stitch in time…?
Just when people had begun to think that Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan should call it a day and hang up his hookah, he has gone and surprised them again. The recent one-point “understanding” between the veteran Nawabzada and the debutante Kulsoom Nawaz to seek an end to the regime of General Pervez Musharraf is a case in point. It supercedes Nawabzada Nasrullah’s earlier one-point agenda — to throw out the civilian government of Nawaz Sharif — which formed the basis of the Grand Democratic Alliance with Benazir Bhutto et al not so long ago. Since that particular alliance became redundant on October 12 last year, the Nawabzada must have thought it time to stitch together a fresh agreement, this time between the two old protagonists Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto against the new incumbent in Islamabad.
Of course, the Nawabzada has had his share of gadflys like Tahirul Qadri and wannabes like Imran Khan. But he has weathered their comings and goings like a willow that bends gracefully rather than an oak which stands its ground stubbornly. Meanwhile, his relationship with Benazir Bhutto has endured and flourished. After all, they go back a long way and have much in common. He has voluntarily spent most of his political life languishing in opposition. She has spent most of her political life involuntarily being kicked out of government. He has wisely refrained from disputing her diminishing popularity. She has cleverly deferred to his conspiratorial wisdom. They make quite a pair. The problem is how to make it a formidable threesome along with Nawaz Sharif.
In the meanwhile, Mr Sharif has been discovering some home truths. How fair-weather foreigners have been quick to reassert national interests over personal friendships. How a heavy mandate has become a weighty noose. How a hand-picked lieutenant has donned the mask of a dreaded executioner. How certain stalwarts who once paved the way for his ascent to power are today seeking his permanent ouster from the party he led. How the very press he once sought to beat and gag is now his only hope of breaking the silence of the lambs. Is it any wonder then that Mr Sharif should be inclined to believe that his salvation lies in embracing his former enemies and fighting his former friends? So if he has nudged his wife in the direction of Nicholson Road (the Nawabzada’s residence in Lahore) and Mr Zafar Ali Shah in the direction of Dubai, there is no great mystery behind his motives. Indeed, it may be argued that he had no choice. But what about Ms Bhutto? What’s in it for her?
The rank and file of the PPP hates the idea of making common cause with the Muslim League. But it will probably go along with Ms Bhutto if she insists. To what purpose, though? Certainly not a mere restoration of the PML parliament? Even without Mr Sharif, this route is not likely to be acceptable to Ms Bhutto because it might cement an alliance between the anti-Sharif Muslim League faction and the army and thereby put paid to her efforts to rehabilitate herself and her party for years to come. Equally, an early election will serve only to marginalise her if it is held on the army’s terms and conditions because it is likely to bring another Junejo to the political surface and enable the army to constitutionalise not only its own source of political power but also the lack of it for her.
An alliance between Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto brokered by the indomitable Nawabzada Nasrullah can only prove meaningful if one major condition is fulfilled. The alliance will hold water if Mr Sharif’s starched but supine supporters are prepared to join arms with Ms Bhutto’s ragtag but energetic workers and heave the army out of power. If they can’t, the alliance will not survive all the clever manoeuverings in the world. But if no great hopes can be pinned on it, is there any harm in it?
No there isn’t. If the nominees of Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif can sit together and let bygones be bygones, if they can compare notes and ascertain the mistakes they made, if they can together appreciate their own role, singly and jointly, in their current travails and in those of this country, if they can see the futility of wanting to hog power in a democracy or understand the necessity of sharing responsibility in it, it would be worth it as an apt lesson for the future.
The army has seized power before. But it has had to go back to barracks. The reasons for seizing power have remained much the same. So too the justifications for hanging on to it and the compulsions for letting go. Why should it be different now? Indeed, there is one very good reason to believe that it will be sooner rather than later this time round. Like Indonesia’s generals and Korea’s communists, our generals too understand the truth that no nation can afford to be an island in this day and age. If Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto can also understand the enormity of their falsehoods through the good services of the Nawabzada, we shall all be richer for it when civilian rule is restored at the end of the day.
(TFT Nov 10-16, 2000 Vol-XII No.37 — Editorial)
Fate foretold
Moeen Qureshi’s recent visit to Pakistan has provoked a rash of rumours. Was he offered the job of interim prime minister? Is General Pervez Musharraf seriously thinking of handing power back to the civilians in October 2001 rather than in October 2002?
Since 1993, Mr Qureshi has routinely visited Pakistan every winter, spending a week or so interacting with friends and former colleagues in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. Invariably, too, he has publicly drawn attention to the overarching problems of the time and delicately advised the government of the day on how to tackle them. At no stage during this time has there been a hint of any political ambition on his part or any scope of a role for him in government. So why should it have been different this time round?
We are not privy to the meeting between Mr Qureshi and General Musharraf. But Mr Qureshi was either offered the job of interim prime minister or he wasn’t. If he wasn’t, there is nothing more to be said about it. But if he was, several critical questions arise. First, what conceivable factors might have compelled General Musharraf to consider appointing a civilian prime minister in the two year run-up to the general elections? Second, given such a need, why should he chose Mr Qureshi rather than anyone else? Third, given Mr Qureshi’s own views, what sort of pre-conditions might he insist upon before accepting the offer vis a vis power-sharing and decision-making with the military?
When General Musharraf ousted Nawaz Sharif last year, he had three broad policy options before him. First, to impose martial law, summarily convict and disqualify a couple of dozen politicians and bureaucrats from holding office, etc., including Mr Sharif and Ms Bhutto, hold party-based general elections within 90 days, arm-twist the new parliament into amending the constitution and accommodate him as the next President of Pakistan and Chairman of a military-dominated National Security Council empowered to sack prime ministers, cabinets and parliaments, singly or jointly as the case might warrant. Second, to follow the route that General Abdul Waheed took in 1993 by appointing Mr Qureshi interim prime minister (this time for three years instead of three months) and giving him a free hand to put things right – accountability, economic revival and foreign policy. This route could have also terminated at the same exit point as the first in terms of the newly crafted political system to be bequeathed to the civilians. Third, to establish a mid-way house in which the army would call all the shots under a civilian façade stretching over three years and ending at the same point as the first two.
In the event, the third route was taken. Unfortunately, however, it has led to the widespread perception at home and abroad that the army has failed to deliver. This continuing debacle might have convinced some generals to advocate a retreat to the second route as soon as possible in order to stop the army’s slide into general disrepute and the country’s descent into international isolation. Indeed, it is entirely possible that such generals might also wisely wish to shorten the end point of their regime’s journey from three to two years.
If Mr Qureshi has been asked to bail out the army from a difficult situation, clearly the offer would be in consideration of his perceived strengths as much as the regime’s known failings. So it must be Mr Qureshi’s seeming acceptability or proximity to two previous army chiefs, his reputation as a top-notch economist, his pragmatic political wisdom and experience and his many important contacts in the West — all highly desirable virtues in the current context of economic dependence and political isolation – that would have made him the punters’ hot favourite in recent weeks. Should he accept the job if it is offered to him?
Yes, if he is truly given a free hand to create the necessary political conditions for a sufficient economic programme of revival and growth based on a substantial debt restructuring and write-off, along with a reduction in the growth of military expenditures. This would entail negotiating fruitful entry into the CTBT, pulling out of a crippling arms race with India, establishing a relationship of “friends not masters or foes” with the West, braving the forces of fundamentalism, extremism and obscurantism which have so damaged Pakistan, and making peace in the region by calibrating support for the Taliban and the Mujahidin in conformity with the correct balance of Pakistan’s strengths and weaknesses. No, if General Musharraf and his blue-eyed Kargil boys expect Mr Qureshi to turn the economy round while they retain control over a foreign policy that has wrecked the prospects of sustainable economic development. The worst thing that could happen would be for Mr Qureshi to take over and be consigned to another clever-by-half mid-way house engineered by the military in which his civilian team is fated to meet the same ignoble end as past and present civilians in this military regime. Indeed, Moeen Qureshi’s absence from the domestic scene could turn out to be the fate of a story foretold.
(TFT Nov 17-23, 2000 Vol-XII No.38 — Editorial)
Subverting Musharraf’s efforts
The federal minister for religious affairs, Mr Mahmud Ali, is given to provocative statements on sensitive issues. We have refrained from commenting in the hope that better sense might prevail in the larger national interest. But that hasn’t happened. In fact, Mr Ali recently said something that subverts General Pervez Musharraf’s heroic efforts to persuade foreign investors to rescue Pakistan’s ailing economy.
“Pakistan owes a debt of US$ 31 billion in foreign loans on which it has so far paid US$ 32 billion as interest, meaning thereby that it has cleared the capital borrowed and also paid one billion in excess…the country should therefore refuse to pay back the interest and demand that one billion dollars should be returned to it”, said Mr Ali. He pointed out that “interest was prohibited in Islam” but “an interest-based economy had been imposed on Pakistanis”. Mr Ali then exhorted the military government to take “a daring decision by refusing to pay any interest to foreign donors”.
Well, well, well. We wonder what finance minister Shaukat Aziz has to say on the same subject. Indeed, how is he going to “clarify” Mr Ali’s pearls of wisdom to the directors of the IMF, the World Bank and the Paris and London Clubs to whom Pakistan owes billions of dollars? How might various groups of foreign investors, who are being toasted by no less a personage than the Chief Executive of Pakistan, react when they hear about the proposed fate of their money in Pakistan?
We are reminded of a similar situation in 1991-92 when Mr Sartaj Aziz was finance minister of Pakistan. Following a judgment by the Federal Shariat Court outlawing interest and ordering the government of Nawaz Sharif to comply with its decision within six months, Mr Aziz was distinctly uncomfortable when he had to explain the meaning and implication of the judgment to frowning members of the Aid to Pakistan Consortium in Paris who had assembled to deliberate a US$ 3 billion aid package (on interest) to Pakistan even as he sought to assure them that his government would challenge the judgment and safeguard their financial stakes in Pakistan.
If Mr Aziz was as good as his word, it was only to a limited extent. The Sharif government, which had only some months earlier amended the constitution to pass the Hadood laws and make “shariah” the supreme law of the land, opposed the FSC judgment in the Appellate Islamic Bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. But interestingly enough, the government obtained an indefinite freeze on the proceedings rather than a decision against the judgment. When Benazir Bhutto ascended the throne in 1993, she decided not to touch the matter and there were no protests from the FSC or the SC. Then Nawaz Sharif returned with a vengeance in 1997 and set about becoming an Amir ul Momineen. Among the more meaningful appointments of the time was that of a confirmed fundamentalist, Justice Khalil ur Rehman, as head of the Supreme Court’s Appellate Bench dealing with the issue of interest or riba. Mr Sharif also ordered the government to withdraw its earlier opposition to the FSC judgment. The route was now clear for Justice Rehman to deliver his earth-shattering judgment confirming the earlier FSC decision to outlaw interest because it was “riba”. Is it any wonder then that Mr Mahmud Ali should think himself on firm ground when he exhorts his boss, General Pervez Musharraf, to tell all foreign donors to go fly a kite because Pakistan has no intention of repaying an outstanding debt of US$ 32 billion?
The irony of the situation should not be missed. Last year, when Nawaz Sharif was prime minister, the notorious Senator Saif ur Rehman asked the Lahore High Court to waive the accumulated interest on his Rs 930 crore defaulted loan to United Bank Ltd. The senator’s lawyers relied on the argument that “interest was un-Islamic”. Subsequently, Mian Sharif, Shahbaz Sharif and Abbas Sharif jointly approached a Sessions Court in Lahore to grant them a “stay” order against a judgment of the London High Court ordering them to pay US$ 32 million in principal and interest on a loan they had taken from a Middle-East bank. Their argument was much the same as the senator’s: interest had been declared un-Islamic in Pakistan and they were not obliged to pay it.
When the Pakistani court granted them their wish, we editorialised on the hypocrisy of the ruling party thus: “If every Pakistani businessman or financial institution in this country with international obligations were to resort to the same irresponsible tactics, no foreigner would ever lend a sou to Pakistan. In fact the whole basis of the international law of contract would be knocked out, with Pakistan’s sovereign credit ratings suffering unmitigated and irrevocable damage… Have the Sharifs and Senator Saif gone mad? How can they blithely jeopardise the national interest by setting such ruinous legal and financial precedents in the country?” Need we repeat ourselves vis a vis the honourable minister for religious affairs in the venerable government of General Pervez Musharraf?
(TFT Nov 24-30, 2000 Vol-XII No.39 — Editorial)
Illusion of peace, reality of war
India recently allowed some Kashmiri leaders, including Mirwaiz Omer Farooq, to attend the OIC moot in Doha. Then India granted a passport to Mr Abdul Gani Lone, a leader of the APHC in Kashmir, enabling him to travel to Islamabad for his son’s marriage to the daughter of Amanullah Khan, leader of the JKLF based in Pakistan. However, just as people were beginning to wonder whether a “thaw” was in the offing in Kashmir, India acted true to form. It refused to allow several other Kashmiri leaders to accompany Mr Lone to Pakistan. India also forbade its cricket team from playing in Pakistan next month. In this twisting illusion of peace and the reality of war, India has now offered a ceasefire in Kashmir during the month of Ramazan.
On the face of it, of course, any ceasefire is better than no ceasefire at all. In fact, if it can be upheld, we may create some political space for determined back-channel diplomacy on all sides. But there lies the rub. In order to be effectively upheld, the ceasefire must be endorsed by both the other players in the game, namely, the organisations which represent all the Kashmiri freedom fighters and the government of Pakistan. Is such a ringing endorsement on the cards?
This ceasefire could be fated to wither on the vine like the earlier ceasefire offered by the Hizbul Mujahidin last July because everything hinges on the motives of the two key but intransigent players, India and Pakistan. Whatever India may say or Washington may think, the fact is that the Hizbul Mujahidin’s ceasefire was not offered without the tacit approval of the very top echelons of Pakistan’s national security establishment, even if it tactically caught many of its civil and military components by surprise, as in the Kargil operation last year. If New Delhi had understood this fact, it would have realised that attempts to go it alone with the HM were bound to prove futile and a more constructive approach lay in involving Islamabad rather than isolating it in the run-up to the proposed dialogue. But India’s initial insistence on a dialogue within the ambit of the Indian constitution, followed by its dogged refusal to include Pakistan into the peace dialogue at any level or via any public or secret means, effectively derailed the July ceasefire. Why should it be any different this time round?
The evidence suggests that India has been very selective and biased in its “confidence-building” measures. All are specifically designed to endear New Delhi to the APHC and the HM whilst angering Pakistan by further reducing contacts with it. This means that far from hoping to include Islamabad in the dialogue at some stage in the future the Indians are trying to exclude it for all times to come. Therefore Western praise for the Indian offer of a ceasefire followed by pressure on the APHC and HM to react “positively” to the Indian move is as premature as was its earlier belief that the HM ceasefire was contrived without a Pakistani nod and could be exploited without Pakistani approval.
On Pakistan’s side, however, there seems to have been a genuine scaling down of the aggressive posture taken by General Pervez Musharraf last year. The general means it when he says he is ready to meet the Indian prime minister any time and anywhere without preconditions. The general has also indicated to Mirwaiz Omer Farooq that Islamabad is not necessarily stuck on publicly frozen positions. Indeed, in a significant statement, a spokesman of the Foreign Office has said that the Kashmir issue should be tackled within the framework of the UN resolutions and the Simla Agreement — which suggests considerable leeway to all parties in moving towards an enduring resolution away from the status quo.
The problem for the leaders of India and Pakistan is their unwillingness or inability to determine a concrete way forward in the historical context of so many false starts, missed opportunities and downright mutual deceptions and betrayals. Thus India is constrained to isolate Pakistan while simultaneously wooing and wrestling the Kashmiri mujahidin. Pakistan, in turn, is unable to explore any other option and is therefore pushed to extend military support for the insurgency in Kashmir. As a sense of frustration deepens all round, this route is bound to provoke dangerous blowback.
If the leaders of the HM and APHC decide to open negotiations with New Delhi without Islamabad’s approval as some Western powers are urging them to do, we may expect a violent split in the HM followed by an upsurge in intra-Kashmiri warfare, much as happened in Afghanistan. Pakistan will then choose its favourites, arm them to the teeth and unleash them against India. That will surely lead to war. If they don’t, India’s ceasefire will burn out in the next few days and the two countries will continue to slide into hostilities. Therefore India must be willing to negotiate the future of Kashmir with Pakistan rather than with the Kashmiris only. That was possible before 1989. It isn’t anymore. Failure to recognise this truth will lead to a fourth round of war.
(TFT Dec 01-07, 2000 Vol-XII No.40 — Editorial)
An ill omen
The split in the PML between the “Sharif-loyalists” and the “Musharraf-hopefuls” is a belated development. It would have come earlier if General Pervez Musharraf had willed it sooner. But in the spirit of a born-again, idealistic reformer, General Musharraf originally didn’t want any “discredited” politician clutching at his coattails. Indeed, the instructions handed down to General Mohammad Amjad, the uncompromising first chief of the National Accountability Bureau, were that all crooked politicians, irrespective of party or faction affiliation, should be targeted and nabbed.
But real-politik (“wiser council”, if you will) began to prevail among the supergenerals in GHQ six months ago when it dawned on them that not everything was going according to plan. The trial of Nawaz Sharif in the plane hijacking case, in particular, seemed to drag on, making the fellow a bit of a martyr in the process. But other factors — international pressure for a definite road to democracy, rising business hostility and diminishing public sympathy — also weighed in, necessitating a political review of short-term tactics and long-term strategy in GHQ.
Accordingly, contingency political plans were developed. General Amjad was told to call off his hounds tracking the financial shenanigans of the Chaudhrys of Gujrat and ignore question marks surrounding the enormous wealth of Ijaz ul Haq and Hamayun Akhtar Abdul Rehman, etc. Then General Musharraf formally invited a number of carefully selected “politicians” to have a “cuppa” tea with him. Later, the DG-ISI, CGS and DG-MI secretly opened lines of “communication” with others of such political ilk. In effect, secret track-2 politiking was initiated to compensate for the lack of public Track-1 compromise.
If the stage was set by the government for a split in the PML six months ago, its November timing was determined by two inter-related factors. First, the government’s announcement that the process of “democratic restoration” would kick off with “non-party” local elections to district governments at the turn of the year. This necessitated an advance understanding with the anti-Sharif rebels so that no untoward gains could be made by the Sharifs in these elections. Second, Nawaz Sharif’s fear of being isolated and sidelined at the behest of the military in the political process ahead. This demanded an alliance with the anti-army Peoples Party of Benazir Bhutto before the Sharifs were knocked out for good and lost their value to Ms Bhutto.
The argument that the rebels decided to split simply because Mr Sharif decided to join hands with arch-enemy Bhutto doesn’t wash. Some of the leading rebels dislike Mr Sharif’s rough and ready ways more than they dislike the idea of an alliance with the PPP. More significantly, it needs to be asked why Mr Sharif waited so long to join forces with Ms Bhutto rather than doing so at the very outset of his travails. The answer is obvious: he didn’t until it was clear to him that the military regime had finally and irrevocably decided to split his party in order to consign him to the rubbish bin. Thus his alliance with the PPP is in response to the machinations of the government rather than being a trigger for the split within his party’s ranks. Of course, as far as Ms Bhutto is concerned, joining hands with Mr Sharif makes eminent sense. In the best of future circumstances from her point of view, she can conceivably cut a deal with the army chief in exchange for ditching Mr Sharif (as she did in 1993); in the worst case, she and Mr Sharif have a better chance of jointly mustering forces to oust the army and reclaiming space in party-politics than risking their fate singly.
Meanwhile, the jury is likely to be out for some time as far as the PML rebels are concerned. They are a dull lot, driven more by personal ambition than any steely principles. The Chaudhrys of Gujrat have a constituency in parts of the Punjab. But they are hardly the sort of “clean” politicians General Musharraf would like to bed on a permanent basis. Ijaz ul Haq is a nobody as far as the public is concerned. The notion that he has an important constituency in the army is more cultivated than real. Both are pure opportunists. The non-controversial elements — Fakhar Imam and Khurshid Kasuri — have yet to distinguish themselves as populist leaders in their own right. Mian Azhar is somewhere in between. Unfortunately, his political stature has still to transcend the local level.
Left to themselves singly or as a group, these rebels will not amount to anything unless any one of them is selected by GHQ and patronised as the chosen one in rather clinical circumstances. That is why their preference is for parliament to be restored so that they can find a suitable role for themselves. The last thing they seek is to be hustled into a general election without the cover of the army.
The hope of radical reform has already evaporated. Now the trappings of political neutrality in government are disappearing one by one. General Musharraf’s regime is slipping into cynicism. This does not bode well for the future of “sham-less” democracy in Pakistan.
(TFT Dec 08-14, 2000 Vol-XII No.41 — Editorial)
How about it, Shaukat Aziz?
The IMF is back in business in Pakistan. After an eighteen month hiatus involving many heartaches, it has finally agreed to “stand-by” with US$ 596 million in assistance to Pakistan as the country grapples to overcome a multi-faceted illness over the next ten months. This is peanuts, considering that finance minister Shaukat Aziz was originally confident of extracting a medium-term commitment of at least US$2.5 billion towards poverty reduction and growth. Indeed, we wonder whether it is already a case of too little, too late.
Of course, it is nice to know that Mr Aziz sets his feet on firmer ground when he admits that the IMF reprieve is no more than a “breather” which is supposed to pave the way for a new round of short-term debt rescheduling from international donors and enable international finance institutions like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank to pitch in with sorely needed project aid. But it is small comfort to learn that all this is predicated on so many dos and don’ts over the next ten months, with the IMF breathing down our neck like a hawk, that it would be a small miracle if we were able to avoid boomeranging to Square One.
The sting in the IMF’s tail is bound to hurt badly. The standby agreement is proof of that, all 14,000 words or so initialed by Mr Aziz, Mr Ishrat Hussain (State Bank Governor) and Mr Horst Kvhler (IMF-MD). Every day brings a new reading of this daunting document that reveals yet another unprecedented and gut-wrenching experience in store for some section of the population or the other. Here is a short-short list of the more important objectives: implementation of quarterly petroleum price adjustment mechanism for all major petroleum products; ban on new GST exemptions and fixed tax schemes under GST; GST extension to all other agricultural inputs; extension of income tax to all new National Savings Schemes on the same basis as the income tax currently applicable to other financial instruments; extension of GST to all retailers/traders above the Rs 5 million threshold; etc.
All these inflationary measures are bound to provoke an urban and rural backlash. Yet all are to be calmly heaped in the next ten months on the plate of a regime which has not been able to levy a GST on retail trade for over a year, which has not yet privatized a single major project, which has shied away from downsizing a single bloated department, which has increased non-productive expenditures instead of reducing them, one which distinctly shudders at the idea of imposing an extra 5 paisa per kilowatt burden on electricity consumers during Ramadan. Are we then headed for another drubbing from the IMF once the “breather” is called off after we are accused of reneging on our commitments as in the past?
Mr Aziz has no business stumbling from pillar to post in search of economic “breathers” to keep his supergenerals happy. Far from it. He should realise that conditional “breathers” will not right the economic wrongs of half a century. He should also know that radical economic reforms cannot be undertaken or sustained without a longer term amnesty from debt payments that enables a gradual fat-shedding of the economy and its transformation into a lean and mean competitive entity operating in a stable, transparent and democratic political environment. But for Pakistan to join the 50-odd nations queuing up for debt write-offs from the US$50 billion fund established for this purpose by Western countries, certain conditionalities other than those outlined by the IMF in the LoI are required. Why doesn’t he tell the supergenerals what these are and how they might consider going about fulfilling them for the sake of Pakistan? And if they are not prepared to listen to his comprehensive recipes for survival and growth, he should call it a day so that he is able to avoid the dishonourable fate which has befallen his predecessors in the ministry of finance.
To nudge Mr Aziz in the right direction, here is a short list of pre-conditions which the IMF didn’t spell out but which remain implicit in the whole debate about how Pakistan’s supergenerals might escape from the nutcracker of debt and underdevelopment: negotiate a profitable and secure entry into the CTBT, negotiate an honourable and enduring settlement with India over Kashmir; negotiate an orderly retreat to barracks by restoring the relevance of political parties, accepting the necessity of free elections and upholding the supremacy of parliament, and negotiate entry into the comity of educated, modern, liberal, rational nations interlocked in mutually profitable trade and commerce. In other words, what Pakistan needs is not a “breather” from debt-payments but an uninterrupted peace dividend based on a conclusive end to warring at home and abroad. Is this an impossible task?
It isn’t, if the gist of what we are suggesting is understood and sincere efforts are made to cobble a consensus on how to achieve it. But it is, if the supergenerals persist in holding out for “economic breathers” as they go about politically alienating foreign friends and condemning domestic allies. In the final analysis the choice is stark: we can go under as we swim against the tide or we can take off if we become great people to fly with. How about it Mr Aziz? You have nothing to lose except your chains.
(TFT Dec 15-21, 2000 Vol-XII No.42 — Editorial)
Blessing in disguise
The supergenerals have clinched the mother of all cynical deals with Nawaz Sharif. Having failed to knock him out politically, they have tried to wash their hands off him. But this highly discriminatory, good-riddance-to-bad rubbish policy will have repercussions long after its stench has evaporated.
The people of Pakistan see it as the mother of all betrayals. Betrayal of accountability. Betrayal of law and justice. Betrayal of national sovereignty. Betrayal of morality. It smacks of hypocrisy, opportunism, even criminality. The army’s stock was lower only in the aftermath of 1971. If the supergenerals don’t care a fig about public opinion, they should be wary at least of the rumblings in their own rank and file.
On the other side, we are reminded of Nawaz Sharif’s famous remark accompanied with the thump of a clenched fist ― “I won’t take dictation!” — which gave heart to many in 1993. But as he scurried to nocturnal safety in the arms of foreign potentates with not a thought for his suffering political colleagues or his bleeding party in his empty mind, we wonder whether Mr Sharif consoled himself with the self-serving rationale of one who, having deceived most of the people most of the time, expects to be able to deceive all the people all the time. Whatever fate may have in store for him, he has been revealed to all as the mouse that roared.
This unsavoury deal was in the making a long while. During General Pervez Musharraf’s first trip to Saudi Arabia only a week or so after he took over, the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz bluntly interceded on Mr Sharif’s behalf, offering to pay Pakistan the money allegedly plundered by the Sharifs. Subsequently, the Saudis relentlessly pursued their objective through the good offices of Qatar’s foreign minister. When General Musharraf began to drag his feet, the Saudis jolted him by initially rejecting the nomination of a retired DG-ISI as ambassador-designate to Riyadh and then suggested to the finance minister Mr Shaukat Aziz that if General Musharraf wanted to benefit from Saudi largesse, the quid pro quo should be handed over to them. It appears that the Saudis have not forgotten how in 1991 during the Gulf war, while the then Pakistan army chief expressed pro-Saddam Hussain sentiment, Nawaz Sharif flew about the world mustering support for the House of Saud. Nor indeed when the world urged Mr Sharif not to test the nuclear bomb and offered inducements, he went ahead just as soon as he received a nod from the Saudi king. The fact is that the Sharifs’ love affair with the Saudis goes back a long way and Mr Sharif has never taken any major domestic or foreign policy decision without their say-so. In winning him a reprieve, the Saudis have paid for services rendered by Sharif at the expense of Pakistan.
The Americans, too, have welcomed Mr Sharif’s reprieve. And why shouldn’t they? They perceive him as one of the architects of the Lahore peace process with India and not as one of the perpetrators of the Kargil adventure. Indeed, there has always been a hint of self-reproach in their attitude towards his fate, with some people saying that he was emboldened to sack General Musharraf following a strong statement by a senior US state department official in late September 1999 to the effect that Washington would never condone a military coup in Pakistan. It has now been admitted that Washington has been in close communication with Riyadh over the matter of Mr Sharif’s release.
Our own reaction, once the bitter pill of betrayal has been swallowed, should be more circumspect. This “deal” may be a blessing in disguise. If it has eroded the myth of Nawaz Sharif’s invincibility, it has also shattered the military’s holier-than-thou political image in the eyes of the people. Indeed, the supergenerals have been revealed to be sinning mortals like the rest of us, with the “super” prefix wholly undeserved. Civil society should rejoice in this awakening. Perhaps the generals will now find a way of retreating to barracks where they belong.
Some people, however, fear that the opposite may be truer — that having got rid of the one political leader who was a spoke in their wheel, the generals mean to lord it over us for years to come. If that is their intent — for who can say whether we have seen the height of opportunism rather than its beginning — we would advise them to think again.
General Musharraf was a reluctant debutant to political power. Just as it was being whispered that he was the long awaited saviour, harsh reality shook him out of this reverie. He should be thankful for this windfall. And we should help him out of the political wilderness into which he has stumbled instead of criticising him for a desperately needed dose of realism. Nawaz Sharif’s departure should be a harbinger of renewed democratisation rather than increased militarisation. If the opposite comes true, General Musharraf will plunge headlong into trouble instead of exiting from it as required.
(TFT Dec 22-28, 2000 Vol-XII No.43 — Editorial)
Bad advice
General Pervez Musharraf’s “address to the nation” last Wednesday was full of sound and fury signifying nothing. At the very least, we hoped he would enlighten us about his compulsions in letting Nawaz Sharif off the hook. After all, hadn’t he assured us that he would pursue the crooks of Pakistan to the ends of the earth and bring the loot back? Didn’t he lecture the British and the Americans about allowing their countries to become havens of refuge for the plunderers of the third world? In the event, however, he desperately tried to make virtue out of necessity and failed.
Nawaz Sharif is supposed to have been exiled on the basis of “an appeal” signed by him and three others. But we still don’t know whether this appeal was a political mercy petition, a cast-iron legal plea-bargain or merely a request to translate imprisonment into exile? Most people are now likely to believe Mr Sharif when he says he did not beg a pardon or make any compromising promise. In fact, by naively admitting that the government does not have any evidence of Mr Sharif’s plundered billions stashed away abroad, General Musharraf has inadvertently painted his accountability sleuths as bumbling fools in comparison with Saif ur Rehman who did such a hatchet job on Benazir Bhutto not so long ago.
General Musharraf says that several countries are pleased with his decision to reprieve Mr Sharif. He claims that this has served to reduce the “negative” image of Pakistan abroad. In fact, he has gone so far as to assert that certain economic benefits are likely to accrue to Pakistan’s ailing economy in its wake. None of this can be disputed. But the logic of the argument is quite perverse. The whole world has been telling General Musharraf that he can curry favour if he reveals a road-map for the restoration of democracy. Yet there is no hint of that. Sign the CTBT and stop proliferating if you want to be molly-coddled, they have repeated ad nauseam. Nothing doing, responds the general. Stop chumming-up with the notorious Taliban and clip the budding fundamentalists and sectarianists in Pakistan if you want to improve the image of the country, they have pleaded, to no avail. Create an enabling environment of regional peace and confidence for foreign investors, they have begged, only to be countered with the assertion that “jihad” is a state-legitimized expression of territorial “national interests”.
General Musharraf’s blithe disregard for matters of principle or bipartisanship is also quite astounding. What is sauce for the goose is apparently not sauce for the gander. But if a deal with the Punjabi, Nawaz Sharif, is politically opportune and diplomatically “correct” in the “national interest”, one with the Sindhi, Benazir Bhutto, would appear to be even more deserved. Corruption apart, Mr Sharif is a political Frankenstein created and nurtured by the army while Ms Bhutto is the democrat who was twice nipped in the bud by the army and all its Frankensteins. Indeed, if there are dozens of stinking cases of misappropriation and misuse of power pending against Mr Sharif and his cohorts, the few against Ms Bhutto and her spouse smell like roses in comparison. Yet, there was not a single word of similar comfort from General Musharraf on this score.
General Musharraf’s contemptuous reference to “drawing-room” gossip is no less revealing. When political leaders thunder about the “chattering classes” and flog them as scapegoats for their own failures, it is a sure-shot sign that they are out of touch with the reality in the streets and bazaars of the country. Equally, when they begin to thump on the table or sing their own praise, it is a sign of nagging doubt and insecurity rather than renewed vigour and confidence. In fact, General Musharraf could not have chosen more ominous words to describe his own frame of mind: “I am not a deserter and I don’t panic. I will accomplish my mission. I will never let you down. I am not afraid of death. God alone is my protector and guider…” The un-typical, repeated references to God Almighty suggest a man in trouble rather than one in command.
General Musharraf has been badly served by his advisors. For a politically sensitive matter such as this one, they should have adequately prepared public opinion for the mother of all retreats. Now they have now compounded their original sin by allowing their leader to look like a rambling, anxious, and lost man. If conspiracy-theorists have now concluded that someone is setting up General Musharraf as the fall-guy of this regime, who would blame them in view of the hollow explanations and half-truths on sale?
Fortunately, however, the situation may still be retrieved. General Musharraf should stop overplaying his “sincerity” card. He should open the route to bipartisan, party-based elections, as early as possible. And he should prepare the people of Pakistan to accept the same international compulsions of “national interest” followed in the Nawaz Sharif case in most other pending cases also — whether pertaining to Benazir Bhutto or to the economy or to the image of the country. The sooner we all accept the truth of our national predicament, the better we will learn to cope with it.
(TFT Dec 29, 2000 to Jan 04, 2001 Vol-XII No.44 — Editorial)
Desperate deadlock
India’s “peace offensive” in Kashmir has solicited Pakistani reciprocity and stirred the imagination of concerned people. In many ways, the current media optimism is building up to that preceding the Lahore Summit in 1999. It is therefore worth asking whether the fate of this initiative might be no different from the one two years ago and what this might imply for Indo-Pak relations as well as domestic political change in Pakistan.
Both countries and the third party seem “flexible” enough. The Hizbul Mujahideen offered the first ceasefire last July. Islamabad did not oppose it. Then India responded by one of its own last month. The HM and APHC welcomed it. Islamabad reciprocated by “exercising maximum restraint along the LoC” — a euphemism for “reducing cross-border infiltration”, a long-time Indian demand. India extended the ceasefire for another month. It has now promised to facilitate a visit of Kashmiri politicians to Islamabad for discussions with Pakistan’s national security establishment. Islamabad has consequently gestured a reduction of troops along the LoC. India may follow suit. A meeting between General Pervez Musharraf and Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee in a month or so would set the stage for a thaw all round. What then?
Consider the burden of history — or more precisely, how many times since the Kashmiris rose up in revolt against India in 1989 the leaders of India and Pakistan have painstakingly arrived at exactly such a juncture, only to slip further back into hostilities after each encounter. In 1989, Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi agreed in Islamabad not only to demilitarise Siachin but also to sign significant cultural and political protocols. Next year, however, the Indians went back on their word. Soon, the two countries were on the brink of war, compelling Robert Gates, a senior US intermediary, to rush over to cool things down.
It took four years, and a change of two governments apiece in both countries, before a new round of foreign secretary talks in Islamabad on Jan 1. But the moot was cut short because the two couldn’t even agree on which issues to take up in what manner. Subsequently, the various Islamic lashkars and jehadi organisations stepped up their assaults on Indian security forces and their civilian stooges.
Prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Inder Kumar Gujral met three years later in Male. This was followed by foreign secretary talks in Islamabad in September. A “historic breakthrough” was announced. India acknowledged that there was a “dispute” over Kashmir; Pakistan agreed to form working groups, including one on Kashmir, for simultaneous discussions on all issues (the all-or-nothing, “core” issue approach was diluted in exchange for an implicit recognition by the other side that Kashmir was not an “integral part of India”). However, Mr Gujral was faced with an election in 1998 and reneged on his agreement. The BJP came to power, India conducted nuclear tests, provoking Pakistan into tit-for-tat tests, upping the ante.
If India had at every stage betrayed an agreement with Pakistan to start talking about Kashmir, it was now time for Pakistan to try and extract a deal from India. The Kargil blueprints were dusted off the shelves in late 1998 and plans were initiated to take advantage of the winter snows, exactly as the Indians had done in the winter of 1984 when they scaled the heights of Siachin in no-man’s land. Unaware of what the Pakistani security establishment had in store, Mr Vajpayee had already kick-started the bus that brought him to Lahore in February 1999.
The “progress” in Lahore was unprecedented from India’s point of view. Pakistan ostensibly dropped the “core” issue approach. Kashmir became one of the “outstanding” disputes along with several others and the LoC became a sacred cow. It seemed as though we had come full circle to 1972 when the Simla Agreement was signed to bury Kashmir. But before the fruits of Lahore could be digested by New Delhi, the Pakistani national security establishment trumped the process in Kargil. Unfortunately, however, the Indians did not react as anticipated. Instead of exchanging Siachin for Kargil and strengthening the Lahore process of equitable disengagement, New Delhi hit back and imposed a full-fledged conflict on the border. As a dangerous military escalation threatened, Nawaz Sharif sued for mediation by Washington on Indian terms. This led to tensions between Mr Sharif and the principal military architects of Kargil led by General Musharraf. In the event, Mr Sharif’s attempted sacking of General Musharraf and two key Kargil players in Rawalpindi led to a coup against him, plunging Pakistan into its third military phase.
In short, every attempt by India to impose a one-sided settlement on Kashmir has been followed by increased Pakistan-abetted insurgency in the Valley, India-controlled terrorism in urban Pakistan, the threat of war or war itself. In addition, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have, in turns, been tarred by the brush of being “pro-India” — the former lost office in 1990 partly because the national security establishment saw her as a “security risk” vis-a-vis India while the latter was booted out in 1999 because he chose to challenge the same national security establishment over how to deal with Kashmir and India. Meanwhile, shorn of its mainstream civilian supporters, the national security establishment has progressively nurtured an ally of increasing power and belligerence — the rabidly anti-India militant Islamic jehadi forces which are ready to do its bidding in the region.
The current situation is marked by extreme volatility in the ranks of two of the three key players — Pakistan and Kashmir. India, on the other hand, is happily placed. Having tried and failed on so many earlier occasions to negotiate a deal with Pakistan bilaterally which enables it to impose a deal on the Kashmiris, India has now chosen to try the opposite route: negotiate a deal with the Kashmiris and impose it on Pakistan with multilateral approval. Also, there is no internal threat to the BJP. Indeed, it has the support of the leading opposition parties in its “peace offensive”. The international community is on board. India’s economy is healthy. And its defense budgets are soaring.
Meanwhile, the Kashmiris are fatigued. Divisions are emerging within political ranks as well as between politicians and militants. The prospects of peace as opposed to war, coupled with some sort of internationally-guaranteed peace dividend short of full-fledged independence, is beginning to appeal to many. If this seems to be a “pro-India sentiment”, it could potentially translate into civil war or internecine conflict in Kashmir.
Pakistan’s position is more problematic. Its military government lacks domestic and international legitimacy. The mainstream opposition wants to overthrow it. The bazaar is set against it. The economy is in a shambles. Worse, in the absence of civil society support, the military government is held hostage by the very radical Islamic groups and jehadi forces that were nurtured by it to advance its aggressive “national security” causes. Much worse, some hawks in the national security establishment see the present stage of the Kashmir struggle as the apotheosis of their strategy rather than as its downside. Thus General Musharraf is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.
If he doesn’t adopt a moderate stance vis-a-vis Kashmir and balks at supporting the indigenous peace process, the international community could isolate and cut him off. If he becomes too flexible, the hawks in his camp could try to derail the peace process by signaling increased violence in Kashmir and elsewhere in India. Indeed, if all else fails, the radical Islamic groups in Pakistan could band together and try to oust him. Qazi Hussain Ahmad has already called General Musharraf a “security risk” and asked the generals to sack him. In the event that General Musharraf is perceived by such forces as “weak” or seen to succumb to Indian or international pressure to make an “unjust” settlement with India which amounts to “abandoning” Kashmir, the very national security establishment which he helped to create could devour him. In the event, a radicalised Islamic national security leadership in Islamabad would provoke India into a conflict with Pakistan.
The issue is not of peace at any cost. It is of a just settlement on Kashmir. If India is lacking in sincerity as in the past, the desperate deadlock can only be broken by war.
(TFT Jan 05-11, 2001 Vol-XII No.45 — Editorial)
Pragmatism and reality
If General Pervez Musharraf were to survey the political landscape of the year gone by, he would discern the dos and don’ts of dog-eared experience. Indeed, if he were a good leader, he would take some lessons to heart and mould them into the building blocks of political wisdom.
Shortly after he seized power, General Musharraf announced sweeping measures to satiate the thirst of the masses for “ruthless accountability”. A year later, the missionary zeal of the early months exemplified by General Mohammad Amjad has given way to the cheerful pragmatism of General Khalid Maqbool. But the damage to business confidence will not be easily repaired.
General Musharraf was equally hard on former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Instead of initiating corruption cases against him in which conviction merited a few years in prison, the government went for the jugular by indicting him in the airplane hijacking case where the offence was liable to the death penalty. In the event, letting him off the hook at the altar of pragmatism has elicited a heavy toll of General Musharraf’s credibility.
Other examples of rigid positions buffeted by the cold gust of reality come to mind. We recall how General Musharraf once pursed his lips and declared that he wouldn’t talk to India unless it was prepared to negotiate the “core” issue of Kashmir above all else. But after listening attentively to the geo-strategic concerns raised by President Clinton during his five-hour stopover in Islamabad in April last year, the good general was ready to meet the Indian prime minister unconditionally for talks “anywhere, anytime”, in pursuit of regional peace. Indeed, his pragmatic flexibility in recent times has diminished his government’s international isolation significantly.
Much the same sort of diagnosis can be made about the government’s economic and financial claims. There is no question about devaluation, we were told last year. Now we know that there was no way out of a hefty devaluation this year. Similarly, the dispute with Hubco was supposed to have been settled even before Mr Shaukat Aziz was sworn in as finance minister. Yet the ink is still not dry on an agreement penned last month. Equally, the IMF was supposed to weigh in a year ago with billions of dollars in funds for poverty alleviation. Now we realize how lucky we are that a few hundred million dollars were granted last month on promise of exceptionally good behaviour.
Tall claims were also made about the scope and impact of local elections. Nothing less than a radical alteration of the political landscape of traditional heavyweights and perennially crooked politicians belonging to the mainstream parties was promised. But if the first phase of the six-month long ordeal is anything to go by, nothing could be further from the reality. The rural and urban elite that the self-righteous generals so love to hate has rebounded with a vengeance and thwarted their ambitious plans to create a middle-class constituency in their own image. The government will now review the extent of power that should rest with these councilors when it should have been the other way round in the first place. What possible legitimacy or longevity can such airy-fairy devolution plans realistically claim?
Clearly, the key words are pragmatism and reality. The key issues – whether relating to devolution of political power or economic well being or sustainable foreign relations – cry out for a heavy dose of both. Will the Musharraf government temper its various policies accordingly in the future?
The prospects seem better than before. There is an increasingly realistic appreciation among General Musharraf and his military colleagues of the manner in which the concerns of the domestic business community and the international political community impinge on the well being of Pakistan. We welcome this development. The strains of pragmatic flexibility are also evident in a review of national security policy in Islamabad currently underway. This too is good news. But certain critical areas now cry out for the same realistic approach.
The question of the restoration of parliament is hanging fire despite firm denials by General Musharraf that it might soon return to business as usual. We see no reason for such strong denouncements of the idea, especially since stranger somersaults have been witnessed in recent times. Indeed, a diplomatic silence would be preferable since it would enable General Musharraf to retain some realistic options in his clutch without having to eat humble pie later. Similarly, there is no point in constantly thundering about an unrealistic three-year mission-statement or agenda when the remains of bigger pundits than General Musharraf are littered all over the political graveyard that is Pakistan.
It has taken General Pervez Musharraf over a year to become pragmatic and realistic. It would be marvelous if he could take under a year to clinch a pragmatic restoration of civilian rule in 2001 rather than in 2002. More crucially, if he can bring himself to sponsor a realistic solution of the Kashmir dispute, Pakistanis will remember and thank him for generations to come.
(TFT Jan 12-18, 2001 Vol-XII No.46 — Editorial)
Leaf from Bangldesh
Last week, two courageous judges of the Bangladesh High Court in Dhaka, a man and a woman, handed down a judgment of great significance to all Muslim-majority countries that claim democratic statehood. They said that religious fatwas or edicts purporting to be Islamic law issued by maulvis, maulanas, muftis or other religo-political leaders are illegal and should be liable to punishment as any other illegality. The court had taken notice of the plight of a rural housewife who was verbally divorced by her husband and then forced to marry another as decreed by a local mullah.
It held that “fatwa means legal opinion which means legal opinion of a lawful person or authority. The legal system in Bangladesh empowers only the courts to decide all questions relating to legal opinion on Muslim and other laws in force…we therefore hold that any fatwa including this one is unauthorized and illegal…Giving a fatwa by unauthorized person or persons, even if it is not executed, must be made a punishable offence by Parliament immediately…” The court admonished the District Magistrate who did not take “cognizance of the said offence under Section 190 of the Code of Criminal Procedure” and hoped that this would serve “once for all as a warning to the other district magistrates, magistrates and police officers”.
In parting, the court wondered “why a particular group of men, upon getting education from madrassas or forming a religious group, are becoming fanatics with wrong views” and suggested that perhaps there might be a “defect in their education and their attitude”. It then went on to recommend the introduction of the Bangladesh Muslim Family Ordinance in the curriculums of madrassahs and schools as well as during Friday prayer sermons. It suggested a “unified education system and an enactment to control freedom of religion subject to law, public order and morality within the scope of Article 41(1) of the Bangladesh constitution. “The state must define and enforce public morality. It must educate society”, held the court.
According to Amnesty International, “dozens of fatwas are issued each year in Bangladesh by the rural clergy at village gatherings after receipt of complaints, usually against women who assert themselves in village family life. They impose flogging and stoning and other humiliating punishments such as shaving of heads, insults and beatings. They are also often involved in their execution”. The motive, says AI, is often financial because fatwas can be a source of income for the fatwabaz (those in the business of issuing fatwas) who justify their deeds in the name of religion. At least 10 women have committed suicide or been killed as a result of such fatwas in the last two years.
Fatwa is an old Islamic instrument of expressing religious opinion based on the “school of thought” of the mufti (fatwa-giver). The mufti was once a state officer who gave official state opinion when the state was represented by an Amirul Momineen. Today, however, the state in most Muslim countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan is represented by a host of institutions whose scope is defined in a Constitution, among which parliament is the sole law-maker and giver while the judiciary is the sole interpreter and opinion-giver of all laws. In modern parlance, if parliament is the Amirul Momineen, the courts are the grand muftis. Therefore there is no room for mullahs or anyone else to issue fatwas or edicts purporting to have the weight of Islamic law behind them.
The practice of issuing fatwas was never altogether abandoned by the mullahs in most Muslim countries even after they adopted democratic statehood. In due course, sectarian and “school” differences of opinion gave rise to various types of fatwas, usually of tafkir (apostasy) of rival sectarian leaders. In the sub-continent, for example, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the great Muslim modernizer of the 19th century, was subjected to a number of “united fatwas” of many “Islamic” schools of thought. Nor was the great 20th century poet Allama Mohammad Iqbal spared.
In Pakistan, the fatwa has come to mean an opinion, exhortation or command issued by an individual, group or party whose belief structure is based on any one of the various sects of Islam. So we have dissenting fatwas on foreign policy, murderous fatwas against the United States, threatening fatwas against various women and human rights NGOs, etc. We can even recall a particularly bullying fatwa against our courageous colleague, Ardeshir Cowasjee, issued by a mullah in Karachi at the behest of a former chief minister of Sindh who was annoyed with the columnist for opposing his land-grabbing schemes. In essence, such fatwas are attempts to silence dissenting opinion by inciting the public to violence against the target.
Unfortunately, our courts have rarely demonstrated the same courage vis a vis such fatwas as the Bangladesh High Court. Nor has the Pakistani state successfully learnt to cope with the phenomena of fatwas, some of which have damaged the credibility of the country and served to create a “negative” image abroad by encouraging violent vigilantist practices and undermining the writ of the state. Therefore we should take a leaf from the Bangladesh High Court judgment and set our house in order.
(TFT Jan 19-25, 2001 Vol-XII No.47 — Editorial)
Unholy wars
Religio-political forces in Pakistan, which have been molly-coddled by civilian and military governments since the time of General Zia ul Haq, constitute a double-edged weapon. On the one hand, they are propped up as an integral element of a “national security strategy” devised to secure some sort of military advantage in Afghanistan and political leverage in Kashmir. On the other, they are visible threats to the fabric of democratic government and civil society in the country. In fact, as the world recoils from an image of Pakistan wrought by such gun-toting fundamentalists bent on waging jehad against the West, the price of this dubious state strategy becomes prohibitive.
Nothing demonstrates this more forcefully than the increasingly threatening postures adopted by some such elements. Certainly, it is questionable whether the Jamaat i Islami is within its constitutional rights to exhort the corps commanders of the Pakistan Army to remove the COAS from office (in effect, stage a coup d’etat). Worse, nothing undermines the efficacy of the state or erodes the writ of law than a policy of “selective appeasement” as demonstrated by a meeting between the Lahore Corps Commander and the leader of the Jamaat i Islami on this issue.
Other worrying examples abound. Alarmed by the spectre of JI and other religio-political activists rampaging on the streets, the government was quick to backtrack on procedural modifications to the controversial blasphemy law, in the process losing considerable credibility at home and abroad. Yet when some minority and human rights organisations decided to march peacefully in Karachi the other day against the excesses of such laws and the injustice of the separate-electorate system, the police was ordered to beat them black and blue and arrest them in the scores. If the first was an act of capitulation disguised as a “tactical retreat” (“we don’t want to open unnecessary fronts”), the second was a manifestation of might against right in defense of a dubious “law” and a non-existent “order”.
Equally illuminating was the government’s response to a threat by another religio-political group — the Tanzimul Akhwan — to march on Islamabad and demand the enforcement of shariah. The groveling attitude of the officials who met with the leaders of this group, including a federal minister, and promised all manner of concessions to them confirms our fears just as much as it raises their hopes — demand a mile and you will be a given a yard; and every yard is another step along the route to capturing state power. Therefore we are not at all surprised that the interior minister, Gen (retd) Moinuddin Haider, was told to buzz off when he ever-so-gently chided the bearded ensemble at Akora Khattak not to perpetuate a negative or bad image of Pakistan.
General Moinuddin Haider, like his boss General Pervez Musharraf, is among the best faces of this regime. Both are temperate and pragmatic persons, who prefer not to speak with forked tongues even when real politik demands otherwise. Indeed, one of their strengths is their ability to project a degree of sincerity or compulsion in what they do or don’t do. That, however, is precisely why they are not hot favourites with the likes of Qazi Hussain Ahmad or Maulana Sami-ul-Haq. But the issue here is not one of personalities. It is one of approach. If the military establishment, of which both Generals are card-carrying members, is so dependent on religio-political groups for its long-term (this is the critical factor) foreign policy agendas in the neighbourhood, why should it clamp down on its allies at anyone’s insistence or instigation? The fundos know this and have time and again shown an inclination to exploit this factor to the hilt. Indeed, that is why it is increasingly looking like a case of the tail wagging the dog rather than the other way round.
This could have adverse short-term consequences for national security apart from the insidious longer-term damage to state and society. A case in point relates to the peace process initiated by New Delhi with the backing of the United States. We do not know whether India is sincere or whether it is posturing. But one thing is already clear: whichever side is perceived to sabotage the process by adopting an unduly intransigent attitude at any stage of the game will be condemned in the corridors of power all over the world. Thus aggressive posturing for maximum negotiating strength by either side is fraught with risk. In India’s case, a denial of visas to the Kashmiri leaders or a continuing refusal to agree to a meeting between its prime minister and the Pakistani chief executive, without sufficiently valid or palatable reasons, would hurt its cause. In Pakistan’s case, diminishing returns are bound to set in if suicide attacks by the Mujahideen continue on key military or civilian targets in India, thereby giving India a good excuse to abandon the peace process and hold Pakistan responsible for its breakdown. Thus the link between the Pakistani state and religio-political elements could spell trouble for the country on more than one count if it is not firmly calibrated. The moot question is whether Islamabad has the will and ability to do that.
(TFT Jan 26-01 Feb, 2001 Vol-XII No.48 — Editorial)
Hunter and hunted
Benazir Bhutto has recently remarked about a functioning intelligence-agency state within the dysfunctional state of Pakistan. She refers to the insidious role of the ISI and the MI in “hunting” democratic governments, in running amok in pursuit of a national security agenda “at variance with the popular will” and in “dividing the civilian popular base by holding out to those who cannot win — the promise of power without legitimacy”. She says she was overthrown in 1990 because she chose to dictate her own security agenda. But because the liberal forces which “should have stood by” her failed to do so, she accepted a “historic compromise” by following the security agenda of the agencies in her second stint in office. “I accept my part of the responsibility but others must own up to theirs”, she says.
Much of what she says about the agencies’ dirty tricks during her first term in office is well known and true enough — the shenanigans of the “midnight jackals”, Brig Imtiaz Billa and Major Amer, in destablising her government; the “poisonous” stories of handing over lists of Sikh terrorists to India; the reluctance of the army chief, General Aslam Beg, to salute her and his role in egging on the MQM to split with the PPP and create violent disturbances in Karachi; the role of a serving corps commander and Nawaz Sharif in persuading Osama Bin Ladin to help finance a no-confidence motion against her by sending a cheque for US$ 10 million to General Aslam Beg personally; etc. If she had dilated on how the agencies rigged the 1990 elections to keep her out, how Nawaz Sharif was chosen by Lt General Hameed Gul and Ghulam Ishaq Khan to be PM above Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, how banker Yunus Habib was nudged to give crores to the ISI and how Lt General Asad Durrani, DG-ISI, forked over hard cash to Nawaz Sharif, General Aslam Beg and many others to ensure ‘proper results’ in the 1990 elections, she would have made a formidable case against her detractors.
Ms Bhutto, however, is guilty of selecting her facts to suit her case. She doesn’t acknowledge, for instance, her own secret attempts to turn the tables on Nawaz Sharif by pushing General Aslam Beg in the direction of a coup against the Sharif government in July 1991. Nor does she note how the then Chief of General Staff and COAS-designate, General Asif Nawaz, along with the then DG-IB, Brig Imtiaz Billa, joined hands to thwart General Beg’s threatening moves against a civilian government just prior to retirement. Indeed, after General Asif Nawaz became army chief and developed differences with Nawaz Sharif in 1992, Ms Bhutto redoubled her efforts to establish contact with him and try to pressurize him to get rid of Nawaz Sharif (remember the abortive “long march” in November 1992?). Thus if Ms Bhutto was done in by the national security wallahs from 1988-90, the fact is she did not hesitate for a moment in joining hands with them to try to destabilise and overthrow an elected government when her own turn came to live in opposition from 1990 to 1993.
Ms Bhutto is quite elaborative about what happened to her during her second time in office from 1993 to 1996. She claims that “everything was fine when Lt General Javed Ashraf Qazi was my DG-ISI” until “an officer called [Maj Gen] Shujaat was installed [in the ISI] and all our troubles began”. But she doesn’t explain why and who installed him, nor why, when General Qazi was such a goodie-goodie in her books, he retained Lt Gen Shujaat despite her objections. She says she tried to persuade the next DG-ISI Lt Gen Rana (“good man but quite simple”), and the Defence Secretary, to remove Lt Gen Shujaat but in vain. How was this possible, we wonder, when the Defence Secretary was her own man, the DG-ISI Rana was a “good man” and the COAS General Abdul Waheed was well-disposed towards her, apart from being a non-interfering sort of fellow.
Most surprisingly, Ms Bhutto lambasts Lt General Mahmood Ahmad, DG-MI in 1996 and currently DG-ISI, for conspiring against her, even though at the time she admits she “kept quiet”. Later, however, when Lt Gen Mahmood allegedly continued with his conspiracies, she asked General Jehangir Karamat, the then COAS, to explain Gen Mahmood’s conduct and rein him in, upon which the COAS is said to have written a letter to her saying that if she didn’t trust him he would be happy to resign. But she didn’t ask him to resign. Nor did she insist as PM that Gen Mahmood ought to be sacked or transferred. Yet she now wants General Mahmood to “explain to the nation at whose behest he did these things”.
Ms Bhutto’s story gets more confusing in 1996. She says that Gen Karamat told her in August that, according to Gen (retd) Hameed Gul, President Farooq Leghari was ready to sack her but was simply waiting for a direct nod from General Karamat. Then she says she learnt that General Mahmood, the DG-MI appointed and retained by General Karamat despite objections by her, was urging President Leghari to get on with it even as President Leghari was offering gulab jamans to her and reminding her that she was his “sister” and he was “ghairatmand” and General Karamat was offering to “mediate” between her and her president. She also refers to “some foreign bankers” [Mr Shaukat Aziz, who was also friendly with her, was one such] who called upon General Karamat and told him that the economy was on the verge of defaulting. She says that when she asked General Karamat to go to President Leghari and “ask him point-blank” whether he intended to dismiss her government, she was faced with the stunning murder of her brother Murtaza Bhutto.
Ms Bhutto blithely “exonerates General Karamat and the military as an institution” and lays the blame at the door of “President Leghari in collusion with rogue elements of the intelligence and security apparatus” for her government’s dilemmas during her second stint. Yet she cannot explain why COAS Abdul Waheed wanted a Brigadier accused of sedition “to be hanged” whereas COAS Karamat wanted him “spared”, nor why COAS Waheed had no objections to the pursuit of an enquiry against former DG-ISI Lt Gen Asad Durrani for disbursing ISI funds to politicians in 1990 while COAS Karamat advised against it. The best part of this story claims that “they changed my military secretary after telling me it was a routine change and when the COAS tried to send me a message [on the night of her government’s sacking], he could not get through and when the COAS got in touch with the defence secretary, he too could not get in touch with me”. This is ridiculous. Who are “they”, if not the COAS and Defence Secretary? Nor is it conceivable that the army chief and defence secretary tried to contact her but couldn’t get through, despite all the hot lines and open phone lines and couriers at their service. As for not proceeding against Lt Gen Asad Durrani, Ms Bhutto has conveniently forgotten to mention one salient fact which might shed light on her indecision — Lt General Asad Durrani was “sacked” from the army in 1993 by General Abdul Waheed after it transpired that he had conspired with Ms Bhutto against PM Nawaz Sharif after Mr Sharif sacked him as DG-ISI in 1992 for running with the PM and hunting with the COAS General Asif Nawaz. Thus Lt General Durrani was not kosher when he was conspiring with Sharif and General Beg to keep Ms Bhutto out of office in 1989-90 but he was a “friend indeed” when he was conspiring with her against Nawaz Sharif in 1992-93!
Ms Bhutto’s story is part truth, part fiction. The truth is that the intelligence agencies undermined her government for various reasons during her two stints in office. But it is fiction to claim that they did so as “rogue elements” without the knowledge and approval of each army chief. The truth also is that if she was the hunted, she was not averse to being the hunter in turn. The truth admittedly is that a section of the liberal intelligentsia did not stand by her. But the fiction is that it did so for personal, false or whimsical reasons — indeed the truth is that she was abandoned because there were credible allegations of corruption against her.
But there is also a broader and more unpalatable truth at stake. The intelligence agencies are an organic and integral element of the military establishment at the apex of which sits the COAS with a rigid perspective on the constituent elements of national security. Therefore as long as the military’s view on such matters is at variance with the popular will as reflected in the views of a freely elected government, PM and parliament, there will be no political stability in this country. Both politicians and generals, past, present and future, should try to resolve this dilemma via a genuine Truth and Reconciliation Commission rather than continue to snipe from behind a façade of make-belief.
(TFT Feb 02-08, 2001 Vol-XII No.49 — Editorial)
How utterly wrong
General Pervez Musharraf was supposed to pay a visit to Kabul many months ago, ostensibly to try and talk some sense into the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan. But General (retd) Moinuddin Haider, the interior minister, is going instead on “mission impossible”.
Iran was once provoked to consider flattening the Taliban. But it changed its mind when the enraged Taliban swarmed to the Iranian border instead of retreating to Kandahar. Then President Clinton rained cruise missiles on them for hosting Osama Bin Laden. But this was like water off a duck’s back. Meanwhile, President Putin of Russia has blown hot and cold over the destabilizing impact of Talibanism in Chechnya and some central Asian republics but it has not made an iota of difference in Kabul. Now the Taliban face a host of American sponsored UN sanctions that will make life uncomfortable for everyone in Afghanistan. But they remain defiant. Indeed, they are hoping that the US will eventually engage with them, recognize them as the legitimate government of Kabul and do business with them.
Meanwhile, the supergenerals of Pakistan have trotted out a list of dos and don’ts for Mullah Umar, partly because Islamabad pretends to be concerned about the blowback effects of Talibanism as manifested in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in general and Islamic sectarianism in particular in Pakistan and partly because it is posturing (“we’re doing our best to moderate them”) for the sake of appeasing the international community. What is right or wrong with Pakistan’s Afghan’s policy?
The supergenerals maintain that Islamabad has always played favourites in Afghanistan because it needs an unequivocal ally in Kabul who provides “strategic depth” to Pakistan in its regional framework. But no one has ever explained what this high sounding “strategic depth” is really all about. If it means a friendly state in Pakistan’s backyard where we can park a couple of airplanes in time of war with India, no one can quibble with that. But an anarchist friendly state in Kabul with a crippling blowback impact on Pakistan’s civil society at the expense of an old and civilisational friendly state like Iran is hardly good strategy. Nor does it make sense for a country with a critically ailing economy like ours to alienate the oil-and-gas rich central Asian republics (who yearn for a mutually profitable relationship with Pakistan) for the sake of friendship with a highly dubious and impoverished regime in Afghanistan.
But the supergenerals may have another notion of “strategic” interest in mind when they view the pros and cons of supporting the Taliban of Afghanistan. Indeed, General Musharraf may have been thinking of some such strategic notion when he recently said that Pakistan had to be friends with the Taliban because they were comprised of ethnic Pakhtuns who formed the main ethnic community of our own NWFP that borders Afghanistan. This leads us to postulate the supergenerals’ strategic thinking that a strong Pakhtun state in Afghanistan would suit Pakistan immeasurably more than a weak Pakhtun on non-Pakhtun state. Is that right?
No, it isn’t. First, we need to make the distinction between a strong and weak state in Afghanistan irrespective of its ethnic composition. Then we have to ask whether a strong state in Afghanistan suits us more than a weak one. Thus a weak state in Afghanistan which is dependent on Pakistan is surely better from our point of view than a strong state which competes with us for regional influence or makes bold to ally with other powers in the region. Finally, we have to ask whether a strong Pakhtun-dominated state in Afghanistan suits us more than a weak, non-Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan. For those who haven’t followed the march of history, a weak non-Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan has never posed any threat to Pakistan because it has neither had any ideological bearings or religious extra-national ambitions nor any ethnic or sub-nationalist stirrings. On the other hand, whenever there has been a strong Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan, whether secular-centrist as under President Daud or secular-leftist as under President Nur Mohd Taraki or Hafizullah Amin or Najibullah, its government has been compelled by the logic of its own composition to pander to ethnic nationalism by supporting Pakhtun separatism (refusal to accept the Durand Line) or try and export religious fundamentalism (Talibanism) to the NWFP and Balochistan. If Mr Ajmal Khattak, who was the first politician to be graced by a meeting with General Musharraf, knows all about the first sort of anti-Pakistan, Pakhtun Afghan state, Maulana Samiul Haq knows all about the latter sort of potentially anti-Pakistan, Pakhtun Afghan state. This would suggest that a strong Taliban state in Afghanistan, which combines the worst elements of ethnic Pakhtun nationalism and religious exclusivism, would eventually pose a threat to the territorial integrity and political solidarity of multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian, democratic Pakistan.
Afghanistan under the Taliban therefore poses a greater potential danger to Pakistan than it does to any other country in the world. But while the world is up in arms against a regime that provides sanctuary to all the religious extremists of the modern century, our supergenerals insist upon lecturing us about the necessity of the Taliban. How completely, utterly wrong they are.
(TFT Feb 09-15, 2001 Vol-XII No.50 — Editorial)
Reason and irrationality?
The facts relating to the Frontier Post episode on January 29 expose the degeneration of state and society in Pakistan. Indeed, for those who, like General Pervez Musharraf, are concerned about the adverse perceptions of Pakistan abroad, this case reveals what is wrong with us.
First: It is inconceivable that any sane Muslim could actually blaspheme against Allah or the Prophet (peace be upon him). It is doubly inconceivable that he/she would deliberately publish a blasphemous statement made by anyone else, not least because the punishment for this offence is death. But if a mad man were to commit this offence, the punishment for it in any civilised society would be confinement to an asylum for treatment rather than death at the hands of a frenzied mob. But we do things differently here.
Second: The blasphemous letter from an American Jew got through the defences of the concerned editor for three main reasons. (a) It was received by e-mail, which meant that it didn’t have to be scrutinised and then typed. (b) Its headline (Why Muslims hate Jews) was the stuff of everyday views in this country, which meant that its chances of being glossed over were greater than if it had been the other way round (Why Jews hate Muslims) (c) It was in English which, unfortunately, is not even a sufficiently-grasped second language for a majority of the writing and subbing staff of many such newspapers (a former editor of the FP in Lahore likes to recount fearful stories of how many reporters were inclined to file copy in Urdu, which then had to be translated into English by only marginally better English writers). This is a good example of what can go wrong when information technology is expected to interface efficiently with a barely literate society.
Third: The mobs that burnt down the press the following day comprised zealots who hadn’t even seen the letter because they couldn’t read or write a word of English. Indeed, if they’d been instigated to murder, they would have done so blindly. But they were neither herded to an asylum, nor booked for arson. Such is the sorry state of law enforcement in our country.
Fourth: General Pervez Musharraf was quick to denounce the publication of the letter as an unacceptable transgression of “press freedom”. That the case had nothing at all to do with press freedom was obvious enough. But General Musharraf’s readiness to tar and feather the press at the first available opportunity reveals his basic hostility to the idea of fundamental rights. Indeed, it is clear that the supergenerals tolerate a free press not because they sincerely believe in its virtues but because the existence of a free press generates desperately needed brownie points for them from the international community. At least there should be no illusions on this score.
Fifth: The role played by PTV was extremely negative. The pictures and commentary on the national Khabarnama were designed to fuel outrage against the alleged perpetrators of blasphemy rather than urge restraint and uphold law and order. Interestingly enough, though, five people were killed the same day in Quetta as a result of police violence against a crowd of demonstrators protesting the dismal drought conditions in Balochistan that have wrecked the lives of countless unfortunate citizens. But there was not one word on Khabarnama about their grievous fate. When the medium is the message in this increasingly violent and fanatical country, why should we blame foreigners for portraying and perceiving us as we really are in everyday life?
Sixth: The local general was more loyal than the Chief. The administration charged seven persons, including the chowkidar of the press, with blasphemy, arrested them, closed down the paper, blacked out its web-site, escorted another mob to attack a cinema in the area the following day, arrested six more persons from the FP’s Urdu publication Maidan and shut it down. Such imprisonment is euphemistically called “protective custody” in this country. It means that instead of protecting you by dispersing the lawless mob, the state is ready to abuse your freedom by putting you into prison.
If the events of January 29/30 have deservedly marred the image of the government and people of this country, we might say a silent prayer for a ray of sanity in its aftermath. A commission of inquiry has been established to sort out this mess. The leaders of the religious parties have been persuaded to cool tempers (indeed, they are now wont to claim that they fell into a trap set by Islam-hating Jews — incidentally, an unrepentant Brooke BenDzac has now e-mailed newspapers crowing that the reaction to his letter proved the point he was trying to make). And chances are that all but one or two of the accused journalists will shortly be set free.
Civil society is increasingly held hostage by religious fanatics in Pakistan. So-called “Islamic” laws, which distort reality, hinder rather than help progress. In an age of reason and rationality, General Musharraf’s Pakistan is out of step with the rest of the world.
(TFT Feb 16-22, 2001 Vol-XII No.51 — Editorial)
Far reaching repercussions
The Sunday Times of London has recently published a story that damns politicians and state institutions alike in Pakistan. The report suggests that an official of the Intelligence Bureau was ordered in 1998 by the head of the Accountability Bureau, Mr Saif ur Rehman, to tap the telephones of Justice Abdul Qayyum of the Lahore High Court (illegal order by politicians, illegal implementation by IB). The IB official later pocketed the tapes and decamped to London, eventually handing them over to the British newspaper. If true, the conversations between Justice Qayyum and Saif ur Rehman, Khalid Anwar (then law minister), Mrs Abdul Qayyum and others are fascinating because they reveal the political bankruptcy of the system and those who are elected or nominated to make it work.
The tapes suggest that Justice Qayyum was bullied by the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his minions into convicting former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and her spouse Asif Zardari for corruption in 1998. This means that – irrespective of the substantial evidence laid against the two accused – the trial wasn’t conducted entirely in a free or fair manner as required by law. Ms Bhutto shrieked as much during and after the trial but critics, including TFT, dismissed her allegations against Justice Qayyum as inconceivable. Hence when the review petition comes up for hearing before the Supreme Court on February 26, the court will be hard put to choose between acquitting the couple or ordering a fresh trial. If it clings to a third option — upholding the verdict — it risks being tarred by the same brush.
The role played by each of the actors merits comment. Nawaz Sharif ordered Saif ur Rehman to bug the judge and Mr Rehman had no qualms in barking compliance to the head of the IB who did likewise to his subordinate staff. Everyone acted illegally down the chain of command. Mr Rehman, in particular, stands out like a sore thumb. He is earlier known to have boasted that the “judges were in his pocket”. Apparently, Mr Sharif also leaned on the then chief justice of the Lahore High Court, Justice Rashid Aziz, to advise Justice Qayyum to do the needful or else. The Supreme Judicial Council needs to take a careful look at this allegation.
The law minister, Khalid Anwar, acted in a deplorable manner. What is wrong with asking a judge to hurry up, he asks. Nothing, if this is done in open court and in a transparent fashion. But it is immoral it if it is done amidst dire threats brandished by officials at the Prime Minister’s behest. Mr Anwar also claims that his government never authorised the IB to wire-tap the judges. Nonsense, says former chief justice Sajjad Ali Shah, who reports that when a bug was discovered on his phone, Mr Anwar advised him not to make an issue of it. We might also recall that this is the same gent who, as President Farooq Leghari’s council in 1996-97 in the Bhutto dismissal case before the Supreme Court, cited phone tapping of judges by the Bhutto regime as a major justification for her government’s ouster.
Finally, there is the judge in the dock. By all accounts, a most competent and learned man, indeed one on whom undue reliance has been thrust by politicians and judges alike in politically sensitive or legally complex cases. But the tapes have compromised his position. He could try and ride out the vicious gossip or he could call it a day and quietly fade away. If he chooses the first route, the law would require him to face the Supreme Judicial Council and explain his situation.
One last matter. The timing of the revelations — just before the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear Benazir Bhutto’s review petition — and the dubious role of the IB Deputy Director (how has he suddenly acquired a conscience?) is thought to cast doubts about the veracity of the tapes and the allegations flowing from them. Not so. The tapes are authentic enough. If they weren’t, every one of the alleged culprits would have tripped over the others to sue the Sunday Times for millions of pounds in criminal defamation and the judges involved would have hauled up everyone in sight for gross contempt of court.
Nor should it matter whether the spook in question received a hefty cheque or a promise of some lucrative posting in the future for allowing his conscience to get the better of him. The fact is that Ms Bhutto has cunningly exploited the counter-evidence at her disposal for maximum effect like a true politician who may be down but refuses to be out.
This case could have far-reaching repercussions. It might give Ms Bhutto a new lease of life. It might stiffen the resolve of lawyers and politicians to agitate for democratic revival and accountability. And it might embolden the judiciary to redeem itself by standing up a little bit to the government.
(TFT Feb 23-01 Mar, 2001 Vol-XII No.52 — Editorial)
Fighting over scarce resources
In 1935 the USA built its famous Hoover Dam and then proceeded to build 2,000 smaller dams on the same river to regulate water in times of plenty and scarcity. The objections of the affected states were quickly addressed, followed by enduring agreements. The run-up to the Aswan Dam in Egypt in 1959 was more difficult because it required an agreement between two sovereign countries, Egypt and Sudan. But that too was achieved — local Egyptian objections pertaining to hydrology were resolved by resorting to international expertise on the subject. But in Pakistan, which signed an agreement with India over water-sharing rights in 1962, non-sovereign provinces can unfortunately claim the longest deadlock in the country’s history over an equitable and efficient division of waters that has effectively embargoed any national effort to meet the critical challenge of global climatic change in times of economic scarcity. This is what happened.
The 1962 agreement with India was based on one major compromise: the waters of the eastern rivers — Ravi, Sutlej and Bias — would go to India and those of the western rivers — Indus, Jhelum and Chenab — would flow through Pakistan. Since the loss of the eastern river water was expected to devastate southern and eastern Punjab on Pakistan’s side, two major link canals were required to divert the waters of the Jhelum and Chenab into these rivers. In turn, the Jhelum and Chenab rivers were to be compensated by diverting water from the Indus via the Chashma-Jhelum and Taunsa-Punjnab link canals. The system was rounded off by building two water storage reservoirs at Mangla (1967) and Tarbela (1976) for use in times of water abundance and scarcity.
There was no significant expression of provincial discord over this arrangement at the time because there were no provinces in the country under General Ayub Khan’s prosperous one-unit west Pakistan. Subsequently, however, when a federal constitution was approved in 1973 under prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a Sindhi, the need arose to devise and clinch a provincial water-sharing accord because Sindhi representatives felt that their province had been deprived of its “rightful” share of Indus river water following the 1962 treaty with India and the diversion of the waters of the “Sindhi Indus” to the “Punjabi rivers”. Unfortunately, however, Mr Bhutto, who was ideally placed to devise and sanction an equitable and efficient water accord, didn’t have the vision to do so during his tenure. Attempts to set up commissions for securing an accord in 1980 and 1983 during the Zia ul Haq regime foundered on the rock of Sindhi distrust or NWFP dissent. Another opportunity was lost when Mohammad Khan Junejo, a Sindhi, was prime minister from 1985-88. Then, under the Nawaz Sharif regime which controlled all four provinces in 1991, a “historic” water accord was signed by all the chief ministers.
Some critical facts about this March 1991 accord should be noted since its alleged violation by Punjab in recent months is the cause of bitter provincial squabbling at a time of water shortage in the country. The accord came after much argument, with the Punjab chief minister Ghulam Haider Wyne finally relenting to a new water sharing formula favourable to Sindh only after the approval by the other parties of a priority clause permitting the establishment of new water reservoirs which would lead to an increase of at least 10% in the quantity of water available throughout the year and help supplement Punjab’s relative loss of “historical” share-rights to Sindh and the NWFP under the accord. Although a dam at Kalabagh was not explicitly mentioned at the request of the Sindhi and NWFP chief ministers Jam Sadiq Ali and Mir Afzal Khan respectively, it was clearly understood that both would prepare the provincial ground for such a project and Mr Sharif would announce it within the month. In the event, however, Mr Khan reneged from the deal by getting the NWFP assembly to vote against the Kalabagh Dam project while Sindh chief ministers Jam Sadiq Ali and later Muzaffar Shah began to drag their feet. Subsequently, neither a Sindhi prime minister (Benazir Bhutto) nor a Punjabi (Nawaz Sharif) was able to cobble a consensus over the Kalabagh Dam project. And ten years later, with no additional reservoirs established or in the offing and a water shortage on its hands, Punjab stands accused by Sindh of subverting the 1991 accord by diverting significant quantities of water from the Indus to its five rivers.
The problem is accentuated by the fact that not only have new water reservoirs not been built to address the problem of water shortage but the old ones have been allowed to silt up, choking critical downstream channels, especially in Punjab. Thus when agriculture is badly affected by low rainfall and low flow in all the rivers, as in recent times, Sindh is quick to level allegations of “water theft” against Punjab. It may be recalled that parts of both Sindh and Balochistan were struck by drought and famine-like conditions last year and Sindh is fearful of the same fate this year too. In fact, the Sindh government has asked its farmers not to expend too much acreage to the province’s most important crop, rice, because of its high water requirements. But the fact is that Punjab’s rice and cotton crops are also at risk in the south where drought has been persistent and river water discharge at its lowest in decades.
As Sindh and Punjab continue to wrangle over the apportionment of river water, the prediction is that in the next three years the catchment area of the Indus system will suffer from low rainfall and lead to drought in the two provinces. Ominously, the United Nations has synchronised its warning about a global shortage of water at the same time as the water crisis in Pakistan.
Sovereign states often do not pay heed to global factors but move selfishly to grab scarce resources at the expense of their neighbours. But Pakistan has the dubious distinction of settling the scarce-water issue with hostile India (despite the rhetoric that the enemy could and would use Kashmir to choke off Pakistan’s water supply) while creating a kind of civil war over the division of waters among its constitutent federating units. So intense has been the war of words over water between Punjab on the one hand and the NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan, on the other, that no new water reservoirs have been built in the country since 1974. Pakistan is therefore in an unenviable energy nut-cracker: it can’t have nuclear energy because of an external embargo, and it can’t have hydel energy and irrigation because of an internal embargo.
The ruling elites of Pakistan have a way of creating crises that allow no resolution. Problems much smaller than the river-water dispute have been allowed to fester because deadlock serves some vested interest or the other. Now most solutions seem difficult, if not impossible, because the time for implementing them is rapidly passing. In terms of the water problem, large dams, in particular, are no longer internationally popular and global citizens’ movements are ready to fight such projects tooth and nail wherever they are discussed. Thus if it is not easy to counsel international arbitration to the provinces of a sovereign state, the fact is that even if the provinces were to agree to submit to such an arbitration and come to an agreement, Pakistan will still find it difficult to raise the money for big dams in the next decade or so without major shifts in the way it is perceived by international money-lenders whose geo-strategic concerns are blithely spurned by our national security establishment.
If Pakistan were a genuine federal democratic republic following realistic and consensual policies at home and abroad, it could get many of its necessary infrastructure projects, including irrigation dams, off the drawing boards. Equally, a bleak economic outlook will fuel inter-provincial, inter-class and inter-ethnic distrust and conflict.
The fact is that a bankrupt economy can be significantly improved only with international help. If this were to be forthcoming, it would lessen the political pressure on the provinces for making a political cult out of economic disagreement. But as things stand, the government in Islamabad has no resources with which to attract the wrangling provincial establishments into a water-sharing agreement. Problems pushed under the carpet since the 1970s have now become crises that brook few amicable solutions. The water dispute, in particular, is potentially explosive. If famine and large-scale movements of population become an annual feature in the years of scarcity ahead, not all the nuclear weapons in our arsenal, nor all the jihads in Kashmir and Afghanistan, will preclude civil war-like conditions in the country.
(TFT Mar 02-08, 2001 Vol-XIII No.1 — Editorial)
Trussed up like a president?
The biggest non-secret of the year is out of the bag; General Pervez Musharraf is readying to don the mantle of the President of Pakistan. He said as much in a recent closed-door meeting in Islamabad with the top dogs of business and industry. Should this happen, he would have traversed a much trodden path in Pakistan’s sad history during which the Presidency has housed all sorts of conspirators (Iskander Mirza, Ghulam Ishaq Khan), usurpers (Generals Ayub, Yahya, Zia), stooges (Chaudhry Fazal Elahi, Rafiq Tarar), misfits (Farooq Leghari) and witnessed or sanctioned all manner of political instability or perversion. How will General Musharraf get there? And if he does, how will he fare?
The simplest way would be for him to follow in the footsteps of Caesar, Napoleon or Ataturk — having seized the crown, he could simply put it on his head, change his tunic and announce: “l’etat, c’est moi!” Alas, times have changed. The international community won’t stand for it. And since the international community is calling all the financial shots, therefore, someone – preferably the public but any mothball parliament, old or new, will do nicely, thank you – has to confer the presidency on him because neither the writ of the supreme court nor the will of the corps commanders will suffice.
But the public cannot be trusted in the Land of the Pure. It is fickle, if not downright treacherous, having reposed faith in demagogues like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, dilettantes like Benazir Bhutto and the intellectually challenged Nawaz Sharif. Indeed, the public is being unpardonably sinful by insisting that, given half a chance, it is likely to vote for one or both of these rascals yet again. So that leaves only parliament to fiddle with.
The defunct parliament could be revived (rubbish, said he not so long ago; it’s one option, he muses today), sooner or later, for better or for worse, to hand him his crown, create the dubious conditions for reinventing itself and call it a day. But that is easier said than done. Shorn of dozens of leading luminaries who are languishing in the clutches of NAB, the old parliament could go into divisive fits of hysteria when it reassembles without its old leaders. In the event, neither its raucous continuation nor a second sacking is likely to do the general’s cause much good.
The other route is to risk fresh general elections, order the ISI and NAB to rig them to his heart’s content by disqualifying every notable in sight, hold a gun to the head of the new parliament, much as General Zia ul Haq did in 1985, and order it to do the needful or else. Or else, what? The new parliament will be conscious of its indispensability as no parliament before it. It will not allow the generals to mess around with it for too long. And since every politician worth his salt is at least another potential Mohammad Khan Junejo, there are bound to be more than ugly hiccups ahead. Thus General Musharraf could find himself up the creek without a paddle like Zia did in 1988. The alternative would be a game of musical chairs as in the 1950s, with prime ministers getting the boot whenever they raised their heads. Neither route would serve to restore confidence in the country and revive the economy.
Yet General Musharraf seems to have opted for a more difficult transition than even General Zia. He has determined to be pitted against two political leaders instead of one. The circumstances of his era are also not as propitious as they were during Zia’s day. For one, the economy was galloping along then. It is barely crawling today under the shadow of default. Two, the international community was ready to turn a blind eye to the dictator’s political machinations then but is downright impatient with the generals today. Thus, all other things being equal, General Musharraf’s burgeoning confidence might not only be misplaced for his own personal political health, it could spell trouble for the country too.
We acknowledge the fact that General Pervez Musharraf didn’t choose to jump into the dirty political arena. He was pushed into it. But from this it should have logically followed that he would have been keen to get out as soon as possible. Instead, he has been trying to dig in his heels for a long innings. A clique of ambitious supergenerals around him, backed by an anti-corruption moral rearmament brigade comprising middle-class intellectuals seeking perfect solutions in an imperfect world, seems to have convinced him that the time is nigh for a final solution worthy of his person and rank. However, just as he is warming to this theme, the homeless intellectuals have deserted him and the economy has begun to exact a nasty toll of his credibility.
General Musharraf is a good, sincere and well-meaning soldier. But he might rue the day he allowed himself to be trussed up like one of our presidents of yore.
(TFT Mar 09-15, 2001 Vol-XIII No.2 — Editorial)
Borrow more not less
Why aren’t foreign investors interested in Pakistan? The Economist recently commented on the prospects of foreign investment in emerging markets on the basis of an opinion survey of 135 key executives of the world’s biggest 1000 companies. “Size matters”, it said, adding “China and Brazil, two big emerging markets that are expected to grow quickly, now occupy the second and third spots” in the preferential scale of foreign investors. India is among the top seven. But Pakistan, with a population nearing 150 million, is nowhere in sight, despite the fact that all but four emerging markets in the poll were smaller in size than Pakistan. Clearly, if size matters, it isn’t critical at all. What is?
“General economic performance and exchange rates” are important confidence-building factors, argues The Economist, quoting Brazil’s GDP growth of 4.4% last year on the back of a surge of 7.5% in industrial production. This makes sense. The east Asian tigers — Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore — who were in desperate waters not so long ago are back in business, having recently stabilised their exchange rates and posted growth rates of 6%-12%. In contrast, Pakistan’s GDP is languishing at about 3.5%, large-scale industrial production is stuck at below 2% and its rupee is devalued by over 13% every year.
Curiously enough, though, even these two factors may not be critical. Turkey is in The Economist’s list of 25 top emerging markets when Pakistan is not, even though its size is less than Pakistan’s, its interest rate is several thousand percent, inflation is about 80% per annum, industrial production was minus 4.2% last December and its trade balance was minus US$ 27.4 billion last November.
Statistics reveal an interesting common factor among the 25 top emerging markets. Irrespective of economic performance, exchange rate stability or size of the country, all of them boast significant levels of forex reserves. China was second in the emerging market list and first in the forex reserve category (US$164 billion); Turkey was 22nd but had reserves of US$ 19 billion. India was 7th but its reserves topped US$ 37 billion. Hong Kong was last with reserves of US$ 106 billion! In fact, only Hungary had reserves of under US$ 11 billion.
Compare this to Pakistan’s forex reserves of only US$ 1 billion last December. In fact, we have been on the brink of financial default for many years, but acutely so after May 1998 when we tested the nuclear bomb, froze forex deposits and betrayed the confidence of Pakistani and foreign investors alike.
The level of forex reserves is a good barometer of the potential health of any economy because it reflects its ability to pay back royalty, dividends and interest on loans. It enables free outward movement of capital, which is a pre-requisite for greater foreign investment inflows. What economic strategy will ensure a respectable level of forex reserves?
The prevailing wisdom is that we should focus on reducing our “crippling international debt”. But, all other things being equal, foreign debt reduction should lead to forex reserve reduction rather than the other way round. Nor is debt a bad thing necessarily. In fact, some of the most indebted countries of the world are among the richest or most dynamic emerging markets of today. It is one’s ability to pay back debt that matters to foreign investors and creditors. Thus, the higher the level of forex reserves, the greater the credit worthiness of the country and potential inflow of foreign investment.
There are two major ways to build forex reserves. By exporting more than importing. But we can’t do this overnight, given the lack of a sufficiently developed human resource base necessary to make the changeover from an import-dependent economy to an export-led one. The other is to create an economic and political environment in which people want to send money for savings and investment in Pakistan rather than one in which everyone wants to hoard, hide or take it out of the country.
But we cannot hate or spurn the international community while we beg it to bail us out of our misery. We cannot hover on the brink of financial default while we ask foreigners to invest in our country. We cannot turn a blind eye to religious extremism and indulge in regional warmongering and expect international secular democrats to support us. We cannot pretend to locate our problems in South Asia while we search for solutions in the Middle-East. We cannot posit a political defiance of the West on nuclear-related issues while we pretend a tactical economic alignment with it.
We can attract foreign capital and know-how to Pakistan by creating a healthy level of forex reserves. This can be done by persuading the international donor community to write off a chunk of our international debt or to radically reschedule it. Or, better still, by getting it to lend us more money rather than less on even more favourable terms so that we are able to capture the space required to restructure our economy for self-sustained growth. But this, in turn, can only be predicated on an assured, long-term strategic partnership with the West as in the case of Turkey. Nothing less will suffice.
(TFT Mar 16-22, 2001 Vol-XIII No.3 — Editorial)
Strategic depth or isolation?
The Taliban’s Buddha-bashing is un-Islamic, argue Islamic scholars and religious leaders across the world. It is illegal, claim international jurists. It is unnecessary, irrational, unreasonable, stupid, nay barbaric, say others. Indeed, not one word in defence of this senseless destruction has been uttered by anyone outside Afghanistan. Yet the Taliban are defiant. Why’s that?
When the rag-tag armies of the Taliban first swept across the war-ravaged plains and mountains of Afghanistan in 1995-96, they were motivated more by their desire to wage war for the purposes of peace than by any madrassah-inspired zeal to enforce a particular “vision” of Islam. But, prodded and propped up by Pakistan, they ended up conquering nearly all of Afghanistan in the next two years. Subsequently, they sought to acquire legitimacy, or reinvent themselves, primarily in the garb of an Islam in which pre-Islamic tribal custom and primitive rituals, superstition and ignorance, all jostled for supremacy with ordained notions of equality and social justice. Thus, even as Pakistan turned a blind eye or condoned their retrogressive actions, one Taliban decree followed another in banning music, shaving heads, outlawing female education and employment, cutting-off hands, and even stoning alleged adulterers to death. In due course, the inability of the Taliban (and their Pakistani handlers) to erect an efficient, moderate and consensual political and administrative system in multi-ethnic Afghanistan and their increasing frustration at being denied international recognition created a propensity for negative or punitive measures in order to entrench themselves domestically.
Unfortunately, the international community’s attitude towards the Taliban hasn’t helped in moderating their beliefs. After walking out of Afghanistan at the end of the cold war, the West has made no serious institutional effort to engage the Taliban in the economic and political reconstruction of Afghanistan as a gateway to the mineral-rich region of Central Asia. On the contrary, it has rained cruise missiles on Afghanistan and thwarted the Taliban’s attempts to demolish their opponents. In fact, the latest episode of Buddha-bashing may be seen in the light of the UN sanctions on the Taliban regime last January. How’s that?
The UN sanctions were applied when drought and famine stalked Afghanistan, when millions were faced with starvation, fuelling the exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Pakistan. The aim of these sanctions is to weaken the Taliban’s hold on Afghanistan, partly by provoking internal instability and partly by denying them Pakistani military assistance in the forthcoming spring offensive by the Northern Alliance led by former Afghan president Burhannudin Rabbani (whose non-existent government is still recognised by the UN as the legitimate government of Afghanistan). These sanctions have been followed by three major acts of defiance, frustration, resentment or anger by the Taliban: Osama Bin Laden’s marriage was internationally publicised, as if to say “up yours”; a massacre of Shi’ite Hazaras was blithely condoned, as if to say “who cares”; two women were executed for alleged adultery, as if to say “so what” and now the Buddhas so beloved of the international community have been demolished, as if to say “damn you.”
The latest provocation is particularly instructive. Five years ago, Mulla Umar had decried the Taliban zealots who ransacked Kabul Museum and destroyed priceless artefacts; last year he set up a committee to review the case of “idol-worship”; five weeks after the UN sanctions, on February 26 this year, and despite acknowledging that there are no Buddhists in Afghanistan, he issued his fatwa and refused to back down when the world roared in outrage.
Pakistan’s cynical attitude to Afghanistan and its opportunist relationship with the Taliban is also responsible for the current impasse. In pursuit of dubious notions of statecraft, Islamabad has relentlessly, and often recklessly, sought to make Afghanistan a subservient client state. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was Pakistan’s first blue-eyed boy. But when he failed to deliver, a “historic accord” was clinched with Burhanuddin Rabbani. But when Rabbani demonstrated that he had a mind of his own, Islamabad was quick to clutch at Mullah Umar. Now Mulla Umar has become unpredictable and unreasonable but there is no fall-back or forward position for Pakistan as it writhes uncomfortably in the glare of international censure. Indeed, even though Islamabad claims that it did more than anybody else to dissuade the Taliban from carrying out their threat to demolish the Buddhas, the world has reserved its harshest criticism for Pakistan as the “sole defender and supporter of the extremist regime in Afghanistan”. The fear is that Islamabad could be further isolated as moderate Muslim nations scramble to evade the fallout of the Taliban’s extremist version of “Islam” that borders “international terrorism”, as the European Union fulminates about Pakistan’s failure to exercise its “considerable and unique influence” with the Taliban, and as the United States weighs its options to bomb Osama Bin Laden out of Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s Afghan policy is an unmitigated disaster. The Taliban blowback in the form of sectarian and jehadi inspired violence continues to exact a heavy toll of civil society in Pakistan. Now it is threatening to push us into the eye of an international storm. The sooner we change our misplaced notions of outreach, the better. The blowback of vague “strategic depth” is certain strategic isolation and despair.
(TFT Mar 23-29, 2001 Vol-XIII No.4 — Editorial)
Too little, too late?
The run-up to Moharram is always predictable. There are official vows to “crush sectarian terrorism” and ulema of all stripes are loud in denouncing firqawariat. But this year, the main sectarian organizations are conspicuous by their deadly silence. In fact, the fear is that the Sunni sectarian terrorists may rampage during Moharram in protest against the recent hanging of their hero, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, and the incarceration of their firebrand leader, Maulana Azam Tariq.
Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, it may be recalled, assassinated the Iranian Consul, Sadiq Ganji, in 1990 but could not be sentenced because at least a dozen judges of the Lahore High Court were afraid or reluctant to convict him. Last year, however, the supreme court was nudged to do the needful by the military regime following an Iranian outcry at his acquittal by the Lahore High Court. But the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a banned offshoot of the Sipah-i-Sahaba, avenged the hanging of its leader by killing dozens of Shias in Sheikhupura two weeks ago. A week ago, the Shias went on a killing spree by targeting SS activists and sympathizers in Nishat Colony, Lahore. Meanwhile, Riaz Basra, a companion of Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, is still at large, having inexplicably “escaped” from police custody many years ago to subsequently sow terror in the heart of various civil administrations by successfully targeting top Shia civil servants and police officers in the Punjab.
Now General Pervez Musharraf has expressed his determination to tackle the scourge of sectarian violence in this country. His words ring truer than those of the politicians he has deposed because he is not obliged to horsetrade. In fact, he is averse to sectarian violence because it hurts his government’s drive to portray itself as a “no-nonsense” regime keen on stability and reform. So we may expect the current ban on weapons-display to be followed by a ban on certain avowedly sectarian organizations, followed by the formal tasking of the military’s intelligence agencies to bring the worst offenders to book. But are such administrative measures, however welcome, a case of too little, too late?
To answer this question, we need to remind ourselves that sporadic sectarian disagreement was institutionalized into continuing sectarian violence in this country during the time of General Zia ul Haq when the constitution was formally stripped of its informal secular garb, and sectarian ideas and leaders were allowed entry into the organs of state and government. From then onwards, it has been downhill all the way. Today, at least three Shia-majority cities — Parachinar, Gilgit and Jhang — are in a permanent state of siege while even Karachi, once a sparkling cosmopolitan city, is acutely vulnerable to the sectarian menace.
Some people say that there is not much that the state can do about a religious disagreement that is embedded in Islam’s early history. True. But when a state in a country overwhelmingly dominated by one sect makes it its business to promote so-called Islamic ideas, beliefs and practices, why should one expect the state to remain neutral in passionate schismatic disagreements between the two sects, however well-intentioned any particular organs of the state may be? Surely, isn’t it inevitable under the circumstances that the weight of the ideas and beliefs of the majority sect will be far greater than that of the minority sect and lead to a potentially discriminatory and divisive situation in the country? Indeed, one reason why the state has not been able to curb sectarian warfare in this country is that powerful sections of the state either secretly agree with some of the prejudices of the dominant sectarian ideology as espoused by its violent practitioners or condone it for opportunist strategic external policies.
The state’s reluctance to uproot the aggressive sectarianism of the majority sect is also related to its administrative weakness. The police, for instance, is far less motivated than its adversaries, not merely because of insufficient material incentives and resources but also because of its majoritarian-sect beliefs which find an echo in those of its leading foe. Certainly, it is not as well armed.
The proliferation of small arms since the Afghan campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s has led to the use of weapons for offence rather than defence, to fuel civil war at home and insurgency abroad. But it is no consolation to say that jehad is being waged outside one’s territory because the mind-set nurtured by a proliferating arms culture is consolidated at home and not abroad. The problem becomes even more intractable if external wars are not fought by professional soldiers but by jehadis from the majority sect who periodically return to the home country as heroes in civil society. Thus, open borders facilitate the inflow of all sorts of sophisticated weapons from all over the world. Indeed, Afghanistan alone has sufficient Afghan-war leftovers to arm the majority-sect warriors for another twenty years.
If it is futile to try and resolve old religious differences, it is downright dangerous in a predominantly two-sect nation to de-neutralize or de-secularise the state by allowing majority-sect versions of Islam to dominate its civil and security discourse. Until we stop doing that, we are fated to bite the bullet and be savaged by the warriors of “true faith”.
(TFT Mar 30-05 April, 2001 Vol-XIII No.5 — Editorial)
History Man
The government may have successfully bust the ARD’s proposed rally at Mochi Gate in Lahore on March 23. But its decision and modus operandi have been variously diagnosed as “reactionary”, “precipitous”, “needless”, etc. The argument is that if the rally had not been disallowed it would have pitched the ARD in rather poor light because the politicians would not have been able to muster a respectable and animated crowd. As it is, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, Qasim Zia and Javed Hashmi cannot bring themselves to wipe out the grins from their faces. Certainly, the regime has got a bad press at home and abroad.
But the supergenerals seem to have figured it out. “We don’t want to be distracted from our main concerns”, they rebut, suggesting that political activity is bad for the economy and noting the virtues of a “non-discriminatory” approach. Mr Farooq Leghari had planned to march from Peshawar to Attock to demand an international debt reprieve, hardly a provocative act. But he wasn’t allowed to do so. Similarly, Mr Rasul Bux Palejo’s long march in Sindh to focus on the issue of water-sharing and shortage was broken up even though it posed no discernable threat to the regime. All this is true enough. But it is actually the proverbial fig leaf for a less than democratic road map for the future. Consider the sequence of events and the logic of a veritable anti-democratic entry strategy that is cunningly portrayed as a “true democracy” exit strategy.
The local elections have been staggered over a seven month period and split unevenly across the provinces ostensibly because voter lists are not ready but actually because it is easier to control and channel passions in the desired direction over a longer time span and wider canvass compared to an unpredictable, one-shot, operation across the length and breadth of the country. In the absence of political parties, this is the best way to corral voters into polling stations without worrying about the results in the heat and dust of battle. Hence the 45% voter turnout last January was comfortably upped to over 50% on March 21. That was just two days before the proposed ARD rally. If the signal hadn’t gone out to the voters on the eve of the rally that party politicians were strictly no-no, the results of the second round of local elections might not have been so welcome to the regime as they were in the event.
Mian Azhar’s election as president of the PML on March 25 was also scheduled in the shadow of the ARD rally. After the ISI had painstakingly herded the recalcitrant PML MNAs into the dissident camp by promising all sorts of sweet nothings, how could it risk allowing the ARD to dilute or sabotage its message on March 25? The iron fist had to be smashed on the party-political street opposition as represented by the ARD so that the non-party independents at the local level and the King’s party hopefuls behind Mian Azhar in Islamabad could be massaged with a veiled glove. And never mind, as one keen observer has pointed out, that the Margalla Cricket Ground where a red carpet was laid out for the 5000 strong anti-Nawaz PML dissidents so that they could jostle and crowd each other out was bigger and better than the barbed-wire Mochi Gate venue denied to the ARD.
Therefore General Pervez Musharraf’s March 25 announcement to seek an indefinite extension in his tenure as army chief fits nicely into the jigsaw puzzle. When the time is ripe, he means to become the president of Pakistan. When and how will that happen?
General Musharraf is half way there already. Half the local elections are in the bag. And half the political opposition (ie, PML) is in his pocket. Come August, the curtain will fall on the local elections and it will be time to start thinking of provincial elections and what to do about Benazir Bhutto and the PPP. Come to think of it, what is to stop him from decreeing that no one may be elected prime minister if he or she has already been PM twice? Once his nemeses are out of the way for good, he could stagger the provincial elections across time and space much like the local elections and try and engineer “positive results”. That would leave him just one step short of the coveted presidency atop a planned national security council or some such thing. The coup de grace would come with the national elections, which would seek to legitimise and institutionalise the role of the supergeneral regime and accord primacy to General Pervez Musharraf. The question of the restoration of the assemblies is peripheral to the main thrust of future developments. It is merely one route among many to the same end.
If General Pervez Musharraf has his way there will be no politics on the streets of Pakistan. And Pakistanis will not be free to choose the politicians and political system of their choice. But if the road to hell is often paved with the best of intentions, history might still have its way and the best-laid plans could go astray.
(TFT April 06-12, 2001 Vol-XIII No.6 — Editorial)
Restrain them, General
The good news is that the number of journalists imprisoned for various alleged offences in 131 countries of the world declined from 87 to 81 in 1999-2000. The bad news is that there were over 600 cases of media repression, including assassination, assault, imprisonment, censorship and bureaucratic harassment involving trumped-up tax-evasion charges, crippling libel suits and prolonged advertising boycotts. Worse, 24 journalists were killed last year in the line of duty — 16 in cold-blooded murders in which most of the murderers went scot-free.
The worst offenders were drug cartels in Columbia, crime syndicates in Russia and state-sponsored death squads in Sierra Leone. The Report suggests that journalists were more likely to be imprisoned in China (22 last year) and murdered in Columbia (34 in the last decade) than anywhere else. Among the other pariah states inimical to a free press were the Ukraine, Mozambique, Venezuela and almost all dictatorships in the so-called “Islamic” Middle-East. The worrying details are listed in the annual report of the influential New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
The CPJ notes, however, that some progress has been made in defending press freedom across the world. This is proof that organisations like the CPJ, Amnesty International and other human rights watchdogs devoted to exposing abuse and rousing opinion against acts of oppression and repression, have distinctly served the cause of press freedom. But “outrageous abuses of the media continue as governments achieve their repressive goals with more sophisticated techniques of harassment”. How has Pakistan’s press fared under the military regime?
Decidedly better than under the last representative government when horrendous tactics were used to try and silence the independent press. In fact, the Nawaz Sharif government lost the support and sympathy of key countries when it tried to gag journalists and papers in Pakistan. By the same token, General Pervez Musharraf has earned grudging support from the international community for his hands-off-the-press policy so far. In fact, he is quick to flaunt press freedom as a key element of his novel “return-to-true-democracy” agenda.
But a degree of disquiet, even alarm and fear, is in the air. Last September, Gen Musharraf denounced journalists for planting stories at the behest of the deposed prime minister. Challenged to prove his allegation, the good general angrily pursed his lips but declined to comment. Then, last November, 3 employees of a daily paper in Karachi died in an inexplicable bomb explosion in their office. Words of sympathy and solace apart, the regime remains totally disinterested in investigating the incident, tracking down the culprits and determining motives. Around the same time, an army monitoring team unthinkingly trampled all over the offices of another paper in Karachi, creating quite a stir among journalists. Earlier, in May, violent mobs attacked and ransacked the office of a newspaper in Karachi while the police stayed put. In between all this, a Sindhi journalist was murdered by a local Mafioso who bought his way to freedom and a newspaper in the northern areas was banned while its editor was hounded out of the area for arousing the wrath of the local military commander.
It is, however, the sacking of the Frontier Post in Peshawar by zealots some months ago that has tarred the painstakingly contrived press-friendly image of this regime. PTV couldn’t hide its glee at the desperate plight of the paper and its journalists. And the Peshawar administration seemed to freeze in its tracks at the wondrous scene of gutting printing machines but swept the streets in search of the blaspheming journalists. Even the CE couldn’t restrain his impulse to signal good riddance to bad rubbish!
Now a senior reporter of The News in Islamabad, Mr Shakil Sheikh, has been badly roughed up by unknown assailants. Mr Sheikh has pointed a finger at those who don’t like his reports. Who are these people? How are they able to roam the streets of Islamabad in unmarked four-wheel drive jeeps? What are the boot-mark injuries on his back supposed to imply? Does he know or suspect their identity but doesn’t want to remark upon it? The journalist community is buzzing with speculation but no one is naming names, explaining motives or investigating the facts in print. Indeed, a curious new development seems to have tainted sections of the press. It is the realisation or fear that if it tramples on the boots of the powerful men in khaki by exposing nepotism or lack of transparency or moral turpitude (thank God, there is no overt corruption so far), there may be scant legal protection in its hour of trial.
This does not bode well for the regime. When the press is afraid to freely air its news and views, a whispering campaign can prove deadly because there is no official or public defense against it. In time, the world will wake up to the plight of the local press and General Musharraf will lose the key to his showcase of democracy. Restrain the rogue elements, General, before they stir a hornets’ nest and harm you irretreivably.
(TFT April 13-19, 2001 Vol-XIII No.7 — Editorial)
One possible script
If a black cat can have up to nine lives, Benazir Bhutto must wonder why she can’t be blessed with a third one at least. Why not, indeed?
The recent supreme court order for a retrial of the SGS/Cotecna corruption case against her and Asif Zardari proves that the high court trial in 1998-99 was rigged by Nawaz Sharif. Certainly, Saif ur Rehman’s abject “apology” to Mr Zardari recently is evidence of his objectionable role in the matter.
Ms Bhutto can also safely assume that the retrial will keep her on the front pages for a long time. Her review petition for acquittal will take some weeks. If she wins, well and good. But if she loses, the question of the “competent court” in which the trial is to be held will have to be addressed. However, the old accountability law under which she was tried in the high court has given way to the NAB ordinance under which the government will want to seize the issue. But Ms Bhutto is likely to challenge this assumption. That should consume some more energy. At any rate, the NAB ordinance is already being thrashed in the supreme court where, let alone the judges who are perceptibly hostile to it, even the attorney-general is embarrassed to own up to its draconian provisions. Thus a watered-down accountability ordinance should afford her personal relief as well present opportunities to fortify her legal defence.
Much, of course, will depend on the supreme court’s detailed logic when this is made public. In turn, Ms Bhutto’s defence will depend on whether the court has attached any relevance or significance to the conduct of the high court judges as demonstrated by the scandalous tapes, or based its judgment on the procedural unfairness of the trial. Additionally, the question of whether there is to be a trial from scratch or whether only certain aspects of recording and appreciation of evidence are to be redressed will impact on the duration of the retrial. Finally, both sides are likely to appeal galore as the case trudges all the way back to the supreme court. Does this mean that Ms Bhutto can afford to relax?
Hardly. General Khalid Maqbool, the head honcho at NAB, was forewarned. So he is forearmed with a clutch of brand new charges against Ms Bhutto and Mr Zardari. He says that if the lady thinks she can set a free foot in Pakistan she is sadly mistaken. Ms Bhutto, of course, understands the language of the generals only too well and has calibrated her response accordingly. Disclaiming a quick return to Pakistan, she has ordered her party stalwarts to make haste for London for a meeting to determine an appropriate re-entry strategy for her. Meanwhile, delighted with the PPP’s improved showing in the Punjab during the second stage of the local elections, she has nudged Nawabzada Nasrullah to test the waters by attempting a second public plunge on May Day. Her approach is failsafe because she has learnt her lessons well.
In a predominantly two-party system, post cold-war nature abhors a political vacuum just as much as it abhors attempts to fill the vacuum by a non-representative third party. Thus the vacuum engineered by Ms Bhutto’s ouster in 1990 was filled by Mr Sharif, the one by Mr Sharif in 1993 by Ms Bhutto and the one by Ms Bhutto in 1996 by Mr Sharif in 1997. So she is basically telling the generals that they should make a deal with her to fill the current vacuum. But General Pervez Musharraf thinks otherwise. He believes that instead of filling the vacuum in the old political system it is time to sweep the old system aside by creating a new one which is based on the two popular parties but without their acknowledged leaders so that he can become the kingpin instead of either of them.
This is a novel idea. It departs from Zia ul Haq’s non-party model by trying to reinvent the Pakistan Muslim League without Nawaz Sharif while holding out the possibility of working with the Pakistan Peoples Party without the Bhutto-Zardaris. But it is far from being accomplished. Indeed, the inability of the pro-Musharraf PML dissident group to fire the imagination of the Pakistani public, coupled with the supreme court’s judicial reassertion and an aggressively pro-democracy international environment, has enabled Ms Bhutto to deal herself a good hand. She means to throw everything she can muster at General Musharraf so that she can get a better deal from him than Nawaz Sharif. What’s possible?
Protestations for the sake of form notwithstanding, General Musharraf is not averse to political deals when the alternative is less palatable. Thus the greater Ms Bhutto’s success in making a real public comeback, the better the deal she can hope to get from General Musharraf. At the very least, she has to make a real nuisance of herself so that Mr Zardari is let off and a front-row seat is reserved for the PPP in the next national assembly without Ms Bhutto. That, at least, is one possible script. But Pakistani scripts are notoriously susceptible to the mercurial Pakistani weather.
(TFT April 20-26, 2001 Vol-XIII No.8 — Editorial)
Duplicity all round
United Bank Ltd has just petitioned the supreme court (SC) to review a sweeping decision by the SC’s Shariat Appellate Bench (SAB) in December 1999 which equated interest with riba, outlawed all interest-based financial systems and transactions as “un-Islamic”, proposed new Islamic financial institutions and economic laws, and set June 30th, 2001, as a cut-off date for implementing its order. However, the UBL petition does not directly challenge the definition of riba approved by the SC, nor its blanket equation with interest in a capitalist, free-market system. It merely argues that the SC went beyond its constitutional jurisdiction in proposing certain types of Islamic institutions and laws to replace the ones in place currently because only parliament is authorised to make laws and establish new institutions.
Since the matter is sub judice, we will not discuss the legal merits of the petition. But the duplicitous manner in which successive governments, including this one, have dealt with this critical issue cries out for comment. It is also necessary to reiterate that in the current international environment of fear and loathing for the wave of religious extremism threatening to engulf Pakistan, this could become a matter of life and death for our struggling economy.
In 1991, the Federal Shariat Court (bequeathed by a military dictator) was prodded by “Islamic ideologues” in Nawaz Sharif’s Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (both created by the military) to declare interest as riba and ban all interest-bearing transactions as un-Islamic. The FSC was emboldened to do so by Mr Sharif who had not only handpicked its chief judge but also amended the constitution to incorporate shariah as “the supreme law of the land”. However, Mr Sharif was forced to reconsider his decisions when his finance minister, Mr Sartaj Aziz, was collared by members of the Aid to Pakistan consortium in Paris in 1992. Therefore, as a sop to aid donors, the government reluctantly appealed the FSC decision in the SC. But as a sop to the Islamic ideologues propping up the IJI government, no serious effort was made to overturn the decision. Indeed, interminable delays were sought by the petitioner and granted by the SC, even though the law expressly said that the review petition should be disposed of within six months.
The hypocritical conspiracy launched by Mr Sharif continued under Benazir Bhutto from 1993 to 1996. In fact, she left the case in cold storage because she didn’t want IJI ideologues baying for her blood. But the mood became decidedly chilling after Mr Sharif returned to power in 1997, packed the SAB with hard-line Islamic judges and, in a shocking U-turn in 1998, withdrew his pending 1991 appeal against the FSC judgment. A proposal to amend the constitution and make himself Amir ul Momineen followed, but was thankfully blocked in the Senate. Undaunted, he moved a local court to throw out a London court’s order to pay about US$ 30m in principal and accumulated interest on a loan his father and brother had taken from a middle-eastern bank a long time ago. His lawyers argued that interest was un-Islamic and the local court accepted their plea. Simultaneously, the Sharifs approached the Lahore High Court to waive all interest payments on the billions of rupees in bank loans outstanding against them. Indeed, the farce soon threatened epidemic proportions when Mr Saif ur Rehman, a Sharif henchman, also requested the High Court to waive interest charges on his Rs 1 billion bank dues.
No less stunning was the manner in which the SAB reacted to the government’s decision to withdraw its 1991 appeal. Instead of dropping the matter as is the norm in such situations, the court summoned “financial experts” and “Islamic jurists” to enlighten it. In due course, a detailed anti-interest judgment was delivered in the absence of any appellant or respondent in the case!
The timing was curious, to say in the least. It came at a particularly difficult time for the country and new government. The former was crying out for foreign investment and the latter was desperate to project a modern and moderate face of Islam to the outside world. Instead, it seemed to make Pakistan look like the Plague.
Curiosity, however, gave way to disbelief when General Musharraf casually shrugged it away. Disbelief turned to shock when Mr Shaukat Aziz ordered his minions to start fashioning the tools of Islamic finance ordained by the SAB. And shock turned to horror when both gentlemen unflappably told the donor community that the judgment would neither apply to foreign financial transactions nor jeopardise the World Bank funded programme for financial and judicial sector reforms along the lines of a modern free-market economy.
The faces have changed but the pretence and opportunism remains the same. UBL’s feeble petition at the last hour does not ask the SC to re-examine the fundamental issue of equating all forms of interest as riba that lies at the heart of the matter. This is a delaying tactic. At best, it will sow more financial confusion when the appeal is finally adjudged. At worst, it will enable a Damocles-like sword to be hung over us as we seek integration in the global economy.
(TFT April 27-03 May, 2001 Vol-XIII No.9 — Editorial)
A small beginning at least
As navy chief (1994-1997), Admiral Mansoor ul Haq’s corruption preceded him. But evidence of commissions and kickbacks was hard to come by, so he remained at large, perennially cosying up to the First Husband, Asif Zardari, and flouting all rules and regulations. However, if TFT couldn’t name names, its back page was heavy with innuendo and allusion about the navy chief’s mischief.
TFT took the plunge during the interim government of President Farooq Leghari in 1996 when it lent its pages to l’enfant terrible of the Pakistani press, Ardeshir Cowasjee, because his own paper was reluctant to print his commentary on the affairs of the navy. After the first article appeared, there was a howl of protest from naval headquarters. The PM’s staff wondered how a paper belonging to the PM’s advisor — TFT’s editor was then on loan to the federal cabinet – could target serving member(s) of the government and bring the armed forces into “disrepute”. Undaunted, TFT went ahead and published a second article by Mr Cowasjee. This now became the object of sharp remarks from the navy chief at a private dinner in Islamabad hosted by the PM in which the president, service chiefs and the advisor were all present.
However, to be fair to the armed forces, it must be admitted that the ISI had also submitted a dossier on Admiral Haq’s doings and undoings to the PM’s secretariat. But the prevailing view among the other service chiefs and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee was that Admiral Haq was giving the forces a bad name, so he should be eased out (not sacked), citing ill-health rather than misdemeanour. In the event, however, the Admiral’s plea that he should be allowed to stay on until he had married off his daughter was readily accepted.
There are a number of incredible aversions in this account. First, it is difficult even under a democratic government in Pakistan for the press to level serious charges of corruption or impropriety against senior members of the armed forces, let alone serving service chiefs, because of a habit of self-censorship and hangover of fear inherited from the long night of military Raj.
Second, there is no civil tradition of putting senior armed forces personnel on trial for corruption or misuse of power. Indeed, the rule is that the civil order must remain at arms length from armed forces personnel, serving or retired, high or low, irrespective of any crimes that they may have committed. Thus, if Admiral Haq was unharmed as navy chief, we only have to recall the case of General Aslam Beg who, after retirement, was condoned by the chief justice of Pakistan after he had publicly confessed (thereby committing contempt of the supreme court) how, as army chief in 1988, he had leaned on the supreme court not to restore the national assembly but to order new elections. General Beg it was, too, who had revealed how he and the ISI split the proceeds from a highly dubious financial handout by banker Yunus Habib in 1990 for the purposes of rigging the elections to keep Benazir Bhutto out of power. Finally, it was General Aslam Beg who received a US$10 million cheque in his personal name from Osama Bin Laden in 1990 for the same objective. The civil and army high command has known this fact from Day-One but no one has had the courage to cleanse the stables.
Third, every accountability law passed by the civilians has steered clear of the armed forces on the pretext that their in-house accountability process is failsafe and transparent, even though the truth is patently otherwise. Indeed, even Mr Saif ur Rehman had to wait after Admiral Haq was eased out of office before he could even contemplate an investigation against him. In the event, Admiral Haq was allowed by Mr Rehman to leave the country even though he should have been a prime candidate to top the ECL list. If all this is true, why has the military government sought Mr Haq’s extradition from the USA?
Clearly, General Pervez Musharraf is hugely embarrassed that NAB’s draconian outreach doesn’t extend to the armed forces, more so because General Mohammad Amjad, the first head of NAB, was in favour of casting his net over certain fellow khakis. But accountability of army generals is not quite the same thing as that of navy admirals. Also, Mr Haq’s links with Mr Zardari are a special attraction. In fact, TFT has learnt that the government sought Mr Haq’s extradition only after he spurned the offer of a deal with NAB whereby he might have avoided a tortuous trial if he had returned the kickbacks and implicated Mr Zardari in the submarine deal.
Explanations apart, we welcome the government’s efforts to drag Mr Haq back to Pakistan. His extradition and trial will set new precedents. In the future, every civilian or khaki crook will suffer a recurring nightmare wherever he or she is holed out. That may not be a sufficient deterrent against high level crime but it is a beginning in the right direction at least.
(TFT May 04-10, 2001 Vol-XIII No.10 — Editorial)
India: conduct unbecoming
Despite peace-mongering, India remains the bully on the block. Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal have been variously alienated. Now, four years after the Gugral peace initiative settled the water dispute with Bangladesh, its eastern neighbour has been given a dose of New Delhi’s aggressive intent.
Last week, 16 Indian soldiers were killed by the Bangladesh army when they violated the international border in the Sylhet-Meghalaya sector. Understandably, Indians were angry to learn that the dead bodies had been mutilated. Inexplicably, however, the Indian government didn’t shed any light on what had happened, despite a string of nagging questions by the Bangladesh media. Nor has India registered the message of the protesting people of Bangladesh. Instead, the BJP’s allies want aggressive action. Accordingly, New Delhi has reinforced its forces on the border and registered a case of “war crimes” against Bangladesh in an Indian court.
India needs to look at what is happening inside Bangladesh in order to understand why its army has encountered such fierce resistance from the Bangladesh army. Mrs Hasina Wajed’s Awami League government is friendly with the Hindu-nationalist BJP government (it was friendlier still with the Gujral government earlier). But India and BD share a potentially troublesome 4000 km long border guarded by 700 ‘border outposts’ because both countries have enclaves penetrating far into each other’s territory. This is the legacy of the 1947 Radcliffe Award. It should have been straightened out but wasn’t when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan. However, an agreement to do so was signed in 1974. But this wasn’t subsequently ratified by India because it perceived ‘unfriendly political trends’ in Dhaka that led to the political eclipse of the pro-India Awami League of Sheikh Mujiburrehman. Meanwhile, India has continued to suffer from a steady ‘leakage’ of Bangladeshis into India which could have been better prevented if the treaty had been ratified.
Most Indian security experts insist that India should adopt a “forward policy” and teach Bangladesh a lesson. They accuse Bangladesh of culpability on other counts too: that a senior BD army officer paid a visit to Pakistan recently; that Khaleda Zia, the opposition leader, visited China; that the ISI had set up office in a certain quarter of Dhaka and was behind it all; that the Bangladeshi army was pro-Pakistan and that General Musharraf’s current visit to Myanmar could be part of a grand design against India. But no one cared to note that the Bangladeshi media was unanimous in criticising India for provoking the conflict.
Indian security minds are unwilling to see Bangladesh as a small state next door that should be sympathetically treated. They also tend to encourage the Indian public to think of India as an innocent and righteous state constantly destabilised by its’ wicked’ small neighbours. Indeed, the Indian state is so disabled by passions of misplaced nationalism that it cannot fathom why a small and poor state like Bangladesh should choose to kill and maim its troops in such a manner. This, despite the eventual great cost to India when a Sri Lankan soldier hit prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1990 with his rifle butt during a ceremonial parade long before he was assassinated as a direct consequence of the Indian role in the civil war in Sri Lanka. The fact that the Indian ‘free’ media has also failed to present the other side of the story — how the BSF has gradually encroached on Bangladeshi enclaves – reinforces the negative aspect of Indian nationalism.
The hostile Indian reaction does not auger well for the future of Indo-BD relations. Prime minister Hasina Wajed’s popularity will plunge if she isn’t sufficiently defiant. Right wing politicians might also try to deepen the wedge that already exists between her and a suspicious BD army. Therefore Bangladesh might be destabilised unless India shows understanding, ratifies the treaty and gets out of the enclaves it has seized.
If India wants to be recognised as a global player it must first be accepted as a generous regional power trusted by its smaller neighbours. But this is highly unlikely in view of the prevailing circumstances. Now that elections are on in some Indian states hosting Bangladeshi refugees, local politics is bound to turn on communal issues, with leaders putting on the war paint in states like Assam, Bihar and West Bengal, and souring the regional atmosphere further. Let us not forget that there are over one million Bangladeshi refugees in India and the Bangladeshi economy is overwhelmed by goods smuggled across the unprotected border from India.
India’s quarrel with Pakistan is out in the open but Nepal and Bangladesh have tended to downplay their simmering squabbles with their big neighbour. However, when governments sweep big issues under the carpet, their people tend to form their own views about what India is doing to their country. Thus India’s villainy tends to be exaggerated and harms its bilateral relationships. Therefore, as the big country, India should understand this better than the small countries in its neighbourhood. But it doesn’t seem to give a damn. That is classic small-power behaviour in a nation that bids to become a global player and sit inside the UN Security Council.
(TFT May 11-17, 2001 Vol-XIII No.11 — Editorial)
The world according to PM
If it’s lonely at the top, as General Pervez Musharraf claims, it’s certainly not evident in his demeanour. The general is bristling with overconfidence. The politicians have no credibility, he thunders, hence they have no right to hold public meetings. The IMF and World Bank are on board, he asserts, hence everything’s chummy with the donor community. Traders and businessmen have forked over an additional Rs 50 billion in taxes this year, he argues, hence everything is going to be hunky dory with the economy. The local elections are whistling through, he chuckles, hence it’s time to start thinking of ascending the presidency. The supreme court is in a cooperative mood, he grins, hence any number of constitutional amendments can be made. The dictatorial regimes in Burma and Egypt which recently laid out the red carpet for him are alive and kicking, he shrugs, hence his own longevity is assured. The foreign minister has been invited to meet the top dogs of the Bush administration in Washington, he clarifies, hence sanctions are on their way out. The Taliban are giving Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Masood a good thrashing, he notes, hence the European Union which invited Masood to Brussels recently can go jump in a lake. The jihadis are making India pay through its nose in Kashmir, he boasts, hence the national security strategy is clicking. Finally, praise be to Allah who moves in mysterious and unexpected ways, Washington and Beijing are trading threats, he submits, hence Pakistan may receive some Chinese windfalls in the bargain.
But before General Musharraf clicks his heels and dances a jig of joy, he might pause to consider the flip side of the coin. The politicians may be down but they are not out, which is why the regime is scared of allowing them to kick up a dust storm. The IMF and World Bank are fickle mistresses, now you see them, now you don’t, depending on their master’s voice in Washington. America has decided to cosy up to India, thus if push comes to shove, it could start brandishing the stick to Pakistan all over again. Traders and businessmen are mad as hell, so instead of investing in the country they would rather take their money and run. The economy is growing, to be sure, but it’s far below target. The local nazims are lining up to elect a president, but the self-same philosophy may induce them to leave a sinking ship like rats. The Taliban’s military victories provide illusory strategic depth to Islamabad, but one false move by Osama Bin Laden could provoke the wrath of the big boy in the White House and make Afghanistan a millstone around our necks. The Indians may not know whether they’re coming or going, but when they tire of Pakistani pricking they might just become desperate enough to pick up the gauntlet and hurl it in our face.
Finally, there is not much comfort to be drawn from the experience of the military dictators in Burma or from the autocratic president of Egypt. Burma is not teetering on the brink of financial default and is not dependent on international goodwill for economic survival. Nor is it at odds with either Washington on the issue of nuclear proliferation and Islamic terrorism or any powerful neighbour over a hotly disputed slice of history. Likewise, General Musharraf isn’t a patch on President Hosni Mubarak. Where the latter is the most virile, anti-fundo American ally in the Middle-East, the former is wont to flirt with the fundos and is not averse to blackmailing the West (Apres moi, le deluge!).
In other words, General Musharraf is safe and sound until he trips up or someone throws a spanner in his works. That is not a matter of if but when, since there are so many angry people and disgruntled states around and the general is seeking nothing less than a total transformation of political life according to his own worldview. When that happens, all his wistful dreams will become recurring nightmares and it will get terribly lonely at the bottom of the well.
There is, of course, one way in which PM can ward off the odds stacked against him. That is by stripping the state of its misplaced concept of national security. In the modern age, national security is not built around notions of extracting pounds of flesh by war or jihad. It is constructed around historical compromises with neighbours east and west so that the peace dividend is used to enhance the welfare of all the citizens of a state. Security doesn’t flow from squeezing growth in order to reduce the fiscal deficit or from pushing human talent and capital out of the country. It springs from a high savings and investment rate in the country. It cannot be protected by controlling dissent because it is critically dependent on a democratic consensus based on free association and will. It cannot be achieved by institutionalising passionate faith because it is primarily predicated on the innocuous self-interest of people. Anyone who thinks or believes otherwise is deceiving himself.
(TFT May 18-24, 2001 Vol-XIII No.12 — Editorial)
Learning from China
The recent visit by Chinese premier Zhu Rongji to Pakistan has aroused many hopes in this country. Indeed, some of us are inclined to view it in the perspective of a deteriorating US-China relationship following the spy-plane incident coupled with the determination of the US to rearm Taiwan, and a warming US-India relationship following India’s opportunist turnabout on President George W. Bush’s controversial National Missile Defence program to which China is opposed. This strategic perspective suggests that China may now be more inclined to assist Pakistan in confronting India and the United States than in the past. In fact, a number of opinion-writers who think Pakistan’s unbending foreign policy is the only way to go are glad to note that a “strategic opening” has been provided to offset Pakistan’s growing international isolation.
But Pakistanis are not alone in thinking in such military terms. In India, too, there are people who see profit in the developing Sino-American contradiction provoked by a Republican Party made rabidly right-wing by its bitter confrontation with ex-President Bill Clinton. In fact, since both India and Pakistan are rather backward in international trade, they are secretly keen to stoke a revival of the Cold War so that they can sort each other out militarily. India supports President Bush’s NMD programme when no one even in the European Union has shown any enthusiasm for it, while Pakistan thinks it can carry on its self-isolating jehadi policies now that China has been provoked by the US to bankroll Pakistan.
That is where the mistake lies. Pakistan must look closely at China and try to understand the real compulsions of its friendly neighbour. This is necessary because Pakistan hardly has any non-official contacts with China, and Beijing is traditionally not given to mouthing reckless foreign policy statements. China is not a warrior state but a trading nation deeply committed to a policy of modernisation and trade surpluses to maintain its astounding growth rate of over 10%. In fact, its status in global trade reinforces the pragmatism that has marked its traditional style of state behaviour. Thus, in its handling of the confrontation with the inexperienced new US president, it is likely to behave as a mature and calculating entity rather than as a state with human attributes that is maddened by a perceived insult.
This means that those Indian and Pakistani ‘experts’ who smell in this “confrontation” the seeds of yet another Cold War and a consequent free military ride should think again. In fact, the Indians may be in for a rude awakening if they think that Washington will build India up militarily as a factor to balance China, given Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent and its nervous rulers. On the other hand, Pakistanis who think that China will lean in favour of Pakistan to offset what is perceived as an India-Israel-US axis should ponder the real meaning of Chinese self-interest.
China’s future lies in retaining its fast growth rate and becoming the biggest economy in the world in the next twenty years. Thus, while it pursues its Asia policy, it is more than likely to take great care in remaining inside a regional consensus and not becoming isolated – a value on which Pakistanis place no premium. It is in this context that China has been pursuing detente with Russia and India whereby it has removed its fundamental disputes with Russia and put its border disputes with India on the backburner. It has achieved a remarkable identity of views with Iran. Indeed, it has even initiated a slight ‘thaw’ in its relationship with the Taliban without going so far as to recognise it as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. But we should remember that all these are countries, excluding the Taliban, with whom Pakistan has bad relations because we believe that there is no alternative to the policies that have led to bad relations with these states. But that is not how China thinks. In fact, Pakistanis should worry about the fact that while India as America’s budding partner is regionally and globally more integrated than ever before, Pakistan can only relate to Burma to break its greater-than-ever solitude. The fear is that Pakistan could become a Chinese liability if it continues to pursue its moribund self-isolating policies.
That leads to a realistic consideration of the promising turn in Pak-China economic cooperation heralded by premier Zhu Rongji’s visit. This is where the silver lining actually exists if Islamabad can demonstrate the capacity of using Chinese help without crumbling under the weight of its old inertia.
We must not let this opening lead us back toward the path of isolationist thinking. Those who suggest that Pakistan should hitch its wagon to China and forget about integrating with the South Asian trading bloc under SAARC are advised to consider whether China would approve of such policies (it won’t!). Finally, we should carefully re-read the import of Chinese advice in the light of its own policies and experience regarding the “unfinished business of history” (our Kashmir cause) on how to settle border and territorial disputes with neighbours.
(TFT May 25-31, 2001 Vol-XIII No.13 — Editorial)
Mixing religion and politics
The federal minister for religious affairs, Mr Mehmud Ghazi, is a veritable busybody. He is constantly conjuring up apparently pious religious edicts, exhorting misplaced cannons to thunder against the avowed evils of riba (interest), and hatching plots to drive the unwashed unbelievers into paradise at the point of General Pervez Musharraf’s bayonet. Reportedly, Mr Ghazi’s latest construction is a draft for legislation aimed at “Islamising” every aspect of our wretched lives. It is said to be titled Iqamat-i-Salah (saying prayers regularly), Amr bil Maruf (furtherance of good), Nahy anil Munkar (purging evil).
There is something rather menacing about this proposed law. It is quite akin to Nawaz Sharif’s proposed 15th constitutional amendment to become a dictator. But there are two crucial differences between them. Mr Sharif didn’t spell out how he meant to promote “good” and expunge “evil” from society. But Mr Ghazi has no such compunctions — his draft is over 1000 words long. Also, Mr Sharif was attempting to strengthen his own hands as prime minister. But Mr Ghazi is singing the president’s tune. Consider.
Hisbah (Censorship) authorities will be appointed at every administrative level to frame rules and ensure compliance. All executive powers shall act in aid of Hisbah authorities. Complaints by citizens (as in the blasphemy law) or public functionaries will be grist for the mills. Such authorities will “discourage anti-Islamic social habits” (not defined). Penalties will range from fines and stripes to “corporal or other punishments”. Accused persons must defend themselves without lawyers. The head of the Federal Hisbah Authority and two ulema members will be appointed by the president while the federal government (read prime minister) will have two reps, thus giving the president a decisive edge in furthering his particular agenda. The same powers will accrue to the president’s nominee (Governor) at the provincial level who will “reorder the individual and collective life of Pakistanis on the cultural pattern and moral values of Islam”.
Why is such a law necessary, when all the so-called “Islamic” laws decreed by that evil dictator Zia ul Haq and that rascal Nawaz Sharif didn’t succeed in purging “evil” from our hearts and making “good Muslims” out of us? Indeed, isn’t this another devious scheme to strip us of our civil and fundamental constitutional rights and hound us into submission to those scoundrels who masquerade as the “chosen” few? The fact is that our bruised and battered constitution already mocks the notion of an Islamic state by calling Pakistan an “Islamic Republic” (in an Islamic state, Allah is sovereign; in a Republic, the people are sovereign). Why do we want to muddy the waters further by such a decree? If anything, we should be moving in the opposite direction by ensuring that the purity of religion, faith or belief is not blotted by the dirt and filth of political engineering.
Mixing religion with politics has spawned unprecedented degrees of violence and terror in this country and progressively uprooted chunks of the citizenry. The Qadianis were banned by a “socialist” government-dominated state in 1974 and hounded to flee from the country. Women were alienated by the Hadood laws in the 1980s when rape was equated with adultery and the Qisas and Diyat ordinances degenerated into elements of the class struggle. The blasphemy net was then cast far and wide to include the hapless Christians as well. Meanwhile the Ushr and Zakat committees were established to empower and enrich the ulema, and madrassas were officially funded and propped up in the entire belt bordering Afghanistan in quest of jihadi lashkars for the war in Afghanistan. And so on.
Thus the Talibanised vigilantes who scour the hills of the NWFP and Balochistan, breaking TV sets, burning video films, banning music and flouting the writ of the state, are characterised more by tribalism and illiteracy than by any organic rooting in Islamic law, history or tradition. The Sunni and Shia sectarian militants who heap abuse and murder upon each other in pursuit of an imagined practise of faith harm revealed truth rather than purify or unify their herd. The intra-sect fratricide in the dominant religious stream of the Sunnis is more about the spoils of power and space than it is of religious zeal. The local jihadis who are bent upon waging war against the injustice of the infidels not just in the region but in the four corners of the world are playing with the fortunes of the sovereign nation-state of Pakistan rather than enhancing the cause of Islam. And the advocates of abolishing all forms of interest in an economic system wedded to and integrated with the global system of capitalism are undermining the growth prospects of the economy and the confidence of our saving and investing classes rather than enhancing the cause of our impoverished masses.
Therefore do-gooders like Dr Ghazi who are bent upon making good Muslims out of us by decree are more likely to strengthen the impulse for dictatorship and disruption rather than support the quest for democracy and stability. Perhaps some enlightened general might have a quiet word or two with the gentleman and set him on the right path?
(TFT Jun 01-07, 2001 Vol-XIII No.14 — Editorial)
Hopes and fears
After adopting a holier-than-thou attitude for 18 months, India has now more than just agreed to talk to Pakistan — its prime minister has actually invited Pakistan’s military leader for talks in India “on all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir”. On his part, too, General Pervez Musharraf doesn’t seem rigid any more. He began by rubbishing the Lahore Peace Summit of 1999 in which Kashmir didn’t figure as the “core issue” between the two sides. Later, however, he shifted ground, sought domestic support for a “moderate and flexible” approach to the Kashmir issue, and called for unconditional talks “anytime, anywhere”. Does this mean that the situation is ripe for the Hindu hardliners in India and the military hawks in Pakistan to arrive at a historic compromise and bury the hatchet?
We think not. For starters, the weight of history is pitted against such a quick fix. In the last decade, there were at least four false starts in 1989 (Bhutto & Gandhi), 1994 (Bhutto & Rao), 1997 (Sharif & Gujral) and 1999 (Sharif & Vajpayee). But there are more concrete reasons why one should not build high hopes into the latest diplomatic flurries. Consider.
General Musharraf was fairly gung-ho when he arrived on the scene in November 1999 and spurned the idea of pursuing the Lahore Peace process. But within months, he realised that even an accidental conflict with India, let alone one provoked by Pakistan, would derail his reform process (especially on the economic front which was critically dependent upon American goodwill) and undermine the stability and longevity of his regime. So the hardliner quickly switched from a policy of “fight-fight” (via the jihadis in Kashmir) to one of “talk-talk, fight-fight” when the Hizbul Mujahideen offered a conditional ceasefire in July 2000.
India, in the meanwhile, wasn’t sitting idle either. After five decades, it had finally succeeded in charming America to tilt in its favour. Now it certainly wasn’t going to allow Pakistan to chip away at its newfound friendship with the sole superpower. So the fraudulent Hizb ceasefire sponsored by Islamabad was followed by a row of fraudulent ceasefires by the Indian army in Kashmir. In due course, each side tried to outdo the other with its “peace overtures” in a bid to woo the international community — restraint along the border and partial withdrawal of troops by Pakistan, and an offer to talk to the Kashmiris by India, etc ― even as the war in Kashmir continued to rage furiously.
India’s latest, rather dramatic offer should therefore be viewed in its proper context. It follows two significant overtures, one by New Delhi (support for President’s Bush’s national missile development program) and another by Washington (a high profile visit to DC by Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and high profile visits to New Delhi by the US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, and the new head of Centcom, General B J Shelton). But if India is keen to scratch America’s back, it is keener still to demonstrate its toughness to Pakistan in more ways than one. The invitation to General Musharraf was preceded by threatening war games along the border with Pakistan, buttressed by aggressive attempts to fence the border in Kashmir and followed up by an abrupt end to the ceasefire in Kashmir. Clearly, it is going to be talk-talk, fight-fight all the way for India as well.
If India has made a clear and decisive move to win international sympathy without alienating its hardliners, Pakistan’s response has been somewhat confused. The invitation was “positively” accepted, to be sure, but the Foreign Office mandarins have been clumsy. They initially supported the context in which the Indians proposed the talks — the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Summit in which both sides agreed to seek a bilateral solution to all outstanding issues, including Kashmir, without assigning primacy to any one at any time. But then the blundering Pakistani High Commissioner to New Delhi, Ashraf Qazi, succumbed to the foot and mouth disease by unnecessarily suggesting that the third option of independence for Kashmir could be considered if the Kashmiris so desired, after an agreement by India and Pakistan to seek an amendment to the UN resolutions, and the Kashmiri freedom-fighters could be persuaded to “alter the pattern of their behaviour” in the event of progress on the peaceful-solution front. This has prompted our Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar to back-pedal furiously by bringing Kashmir back into the “core-issue framework” and insisting that the talks will take place in the context of all previous agreements with India, including the UN resolutions for a plebiscite to determine Kashmir’s future in India “or” Pakistan. And this has led India’s Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh to retaliate that while Kashmir can be discussed, it cannot be negotiated away since it is an “internal” matter of India.
Alas. We have been down this slope many times in the past. The opening moves by both sides were so full of hope and promise. But after each summit, there has been a long and bitter estrangement because neither side had the courage or sincerity to seek a historic compromise. We hope it will be different this time. But we fear it won’t.
(TFT Jun 08-14, 2001 Vol-XIII No.15 — Editorial)
Lies and damned lies
A report by the State Bank of Pakistan on the health of the Pakistani economy at the end of the third quarter (March) of the current financial year 2000-2001 paints an interesting picture. Among its summary conclusions may be listed the following: 1. Large-scale manufacturing is up by 8.8%, as against 3.5% last year and 3.6% a year earlier, partly because sugar production and petroleum refining are buoyant. [This is a good sign.]
- Exports are also up 8.4%, as against 8.9% last year and a decline of 11.7% a year earlier. [This is a good sign.]
- Home remittances are up by 16.8%, as against a fall of about 9% last year and a fall of 31.5% a year earlier. [This is a good sign.]
- Tax revenues are also up by about 15%, as against 18% last year and a mere 2% in the earlier year. [This is a good sign.]
- The consumer price index, which is a measure of the rate of inflation, is up by 4.8%, as against 3.4% last year and 6.3% a year earlier. [This is not a bad sign.]
- The fiscal deficit is down to 5.3%, as against 6.5% last year and 6.1% a year earlier. [This is a good sign.]
- The trade deficit is up by only 1.7%, as against 2.3% last year and 3.6% a year earlier. [This is a good sign]
- The cotton crop has largely escaped the ravages of the drought, partly because of its early sowing season and partly because it is less water-intensive than other crops. [This is a good sign.]
- The IMF targets have been generally met and the country’s “good standing” with the IMF has “enhanced its credibility with the international community”. [This is a good sign.]
- BUT GDP growth will be less than 3% this year, as opposed to under 3% last year. Therefore GDP per capita will be stagnant, since population growth is still estimated at about 3% per year. [This is a bad sign]
- Responsibility for the low GDP has been laid at the door of water shortage and drought, “which have taken a heavy toll of agricultural production”. Last year, the major crops averaged over 9% growth. This year, there may be an actualdeclineof over 5%.
In other words, implies the SBP, the managers of the economy have notched many pluses. Unfortunately, however, nature has thwarted their designs and stopped the economy from taking off into self-sustaining growth. Is this true?
No, it’s not. Agricultural production accounts for less than 25% of GDP. A small decline in the output of some agricultural crops, excluding cotton which accounts for nearly 65% of our exports, should not have such an adverse impact on GDP growth rates. After all, last year agricultural production of the major crops averaged growth of over 9.6% as admitted by the SBP, yet GDP growth was less than 3%!
A glance at the SBP’s summary reveals that critical statistics and explanations which tell the real story behind the economic slump are missing from its analysis. For starters, there is no mention of what has happened to savings and investment (they have actually fallen to about 11% of the GDP, the lowest for a long time) and no attempt has been made to outline and explain the decline of foreign investment in the country (a decline of 70% over last year’s level, bringing it to under US$150 million so far this year). Nor has the SBP told us how much money, which might have been used for investment at home in the right conditions, has fled to foreign shores in search of safety and certainty (unofficially estimated to be about US$1 billion this year). Indeed, the SBP has not explained why anyone in this country should save in rupees when interest rates are down to under 10%, the lowest in a decade, and the government proposes to levy an unprecedented income tax on saving schemes, while the rupee is being devalued by about 15% every year and dollar deposits can earn at least 5% abroad. [In other words, rupee savings yield less than 10% while dollar deposits yield at least 20% in rupee terms.] We might also point out that the home remittance figure is up not because Pakistani expatriates actually sent more money home this year than last year but because there was a one-time windfall handout from the Kuwait government to Pakistani workers in Kuwait as compensation for losses suffered during the Gulf war in 1991. Finally, the fact that the fiscal deficit is down to 5.3% of GDP is relevant only for IMF purposes. The more relevant fact is that this cut in the deficit has entailed cuts in development expenditures and poverty alleviation programmes, and this fact has not been highlighted by the SBP. Similarly, there isn’t much point in crowing about the revival of Pakistan’s standing in the international community by virtue of access to debt-rescheduling programmes when we are being forced to run faster and faster merely in order to stay at the same spot.
The fact is that the economy is down because Pakistani savers and investors are not inclined to save and invest at home because the government’s domestic and foreign policies are not designed to instill certainty and confidence. Until these are realigned, all statistics will prove to be lies and more damned lies.
(TFT Jun 15-21, 2001 Vol-XIII No.16 — Editorial)
Action wanted
Audacious or blunt, opportunistic or pragmatic, General Pervez Musharraf seems a remarkable person. He appears neither as rigid as his old uniform might warrant nor as diplomatic as his new position might demand. His arguments are invariably tempered by realism rather than rhetoric. Indeed, his plain-talking and flexibility may have won him more friends at home and abroad than his critics might wish to concede.
General Musharraf’s exceptional performance at the National Seerat Conference in Islamabad on June 6th merits comment. Until now, no political or military leader in the history of Pakistan has had the courage or integrity to call a spade a spade in front of the aggressive, self-appointed “guardians of Islam” and self-righteous “defenders of the identity” of Pakistan. Indeed, if the orthodoxy was confirmed in its suspicions that General Musharraf is unlikely to do its bidding blindly, the liberals were left wondering whether the general might somehow fit their own bill rather smugly. In all honesty, though, who can disagree with the gist of what General Musharraf said that day?
What is so “Islamic” about our country when Sunnis and Shias, and now Deobandis and Brelvis, are killing each other so wantonly, when we are so devoid of a sense of brotherhood and tolerance, when there is no justice for the poor and destitute, when our women are relegated to second-class citizenship? Who can blame the international community for calling us an “irresponsible” or “failed” or “terrorist” state when our religious leaders are quick to hurl outlandish threats? Who will invest in our country if it is constantly rocked by senseless religious strife and violence? Since no nation is an island, how can Pakistan survive in hostility to the global community? The root cause of our instability lies in mixing religion, which is pure, with politics, which is dirty. Could General Musharraf have said half as much last year?
With hindsight, we think probably not. A case in point is the proposal to amend the procedure of filing a case under the blasphemy law. The idea was sound enough since the law is exploited by all manner of vested interests. In fact, a representative government had drafted the necessary changes already. But General Musharraf was ready to backtrack when his intelligence agencies revealed how the religious parties intended to stir up trouble for the government if the proposed changes were implemented. (In one scenario, a religious party would stage an angry demonstration in which a copy of the Holy Quran would accidentally fall to the ground and be trampled upon, thereby enraging the mobs and provoking widespread arson). Why, he was advised, should the military government stir a hornets’ nest, when the politicians and businessmen were already up in arms against the military government, India was fomenting trouble, the economy was down in the dumps and the international community wasn’t being terribly helpful? One step forward might have become two steps back.
Clearly, General Musharraf is not on such a weak wicket any longer. He has rung changes in the army’s high command so that all critical slots are manned by hand-picked generals loyal to him. He has neutralised India and the international community by initiating the regional peace process and buckling down to IMF conditions. He has assuaged the prickly domestic business community by nudging NAB to focus on the public sector while restraining the ubiquitous CBR from fishing in troubled waters. And he has successfully unleashed the process of local elections, thereby isolating the traditional political parties in the run-up to the general elections next year. If ever there was a budding Bonaparte in Pakistan, it is General Pervez Musharraf.
That should not be misconstrued as a compliment. While modern-day Bonapartism could conceivably act as an anti-status quo force favouring modernity and assimilation rather than backwardness and isolation, as in 18th century absolutist Europe, it has no lasting place in a budding 21st century third world democracy like Pakistan. The task for General Musharraf is to initiate the process of growth, globalisation and modernity in a progressively democratic environment without unleashing any of the turmoil and instability associated with rapid change in a largely static society, and then exiting from the scene in a voluntary and organised manner. Anything less than that would be unacceptable to civil society. And anything more than that could be personally perilous for General Musharraf. Is the road clear?
No, it’s not. There is a contradiction between continuing to sponsor jehad as state policy and buttoning up the religious activists in the interest of domestic stability. There is a contradiction between squeezing the public for greater revenues and channelling them into unproductive defence expenditures. There is a contradiction between remaining uneducated and attempting to retool our labour force for IT purposes. There is a contradiction between plans for devolution of power and the state’s preferred mode of centralism. There is a contradiction between constantly stockpiling and upgrading nuclear and missile materials while asking the international community to write off or reschedule our staggering foreign debt. And so on. The sooner General Pervez Musharraf removes these contradictions from Pakistan’s reckoning, the better. Words alone will not suffice. We need action.
(TFT Jun 22-28, 2001 Vol-XIII No.17 — Editorial)
So what’s new?
General Pervez Musharraf’s ascent to the Presidency shouldn’t come as a surprise to discerning TFT readers. Three months ago, we editorialised (Trussed up like a President, TFT March 2-8, 2001), that he was “readying to don the mantle of the President of Pakistan” and wondered whether “the simplest way would be for him to follow in the footsteps of Caesar, Napoleon or Ataturk — having seized the crown, he could put it on his head, change his tunic and announce: ‘l’etat, c’est moi!’” (‘I am the state’). Should this happen, however, we noted advisedly, that “he would have traversed a much trodden path in Pakistan’s sad history during which the Presidency has housed all sorts of conspirators (Iskander Mirza, Ghulam Ishaq Khan), usurpers (Generals Ayub, Yahya, Zia), stooges (Chaudry Fazal Elahi, Rafiq Tarar), misfits (Farooq Leghari) and witnessed or sanctioned all manner of political instability or perversion”.
Last week (Action wanted, TFT, June 15-21, 2001), we thought D-Day could be round the corner. “General Musharraf is not on a weak wicket any longer. He has rung changes in the army’s high command so that all critical slots are manned by hand-picked generals loyal to him. He has neutralised India and the international community by initiating the regional peace process and buckling down to IMF conditions. He has assuaged the prickly domestic business community by nudging NAB to focus on the public sector while restraining the ubiquitous CBR from fishing in troubled waters. And he has successfully unleashed the process of local elections, thereby isolating the traditional political parties in the run-up to the general elections next year. If ever there was a budding Bonaparte in Pakistan, it is General Pervez Musharraf”.
That is exactly what General Musharraf has now done — put the crown on his head rather than wait to be crowned. Having scratched the back of the international community by ticking off the fundos, freezing defense expenditures and reaffirming faith in IMF-dictated policies in the new budget, he must be pretty sure of getting away with his audacious fait accompli.
Barring an accident, he probably will. Nawabzada Nasrullah & Co will rant. Benazir Bhutto will shriek. Nawaz Sharif may squeak. Qazi Hussain Ahmad will bluster. But who cares? The Commonwealth will protest. The EU will condemn. But so what? The Japanese and Americans will cluck disapproval, urge him to note their concerns and continue doing business with him. And General Musharraf will start sprucing up in sherwanis and suits for his forthcoming visit to India so that he is accorded a reception befitting a head of state legitimised by no less an august body than the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Meanwhile, the people of Pakistan will wake up and go to sleep as usual, as though they’ve seen it all before.
Beyond that, there will be other milestones to cross. The move will certainly be challenged and clever legal arguments will be aired in the courts. But a judiciary that has taken oath under the PCO and legitimised the coup, and a Supreme Court whose chief justice has sworn in the new president, are hardly likely to undo their own decisions.
Nor is the fate of the PML(LM) a moot issue any longer. The decision to put the suspended assemblies out of misery will force many Nawaz dissidents to stand on their own feet and face the competition for the hearts and minds of the voter squarely. Others may join the cabinet to improve their prospects. It also means that the confusion and uncertainty about whether or not the next general elections will be held as promised before October 2002 has been removed. Finally, the news that General Musharraf will remain the Chief Executive implies that there will be no interim prime minister — until a new one is nominated by an elected parliament next year and is asked by President Musharraf to demonstrate a vote of confidence prior to becoming the chief executive atop a cabinet of elected ministers.
In the months ahead, we may witness some new constitutional developments that don’t necessarily clash with the guidelines of the supreme court of Pakistan. The National Security Council headed by the president may be further institutionalised, ostensibly in the interests of “national security”. The provincial elections may be staggered one by one, presumably to get a better “handle” on the provinces. An element of proportional representation may be brought into the general election process supposedly to provide for greater “electoral fairness”. The president may acquire the power to sack the prime minister and his cabinet without simultaneously sacking the parliament for purposes of “electoral stability”. The president may transfer some of the subjects of the concurrent list to the exclusive domain of provincial parliaments in order to massage the hurt egos of the provinces in the face of strong local governments. And the next national and provincial assemblies may come to resemble a cluster of fractured groups and alliances rather than abodes of the two mainstream parties so that the president can exploit their differences and lord it over them.
So what’s new? The sordid game has begun all over again. The message is clear. Those who don’t like it can lump it.
(TFT Jun 29-05 July, 2001 Vol-XIII No.18 — Editorial)
Tight leash
Mr Shaukat Aziz, our soft-spoken finance minister, is a fortunate person. For two years in a row, he has not had to stand in parliament and sweat about making a budget speech without drowning in a sea of cacophony, as was “normal” during the heady days of democracy. Better still, he has not been forced to listen to the unending “critiques” of party political faithfuls belonging to the “other” side. No parliament, no accountability. But how lucky can you get! Mr Aziz was reprieved when this year’s budgetary blues were neatly eclipsed a day after the budget by the rather dramatic ascent of General Pervez Musharraf to the Presidency!
But, to give the devil his due, it must be admitted that Mr Aziz hasn’t desperately tried to hide all the unpalatable truths or gloss over most of the unpleasant facts. GDP growth last year was listed at 2.6% (target 4.5%), even though it might conceivably turn out to be slightly higher when all the figures are collated and analysed in September. In the past, it was the other way round – the rosiest possible picture of achievements was painted at budget time and quickly curtained off from scrutiny until the “provisional estimates” were quietly “fixed” a couple of months down the line. Nor has he tried to fudge last year’s fiscal deficit or pretend that revenue targets were adequately met. He has also been true to his word in some other ways: GST on retail trade has finally arrived; import duties have been reduced; more taxpayers have been brought into the net; and revenues have grown impressively.
But some bones remain to be picked. The tax structure has not been simplified as promised. The hike in the salaries of government servants is closer to 18% than 50% as earlier claimed. The defence budget has, strictly speaking, not been “capped” at Rs 131 billion as argued – it is actually going to be about Rs 136 billion, or 4% higher, if the proposed increase in defence pensions (Rs 27 billion last year, Rs 32 billion next year) tucked away in the category of “government expenditures” since last year is taken into account. Nor is there much point in crowing about the “low rate of inflation” of under 5% as compared to the target of about 6%, if only because ordinary folk bitterly perceive the cost of living to have risen by much more than that. In any case, a lower than targeted rate of inflation merely suggests that growth has been lower than predicted on account of a fall in business confidence rather than prudent fiscal and monetary management.
Looking ahead, Mr Aziz claims that a tax revenue target of Rs 464 billion next year is quite “realistic” in view of the problems encountered this year. Last year, this target was an overly ambitious Rs 437 billion. This was quickly scaled down to Rs 431 billion in September and Rs 417 billion in March. But actual receipts end-June turned out to be closer to Rs 404 billion, which itself was no mean achievement, considering that the CBR had only managed Rs 356 billion a year earlier and not much less than that in the preceding year. Thus, against a growth of about Rs 50 billion this year, the government is budgeting growth of Rs 60 billion next year. On the face of it, this seems fair enough. But is it?
There is a limit to the amount of taxes that the CBR can extract from people if the economy is not growing fast enough to generate a fair degree of autonomous growth in the revenue base. This year, many people coughed up more money than usual, despite low economic growth, only because the government succeeded in browbeating them in an environment of fear. But a stiff price was paid for doing so – savings and investment fell to their lowest levels for a long time. This means that the same counterproductive strategy will probably be avoided this year. Thus a great deal of reliance will be placed on the results of the income surveys completed earlier in which businessmen were arm-twisted to admit significantly greater turnovers (and therefore potentially greater tax liabilities) than usual. But even this will not suffice to raise revenues by as much as Rs 60 billion, which works out to an increase of about 15% for the second year running, especially if GDP growth is still imprisoned at not much more than 3%.
Mr Aziz also seems optimistic that the IMF and other donor agencies will fork over a great deal of money for balance of payments support and poverty alleviation. But there will be a price for that too. The rupee, which has been effectively devalued by 15% this year, will face continued pressure if the State Bank of Pakistan persists in buying up to US$ 2 billion from the free market to shore up its reserves to IMF standards. This is a sure shot recipe for the continued dollarisation of the economy which must be avoided.
The economy desperately needs a shot in the arm. Mr Shaukat Aziz should persuade the IMF not to keep him under such a tight leash.
(TFT Jul 06-12, 2001 Vol-XIII No.19 — Editorial)
Change the status quo
General Pervez Musharraf is all thumbs-up. On June 26th he got a pat on the back from the leading editors of Pakistan to go ahead and talk to India with an open mind. Much the same response was forthcoming from the leaders of all religious groups and political parties who met him a day later. But most critically, the ISI, which destabilized both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif when they didn’t see eye to eye with them on how to deal with India, is already in the bag. Indeed, to all intents and purposes, General Musharraf heads a military government in which former ISI big-guns hold sway — two are serving as powerful corps commanders, one is in the federal cabinet, another is defense secretary, a third heads the CE’s secretariat, a fourth is governor of a province and at least two are ambassadors in foreign lands — while the former corps commander of Pindi whose troops arrested Nawaz Sharif on 12 October 1999 is currently DG-ISI.
The irony should not be lost on us. Among the editors who are sanguine about General Musharraf’s visit to India are many who vigourously opposed Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif when they hinted at “flexibility” — the buzzword these days. More significantly, among the religious groups and parties who are now backing General Musharraf are many with overt or covert links to the jehadi forces in Kashmir. Indeed, Qazi Hussain Ahmad of the Jama’at-i Islami, who created such a ruckus during the Lahore Summit in February 1999 and who not so long ago was urging the corps commanders to remove General Musharraf because he had allegedly become a “security risk”, has now gone all the way to Islamabad to say “yes” to the general. Similarly, the other fiery clerics who are given to castigating General Musharraf for his so-called ‘secularism’, were all too conspicuous when they prostrated themselves along with him in the namaz following the meeting. In fact, JUI leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman has actually called for a general ceasefire in Kashmir and on the LoC if the Musharraf-Vajpayee summit makes progress. The Maulana is an important leader in Pakistan because his party represents the grand Deobandi alliance behind the jehad in Kashmir. Together with Qazi Hussain Ahmad, he was until recently most given to making aggressive statements about General Musharraf’s ‘NGO-driven’ cabinet. But so soft was Fazlur Rehman’s stance the other day that the apex jehadi organization, the Mutahhida Jehad Council, could not resist denouncing him, although the very next day the Council was itself front-paged for endorsing the summit. The newspapers also carried the namaz photo of General Musharraf lining up with such jehadi panjandrums as Maulana Samiul Haq, a friend of Afghanistan’s Mulla Umar and a powerful seminary-owner of the NWFP. In fact the jehadi religious parties first formed a six-party alliance topped by an action committee, then went and met General Musharraf to lend him their support vis-à-vis India. All this, while the chief of the main religious party feeding the Deobandi jehad, Maulana Azam Tariq of Sipah-e-Sahaba, was languishing in jail. Meanwhile, an internally riven Hurriyat Conference has also endorsed General Musharraf unequivocally.
The irony is all the greater because the three political parties which wanted peace with India – PPP, MQM and PML-N – did not deem fit to meet General Musharraf and wish him good luck. In fact, they have tried to play the role of spoilers by asking India not to negotiate with a military leader. Equally interesting is the government’s disdainful attitude towards former DG-ISI, General Hameed Gul, a self-styled Islamicist hardliner, and former army chief General Aslam Beg, an avowedly trigger-happy “defiance” theorist. Neither was “invited” to meet General Musharraf. It may also be recalled that on 5 June, General Musharraf, had criticized the jehadi organisations for their lack of accountability over jehad funds and for the empty anti-India braggadocio of their leaders. Only a man squarely in control can express such sentiments and get away with it.
General Musharraf can rein in the jehadis in Kashmir if the situation so warrants. That is the message he is sending to New Delhi. And that will be his strong card at the Agra Summit. Is New Delhi going to stop playing bloody games?
India is forestalling hopes by referring to Kashmir as ang (or part of its body). Pakistan can respond by terming Kashmir its shahrag (jugular vein). But the truth is that both have to show flexibility on Kashmir. India’s view of Pakistan may be that of a deadbeat state now desperate to sign on the dotted line. But Pakistan has the bomb and General Musharraf can bleed India in Kashmir for some time to come. New Delhi should also realize that Agra is not Simla and General Musharraf is not negotiating the release of 90,000 POWs. But if “deadbeat Pakistan” actually goes under as some Indians would like, India and Pakistan will be at the receiving end of jehad like never before. Therefore neither can afford to stick to the status quo.
(TFT Jul 13-19, 2001 Vol-XIII No.20 — Editorial)
NSC: IFS AND BUTS
The idea of a National Security Council in which the army constitutionally “shares” power with a prime minister was first mooted by General Zia-ul Haq in 1985 but shot down by a non-party parliament midwifed by him. It was raised again in 1991 by COAS General Aslam Beg but knocked out by his handpicked prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. The NSC was floated a third time (in the shape of the Council for Defense and National Security) by COAS General Jehangir Karamat and President Farooq Leghari during the interim government in November 1996. But once again Nawaz Sharif would have none of it. Indeed, Mr Sharif went so far as to compel the president (who wanted to share power with him) to resign in 1997, and later put paid to General Karamat when he dared to persist with the idea in 1998.
Now COAS General Pervez Musharraf wants to implant the NSC once and for all. He believes it is a good idea whose time has finally come, not least because he expects to be in charge of the destiny (fate?) of Pakistan for donkeys of years and will make sure that no future prime minister can dispense with the army’s pet scheme. Is this realistic?
Everything will depend on the reformulated NSC’s aims and objectives. If it satisfies the demands of the present and future, it will become and remain a reality. But if it clings to the past, it will meet the same fate as its predecessors. Consider.
General Musharraf has ordered that there will now be nine members in his NSC presided over by the president and including the COAS, C-JCSC, the two other service chiefs, the four provincial governors and as many civilians as the president deems fit. In other words, the wise men in mufti will lord it over the imprudent men and women in civvies, and elected parliaments and prime ministers will exist at the pleasure of the COAS/President who will determine all issues relating to Pakistan’s “ideology, security, sovereignty, integrity, and solidarity, in light of the Objectives Resolution of 1949”. If this is not to be billed as a presidential system, one may safely note it as ‘guided’ democracy with a ring in its nose. How will such a NSC fare?
By straining the imagination, one may come to believe in a functioning NSC under General Musharraf. After all, two years in power have taught him the value of being more pragmatic and less ideological. But if a future NSC under an elected government is to become a permanent institution of the state overriding other players in the democratic set-up, then we must pause and reflect upon the conditions of its viability.
Ostensibly, Pakistan is an “Islamic” state with a strong disposition in favour of enforcing the Shariah under the Federal Shariat Court, despite an inchoate political model at the level of Islamic theory. Indeed, the Pakistan army since General Zia ul Haq’s time has become increasingly “Islamic”, with frequent born-again outcroppings among the officers’ corps. In fact, there is no institutional device barring the “Islamicists” from “taking over” and further subjecting the state to an unsteady process of “Islamisation”. But given Pakistan’s multiple crises, it needs more pragmatism today and much more pragmatism tomorrow than it ever did during the cold war. Thus the fate of the NSC is critically dependent not so much upon the feasibility of the power-sharing formula between the army and elected civilians per se as it is upon the NSC’s ability to steer a pragmatic and non-ideological path for Pakistan.
The fact is that a National Security Council can be useful only as long as a moderate, anti-isolationist general is head of the Pakistan army. He and his service chiefs can then actually cooperate with a beleaguered prime minister who is looking for rational and realistic options. In this situation, even an army chief under pressure from an “Islamicist” army can collaborate with the civilian government and strengthen its resolve to practise statesmanship instead of delivering on unpractical and extremist foreign policy slogans concocted during election campaigns. Such an army chief can reach a consensus within the National Security Council about Pakistan’s rapidly declining economy, the rising power of the jehadi organisations at the cost of the writ of the state, and the advisability of taking foreign policy decisions to avoid international isolation and censure. By the same token, acute problems are bound to arise if “Islamicist” generals espousing the same sort of creed as a couple of former ISI chiefs take over and are then allowed to dominate the discourse by virtue of ruling the National Security Council.
Fortunately, such “Islamicists” have never got to the top of the army. But the fact is that their hold on the army’s thinking is palpable enough and brings the army chief constantly under pressure. Indeed, the leaders of the Jamaat i Islami have already warned that when they “come to power two years from now” they will overhaul the structure of the armed forces to make them exclusively “Islamicist”. Therefore it is this threat rather than any perceived democratic “disequilibrium” in the power-sharing equation embedded in the NSC that should be of primary concern to us.
(TFT Jul 20-26, 2001 Vol-XIII No.21 — Editorial)
Two steps forward, one step backward
General Pervez Musharraf is back from Agra without a peace-process pact with India in his pocket. Was failure on the cards, or did “misplaced sequencing” and “vested interests” sabotage a happy ending?
The Agra Summit followed year-long diplomatic overtures by India and Pakistan. Whether these can be ascribed to international pressure or a sincere desire to mend fences by both sides, or a bit of both, the fact is that both countries were guilty of orchestrating media hype and creating the impression that, despite differences, they would kiss and make up in the city of love. Indeed, many people were led to believe that secret diplomacy had already ironed out the differences between the two protagonists and the two leaders would meet in Agra only to smile for the cameras. In the event, far from concluding anything of the sort before the Summit, both stepped into the fray by firmly drawing their lines in the sand. Mistake One.
On the face of it, General’s Musharraf’s “cautious optimism” didn’t seem unwarranted. He was, after all, only seeking to reflect the ground reality by a slight amendment in one particular clause of the Lahore Agreements — by changing the previous requirement of “moving forward on all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir” to a new one of “moving forward on Jammu and Kashmir, and all other outstanding issues”. That is why he constantly asked everyone whether India was “sincere” in wanting durable peace with Pakistan — his argument being that an acknowledgement of core ground realities, especially in Kashmir, would demonstrate sincerity on India’s part.
Alas. That was Mistake Two. “Sincerity” has little to do with diplomacy, just as a grudging acknowledgement of “ground realities” is to be invariably sought and expected at the end of a long drawn out process of give and take rather than at the beginning of negotiations between states. Nor, in reality, could General’s Musharraf’s demand to put Kashmir at the centre of the debate be seen as a small Indian concession to the peace process. From India’s point of view, the Simla Pact in 1972 buried the Kashmir dispute for all practical purposes while the Lahore Summit in 1999 made a notable concession to Pakistan by allowing Kashmir to be included in the litany of outstanding issues to be resolved. Hence, the small change of emphasis demanded by General Musharraf on the basis of sincerity and ground realities amounted to, in effect, a significant about-turn from India’s point of view. How could this be affected without a seeming loss of face for India, or without getting something in exchange? Such was India’s dilemma from the outset.
General Musharraf was, of course, prepared to make significant concessions to India in exchange for centralizing the Kashmir dispute. But Step One, he told a conference of Indian editors, was to reflect ground realities by focusing on Kashmir and bringing the aggrieved Kashmiris into the dialogue. Step Two, he suggested, would be to link progress on other contentious issues with that on Kashmir. Meanwhile, progress on Kashmir could be initiated by mutually ruling out Kashmir “solutions” unacceptable to either India or Pakistan. This was an unprecedented and daring offer.
In effect, he seemed to imply that Pakistan’s “flexibility” on the issue could amount to no less than an implicit abandonment of the “either” “or” UN Resolution position in which one country’s gain is the other’s loss, just as much as it would negate the idea of an independent Kashmir at India’s cost. In other words, General Musharraf held out the exciting possibility of a final arrangement on Kashmir in which the Kashmiris could claim to be winners without either India or Pakistan having to be losers.
Pakistani sources claim that an agreement was sabotaged at the last minute by Indian hardliners in Mr Vajpayee’s cabinet who insisted on linking the issue of “cross-border terrorism” with the central Kashmir issue. Indian sources claim that the Indian hardliners were constrained to pull out the stops after General Musharraf’s unrelenting remarks about the centrality of Kashmir in the editors’conference. But the fact is that the Pakistanis were provoked by the one-sided remarks of the hard-line Indian Information Minister, Sushma Swaraj, following the first round of discussions in which she tried to convey the impression that the Pakistanis had quietly acquiesced to the “composite issue approach” advocated by India. When General Musharraf tried to set the record straight in the editors’ breakfast conference the next day, the Indians retaliated by fishing out the clause about “cross-border terrorism” on which the Summit hopes eventually came to be dashed. Wittingly or otherwise, the sequencing of events left much to be desired.
Clearly, both countries still have much to learn about the art of Summitry. But they have regrouped rather well and kept hopes alive for the future. Of course, the hardliners on both sides must be delighted and will do their best to decry future openings. But the two leaders must resist the temptation of finger-pointing. Indeed, every opportunity to talk as soon as possible again must be grasped because people on both sides passionately desire peace.
(TFT Jul 27-02 Aug, 2001 Vol-XIII No.22 — Editorial)
Sometimes less is more
India and Pakistan were prodded by the international community to try and build the blocks of peace. But if India was under pressure to demonstrate benevolence in the region in exchange for big-power status in the world, Pakistan was left in no doubt about the linkage between peace and economic bailout by the IMF. Therefore the argument that India was negotiating out of a position of relative weakness vis a vis Pakistan is patently false. Indeed, if Pakistan or its state intellectuals insist on extracting mileage out of misplaced concreteness, the Indian response, as its prime minister has now iterated, may become more rigid and intransigent when the second round of talks is held. This will not serve Pakistan’s interests if its government is seen as trying to score points rather than searching for real peace.
More homework also needs to be done behind the scenes by both sides before the two leaders meet again in Islamabad. In fact, it would be a good idea if the foreign ministers can build on the substance of the 8 or 9 points discussed in the Summit and get the text of a joint declaration/statement approved and readied before the second Summit.
The Indians are, of course, right when they say that negotiations should not be conducted in the glare of the media. This suggests that if the Pakistanis try the same media tactics again, they will provoke the wounded Indians to react, and the second Summit will founder on the rocks of mutually destructive propaganda. In the event, Pakistan may be held responsible as the party sponsoring such tactics on both occasions.
Whether or not the Agra Summit was always vulnerable to BJP hardliners, as Pakistani hawks insist, the fact is that the Indian hawks were provided a perfect excuse to spike the declaration after Pakistan’s decision to go public with the Pakistani president’s breakfast meeting with top-notch Indian newspaper editors. This was an extraordinary intervention. On the plus side, it provided General Pervez Musharraf an unprecedented opportunity to reach out to the hearts and minds of ordinary Indians, which he did with devastating effect. On the minus side, it compelled the Indian hardliners to drum up the issue of “cross-border terrorism” as a new element in the proposed Indo-Pak equation. Thus the formidable challenge ahead will be to convey the same message to the people and opinion-makers of India while delinking the issue of Kashmir’s centrality with “cross-border” terrorism.
It is, however, unlikely that the Indian government will provide another grand opportunity to General Musharraf to talk directly to the Indian people. But even if such an opportunity should present itself, not much advantage may be gained by repeating the same point again and again. This is borne out by the dismissive manner in which the Indian media and public have responded to General Pervez Musharraf’s press conference in Islamabad the day after the Agra Summit. In the mind of the Indian public, General Musharraf’s “Kargil-warrior” mystique and the idea of Kashmir’s centrality were inextricably linked during the Summit. But the first is naturally wearing thin with overexposure and the second is likely to be finessed with the counter-idea of “cross-border” terrorism.
The time has therefore come to pick up the gauntlet thrown by India in supporting greater people-to-people contacts between the two countries by means of a soft visa regime, freer flow of information and renewed cultural interaction. This will promote the cause of Kashmir articulated by General Musharraf rather than hinder it. Indeed, There can be no greater ambassadors of Pakistani “sincerity” and “ground realities” than the people of Pakistan, even those who are opposed to military rule in Pakistan.
This people-to-people approach should not be mistaken by the Pakistani establishment as a “confidence-building” measure proposed by India in order to sideline the Kashmir issue, in line with its “less contentious issues” strategy. Instead, it may be viewed as an element of Pakistani strategy to win its cause in the hearts and minds of India rather than in the exclusive killing fields of Kashmir. It may be recalled that all guerilla wars for liberation or freedom in the annals of history were successfully concluded only after public opinion in the oppressing country was won over to the cause of the oppressed people, thereby pressurizing their own governments to let go without further bloodshed. Thus the ball that was kicked into flight so beautifully by General Musharraf during his “hardtalk” with the Indian editors should be caught in motion by lay Pakistanis and carried to the goal post across the border. This can only happen if the Pakistani leadership has the courage of its convictions and allows its people to express theirs with the same candour as General Musharraf.
Finally, some clarifications may be in order. Not losing is not the same thing as winning. Today’s hero could end up as tomorrow’s villain. Passion should not be confused with patriotism. Patriotism is not the same as nationalism, and neither is the monopoly of the military or its hawkish defenders. The divide between hawks and doves doesn’t translate into right and wrong. Confidence should not degenerate into cockiness. Personal success should not be equated with national vindication. And sometimes less is more.
(TFT Aug 03-09, 2001 Vol-XIII No.23 — Editorial)
Is this democracy?
The local elections are finally over. The politicians and generals should have learnt some valuable lessons. And we should know what to expect from the unfolding roadmap ahead.
The military government’s plans for “devolution of power” announced a year ago, were greeted with cynicism from politicians and press alike. But increasing voter turnout has cheered up some people. Indeed, the appearance of former provincial or national political heavyweights at the District Nazim level also suggests that the military may have succeeded in creating the perception that there could be a real shift of power from the centre to the local level. This, despite the fact that the local elections were marred by administrative opportunism or rigging, as when confronted by the MQM boycott in Sindh, or the fundamentalist opposition to voting by women in the NWFP.
Under the new law, the District Nazim may be expected to lord it over the police and become a very powerful person. Is that an intended consequence of the ordinance?
We think not. The District Nazims will be kept in line by the provincial Governor via the District Coordination Officer. And the Governor, as we have been told, will be appointed by the COAS-President and will hold office at his discretion. And the COAS-President, as we have come to learn, will lord it over the future elected prime minister and his cabinet via a super-charged National Security Council in which the four provincial governors will tilt the votes inescapably in the President’s favour.
So there it is. President General Pervez Musharraf will tell the elected prime minister what to do and his handpicked provincial Governors will tell the District Nazims what not to do. If the prime minister tries to go beyond his brief, he will be rapped on the knuckles and, failing that, sacked. If parliament tries to protect him/her, it will be advised to think again and, failing that, packed off too. Likewise, should any of the many army monitoring teams floating around file an adverse report about any District Nazim’s mischief or flight of fancy, the Governor will quietly ask the Regional Accountability Bureau to lock him/her up and throw the key away.
The same sort of engineering is on the cards for the provincial and national elections. Most of the candidates will be “sorted out”, literally, at the nomination stage. Those who escape the khaki net will be subjected to the discreet charm of the intelligence agencies at the time of voting and the RAB and NAB after the voting is over. Finally, if the herds insist on electing their own independent leaders, they will be throttled by the ubiquitous Governor in the case of errant chief ministers and the President in the case of an unwise prime minister, while the provincial or national assembly, as the case may be, will be advised to show restraint or else.
The essence of the political system that is in the throes of being engineered is clear. At every level of government, the army will determine which civilian is fit or not fit to be elected by his peers. Many who are not acceptable to the generals – for whatever conceivable reason — will not be allowed to contest or will be knocked out after the election on one excuse or another. For the sake of devolutionary form, of course, some of the redundant subjects in the centre’s concurrent list will be offloaded in the exclusive domain of the provincial governments.
It is a neatly designed system. Everything fits into place because it has been conceived by a gang of laptop wannabes. The system will be protected by an anti-virus army shield that is supposed to run unobtrusively in the background. On the face of it, it will be democratic and promise stability and continuity. In reality, however, it could be anything but that. Why’s that?
Despite the claimed failsafe credentials of various military-political operating systems in the past, the fact is that human beings are, by nature, chaotic and averse to programming. For example, it will not be easy to sack parliaments at will without undermining the new system and provoking domestic and international censure. Thus prime ministers and chief ministers, whatever their originally proclaimed timidity, may not be tamed eventually. Likewise, the inherent fluidity of the political situation may preclude any easy reigning in or sacking of errant District Nazims, thereby creating administrative confusion, deadlock and instability. Finally, the inability of the generals to erase Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto and Altaf Hussain from the hearts and minds of large chunks of Pakistanis, may prove to be a blunder. Excluding them from impinging on the new rules of the game by decree is not the same thing as removing them from peoples’ political reckoning altogether.
That is the central flaw in the new system. It is of the military, by the military, and for the military. It is much more intrusive than even the political system in Turkey. This is not democracy. Thus, while the system may succeed in the very short term, its chances are bleak in the longer run.
(TFT Aug 10-16, 2001 Vol-XIII No.24 — Editorial)
What law and whose order?
General Pervez Musharraf is enraged by terrorists. He says he wants to don his SSG uniform and blast them all to smithereens. We share his sentiment. But we are not terribly enthused by the government’s stale “law and order” approach to the problem.
Many of these terrorists are motivated by religious passions. Others are clearly agents of foreign powers seeking to destabilize state and government. Together, they have laid our country low. Foreign tourists and businessmen are afraid to visit Pakistan or invest in it. Enforced work stoppages in the wake of terrorist violence greatly hurt the economy. The targeting of Shia professionals, especially doctors in Karachi, has scared them into seeking refuge abroad. In short, an environment of violence, fear and loathing has confirmed the awful perception of Pakistan abroad.
The worst offenders are religious fanatics. Last year, over 300 Pakistanis died at their hands. This year, the score already exceeds 150. Karachi is the current hot spot and Shias are the main target. For weeks TFT has reported on what is brewing in the city, why the police is unable to handle the problem, why the issue defies purely administrative measures. Yet the government’s fixation on dusting curative prescriptions off the shelf rather than attempting preventive solutions, despite the continuing failure of this approach, suggests that the state is tied up in knots.
To be sure, the government could do worse than ban sectarian parties and “de-weaponize” society, improve intelligence gathering and motivate the police. But is that all that needs to be done?
Did General Musharraf’s order to hang Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, who assassinated an Iranian Consul General in 1990, deter the banned Lashkar-i-Jhangvi from killing dozens of Shia leaders subsequently? Has General Moinuddin Haider’s “de-weaponisation” campaign deterred the terrorists from using deadly weapons? Has any government’s “sincere” exhortation to shun sectarian strife ever led to any meaningful results? Has the continuing re-organisation and revamping of the police and administration succeeded in deterring terrorist violence? Indeed, on a general note, it is worth asking whether the voluminous criminal procedure code (law) has ever deterred hardened criminals and motivated terrorists from committing crimes?
The fact is that no administrative force can ever be sufficiently equipped or motivated to match the raw passions of religiously blinded warriors or foreign-inspired mercenaries. The fact is that the theory of deterrence is fine as far as it goes logically and rationally, but it doesn’t go too far when it is countered with the opium of the masses. The fact is that every government since the time of General Zia ul Haq has been helpless in the face of the sectarian menace because he stripped the constitution of its secular spirit and enabled pan-Islamic ideas and religious leaders to erode the hitherto neutral organs of the state like the army, ISI, judiciary, police and political parties. The fact is that when a nation-state so dominated by one religious sect makes it a matter of policy to sustain and promote the religious ideas and beliefs of the majority sect, we cannot expect it to stay neutral in passionate schismatic disagreements between the various sects. The fact is that powerful elements in the state apparatus, even when they disagree with majoritarian sectarian prejudices, are ever ready to condone or ignore them for so-called “strategic” external policies. The fact is that our strategic foreign campaigns and wars are not being fought by professional soldiers of our army but by religiously inspired warriors belonging to the majority sect and dominant provinces. The fact is that the sectarian militants are neither Mohajirs nor Sindhis but hail from the Punjab and NWFP which also supply a majority of the manpower of the army, bureaucracy, police and judiciary. The fact is that the weapons of war are stored by the religious warriors not in safe homes or underground cellars which can be raided by the police but in places of worship and indoctrination where no unholy encroachment may be made. The fact is that there is an organic link between sectarian violence in Pakistan, the rise of indigenous religious militias to overwhelm infidel peoples and places and the retaliatory “foreign-hand” behind inexplicable acts of terrorism in Pakistan.
Generally speaking, when we talk to army officers, civil servants, judges and journalists, we are struck by the similarity of their views with ours regarding concerns about the dangerous domination of Pakistan’s civil and security discourse by the warriors of the majority sect. Yet when we talk to the same set of people in the loop of the national security establishment led by the intelligence agencies, we find a reproachful shrugging away of the problem. It is as though “it is a small price to pay for our security” which cannot be entrusted to the faint-hearted. Is that a fair response?
No, it’s not. The price is getting beyond our national outreach. The poverty of state philosophy is impoverishing us in myriad ways, of which the current exodus of doctors, scientists, businessmen and capital is only its most cruel manifestation. Thus General Musharraf would do well to reflect on the real and underlying causes of terrorism instead of fuming mistakenly about it.
(TFT Aug 17-23, 2001 Vol-XIII No.25 — Editorial)
Hold your breath!
General Pervez Musharraf’s announcement on August 14 purports to be a transparent roadmap for democratic revival. However, it is anything but that. It situates the general elections at the edge of the supreme court’s cut-off date rather than early next year which might have been more welcome as a confidence-building measure. This suggests that he means to lord it over the civilians for as long as possible before handing them a slice of power.
The 14 month gap between now and then also implies that he is not terribly sure how he should transfer some power to party-political elected assemblies. Thus he is playing his cards close to the chest because he doesn’t quite know how to trump or finesse the hands of his potential political adversaries. Indeed, some people may find it ominous that he had nothing to say about the party-based status or otherwise of the forthcoming elections, leaving his spokesman to later shed some light on the matter. Clearly, the announcement has been made as a sop to international opinion rather than out of any real concern about reviving civilian rule.
The government proposes to take no less than nine months to debate the pros and cons of various possible constitutional amendments before carrying them out. As if that is not ridiculous enough, we have not been told how this is to be done. Presumably, it will be no different than the “debate” conducted by General Tanvir Naqvi and his loyal band of laptop wannabes over the form and content of the local elections scheme, aided and assisted by their evergreen, strategy-regurgitating hacks. In other words, the military troika around General Musharraf will lay down the amendments for their touts to flog before a captive audience, and that will be that. These constitutional amendments will ostensibly relate to the issue of “checks and balances on civilian power”. On the face of it, this sounds reasonable enough, given the unbearable extremes to which former prime ministers Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif went in trying to accumulate all power and decimate all manner of opposition. But if our elected representatives are to be checked for the good of the country, who will check the “checkers”? The political record of army generals Ayub Khan and Zia ul Haq is hardly any better, if not worse, than that of our most errant politicians. Indeed, as the experience of Benazir Bhutto in government suggests, what is to stop the uniformed “checkers” from checkmating the civilians and making a mockery of prime ministerial government? Equally, the insistence that political parties should be compelled to act in a reasonable and responsible fashion should not be taken to mean electoral engineering in order to outlaw or bypass them.
Several other questions need credible answers. How will General Musharraf become a legitimate president? Will he tilt in favour of some sort of dubious device, like a rigged referendum as in the case of General Zia, or is he inclined to take the route taken by General Aslam Beg when he leaned on Ms Bhutto in 1988 to “elect” Ghulam Ishaq Khan as president?
The fate of General Musharraf’s coup-making colleagues is also hanging in the balance. Will they all be retired, one by one, or will some be chosen over others to stick close to him on his long journey? Who will ascend the NSC along with him and in what form? As much as the outcome of the elections, the country’s fate depends critically on the sort of choices he will make about such men and matters in the months to come. After all, one of them may be called upon to consolidate or scuttle his legacy in the event of some unforeseen happening or circumstance.
In the final analysis, however, the outcome of the elections will determine the extent to which General Musharraf and his merry men are able to erect a political system of their liking. Ideally, of course, it would be marvelous from their point of view if no political party were able to muster a majority in the National or Provincial Assemblies, thereby making it easier for the ubiquitous intelligence agencies to mould the disparate factions into flexible national or provincial coalitions. But in the event that this is not possible – on current form, the PPP is most likely to stage a thumping comeback – how will the brass deal with the situation?
General Musharraf has demonstrated a practicality in affairs of state that has served his purposes well so far. A good example is the deal struck with Nawaz Sharif. But the task may become harder in the run-up to the elections, especially as regards the ability of a resurgent PPP to throw a spanner in his works. Will he rig the elections or will he carry out wholesale disqualifications of the PPP? Or will there be a deal with Ms Bhutto as well?
It has been a piece of cake so far. But the going will get tough as the tough get going towards the goalpost.
(TFT Aug 24-30, 2001 Vol-XIII No.26 — Editorial)
Untenable position
Since the military seized power in October 1999, more than 220 people (mostly Shias) have been killed and over 200 seriously injured in 80 outbreaks of religious violence in 30 cities of Pakistan. The worst affected is the economically backward, religiously conservative, largely illiterate, Federally Administered Tribal Area where Sunni-Shia clashes have accounted for over 60 dead. But the contagion has spread to Karachi, the industrial hub of the country, killing 50, disrupting economic activity and undermining business confidence. What is the government doing about this malignant sectarian disease?
General Pervez Musharraf seems alive to the national threat posed by religious extremists nurtured in Pakistan’s many sectarian-inspired madaris (religious schools). On the curative side of the prescription, he has constantly urged religious groups and parties to tolerate diverse opinion and shun violence. But after failing to elicit an encouraging response, he has now banned the two leading proponents of sectarian violence — the Sunni-Deobandi Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Shia Sipah-e-Mohammad — and warned their “parent” parties — the Sipah-e-Sahaba and Tehrik-e-Jafaria respectively — of more serious consequences if they don’t behave. The government has also stiffened the anti-terrorist law by imposing punitive restrictions on the “glorification” of such sectarian acts by the media. On the preventive side, the government proposes to establish an institution for the rational guidance and financial care of model deeni madaris whose curricula are in tune with the requirements of a modern and rational outlook.
Clearly, General Musharraf is embarrassed by the negative diplomatic consequences of allowing jehadi groups to maintain a high profile in Pakistan. This concern follows India’s insistence in Agra last month that the issue of “cross-border terrorism” (meaning “Pakistan-based and inspired jehad”) should be treated at par with the Kashmir dialogue in any Indo-Pak peace talks. Thus the government is making a tentative effort to cap this adverse fallout by trying to veil the jehadi groups, in particular by restraining them from collecting funds in public. All these steps are commendable. But they fall far short of the drastic measures needed to halt the slide into violent religious anarchy, economic uncertainty and political confusion.
The ban on two underground sectarian organizations makes no concrete sense. Warning an incorrigible group to behave, while setting its leader free from prison, is baffling. Arresting scores of sectarian activists amidst a glare of publicity one day and releasing them quietly in ones and twos the next day is hypocritical. The idea of a new body to establish and oversee model religious schools is hardly ingenious, considering that is the job of the ministry of religious affairs anyway. Similarly, amending the anti-terrorist law by imposing restrictions on press freedom is misplaced concreteness. Significantly, too, the government has not banned jehadi organisations from collecting funds; it has merely asked them not to collect them publicly. And that too only in one province, where they are quite insignificant.
But if moderate Muslims are dissatisfied with these mock-measures, the extremists are deeply offended by them. The government’s attempt to guide or oversee religious schools is seen by their sponsors as an effort to “control” and steer them away from their objectives. Similarly, the jehadis have flatly refused to stop collecting funds. Indeed, sections of the ideological print media in accord with jehadi aspirations are advising General Musharraf to proceed with “caution” on this front.
Clearly, General Musharraf’s situation is untenable. On the one hand, he is the Chief of an army whose outlook is conservative and whose fighting spirit is inspired by religious ideals and slogans. The army’s “corporate” interests in Afghanistan and Kashmir, however mistaken they may be, also dictate a specific linkage with jehadi groups motivated in support of the army’s tactical or strategic foreign objectives. Thus it is not easy for him to sever ties with the religious and jehadi elements. On the other hand, General Musharraf is the President of a country that desperately seeks rejuvenation as a modern, moderate, peaceable, Muslim state in the community of nations. The country’s “corporate” interests also demand a resounding economic revival program organically linked to the secular dynamics of global capitalism rather than to the ideological statics of a semi-feudal domestic order. But in order to achieve this international status, he must erase all evidence of religious extremism, bigotry and extra-territorial jehadism from Pakistan’s body-politic. Meanwhile, the contradiction between the two corporate requirements or positions is accentuated by the fact that the religious extremists have an independent agenda and life of their own in which they seek to capture the command of the Pakistan state and army rather than remain their pawns for all times to come.
General Musharraf is trying to play all sides at the same time. But the contradictions in his position are becoming sharper by the day. He should lead Pakistan unambiguously into modern nationhood. If he can’t or won’t, it is only a matter of time before the country and army are engulfed in domestic anarchy and international conflict.
(TFT Aug 31-06 Sep, 2001 Vol-XIII No.27 — Editorial)
Dirty little great game
A recent newspaper photograph shows Makhdum Amin Fahim of the Peoples Party looking like a deferential prime minister-to-be chatting amiably with a benevolent-looking General Pervez Musharraf. This has sent political pundits into raptures. A “deal” between Benazir Bhutto and General Musharraf has been clinched, they believe, in which the two, in association with the Like-Minded rebels from the Pakistan Muslim League, will make and run a “national” government in Islamabad after the October general elections next year. This speculation has been given a fillip by Ms Bhutto’s revealing statement to a middle-eastern newspaper in which she is quoted as saying that she would like to return to Pakistan and look after her children while her nominated prime minister from the PPP governs the country. Is this a plausible scenario?
It certainly doesn’t square with General Musharraf’s oft-repeated view that Ms Bhutto, no less than Nawaz Sharif, is corrupt as hell and must pay for her sins. In fact, the government calls her a convicted absconder from justice. Nor has it relented in the case of Mr Asif Zardari. Indeed, the recent arrest of the PPP Secretary-General, Jehangir Badr seems proof of the government’s abiding hostility towards Ms Bhutto and her trusted lieutenants, several of whom face the wrath of General Khaled Maqbool’s ever-zealous NAB. Is no “deal” necessary or possible from either protagonist’s point of view?
On the contrary. General Musharraf likes to portray himself as a straight-forward soldier who says it as it is and sticks to his word, come hell or high water. However, he is anything but that. In fact, the end justifies the means for our simple soldier. Remember his detestable but most practical “deal” with Nawaz Sharif when confronted with the spectre of the ex-premier’s martyrdom? Or his disappointing but pragmatic backtracking on the blasphemy law when threatened by the Islamic fundamentalists? Or his readiness to be “flexible” on Kashmir when faced with a belligerent New Delhi capable of imposing a destabilising conflict on the border? Or his quiet submission before the IMF in order to forestall external default and domestic anarchy?
No, the good general is capable of making a deal with the devil, if necessary, let alone Ms Bhutto, who increasingly seems a “lesser evil” compared to the vengeful Sharifs in exile or the violent mullahs in the wings. In fact, a strong case can be made out for a working alliance between the military led by General Musharraf and the peoples’ representatives comprising elements of the PPP, PML(LM) and MQM. How’s that?
Notwithstanding the “non-party” nomenclature attached to the local elections held recently, the fact is that pro-PPP candidates swept Sindh province and made deep inroads into Punjab and the NWFP. Similarly, the MQM remains master of all it surveys in Karachi and the PML-LM has made a niche for itself in Punjab. Projecting on this basis, the PPP is clearly the most “national” party of all. We can also confirm that the PPP voter is alive and kicking, having simply refused to turn out to vote in the last elections rather than switch sides. But it is the PPP’s abiding liberal and national outlook that is probably more relevant today than ever before as the country lurches dangerously between violent religious passions and stable economic self-interest. In fact, it is the one party that is naturally placed to help General Musharraf move the country forward in a modern and moderate manner.
General Musharraf must know this. Yet no one can take a potential alliance between the military and PPP for granted. Ms Bhutto would like to be prime minister, her husband by her side and her party loyally behind her. But Generally Musharraf would like her to remain in exile, her husband in prison and the PPP loyally behind him. The “deal” will therefore lie somewhere in-between these extreme positions as both jostle to overwhelm the other and extract maximum concessions in their own favour. That is where two recent developments become relevant. Ms Bhutto’s statement that she is ready to become a mother rather than a prime minister is meant to extract an early deal from General Musharraf so that her party can strengthen itself, sweep the next elections and put pressure on the military for a better deal for her later. But the sudden arrest of Jehangir Badr suggests that General Musharraf means to whip the PPP into an alliance of his liking rather than gamely let it impose one upon him. Thus we may expect the government to openly turn the screws on the PPP in the short term even as it discreetly reaches out to it in the medium term.
It is good that both sides have broken the ice and are talking to each other in the national interest. But neither should count its chickens before they are hatched. Certainly, we should expect some cunning manoeuvres from Ms Bhutto via her political allies at home and abroad and some firm manipulation by General Musharraf via his ubiquitous NAB. The dirty little great game of politics has begun all over again. Sit back and enjoy it.
(TFT Aug 31-06 Sep, 2001 Vol-XIII No.27 — Article)
Remembering General GA
Lt General Ghulam Ahmad died tragically in a car accident last week. He was Chief of Staff at the Chief Executive’s secretariat. He belonged to the Armoured Corps and served as head of the ISI’s Internal Wing from 1998-2000. He leaves behind a wife, two sons and two daughters
I first met him in an ISI hideout somewhere in Rawalpindi in May 1999. A clean-cut, genial man, he sported aviator glasses and was decked out in a colourful bush shirt and tan trousers. Not exactly your deadly hush-hush sort-of-spook, I thought, since he seemed relaxed and reassuring.
“Sethi Sahab”, he said, firmly shaking my hand, but without introducing himself, “I’ve arranged for your wife and lawyers to meet you. Please come with me. I hope you don’t mind if I sit in the room with you”. And then, without further ado, he ushered me into the company of my wife Jugnu, and my lawyer-friends Dr Khalid Ranjha, Asma Jehangir and Shabbar Raza Rizvi. At the conclusion of our meeting, Jugnu told me that my mother sent her love and was anxious about my well-being. General GA heard her and said: “Sethi Sahab, why don’t you call your mother?” The colonel who was my minder then took me to the room next door and I spoke briefly to my ailing mother.
I was brutally kidnapped from my home in Lahore by the Punjab police and Intelligence Bureau in the early hours of May 8th, 1999, roughed up in custody and handed over to the ISI. But the ISI handled me with kid gloves, as though instructed by its “higher-ups” to be careful. I was lodged in a “safe” house, a doctor checked me out and prescribed medicines. My minders were two bright ISI colonels and a youthful captain — polite, poker-faced, confident. “Don’t worry, everything will be OK”, was their constant reassuring refrain.
General GA, I learnt subsequently, was head of the internal political wing of the ISI in Islamabad. He was posted to the secret service in 1998 by the then army chief, General Jehangir Karamat. When the then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, personally called up the then DG-ISI, General Ziauddin Butt, and ordered him to arrest and court martial me, it was to General GA that the DG-ISI turned for advice and compliance. GA called up Brigadier Ijaz Shah (now our untiring home secretary Punjab), then head of the ISI in Lahore, and briefed him about the situation. But Mr Sharif’s vicious henchman, Saif-ur-Rehman, thought the ISI was dragging its feet. So he coordinated with the Punjab chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, and jumped the gun. Apparently, I had to be taught a lesson so that others of my ilk would not become so audacious.
During my “captivity”, I came to one confusing conclusion. The prime minister and Saif-ur-Rahman wanted to lock me up and throw away the key. But the army and ISI — from General Musharraf to Brigadier (now Major General) Rashid Qureshi, Brigadier Ijaz Shah and General GA — thought otherwise. The ISI did not share Sharif’s hostility towards me. It made no attempt to intimidate or coerce me into making a false “confession”. Indeed, it actually refused to hand me over to the IB for “interrogation” when Saif-ur-Rehman made the demand. More critically, it did not agree with the prime minister that I should be court-martialed. How was this possible, I thought, wasn’t General Ziauddin Butt, the DG-ISI, handpicked by Sharif and bound to do his bidding? What was going on?
The answers were partly and indirectly provided by GA in a long afternoon session that we had together in the last week of May in my “safe house” in Pindi. He was in uniform this time. He told me how General Musharraf , whom I didn’t know from Adam at the time, had refused to sanction my court-martial, despite pressure from the government, how the ISI in general, and GA in particular, didn’t like to be “used” for anyone’s personal vendettas. We also talked about the content of a rather candid speech that I had made at the National Defence College six months earlier about the multiple crises facing Pakistan. This had now become the pretext for action against me by the Sharif government on the grounds that when I aired it in New Delhi I was acting in a treasonable manner. GA thought I should have been more circumspect but it certainly didn’t amount to treason by any stretch of the imagination. “You’ve been writing some pretty strong stuff against him”, he added, referring to Nawaz Sharif. “Is it all true?” he mocked, his eyes hinting at mischief.
But one small detail seemed to intrigue him. In my so-called “controversial” speech, I had, in a rhetorical flourish, written that “there is only one modern-day ideology over whose application there can be no bitter or divisive controversies, and which will be acceptable to all Pakistanis, irrespective of caste, creed, gender, region, ethnicity, sect, etc. And that is the ideology of economic growth, the ideology of full employment, the ideology of distributive justice and social welfare”. Expanding on the theme, I had suggested that “Pakistan should make this ideology the ideology of the state and thereby bury all false consciousness and false ideologies”. GA wanted me to explain the gist of this construction. He was especially keen to know what I had meant by “ideology” in this context. When I explained the “idea” of economic revival and reconstruction as being central to building modern nationhood, he nodded thoughtfully.
Discussion over, he got up to leave, shook my hand, looked me in the eye and said matter-of-factly: “Sethi Sahab, I shall submit my report to my DG in a day or two. It shall be brief. No one can force me to write against the facts”.
One week later, the government was forced to concede before the Supreme Court that it had no case against me and I was a free man again. In an interview to the BBC, I attributed my arrest to the prime minister and my freedom to, among the many others who fought for me, the ISI and the Pakistani army chief who refused to be exploited for political purposes. Many people were confused by this statement because they had all too easily believed the government’s propaganda that I had been detained by the ISI for “anti-national” activities.
But my “association” with GA was not yet over. When Amnesty International invited me to Britain to accept an award for Journalism Under Threat, I called up GA and asked him to facilitate the return of my passport which lay with the ISI. He promised to “try his best” but indicated that the IB was pressurising him to hand over the passport to Saif-ur-Rehman. In due course, however, it was quietly handed back to me by the ISI with the request that I should not make a song and dance about it.
GA was promoted to Lt Gen and made Chief of Staff to General Musharraf last year. His appointment reflected his strengths as a gatekeeper to the most powerful man in Pakistan just as much as it reflected the temperament of his boss. GA was, as Major General Rashid Qureshi put it, “someone with his feet firmly planted on the ground, down to earth, realistic above everything else”. He was hardworking, intelligent (but without the pretense of being an intellectual), candid in his opinion but never expansive or intrusive. He never had a bad word to say about anyone.
In the brief moments that I spent with him, I saw all these qualities in the man. But I also felt he was a deeply compassionate and fair-minded person. Everyone testifies to his modesty and humility. He was barely two years away from retirement, yet had not even begun to build his retirement nest. Whenever his wife would express her anxiety on this score, he would gently chide her by saying “My dear, do you have any problems?”
I last met him on July 13, when General Pervez Musharraf invited the leading editors of the country for a pre-Agra chat in Islamabad. During the meeting, I noticed that he made a note in his pad only when someone made an original or meaningful comment, for the most part hearing out our ramblings with a poker face. After the meeting, he came over to embrace me warmly.
“I hope you’re accompanying the Chief to Agra”, I said. “If he wants me to, sir, I shall certainly do so”. General Rashid Qureshi tells me that GA was a model of restraint and sobriety in India as all around him hopes soared and fell, and nerves were frayed. That was so typical of GA. He was, as they say, a good and true man. We shall all miss him. May God bless his soul.
(TFT Sep 07-13, 2001 Vol-XIII No.28 — Editorial)
Afghanistan is core issue
The travails of the Afghan people and the turmoil in Kabul under the Taleban continue to cast their shadow over Pakistan. But the Islamabad establishment refuses to account for the mounting costs of this relationship to Pakistan, apart from mouthing inanities about some sort of “strategic depth”.
Some weeks ago, we reported a high-powered Taleban “delegation” in the Mohmand agency of Pakistan. Among other things, the Taleban were advising the local people not to fret about getting Pakistani ID cards because they would be provided Afghan ones in time to come. The political agent of the area was helpless in the face of such audacity by our “guests”. But Islamabad remains quiet about the Taleban’s refusal to accept the Durand Line and claim chunks of Pakistan.
This is nothing new. Every Pashtun-dominated government in Kabul has rejected the Durand Line and demanded it should be redrawn at Attock. Indeed, the stronger the Pashtun regime in Kabul, the more aggressive has been its ethnic-nationalist territorial claims on Pakistan. But for the Taleban to embarrass us so openly should be doubly difficult to swallow, considering just how much they owe us in terms of their very origin and continued existence. Yet Islamabad shows no sign of reviewing and changing its failed Afghan policy. But that is not all.
The Taleban are hosts to Osama bin Laden, a hero to a few and a terrorist to most countries. They are the destroyers of the Bamian Buddhas, symbols of peace for the many and idols of oppression for a few. They seek to keep their women in chains while the rest of the world celebrates their growing freedom. They are determined to take Afghanistan back to the 7th century even as we all rush to embrace the new millennium.
The United Nations has long advocated a broad-based and moderate government in Kabul. But the Taleban have been able to spurn that advice because Pakistani support for the war against the ethnic Hazaras, Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north is still assured. Indeed, the Taleban can shrug away all manner of international advice or criticism as long as Islamabad is solidly behind them. But the price of camaraderie with the Taleban is rising by the day for Pakistan.
In the old days, Pakistan was able to house and feed millions of Afghan refugees because the western powers were eager to give money to Pakistan. In fact, many Pakistani and Afghan mujahids were flushed with cash because their jehad was the same as the Western cause. But times have changed. Now we are driving them not just back to war-ravaged Afghanistan but beyond the seas to the southern hemisphere in search of refuge. More worryingly, the UN has slapped sanctions on the Taleban and determined to send monitors to Pakistan to make sure that Kabul is not so blatantly propped up as before. This has raised the stakes for Pakistan and created a precipitous situation.
If Pakistan is seen to defy the sanctions on Kabul, it is likely to crumble under the burden of fresh economic and political sanctions itself. If it doesn’t, the Taleban will be slowly strangulated out of their intransigence and Pakistan’s foreign policy will be shown to have been a disaster. So what should Islamabad do?
The Taleban’s “advisors” have countered with a cunning “strategy” to maintain the status quo. First, they have cobbled a private-sector jehadi front in Pakistan which is threatening to kill the UN monitors should they land in Islamabad. Second, the Taleban have taken a leaf from the early days of the Khomeini regime in Iran by taking Western hostages under the pretext of illegal Christian proselytizing. It is thought that this two-pronged approach will lead to greater leverage for both Islamabad and Kabul vis a vis the West. How’s that?
Pakistan faces three layers of American sanctions. Since nothing can be done about those related to crossing the nuclear red-light in 1990 and those related to the coup in 1999, the Americans are to be persuaded that they should lift the nuclear-testing related ones in 1998 as soon as possible after India is reprieved on the same front as well as the IMF lifeline going. What better way to get this done than as a quid pro quo for Islamabad’s quiet intervention to get the Shelter Now hostages released after they have been convicted and pardoned by the Taleban? The jehadi threat against the UN monitors should also lead to a postponement of their mission, thereby averting serious problems with Pakistan.
This strategy may seem terribly clever but it is all too obvious. At best it will prolong the painful economic status quo and stunt Pakistan’s rebirth as a creative and modern nation. At worst, it might hasten the Talibanisation of our country and precipitate a showdown with the West when its patience runs out. If Pakistan expects the world to support it in terms of its core dispute with India, it should not snub the world in terms of its core concerns about Afghanistan under the Taleban.
(TFT Sep 14-20, 2001 Vol-XIII No.29 — Editorial)
Time to change tack
The 11th September terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon and State Department in Washington DC could become a defining point for Pakistan, if not for the rest of the world. The US is ready to declare war against those groups, countries and civilizations that aid, abet or harbour its declared enemies. This will have profound implications for the world order in general and certain “rogue” regimes and their friends, associates or supporters in particular.
The “terrorists”, “freedom fighters”, “jehadis” — call them what you will – chose their targets specifically for their symbolic value. The World Trade Center as a symbol of US capital, the Pentagon as a symbol of US muscle and the State Department as a symbol of America’s government. Together, they define the soul of the USA, one that has now been bruised beyond American reckoning. There is, clearly, no “shield” against human suicide squads.
As stunned Americans grieve the enormous human tragedy, elsewhere in the world certain battered groups, communities and countries – ranging from the angry jehadis of the Islamic world and the displaced Palestinians in the Middle-East to sanction-burdened Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Afghanistan, and even Pakistan – strain to hide their true emotions: “the bully on the block has met its comeuppance”.
So far no particular group has validly claimed responsibility for the attack. But Western commentators, politicians and even philosophers are straining at the leash to join in a “clash of civilizations” by starting a “hunt” for Osama Bin Laden and his Islamic jehadis in those countries like Afghanistan that are accused of harbouring or facilitating him. Bin Laden is, of course, a self-avowed enemy of the US. Therefore, once the shock of the tragedy is replaced by the rage of wounded American pride seeking a swift and terrible retribution, the politicians and generals will start pushing buttons and all hell will break loose. Saner voices, explaining the origins of rising anti-Americanism in patently unjust American policies in certain situations and countries, and advising restraint, dialogue and diplomacy, are likely to be drowned in a wave of raw human passion. In the longer term, also, we should not be surprised if some democratic freedoms and common rights that are taken for granted in the West are visibly circumscribed in the host countries for people with certain religious or ethnic or national backgrounds.
As each potential target of American wrath holds its breath, Pakistani policy makers might be advised to take urgent stock of the situation. A few months ago, (Editorial, The world according to PM, TFT, 11th May, 2001) we argued that General Pervez Musharraf should not become too complacent in power and pointed out the pitfalls of his Afghan policies. “The Taliban’s military victories provide illusory strategic depth to Islamabad, but one false move by Osama Bin Laden could provoke the wrath of the big boy in the White House and make Afghanistan a millstone around our neck.” Last week, (Editorial, Afghanistan is core issue, TFT, 7th September, 2001), we said that: “The travails of the Afghan people and the turmoil in Kabul under the Taliban continue to cast their shadow over Pakistan. But the Islamabad establishment refuses to account for the mounting costs of this relationship to Pakistan, apart from mouthing inanities about some sort of ‘strategic depth’…This strategy may seem terribly clever but it is all too obvious. At best it will prolong the painful economic status quo and stunt Pakistan’s rebirth as a creative and modern nation. At worst, it might hasten the Talibanisation of our country and precipitate a showdown with the West when its patience runs out.”
Unfortunately for Pakistan, that patience may have finally run out on 11th September. If the Americans demand that the Taliban hand over Bin Laden to them, the Taliban will probably refuse. The US will then expect the Pakistani government to stop playing both sides and stand by, if necessary with men and materials, to assist American action against Kabul. If the national security establishment under General Musharraf agrees, that could be the beginning of the end of its Afghan and Kashmir policies because its “Islamic” jehadis will turn irrevocably against it. If it refuses, the US may have few qualms about embracing India and turning the screws on Pakistan, plunging it into economic ruin and political anarchy. In that event, Pakistan could not remain sanguine that its nuclear program would survive the tumultuous developments in the region, the armed forces would be destabilized and General Musharraf’s personal and political survival could not be taken for granted.
Whether or not Osama Bin Laden is involved in this attack, the situation will henceforth remain perilous for Pakistan because Washington is not likely to ignore the continuing threat from Islamic jehad and will jump the gun sooner or later. Domestic economic confidence is thin. The political leadership is alienated or thwarted. Therefore visionary leadership is necessary to steer Pakistan to safer waters. This is no time for domestic prevarication or international bluff. General Pervez Musharraf should stake the country’s future on right and rationality rather than on pride and passion.
(TFT Sep 21-27, 2001 Vol-XIII No.30 — Editorial)
Support Musharraf!
General Pervez Musharraf is correct in arguing that Pakistan is facing its most critical crisis since the dismemberment of the country in 1971. He is correct in listing the strategic and economic dangers facing the country should its leaders and people succumb to rage and passion instead of acting with intelligence and wisdom. He is correct in warning India to “lay off” from stirring trouble in Pakistan. And he is correct in demanding that Pakistanis should demonstrate the will and courage to put the interests of their country above everything else at this juncture.
This is not the time to apportion blame on leaders past or present for our current predicament. But certain factors have contributed to it and we should highlight them so that the agonizing process of finding a comprehensive solution is made easier.
First: Our five decade-long relationship with America, with its unthinking ups and ruthless downs, has left us with two major sores: a dependent economy and an anti-American backlash. Therefore, as we strive to rebuild our economy and rethink our relations with the United States, we should be wary of the sort of quick-fix-solutions that have brought us to this pass. Yes, every cloud has a silver lining — and in this case there is clearly an opportunity to set many things right – but let us not get carried away into believing that a “strategic realignment” with the US along the old client-state parameters is either necessary or possible in our own best interests.
Second: Our two-decade long so-called process of “Islamisation” of state and society — with its constitutional amendments, Hadood laws, riba injunctions, blasphemy excesses and emphasis on apparent piety instead of truth and justice — has planted the seeds of recurring instability in our nation-state. The “reassertion” of such fundamentalist impulses has hurt many human rights causes, fueled violent sectarianism and created economic confusion. But worst of all, it has revived the notion of jihad across the geographical boundaries of our nation-state and pitted it against other nation-states. Yes, we are all Muslims — and in many instances we have been clearly wronged as a people — but let us not retreat into a raging clash with all the infidels of the world. As General Musharraf said, “let us put our (nation-state) Pakistan first”.
Third: Our two decade-long “intervention” in Afghanistan has been an unmitigated disaster, leading to our current “critical” circumstances. We plunged into America’s war with the Soviet Union and helped destroy that country. Then we replaced our requirement for a friendly state in our backyard with an obsession for a client state at our back by picking and supporting favourites among the Afghans, engineering civil strife, making enemies of Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities and driving them into the lap of neighbouring powers. When all failed, we propped up the Taliban without acquiring any significant leverage with them in exchange. Now we are being held accountable for befriending them and being made to count the costs of ditching them. Yes, we must have a friendly government in our backyard, and yes, it must be dominated by the Pashtuns, but the radical Islamicist Taliban have to go and Pakistan’s establishment must learn to live with an autonomous, moderately Muslim, broad based national government in Kabul.
Fourth: Our five decade-long war with India over Kashmir has burdened our economy, led to the dismemberment of our country and brought us to a nuclear impasse. But thousands of Kashmiris have died and there is no solution in sight. Meanwhile, the jihad is threatening to disrupt civil society in the valley. But a larger writing is on the wall already. Despite any short-term concessions to Pakistan for reasons of exigency, like ignoring the Pakistan-sponsored jihad in Kashmir for the time being, America’s war against “terrorism” — meaning America’s war against radical Islam — is bound to bring the various domestic and foreign Lashkars and Mujahids in its sights after the Taliban and Afghanistan have been “sorted out”. Therefore if India is to be pressurized to “lay off” Pakistan today, Pakistan must expect to face pressure to “lay off” India tomorrow. Thus it would be a good idea for both to start talking again in the search for peace rather than try to threaten or undermine the other in the current circumstances.
What lies ahead is clear enough. The Taliban will attach unacceptable conditionalities on the extradition of Osama bin Laden which America will spurn contemptuously. America will ask Pakistan to provide overt and covert logistical support (intelligence, airspace, fuel, and bases) for the creation and maintenance of a bridgehead in Afghanistan for military operations against the Taliban. After the Taliban leadership has been eliminated, America will seek to establish a new, broad based government in Kabul which will be entrusted with the task of reconstructing the country. Throughout this period, Pakistan will remain in the eye of the storm. But if it plays its cards right, it could come out a winner in the end.
The current crisis has shown General Pervez Musharraf to be a clear-thinking, moderate, pragmatic, decisive and courageous man. Pakistanis should rally round him as the right man in such trying circumstances.
(TFT Sep 28-04 Oct, 2001 Vol-XIII No.31 — Editorial)
De-mythologising Afghanistan
Conspiracy theorists apart, many commentators have assumed that the United States will bomb Afghanistan into the stone age, thereby provoking a dangerous blowback for America and its Muslim allies like Pakistan. Some argue that it will be “a war without end” in which the tenacious Afghans will defeat America much like the Russains a decade ago and the British a hundred years earlier. Others fear that thousands of innocent Afghans will perish, triggering widespread anti-American riots in Pakistan that could lead to the overthrow of the moderate Musharraf regime. America’s Muslim allies therefore want “credible evidence” of OBL’s complicity in order to “neutralize” the rage of their people.
The basic assumption in these scenarios, however, may not be true. Far from exacting revenge for the innocent lives lost in America by launching indiscriminate attacks in Afghanistan, the US strategy may be more calibrated by focusing on OBL, his Al-Qaeda companions and the core Taliban leadership. This much can be gleaned from President Bush’s recent statement that the best way to bring those responsible to justice for the September 11 terrorist attacks was “to ask for the cooperation of citizens within Afghanistan who may be tired of having the Taliban in place”.
This suggests that the US may seek to ally with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in order to pressurise the Taliban to concede American demands regarding OBL and Al-Qaeda. It would entail beefing up the Northern Alliance and “softening” up the Taliban forces in control of Kabul, Mazar i Sharif and Herat by high-altitude target bombing. This assessment is reinforced by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who recently pointed out that not all Taliban members agree with the their leader’s decision to “create a hospitable environment for Al Qaeda”, adding that certain tribes in the south might be persuaded into joining the anti-Taliban coalition. The recent visit of Britain’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, to Iran may also be read in this context.
But an Afghan government led by the Northern Alliance would not be acceptable to Pakistan and create severe strains in the budding US-Pakistan relationship. That is why, perhaps, President Bush has also said that he is seeking “justice” and “isn’t into nation-building” — meaning that the US will not go so far as to install a Northern Alliance led government in Kabul hostile to Islamabad. This scenario is a far cry from the crude one assumed by some commentators.
Other assumptions also need to be scrutinized. It is assumed, for example, that the north-west frontier province is bound to “explode” with insurrectionary outbreaks in favour of the Taliban. But this assumption completely disregards the complex interplay of tribal interests within the Pashtun matrix. For instance, the Afghan Taliban are primarily part of the Ghilzai-Durrani tribal federation of Pashtuns while the main Pashtun tribes which proliferate in Pakistan are the Wazirs, Mahsoods, Mohmands, Afridis, Khattaks, Bangash, Orakzais, Yusufzais, etc. Many among these tribes are in the “pocket” of the federal government in Islamabad and there is no reason to believe that they cannot be dissuaded from supporting the Taliban should a desperate need arise.
Similarly, the premise that the people of Afghanistan are bound to line up behind the Taliban because they love them is questionable. Indeed, the opposite may be truer, since the Taliban have not provided any institutional justice or prosperity to the Afghans. In fact, many of the local commanders who acquiesced in Taliban rule when the Taliban first swept across the country in 1994-95 with the backing of Pakistan may be tempted to switch sides once the writing on the wall is clear and the Pakistani props have been removed.
The assumption that Afghanistan is bound to become a “graveyard” for the Americans because it was such for the British and the Russians before them is also dubious. The Afghan tribes were the “object” of the “great game” in the 19th century and exploited it by switching patrons. In the war against Russia, their powerful patrons were the Americans. Today, however, their sole patron Pakistan has been neutralized while the world powers are forcefully arraigned against them. There is no great game to exploit.
Finally, the argument that the US should provide “credible evidence” of OBL’s role in the September 11 attacks in NY may be good for purposes of assuaging public opinion in Muslim states but is a non-starter as far as radical Islam’s jehad against America and Israel is concerned. OBL has formally declared such a jehad more than once and Afghanistan under the Taliban has become a veritable base area for all the jehadis of the world. If some jehadis have now attacked America because they perceive it to be their enemy, rightly or wrongly, America has returned the compliment by targeting their base area and leaders in Afghanistan.
That said, the fundamental truth remains as powerful as ever. The United States must strive to remove the root cause of Muslim rage if it seeks to end the scourge of “terrorism”. That means it must seek justice for the oppressed peoples of Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo, etc, and end its indiscriminate support for the state terrorism of Israel.
(TFT Oct 05-11, 2001 Vol-XIII No.32 — Editorial)
Stand up and be counted
September 27 was billed as a day of national solidarity. On that day General Pervez Musharraf asked the people of Pakistan not so much as to choose between the Taleban and America as to stand up and be counted in the ranks of those who oppose extremism and reject narrow-minded isolation. Accordingly, notable rallies were held across the country.
Two salient facts about these rallies stand out. The religious parties were conspicuous by their absence. And the mainstream political parties, especially those who have incurred the military government’s wrath on more than one count like the Peoples Party and the MQM, were very much in attendance. Thus while the mullahs are burning effigies and threatening jehad against the government for upholding the national interest, the politicians have set aside their quarrels with General Musharraf and are backing him to the hilt in this difficult moment for Pakistan.
There is a lesson in this for the wise men and women of General Musharraf’s government. During a national security crisis, internal political differences should be sacrificed at the altar of the supreme national interest. Our difficulties have just begun and the worst is yet to come. If the politicians have understood this point and demonstrated wisdom by supporting General Musharraf, the government should reciprocate by building a formal national coalition to steer the nation-state into safer waters. This is a time to close ranks, a time for international credibility and not domestic accountability.
There are lessons to be learnt also by Pakistan’s perennial Establishment. The most important is that the tail should not wag the dog. In our case, this means that foreign policy should not dictate how Pakistan is domestically organized and run. Islamabad’s swift about-turn on Taleban policy in the face of viable threats to our domestic economy and nuclear assets is therefore commendable, as is General Musharraf’s speedy invitation to ex-Afghan King Zahir Shah for emissary-level talks in Pakistan. But this is a moment not just for adjustment to pressing foreign realities. It should also be a time for serious introspection about what sort of nation-state and civil society we want to build and how we want to integrate with the rest of the world in a mutually profitable, creative and enduring enterprise.
Therefore it is not only the Pakistani Establishment that has to make its choices. It is also us, the elites and the middle-classes, who must choose the kind of society we want to build. We have to choose how we want to live and what sort of country we want to hand over to our children. We must ask ourselves certain crucial questions: Can we afford the kind of isolation that was imposed upon Afghanistan? Can we live the way the Afghan population has lived under the extremist Taliban? If the answer to both these questions is no, then we have made our choice. We want to be part of the world, we value freedom, we want to be prosperous and we want our children to have a future with choices.
For too many years, the elites in particular have had their golden parachutes on the ready. They have lived luxurious, alienated lives in Pakistan and banked their money abroad. Their children have sought educations abroad (mostly in America) and gone on to find gainful employment (mostly in America). Do the elites now realise that there are no safe havens left? Do they realise the enormity of the fact that we are now to be judged by the colour of our skin and the sound of our names in the coveted West of our dreams? If the elites don’t build a modern and moderate Pakistan, they will find all doors closing on them abroad. So instead of seeking slippery toeholds abroad, the elites must more firmly stake their interests at home.
The middle classes, who were all lining up for immigration visas, must make their choices too. They cannot opt for western countries with hatred in their hearts for secular values and free cultures. In fact, those who’ve already made their lives and jobs abroad must realize that a judicious integration with the world is necessary if they are to escape the disastrous consequences of racial attacks and suspicions that are before them today. All expatriates should shed political hypocrisy and retreat from the mental ghettos in which they survive.
Finally, every Pakistani needs to confront the challenge of violent religious passion in an age of reason, rationality and science. For too long the moderate silent majority has shirked its responsibilities. For too long, the Establishment has condoned the growth of violent militias. For too long, the judiciary has cowered in fear of reprisals. For too long, the politicians have made political alliances detrimental to the interests of the nation-state. For too long, we, the nation, have unthinkingly foreclosed our options for a truly satisfying nationhood.
If, as many are wont to claim, today is a critical moment in our history, let us join hands in defining it afresh. Having betrayed our forefathers, let us not now betray our grandchildren. Let us stand up and be counted as an articulate and confident majority in search of a modern Pakistan.
(TFT Oct 12-18, 2001 Vol-XIII No.33 — Editorial)
In the national interest
Pakistan’s obsession with a strong Pashtun state in Kabul also flies in the face of history. Until 1973, when Afghanistan’s king, Zahir Shah, a Pashtun, ruled in Kabul, the Afghan government was pro-Soviet and friendly to India. But because it was politically broad-based and decentralized, it posed no serious threat to Pakistan, which was pro-US. In fact, despite pressure from India, Zahir Shah declined to open a front against Pakistan during the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistan wars
Until recently, the ISI was set on helping the Pashtun Taliban clinch total victory in Afghanistan. But today we are told that the “ground reality has changed” and a broad-based, multi-ethnic government is the name of the game. Fair enough.
Until yesterday, it was treasonable to mention the name of ex-Afghan king Zahir Shah in the corridors of the ISI Headquarters in Islamabad. Today no less than the COAS/CE/President of Pakistan says that the ex-king may yet have a role to play. Good enough.
In fact, former foreign minister Assef Ahmad Ali and former president of Pakistan Farooq Leghari have now come out in support of the idea that Zahir Shah should be asked to play his due part in the establishment of any future government in Afghanistan. Even former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, during whose last tenure the Taliban were midwifed by interior minister General (retd) Naseerullah Babar and nourished to manhood by the ISI, seems wiser after the event.
As for former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, it was during his first stint in office that a great opportunity was lost in 1992 when the then Pashtun president of Afghanistan, General Najibullah (allied to the Uzbek commander Rashid Dostum), offered to facilitate, and hand over power to, a broad-based Afghan government supported by Pakistan. But the ISI under General Javed Nasir, a born-again fundamentalist handpicked by Mr Sharif, spurned the “communist” offer, preferring instead to spur its favourite Pashtun Islamic commanders to hunt Najibullah down. In the furious melee that followed, Ahmad Shah Masood, the Tajik commander, rushed to seize Kabul, compelling Pakistan nine months later to acquiesce in the nomination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik, as president, Ahmad Shah Masood as defense minister and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pashtun, as prime minister of a new government. But the arrangement was doomed to fail because neither side trusted the other and the ISI was overly partial towards Hekmatyar.
It may also be recalled that when in 1997, during Mr Sharif’s second stint in office, the ISI prodded the Foreign Office under foreign minister Gauhar Ayub to formally “recognize” the Taliban government following the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, the Pakistani prime minister was gallivanting in Central Asia. In fact he was only informed of his government’s recognition of the Taliban regime as the lawful government of Afghanistan after the announcement had been made on Pakistan TV and radio. That put paid to secret attempts by Mr Sharif, through the good offices of his chief minister in the NWFP, to negotiate with Mr Masood in quest of a stable and broad-based government in Kabul. It also compelled the Rabbani government to seek a firmer alliance with the Uzbeks and Hazaras and consolidate sources of support from Iran, India and the central Asian states. After Mr Masood paid a trip to India, the die was cast.
How was Taliban policy shaped and why has it never been adequately explained? Perhaps General Nasim Rana, who presided over the ISI from mid 1995 to the end of 1998 — a period straddling two civilian governments which dared not oppose the ISI — can enlighten us. General Rana retired after COAS General Jehangir Karamat was eased out by Mr Sharif in 1998. He resurfaced as defense secretary after the October 1999 coup d’etat.
In the meanwhile, we may explore the viability of every Pakistani government’s declared aims and objectives vis a vis Afghanistan. Since the Soviets were kicked out of Afghanistan in 1988, Pakistan has tried to cobble and prop up four governments in Kabul and failed. All but one, including the Taliban, were led by ethnic Pashtuns. What was Pakistan’s interest in such dispensations?
Pakistan has a natural interest in wanting a friendly government in its backyard. We are ringed by India, which is Hindu and hostile, and Iran, which is Shiite and aspires for regional dominance. Pakistan therefore rightly feels that a new government in Kabul dominated by the Northern Alliance, whose constituent Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara elements have received economic and military assistance from both Iran and India, would hurt its national security.
Unfortunately, however, another notion has confused the issue. This is the idea of “strategic depth,” first articulated by Pakistani army chief Gen. Aslam Beg. Gen. Beg believed that in the event of a long, drawn out and difficult war with India, Afghanistan’s friendly territory could serve as a strategic zone, providing secure operating bases for Pakistan’s air force and army. During the 1965 war with India, Pakistan sought to protect its smaller air force from Indian air attacks by parking some of its American-supplied fighter aircraft in Iranian airfields near its western border.
But times have changed. Given the development of nuclear weapons and the deployment of ballistic missiles and faster jet planes, it has never been clear what Pakistan might want to “park” in Afghanistan, or why, in the event of another war with India. More critically, Pakistan’s strategic thinkers have refused to learn lessons since they began cultivating close relations with the Taliban in 1996: a rigidly ideological government such as the Taliban’s with a narrow worldview cannot be a reliable partner in the defense of Pakistan’s interests.
Therefore Pakistan’s current predicament follows two decades of misplaced “interventionism” in Afghanistan. This was based on a policy of picking Pashtun “favorites” and trying to install them in power in Kabul. Over time, however, this transformed Pakistan’s natural requirement for a friendly neighbor into an unyielding obsession for a client state. Consequently, Pakistan has ended up alienating Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities such as the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, and driven their leaders into the lap of India or Iran or Russia.
Pakistan’s obsession with a strong Pashtun state in Kabul also flies in the face of history. Until 1973, when Afghanistan’s king, Zahir Shah, a Pashtun, ruled in Kabul, the Afghan government was pro-Soviet and friendly to India. But because it was politically broad-based and decentralized, it posed no serious threat to Pakistan, which was pro-US. In fact, despite pressure from India, Zahir Shah declined to open a front against Pakistan during the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistan wars. This, despite the fact that his government refused to recognize the Durand Line.
But this benign Afghan attitude changed after Sardar Mohammad Daoud, a Pashtun nationalist, deposed the king and seized Kabul in 1973. He established a strong, centrist state and began to foment Pashtun nationalism and separatism among the Pashtuns of Pakistan. After Daoud was overthrown by leftists in a 1978 coup, the Durand Line was aggressively challenged by communist presidents Nur Mohammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, both die-hard Pashtuns. Thus, strong and centralized Pashtun governments in Kabul have either pandered to Pashtun nationalism in Afghanistan by supporting Pashtun separatism in Pakistan, or tried to export Pashtun-Islamic fundamentalism to Pakistan’s border provinces like the Taliban have done in recent years.
This should have suggested to Pakistan’s defense establishment that a strong Taliban-led state in Afghanistan would eventually pose a threat to the territorial integrity and political solidarity of a multi-ethnic Pakistan because it would combine the worst elements of ethnic nationalism with violent religious sectarianism. But it didn’t. Instead, when the Taliban arrived on the scene in 1994 rather unexpectedly, and demonstrated a degree of public support in war weary Afghanistan, Pakistan leapt into the fray and gave unstinting economic and military support to them to the exclusion of all the other ethnic contenders for power.
Unfortunately, however, the Taliban’s military successes made them progressively confident and rigid, thereby diminishing Pakistan’s political leverage with them. Now Pakistan is being held accountable for befriending the Taliban and being made to count the costs of not ditching them earlier. Where does Pakistan go from here?
The plan for the future of Afghanistan should not be too difficult to fathom. Afghanistan faces an American offensive meant to soften up the Taliban’s militia so that its components peel off gradually as the pressure of war and isolation increases. The Taliban are, in effect, composed of those Pashtun elements of the government-in-exile established by Pakistan in Peshawar in 1989 after the exit of the Soviets from Afghanistan. The Pashtun commanders of the various militias, once numbering 6,000, are either with the Taliban or have their men fighting in the ranks of the Taliban. They also contain elements of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan last ruled by President General Najibullah and these constitute the engineering and military brains of the militia. Experts also point to a Durrani-Ghilzai tribal divide in the Taliban regime which could be exploited. There is also no doubt of the wide variety of ideological opinion that prevails in the dominant Pashtun matrix. The pressure of war is bound to increase the fissures within the Taliban, therby undermining their unity and paving the way for the notion of broad based governance.
It is this possibility that has attracted the opponents of the Taliban to Zahir Shah, the king who was ousted in 1973 and later favoured by five out of the seven militias that Pakistan was supporting against the Soviet invasion. This support stemmed from the fact that the militias had little cohesion at the time because they had been subjected to splits in order to facilitate Pakistan’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan. His long absence from the scene has certainly diminished that early support but he remains the one figure around whom the Afghan cities might conceivably rally, somewhat like the kings who returned to the Balkans after long years of chaotic nationalist conflict.
The anticipated victory against the Taliban, however, should not lead to the dominance of the Northern Alliance in which the main party is Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-e-Islami whose regime in Kabul was disastrously cruel and paved the way for the victory of the Taliban without much fighting. Pakistan has rightly warned that a government dominated by the Northern Alliance would be counter-productive, against its national security interests and therefore unacceptable to it.
Fortunately, there is a tacit acceptance of Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan among the Western powers lined up against the Taliban. It is also realistic to link the broad-based future government in Kabul to the ratios that determine the ethnic map of the country. The Pashtuns are over 45 percent of the population but there are large chunks of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and Turkmen who must be represented. The concept of the Loya Jirga has always been at hand but any kind of realignment of forces will depend very much on the efforts made by the world to rebuild the destroyed country, revive its economy and resettle its uprooted population. The best roadmap through this period should be drawn within the framework of the United Nations, under the aegis of a carefully selected UN force that descends on Afghanistan after the Taliban have been replaced. Some kind of loose federal order must prevail in Afghanistan in line with ‘consensual’ laissez faire governance under Zahir Shah before the Soviet obsession with centralisation destroyed it under Presidents Nur Mohammad Taraki and Hafeezullah Amin. To achieve this, all the neighbouring states with interests in Afghanistan — Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Central Asia – must come to an agreement without necessarily abandoning their own national security priorities. In turn, Pakistan, the most affected party, must trim its policy in light of the relief it will get from the sectarian terrorism and violent fundamentalism that has “blown back” from Afghanistan over the past decades. This will be essential to keep the new broad-based government going in tandem with an attractive economic deal that keeps the funds flowing into Afghanistan.
Thus, firstly, nation-building in Afghanistan must rely on a truly loose and federal arrangement in which the various ethnic nationalities are fully empowered. Second, it must be an international, as opposed to a national, affair. Third, it must be recognized that the Taliban, even after they have been defeated, cannot be eradicated because they are part of the ground reality, in or out of power. Thus they would have to be represented in any future set-up. Finally, it should be noted that while kings can provide powerful symbols in certain extreme situations that need swift balancing solutions, they can only play a limited role and that too in a transitional sense in which the final outcome is determined by the complex manipulations of internal and external forces.
Zahir Shah could provide such a transitional umbrella under U.N. supervision. The new government’s job would be to “clean up” Afghanistan with Western support – get rid of al Qaeda terrorist training camps and elect a representative governing body for Afghanistan.
The Western powers could then ask Pakistan to assist them in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan, thereby giving it a strategic foothold in Kabul, and eventually opening access to Western oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Pakistan and beyond. Transit royalties from the pipelines alone would swiftly pull Afghanistan out of its abject economic misery. Is this a far cry from the rage and passion and bloodshed of today?
It is. The conflict could be long and difficult. Many people will be dead before it is over. Pakistan’s religious parties are digging in for a final battle for the soul of the Afghan and Pakistan states. The Taliban remain defiant. Increasing civilian casualties in Afghanistan will enrage Muslims everywhere, with unpredictable consequences. And Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda jehadis will fight to the last.
But no matter. In the final analysis, as General Musharraf has admitted, “the Taliban’s days are numbered”. The ISI has a new head. Zahir Shah’s emissary has been invited for talks in Islamabad. The OIC is being harnessed to bolster the anti-Taliban coalition. General Pervez Musharraf could not have done better than take such first steps in the national interest of Pakistan.
(TFT Oct 19-25, 2001 Vol-XIII No.34 — Editorial)
Dangerous political vacuum
“Musharraf’s battle to reshape Pakistan is a lonely one”, says Time magazine. “No political party backs him: he has consistently poured scorn on the parties’ established leaders. His anti-corruption drive, his jailing of politicians for abuse of authority, his categorical statements that he wants to introduce a new political class at the expense of the old, have all alienated established politicos who see him only as a threat”.
Time magazine is half right. General Musharraf is attempting to navigate “the toughest job in the world” at the moment without an effective political crew. But not all established politicos see him as a threat. For whatever it’s worth, the anti-Nawaz PML is clutching at his coattails. But its members are more anti-Nawaz than pro-Musharraf. They are also fractured and leaderless. Many are still too ideologically straitjacketed for comfort in the daring new dispensation. Nor have they risked their necks in publicly denouncing the Taliban and welcoming the international intervention in Afghanistan against extremist jihadi elements. In fact, all have dithered, demanding “evidence” of Osama bin Laden’s complicity in the September 11 attacks. And not one has stood up to admit that Osama bin Laden long ago confessed his enmity with America and vowed to wage jihad against “civilian and military targets in America”.
The stunning exception is former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. She has not prevaricated or minced her words. Long before this crisis burst upon Pakistan, she was openly rebuking the Taliban and urging General Musharraf to change course in Afghanistan. Indeed, she is the one Pakistani politician who has braved public sentiment at home by openly calling Osama bin Laden a terrorist. Now she has lent unconditional support to General Musharraf and parted company with many colleagues in the ARD who are either sitting on the fence or openly condemning General Musharraf. She says she has put aside her personal predicament “in the national interest” – the Musharraf regime is seeking to oust her from politics, albeit unsuccessfully, while her husband has been in prison for five years without a conviction. Like her, General Musharraf has also risked his all for the sake of Pakistan. It may be recalled that when, in a meeting with senior editors last month, one self-righteous “guardian of Pakistan” advised him to “be a hero and defy America”, General Musharraf shamed him into silence by saying he would rather be an anti-hero and save Pakistan.
Therefore much the same sort of reasoning should now nudge General Musharraf away from the “accountability policies” that have politically isolated him in the country. In fact, he should quickly build a viable political coalition in order to shield himself and his new policies from attack by misguided, confused, bigoted or vested interests.
The Friday Times remains fiercely opposed to corruption and abuse of power in government. It targeted former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto and paid a price for its principles. It is still stoutly pro-accountability. But there comes a time when the principal contradiction in the life of a country should be identified and resolved while shelving all other considerations. And that moment has arrived. The core contradiction today is not between corruption and accountability. It is not between dictatorship and democracy. It is between fundamentalist national isolation and liberal global outreach. And in this context, Ms Bhutto and the Peoples Party, despite their misdemeanours and misjudgments, are natural allies of General Musharraf. Therefore they should be politically rehabilitated as soon as possible in the national interest.
Of course, people will advise General Musharraf to spurn political alliances and go it alone, counting only on his army and new-found friends in the West. But that would be a grave mistake. Recall the exits of Sadaat of Egypt, Zia of Pakistan, Noriega of Panama, Pinochet of Chile, Suharto of Indonesia and countless other dictators who could not be “saved”, or were abandoned, by the West when the chips at home were down. But there is a yet more compelling reason to play politics urgently.
In 1996, President Farooq Leghari sacked Bhutto and singled her out for accountability. Result: Nawaz Sharif obtained a two-thirds majority, got rid of Leghari and went berserk. In 1999, General Musharraf seized power and forced Sharif and Bhutto into exile. Result: political isolation at home. But general elections are within sight. If mainstream moderate politicians and parties are sidelined, a dangerous vacuum will be created. Pakistanis might then vent their rage at America by sweeping the fundamentalists and anti-West elements into office. Then the Pakistani army and its chief will find themselves in the same untenable situation as Algeria and Turkey without the will or inclination to act in a forceful and overtly secular manner. That would spell a greater national disaster than the disaster General Pervez Musharraf has just averted.
General Pervez Musharraf says elections will not be postponed. That is good because there is no alternative to democracy. But it would be heartening if he were to cobble an alliance with liberal, forward-looking politicians so that his daring and patriotic national initiatives can lead to a free and progressive Pakistan.
(TFT Oct 26-01 Nov, 2001 Vol-XIII No.35 — Editorial)
India’s error
New Delhi’s behaviour is startling. Two years ago, it didn’t want to talk to General Pervez Musharraf because he was a military dictator and the architect of Kargil. But that didn’t cut much ice with observers. N Delhi’s historical record shows its readiness to cosy up to dictators when it suits its interests. Certainly, India had no problems dialoguing with General Ayub Khan with whom it signed the historic Indus Waters Treaty in 1962, and with General Zia ul Haq with whom it enjoyed cricket diplomacy in 1987. The former, it may be recalled, went to war with India in 1965 while the latter stirred up the Khalistani separatists in Indian Punjab in the early 1980s.
Last year, New Delhi was ecstatic when US President Bill Clinton spent five days lapping up India and five hours badgering Pakistan. In particular, the spectacle of Indian MPs literally tripping over themselves to paw Mr Clinton in the Indian parliament was inexcusable. Even in the heyday of US-Pak relations in the 1960s, when Pakistan was an American client state, such toadying was never sanctioned in Islamabad. And this fawning India was the same independent India that once led the non-aligned movement of the third world.
Early this year, however, India’s prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee suddenly decided that General Musharraf was kosher for talks. Perhaps Mr Vajpayee sought to curry favour with the new Republicans in Washington by portraying himself as a man of peace. Unfortunately, however, the BJP hardliners derailed his planned diplomatic coup at Agra by fishing out the concept of “cross-border terrorism” at the nth minute in exchange for conceding the centrality of the Kashmir dispute between the two countries.
But if Agra did not cement an immediate agreement, it did not preclude one in the near future either. Indeed, the requirement of incorporating “cross-border terrorism” into the diplomatic loop totally rejected by Pakistan did not stop Mr Vajpayee and foreign minister Jaswant Singh from accepting a Pakistani invitation for talks in Islamabad. In fact, early post-Agra statements from them suggested that they saw wisdom in continuing the talks about peace-talks. All this was said and done because it was correctly recognized in India that a failure to achieve an understanding with General Musharraf was likely to strengthen the militants in Kashmir and prolong the insufferable insurgency. Meanwhile, both sides continued to feign a stout defense of their uncompromising position over Kashmir. Thus when the Kashmiri militants attacked military targets and provoked “collateral damage”, N Delhi renewed its attempts to crush them without bringing Pakistan into its direct firing line.
On September 11, however, the world changed in many ways, not least for India. As the US thundered “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” and vowed to wage an infinite war against the Taliban, al-Qaida and all those abetting them, India saw a perverse opportunity to embrace the United States and isolate Pakistan. Suddenly, even before Presidents Bush’s words had stopped ringing in the ears of its Western allies, India was ready to offer airbases and anything else the US so desired in its war against “terrorism”. It was an act of incomparable obsequiousness ill-befitting India. Therefore the humiliation and anger and hurt that has followed America’s spurning of India in favour of Pakistan has begotten a new anti-Pakistan belligerence from India that began by welcoming Colin Powell with an unprovoked barrage across the LoC and is now threatening to spiral out of control in Kashmir.
The anti-Pakistan rhetoric that has followed is a matter of grave concern. The return of the cavalier George Fernandes as defense minister also suggests that India is tilting in the direction of destabilizing Pakistan by undermining General Musharraf. Apparently, its thinking is that it’s now or never. In other words, it believes this is the time to wake up the world “to the terrorism spawned by Pakistan in Kashmir” and get it to collar Islamabad. Hence what was kosher yesterday (talking with General Musharraf) is not kosher today, not in Pakistan and not at the UN next month.
This is misplaced strategy on the part of India. It means that the Hindu Fundos in India are unwittingly playing into the hands of the Islamic fundos in Pakistan. The Jaish-i- Mohammad, for instance, has upped its attacks on civilians in Kashmir in order to put General Musharraf on the mat. Other fundo organizations are openly trying to subvert the Pakistani army and unleash an Islamic coup. Their purpose is the same: create mayhem and rage, then try and seize the Pakistani state.
Seen in this context, the current poverty of philosophy in India is both self-insulting and self-injuring. If a couple of thousand Islamic fundos in Kashmir are a millstone around India’s neck, a couple of million Islamic fundos in Pakistan could trigger a nuclear war in the region. The sooner India recognizes the truth of current realities — including the injustice in Kashmir — the better. N Delhi should therefore start talking to Pakistan again as soon as possible since there is no better-placed or flexible Pakistani than General Pervez Musharraf with whom to clinch an honourable and equitable compromise.
(TFT Nov 02-08, 2001 Vol-XIII No.36 — Editorial)
Afghan roadmap needed
Has the supercharged US military-intelligence machine got bogged down in Afghanistan? Despite the bombs and high-gadgetry homing devices poured over Afghanistan, the “tenacious” Taliban seem unrepentant. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden has gone underground, literally, but not before threatening to ignite the ground under the feet of the “aggressors”. Americans are therefore bracing for another terrorist attack.
Critics argue that the American carrot-stick strategy of trying to bomb and bribe the Taliban has failed to bear fruit. Further evidence of failure relates to the CIA’s botched attempt to stir rebellion against the Taliban via commander Abdul Haq who was armed only with satchels full of greenbacks before he was betrayed, captured and executed. It is therefore concluded that this war or campaign is going to be a long and nasty one, with some people apprehensive about a right-wing military coup against General Pervez Musharraf. Leading this pack is the irrepressible American journalist Seymour Hersh who says that special American troops are rehearsing how to “take out” Pakistan’s nuclear programme should General Pervez Musharraf be ousted from power.
Like many others, General Musharraf had hoped that the American military campaign would be short, swift and sharp, leading to the installation of a friendly broad based government in Kabul before public opinion turned irrevocably hostile in Pakistan. But this hasn’t happened. In fact, local religious parties have swelled their ranks and are flexing for a showdown with the government, with a few actually trying to subvert the army. This has prompted General Musharraf to sweep the decks and bring moderate and pragmatic army officers into positions of responsibility in place of the more ideological or politically ambitious ones who originally installed him in power. The prospect of a longer than anticipated war with rising “collateral damage” (what a callous phrase!) and an attendant popular backlash in the country has also fueled speculation that he might seek to mend fences with certain politicians in the national interest of Pakistan.
But General Musharraf is reasonably sanguine that he has taken the right decision and the storm will pass. He is hoping for positive results in Afghanistan even as he digs in for a longer haul. Is his guarded optimism justified?
As everyone knows, two salient facts stand out about the American campaign against OBL, Al Qaeda and the Taliban so far. First, the Americans have said from Day-One that this is the beginning of a multi-faceted and prolonged war against Al-Qaeda and its ilk. So if there are any qualms about the lack of progress until now, people should be patient. Second, the Americans have merely tried to “soften” up the Taliban rather than seriously finishing them off. They are concentrating on knocking out the Taliban’s logistical support and heavy weapons instead of indiscriminately carpet-bombing their troop concentrations. There are two reasons for this: the Taliban’s heavy armour and logistical bases must be knocked out before the Americans can establish a couple of secure bridgeheads for “boots on ground” and intelligence operations; and the NA has to be kept at arms length from Kabul until a broad based government acceptable to Pakistan and the rest of the regional players has been cobbled and installed in the capital. What are the prospects of that happening soon?
Pro-Taliban commentators say the Taliban will never surrender to the Americans. But might they not switch in sufficient numbers if the conditions were right? General Musharraf’s rather coy remark recently of impending switches and defections among the Taliban should not be ignored. Perhaps the hiatus in the war provided by Ramadan will be a cover for achieving this objective. Voices in the American establishment are already saying that Washington may have missed the import of the Taliban’s early statements suggesting that they would have no serious objections if the Americans could “take out” their honourable guest without direct reference to them.
A couple of days ago some American soldiers and advisers were attached to contingents of the NA facing Mazhar i Sharif. This significant development suggests that further pressure will be brought to bear on the Taliban’s front lines by a targeted dose of carpet-bombing while propelling the NA’s ragtag army into effective military action. Equally critically, the presence of the Americans is meant to make sure that the NA’s troops do not commit atrocities after they capture the city. The same sort of pressure on the Taliban and restraint on the NA may be evident along the Kabul front in weeks to come. In fact, the Americans may be preparing the ground to hold the NA in check while readying a UN sponsored military force to occupy Kabul as soon as possible.
Fortunately, civilian casualties in Afghanistan are still much less than originally anticipated. But these will surely mount as the war is extended. Islamic passions are bound to be further inflamed. That is why the Americans and Pakistanis must extract maximum mileage from the onset of Ramadan. The sooner the political essence and organisational structure of a new government in Kabul is agreed upon between the contending powers, a roadmap, as it were, the quicker the Taliban can be swept aside and the bombing brought to an end.
(TFT Nov 09-15, 2001 Vol-XIII No.37 — Editorial)
Think positively
Mr Shaukat Aziz says that if the post-September 11 geo-political situation does not stabilize quickly, Pakistan’s economy could lose about US$ 2 billion this year. That would translate into a GDP growth rate of about 2.5% instead of the targeted 4%. It would also rubbish our fiscal and trade deficit targets and jeopardize the IMF-sponsored reform process initiated two years ago. It may be recalled that original expectations of investor and donor confidence surging back and reviving growth this year were based on cementing this comprehensive structural adjustment programme rather than abandoning it mid-way.
According to the State Bank’s most recent report on the health of the economy, these expectations are now doubtful because of two factors: the global recession which has brought down global economic growth forecasts from 3.2% to 2.6% this year; and the consequences of the post-September 11 events which have reduced stock indices in the US and Europe by 7% to 15%. The SBP cites a number of resultant factors which may have an adverse impact on Pakistan’s economy: the increase in freight rates and imposition of war-risk insurance cover will increase the cost of imports and make exports more expensive and therefore less competitive, thereby widening the trade deficit; the cancellation and disruption of air cargo flights to and from Pakistan will undermine trade flows compelling manufacturing units to maintain abnormally high inventories or face shortages, thereby raising operating costs; the exit of foreign heads of multinationals and a freeze in the operations of foreign companies in the oil and gas sector will further erode foreign investor confidence; privatisation, which was expected to yield up to US$ 1 billion in sales this year, may not materialize; and the influx of millions of Afghan refugees will add a burden to our scarce human and capital resources.
In the SBP’s worst case scenario — a prolonged and bloody war in Afghanistan and deepening political instability in Pakistan — exports will decline significantly, foreign investment flows will dry up, capital flight will intensify and GDP growth will be stagnant. According to another authoritative assessment (ABM-AMRO), the net impact of these adverse factors would reduce GDP growth to 2.5%-3.1%, with exports barely reaching US$ 8 billion (last year about US$ 9.3 billion) and imports hovering around US$ 10 billion (last year about US$ 11 billion).
But as the SBP, ABM-AMRO and others have also pointed out, there could be serious mitigating factors in the medium and long-term. To begin with, there are bright prospects of a restoration of bilateral foreign financial assistance on soft terms worth at least US$ 1 billion this year. The IMF/ADB/WB et al would probably weigh in with another US$ 2 billion or so. We would save US$ 500 million or thereabouts on our import bill for oil because crude prices are falling in the wake of a slowdown in the world economy. The switchover from the hundi system to formal banking avenues in the wake of an anticipated crackdown on hundi dealers by US authorities on the track of Al-Qaeda, coupled with the inflow of forex deposits from not-so-safe havens abroad anymore, should beef up the rupee and keep inflation in check. The 15% increase in the quota of value-added cotton goods from Pakistan to the EU effective next year, plus a reduction in EU import duties on many items from Pakistan, should lead to a net gain of about US$ 500 million a year. If this is supplemented by greater access of Pakistani goods to US markets, as promised by US leaders, Pakistani exports could increase by an additional 10% every year over and above normal export growth.
Finally, as financial experts have clarified, the greatest gains may be forthcoming in the event of an anticipated long-term re-profiling of our foreign debt instead of the usual short-term re-scheduling by friendly Western donors. Rescheduling is essentially the replacement of an existing debt obligation with another in which there is no reduction in the stock of debt. Re-profiling, however, means a reduction in the outstanding stock of debt in its net present value via an extension of the maturity period of outstanding debt contracts. Under certain terms, this reduction in the net present value of the debt stock could be as high as 50%-70%. Re-profiling would also imply concessional interest rates on outstanding loan amounts which are significantly lower than in the original terms. In other words, re-profiling would provide a permanent reduction in Pakistan’s stream of foreign payments every year because it would affect both stocks and flows. It would therefore provide valuable fiscal space unavailable under simple re-scheduling as in the past and alleviate the requirements of a massive debt write-off as a pre-condition to sustainable economic growth.
General Pervez Musharraf’s misplaced religious critics are devoid of common sense. It is in Pakistan’s long-term national interest to stick with the international community and try to reap economic benefits rather than risk isolation and face economic meltdown. Much, of course, will now depend on how the war shapes up in Afghanistan and how General Musharraf deals with the tricky situation on the home and foreign fronts. His current trip to Europe and the US is therefore critical. It will provide pointers in the direction we are about to take.
(TFT Nov 16-22, 2001 Vol-XIII No.38 — Editorial)
On the right track
Following the sudden Taliban rout in Afghanistan, Polly Toynbee of The Guardian had this to say: “Never in the field of human conflict have so many experts of the highest renown been so thoroughly wrong. Never have so many old war horses of right and left been so embarrassingly trounced”. Of course, these trenchant words fully apply to Pakistani state intellectuals, ex-army chiefs and ISI types who have made an art of mythologizing Afghanistan and the Pashtun Taliban.
Recall the doomsters’ warnings: The Taliban jehadis were infused with the mythic Pakhtoon warrior spirit that created a rare breed of fighting machine that would suck in the Americans and fight to the terrible end since defeat was not in the vocabulary of heavenbound martyrs while the fractious rogues of the Northern Alliance could never beat the Taliban and American bombing would only kill thousands of civilians without touching the elusive foe which could flit from cave to cave in an unending guerilla war.
Recall too that it was none other than General Pervez Musharraf who had the courage and perspicacity to admit in an interview with BBC late October that “the Taliban’s day’s are numbered”. Our view, too,
(TFT Editorial “De-mythologising Afghanistan”, September 30th) had been similarly expressed earlier. “Conspiracy theorists apart, many commentators have assumed that the US will bomb Afghanistan into the stone age, thereby provoking a dangerous blowback for America and its Muslim allies like Pakistan. Some argue that it will be a war without end in which the tenacious Afghans will defeat America much like the Russians a decade ago and the British a hundred years earlier. Others fear that thousands of innocent Afghans will perish, triggering widespread anti-American riots in Pakistan that could lead to the overthrow of the moderate Musharraf regime. But the basic assumption in these scenarios may not be true”.
We explained why there would be no significant pro-Taliban insurrections in the tribal areas of Pakistan, why the people of Afghanistan and the old Pashtun commanders currently allied to the Taliban were not bound to line up with the Taliban in a crunch, and why Afghnaistan was not likely to become a graveyard for the Americans. Indeed, we argued
(TFT Editorial “Afghan roadmap needed”, October 31st ) that “if there are any qualms about the lack of progress (related to American bombing) until now, people should be patient”. We noted the significance of “American soldiers and advisors attached to the contingents of the NA facing Mazhar i Sharif which suggests that further pressure will be brought to bear on the Taliban’s front lines by a targeted dose of carpet bombing while propelling the NA’s ragtag army into effective military action” and pointed out that “the presence of the Americans is meant to make sure that the NA’s troops do not commit atrocities after they capture the city…the same sort of pressure on the Taliban and restraint on the NA may be evident along the Kabul front in weeks to come”.
Unfortunately, however, it seems that the pundits are still alive and kicking. Now they are saying that the Taliban and OBL have “tactically” retreated from the cities so that they can wage a punishing guerilla war in the countryside. Nonsense. If that had been the case, Mullah Umar wouldn’t have been begging his commanders to stand and fight the NA. It should also be clear that for a successful guerilla war to be waged for any length of time, the Taliban will require militarily impenetrable and economically self-sustaining base areas, solid and secure lines of communication and much external financial and military support, none of which will be available. Indeed, if anything, the sea in which these fish are expected to swim may not be too friendly after hundreds of small and big local commanders who form their military backbone in many provinces have switched sides for one reason or another.
Other critics argue that General Musharraf’s about-turn policies have failed because the Americans now have no use for Pakistan since they have won the war in Afghanistan. Nonsense. Washington will require the assistance of Pakistan’s army to deny hiding places in its tribal belt to the Taliban, to Mullah Omar, OBL and the al-Qaeda terrorists. It will need the help of the Pakistani ISI to locate and flush out the terrorists from their caves in Afghanistan. Pakistan will be needed to persuade non-Taliban Afghan Pashtun leaders to join a broadly representative and extremely loose federal government in Kabul under a UN umbrella. And the US will require the full cooperation and long term assistance of Pakistan in the reconstruction of a stable Afghanistan so that the oil and gas pipelines of Central Asia which have long been eyed by Western oil companies find non-Iranian outlets in the Arabian sea and beyond.
General Pervez Musharraf is on the right track. But in a rapidly developing situation, he must redouble his efforts to remain firmly entrenched in the international coalition while scaling down his army’s regional ambitions and dealing swiftly and effectively with his country’s internal political contradictions.
(TFT Nov 23-29, 2001 Vol-XIII No.39 — Editorial)
No time to sulk
The race is on for Kabul. Mr Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Jamiat-e-Islami leader recognised by the UN as the legitimate president of Afghanistan but debunked by Pakistan, is back in the capital, pruning himself for re-anointment. He is a Tajik. Mr Zahir Shah, the deposed king of Afghanistan long spurned by Pakistan and now baited by the West, is waiting for a nod from the Unites States to stake a claim to the throne. He is a Pashtun. Meanwhile, Moscow, an old Indian ally which despises Pakistan, has thrown its weight behind Mr Rabbani. Not to be left behind, India is straining at the leash to play a significant role in Afghanistan now that the Taliban are gone and the Northern Alliance which it partly funded and trained is back in the saddle. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are supporting the NA Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum and Iran’s NA protégé is the Persian-speaking Gen Ismail Khan. Pakistan is unfortunately nowhere in the scene with its proclaimed band of loyal Pashtuns.
Next Monday, the UN will herd into Berlin nearly 40 military commanders and politicians claiming to represent one segment or another of the people of Afghanistan. Their job is to agree on a special governing committee to oversee the transition to an interim government approved by a loya jirga or tribal assembly until general elections are held in a couple of years in Afghanistan. This moot follows an implicit US warning to the NA that it won’t be allowed to fly solo, not least because its control over most of Afghan territory following the rout of the Taliban is due largely to US military might but also because it doesn’t represent the dominant Pashtun community of the country.
The UN, prodded by the US, wants to move fast in order to stop the country from sliding into another bloody round of civil war. Despite its high sounding name, the triumphant NA is riven with ethnic and military rivalries which make it volatile. The three generals who captured Mazhar i Sharif — Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek; Atta Mohammad, a Tajik; and Ustad Mohaqqik, a Haraza — are at loggerheads. Gen Ismail Khan, who has established control over Herat and the western territories, has serious differences with the NA group holding Kabul. In Jalalabad, the Pashtun commander Haji Abdul Kadeer, (brother of commander Abdul Haq who was executed by the Taliban) has become governor and is pushing Pashtun interests. In Kabul itself, even as the pro-Russia and pro-Iran Rabbani bills himself as president, effective power remains in the hands of Tajiks like Younus Qanuni (interior minister), Dr Abdullah Abdullah (foreign minister) and Gen Mohammad Fahim (army chief) who are all inclined to look to the US just as much as to Russia and Iran. The internal challenges within the NA also come from the Shia Hazara fighters of the Hizbe Wahadat party that is demanding a stake in governing Kabul because of a strong Hazara presence in the city.
Worse from the point of view of a quick peace plan, the deal between the NA and Zahir Shah, struck with some fanfare last month, is all but off. Former Taliban commanders in the south of the country have bolted from Kabul-Kandahar’s central command and become Pashtun chieftains bent upon staking and exercising control over large swathes of territory in their own right. And renegade, armed groups and roaming bandits are once again the order of the day. With no one in a commanding position in Afghanistan, the potential for internal strife has increased alarmingly. In this difficult and unsure situation, what should Pakistan do? How can it protect its national interests?
Some analysts think that continuing political and military chaos may not be such a bad thing after all from Pakistan’s point of view. If every major player turns out to be a loser and a vacuum persists, Pakistan might be able to exercise some leverage in the southern and eastern Pashtun belts by default. The geographic contiguity that has condemned Pakistan to embrace Afghanistan might, it is argued, also give it the advantage of re-engaging Afghanistan after the other players have thrown up their hands in despair or exhaustion. Thus this line of thinking suggests that Islamabad should bide its time while ironing out its differences with Iran, another country geographically placed to play a long-term role in Afghanistan.
Alternatively, and more realistically, Pakistan could become pro-active and reach out to Zahir Shah, who has full Western support, may be eventually acceptable to the power-brokers in the NA and is potentially the least objectionable or undesirable person to temporarily lead and represent the Pashtuns. In fact, Pakistan’s interest lies not only in an Afghan state that is friendly and sufficiently Pashtun-led but one that is united and stable. Continuing chaos could lead to the Balkanisation of Afghanistan along ethnic lines which would eventually spill over into Pakistan by rousing its Pashtuns into violent sub-nationalism and separatism. The worst policy, of course, would be one of sulking indifference to key players and regional developments or brash confidence in one’s own indispensability in the order of things, which has unfortunately been the case so far.
(TFT Nov 30-06 Dec, 2001 Vol-XIII No.40 — Editorial)
Chomsky’s relevance
Noam Chomsky, the western world’s leading dissident thinker, was in Pakistan recently to deliver the third Eqbal Ahmad Distinguished Lecture organized by the Eqbal Ahmad Foundation in association with TFT in Lahore and Dawn in Islamabad. An impressive gathering of students, teachers, journalists, intellectuals, politicians and concerned civil and military officials turned out to hear him at the seminars. Amidst the madness of war in Afghanistan and rage and confusion in Pakistan, he provided a brief respite for the consideration of universal moral and human values.
Chomsky’s visit and the Lahore seminar meant a great deal to TFT. It was an expression of our continuing links with the one Pakistani whom we loved, admired and respected above all others: Dr Eqbal Ahmad. His passing has left a stunning void in our lives.
It was also a dream come true: a meeting with Chomsky whose brilliant work and courageous views have moulded the intellect and morality of many dissidents of the 60s generation in no small way. Even as he and Eqbal were protesting the Vietnam war in Boston in 1967, many others were spilling over into the streets of Lahore and Karachi and London and Paris shouting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed to-day?”
More significantly, the fact that the most trenchant American critic of America was able to lambaste his country’s foreign and domestic policies abroad should mean something to us. Here was an American of Jewish origin who called America the biggest rogue and terrorist state of all, and he said so not just at home in America but abroad as well, even in countries and amidst populations hostile to America. And he did so without being branded a traitor by his government or being put into prison for his views.
These three points are linked together in an organic way. Eqbal Ahmed was the most profoundly patriotic, moralistic intellectual that Pakistan has ever produced. If ever there was a living and breathing Chomsky in our very midst, it was Eqbal. Yet, for all his intellectual brilliance and political wisdom, he was shunned by the exclusivist nationalist ideologues of Pakistan, ignored by the liberal or secular political parties of the country and sidelined by the rest. In fact, when he sought to establish a liberal university of the social sciences called Khaldunia (after the great Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun) in Islamabad, neither the Sharif nor the Bhutto government could bring itself to grant him a sizeable chunk of land or give him an autonomous title for the proposed university. The disillusionment was all the greater because Eqbal’s many well-wishers, friends and colleagues at home and abroad were ready to raise the seed capital required for the project. So there is great irony in the fact that it should have required Noam Chomsky to come all the way from America and choke halls to capacity in Lahore and Islamabad in memory of Eqbal Ahmad.
Professor Chomsky’s multifaceted fame precedes him. One biographer has pointed out that “the era before his linguistic interventions was known as Linguistics BC”, meaning not Linguistics Before Christ but Linguistics Before Chomsky. Another claims that he ranks among the most quoted sources in the West, along with Shakespeare, the Bible and Marx. But his presentations in Lahore and Islamabad were not as a linguist. In an essay he wrote as long ago as 1966, Professor Chomsky said that “the duty of intellectuals is to speak the truth and to expose lies”. He has an acute sense of moral responsibility, and as the leading conscience of the world, we heard him speak the truth about the profoundly immoral and unjust world order dominated by the lone superpower of the new millennium, the United States of America.
Truth, of course, is a bitter pill to swallow, for many people. In particular, those who speak the truth about their rogue regimes, errant establishments or failing states, at home and abroad may expect to face the wrath of their establishments and be stamped out in the name of patriotism. This is nowhere truer than in Pakistan. Free-minded journalists, non-state intellectuals, human rights activists, peaceniks and dissident politicians who make critical comments on political developments in Pakistan at forums and conferences abroad are routinely condemned by PTV and “independent” newspapers as being “anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam”. Some have even had to endure the agony of prison as “traitors”. The sad thing is that many well-meaning Pakistanis are also quick to succumb to such misplaced notions of nationalism and pride that undermine our fundamental human and constitutional rights of freedom of speech. A great irony is that many Pakistanis who are likely to condemn criticism of Pakistan’s policies abroad by fellow Pakistanis are often the first ones to line up to hear criticism of western policies by western dissidents in Pakistan.
Noam Chomsky and Eqbal Ahmad are beacons of light precisely because they are guided by high morals and great human values rather than hypocrisy, lies and double standards. When we seek to understand their political views we would do well to place them in their great humanitarian context.
(TFT Dec 07-13, 2001 Vol-XIII No.41 — Editorial)
Revive commitment to free press
Among the few enduring strengths of this country is a free and vibrant press. To those who have not lived under the shadow of dictatorship or don’t know this country well, this fact is taken for granted. But for much of the time since independence in 1947, the press has been in chains. And it was only in 1988, after Gen Zia ul Haq perished, that the first gust of freedom blew our way. This was owed in no small measure to a repeal of the notorious Press and Publications Ordinance (PPO) enacted by General Ayub Khan in the early 1960s in which the press was treated in the manner of a subversive native element in a repressive colonial state.
The repealing Ordinance, appropriately called the RPPO, was promulgated by a caretaker regime only days before the elections of 1988 which Benazir Bhutto was expected to win. To be sure, the press had bravely fought for freedom and deserved its rights. But the anti-Bhutto establishment that had denied such rights earlier was now quick to open the floodgates of the printed word. Cynics said the establishment wanted to “exploit” a free press to undermine the new democratic government in the offing and there was much proof of such manipulation in the years to follow, with clever journalists becoming witting tools (information ministers, press secretaries and attaches) in various civilian dispensations. But in due course sections of the press were able to shrug off the persistent demands of overbearing governments and stand on their own feet. A proliferation of newspapers and magazines since then has made it almost impossible to “control” the press effectively, though, of course, this has not stopped any government from offering “press advice” or using various levers of power (inducements and threats) to try and keep editors and publishers in line. This was especially evident during the “democratic” regime of Nawaz Sharif from 1997-99 when the stick was applied more ruthlessly to newspapers and journalists than at any time since the Zia years.
Indeed, one of the “blessings in disguise” inherited by the coup-makers of 1999 was a free press which told the world how the country had suffered under Mr Sharif and why no one shed any tears for the not-so-dearly departed “democrat”. It was a bizarre situation: an elected prime minister had been deposed by the military; but instead of a chorus of press voices condemning the unconstitutional act and fearing the worst, free-minded journalists were inclined to weigh their words in “explaining” away the military intervention when they were not openly justifying it. No leader has kicked off with so much press hostility against a departing one and so much support for a new one than General Pervez Musharraf.
It is, of course, to General Musharraf’s abiding credit that his government has not taken any steps to try and gag the press. In fact, he has been wise to exploit the international goodwill generated by the existence of a lively press in the country. Certainly, the hostility of the international community to the Kargil coupmakers was assuaged in no small measure until recently by elements of the free Pakistani press. But there have been some disquieting developments since General Musharraf has acquired greater legitimacy at home and abroad and demonstrated a swaggering confidence in his own ability to hold sway.
Thankfully, though, the incidents are few and far between as yet. Irritation at stupid questions during press conferences and anger at awkward ones. Accusations against journalists and hostility towards critics. Standard Operating Procedures in regard to snubbing “negative” reporting. And so on. But that is how it always begins, doesn’t it? When rulers are insecure, they are keen to woo the press. When they become supremely confident, they are likely to become intolerant of a boisterous press. But overconfidence has rarely yielded “positive” results. Indeed, as our own history testifies in the case of Bhutto II and Sharif II, it has led to fatal ends. Therefore greater personal tolerance and political modesty may be a preferred course of action for leaders seeking to retain support and ensure longevity.
General Musharraf’s attention is required in one other matter. The RPPO was allowed to lapse unlegislated by the Sharif regime. Therefore there is a legal vacuum in the law regulating the press. The 1960s PPO is dead and buried but the 1990s RPPO is not alive and kicking. The problem has been accentuated since the provincial governments were rendered clueless about their prerogatives under the new local government’s charter of rights. It is therefore imperative that the federal cabinet should breathe new life into the RPPO quickly before some blundering official trips the wire and embarrasses the government by clamping down unnecessarily on a publication or some frustrated publisher prints a new title without “official” permission. The RPPO, we understand, has been approved by the ministries of information and law and only needs the cabinet’s green light. Can we expect General Musharraf to revive the RPPO immediately as a sign of his personal commitment to a free press in this country?
(TFT Dec 14-20, 2001 Vol-XIII No.42 — Editorial)
Afghanistan: what next for Pakistan?
Except for the core troika in the Northern Alliance represented by Mr Abdullah Abdullah (foreign minister), Mr Younas Qanooni (interior minister) and General Mohammad Fahim (defense minister), no one in Afghanistan is particularly pleased with the power-sharing formula hammered out in Bonn. The “troika” has hogged all the important posts and is now manipulating internal and external policies with a view to influencing the Loya Jirga when it meets six months down the line to construct a longer-term government. Forget about the majority Pakhtuns who have been given no more than a token representation in the form of the prime minister, Hamid Karzai. Even old NA allies like the Uzbek warlord, General Rashid Dostum, in the north and the former president of Afghanistan, Burhanuddin Rabbani, are grumbling.
It is, of course, the fate of the Afghan Pakhtuns that concerns Pakistan for many reasons. The Pakhtun south is predictably split. If that seems to be an unfortunate Pakhtun characteristic, the contrast in the political behaviour of the other ethnic communities of Afghanistan is quite remarkable. In the old days when everyone was fighting the Russians, the Uzbeks stuck together and General Dostam was able to sway all incoming governments in his favour with his 40,000 strong army. He was available to the communists of the PDPA for “use”. Then President Mujaddidi made him his own top general. The Tajiks also stuck together and created the second largest army of Afghanistan under commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. In contrast, the majority Pakhtuns tended to split into separate parties and behaved as if their Pakhtun identity did not really matter. Although this characteristic made them amenable to their ISI and CIA “handlers”, this kind of divide and rule strategy yielded no permanent loyalties and everyone knew that everyone was in the game for his own dirty purpose. Indeed, Pakistan may have played it domestically as a holy jehad but it was a cruel dog-eat-dog game on the ground. Therefore when the Taliban entered the arena and united the Pakhtuns in 1996, the situation gradually slipped out of Pakistan’s control and the tail began to wag the dog. Over the years, the heady feeling that Pakistan finally had Afghanistan as its own backyard while no other country could even sustain an embassy in Kabul became a soporific that closed Islamabad’s eyes to the future.
If the fear of a “Pakhtun split” once again is real, nothing else on the ground is what it was when Pakistan went in with the Taliban and thought it had the field to itself. All the foreign embassies are soon going to be back in Kabul. The UN is going to be more influential than in the past as Bonn has demonstrated and its clout will be felt just as soon as British, European and Turkish “boots are on ground”. Above all, a lot of international money is going to be spread around, not so much through the biased parties in the Kabul interim government as through international agencies that are likely to concentrate on humanitarianism and social development rather that politics. The hope is that as this money is funnelled to the grassroots, it might lessen the intensity of the potential Pakhtun splits in the south of Afghanistan. In the event, this would contrast sharply with what happened to the money when it was given to the ISI for distribution among the mujahideen during the war against the Soviets.
Pakistan’s bugbear in Afghanistan has been India. But that policy of seeing red every time any Afghan is seen shaking hands with the Indians must be given up and a new non-ISI policy initiated to work on the emerging Tajik leadership on the basis of the transit trade facility that Pakistan can always use as leverage. India will remain marginal even after the end of the war. Its entry in the Afghan arena was a kind of tit-for-tat for the flanking move the ISI was making in Bangladesh, a flawed policy based on the assumption that Mrs Hasina Wajed was pro-India. In fact, India’s role in the new Afghanistan is bound to subside as Kabul will be inclined to act more and more in light of the advice offered by those who fund it. The biggest counter in Pakistan’s favour and against India is that India has exclusively backed the Tajiks while the stage must inevitably be set for the Pakhtun majority to reassert itself through the Loya Jirga next year.
Ironically enough, the fact that Afghanistan has gotten out of Pakistan’s stranglehold should go in favour of Pakistan. A large number of countries contributing to the reconstruction of Afghanistan should prevent it from becoming a battle-field for India and Pakistan. Therefore the sooner Pakistan recognises this reality, the better. It is the consolidation of internal rather than external control that should matter to us. A policy shaped passively on the belligerence of Islamic extremists posing as friends of the Pakhtuns in Afghanistan is a bad policy. India’s undue interference in Afghanistan can best be countered by aligning with the international community whose clout will be focused on keeping Afghanistan away from fundamentalist terrorism.
(TFT Dec 21-27, 2001 Vol-XIII No.43 — Editorial)
Fresh start needed
Pakistan’s military leaders have had a propensity for adventure unmatched by other dependent states in the modern age. Irrespective of the rights or wrong of the issue, Pakistani army generals provoked military conflict with India in 1965, 1971 and 1999. In the process, Pakistan has had to sign unequal ceasefires (Tashkent), submit to humiliating surrenders (Bangla Desh) or accept forced withdrawals (Kargil).
It was, however, General Zia ul Haq who believed that Pakistan was in a win win situation in Afghanistan. But he was wrong. If the legacy of the various wars with India is a reinforcement of historical pride and prejudice, the legacy of our “involvement” in Afghanistan is even more pervasive and poisonous. It has derailed the post cold war impulse for political democracy, created the demon of bloody sectarianism, raised the spectre of violent fundamentalism, stamped a militaristic ethos on society and created a powerful but unaccountable state within the state.
The ISI’s writ has spread far and wide, at home and abroad. Indeed, in recent times, an unprecedented and worrying development had begun to manifest itself with senior ISI operatives being invited as a matter of state policy into the precincts of GHQ and civilian government and also slotted into senior command positions in the army and vice versa. This was in sharp contrast to the situation before our involvement in Afghanistan when no more than Brigadiers ran the ISI and army chiefs tended to frown upon overly active roles for former ISI-types in regular army matters. Thus the ISI was actually poised to become a state in itself and for itself if the Afghanistan debacle hadn’t compelled General Musharraf to rein it in and freeze its more adventurous external operations.
Clearly, the ISI’s twenty-year “adventure” in Afghanistan is the worst thing to happen to Pakistan’s state and society in fifty years of independence. One dismal but stark manifestation of this fact is that our army now has to defend not just our eastern borders with India as part of an old historical reality but also our western border with Afghanistan as part of a new self-inflicted injury. Latest reports say that we have been obliged to move over 50,000 soldiers and 150,000 para-military troops to the border with Afghanistan in order to stop infiltration of Al-Qaeda terrorists into our tribal areas. And we are being obliged to do this in a security environment in which India is threatening to overrun our borders in hot pursuit of “terrorists” allegedly trained and supported by us while the international community is clucking in sympathy with its plight.
If there is a silver lining in the cloud, could it be, ironically enough, General Musharraf? Here is a man who has acted decisively and courageously to win international support for Pakistan’s ailing economy by swiftly abandoning a thoroughly bad foreign policy in Afghanistan. He has also held out an olive branch to India by showing flexibility on Kashmir, even though India hasn’t yet had the sense to recognize the true value of his initiative. He has reined in the ISI by suitable postings, transfers and retirements. He has shunted intractably rigid-types from GHQ. And he has risked the wrath of the religious extremists by clamping down on them in the national interest. This is a great start in the right direction. But much more needs to be done to reverse the tide.
Let us admit it. After Afghanistan, our biggest foreign policy failure is in Kashmir. From 1947 to 1965, we beseeched the UN to grant us Kashmir in vain. We then tried to stir revolt in the valley and triggered a destabilizing war with India. After 1971, we buried the Kashmir issue at Simla and forgot about the UN resolutions abroad. We then woke up in the 1990s to foment trouble in Kashmir after New Delhi had made a mess of things in the 1980s. In the last ten years, we have exported Islamic revolution to Kashmir and provoked untold brutalities on the Kashmiris by India’s security forces. In exchange, we have paid the price of urban terrorism in Karachi and elsewhere sponsored by India. We have undermined civil society and democratic pluralism by relinquishing political space to extremist jehadi organizations. We have piled up debt in order to fuel the cold war with India and scared away potential foreign investors. And we have pulled the rug from under the feet of elected political representatives who dared to think of smoking the peace pipe with New Delhi. Now we are being pushed into a conflict with India by the very extremists who have already dashed our hopes in Afghanistan. Isn’t it time to change a policy of perennial warring with India into a policy of enduring peace with our neighbours?
We have barely managed to survive a highly destablising debacle in Afghanistan whose end is not yet in sight. But we might not be so lucky in the event of a conflict with India over Kashmir. Putting Pakistan first means doing it not just vis-á-vis Afghanistan policy but also vis a vis Kashmir policy. Nothing less than that will constitute a safe and secure fresh start for the country.
(TFT Dec 28, 2001-03 Jan, 2002 Vol-XIII No.44 — Editorial)
Indo-Pak follies
As India ferries its tanks and missiles to the border to “teach Pakistan a lesson” for “meddling in Kashmir”, it might sensibly pause to consider its error. One nuclear power can’t possibly teach another nuclear power any “lessons” through war. Nor can it rest assured that its military intervention will have “limited” objectives. Escalation is inevitable when each side is able and willing to hit back, as both India and Pakistan discovered to their mutual discomfort in the Kargil conflict.
Equally, Pakistan’s old strategic doctrine of supporting proxy wars in India’s periphery, especially through an Islamic jehad in Kashmir, so that the conventional military balance is restored to more manageable proportions, is out of sync with recent realities. In particular, the post 9/11 world sees Islamic jehad as pure terrorism that must be stamped out everywhere.
We said as much over a year ago
(TFT Editorial “Start talking”, April 7, 2000): “The greater the losses of India at the hands of Pakistan inspired jehadi forces in Indian-held Kashmir, the greater the chances that New Delhi will be provoked into launching a war against Pakistan…. In the event of such a conflict, the international community led by Washington may be expected to support India as a victim…the fact that India’s robust and independent economy will also be able to better withstand the rigours and ravages of war…than Pakistan’s dependent and crippled economy lends weight to this line of thinking”.
The dye was cast last October when the jehadis of the Jaish i Mohammad (JM) led by Maulana Masood Azhar in Pakistan killed 40 people outside the state parliament building in Srinagar, prompting the American ambassador in New Delhi to finally say that the militants in Kashmir were terrorists and not “freedom fighters”. A more aggressive response from India and the international community should therefore have been anticipated following the December 13 jehadi attack on the parliament house in New Delhi. As India has mobilized for war, Washington has stepped in to outlaw the JM and the Lashkar e Taiba (LeT) and warned Pakistan to clamp down on them.
Unfortunately, Pakistan’s argument that India should provide “evidence” against the JM and LeT before action can be taken against them doesn’t cut ice with the international community which scarcely bothered with such niceties itself when it came to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. But like their ill-fated counterparts in Afghanistan, the jehadis in Pakistan and Kashmir have proven to be their own worst propagandists, having proudly owned up to acts of militancy in Kashmir as well as publicly threatened to carry the jehad to the heart of India in Delhi. Therefore Pakistan’s condemnation of such acts as “terrorism” evokes the same contemptuous dismissal as its lack of adequate “leverage” over the Taliban before 9/11.
But this, too, hasn’t come as a surprise to us. In the same TFT editorial in April last year we warned that “the strengthening of the diverse jehadi parties and groups based in Pakistan for the purposes of the proposed liberation of Kashmir is bound to undermine Pakistan’s internal cohesion and political stability. Indeed, granting center-stage to the Kashmir struggle by the mujahideen could signal a strengthening of the forces of Talibanisation in Pakistan just as similar succour to similar forces for similar purposes in Afghanistan has had a socially destabilizing impact on Pakistan. Equally, since such groups lack a calibrated world view with regard to diplomatic gains or losses, their military successes in Kashmir would be proportionate to a decrease in the political leverage of Pakistan over them, as in Afghanistan. Indeed, in time to come, Kashmir could come to resemble Afghanistan with all that that description entails.”
If Pakistan’s past errors have caught up on it, is there any hope of a realistic adjustment in its Kashmir policy? Islamabad has certainly gone through the motions of complying with the international requirements of freezing the assets of some jehadi groups and detaining their leading lights. But this may not be sufficient to stave off further pressure if the jehadis continue to mount suicide attacks in Kashmir and India, thereby jeopardizing the political and economic “gains” of Islamabad’s revamped Afghan policy after 9/11.
However, if Pakistan desperately needs a more realistic Kashmir and India policy, it is equally true that “India remains bereft of a Kashmir policy and a Pakistan policy and its brinkmanship policy is unimaginative”, as American scholar Stephen Cohen has noted. “This policy cannot consist only of Pakistan-bashing. India must also reassess its entire strategy for dealing with the Kashmiri separatist movement and with Pakistan under its present leadership,” argues Mr Cohen. “India fantasizes that the Pakistan army will suddenly yield power to a pro-Indian civilian government that will turn Pakistan into a pliable and accommodating neighbour but this is wishful thinking. New Delhi cannot afford a truly radicalized and a fragmenting but angry and nuclear-armed Pakistan…Ignoring the root causes of the anger of some of its own citizens and the very existence of its neighbour do not seem to be steps in the right direction”.
Truer words have not been spoken. India should talk to Pakistan and the Kashmiris and resolve their disputes with it instead of fighting with them.
(TFT Jan 04-10, 2002 Vol-XIII No.45 — Editorial)
Diminishing returns for flexing muscle
India is threatening to wage war against Pakistan for “aiding and abetting terrorism” in Kashmir, territory held by India but hotly disputed by Pakistan since the independence of both nations in 1947. India’s view is that if America can attack Afghanistan for hosting Al-Qaeda terrorists, why can’t India follow suit against Pakistan for sustaining Islamic groups bent on “terrorist” violence in Kashmir?
But this argument is a non-starter. The fact is that the United States had obtained three UN Security Council resolutions sanctioning the Taliban regime in Afghanistan before September 11 and two more later before it took the decision to attack Kabul. Washington also had full NATO support. In India’s case, no such legal backing or world support is available. In fact, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, key players in the anti-Afghan coalition, have firmly advised against such an adventure. Nor can the fighting in Kashmir be classified in black and white terms, as in Afghanistan’s case. The Taliban regime was not recognized by the United Nations. In the case of Kashmir, however, there are several UN Security Council resolutions going back to 1948 urging India to hold a plebiscite to determine whether the Kashmiris want to stay with it or join Pakistan, resolutions which India has blithely spurned. That is why Pakistanis insist that the jihadis in Kashmir are not terrorists but freedom fighters seeking Kashmir’s liberation from India.
India’s attempt to ratchet up its military might to put pressure on General Pervez Musharraf to stamp out pro-Kashmir groups based in Pakistan could also create problems all round.
First, no Pakistani ruler could survive the backlash from the public and the military if he were perceived to have “betrayed” the cause of Kashmir by bending before India. So beyond a point the more India relies on military muscle to “persuade” Pakistan to rein in the jehadis, the greater the chances that such tactics might backfire by provoking Pakistan to lash out in anger. That is why when General Musharraf decided to swing behind the allies against the Taliban he was careful to create the domestic perception that he did so because he thought it was in Pakistan’s best interests rather than because America had put a gun to his head.
Second, General Musharraf has already risked much by alienating powerful religious forces in Pakistan after aligning with the West over Afghanistan. His personal security has had to be increased after certain domestic forces have begun to target him as their enemy No. 1. Thus Indian actions might destabilize him and therefore Pakistan just when the West needs a reliable partner.
Third, by ferrying half a million men under arms to the Pakistani border, India has forced Pakistan to thin its 200,000 strong paramilitary force plugging the Afghan border. This means that Qaeda terrorists still holed up in the Tora Bora mountains will find it easier to sneak into Pakistan and hide until the American storm blows over. Surely, that is not what Washington wants.
Fourth, General Musharraf is not like Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban regime, who refused to act against the terrorists. On the contrary, he has reiterated his resolve to root out religious extremism in Pakistan. A month ago he froze the assets of several terrorist groups and arrested the top five leaders of the anti-America and pro-Kashmir jihadi parties in the country. Now he has detained leaders of the two militant organisations named by India and the United States as responsible for the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13, even though neither country has provided evidence of its claims. And General Musharraf has revamped the external operations of the Interservices Intelligence directorate, which is credited with backing the “terrorism” in Kashmir, so that its policies are in line with those of the government of Pakistan. What more could New Delhi or Washington have asked for and got immediately?
Finally, India should remember that Pakistan is not as defenseless as Afghanistan was against America, nor as helpless as the Palestinians against Israel. The Pakistani army has given as good as it has ever got from India during times of military conflict. And Pakistan is a nuclear power that will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons should India threaten to overrun it.
Under the circumstances, even an accidental or limited war could get out of hand, with dangerous consequences for the entire region.
General Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India are scheduled to attend the SAARC meeting in Nepal this Thursday. India should stop thundering about war and use the occasion to start talking peace with Pakistan.
India’s political aims in Kashmir may be better served by patiently strengthening General Musharraf’s hand in his fight against all forms of religious extremism than by foolishly pushing him to the wall. Nuclear weapons apart, Muslim Pakistan’s last line of defense against Hindu-majority India is an Islamic jihad on a national scale. That is exactly what the fundamentalist forces in Pakistan want to exploit, not just against liberal democratic elements within Pakistan but against infidel India and the hated West as well.
(TFT Jan 11-17, 2002 Vol-XIII No.46 — Editorial)
Together or separately
Who is the most popular politician in the country? Nine out of ten people will probably say “Benazir Bhutto”, even as most will remind you that she is corrupt and incompetent. That is to say that most of the nine wouldn’t actually vote for her, with some absenting themselves from the polls as usual and others voting against her on some principle or the other. Ask them about Nawaz Sharif and they are likely to shrug contemptuously, “He’s finished”, implying that not only is he corrupt but also out of the political reckoning, hence not worth commenting upon. Talk about Pervez Musharraf and the remarks are likely to be as diverse as the class composition of the sample polled. “At least he’s anti-fundo” (professional types); “He’s not corrupt” (urban middle-classes), “He’s a survivor” (retired army officers); “What’s he ever done for us?” (working classes); “He’s the devil in disguise” (mullahs); “He’s got the wrong team” (big business); “He’s got it in for us” (traders) – none of which is exactly a good barometer for domestic popularity. How does all this translate into practical politics in the months ahead?
There are some people who want General Musharraf to postpone the general elections and rule without the politicians. But their arguments are either self-serving (“The politicians are corrupt and incompetent”) or misplaced (“The country cannot afford democracy at this critical juncture”). Fortunately, all accounts so far suggest that General Musharraf intends to keep his word and elections will be held before the year is out. What is less clear is how democratic, free and fair these will be in the prevailing circumstances and who will be allowed or banned from participating in them and how power will be shared between the army and the politicians.
It is clear that General Musharraf means to sit in the driving seat. The constitution is to be amended for this purpose. We shall see a super presidential National Security Council lording it over the prime minister and his cabinet. A degree of proportional representation may be decreed along with an enhancement of the seats in parliament so that no party can whip up a majority; apart from the power to confirm a prime minister, the president may also demand the right to nominate members of the cabinet; and so on. But all these calculations would amount to nought if a popular but corrupt politician like Benazir Bhutto were to sweep the polls and refuse to play ball with General Musharraf. So, for starters, she has to be kept out of the game and her Pakistan Peoples Party is to be isolated and divided so that it cannot muster the strength to upset General Musharraf’s apple cart. How is this to be done?
Recent political maneuverings are a sign of things to come. The PPP is now in the anti-Musharraf Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, now out of it, depending upon its state of negotiations with the government. General Musharraf has a straight-forward formula: Bhutto is corrupt and incompetent; she was prime minister twice and didn’t mend her ways; hence she doesn’t deserve a third chance. If the constitution has to be amended to keep Bhutto and Sharif out, it will be done by decreeing that no one can be elected or become prime minister three times in a row; but since the PPP is a valid enough national party, it will be accommodated in Islamabad and wherever else it deserves, depending upon how many votes it has managed to pull. In the meanwhile, the government will do whatever is needed to ensure that the PPP is kept in its place. This will be done by stringing an anti-PPP coalition made of PPP renegades (Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, etc), PML-N renegades (Mian Azhar et al), Pashtun and Baloch opportunists (Begum Nasim Wali Khan, Akbar Bugti, etc), and perhaps even the MQM if it is ready to accept terms and behave itself. And if, despite everything, the Bhutto factor still seems to threaten General Musharraf’s blueprint, then the elections will be rigged selectively to guarantee “positive” results.
Isn’t all this familiar? Did we not see the same sort of strategy in 1990 when President Ghulam Ishaq and General Aslam Beg contrived to thrust Nawaz Sharif and Jam Sadiq Ali on Islamabad and Sindh respectively and had to follow it up with the most disgraceful politicking to keep the PPP at bay? Nor should it be forgotten that puppets have a habit of pouncing on their string pullers with devastating effect – Junejo on Zia, Nawaz on Ishaq, Leghari on Bhutto, Osama on the CIA, Bhindranwalle on Gandhi, etc. It is far better to make realistic compromises and rule as democratically as possible. That is why Ms Bhutto should be given a personal face-saving exit from office while enabling the PPP to make a deserving institutional entry into power. We have bitter experience of rigging and no establishment has ever prospered by such tactics.
Together, General Musharraf and the PPP can walk the straight and narrow as prescribed by the modern world and construct a new Pakistan. Separately, they are bound to flounder.
(TFT Jan 18-24, 2002 Vol-XIII No.47 — Editorial)
A great beginning
All except religious extremists have hailed General Pervez Musharraf’s recent speech. The Americans approved it. The Indians welcomed it. Domestic liberals delighted in it. Politicians lined up behind it. The media appreciated it. And the public has breathed a sigh of relief after it. He has averted a terrible war and put the lid on religious strife in the country. That’s a great beginning.
The speech, read as a manifesto, has two aspects: domestic and foreign. Each is significant, but the foreign element is mainly responsible for its timing and thrust. The suspicion is that without unbearable military pressure from India and compelling diplomatic advice from the US, it might not have been made at all or certainly not at this time and in this form. After all, some of us have pleaded for much the same sort of forceful state intervention and policy change in the national interest for donkeys of years but been sidelined as “negative” and “unpatriotic” elements by the very patrons of the “new” Pakistan.
This is not to say that General Musharraf has acted only because a gun was put to his head. Indeed, there is evidence to show that he has long thought of moderating Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies in line with present economic and geo-political realities. But there is also contrary evidence to suggest that he was thwarted from doing so by military advisors and civilian colleagues to whom he was personally indebted in some way or by whom he was intellectually overawed, or a bit of both.
We might recall that in his first speech to the nation on October 12, 1999, General Musharraf had instinctively and spontaneously framed the right questions about Pakistan’s crises and hinted at the right answers in an Ataturkian fashion. But thereafter certain khaki colleagues prevailed upon him to make conservative “tactical readjustments” on many issues, the retreat on the blasphemy law being one of the most objectionable. In due course, his frustration and anger with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the sectarian parties and groups at home also became increasingly obvious. Yet, even as he rejected the “strategic depth” doctrine of his predecessors vis a vis Afghanistan, he was unable to fully break free of the “national security” doctrines regarding India into which most army officers are straitjacketed as a matter of training and motivation.
In fact General Musharraf was most intransigent in the case of India. At first he pooh-poohed the Lahore Summit, saying he wouldn’t talk to India until it was ready to principally discuss the “core” issue of Kashmir in the light of the 1948 UN resolutions. Then he went so far as to stamp jihad as a “legitimate” weapon in the Kashmiris’ struggle for freedom and self-determination, irrespective of the source of that jehad. Fortunately, however, by the time of Agra a degree of realism had naturally crept back into him and he was ready to discuss all options with India. But he was prevented by his glib “nationalist” hawks from cementing an agreement with India. Provoked by Pakistani insistence on the centrality of Kashmir, India countervailed with the unprecedented centrality of “cross-border terrorism” to it and wrecked the Summit. The loss of an agreement in Agra is acutely felt in Islamabad because General Musharraf has had to say that Pakistan and Pakistanis will not sponsor or support any jihad on the soil of any country. This is a unilateral commitment not to export militancy of any kind to India (what India calls “cross-border terrorism”). India has yet to concede a dialogue focused on the Kashmir dispute in exchange.
If a Pakistani about-turn on a ten-year Afghan policy was an immediate response to the events of September 11, there are two additional political turns evident from General Musharraf’s latest speech. One, a retreat to the pre-1989 “hands-off Kashmir” policy negotiated with India at Simla in 1972 and in Lahore in 1999. Two, a commitment to return to the modern, moderate and progressive Pakistan envisioned by the Quaid-e-Azam in 1947, with General Musharraf seemingly categorical in burying the notion that Pakistan might become a theocratic state. Both steps are in the right direction.
If the force of military habit and political insecurity marks the early Musharraf, the force of circumstance and political maturity is writ all over the late Musharraf. But administrative regulation of the madrassa and the mosque is only a half-curative measure. The organs of the state — the military and its intelligence agencies, the judiciary and civil services, the public universities, colleges and curricula, the state controlled and patronized media, etc – which have jointly spawned politico-religious indoctrination for elusive “national” or “ideological” interests since General Zia ul Haq have all got be to purged as well. And these vested interests will not go without a bloody fight. On the preventive side, too, nothing less than universal education, gainful employment and health security is needed, which means a substantial economic revival programme. And that is not going to be available on a platter.
There are miles to go and promises to keep. Only time will tell whether or not General Pervez Musharraf was the man of the hour.
(TFT Jan 25-31, 2002 Vol-XIII No.48 — Editorial)
No politics without politicians
The military is unveiling its proposed constitutional and electoral changes in the run-up to the general elections later in the year. But apart from the PML Yes-Men, the popular political reaction has not been enthusiastic, even though there are obvious merits in specific provisions. The abolition of the separate electorate system is an unequivocally good step. It will bring the minority non-Muslims back into the political mainstream, which is what was desperately needed. Similarly, by increasing the number of parliamentary seats for women, the government has moved to try and redress an historical injustice. This is also to be welcomed as an attempt to remove apartheid in one particular form. Also, no serious objection may be raised to the addition of certain privileges for “technocrats” who are unable to participate in the political life of communities because the electoral route is closed to them for a host of reasons. But what on earth does the government mean to achieve by insisting that only graduates may contest elections?
If by “graduation” we mean education and education is supposed to lead to a lack of corruption and better morals, then we are barking up the wrong tree. The most successful crooks are invariably quite educated, which is what white-collar crime is all about. So clearly that is not the intention. Indeed, since nearly 80% of the population of this country is illiterate, this scheme will disenfranchise all except the graduated few (under 10%) from holding senior positions of public office. Surely, that cannot be the objective of a regime which professes “true democracy”. So what is the game all about?
We cannot escape the conclusion that a general link may have been found between “education” (university graduation) and political moderation, between religious bigots and extremists (especially those begotten by madrassas) on the one hand and progressive Muslims with a degree of education on the other. That is to say that in one swoop the military may be seeking to clip the wings of the extremist religious orthodoxy in the most uneducated and peripheral areas of the country and among the most militant sections of the population (excluding the Jama’at-e-Islami, which ranks among the mainstream parties), paving the way for a brand of politics that is both modern and moderate. Of course, this move will also disqualify about half of the last assembly of parliamentarians and, with the rest already in the grip of NAB, pave the way for a fresh, more youthful and enlightened start. A most original idea, and one whose repercussions could have significant implications for the political development of the country.
This would suggest that the main issue is the unwillingness of the military to take the mainstream opposition politicians and political parties into confidence about how and to what extent it intends to share power with the moderate civilian leaders of tomorrow.
It is true, of course, that many politicians are thoroughly corrupt and discredited. But that is no reason to say that politics without politicians is more desirable than politics with politicians. In the final reckoning, it is the politicians who have the vote of the people, and they are the ones who will have to make the system work and deliver. By the same token, the military’s record in government has been disastrous. True, such periods have been marked by relatively insignificant doses of overt corruption. But the mindless political and military adventures of various juntas have irreparably damaged this country. Indeed, the military’s creeping political ascendancy has been singularly responsible for the failure of the state to manufacture a credible nationhood. Certainly, no military leader has ever won the trust and confidence of the people of Pakistan. Nor is one about to in the short term, irrespective of his sincerity and righteousness. Why then should the military exclusively make and unmake laws and constitutions? If war is too serious a business to be left solely to generals, there is even less reason to entrust the art of politics to them exclusively.
A good example of how military self-righteousness and personal sincerity can mar the political and economic landscape is available in the shape of the confusing local self-government forms unfurled by the military in the last two years. It also needs to be recognized that if certain people and their policies are now acquiring heroic proportions, this is ironically due more to their sense of survival rather than to any innate sense of vision.
The greater misfortune may be that having made virtue out of necessity, there is no visible attempt to recognize necessity for what it is – the opposite of freedom. Hence the peoples’ representatives are not to be given the freedom to choose a political system that suits them. Instead, the representatives are to be vetted according to pre-determined criteria and an appropriate system is to be thrust upon them. Haven’t we been down this failed route before?
The government has some good ideas up its sleeve. It should discuss them with the mainstream politicians and win their approval. That is the only way to make sure that the system now being devised is not aborted by its forced practitioners after the manufacturers have long gone, as inevitably they must.
(TFT Feb 01-07, 2002 Vol-XIII No.49 — Editorial)
Destiny and fate
General Pervez Musharraf is increasingly looking more like a brave helmsman than a great soldier. The ghost of September 11 – anti-American terrorism at home and in neighbouring Afghanistan – has been laid to rest. The Indian threat of war has been blunted for the time being by muzzling the local jehadis. The downslide in the economy has been halted by the successful solicitation of foreign aid, debt re-scheduling and debt re-profiling. Having thus made the transition from a pariah state usurper to an international partner and regional statesman, he is now ready to lap up the icing on the cake – a state visit to Washington as a guest of President George W Bush.
This is an extraordinary turnaround. It is remarkable because of the swift manner in which a lack of strategic vision has been compensated for by a decisive dose of political realism. Rarely in the annals of Pakistani history has dire necessity been so swiftly accommodated as common virtue. But hark. Therein could lie the seeds of despair if a measure of history is not taken.
General Musharraf has publicly said that he means to rule for another five years at least as president and army chief rolled into one. Indeed, the good general sincerely believes and says that “the country needs” him above anything and anyone else. This is a man who is already thinking of himself in terms of destiny and not fate. So be it. If he is wise and generous and brings peace and prosperity to this land, his hopes may bring welcome relief for the populace as well.
But it would be a mistake to see the beginning of the story as its end. Seen in the light of historical irony, some of these statements sound more worrying than assuring. Recall. Shortly before the polls for 1977, a supremely confident Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told friends that he expected to rule for twenty-five years. In the event, twenty five years were eclipsed into five months when he fell from power and twenty five months before he faced the gallows. Recall, too, the audacious manner in which General Zia ul Haq booted out a prime minister and parliament in early 1999 and didn’t live to regret his arrogant decision five months later. And let us not forget that Nawaz Sharif was talking in much the same sort of language in 1999 (Amir ul Momineen) before fate intervened and put him in his rightful place.
That is to say, if General Musharraf’s reign is marked by an arrogance of power and opportunist bent of mind rather than a disposition in favour of democratic power-sharing and farsightedness, it is bound to flounder. The three gentlemen referred to above had deluded themselves into believing they were justified in decreeing sweeping changes in the body-politic of the state and civil society because they were the long-awaited saviors of the nation. But if they had set more modest goals for themselves, including an honourable and democratic exit strategy, they might have fared better both in personal and institutional terms.
Seen in this light, the electoral amendments that are flying thick and fast and the sweeping constitutional changes on the anvil raise a host of apprehensions. There has been no significant independent discussion with the representatives, actual and potential, of civil society and the people of Pakistan about what is needed and what is workable. There is no credible attempt to make a level playing field for all politicians and parties, irrespective of caste, colour or creed. Indeed, if anything, the opposite is truer, that a stage is being set for fully-managed and pliable parliaments in Islamabad and in the provincials capitals of the federation. Equally, if a King’s party has not been officially announced, it has not been officially denounced as well – the efforts to cobble a grand Muslim League of Yes-Men without the nettlesome Nawazites are all too familiar. Finally, the attempt to whittle down the PPP is becoming obvious, the leading player nominated in this political treachery being none other than Aftab Sherpao. But even Mr Sherpao cannot be trusted to do the needful without ensuring a degree of compliance, courtesy NAB (a 1996 case has been dug up against him). What manner of “deals” have been suggested and cemented with the Wali Khans and Saifullahs of the NWFP, whose scions have tasted the bitter fruit of NAB and then been let off rather suddenly, also doesn’t require a leap of the imagination. The appointment of the former chief justice of the supreme court who helped legitimize the military government as the new chief election commissioner is equally evidential.
If General Musharraf’s windfall political profit is owed to pressing and rather pointed American requirements as much as it is owed to his own dexterity, he should start thinking of a time in the not too distant future when the hand of the great benefactor will not be there to bless him as advisedly. State interests change with changed circumstances, and circumstances may change without notice, as we all know only too well. That is when the brave helmsman will need more than just a clutch of soft hands on deck to traverse the ocean between fate and destiny.
(TFT Feb 08-14, 2002 Vol-XIII No.50 — Editorial)
Cleanse thyself
The case of the missing American journalist Danny Pearl is intriguing. He is the Bombay bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. Mr Pearl disappeared from Karachi on January 23. At first it was rumoured that he was trying to locate Dawood Ibrahim, the former Bombay underworld Mafioso who is on the run from Indian authorities and is reportedly in Karachi. It was feared that Mr Pearl might have been “wasted” for trying to step in where even fools would fear to tread. This view gained currency when another journalist, Ghulam Hasnain, who works for a foreign magazine, also went missing for two days around the same time in Karachi. Mr Hasnain had written an article for a local magazine some time earlier exposing Mr Ibrahim’s underworld nexus in the city. It was feared that he might have incurred the wrath of the powers-that-be who wanted to stitch up his mouth because the Indians were clamouring for Mr Dawood’s return. So when Mr Hasnain reappeared two days later, his stony silence confirmed this line of thinking.
But when Mr Pearl remained missing, the supposed link with Mr Ibrahim snapped. Instead, it was now revealed that he had been on the trial of the American shoe-bomber Richard Reid which had led him in the direction of a certain Mr Mobarak Ali Shah Gillani whose terrorist Tanzeem al-Fuqra organization based in Pakistan had been outlawed by the US some time ago. The subsequent arrest of Mr Gillani by the Pakistan authorities seemed to clinch the argument.
However, a new angle now crept in. Mr Mobarak was said to have made some calls to important people in India. The “Indian hand” seemed to lurk behind another fact: Mr and Mrs Pearl’s Karachi host turned out to be an “Indian” lady who had allegedly overstayed her visit to Pakistan without getting a visa extension from the ministry of interior. This prompted General Rashid Qureshi, the top government spokesman, to hint darkly at an Indian conspiracy behind Mr Pearl’s kidnapping. The same fears were alleged by Pakistan’s foreign minister Abdul Sattar who suspected that India’s RAW had planned the whole thing in order to defame Pakistan.
While all this was going on, the Wall Street Journal received an e-mail ultimatum demanding the return of the Pakistani terrorists detained in Cuba and the delivery of F-16 aircraft to Pakistan in exchange for Mr Pearl’s release. The name of the group making the demand (National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty) was most curious since it was unlike that of any Jehadi or non-state actor. Also, by digging up the issue of the aircraft, the group seemed to go out of its way to suggest a link of sorts with Pakistani officialdom. A second e-mail extended the ultimatum and changed the conditions: the group now wanted the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mulla Zaeef, released by the Americans in exchange for Mr Pearl. But when Mr Zaeef’s family disavowed any relationship with the group or its latest demands, the matter was brushed aside. The story then hovered on the brink of a tragedy when someone called up the police and said that Mr Pearl had been killed and his body dumped in some Karachi graveyard. An unidentified body of a “white man” was soon discovered, prompting the world media to announce the death of Mr Pearl.
Fortunately, that was not true. In fact, Mr Moinuddin Haider, the interior minister, has now raised hopes by claiming that Mr Pearl is alive and should shortly be a free man. No one can make such a claim unless he is already negotiating with the kidnappers. This means that the government and FBI teams tracking this case know more than they have revealed. The recent arrest of Sheikh Umar Saeed in Karachi could be a pointer in the right direction. Mr Saeed is the former London School of Economics graduate who became a Kashmiri mujahid, tried to kidnap foreign journalists in India some years ago, was caught and imprisoned and then freed from an Indian jail via the 1999 hijacking of an Indian plane, after which he conveniently “disappeared”. He is also wanted for his links with Mohammad Atta who masterminded the suicide attack on the World Trade Centre. Is it possible that Mr Pearl’s ordeal has to do with his discovery that certain terrorist groups banned or wanted by the government are still alive and kicking, thanks to the protection of rogue elements in the intelligence organs of the state? That would also explain why the government has been able to track down the culprits and is hoping to conclude it on a favourable note before General Pervez Musharraf embarks on his state visit to Washington.
We hope and pray that Daniel Pearl is alive and will be a free man shortly. But there are no guarantees. This episode is a timely reminder that the terrorists and religious extremists spawned by the state over a thirty year period will not be crushed by thundering speeches and well-meaning arrests alone. The state will have to cleanse itself before it can clean up anybody else.
(TFT Feb 15-21, 2002 Vol-XIII No.51 — Editorial)
Strengths and weaknesses
General Pervez Musharraf has made a number of candid statements recently that provide a valuable insight into his mind. Since he is expected to be in charge of Pakistan for an untold period ahead, they may be worth dissecting for more than their intrinsic value.
He recently told an American journalist that “the three most difficult decisions in his life” were the about-turn on Afghan policy shortly after September 11, the crackdown on religious extremists that followed, and the handshake with the Indian prime minister at the SAARC summit in Nepal last month as a gesture of friendship. We empathize with him entirely.
No Pakistani politician, let alone an army chief, has ever had the guts to call a spade a spade on each of these issues. Indeed, most have blithely supported the opposite initiatives in order to further short-term personal ends or long-term state goals, which is why these “problems” acquired such significant proportions in the first place.
But in General Musharraf’s case, too, it may be noted that when he took power he was gung-ho about a hands-on Afghan policy, a hands-off fundo policy and a no-holds barred India policy. And why not? The three postures are interlinked. If you want to bleed India, you need the jehadis. If you need the jehadis, you have to condone their religious intolerance and sectarianism in Pakistan. You also have to train them in Afghanistan. And if you need Afghanistan, you have to condone the Taliban and turn a blind eye to their friends in Al-Qaeda. Everything, clearly, hinged on our India policy.
But in a curious way, it wasn’t India that triggered the need for these difficult decisions in the opposite direction. It was, in fact, America who demanded that Pakistan help catch the Al-Qaeda tail that was wagging the Afghan dog. But helping America go after Al-Qaeda meant going after the Taliban who were protecting them. Going after the Taliban meant going after the religious extremists and jehadis who supported them in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And going after these elements meant antagonizing or alienating important elements of the anti-India strategy network, including sidelining its most ardent traffickers in the army and intelligence agencies. Therefore it is difficult to escape the suspicion that the “hand of friendship” to India was a direct and necessary diplomatic consequence of this dialectic, which included a military threat from India, rather than the effect of any change of heart in General Musharraf’s institutional view of India-Pakistan relations.
This impression would unfortunately seem to be reinforced by General Musharraf’s speech in Muzaffarabad on 5 February (Kashmir Day) in which he reiterated Pakistan’s long-standing official position that the fighting in Indian-held Kashmir was the result of an indigenous insurrection that deserved Pakistan’s support. As a worried editorial in the Washington Post on the day of General Musharraf’s meeting with President George W Bush pointed out, “the problem is that Pakistani governments for years have used this formulation as a cover to foment and supply the Kashmir insurrection”. The WP also feared that the crackdown on religious extremists and jehadis was not uncompromising as officially billed since “many of the militants have been allowed to remain free in exchange for lying low”. Such fears were heightened when General Musharraf blamed India for conniving the kidnapping of the American journalist Danny Pearl – “an irresponsible and implausible suggestion that is not backed by evidence” according to the WP. In the event, feared the WP, “where the extremists’ cause intersects with that of Kashmir, Musharraf may feel tempted to pull his punches”.
We hope not. The decisions General Musharraf has taken may have been difficult, given his institutional training and motivation, but they were the correct decisions to take in the long-term interests of the country. Therefore, as a logical follow through, the Pakistan army must decisively break with theories of strategic outreach, stop molly-coddling the jehadis and make durable peace with Pakistan’s neighbours. But much more than that could be at stake. An alliance between the jehadis and the intelligence agencies in the past was used to undermine democracy and politicians and stake out a permanent political role for the armed forces in the body politic of the nation. This must stop. Civil society and the military should join hands to break from the past rather than woo the fundamentalists and extremists to undermine each other as in the past.
General Pervez Musharraf has also claimed that God has ordained him to be President. Of course, as Believers, we know that not a leaf stirs without divine intervention. But much more than that is implied by the president’s statement. It suggests a delusion of power that is totally unacceptable in a society struggling to find rational, democratic moorings. It reminds us of the Amir ul Momineen status sought by Zia ul Haq and then Nawaz Sharif in their quest for absolutism before they fell from grace. It is not a thought that we would wish to associate with General Musharraf. His strength lies in his vulnerability to civilian notions of freedom and moderation and not in his rigidity as a military dictator.
(TFT Mar 01-07, 2002 Vol-XIV No.1 — Editorial)
Post mortem
Mariane Pearl has been courageous and gracious in her hour of tragedy. She has borne the terrible death of her husband with fortitude despite the many false starts and desperate hopes attached to his plight since he was kidnapped on January 23. And she has been kind enough to praise the Pakistani investigating authorities for “doing an amazing job with limited resources”. Her statement is worth reproducing for its eloquence and clarity.
“Revenge would be easy, but it is far more valuable in my opinion to address this problem of terrorism with enough honesty to question our own responsibility as nations and as individuals for the rise of terrorism. My own courage arises from two facts. One is that throughout this ordeal I have been surrounded by people of amazing value. This helps me trust that humanism ultimately will prevail. My other hope now—in my seventh month of pregnancy—is that I will be able to tell our son that his father carried the flag to end terrorism, raising an unprecedented demand among people from all countries not for revenge but for the values we all share: love, compassion, friendship and citizenship far transcending the so-called clash of civilizations.”
None of this, however, excuses us from a political post mortem of the case of Daniel Pearl. His dastardly murder was an act of desperation and defiance by religious extremists on the run. Their desperation flowed from increasing isolation and alienation from the civil society into which they were “ideologised” by vested interests. Their defiance was aimed both at the Americans who thrashed them in Afghanistan and the Pakistani state that abandoned them at home. Brainwashed into believing that they were invincible “soldiers of Islam”, they were frustrated by their own impotence and turned their rage into revenge by decapitating Danny Pearl before the eyes of the world. Many disquieting questions arise.
Why was the Pakistan government optimistic until the grisly end that it would herald the “good news” of Pearl’s freedom “soon”? Did it always “know” the perpetrators of the crime and felt it could “handle” them safely? Why was news of the arrest of the alleged master-kidnapper Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh kept under wraps for a week? Why did bigwigs like General Pervez Musharraf and General Moinuddin Haider become overly optimistic about the outcome of the case after Omar Sheikh’s arrest? Why did Sheikh Omar refuse to “deliver” the goods? We can try and stitch a reasonable story.
Since Omar Sheikh and Maulana Masood Azhar were sprung to freedom from an Indian prison cell via the hijacking of an Indian plane in 1999 by unknown “freedom fighters” or “terrorists” linked to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, they were free to rent or recruit “Kashmir jihadis” throughout Pakistan with a wink and a nod from our national security establishment. Then came 9/11 with its “you-are-either-with-us-or-against-us” ultimatum, followed by an American demand for the arrest and extradition of Omar Sheikh who was thought to have links with Mohammad Atta, the key suicide bomber in the World Trade Centre attack. Consequently, Omar went, or was pushed, underground in order to avoid an extradition that might have unraveled other national security links, acts and operatives.
Soon thereafter, Masood Azhar became an “embarrassment” when he claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack that left 40 people dead outside the parliament building in Srinagar. Pakistan condemned the outrage but balked at arresting him. But when the pressure became unbearable, General Musharraf banned the Jaish-i-Mohammad outfit in January and arrested Azhar and his supporters. It was easier to detain Azhar than Omar because Indian demands for the former’s extradition could be stoutly resisted while American demands for the latter’s extradition could only be deftly sidestepped.
However, the arrest of Azhar and his Jaish-i-Mohammad companions on American prompting probably convinced Omar that his erstwhile Pakistani “handlers” couldn’t be trusted in the circumstances and he should distance himself from them. The dye was cast when Pearl stumbled upon hard-core elements of the Jaish in Karachi and Bahawalpur despite news of the “mass arrests” of its cadres by the government earlier.
When Omar Sheikh was arrested on or about February 5, the government’s silence was probably based on the reasoning that if he could be persuaded to help free Pearl quickly it would be a feather in General Musharraf’s cap when he met President Bush in Washington some days later. But if he did not cooperate, it was reasoned, it might be better to keep him under warps lest his confession or defiance mar the president’s trip to America. In the event, the government claimed that “good news” was on the way after it admitted Omar’s arrest while General Musharraf was still in DC. But Omar’s statement before a magistrate soon thereafter that Pearl was probably already dead put paid to the government’s efforts to redeem the situation. Why did Omar become “hostile” towards his former “friends” and “handlers”?
It is reasonable to think that he may have been pushed over the edge following statements by senior government functionaries denouncing the kidnapping and kidnappers as “Indian agents”, when not so long ago the same people had verily taken pride in them as legitimate “freedom fighters”. How did they think Omar and his fellow jihadis would react to this outrageous charge? By meekly turning themselves in and confessing their crimes so that they could either be sentenced and silenced by their own “handlers” or, worse still, be deported to Cuba as “Al-Qaeda” suspects or supporters? Indeed, this accusation probably persuaded Omar Sheikh and Pearl’s captors that it was the end of the line for them. Their best friends had become their worst enemies, there was nowhere to hide, it was time to go with a bang. Poor Danny Pearl. In the eyes of his frustrated and enraged kidnappers, he had unwittingly become a symbol of everything they had come to distrust, despise and loathe – America and Americans, General Musharraf and his intelligence agencies.
All this can be reasonably inferred from reports of Omar Sheikh’s behaviour while in captivity. He was furious that he had to turn himself in because his family was being harassed by the police. He lectured his “handlers” about betraying the cause of “jihad” and becoming American stooges. When all else failed, he decided to put an end to the ordeal by claiming before a judge that Pearl had already been killed. If that was supposed to be an indirect message to his colleagues to put an end to Pearl, he needn’t have worried about getting it through. Government sources were now quick to claim publicly that his statement amounted to a death sentence on Pearl. If Pearl’s captors had had any doubts about the import of Omar’s statement, there were none following such a “clarification” from the police.
Is this an isolated act of wanton terrorism by fading jihadi outputs? Are all Americans in Pakistan in some sort of danger? On the face of it, the threat of terrorism is palpable enough. The fury of Omar Sheikh and his fellow jihadis has been more than matched by a spurt of bloody sectarian killings in Karachi and Rawalpindi recently. That would suggest only one sort of desperate link between the perpetrators of both acts of violence: they all hate General Musharraf and his idea of a new Pakistan that has downgraded militant jihad and religious supremacy, and is keen to woo, and be wooed by, the “infidel” international community. Their institutional loathing for General Musharraf’s new found liberalism is buttressed by their sense of personal betrayal at his hands. Those who spawned them and led them up the garden path have now blithely turned against them.
If it is pay-off time for the “great betrayal”, are the “Islamic” terrorists a formidable threat to the Musharraf regime? It is tempting to play up this theme as if there are hundreds of thousands of such desperate and angry jihadis ready and willing to take on the government in a series of terrorist acts, including suicide missions against key officials. In fact, government sources say they are on red alert for sectarian attacks during Moharram. General Musharraf’s personal security has also been enhanced manifold. All these precautionary measures are welcome because the threat is real enough and no militant organization is going to dissolve itself or give itself up without a fight to the bitter end. But let us be realistic. The fundamentalists are no match for the state in the long run. Nor do they have much support or sympathy in the public. They may create headaches for everyone, including and especially General Musharraf, but eventually they can and must be crushed. Of course, the nation and the state will have to pay a price for condoning and nurturing them in the first place. But the threat will pass if the state is sufficiently clear about its new goals and objectives and determined to sweep all obstacles from its path. Already, the mainstream religious parties and groups have distanced themselves from the gruesome tragedy of Danny Pearl.
One last point. If General Musharraf is misled into thinking that the fanatics should be muzzled but not de-clawed, or that their energies can be redirected into some reformulated national security cause by means of a calibrated dialogue with them, he should spurn such advice. He must confront the past and cleanly break from it. The masks must come off or be scratched off. The country needs a new national security team for a new national security policy. Trussing up the old misguided team in the cloaks of a new one will not work. The sooner he comprehends the nature of the basic and bloody challenge to state and society, and to his own person, and acts decisively, the better for General Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan.
(TFT Mar 08-14, 2002 Vol-XIV No.2 — Editorial)
More or less like each other?
An acclaimed Indian Muslim “secularist” recently lambasted Mohammad Ali Jinnah as “the man who single-handedly divided India in 1947”. That is not true. While Mr Jinnah certainly created Pakistan single-handedly, it was Mr Jawaharlal Nehru and Mr Vallabhbhai Patel who jointly presided over the division of India by compromising with the Hindu communalists within the Congress party and pushing Mr Jinnah out of their fold. The sad irony was that it was Mr Gandhi who had to pay the price of their folly with his own life by insisting on a secular ideal for India. That lesson remains lost on many Indians even today.
Since 1969, over 10,000 people have died in communal clashes in Ahmadabad, which fact bemoans the passing of Mr Gandhi’s dream into a sectarian nightmare. Last week, over 600 innocent Muslims died in Gujarat and at least 30,000 were rendered homeless. Nearly 30 mosques in Ahmadabad were razed to the ground. Ten years ago, Hindu militants ran amuck in Ayodhya and sparked communal riots which left over 2000 people dead.
Well meaning secular Indians rightly berate Pakistan for being an “ideological and authoritarian state”, proudly pointing to their own country’s “secular and democratic” moorings. Yet they overlook the frightening similarities between the fundamentalists of the two countries, those in Pakistan who have declared war on Hindu India and the infidel West and those in India who talk of protecting or strengthening the “Hindu nation”, those who wield the trident, stick and firetorch in India and those who carry automatic rifles and advocate an Islamic state for the “Muslim nation” in Pakistan. Both may be minorities within their faiths but both have powerful political supporters in the civil and military hierarchies of their own countries.
The impulse of Hindu-Muslim communalism is rooted in the politics of medieval Indian history. Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism emanated from within the soul of ancient India and therefore didn’t lead to violent conflagration. But Islam arrived from outside India as a “conquering” force through the sword of the “temple breaking” Muslim hordes or on the back of “liberating” Muslim saints and mystics. Later the British imperialists aggravated religious tensions by politicizing the divide. The birth of Pakistan followed because Indian secularists couldn’t comprehend the nature of the communal challenge posed by the Hindus communalists within their fold rather than as a result of Muslim League belligerence in quest of a Muslim “nation”. But just as Pakistani Muslims should have stopped their search for a “Muslim nation” after the formation of their state in Pakistan in 1947 (as Mr Jinnah had advocated) but didn’t do so to their everlasting disarray, so too the Hindus should have stopped clamouring for a Hindu “nation” in India (as Mr Gandhi had pleaded) but didn’t do so to their recurrent dismay. Indeed, if many of Pakistan’s post-independence woes can be laid at the door of its “Muslim ideologues”, some of India’s problems have been accentuated by its Hindu revivalists who seek to define and enlarge Hinduism in the same erroneous manner of Islamism in Pakistan.
Of course, the rise of Islam as a “civilisational” force following the eruption of oil politics in the 1970s has hurt both countries. In Pakistan it fertilized the ground for the emergence of Ziaism and provided the impetus for the Saudi-American sponsorship of jihad in Afghanistan. In India, it laid the seeds of a counter-civilisational response in the form of Hindutva. The articulation of this “civilisational” behaviour was manifest in India by the advent of the “smiling Buddha” in 1974, a reference to India’s “peaceful nuclear explosions”, and in Pakistan by the launching of plans to build the “Islamic bomb” subsequently. Pakistan now came to be cast in the mould of an Islamic state while India began to shed its secular leanings in favour of a Hindu Rashtra. In Pakistan the process of Islamising the state was fed by the ambitions of the military while in India the BJP could not have scaled the heights of the state without the democratic votes and financial power of civil society. Over time, the failed authoritarianism of Pakistan and the successful democratization of India have led them to the same ideological cul-de-sac. In trying to disprove the political legitimacy of each other, both countries have mirrored the compulsions and concerns of the religious impulse in the other.
The most indelible memory of Partition is of railway carriages filled with mutilated corpses of Hindus and Muslims. Five decades later, the blood lust of both communities in India was fanned by exactly the kind of circumstances that fueled the slaughters in 1947, making India’s orgy of secular self-immolation look like some hoary fantasy. The irony is that it is General Pervez Musharraf who wants to liquidate fundamentalism and separate religion from politics in Pakistan today while India’s prime minister in waiting, Mr L K Advani, remains a staunch supporter of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad which seeks a “Hindu Rashtra”. The truth is that if India and Pakistan want to be stable and prosper together, they must be more like each other in secular outlook and less like each other in religious terms.
(TFT Mar 15-21, 2002 Vol-XIV No.3 — Editorial)
Lengthening shadows?
Some disquieting questions have been raised by the sudden resignation of Shaheen Sehbai from the editorship of The News amid a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations between him and the owner of the paper, Mir Shakilur Rehman. For one, why did Mr Sehbai catch the first plane out of the country for the US, where his family is based, even before the ink was dry on his resignation letter? Two, why did he deem fit to give interviews to the foreign press rather than hold a press conference in Pakistan and explain his decision? Third, why did the local media largely, though not entirely, refrain from reporting the news of his resignation or enlightening the public about the reasons behind his departure?
Mr Rehman has questioned Mr Sehbai’s professional competence in handling matters. Stories of “uncertain veracity” were published, says the owner, hurting the organisation’s “financial” interests and damaging its “reputation”. He implies that the editor may have had a personal axe to grind in publishing such stories. Consultation on “contentious issues” with the owner was totally lacking, says Mr Rehman. Considerations of the “national interest” were disregarded in publishing certain stories, he alleges. Senior government officials were deliberately “rebuffed” he says and so on and so forth.
In response, Mr Sehbai accuses Mr Rehman of succumbing to government pressure and leaning upon him to sack three offending journalists – Kamran Khan, Amir Mateen and Rauf Klasra – from The News. He says he indirectly “conveyed to the government” evidence proving that “the policy of the paper was very balanced, in fact tilted in favour of General Pervez Musharraf, not under any government pressure but because some of the things he was doing were right”. Mr Sehbai claims that “at least 50 editorials and over 100 Op-Ed articles over a six week period were cited to show that The News had no bias against the government”. He also rejects allegations of professional incompetence. The gist of his message is that “the government’s pressure on Mr Rehman is unbearable”, that is why he has charge-sheeted Mr Sehbai and forced his resignation.
On the face of it, such mutual recriminations are not surprising. Many such tensions are built into the relationship between the owner and the professional editor of a paper, with some owners mainly concerned about money matters and some editors obsessed with editorial independence. However, where the government enters the fray as a key player impinging on the financial health of a paper and the independence of an editor, as in Pakistan whether under civilian or military rule, sparks are bound to fly.
Mr Rehman certainly has many assets to protect or procure and cannot afford to irrevocably alienate the government. But he knows that the public will disavow his paper if it is less than fully independent. Thus he must constantly walk a tight rope between reining in an independent editor and succumbing to an overbearing government. A problem came up in 1999 when his editors ran afoul of the Nawaz Sharif government. Confronted with a demand to sack some journalists, Mir Shakilur Rahman stood his ground when the government’s henchman Saifur Rehman employed the most brutal methods to bring the press to heel. Eventually, maters were “settled” without sacking the journalists in question. Why wasn’t the same route possible in the current situation? Did Mr Sehbai’s resignation and departure preclude it altogether? Herein may lie some clues about what really happened and why.
Mr Sehbai resigned and left the country in a hurry because he feared that the government was readying to trump up some charge or the other against him. We don’t know whether his fears were justified — no such evidence has been presented. But the three journalists in question haven’t been fired by Mr Rehman, say sources, most probably in order to give the lie to Mr Sehbai’s allegations. Therefore it is irresponsible to claim, as his critics have done, that Mr Sehbai had made up his mind to quit for various reasons and sought an opportunity to leave with a bang rather than a whimper. Don’t we know concrete cases of Pakistani journalists being strangely silenced since the military government came to power?
Two years ago, an editor was hounded out of the northern areas by the local military commander. Last year a senior journalist was brutalised by masked men for writing unflattering stories about a serving general. Another was severely reprimanded by the newspaper owner after the government complained about how he had needled General Musharraf at a press conference. A photographer was imprisoned because he mistakenly submitted a photograph for publication that “demeaned the nation”. A local journalist disappeared for a couple of days some months ago after he wrote a story about official patronage of a wanted criminal. And so on. We know, of course, how government functionaries, including General Musharraf, have sometimes flown off the handle when faced with awkward questions from the press, and how “press advice” from Islamabad, coupled with advertisement leveraging, has become a matter of routine for some newspaper owners and editors.
True, the press is still relatively free and that is a plus point for General Musharraf. But the government’s shadow must not be allowed to fall on the press and the relationship should not be marred by the sort of circumstances that forced Shaheen Sehbai to flee to safety.
(TFT Mar 22-28, 2002 Vol-XIV No.4 — Editorial)
Music from its armpits
In a nauseating replay of hypocrisy, the Punjab police recently raided some theatres in Lahore and arrested many actors on the charge of “obscenity”. The “evidence” was provided by police officials (who are not counted among the most “civilized” of government servants in Pakistan according to the frequently bitter obiter dicta of the High Court). The police sat among the packed audience to determine if the double-entendre of the comedians amounted to “obscenities” that the pure state of Pakistan simply could not tolerate. And sure enough, it was soon discovered that the apocalyptic offence of fahashi (vulgarity) had been committed, especially in the sexually arousing (to the police) nature of a sequence called “balti” dance. The police then arrested the actors in its trademark brutish manner. People ran for cover, screaming in confusion and fear. The actresses were particularly distressed because of the anticipated rough embrace of the police who are the custodians of our honour.
As the Urdu idiom goes, the Punjab government thereafter made “music from its armpits”, telling citizens that the label of “liberal” pasted on its forehead by Pakistan’s aggressive clergy was misplaced. In fact, the message was that the new order under General Pervez Musharraf was as strait-laced as under General Zia ul Haq and all the ideologically blinkered governments that followed. Accordingly, the Punjab Governor’s advisor preened himself at a religious conference in Lahore the same week and boasted about the way “propriety” had been restored by the police. Clearly, General Musharraf’s visit to a Deobandi seminary in Lahore last month had not been enough to demonstrate his agreement with old causes, so a more solid demonstration of intolerance to “liberalism” had to be given to reassure the old guard.
The Urdu press was predictably obsequious in its high-pitched welcome to the clampdown on the entertainment industry. But some Urdu newspapers carried comments stating that obscenity on the Lahore stage was actually the handiwork of General Musharraf’s “permissiveness”. This is not true. The comedy theatre of Lahore was born under General Zia ul Haq and has been kept alive by citizens who seek to relieve their boring lives in the puritanical state of Pakistan. The ad-libbing plays of Lahore have attracted audiences for the past twenty years on the basis of their use of the double meaning, a practice that has continued from time immemorial all over the world.
Thankfully, though, not everyone was pleased or relieved. Justice (retired) Javid Iqbal, the son of Pakistan’s poet-philosopher, Allama Muhammad Iqbal, told a Lahore newspaper that the brutal rounding up of the entertainers was an ill-advised attack on the liberty and free will of the people. There was no clear-cut edict against dance and music in the Quran, he said, and if governments in Pakistan persisted in hounding the entertainment industry, society would produce nothing but morons. The actors manhandled by the police and condemned by the state have also tried to voice their opinion but to no effect. They are guilty of entertaining a pleasure-starved population that lives a dull, unrelieved existence under the threat of violent crime about which the police does nothing. In fact, some actors became so disheartened after their mistreatment by the police that they decided to retire from their profession. The cable channels, already depleted through the government’s fiat banning “Indian” entertainment, were told not to show videos of comedies performed by these stage actors. This, despite the fact that these comedies on cable are not considered obscene by audiences because the exchange of such “vulgarity” has been normal fare in our part of the world for centuries.
It is fashionable to decry “liberalism” in Pakistan without understanding its meaning or choosing an alternative path. Droning about the middle path of “moderation” between extremism and liberalism is misplaced concreteness because moderation is nothing but liberalism just as extremism is nothing but fundamentalism and terrorism. So what is the government going to do next? Crack down on the cinema? Raid private parties? Order the youth to stay at home? Or worse still, push “immorality” and “obscenity” into the chardevari of the rich and powerful and thereby strengthen the system of apartheid which is stifling public creativity and growth in the name of ideology? What will happen when the citizenry that is to be saved from perdition goes down the dangerous road of repression and violent release?
Not long ago, the government was forced to confine some religious leaders because their plans to enforce the cultural shariah in Pakistan were potentially violent. The plan was to take over 20 cities and enforce pieties like the hijab for women and compulsory prayers for men. There is no end to the sort of demonstrable piety that governments love to flog. But General Musharraf must not fall into that trap. He was won goodwill at home and abroad for the making of a modern and liberal Pakistan. He should stick to his commitment rather than diminish his credentials by supporting the sort of bureaucratic action that caught the headlines recently.
(TFT Mar 29-04 April, 2002 Vol-XIV No.5 — Editorial)
Ho Hum Referendum
Government functionaries admit that General Pervez Musharraf is toying with the idea of holding a referendum to try and “legitimize” himself as president of Pakistan for another five years. The two most articulate proponents of the idea are Sharifuddin Peerzada, the perennial legal eagle of all dictators-cum-wannabe democrats and all democrats-cum-wannabe dictators, and General Tanvir Naqvi, the ubiquitous intellect behind all grand schemes to revamp the political system in the image of the military. Ho Hum. Haven’t we been down this wayward path before?
It certainly didn’t seem so when General Musharraf first arrived on the scene in 1999, looking and sounding so refreshingly different from General Zia ul Haq. Where Gen Zia executed an elected prime minister and lived to rue his decision, Gen Musharraf opted for banishment as a more sagacious policy. Gen Musharraf vowed to restructure state and civil society in a moderate and liberal framework whereas Gen Zia remained obsessed with straitjacketing society and ramming two-faced piety down its throat. Gen Musharraf seemed determined to inject a credible dose of accountability into the system in contrast with Gen Zia who systematically victimized the Pakistan Peoples Party and its leaders. In fact, the differences between the two coup-makers became more marked after September 11 last year. Whereas Gen Zia had foolishly catapulted Pakistan into Afghanistan on the back of the jihadi forces and made opportunist alliances with the religious right, Gen Musharraf bravely decided to stand apart from Afghanistan and rapped the jihadis and religious extremists for getting out of line. Suddenly, hopes began to soar and Pakistan seemed to glow with renewed vitality.
Unfortunately, that Musherrific promise is threatening to dissipate. The accountability drive has bypassed its own political supporters in the army, bureaucracy and political parties. Also, General Musharraf’s political ambitions, cloaked as they are in self-righteous garb, are obvious now – he means to remain an all-powerful president for five more years at least, notwithstanding all the talk of “instituting checks and balances without changing the basic structure of the constitution.” In fact, his political demeanour is beginning to change in ominous ways. Instead of alienating one mainstream political party as Gen Zia did, Gen Musharraf seems bent on sidelining two major parties at least. Instead of staying aloof from the intolerant religious parties who caused him so much anguish and distress not so long ago, he seems to be inching toward them once again. Now comes the mother of all rubs. In true Ziaist fashion, a referendum may be held in which the people of Pakistan are collared to say “yes” to “something” that will be billed as “legitimizing” General Musharraf as a powerful president. In the event, we should get ready to see the spectacle of all the ruthless opportunists of the country rallying round to achieve this cynical aim as soon as possible. How can that possibly help General Musharraf?
Legitimacy flows from the rule of legislated law that flows in turn from a voluntary, free and overwhelming national consensus on a given constitution. Anyone who abrogates, suspends or mangles the constitution, is “illegitimate” or loses legitimacy. By definition, therefore, no dictator or usurper can ever be truly “legitimate”, not even after he has “amended” the constitution to feign legitimacy with the help of the courts or manipulated the constitution makers to accord it to him or her. In the final analysis, the power of all dictators flows from the barrel of their guns. When they drop the gun or are unable to use it, they lose that power. If dictators are wise and benign, and if their policies are widely perceived to be in the public good, they may rule undiminished for as long as circumstances will permit, but they do so without legitimacy. If that were not the case, there would be no distinction between democrats and dictators, usurpers and elected representatives. Therefore no number of dubious referendums and unilateral constitutional amendments will make General Musharraf more or less legitimate than he is today. If that is so, why go through an exercise that is totally discredited in this country by virtue of association with a discredited dictator with whom comparisons are odious?
A presidential election a la Gen Ayub Khan on the basis of the 300,000 strong “nazimate” is another option for becoming “less illegitimate”. But we would advise against it for much the same reasons as in the case of the referendum. The cleanest, most desirable route is to hold a national, all parties convention, seek the approval of the representatives of the people of Pakistan for making necessary amendments in the constitution to enable the sorts of broad constitutional checks and balances proposed by General Musharraf and others to be implemented, hold free and fair elections and get a new parliament to ratify the agreed amendments. That is the only form of truth and reconciliation that will work and endure during General Musharraf’s time and after his departure. All others will fall when he loses his firepower for one reason or another, as he must inevitably one day, and plunge the country into another round of political and constitutional anarchy.
(TFT Apr 05-11, 2002 Vol-XIV No.6 — Editorial)
Palestinian martyrdom won’t be in vain
The Arab League’s recent summit in Beirut concluded with the offer of normal relations with Israel in return for a complete withdrawal of the Israelis from the occupied lands. This is, in effect, a historic concession by the Arabs. Before Israel invaded and occupied Arab lands, it wanted to be recognized by the Arabs and have normal relations with them. But the Arabs said they would settle for nothing less than the destruction of the state of Israel. In the event, Israel invaded and occupied Arab lands so that it could eventually negotiate the return of the lands for peace. Why then has Israel spurned the recent Arab concession and declared war in Palestine? Is there a method in Israeli madness?
Israel seeks the complete destruction of the Palestine national movement before exchanging land for peace with its Arab neighbours. It fears that recognition alone of its right to exist will not bring enduring peace as long as the Palestinian resistance movement is alive and kicking. History is replete with examples in which the stronger warring side has continued to rain bombs on the weaker side until it has disarmed or destroyed its military capacity before sitting down at the table to negotiate an unequal peace treaty. That is what Israel is also trying to do. But the critical problem with this line of thinking is that unequal or unjust treaties rarely endure or bring peace.
The role of the United States in this strategy is also clear enough. Having publicly announced its support for the formation of a Palestinian state, the US is now trying to make sure, like Israel, that it is a moth-eaten, weak-kneed state in which nearly 400,000 Israeli settlers constitute a potential spike in the heart of the new state. But there is a wider US motive in sanctioning the current Israel madness. It is to break the spirit of resistance to imperialist injustice and domination that has come to mark much of the Arab and Muslim world but which is perceived in many western eyes as a civilisational outgrowth of Islamic hostility. Indeed, since the Islamic world has cried itself hoarse explaining how the rise of Islamic militancy and the events of September 11 are in many ways directly related to the injustice of what is happening in Palestine, the US has been confirmed in its belief that the militant Arabs who lead or support the Palestine cause are as much a danger to them as they are to Israel. Hence the sanction to eliminate them as far as possible before dictating peace terms to the wider Arab community. This would suggest that it is the recent American fear of and obsession with Islamic militancy that has given Israel a new carte blanche to shed blood and wreak untold havoc in Palestine and the occupied territories. The Islamic terrorists who reacted to Israeli terror by attacking the US have unleashed a cycle of hatred, bloodshed and terror that is threatening to provoke reaction and counter-reaction on a global scale.
There remain two fatal flaws in the thinking of Israel. It thinks that the only way to be secure vis-à-vis the Palestinians is to stake settlements in the heart of the occupied territories, i.e. to colonize the territories. But that policy has proven to be an unmitigated disaster because it has spawned an intifada (resistance) that continues unabated even under the most oppressive circumstances of today. Indeed, it is proof that Israel can never be secure without liberating the Palestinians, abandoning most settlements, and accepting a viable Palestinian state.
The second flaw lies in the claim that the rise of Palestinian “terrorism” is a sign of the unwillingness of the Palestinian to accept peace which compels Israel to again fight for its survival. The fact, however, is that all mainstream Palestinian leaders have stuck to their pledge for peace with Israel in return for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. And if this were to be realized, the minority Palestinian militants who still dream of destroying Israel would be isolated and disabled by the majority-moderates who would strike the deal with Israel. History is replete with instances of this kind.
There also remain two fatal flaws in American thinking. First, the US has always had a strong policy against Palestinian “terrorism” but never even a weak policy against Israeli “terrorism”. It is time to redress the imbalance because the crisis has deepened rather than abated as a result of this one-note policy. Second, the US has failed to offer the Palestinians a realistic hope that a state can also be won through negotiations. This has alienated the Palestinians from the US and encouraged Israeli to belligerence.
Non-state terrorism and violence are symptoms of conflict, not its causes. Israel and the US don’t recognize this as yet but they will, eventually. The fact is that even as Israel wages an unjust war in Palestine, the rest of the western world is slowly beginning to wake up to the truth of this assertion and protest its naked transgression. In that sense, the blood of the martyrs of Palestine will not have been in vain.
(TFT Apr 12-18, 2002 Vol-XIV No.7 — Editorial)
Double, double, toil and trouble…
General Pervez Musharraf has laid down a strong hand. He did so with a flourish at Lahore’s Minto Park where even demagogues have feared to tread. Decked out in camouflage battle-dress to signal military prowess and punching the air with his fists, he repeatedly conjured up the “unworthy” effigies of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif and knocked them down to the ground. The following day, he was up in Bannu, in the heart of conservatism, trampling all over the extremist religious parties, accusing them of being “anti-national” and exhorting people not to support those who cannot even assemble to “pray together in the same mosque”. Make no mistake about it. These are fighting words. And more to come as he stumps the length and breadth of the country in his newfound role as our latest politico-military saviour.
If the political arena is to be turned into a military battlefield, it is not surprising that the administration should be oversubscribed at his behest. It is coughing up funds for pro-government nazims to herd the masses to his rallies, impounding busses and trucks and wagons to lug the unwashed from far and wide, ordering government employees to swell the crowds, ensuring military supervision of “unfriendly district nazims”, rooting out potentially irksome lower judicial staff from referendum duty, and decreeing wholesale amendments in the law to guarantee a failsafe passage. Bringing up the rear is the lightweight brigade comprising all the political non-entities of the country who between them can hardly muster a seat or two off their own bat in any general election but who are likely to become raucous allies in the heat and dust of electoral battle when they are propped up by the state. Under the circumstances, General Musharraf fields a formidable arsenal. Even his two military predecessors with whom he finds comparisons odious – Generals Ayub Khan and Zia ul Haq — were unable to gather such an ensemble in pursuit of similar objectives.
On the face of it, however, the opposition does not look like a pushover. It comprises the two mainstream political parties – the PPP and the PML(N) – and the six leading religious parties and groups denoted by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) which includes the Jamaat-i-Islami of Qazi Hussain Ahmad and the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam of Maulana Fazlur Rehman. These are no mean foes. Left to their own devices, the PPP in Sindh, the PML(N) in Punjab and the MMA in northern Pakistan, are all capable of stiff resistance. But two significant questions arise: are they able and willing to join hands to mount a counter-offensive? Will the state calmly stand by and allow them to exercise their democratic right to agitate against its agenda?
The second question is easily solved. Forget normal democratic rights. The compulsions of true democracy are such that arrest warrants are being readied for any leader or activist of this would-be alliance who expresses a desire to agitate against the proposed referendum. We also understand that none of these parties or groups will be allowed to hold public rallies denouncing the new messiah.
The issue of whether or not a combined opposition group can quickly materialize out of those who until today were natural political foes – the PPP against the PML(N) and both against the MMA – is thorny. Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan’s Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) is supposed to comprise, amongst some small fry, both the PPP and PML(N), but neither of the two has been a reliable partner so far, hopping in and out of bed with the Nawabzada to suit its changing interests. The waters have been further muddied by the continuing hide and seek between the PPP and the government in which the former seeks a free hand to try and win the forthcoming elections and anoint Benazir Bhutto prime minister for the third time, and the latter which means to ensure that Ms Bhutto remains out in the cold for at least five more years and the PPP is not allowed a snowball’s chance in hell of winning even a third of the seats in the next parliament. Add to this the secret glee with which both Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif view the plight of their historical nemeses — the religious parties — who’ve been earmarked for “special handling” by General Musharraf at the urging of the Great Satan, and their capability of putting a lid on everything by playing safe and staying put in Jeddah and London. We would then have all the ingredients of a grand “no-show” in the offing.
All this may seem to bode well for General Musharraf. He may “win” the referendum, amend the constitution, ennoble the military with a “permanent” role in government, and ensure a pliant parliament and prime minister to do his bidding. But is that what we want or need? A forced marriage between civil society that naturally yearns to be free and the military that is a stifling bureaucracy by definition? And for how long will such an inherently unstable arrangement last? Our fears – that history may yet deceive those who don’t learn its lessons — remain as valid as ever.
(TFT Apr 19-25, 2002 Vol-XIV No.8 — Editorial)
Don’t mess around with the press
For nearly three years we have praised General Pervez Musharraf’s tolerant attitude towards the press as one of the most endearing features of his regime. When certain sections of the press were wont to exaggerate or misreport, General Musharraf would register his complaint and leave it at that. And when the government erred in unduly leveraging its demands, quiet diplomacy would resolve matters quickly. It was a mature relationship in which both sides were acutely aware of the limits of power and the requirements of responsibility.
Of late, however, overt tensions are manifest in government-press relations. The “list” of incidents in which the government has reacted indiscreetly, and sometimes brutally, against members of the press cannot be brushed aside any longer. Nor can we remain sanguine about the increasing use of press “advice” by the secret and not-so-secret agencies of the government to try and influence newspaper owners and editors. The developing rift is now out in the open. General Musharraf has publicly accused the press of deliberately downgrading his public rallies and gone on to suggest that some press wallas are recipients of financial incentives from “discredited” political forces opposed to his reform agenda.
So what’s new? Every government to date has clutched at similar conspiracy theories to justify its dislike of an independent press. Indeed, the press is used to being wooed by politicians and generals alike when they are in overt or covert opposition to the government of the day, and being flogged by them when they are in power. In fact, when times are good and governments are sailing smoothly, the relationship is exemplary. But when times are bad and governments find themselves in turbulent waters, the relationship turns sour. This implies that the responsibility for good or bad times rests upon governments while the press is simply an instrument to reflect the reality on the ground. When it reflects a stable environment, government-press relations are hunky-dory. When it reflects otherwise, the government is quick to brandish the stick and cite conspiracy theories.
That is exactly what is happening these days. General Musharraf has donned the metaphorical clothes of the dirty politicians that he abhors. But he doesn’t want the press to portray him as another such politician in the making. Like a good politician, he is making political speeches full of sound and fury signifying nothing. But he doesn’t want the press to extend its usual cynical welcome to him. He is kicking up dust and raking up charges wherever he goes. But he doesn’t want the press to touch upon his own ambitions and shortcomings. For a variety of valid historical reasons, the press is generally averse to generals as politicians and General Musharraf is no exception to the rule. But what is specially getting the goat of the press is his bristling self-righteousness and cocky behaviour in which political opportunism is being paraded in the garb of law and patriotism.
The trouble first arose over the general’s referendum plans that most reputable journalists don’t like for many reasons. It got worse when the press objected to the use of state resources to rent-a-crowd for the general’s public rallies. General Musharraf hit back with conspiracy theories. Worse, the loyal Punjab governor went overboard in his political debut in Faisalabad and the resultant police assault on a couple of dozen protesting journalists left many to nurse their wounds. The Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors has issued a stiff note of protest, the first of its kind in three years, and snubbed the government’s efforts to hold an inquiry under a District and Sessions judge instead of a High Court judge. Press clubs across the country have erupted in anger and indignation and the one in Lahore has revived the Press Freedom Committee dormant since Nawaz Sharif’s tyrannical time. General Musharraf has apologized for the police excesses in a round about way, but we are left with the unmistakable impression that in his heart of hearts he believes the press got its comeuppance that day and wouldn’t be any the worse off for some more of the same. The Punjab governor may think much the same thoughts as his leader but his demeanour suggests he will think twice before stirring this hornets’ nest again.
And what of the press? We fear that as General Musharraf wages a series of political battles to achieve his grand national objectives, he shall find the press increasingly on the other side of the fence. This is a natural consequence of his own transition from a clean and upright soldier to an opportunist politician whose pristine mantle is bound to get muddied by the “dirty” politicians he has embraced of late. The challenge before him is to achieve his dubious ends without irrevocably alienating the press. In this context, he would do well to remember a couple of lessons of Pakistani history. First, the domestic press has come of age by linking up with the free international press. It won’t be cowed down by anyone. Second, those rulers who are hated by the press are fated to short political careers.
(TFT Apr 26-02 May, 2002 Vol-XIV No.9 — Editorial)
Sit back and enjoy the ride
As we race to April 30, R-Day, the writing on the wall is becoming clearer. All pollsters say a majority of those polled are in favour of General Pervez Musharraf. Whether or not the polls were conducted to fairly represent the respective weights of the urban and rural areas of the country in a scientific manner is not known. Nor can anyone be sure that those who are said to be in favour of General Musharraf will all come out and vote for him. But other signs also point in his direction.
The crowds at his rallies are significant even if they are relatively insipid. That these have all been pulled out by the nazims (mayors) with financial and organizational assistance from the public sector, however distasteful and illegal this practice, is proof that the same tactics will bear fruit on R-Day. This also confirms the strategy of General Tanvir Naqvi to use the local government system as the bedrock of the new political system in the offing. Indeed, where pundits have been scanning the horizon for the Pakistan Muslim League (QA) as the King’s Party in-waiting, the real King’s Party has been quietly spreading its tentacles on the ground. After the referendum, many of the same nazims, flushed with success, could be tempted to become the torchbearers of the new provincial and national assemblies, there to form the backbone of General Musharraf’s very own parliamentary group.
Meanwhile, the dilemma of the wretched political parties is getting worse. When the local non-party elections were announced last year, the parties grappled with the idea of participating in them indirectly or altogether boycotting them, succumbing in the end to the ground reality which showed many party activists itching to bolt in the event of a boycott by their leadership. That same ground reality has now swelled manifold, compelling the parties to threaten action against party nazims who want to participate in the welcoming queues for General Musharraf even as they wink the green light to dissenters under the “law of necessity”. What remains to be seen is whether those party-political nazims of the PPP, PML(N), JI, JUI et al who are tripping over themselves to spread the red carpet for General Musharraf these days will remain true to form (and pull out the voters) on R-Day or loyally switch to the fold of their parties and leave the general high and dry.
But General Musharraf isn’t only relying on the nazims to pull him through. He is hoping that the facility with which voters will be allowed to vote – as many times and wherever they want – should add to the numbers game. All other things being equal, too, one should expect certain groups in society to be more disposed to voting in his favour than others – women, non-Muslims, government employees, expatriate Pakistanis, technocrats, students, etc. Women are more likely to vote for rather than against him because they rightly perceive him as having promised more to them (especially public representation) than any Pakistani political leader in history. Non-Muslims, too, fall in the same category – his promise of a “moderate and modern Pakistan” based on the abolition of the separate electorate system and a stern attitude towards the extremist Islamic parties has gone down well with them. Government employees, especially those from the armed forces (serving and retired), expatriate Pakistanis, middle-class urban students and technocrats are also likely to favour General Musharraf because these groups have historically preferred the illusion of stability over the din of democracy, and political accountability (a la NAB viz. corruption) over popular representation (a la elections and parliaments).
The Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy or the All Parties Conference or what-you-will has promised a show of strength in a couple of days to try and resist this Musherrific tide. But if the past is any guide, and the crowds threaten to overwhelm the good impressions left by General Musharraf’s Lahore rally, we should not expect the ever-loyal Punjab governor to sit idle and twiddle his thumbs. Thus the second best thing to a grand rally could be a failed grand rally with a spot of violence thrown in for good measure. Even so, that is hardly likely to dampen the spirits of pro-government nazims or their ubiquitous and powerful minders.
If the referendum a thing of the past already, despite the constitutional petitions in the Supreme Court (SC) against it, we must take stock of what lies ahead. For one, we will have a truckload of constitutional amendments and new decrees to ensure that the Musherrific system works. But this is going to be a very tall order — a critical contradiction runs right through the proposed order of things. General Musharraf intends to have a “unity of command” – a solid and valid military concept but totally alien, indeed hostile, to the concept of pluralist or consensual democracy. Furthermore, he wants the selected prime minister to be the fount of this unified command system even as he insists that he personally, as president with veto powers, intends to oversee the elected prime minister and the elected cabinet via a majority of the unelected members of the National Security Council chaired by him.
Sit back, ladies and gentlemen, and enjoy the ride all over again. That is, unless the SC has other ideas.
(TFT May 03-09, 2002 Vol-XIV No.10 — Editorial)
Disgraceful
To prove a point, one of our reporters cast four votes in the “presidential” referendum yesterday, all in favour of General Pervez Musharraf, in four different polling stations within a kilometre radius. Another outwitted her by stamping six votes in the general’s favour. The story is much the same across the country. One could vote as many times as one desired and many did. This is adult franchise taken to preposterous limits for dubious ends. Think of it, 71 percent turnout of which 97.5 percent voted ‘yes’. So much for the credibility of the exercise.
If ever there was a case of deliberate institutional rigging, this was it. No formal ID was required for voting. There were no constituency lists. The opposition wasn’t allowed to canvass votes against the referendum. Billions were doled out to hire crowds for pro-Musharraf rallies and lug pro-Musharraf voters to the polling stations. The number of polling booths was increased tenfold. And the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 years so that millions of new voters without any memory of the military’s disastrous interventions in 1958 and 1977 could be added to the kitty.
Worse, much worse, tens of millions of low and middle level civil servants, factory workers, school teachers, peons, janitors, jail inmates, soldiers, paramilitary troops, policemen etc were ordered by private and public employers to shape up or ship out. This is unprecedented even in Pakistan’s flawed electoral history. Just think of it. Wardens ordering prisoners to stamp “yes” on ballot papers. Department heads taking roll calls and lining up subordinates at special polling station on the premises. Policemen on the streets and rangers on border patrol, even as their votes were being stuffed in ballot boxes and winging their way to headquarters. The most appalling aspect of this sordid affair was the despicable role of the private sector. Of capitalists, bankers, factory owners, school/college owners/principals, traders and businessmen ordering their employees to queue up for General Musharraf. Of multinationals that went overboard in rustling up their workers. “Captive” voters in the hands of capricious elites. Disgraceful. If April 30 was a sad day for democracy, the complicity of civil society should not go un-remarked.
Why did General Musharraf go for an overkill when every pundit with even a remote memory of the farcical presidential referendum held by General Zia ul Haq in 1984 had advised against it?
The question of legitimacy haunts every dictator and General Musharraf is no exception, however benign his attitude towards the press or however cooperative his response to the international community’s war against terrorism. Thus the common perception is that an overwhelming “yes” in the presidential referendum should give General Musharraf a degree of civilian legitimacy that is sorely lacking in him. This is buttressed by the fact that the Supreme Court of Pakistan has said that he is perfectly entitled to hold such a referendum. But the facts belie this argument.
The Supreme Court has not said that this referendum is a constitutional substitute for a presidential election. In fact, it has left that issue to be resolved by the parliament that comes into being after the next general elections in October. Nor does a referendum, however credible or successful, under a provisional constitutional order legitimizing a military coup (which is the legal umbrella under which General Musharraf is currently operating), eliminate the requirement for a parliamentary endorsement after the constitution has been fully restored. Indeed, every action that General Musharraf has taken in the last three years will require a constitutional sanction by means of a two-thirds majority in the next parliament. So what is the point of a referendum today if, in the ultimate analysis, General Musharraf’s fate lies in the hands of a parliament that is yet to be born?
The answer is that the referendum was never meant to be an exercise in acquiring legitimacy. Instead, it is an attempt to flex muscle and browbeat intransigent political opponents to join the Musharraf camp so that a King’s Party or Alliance can be cobbled to win the next general elections and become a dutiful parliamentary appendage to President General Musharraf. Indeed, General Musharraf admitted as much when he said that he was conducting this exercise because he wanted “to get the fence-sitters off the fence”, alluding to the many political stalwarts in the country who had not yet deserted the two mainstream parties led by Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Has he succeeded in his objective of ensuring, as he put it once, an “upper hand in parliament”?
No. Whatever the government may claim, the opposition will certainly be emboldened by the referendum’s lack of credibility at home and abroad. Indeed, an element of defiance could creep into the main opposition parties, forcing General Musharraf to adopt repressive policies, which in turn would hurt his benign image and undermine his credibility further. The fear is that in the ensuing tussle for the hearts and minds of Pakistanis in the run-up to the October elections, General Musharraf may be erroneously advised to postpone the elections on some pretext or the other or try and rig them massively to thwart his opponents. In the event, the loss won’t be his only. It will be Pakistan’s too.
(TFT May 10-16, 2002 Vol-XIV No.11 — Editorial)
Fighting terrorism should come
before fighting politicians
Last January, General Pervez Musharraf gave a rousing speech to the nation in which he promised to crack down on terrorism inspired by internal or external forces. He also vowed to stamp out religious extremism in all its manifestations, especially sectarian warfare at home and violent jihad against members of the international community. The speech went down very well at home and abroad. No country can afford to be racked by such divisive and fearful forces. Nor can it expect the international community to condone a lack of will in tackling such critical issues. At last, we thought, General Musharraf is coming to grips with the real problem bequeathed by General Zia ul Haq and twenty years of misplaced regional policy in quest of dubious national security goals. In fact, our hopes soared when General Musharraf ordered a clean-up of the intelligence agencies that have spawned many terrorists wittingly or otherwise and followed it up by arresting potential and actual troublemakers.
Barely three months later, however, we have grave cause to reassess General Musharraf’s will and ability in pursuit of this objective. The “deweaponisation” campaign that was launched with so much trumpeting has turned out to be a dismal flop. Worse, the government has quietly relaxed its grip over the religious extremists even as they appear more determined than ever before to undermine the Musharraf regime. Now we are faced with a wave of terrorism in which the sinister forces of sectarianism, ethnicity, jihad and India (all outgrowths of our national security policies) seem to be involved in a dire project to “get General Musharraf” and plunge the country into anarchy. And what, pray tell, is he doing about all this?
He is donning bewildering headdresses, drumming up dubious referendums, conjuring dozens of constitutional amendments, herding non-entities into grand sounding national alliances, arm-twisting Muslim League “fence-sitters” to join his entourage, and generally having sleepless nights tossing and turning the permutations and combinations of a parliament that is not yet born but may not be sufficiently obedient after it has been midwifed by him. In short, he looks very much like a modern day Don Quixote tilting at the windmills.
The problem basically stems from two misplaced notions. First, he wants to stake an institutional role for the army and for himself personally (via the office of the COAS) in the constitution of the country. That is against the natural political order of things and is bound to create many problems. He is seeking an institutional entry into politics whereas he should be searching a viable exit from it. Second, he means to perform this inherently difficult task by allying with political non-entities and weak economic classes while alienating mainstream political heavyweights and soft peddling on the extremists. This is the worst of all possible worlds. Gen Ayub Khan allied with the business classes and the bureaucracy but put down the democratic impulse in the country and paid the price for it. General Zia ul Haq went one step further: he allied with the religious lobby and the business classes and the bureaucracy and the Muslim League but still couldn’t hold down the main democratic impulse in the country at that time. What General Musharraf should do is, in fact, the opposite of what he is doing. And what is that?
This country needs a period of stable, liberal democratic order in step with the economic requirements of this day and age. In fact, as modern day economists remind us, democracy and development go hand in hand, and the model of patriarchal development so favoured by small state-nations in South East Asia in the 1960s and 1970s is no longer valid. Thus, having being pushed into the well of politics, General Musharraf needs to pull himself out of it rather than trying to nestle comfortably in it. He also needs to recognize that, notwithstanding personal likes and dislikes for some parties or political leaders, he must join hands with the liberal and forward looking forces in the country in order to get out of this quagmire. In other words, he must change his political strategy 180 degrees and reorder his priorities. He is blowing against the wind instead of blowing with the wind.
It is possible that General Musharraf has been lulled into a false sense of security because the international community cannot discern a “better” or more credible alternative to him right now. But this support is ephemeral. It is here today, may be gone tomorrow. That is also why he should worry about what happened in Karachi on Wednesday when foreigners working on a defense related project were blasted to smithereens by a suicide bomber. If he doesn’t act decisively against terrorism in all its forms, he will become a victim of it himself in one way or another. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If General Musharraf is not able or willing to crush this monster, it will devour everyone and everything in its path. In the event, all his carefully crafted designs of political and economic restructuring will fall by the wayside. And someone else will have to pick up the pieces and start all over again.
(TFT May 17-23, 2002 Vol-XIV No.12 — Editorial)
Dose of political economy needed
Mr Shaukat Aziz, the finance minister, is perennially optimistic about the country’s economic prospects. That is why he is General Pervez Musharraf’s “favourite” minister. Indeed, Mr Aziz has so mastered the art of “positive” thinking demanded by the good general that not a frown marks his burrow even at the most testing of times. This is a technique inherited from his halcyon days as Citibank’s roving “personal fund manager” par excellence, when he rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty, including our very own Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. Indeed, if Mr Aziz appears to be even more sanguine than usual these days, we must not grudge him his moment in the sun. General Musharraf is stepping into the runaway world of politics. He needs all hands on deck. And none more so than the great helmsman in charge of the bread and butter issues of the day.
The unsuspecting general was well briefed for his mass rallies during the referendum campaign. Forex Reserves are up to US$5 billion, he proclaimed, leaving the audience wondering what on earth he was talking about and how that was in any way related to the quality of their everyday lives in which jobs were harder than ever to find. Debt-rescheduling of up to US$12.5 bn has been accomplished, he thundered, without explaining why higher domestic oil and electricity prices had laid the public low despite falling oil prices in the international market. The trade balance has improved by nearly US$1 billion, he added for good measure, leaving importers and manufacturers gasping about their diminishing prospects in a stuttering economy (If exports had risen by more than imports, showing increased economic activity in the country, the trade balance would have improved and that would have been a good sign; but that hasn’t happened. Instead, imports have fallen and exports haven’t risen. So the trade balance has improved but that is a bad sign of diminished economic activity in the country.) The IMF, World Bank and international donors are lining up to give us more foreign loans, he boasted, making nonsense of his earlier promises to reduce the national debt piled up by the dirty politicians. Privatisation is gearing up, he pointed out, ignoring the number of times the sale of major projects has been postponed due to the dismal economic environment in the country. Remittances have more than doubled, he bragged, as if he and his minister had anything to do with channeling them into the formal banking sector in the wake of an American crackdown on all forms of informal money transfers since September 11.
The fact is that the Musharraf government has mastered the art of making economic virtue out of political necessity. Up until September, it was stubbornly ploughing ahead with “regional and national security policies” designed to keep Pakistan in splendid international isolation regardless of the adverse economic impact of these policies on the lives of ordinary citizens. The dividend from peace and trade with India was spurned in favour of sponsoring jehad in Kashmir. The dividend from oil and gas pipelines from Iran and central Asia was wrecked on the altar of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Among the costs of this unholy nexus of garrison and mullah could be counted the rise of terrorism inspired by religious extremism, which in turn had a disastrous impact on the perception of the country by potential foreign investors. To add to our woes, the hostility of the Musharraf regime to the mainstream political parties suggested a throwback to a much abused and highly unstable political order. As for everyday lives, three years of Musharrafic restructuring did nothing to lift the pall of doom and gloom overhanging the economy. Every real economic indicator with a bearing on everyday lives remained negative and there were no signs of improvement.
Then September 11 happened. The prospect of standing against the mighty US was too much to stomach, even for commando types. But a great justification was fortunately at hand. Our cherished nuclear “assets” were threatening to become “liabilities.” So dear allies like the Taliban were thrown overboard before they could say Jack Daniels, back-thumping friends and coup-making colleagues who disagreed were sacked, and barely disguised noises were made for soliciting economic “rewards” for enforcing the required about-turn. All this while, however, it didn’t occur to the high and mighty that these very economic benefits that they are so eager to notch up as their own achievements today could probably have been had on an institutional platter a decade ago if misplaced notions of national grandeur in the guise of national security hadn’t taken center-stage with the brass.
But by the same criteria, an about-turn on Afghanistan and a freeze on Kashmir can hardly provide the basis for a grand economic recovery. The goodies from the international community are flowing free and easy but the optimism in Islamabad’s finance ministry is still misplaced. It is certainly not reflected in the industrial hubs of Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, etc. Agricultural growth is down to 1%. Industrial growth is down to 2%, despite a resurgence in the textile sector, thanks to a relaxation in international tariffs and quotas after September 11. Private sector borrowing for industrial development is down by nearly 40% compared to last year despite the fact that the average lending rate has fallen from above 16% to below 12%. National consumption of energy – oil, gas, electricity – is also down, showing falling economic activity. This, despite the fact that the fiscal deficit could hit 6% in June this year instead of falling to the 4.5% targeted two years ago!
The root-cause of a lack of investment is political instability at home and regional uncertainty abroad. With anti-West terrorism rampant, which foreigner wants to come to Pakistan, let alone invest in it? With General Musharraf embarked on a political route that lacks credibility and therefore sustainability, which domestic investor has confidence in the longevity of his economic policies? With India breathing down Pakistan’s neck and itching to have a go, which businessman wants to sink money in industry when a devastating war could disrupt all his calculations? With America insistent on tracking down Al Qaeda terrorists in every nook and corner of the country and bent on provoking the religious fanatics to suicidal lengths, who can predict the future of the Musharraf regime with any degree of accuracy?
Tomorrow, better water supply and greater rains may yield higher agricultural growth. And the relief afforded the national budget by debt-rescheduling and renewed international assistance could spur government expenditures and revive demand and economic growth. But the basis for such growth would remain highly vulnerable to the vagaries of the “weather” – both climactic and geopolitical. And that is hardly an enduring peg for sustained economic development and growth.
No, General Musharraf and Pakistan would be much better served by Mr Shaukat Aziz if, instead of always painting pots of gold at the bottom of every rainbow after every downpour, he would apprise his benefactor of the limits of “positive thinking” and steer him away from the dangerous edge of national and international politics. Indeed, if Mr Aziz can make a smooth transition from a special banker to a special finance minister, it is time he made the leap into the realm of political economy. Who knows better than him that he may be required to offer his services as a politician rather than as an economist in time to come. And what better time to start than now when General Musharraf thinks he is going up when in fact he may be veritably slipping.
(TFT May 24-30, 2002 Vol-XIV No.13 — Editorial)
Road map is clear
India’s prime minister says the “time for a final war” with Pakistan has come. But India’s defense minister claims India will not attack Pakistan until after the Kashmir elections in September. This can be construed as breathing space or deliberate deception. Meanwhile, India is marshalling its forces along our border. Worse, in an unprecedented exhortation full of religious symbolism, India’s leaders are urging their “Hindu” troops to “crush the Islamic menace”. India’s rhetoric is clearly in step with its physical capability on the ground; hence conditions are ripe for war by India. But will India actually launch war?
Pundits argue that war must have a compelling objective. In India’s case, it is to stop Pakistan from fueling the insurgency in Kashmir that is bleeding half a million Indian troops in the valley. But war is also not without heavy costs. In India’s case, these could range from a fatal loss of political face by the BJP government in the event of a military stalemate or setback in a limited war — which is most likely since Pakistan is capable of giving as good as it gets in a short, swift conventional war in a small theatre like Kashmir where the force-ratios favour it. Or, in the event of a wider conflict that leads to nuclear holocaust, the losses can be multiplied a hundred times over without any clear winner emerging. Thus India must think a hundred times before embarking on a war with Pakistan.
But pundits will also note that there is a better strategy than war in pursuit of given objectives. And that is to push the adversary into compliance by a credible threat of war without actually going to war. It’s like holding a person at gunpoint and asking him/her to hand over the wallet rather than shooting him/her for it and risking a murder charge. Is India trying to do that with Pakistan?
Certainly, India has managed to create the perception abroad that it means business like never before. That is why the international community is asking Pakistan to dismantle the Kashmiri training camps and stop infiltrating men and materials across the LoC before India’s patience runs out. Our generals have also noted that India’s political intentions and military capabilities have never synchronized so menacingly before. Thus, in Pakistan’s reckoning, the chances of India launching a limited or unlimited war are about fifty-fifty. What should Islamabad do?
One option is to prepare for war, tell India to go fly a kite and face the political and military consequences that flow from war. That would be stupid. No government or nation can afford to miscalculate the consequences of war, let alone ignore them. In our case, these could range from the worst-case nuclear holocaust scenario to the best-case military stalemate scenario. But the latter case would probably exact the same political cost from General Musharraf as the military stalemate (even victory) in Kargil did of Nawaz Sharif in 1999. Why is that?
There is one basic reason for this. The international community, especially the United States, is now sympathetic to India’s view that our Kashmiri “freedom-fighters” are their common “jihadi terrorists” in the same manner as the Al-Qaeda terrorists who are motivated by religious rage. Indeed, where our hawks are inclined to separate our “freedom fighters” from our sectarian extremists and Al-Qaeda terrorists, the world is convinced that they are of the same ilk with a shared hatred for the United States, Israel, India and the West. Thus India’s demand that General Musharraf crack down on “cross-border terrorists” finds a strong echo in Washington and elsewhere where this is seen as part and parcel of the crackdown promised by General Musharraf on all forms of terrorism last January. Therefore in the event of a conflict with India, however limited, there will be at least one casualty at the very top in Islamabad.
Another option is to call India’s bluff and do nothing. This is problematic too because India’s BJP is continuing to beef up its arsenal and shrilling its rhetoric, thereby painting itself into a corner from where it can only extract itself by lashing out at Pakistan.
At the heart of the matter is the Kashmir conflict. What lessons, should we have learnt from our experience so far?
First, that infiltrating men and materials into the valley will not yield the forbidden fruit. It didn’t in 1947-48; it didn’t in 1965; and it hasn’t since 1990. And second, that “Islamising” a liberation struggle as in Kashmir since 1990 or supporting an “Islamic” cause as in the Taliban’s Afghanistan from 1994-2001 does great harm to us since it alienates and angers the world against Pakistan and also sows the seeds of instability, violence and division within our own homeland.
Under the circumstances, General Pervez Musharraf’s road map is laid out for him just as clearly as it was last September vis-à-vis the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. He should implement his January promise to root out all imported, homegrown or exported forms of extremism, violence and terrorism. If he does that, he will be seen as having served the cause of Pakistan rather than succumbing to the demands of India or the United States.
(TFT May 31-06 June, 2002 Vol-XIV No.14 — Editorial)
What next?
When General Pervez Musharraf did a swift about-turn on a twenty-year old Afghan policy last September, he justified it on the basis of a “pragmatic” assessment of “changed ground realities” (an American ultimatum). However, despite well-meaning domestic views to the contrary, he refused to acknowledge the uncomfortable organic links between the jihad in Kashmir against India and the jihad of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban against the US and the West. Indeed, he was adamant that the Pakistan army’s Kashmir policy vis a vis India would not be adversely affected, perhaps even going so far as to imagine that he might be able to raise the ante with India because the US would be constrained not to jeopardize its alliance with Pakistan in pursuit of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Now we know that that assumption and the policy that flowed from it – it is alleged that training camps were activated and plans were underway to infiltrate thousands of jihadis into Kashmir — was wrong. Washington and the rest of the world have been compelled to declare that Pakistan’s “freedom fighters” in Kashmir are “terrorists” at large and they must be stopped from provoking a nuclear war in South Asia. Thus Pakistan has been compelled once again to respond in a “pragmatic” way to the “new ground realities” (another American ultimatum) by putting a unilateral lid on cross-border infiltration into Kashmir (“terrorism”) without any apparent quid pro quo from India.
This is another example of bad policy planning by Pakistan’s national security establishment. It may be recalled that the Agra summit a year ago foundered precisely on the point of “cross-border terrorism”. Mr Vajpayee had invited General Musharraf to smoke the peace pipe and discuss Kashmir and all other outstanding issues. This was a minor coup for General Musharraf already because mention of Kashmir was conspicuously missing during the Lahore summit in 1999. At the last minute in Agra, however, Mr Vajpayee fished out the issue of “cross-border terrorism” and stunned General Musharraf by insisting it was as much a “core” issue for India as Kashmir was for Pakistan. But General Musharraf would have none of it and returned home in a huff. The dialogue was ruptured and later overtaken by 9/11. A year later, however, India has caught Pakistan on the wrong foot and extracted a commitment to end “cross-border terrorism” without giving anything in return, not even the public assurance of a dialogue on Kashmir that was conceded at Agra. The “calibrated” strategy of pressurizing India via the jihad that Pakistani hawks and establishment types so love to articulate has once again rebounded on them, much to Islamabad’s embarrassment and discomfort. Where do we go from here?
General Musharraf’s May 27 speech and the world reaction to it may be a pointer in one direction. Apart from some unnecessary digressions about the referendum, it was bang on target. Compelled to retreat on the foreign policy question of cross-border terrorism, General Musharraf sought to deflect potential criticism on the domestic front by denouncing India and announcing a date for free and fair general elections. His passionate defense of the liberation struggle in Kashmir was aimed not so much at warning India as it was at ensuring that the Kashmiris would not be demoralized by Pakistan’s impending policy shift. And his demand for an implicit quid pro quo from India was aimed at the international community that has underpinned his policy retreat: de-escalation of Indian troops along the Pakistan border, reduction in India-sponsored terrorism in Kashmir; and initiation of a dialogue with a view to finding a just solution to the issue of Kashmir. In other words, a plea to return to Agra and pick up the pieces again.
India’s careful response (“disappointing”, “we shall wait and see”) shows that all this is within the realm of the possible and desirable. As if on cue, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has invited General Musharraf and Mr Vajpayee to a conference in Almaty June 3-5. This makes sense. India is publicly more comfortable exploiting Russian “facilitation” than American “mediation”. What follows next?
Irrespective of what transpires at Almaty, India will take its time to de-escalate. It has painted itself into a corner and will wait to confirm that General Musharraf has been as good as his word on cross-border terrorism so that it can justify its pull back before the Indian public. An opening dialogue may follow in time to come. Eventually, the two sides will have to sit and grapple with the short-term Indian objective of holding elections in Kashmir with which New Delhi is comfortable and the long-term Pakistani objective of ensuring transparently free and fair elections so that the real voice of the people of Kashmir can be heard loud and clear.
Between now and September, however, there will be many hurdles of pride and prejudice, suspicion and betrayal, misunderstanding and deceit. But both sides need to trade incremental political gains and reduce military or terrorist options. If rogue elements in Pakistan and Kashmir succeed in throwing a spanner in the works, or if India misreads Pakistan’s gesture as a sign of weakness and persists in its aggressive intentions, then the war clouds are likely to reappear on the horizon again.
(TFT June 07-13, 2002 Vol-XIV No.15 — Editorial)
Keep your fingers crossed
General Pervez Musharraf hopes his Almaty trip will yield dividends even though there was “no eye-contact”, let alone a handshake, with Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee. Pakistan, he said, was ready for “unconditional” talks with India. This offer follows an earlier commitment not to allow infiltration across the LoC. Together, the two commitments constitute an unprecedented peace package offering. How’s that?
Until now, Pakistan has always set the pre-condition that the Kashmir dispute should figure prominently in any dialogue. Also, Pakistan has never accepted the charge of cross-border infiltration, let alone commit itself to ending it swiftly. Indeed, the Agra dialogue was jettisoned by General Musharraf when the Indians countered with the demand to stop “cross-border terrorism”. Now Pakistan has conceded both Indian points unilaterally but India refuses to de-escalate and begin talks.
India says it will wait and see if General Musharraf makes good his promise. Meanwhile, it wants joint Indo-Pak border patrols across the Line of Control for verification purposes. This is a curious demand. Surely, if India can claim to know when cross border infiltration takes place, it should also know when it isn’t taking place. In fact, given that both armies are bristling with indignation and itching to have a go at each other, this is the sort of measure that may well provoke conflict rather than build confidence. So there is more to it than meets the eye.
This proposal was mooted after the Almaty conference declared a distinction between legitimate liberation struggles for self-determination against foreign occupation and illegitimate separatist struggles within internationally recognized territorial state boundaries. The Kashmir struggle falls into the first category for Pakistan and into the second for India. But if Pakistan were to accept joint border patrols along the LoC, India could argue that the LoC has been de facto treated like an international border, implying thereby that Kashmir is a part of India and the struggle in Kashmir is illegitimate.
This is not the first time India has floated such proposals. One such was the idea that India would offer visas to visitors from Azad Kashmir at border crossings along the LoC. If Islamabad had accepted this, its state practice would have legitimized Indian-held Kashmir as an undisputed part of India. Meanwhile, India continues to spurn international monitors along the LoC because it doesn’t want to internationalise the Kashmir dispute.
This Indian position has now become more untenable than ever before. The world is having nightmares about nuclear war in the region and international emissaries are rushing to South Asia to advise restraint. Yet India deludes itself into believing that the issue is still bilateral. Nuclear weapons and nuclear wars are international, global concerns. At the very least, a nuclear war between India and Pakistan would have a radioactive fallout on neighbouring countries. The irony is that it is India’s chilling threat of war that has internationalized the issue. Under the circumstances, India’s joint-border patrol proposal is aimed at shifting the goal post of dialogue rather than concretizing it.
Indeed, there are fears on at least two counts here. One, of course, is that India may shift the goal post and make a return to dialogue more difficult rather than easier. This could be done by offering unworkable or unacceptable formulas as pre-conditions for dialogue, e.g., a cease-fire by the Kashmiri insurgents, a repudiation of Pakistani involvement in a dialogue between New Delhi and the All Parties Hurriyet Conference, etc. In the event, Pakistan would be compelled to make its own demands and the whole effort at dialogue would be buried beneath a heap of pre-conditions and counter-preconditions. The second fear is that rogue elements in Pakistan and/or Indian-held Kashmir not in the control of General Musharraf’s intelligence agencies could strike out on their own and succeed in driving a blistering wedge between India and Pakistan. This has happened in the past – indeed is the very reason for the Indian troop buildup – whenever a foreign peacemaker of repute has descended on New Delhi to try and make it listen to reason. But India has always clutched at the “Pakistan-hand” theory even when the terrorist act has been patently against the interests of Pakistan. With senior American officials expected this week, it is anybody’s guess what lies in store for Indo-Pak relations in the short term.
Meanwhile, the post 9/11 world has concluded that Pakistan’s Kashmir policy of the last decade has “failed” because its reliance on militant Islamic jihad has shorn it of international support. In fact, the international community wants General Musharraf to take an immediate and unilateral about-turn on Kashmir policy as he did in the case of Afghanistan. Herein lies an acute dilemma not just for General Musharraf personally but also for the Pakistan army and the Pakistani nation. Can the quest for “Kashmir banega Pakistan” be given up in any way? If not, what are the internal and external consequences for Pakistan? If yes, how is the process to be the successfully choreographed? If ever there was a turning point in Pakistan’s history, it has now arrived.
(TFT June 07-13, 2002 Vol-XIV No.15 — Article)
It’s high time for a goodwill gesture from India
Indian and Pakistan I
In a speech addressed as much to the international community and India as to a domestic audience in Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf reiterated this week the he would not allow militancy and violence to be exported. Nor, he said, would cross-border infiltration into India be permitted.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia has responded by inviting Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of India to peace talks in Kazakhstan, starting June 3. Does this mean that the war clouds are about to disappear swiftly from South Asia?
Hardly. India finds Musharraf’s speech disappointing and dangerous – disappointing, because there is no clampdown on jihadi militants stoking the fire of insurgency in Kashmir, and dangerous, because Musharraf talked about nuclear weapons.
Musharraf began a crackdown on extremists in January with a bang but it ended with a whimper. By April, western intelligence sources were accusing Islamabad of reviving the training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir for over 3000 potential infiltrators into adjoining Indian-held Kashmir. In early May, Pakistan-trained insurgents killed over two dozen civilians in an attack on an army post in Indian-controlled Kashmir. In response, Vajpayee threatened all out war. He has threatened military reprisals against Pakistan before. What is different now?
Previously, Musharraf could count on the United States to turn a blind eye to the training camps and the infiltration because of Pakistan’s support for the war against Al Qaeda. But not anymore. The risk of nuclear war has compelled the United States to step into the fray and warn Pakistan.
Washington has woken up to the dangerous interconnections between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani jihadis. It is not prepared to condone the latter as “freedom fighters”. Musharraf can’t say no to America because Pakistan’s economic lifeline comes from the United States. But even if he is willing, can he actually put a stop to cross-border infiltration?
Only up to a point. There are dozens of Islamic jihad factions and parties comprising thousands of loyal followers. Mainstream religious parties in Pakistan support them. For ten years the jihadis were nurtured by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in Afghan camps as cannon fodder in the war for the liberation of Indian-held Kashmir.
The camps were shifted to Pakistan after the terrorist attacks on the United States in September in the mistaken belief that Washington would ignore their presence. But when Musharraf became overly pro-U.S. and anti-Taliban, most jihadis began to hate him as much as they do the West, India and America. Some cut their links with their official intelligence agency “handlers”.
This has led to rumblings in the intelligence agencies, compelling Musharraf to shift key officers and weed out others. Reports now suggest that Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants hiding in Pakistan are trying to forge a common bond with Pakistan’s Islamic jihadis. The aim: to try and provoke a war between Pakistan and India to rupture the cooperation between Islamabad and Washigton and exploit the anarchy that follows.
India’s refusal to address the Kashmir conflict squarely angers Pakistanis. Thus, without a gesture of goodwill or reciprocity from India, it is a moot point whether Musharraf can ever commit to put an irrevocable lid on the thousands of Islamic jihadis who are Pakistan’s secret suicide-weapon against India.
The next few weeks are critical. As a result of international prompting, there could be negotiations between India and Pakistan in which incremental political gains are traded while military or terrorist options are progressively reduced.
But if rogue elements in Pakistan and Kashmir succeed in disrupting the process, or if India misreads Pakistan’s gesture as a sign of weakness and persists in its aggressive intention’s then there will be war.
(TFT June 14-20, 2002 Vol-XIV No.16 — Editorial)
Greater challenge at home
On June 11, Muhammad Yusuf, convicted two years ago of blasphemy by a sessions court, was shot five times in the chest with a .30 handgun at Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore. The next day, the press reported that the gun was allegedly brought into the prison by one of the jail staff and given to a prisoner on death row. The said prisoner didn’t have the stomach for it, so he passed the gun on to a fellow-convict, Tariq Mota of Gowalmandi, Lahore, a member of the banned extremist outfit, Anjuman-e-Sipah-e-Sahaba. Tariq, after killing Yusuf, shouted “Allah-o-Akbar” and declared that he had done the deed to win eternal salvation.
Reports in the press say that the sessions judge who gave Yusuf the death sentence in the first place was a close relative of General Zia-ul-Haq and had made it clear during the trial that he was moved more by religious passion than solid evidence. Yusuf had appealed the sentence in the High Court and his case was pending. Since there were some serious flaws in the earlier judgment, legal experts had opined that his sentence would be set aside. Unfortunately, some newspapers began calling him kazzab (pretender) even before he was convicted and have continued to label him thus after his murder. All this before his guilt could be conclusively proved at the High Court.
A few days before Yusuf’s murder, on June 7, a group of lawyers and mullahs nearly came to blows in the Supreme Court. The Court was hearing a petition filed by the United Bank Limited against a 1999 verdict banning bank interest. Eminent lawyers Raja Akram and Raza Kazim appeared for UBL while Ismail Qureshi of the Jamaat-e-Islami represented the party defending the 1999 verdict. In arguing their case, the former quoted verses from the Quran. To this, the clerical crowd raised objections saying Raja Akram was not employing the “right accent” when quoting from the Quran. They also took exception to the presence in court of Dr Rashid Jallundhuri, a scholar of Islam. Qazi Hussain Ahmad of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Engineer Salimullah of the JUP (N), ex-convict Maj-General (retd) Zaheerul Islam Abbasi, and Maulana Allah Wasaya were also present. The defendants’ lawyer Ismail Qureshi also protested the removal of Justice Taqi Usmani from the Bench. Justice Usmani had been part of the court consensus against riba in 1999. Matters came to a head and the assistants of both sets of lawyers came to blows. The honourable court warned the mischief-makers but took no action, clearly embarrassed by the presence of a powerful religious pressure group in the court.
It has also come to light recently that of the 12 high-profile cases of sectarian violence, none was brought before the anti-terrorist courts after the expiry of the one-month deadline set for the production of the accused belonging to the banned Anjuman-e-Sipah-e-Sahaba and Sipahe-e-Muhammad. Earlier, Pakistan’s most notorious sectarian killer Riaz Basra was killed in a “police encounter”, which many analysts thought was stage-managed to avoid bringing the case to court. The reason for this was not only that the police usually fail to investigate the case effectively but that the judges at the lower courts are subject to threats from religious organisations. Scores of highly qualified and public-spirited doctors have been killed in Karachi by the religious terrorists. Despite pledges of tough action, the killings have continued and some medical practitioners have quietly left Pakistan because they know the state’s writ does not extend to those who strike terror in the heart of the nation. Even police officers have been quoted in the press as saying that they cannot stand up to the terrorists because the state is unable to protect them. Interior Minister General (retd) Moinuddin Haider was the only member of General Musharraf’s government who chose to call a spade a spade and spoke out against the religious mafias that run riot in Pakistan. He was warned of dire consequences by many recognized clerical bodies. His brother was then cruelly done to death in Karachi. General Musharraf himself was threatened with physical removal by Maulana Akram Awan of the Tanzim-al-Ikhwan in 2001.
Such is the power of the terrorist in Pakistan. The elements that the state has unleashed on the nation over the past two decades now threaten its very existence. The economy is starved of investments, which have dried up in the face of runaway terrorism in Karachi, Pakistan’s industrial and commercial hub. Wary investors euphemistically call this terrorism “Pakistan’s unsatisfactory law and order situation”. The fallout of the 1999 anti-riba verdict of the Supreme Court Appellate Bench compounds the threats that booby-trap the national economy.
The groundswell of support for General Pervez Musharraf when he first came to power in 1999 had sprung from the citizen’s desire to see the military putting an end to Pakistan’s internal anarchy. Unfortunately, state and society have both become more undermined since 1999 and the country is clearly unable to withstand external challenges while the government is unable to protect it from internal dangers. As the Musharraf government faces off with India, it would do well to remember that the greater challenge is at home.
(TFT June 21-27, 2002 Vol-XIV No.17 — Editorial)
Conservatism or dynamism?
It is not unusual for the finance ministry to blow its own trumpet about “investor-friendly” budgets and so on. But it is unusual for the business community not to crib about some feature or the other of every budget, which is the case this year. In fact, Mr Shaukat Aziz’s latest budget has been described as “listless” rather than “crippling”, which is not such bad news after all, given a cheerless situation all round.
The good news refers to a clutch of “incentives” for capital markets and investments ranging from a continuing rationalization of withholding tax and excise duty structures and a reduction of the customs tariff to a small but significant lowering of the corporate tax rate and an extension of the self-forecast for the new trade liberalization regime vis-à-vis Afghanistan, the economic reconstruction of which remains subject to the uncertainties of political consolidation in an environment of war, warlordism, foreign occupation and ethnic strife.
The bad news is the adverse impact of GST on edible oil and on utility services. But if the net result of these is a rationalization of the consumption patterns of the rich more than of the poor, some good may come of it in terms of tax collection. The truly controversial aspects of the budget relate to its various assumptions and projections. For instance, tax revenues are projected at Rs 460 bn, up by about 15% on the actual amount of less than Rs 400 bn collected last year. This is ridiculous. Despite or because of NAB, tax revenues haven’t grown beyond 8% any year for many years. Has this experience been blithely shrugged away or is there some devious jugglery afoot? The record suggests that every year the government sets on overly unrealistic GDP growth target and then budgets for tax increases that are based on an “autonomous” growth of revenues on the basis of that projected economic growth rate. But when the economic growth rate refuses to come anywhere near the projected target because investment remains stagnant, tax revenue targets are periodically revised downwards followed by consequent reductions in the allocations for the public sector annual development plan. But this year, much more than the usual assumptions will be challenged.
For one, the assumption that GDP will grow from 3.5% last year to 5% this year is totally unwarranted. There is no evidence that investors are tripping over themselves to build new factories or increase production runs. Nor is there any likelihood that exports will become the engine of domestic growth – a quick economic recovery of the advanced countries is not assured by any stretch of the imagination. That would suggest that, despite lower import duties, aggregate demand in the economy is not likely to rise by much. This means that revenues from relatively inelastic imports may decline instead of increasing as projected, thereby putting additional strain on the aggregate tax revenue targets and, by implication, on government spending on the social sector.
Another moot issue relates to allocations for defence. The point is not that higher defence expenditures are unjustified, because in the current circumstances they may even be necessary. The point is that every year an attempt is made to hide the true extent of such expenditures in the budget because supplementary budgets are available, no questions asked, to do the needful when required. Thus we are told that defence expenditures have actually fallen in this year’s budget (Rs 146.02 bn) compared to the revised figures for last year (Rs 151.6bn). But last year’s budgeted defence allocation was Rs 131.6 bn while supplementary grants amounted to about Rs 20 bn, or an increase of about 15% over and above the budgeted amount. So we may expect more or less the same to happen this year – which means that by June 2003 the defence budget should have ballooned to about Rs 165 bn or so, which means further reductions in social sector expenditures. And so on.
Meanwhile, there is no sign of the Rs 100 bn dividend from the external debt-rescheduling granted by foreign donors. One might have hoped that not all of it would be consumed by a rise in defence spending and a reduction of the fiscal deficit. In fact, a substantial increase in public sector spending, coupled with significant corporate investment incentives, a policy of much lower interest rates, and greater spending powers to the middle classes, might have been a good tonic to spur aggregate demand and revive the economy.
But that isn’t likely to happen until Mr Shaukat Aziz takes off the robes of a conservative banker and dons the garb of a dynamic finance minister.
(TFT June 28-04 July, 2002 Vol-XIV No.18 — Editorial)
Function and exploitation
The old tiger of Balochistan, Nawab Akbar Bugti, is no pushover. Dogged, arrogant, foolhardy, he has chewed more politicians than anyone else. The exception was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who succeeded in stoking the Nawab’s fiery ambitions and manipulated him to split and undermine the Baloch tribal-nationalist movement in the 1970s. In recent years, shunned by his Baloch comrades and estranged from Islamabad, Nawab Bugti has retreated into a sullen and isolated splendour, growling his presence from time to time and keeping a tight rein over the Bugti tribe.
Now he is in the news again. Reports say Bugti tribesmen have amassed around Sui in Dera Bugti and are taking pot shots at the oil and gas pipelines of the OGDC, allegedly at the behest of Nawab Bugti. But Mr Bugti claims they are retaliating against broken pledges by the federal government regarding welfare issues of employment, workers’ salaries and benefits, pensions, etc. The OGDC submits that crores have been paid against such claims but the Bugti tribesmen, acting through their trade union Nawab, are accusing the federal government and the OGDC of reneging on various contracts and agreements signed with them in the past.
Islamabad is apparently at its wits end about what to do. The oil and gas sector is the only sector to receive a dose of foreign investment this year and the last thing this financially strapped government wants is an unruly insurgency in the oil and gas lands on its hands. So the OGDC has dangled some carrots for the Nawab while the federal government has unleashed a stick with which to browbeat the rebels. Contingents of the Frontier Corps, along with elements of the Bhambore Rifles, Loralai Scouts, Chagai Scouts, Sibi Scouts etc have “gheraoed” Nawab Bugti’s lair and are itching to rout the frisky Bugtis.
There are two ways in which people can react to this situation. They can say they are sick and tired of “tribal Sardars holding the state to ransom” and standing in the way of the state’s centralizing and leveling mission in pursuit of a “unified and enlightened” nation. Such people see backward remnants and aggressive defenders of tribalism as an obstacle to progress measured in terms of transiting from pre-capitalist social structures based on special bilateral agreements and arrangements to market economies based on universal, contractual laws. In this perspective, Nawab Bugti and his tribes are anachronistic blackmailers who should be dealt with ruthlessly by the state so that the multinational oil and gas companies can get on with their job.
Then there are those who, like their opportunistic political predecessors, would rather buy off the Nawab and his Bugtis for a token in ransom rather than incur their wrath and be compelled to take military action against them. No one really wants to draw attention to yet another fault line in the country’s body politic.
Neither side is completely right or wrong. But both seem unaware of the peculiar strains of Baloch nationalism that still impinge on such issues and create the conditions for national distrust and disunity. Consider.
The Baloch believe that Balochistan “state” acceded to Pakistan in 1947 as a sovereign entity with defined rights. Among these, they claim, was the right to hugely benefit from its natural resources, including oil and gas. But since these have been effectively usurped by Islamabad which has denied any form of royalties to the province on the exploitation of these resources, political and economic struggles to reclaim such rights and privileges are not only justified but necessary. Of course, Islamabad has not helped matters by adopting “double standards” and conceding a percentage of royalties to the NWFP on the federal exploitation of its water resources. Thus when Nawab Bugti exhorts Islamabad to cough up in Sui, he evokes a degree of sympathy from his fellow Baloch and provokes a wave of outrage against Islamabad from his fellow Bugtis.
Islamabad tends to be on a short fuse when it is ruled by the military. This is especially true of insipient provincial or tribal rebels with or without a cause because the military’s “civilizing and nation-building” view of itself is so powerfully and self-righteously imbedded in its approach to political issues. But this is a classic case of false consciousness. True, states have had to be cobbled together. But it is truer still that nations have evolved voluntarily over time.
Thus the use of the stick against the Baloch in general and the Bugtis in particular should be avoided, irrespective of Nawab Bugti’s histrionics. Similarly, instead of opportunistic agreements to appease the Bugti tribes or silence Nawab Bugti, Islamabad might be advised to better define and build provincial rights and benefits into the federal constitution so that the provincial government rather than the federal government is responsible for “trickling-down” the benefits of exploiting the natural resources of any state or province. Indeed, if Akbar Bugti is to be the last Nawab of the Bugti tribe who combines in himself the dual power of function and exploitation, the state of Pakistan should strive to become the first Sardar of the Bugti tribe which retains the power of function and gives up the power of exploitation.
(TFT July 05-11, 2002 Vol-XIV No.19 — Editorial)
Another blunder?
Except for a clutch of self-righteous generals, everyone advised General Pervez Musharraf against the referendum. But he spurned the advice and demeaned himself in the process. Now the same people are egging him on to hog power and change the fundamentally prime ministerial constitution into a presidential one. But history suggests this route is neither desirable nor feasible. It will lead General Musharraf into the same political quicksand that devoured Generals Ayub Khan and Zia ul Haq.
General Musharraf claims he isn’t seeking to usurp power. That’s not true. Even by his own admission, a “continuation” of various policies is paramount; therefore it is logical that he should want powers to make them stick. The problem is that constitutionally it is not his or the army’s prerogative to devise policies for the country. Thus wholesale constitutional changes will be needed to rid it of its republicanism.
The restoration of Article 58 2b, with added provisions enabling the president to sack the prime minister and/or parliament, aims to give flexibility to General Musharraf against obstinate or conscientious objectors; the NSC is devised to thump prime ministers and chief ministers in private rather than in public; the presidential right to a five year term against four years for parliament is demanded so that the president can start determining the contours of every new parliament and government well before every general election, including his own next term; the law banning “convicts” from contesting the polls is aimed at keeping Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Altaf Hussain out of the loop, regardless of the fact that each has been convicted under duress or in absentia or by a “special” court of one sort or another; the law that makes party elections mandatory for contesting general elections within only 60 days (why wasn’t this law promulgated earlier?) is meant to provoke a boycott so that non-party polls can salvage the mess; and so on. General Naqvi is truly amazing. How does one block future army coups, he asks in all seriousness. By allowing the army to call the political shots in the first place, he responds innocently. Take away the question mark and you don’t need an answer.
Unfortunately for the generals, this won’t work. It won’t work because it militates against the very “ground realities” that General Musharraf is so fond of pointing out. These ground realities are: the local body system has failed to deliver the goods coveted by General Musharraf; the referendum has undermined General Musharraf’s standing at home and abroad; the constitutional package reeks of cynical opportunism rather than sincerity and Pakistanis are intelligent enough to note how General Musharraf is increasingly looking and sounding very much like the politicians he is railing against; the religious parties and the mainstream political parties (PPP, PML(N), MQM, JI, JUI etc) are lining up against him; even the earmarked elements of the King’s Party (PML-Q, Millat, TI, PAT, ANP, etc) are expressing doubts about the workability of the proposed presidential arrangements; and the international community is getting tougher by the day demanding a reversal of General Musharraf’s Kashmir and India policies (indeed, questions are being asked whether Musharraf is unable or unwilling to do the needful – it being obvious that in either case thoughts have begun to dwell not just on alternatives to him but also on the sort of political system best suited to make Pakistan “a stable, democratic and moderate country fully committed to the international fight against religious extremism”); and the economy is far from picking up to the point where General Musharraf can exploit some goodwill.
But even if General Musharraf is able to railroad the general elections on his own terms, what then? If the elections are grossly unfair, a new crisis of legitimacy will erupt. Otherwise, the next parliament will comprise all the oppositionist elements which will be loath to provide him with a pliant prime minister and a two-thirds majority to amend the constitution. Later, the whole setup will become untenable when General Musharraf is asked for a quid pro quo by the politicians and the international community that threaten key elements of the army’s domestic or foreign policies. It would also be a mistake for General Musharraf to think he can sack the next parliament if it doesn’t play ball with him. The international environment is likely to get more hostile to useless dictators in the years ahead and instability and uncertainty may return to haunt Pakistan under General Musharraf.
General Zia was supported by all the parties except the PPP. He held non-party elections that returned a pliant parliament. But the system crashed under the weight of its own contradictions. Under the circumstances, how will General Musharraf’s proposed system fare? He has alienated all the significant parties of the country and the next parliament won’t be such a pushover. The best thing for him to do is to seek a compromise with the PPP and PML(N) and ally with them. After all, the cost of their joint decade-long corruption is less than the cost of the army’s defense overruns of last year alone resulting from failed national security policies.
(TFT July 12-18, 2002 Vol-XIV No.20 — Editorial)
Women and honour
In which country are women who have been raped liable to be charged with adultery and stoned to death in punishment?
In which country are women liable to be publicly gang-raped on the orders of “democratic” village community organizations like jirgas and panchayats in revenge for alleged crimes committed by male members of their families and clans?
In which country are young girls criminally assaulted by deranged, perverted or powerful individuals as a matter of routine and condemned to live a “shameful” lie in silence?
In which country are women killed to avenge the perceived “honour” of their male relatives, tribes, clans, village elders, and influential families even though they may not have committed any crime?
In which country are women defaced and deformed by frustrated, “acid-throwing” maniacs?
In which country are women burnt alive in “stove explosions” engineered by enraged in-laws, husbands, brothers and fathers?
In which country do judges clutch at medieval notions of dishonour, inequality, piety and even religiosity to punish and demean women?
In which country are state and society predisposed against women?
If the answers are shameful and embarrassing, we should do something about it. If it is hurtful to see the foreign media washing our filthy linen in public, we should put an end to our dirty practices. If we are appalled by such brutality, we should protest vehemently. If we are aghast at such injustice, we should institutionalize punishments for crimes against women. If our laws are misplaced or discriminatory, we should change them.
Women constitute more than half the population of Pakistan. Yet they are more illiterate, downtrodden, oppressed and exploited than any other section of society. This is a blot on our country’s face; a blot that all the nuclear or nationalist “honour” in the world will not efface. The irony is all the greater when it is lost on our leaders. In an interview some time ago with the National Geographic magazine on the subject of women’s oppression in the context of “honour killings”, General Pervez Musharraf was asked by the foreign interviewer why nothing had been done to alleviate the plight of women in Pakistan. Pat came the answer: “We don’t have the money for alleviating poverty and eradicating illiteracy and backwardness”. “But you have the money for nuclear weapons and missiles”, retorted the devious foreigner. “Yes”, said the simple soldier, “we need nuclear weapons and conventional weapons and missiles in order to live honourably ”. Should General Musharraf ever get round to watching that anguished documentary, he might look out for the gleam in the interviewer’s eye. It indicts the country and convicts its leader.
Much the same sentiment can and should be expressed regarding some so-called “Islamic” laws that are demonstrably unjust and also give a bad name to Pakistan. We refer, in particular, to the blasphemy law that has been the subject of so much mischief in the name of a great and just religion. Alleged blasphemers are punished by enraged mobs. They rot in prisons or are killed awaiting trial. They are assassinated inside and outside the courts. Judges dare not acquit them. And self-avowed reformers like General Musharraf don’t have the courage of their convictions to revamp such laws. Why, then, are we surprised by the condemnation of the world when a miscarriage of justice concerning some masih or the other is splashed on television screens and some of Pakistan’s murderous laws and cultural practices are displayed in all their gory details?
Pakistan is stretched on a historical rack, an arm and a leg in antiquity and barbarism, an arm and a leg in modernity and civilisation. Old notions of sovereignty, statecraft, politics, power, patronage, despotism, honour, religion and culture vie with modern symbols of globalisation, electoral democracy, constitutionalism, accountability, civil society, gender equality, professionalism, competitiveness and universal literacy. Historic Islamic strictures contradict post-colonial Anglo-Saxon structures. Unable to find a mutuality of interests between these two streams of thought and behaviour, society is inclined to descend into a feisty confrontation between the two. As the pace of life quickens under the impact of the new world order, large swathes of state and society are uprooted and dispersed. The job of the modern prince is to channel this energy into a productive, stable and assimilated nationhood. But tragically Pakistan has lacked leaders of substance or vision.
The worst excesses against women and the minorities are the tip of the iceberg. But this is the arena in which we must begin the quest for the soul of our country. Every negative image of their oppression is another nail in our collective coffin. Free them from bondage and suffering and we will have freed half our humanity from chains. There can be no greater celebration of national honour than that.
(TFT July 19-25, 2002 Vol-XIV No.21 — Editorial)
The world according to PM
General Pervez Musharraf doesn’t like to pussyfoot around. He shoots from the hip and dares to win. His latest constitutional gambit aims to restructure Pakistan’s state and society according to a commando’s guide to politics and philosophy. That is why he’s so fond of lecturing everyone on the virtues of “unity of command” and the necessity of “command and structure”. In fact, that is why he’s so obsessed about retaining the “commanding” heights of “authority”.
Such naked political ambition is not expected from a soldier in this day and age, certainly not from one who says he was “pushed” into the whirlpool of politics and didn’t jump in to seize power. But since General Musharraf obviously seems convinced not only of the sincerity and righteousness of his cause but also of its political and philosophical rationale, his worldview is worth examining on its own merits.
Pakistani politicians have proven themselves to be corrupt and bad; hence they cannot be allowed to run the political system on their own and without any checks and balances on them from the military. Right? No, wrong. All over the world, politicians are more or less corrupt, yet they still retain the political right to run the world on their own to the complete exclusion of the military. Next door in India, for example, where the political culture is much like ours, the politicians are generally more corrupt than the ones in Pakistan. Yet their “democracy” is a showcase of the less developed world and their military has no political role in it. Equally, our generals in power or authority have rarely been blameless. Indeed, in 1986 Time magazine noted that a clutch of Pakistani generals involved in the multibillion dollar arms and drugs pipeline for the Afghan mujahidin had overnight entered the ranks of the richest men in the world.
But that’s not all. When politicians hand out plots of land to themselves and their cronies, it’s recognized as “corruption” and they are hauled off to prison for their sins. But when generals and bureaucrats hand out plots to those of their ilk, it’s in recognition of their “services” to the state and they are decorated for their troubles. Indeed, when politicians run up fiscal deficits by squandering money on motorways and prestige projects, they are called “irresponsible” and “incompetent”. But when generals break budgetary barriers for defense expenditure overruns, it is all in the “national interest”. When politicians make retreats and political somersaults, they are called “opportunistic”. But when generals do about-turns, they are applauded for accepting the new “ground realities”. When politicians want to change our so-called Kashmir and Afghan policies, they are condemned as “unpatriotic” and even “treasonable”. But when generals are obliged to do the same, they are complimented for being “pragmatic”. And so on.
Pakistan’s democracy in the last decade was unstable, inefficient and flawed. Both prime ministers were bounced out without completing their terms because they didn’t deserve to stay in power. Hence we must not revert to such a system again. Right? No, wrong. The system was never allowed to work and iron out its wrinkles. The record shows that the khakis have overtly, covertly and consistently undermined and destabilized political governments throughout this period. Benazir Bhutto had to contend with an IJI that was manufactured by a general, a no-confidence motion that was sponsored by a Brigadier, a hostile MQM that was playing to the tune of the army chief, and Younas Habib’s handouts to the army and ISI chiefs to make sure she didn’t get elected again in 1990. Indeed, Ms Bhutto might well have completed her second term if the then president hadn’t been “persuaded” by the generals to do the needful. As for Nawaz Sharif, the less said the better. He was created and nurtured by a string of generals from 1981 to 1993 when he was also nudged out of office by the army chief despite a supreme court verdict allowing him to remain in office. In his second term, his government was so destablised by the Kargil crisis manufactured by the military that he lost his bearings and committed hara-kiri by taking on the generals.
Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif are so corrupt that they have no right to become PMs again. Right? No, wrong. Both politicians are perceived to be corrupt, but they have not been proven to be corrupt. Give them a free and fair trial and if they are convicted all the way to the supreme court, write down their epitaphs and give them a quick burial. At any rate, the sins of the party leaders should not be visited upon the parties or the political system.
General Musharraf is a clean and upright soldier. But so too were Generals Ayub Khan and Zia ul Haq before their heads were turned by political ambition, self-righteousness, infallibility and the wish for self-aggrandisement that follows. General Musharraf says we should trust him, even if we think his judgment flawed. But governance is only marginally about trust, it’s really all about judgment. That is why it’s better to devise a workable mechanism for the transfer of power than to try and hog it and tempt fate all over again.
(TFT July 26-01 Aug, 2002 Vol-XIV No.22 — Editorial)
The last Straw
Britain’s foreign secretary, Mr Jack Straw, has come and gone. But he didn’t divulge what transpired in his meeting with the Pakistani minister of state for foreign affairs, Mr Inamul Haq. However, it was duly noted that a meeting with General Pervez Musharraf didn’t take place, fueling speculation that the Pakistani snub was delivered because he seems to have become too pro-India and anti-Pakistan to be called an honest broker. While in India, Mr Straw had said that Pakistani was expected to do more to plug all the holes facilitating cross-border infiltration. The fact that Mr Straw seems to be taking a tougher line with Pakistan than even Mr Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, is remarkable, considering that the UK has kept out of South Asia’s overheated politics for far too long to be able to make a quick and smooth comeback. So it transpires that you can’t lean on Mr Straw too much if you want the lurching bandwagon of Indo-Pakistan relations to move forward.
The US and the UK clearly see what they want done in South Asia. But the political horizon in this region is murky. It is true that Pakistan has been less popular with the world than India for some time past, and has had to change its spots rather quickly after September 11. Thus the G-8 summit of last month expressed itself in terms that clearly demand more from Pakistan than India. In this context, the biggest negative factor weighing against Pakistan is the rise of the jehadi militias which Pakistan’s national security establishment has acknowledged only grudgingly after September 11. Now the war against some of these militias is on inside Pakistan. Hundreds have been hauled up. In return, one group tried to assassinate General Musharraf last April. And if some of the more militant religious parties and groups could help it he would disappear on the wings of a prayer.
Unfortunately, General Musharraf has mishandled the mainstream political parties. They are now so alienated from him that they have few qualms of hoisting themselves on to this anti-Musharraf bandwagon. The rigged referendum and the aggressively self-serving constitutional amendment package have lost him many former supporters and sympathizers too. Also, the state of the economy isn’t winning him any kudos with ordinary folks at home. The tariff hikes are killing, with oil, gas and power rates halving middle incomes already under siege by diminishing savings rate on fixed income accounts.
If General Musharraf no longer looks like a messiah who rescued Pakistan from Nawaz Sharif, how can he backtrack too much and too overtly on Kashmir without any discernable quid pro quo from India? But on the Indian side, too, the kaleidoscope has been thoroughly shaken by the BJP extremists. A party brought to power by the anti- Muslim passions aroused by the Babri Mosque affair is now wilting under the Gujarat communal pogrom. Its governments are falling in the provinces like ninepins and its coalition allies are attacking it in the Lok Sabha from right and left. This has compelled party fanatics to clutch at a hard line on Pakistan because that is where the rare Lok Sabha consensus is located. Thus the only strategy it can adopt is an opportunistic, anti-Pakistan one, and mix it with sound and fury about the war against terrorism that goes down well with the international community. Now it is seeking to improve its prospects by winning big time in the Kashmir elections next October on which it has international support despite Pakistan’s protestations.
But that’s not all. Having sniffed the global winds, the Hurriyet Conference chairman, Mr Abdul Ghani Bhatt, is becoming ambivalent over boycotting the election. Also, the son of the recently assassinated Kashmiri leader, Abdul Ghani Lone, who now occupies his father’s seat in the Hurriyet executive committee, wants the Hurriyet to talk to New Delhi without Pakistan. This suggests that Mr Straw couldn’t have gotten much out of New Delhi in the shape of a pledge to start talking to Pakistan before the Kashmir elections. Under the circumstances, General Musharraf may soon have to worry about more than just the backlash to his constitutional proposals.
It also appears that the US and the UK don’t clearly see how they are going to advance their anti-terrorist agenda. Both want to attack Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein but no one agrees with them. Father Bush fought the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein with the entire world behind him, but son Bush wants to attack him while the world is disapproving. This means that his special allies in the war against terrorism are soon going to come under pressure from their own publics. That is why it will probably suit India to keep its troops amassed on the border with Pakistan, which in turn will make it easy for India to “stage” the Kashmir elections. But by the same token, it may no longer suit Pakistan to make serious efforts to plug the LoC holes as demanded by Mr Straw.
We are looking at renewed tensions and war clouds in South Asia ahead. The fear is that elections in Pakistan may be washed out if it starts to pour.
(TFT Aug 02-08, 2002 Vol-XIV No.23 — Editorial)
An absence of law
It all happened in just one month. In a village named Jatoi near Muzaffargarh in Punjab province, a “panchayat” (elders’ council) of the Mastoi tribe decided that the daughter of a labourer should be raped by four men. The deed was done in front of hundreds of spectators and the girl was sent home naked afterwards. This action was followed by the rape of another girl by two armed Mastoi feudals. The police let the culprits off, after which the girl committed suicide by drinking poison. In all, 22 women were subjected to gang-rape in the Muzaffargarh area of Punjab in one month. It transpires that the “panchayats” of the area are inclined to resort to rape as punishment as a preferred policy option. We also learn that in Attock, a girl had to marry a 70-year-old man to prevent her brother from being killed by family rivals. And in Dunyapur, a girl who dared to contract a “love marriage” was killed on the orders of the “panchayat” and no one dared to take notice of it. Thus we note that cases of rape in Punjab have registered a hundred percent increase. The highest number of rapes in the past was committed in 1995 when 340 women were dishonoured. In the first five months of 2002, already 521 women have been raped. After 3,000 cases of rape were registered with the police, only 80 rapists have been punished in the court of law.
There’s more. In a village of Faisalabad, an “imam” of a mosque called a “panchayat” and persuaded the locals to catch a man and stone him to death. He was accused of insulting the Holy Quran in 1994 but had been bailed out because he was deemed to be mentally disturbed. He had quit the village but infuriated the cleric when he returned. This time the “khateeb” did not have recourse to law and got a “panchayat” to order the people to stone him to death. In the village of Abakhel in Mianwali, a panchayat ordered that to resolve a dispute over murder, eight girls (the youngest being only 8) of a clan should be forcibly married to the men of the opposed clan. The council which took this decision included one MNA, one MPA, the present Nawab of Kalabagh, and a number of religious leaders who approved of the verdict under Islamic principles. The offended party had actually asked the clan to give them 20 virgins. And so the story of local democracy continues.
Under law, crime and punishment is well defined. In one society, in one state, there is only one law, so that justice can be done under one norm. The criminal isolates himself before committing a crime. It is because of law that there is such a thing as social conscience: the feeling of contrition when defiling a collective norm. But this conscience is dulled when a group commits a crime. Indeed, in most societies, defiance of the law is often expressed through gangs or groups. But no state can survive such moral segmentation. Unfortunately, however, that is exactly what has been happening in Pakistan over the past twenty years or so as the law has been weakened in the face of defiant group norms. In Karachi, for instance, ethnic groups have set up their own “morality” and subjected the city to crimes of unspeakable cruelty without any qualms of conscience about what they have done. In fact, all manner of organised criminals have set up their own moral values which a simple exhortation to return to the law will not wipe out. And there is nothing more dangerous than the use of religion in this segmentation. The politics of the sect has dominated Pakistan’s social scene in the past three decades and the Islamic state has surrendered its writ more than readily when confronted by a cleric empowered by a sectarian norm.
All over the country, the process of segmentation into group codes has resulted in a collective recidivism. We all know that the tribal “jirga” had serious social flaws because of its clan domination. Our films and our literature have made it amply clear that the “panchayat” of the village in the plains is controlled by the feudal elite. In Afghanistan, the history of the famous Loya Jirga is that of a sad hoax. In Pakistan these institutions should have declined and gradually disappeared as the Penal Code and our regular courts came into their own. But the opposite has happened. The courts have shrunk in terror in the face of threats from the state-sponsored jehadi warriors. Judges brave enough to decide cases on merit have been killed. The police has learnt to favour the powerful criminal because it knows that the final verdict will inevitably go in his favour. These are symptoms of the demise of the state. There is nothing romantic about the “jirga” or the “panchayat”. They are simply expressions of defiance of the law of the state.
The biggest social evil to emanate from this segmentation of morality is the criminalisation of society. Pakistan desperately needs a law which bans the holding of “jirgas” and “panchayats” outside the ambit of state authority and without the supervision of a legal representative of the state. And it needs the will of the state to implement it.
(TFT Aug 09-15, 2002 Vol-XIV No.24 — Editorial)
Tragi-comedy
General Pervez Musharraf has always said he wants to rule Pakistan for at least five more years without contending with Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif. With a dubious referendum in his pocket to anoint himself president and a plethora of discriminatory laws in his clutch to empower himself, have Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif been personally sidelined altogether?
On the play of the dice so far, it would seem so. Mr Sharif has bitten the bullet and handed the crown of the PML(N) to Shahbaz Sharif. Ms Bhutto has been equally pragmatic, sidestepping the hurdles and clearing the way for the PPP via the PPPP. Both believe it is better to live and fight another day than to fight and lose today. But it didn’t have to turn out this way at all.
General Zia ul Haq had a personal and political contradiction with Ms Bhutto and the PPP in the 1980s. So he wooed the PML and nurtured a compliant Nawaz Sharif. His successors in the “1990s establishment” followed the same policies. But the tables were turned in 1999 when General Musharraf acquired a personal and political contradiction with Mr Sharif and the PML when he exiled the leader and hounded the party until it yielded a potentially pro-Musharraf faction. Thus it should have made sense for the army/establishment and Ms Bhutto/PPP to embrace each other at the expense of their joint Sharif/PML nemesis.
But that didn’t happen. General Musharraf’s anti-corruption, self righteous, reformist zeal compelled him to put Ms Bhutto in the same dock as Mr Sharif even as his moderate leanings and pragmatic assessment of the “ground realities” prompted a possible “understanding” with her powerful party. Indeed, an “alliance” with the PPP without Ms Bhutto seemed all the more necessary to the military when the PML(Q) faction, while being stoutly anti-Nawaz, failed to transform itself into a significant pro-Musharraf force. But Ms Bhutto miscalculated the balance of her dormant power over the voter with the budding influence of General Musharraf with the organs of the state and the international community. She mishandled the initial probes, laying down conditions for an alliance with General Musharraf that were unacceptable to the military. Having lumped the offer, she thought sounding-off in relevant international quarters might yield dividends. This strategy might well have worked if September 11 hadn’t happened. But when Mullah Omar and OBL came to General Musharraf’s rescue, he changed his spots and transformed himself from an international pariah into a “trusted friend and ally” of the West who could do no wrong. Now the boot was on the other foot. And it was time to make amends with him.
But Ms Bhutto couldn’t bring herself to be sugar and honey. She continued to stalk the corridors of international power, bemoaning the lack of democracy in the country and thundering against the military for spawning the terrorism of jehad. However, her fatal political error came when she tried to nudge Nawaz Sharif in Saudi Arabia into a united front against the military. Alarmed, the ISI quickly winked at Shahbaz Sharif and thwarted an unholy alliance. In defiance, Ms Bhutto got herself elected as chairperson of the PPP. But the cynics in Islamabad put paid to that by threatening to outlaw her party if it tried to contest the general elections under her leadership. Thus the Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians (PPPP) was midwifed with Ms Bhutto as its “guide” and Makhdoom Amin Fahim as its president. It is a measure of the last resort by a popular though tainted political leader whose claims to legitimacy have been frustrated by an apathetic public and wounded by an illegitimate though uncorrupted military dictator bent upon clinging to power by the coattails of the international community.
But if Ms Bhutto hasn’t succeeded in scaling the heights of Islamabad, the Sharifs are far from sneaking into the hallowed halls of parliament. Mr Shahbaz Sharif, says the government, will not be allowed to return to the country. But there is no doubt that the linear-thinking generals, especially those from the Punjab, have a soft corner for Sharif Jr. because of his carefully orchestrated reputation for good administration. But if he is allowed to return and freely canvass for his party while Ms Bhutto is arrested at the airport, the halo of renewed martyrdom for her should give an enormous boost to the PPPP and undermine the credibility and neutrality of the military regime as well as the legitimacy of the polls to come, an outcome General Musharraf may well wish to avoid.
The truth probably is that General Musharraf would be happiest with Benazir Bhutto and Shahbaz Sharif and Altaf Hussain canvassing for their respective parties from London rather than Lahore or Karachi so that the PPPP and the PML(N) and the MQM are equally disadvantaged, thereby enabling the PML(Q) and other regional parties and religious groups to stake small but significant claims in the upcoming new order and denying any of the two mainstream parties a majority in parliament.
That said, there are miles to go before any of the protagonists will know for sure what fate has in store for him or her. But it promises to be a first rate tragi-comedy.
(TFT Aug 16-22, 2002 Vol-XIV No.25 — Editorial)
The “real” terrorist network
The latest “revelation” from Islamabad is that the terrorists who spilled innocent blood in Murree and Taxila this month belonged to only one organisation, the banned anti-Shia sectarian outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Earlier, the murder of Daniel Pearl was also officially pinned on the LJ. The curious thing is that only a year ago, the LJ was not officially centre-stage. It was said to be a “peripheral” organisation that allegedly focused only on sectarianism while the other well-known militias were busy fighting for Islam well beyond the neighbourhood. But now we have been informed that the LJ has been up to other kinds of terrorism too, that the LJ was closely associated with al-Qaeda and received money from OBL. The name of a new organization, al-Umar, cropped up lately but was suppressed because the policy is to dump everything on the LJ, thereby making it the fall guy for others who are not to be targeted for one reason of state or another.
The terrorist network may be much bigger and wider in Pakistan than is suggested by this focus on the LJ. But one reason why the LJ is being isolated and attacked is to create the perception that the government is winning the war against terrorism and we can relax. The LJ’s founder, Riaz Basra, has been knocked off by the police and his successor, Akram Lahori, is in custody, singing like a canary. But we can’t help wondering whether this singing is on the basis of a musical score that is intended to save the necks of a lot of people, including the “handlers” who had convinced the people of Pakistan that the Jihad was “pure and spiritual”. The LJ was “separated” from its parent organisation but two other jihadi organisations have sprung from the same parent and are now under global ban as terrorists. Are these organisations separate entities or are they the footprints of an extremely protean single entity strongly entrenched inside the organs of the Pakistani state? Here’s a frightening glimpse of the length and breadth of the interconnections.
As reported in Khabrain, “FBI and Pakistani intelligence agencies arrested an Egyptian Arab named Hisham al-Wahid from Saudi Arabia and brought him to Pakistan. He guided the agencies to Gaggar Phatak in Karachi from where, behind the police station in a garage, three activists of Jaish-e-Muhammad and two of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi were arrested. These activists belonged to Sargodha and had been trained at the Akora Khattak seminary of Maulana Samiul Haq. These activists then guided the police to a bungalow in Gulshan-e-Hadeed in Steel Town from where the police arrested one Iraqi and two Yemeni Arabs. All of them belonged to Al Qaeda and were working in a poultry farm owned by a man from Nazimabad. The three Arabs spoke fluent Urdu, Balochi and Pashto. From them the police recovered three satellite mobile phones, two laptop computers, four ordinary computers, four mobile phones, four sub-machine guns and six magazines. The police also searched Mujahid Colony Nazimabad and arrested Rafeequl Islam of Sipah Sahaba. It recovered cassettes showing Mullah Umar and Osama bin Laden and books on jihad from Nazimabad. Rafeequl Islam acted as a communications man for the jihadi network in Karachi. The same day the police discovered a large cache of arms and rocket launchers of Russian make from Kachra Mandi behind UBL Sports Complex.”
Obviously, it isn’t just the LJ that is connected with OBL and al-Qaeda. All three persons freed from Indian jails after the Kandahar hijacking of an Indian airliner two years ago went on to acquire their own militias, with Umar Saeed Sheikh leading the Jaish after its leader’s arrest. Two of them are now in Pakistani jails and the third one is getting interviews published in Pakistan from somewhere in Kashmir, but his militia, al-Umar, is emerging as OBL’s fourth proxy. After the Murree carnage, one leader of a banned militia was reportedly arrested because he was found traveling in the area at the time of the terrorist strike. Whoever got the report of his arrest printed in the press also volunteered the additional information that he was being kept under house arrest. The truth of the matter is that his “handlers” had let him live in opulence with the money he got from OBL (Osama’s gift to him of a dozen double-cabin pickup trucks was reported by the press). The Murree killings were so blatant that it was decided to make a show of arresting him. No one cared to look at the contradiction that if the man was under comfortable house arrest in Islamabad, how could he be found driving in the vicinity of Murree?
This subject is not closed. A British organisation says it has proof that over US $1 billion were sent annually from the United Kingdom to the organisations led by these gentlemen. Even if a fraction of this money was sent, we have a serious problem on our hands. With judges inclined to run away from cases involving these jihadis and the state continuing to adopt a hands-off policy for dubious reasons of “national security”, the problem of terrorism in Pakistan is far from being tackled in a meaningful way.
(TFT Aug 23-29, 2002 Vol-XIV No.26 — Editorial)
War and peace
Three good persons from India recently came to Pakistan to help launch Daily Times, a liberal English newspaper from Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi. Narasimhan Ram is the forthright editor of Frontline, a journal of integrity. Shekhar Gupta is the expansive editor-in-chief of The Indian Express that is published in eight editions. And Arundhati Roy is the little big woman whose mesmerising prose and breathtaking vision is a source of inspiration to so many around the world. That they came at a time of heightened Indo-Pak tensions was creditable. That they chose to talk of peace when the ruling Hindu-BJP in India is obsessed with talk of war was courageous. We salute them. We also salute the thousands of Pakistanis who thronged the seminars to welcome the visitors and applaud the demand for peace.
But Indo-Pak peace is as elusive as a chameleon. Whenever it seems within our grasp, it manages to transform itself into war. The fifty-five year post-independence history of both countries is littered with lost opportunities for peace followed by outbreaks of hostility. The record of recent times is especially depressing. In late1989, Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi almost clinched an accord on Siachin. But, faced with general elections, Mr Gandhi couldn’t make it stick in India. The next six years were full of acrimony. In 1997, Nawaz Sharif and I K Gujral reached an understanding on how to tackle the full range of issues bedeviling relations, including Kashmir but not limited to it. But Mr Gujral felt compelled to backtrack when confronted with the prospect of a resurgent BJP in the 1998 elections. Then came the nuclear blasts and the “desert shook” in India while the “whole mountain turned white” in Pakistan.
Fortunately, though, the war paint was peeled off by both sides when the Lahore Summit rolled round in 1999. Nawaz Sharif agreed not to be dogmatic about Kashmir and Atal Behari Vajpayee went to the Minar-i-Pakistan to assure Pakistanis that India had no malicious or evil designs on their country. But did we bury the hatchet for all times to come? No. Pakistan’s Kargil adventure scattered the prospects of peace so carefully nurtured at Lahore a few months earlier. Two bad years followed. Then came Agra in 2001. But once again peace proved abortive when General Musharraf’s personal success proved to be Pakistan’s collective loss. The flexibility over Kashmir offered by General Musharraf was spurned by Mr Vajpayee at the altar of “cross-border” infiltration.
Since then, Mr Vajpayee has become a bit of a warmonger while General Musharraf is sounding like a peacenik. India’s army has maintained a continual and unprecedented threat along the border and innocent villagers on both sides are falling in the artillery duels between the two sides. Fresh hope was injected into the equation recently when the US stepped into the fray and tried to pry the two sides apart. This was followed by General Musharraf’s unprecedented offer of unconditional talks with India, coupled with verifiable assurances that Pakistan would do its utmost to plug cross-border infiltration into Kashmir. What more could India want?
The BJP wants to hold elections in Kashmir in September-October of this year. It says these shall be free and fair. And it doesn’t want Pakistan to interfere in the process, let alone instigate the Kashmiris to boycott them. But it refuses to concede that Kashmir is a trilateral issue which will not be “solved” by keeping Pakistan out of the loop while putting most of its eggs in the basket of Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference rather than in the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. This suggests that the BJP is not sincerely interested in finding a solution to Kashmir, not even one within the ambit of India’s constitution, and is merely playing for time in order to relieve the international pressure on it.
Recent developments strengthen this perception. The Ram Jethmalani committee sponsored by New Delhi to talk the APHC into contesting the elections has recommended that the elections be postponed so that more time is available to iron out the differences and problems between the contending sides. But Mr LK Advani, India’s deputy prime minister, has not only rejected the proposal but also accused General Musharraf of pressurising the APHC to boycott the elections. So what else is new? Did he expect that General Musharraf and the APHC would roll over and play dead so that New Delhi can walk all over the Kashmiris as in the past?
Under the circumstances, we might conclude that the war in Kashmir could be part of the “solution” rather than part of the “problem” for the BJP. The more the Hindu right in India slips in popularity, the more it whips up war hysteria against Pakistan and the Muslims of India. And with elections in ten more Indian states forecast for next year, the BJP will not risk lowering the anti-Pakistan hype in the foreseeable future so that it can retain its Hindu vote-bank.
This doesn’t bode well for peace. Mr Richard Armitage, the US deputy secretary of state, is on his way to the region for the umpteenth time to try and knock sense into both countries. We wish him luck.
(TFT Aug 30-05 Sep, 2002 Vol-XIV No.27 — Editorial)
Soldiers in pursuit of solutions
General Pervez Musharraf must wonder what the continuing fuss is all about. His original constitutional amendment proposals were endless and outraged everyone. But now that he has chucked away most of his half-baked ideas, why is the public outcry still so shrill? In fact, the international media is sounding downright hostile towards the very “strongman” it so lavishly praised when he put “democracy” on the back-burner in the face of the threat from radical ‘Islamic’ terror. What’s gone wrong for him?
It’s true that the constitutional amendments announced by General Musharraf last week are absolutely ‘minimal’ in terms of his original proposals. Essentially, his supporters argue, he has merely restored Article 58-2B with minor alterations. So what’s the big deal? Didn’t parliaments from 1985 to 1997 voluntarily accept this clause? Didn’t all the political parties in turn beg former presidents to use this clause and dismiss elected parliaments and governments during periods of actual or contrived constitutional deadlock? Didn’t well-meaning journalists write reams in defense of the “checks and balances” enshrined in this amendment? Didn’t the supreme court uphold all but one parliamentary dismissal at the hands of such presidents? Didn’t the removal of this clause by the passage of the 13th constitutional amendment in 1997 pave the way for the unmitigated sackings of the chief justice, the president and the army chief, thereby emboldening the prime minister to try and become an omnipotent and unaccountable Amirul Momineen? And what is all this hue and cry over the establishment of an “advisory” National Security Council? Aren’t there twice as many elected civilians in it than nominated soldiers to ensure sufficient civilian advocacy rights?
These “reasonable” arguments tend to evaporate in the face of weightier “ground realities”. First, General Musharraf’s much trumpeted local government system has crashed before it could even take off. Its “democratic” pretensions have been laid bare in the face of central bureaucratic authority and its failure casts a dark shadow on the rest of the “true democracy” still to come.
Second, his reckless referendum to anoint himself president has dealt a deadly blow to his personal credibility and revealed his true political mindset. He is no different from Generals Zia ul Haq and Ayub Khan in wanting to conjure necessary ‘results’. And it has indicated his innate contempt for representative institutions like parliament and consensus documents like the constitution. In fact, if General Zia’s referendum was a farce, Musharraf’s will be read as a tragedy. What little might have been acceptable from him before the referendum is not acceptable after it.
Third, his attempt to institutionalize the role of the army in politics in an age of democracy seeks to reverse the natural order of things. It will come a cropper, like General Zia’s did, when the international community on which it is propped is finally done with him. That is also why 58-2B might have been acceptable in the hands of an elected civilian president as in the past but will constantly be challenged as long as it remains in the hands of a soldier.
Fourth, his attempt to rig, divide and rule flies in the face of society’s urge for truth and reconciliation. General Zia kept just one party — the PPP — out of the loop and failed to provide stability. How can General Musharraf hope to keep the PPP, the PML(N) and the MMA out of the reckoning and still stake a claim to longevity? He should have co-opted the true representatives of the people — whoever and whatever they were — in a political and statesmanlike manner rather than manufacture consent and exclude them from full political participation. In fact, as things stand, the next general elections will probably go down as the most “pre-rigged” polls in Pakistan’s history and rob General Musharraf of the credibility he craves.
Fifth, and this is the most important reason, General Musharraf’s act of seizing the crown in 1999 is not half as illegitimate and unacceptable as the Bonapartist act of putting it on his head last week without seeking the approval of the next parliament. Neither of his coup-making predecessors was so arrogant or self-righteous. “Go to the supreme court”, he says contemptuously, “it has allowed me to crown myself”, knowing fully well that the supreme court does not have the power to “give” the power of constitutional amendment to anyone. And what if the court were to deny him this power? What if the next parliament were to try and take it away from him? “Why then,” he warns, “I shall have to sack it.”
All these factors manifest an anti-institutional frame of mind that mocks the very concept of checks and balances that he wishes to institutionalize. It highlights the contradictions of the man and his politics so eloquently captured by the remark that “the army must be allowed in so that it is kept out”.
General Pervez Musharraf has come a long way from the apolitical soldier who was pushed into the cesspool in 1999 to the soiled politician who has emerged from it in 2002. Sooner or later, however, the world will recoil from soldiers and armies in pursuit of solutions and focus on soldiers and armies as part of problems. And that is when the cookie will begin to crumble.
(TFT Sep 06-12, 2002 Vol-XIV No.28 — Editorial)
Dangerous political vacuum
General Pervez Musharraf says Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif wanted to make deals with him, which he piously shunned. There was a time when this spiel probably appealed to Pakistanis disenchanted with the country’s two main parties, but after the referendum, the manipulation of local governments, visibly selective accountability, and the selective rejection of nomination papers for the October election, it no longer rivets public attention or gives the general the aura of legitimacy he craves. In fact, after three years of Musharrafics, Pakistan’s tainted politicians have been rebaptised into popularity. After the rejection of Benazir Bhutto’s papers, there have been protests in Karachi and Lahore, and Nawaz Sharif’s transparently disingenuous “gesture” of withdrawing his papers in sympathy with Ms Bhutto, has gone down well with the electorate. This is a measure of how much the general’s credibility has taken a beating.
Had General Musharraf been a romantic one would have accepted his statements. But he is highly pragmatic when it comes to removing threats to his power. Why then his posture of “not doing deals” with “discredited” politicians? The fact is that Musharraf is both things, pious and pragmatic, and this imbues his actions with ambivalence. Had he been as pragmatic at the beginning as he has been in manipulating the forthcoming elections, he could have got the Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan Peoples Party on board his proclaimed agenda to liberalise the country and put an end to extremism. But he was a “purist” of the Imran Khan variety at the beginning, refusing to have any truck with the tainted. However, he later rallied many of the same ilk to give shape to his plan of the post-2002 dispensation. But after the King’s Party had come into being, he once again allowed his habitual ambivalence to prevail. Amidst rumours of dubious envoys flying to Jeddah, the King’s Party was on tenterhooks: was he really with the PML (Q) or would he ditch them?
General Musharraf has created a huge political vacuum in Pakistan by decapitating the PML (N) and the PPP. Everyone is now clawing for supremacy in this space and chaos reigns even amongst the ranks of those who initially supported him. The Mutahida Majlis Amal (MMA), composed of many of the military’s favourite zealots, took the anti-American plank for some time, then developed cracks and now looks exhausted. Imran Khan and his Tehrik-e-Insaf thought the general was on the same wave length as themselves but they fell victim to the general’s ambivalence and moved aside accusing his principal secretary of collusion with the PML (Q). Following that, Imran Khan and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain of the PML (Q) publicly exchanged charges of corruption which did not redound to their electoral advantage. The Chaudhry, bemused by the many-sidedness of the general, first lashed out at what he thought was his secret deal with Shahbaz Sharif, then went public with his opposition to Musharraf’s Afghan policy. Imran Khan had already expressed his bitterness about the “betrayal” of the Afghan people by Musharraf. And a “liberalised” Allama Tahirul Qadiri doesn’t know where to go after breaking away from the rest of the parties under Islamabad’s tutelage.
It appears that the PML (N) has made a gradual comeback against its breakaway faction which many in Pakistan now consider contaminated by contact with the military. Similarly, the PPP (Parliamentarians) expect to do well while its two breakaway factions, led by Farooq Leghari and Aftab Sherpao, may win some seats. Thus, after the elections parliament will be populated by a motley crew with no single-party in a clear majority. This is supposed to suit the General-President down to the ground because parliament will look to him and his operatives to put together a strong majority to form a government.
What is likely to happen is that no one will be happy with the state of affairs, just as no one is really satisfied with the house that General Musharraf has built, not even, increasingly, the Americans, who think that he is half-hearted or simply duplicitous. Therefore, the next parliament will be an extremely noisy house in which cantankerous politicians will produce poisonous headlines on a daily basis, new press laws notwithstanding. General Musharraf’s new Afghan and Kashmir policies, which whet the American appetite without satisfying it, might well be the shoal on which the new dispensation could run aground. Politicians being politicians, the disgruntled ones will undermine the General’s paramountcy within the system by crying sellout to the Americans with no one to defend him in the cabinet to come. Not only will Pakistanis see this spectacle, the military and the international community too will clearly discern the confusion and lack of direction in Pakistan.
General Musharraf must guard against the rebuke he might earn in the US next week for manipulating the elections in Pakistan while he complains about the coming “rigged” election in Indian-Held Kashmir. The international press is in lockstep over the way Pakistan’s two main parties have been disabled just before the October elections. Going it alone after October 2002 on the basis of a few constitutional amendments is going to be perilous both for General Pervez Musharraf and for Pakistan.
(TFT Sep 13-19, 2002 Vol-XIV No.29 — Editorial)
9/11 and after
9/11 is a defining time in American history much like Pearl Harbour. But because America is the sole superpower, its vulnerability and rage at the historical pinnacle of its power has had a blowback effect on the rest of the world. Afghanistan has been pulverized by “daisycutters” and occupied by American forces. But despite the “regime change”, a stable, pro-West, Afghan state is still nowhere in sight. The Al-Qaeda has been uprooted from Afghanistan but the enigma of Osama bin Laden continues to haunt America.
The world was one with America on that fateful day last September. But a year later, anti-Americanism is rife everywhere, from the “deep”, enraged passions in the Muslim world to the “shallow”, cynical mutterings among traditional western allies of the US. And as America prepares to attack Iraq and engineer another “regime change” in pursuit of its security obsession, opinion is seriously divided not just among the American people but also within the American government and its allies about the wisdom of doing so. Meanwhile, a brash new American doctrine of “unilateralism” or “pre-emption” is causing concern everywhere, leading to suspicions that America may seek to exploit 9/11 by embarking upon a longer term strategy to “redefine” the world by carving out new states and political systems in the Middle-East and beyond.
9/11 has also falsely pitted the West against the Muslims of the world by disfiguring the image of Islam, a religion of peace. In places like Kashmir and Palestine, especially Palestine, their “cause” has visibly suffered: Israel has exploited the American war against terrorism to equate the desperate suicide-bombers of Palestine with terrorists; and India has clutched at it to successfully redefine the Kashmiri struggle for liberation as “Pakistan-sponsored terrorism” even as the Hindu BJP went ahead and sanctioned an anti-Muslim pogrom in the state of Gujarat. Pakistan, too, has changed in significant ways as a result of 9/11. At first there was shock at the scale of the terrorist attacks in the US, then sympathy for the American people. But the sentiment seemed to change when Pakistan was forced to wean itself away from the Taliban and cooperate in the American attack on stone-age Afghanistan. Perceptions worsened when India sought to exploit the situation by making aggressive military deployments on the border. The renewed Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, the mounting civilian casualties in Afghanistan, the Gujarat killings, the mistreatment of Muslim prisoners of war by the Americans, all helped create the impression that America was bent upon making war against Islam.
Worse, amid the cacophony orchestrated by the religious parties, terrorism turned around and attacked Pakistan itself. The barbaric murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, followed by bloody attacks on Westerners and Christians, indicated not just the depths to which Pakistan had plunged during its years of Talibanisation but also the rage of wounded “Islamic” pride at its powerlessness.
Of course, there is no small irony in the fact that 9/11 probably “saved” Pakistan from failing as a working state. General Pervez Musharraf’s support to America’s war against terrorism has generated an American-sponsored economic reprieve for Islamabad – apart from billions of dollars worth of debt rescheduling, significant write-offs and fresh injections of financial assistance from donor agencies, the American crackdown on illegal or unofficial sources of capital transfers and remittances by Muslim and Pakistani expatriates has led to burgeoning surpluses in the forex reserves of the State Bank of Pakistan. In fact, 9/11 enabled General Pervez Musharraf to solicit support for the promise of a “moderate” Pakistan in which General Zia ul Haq’s legacy of violent sectarianism and religious terrorism would come to an end. It may be recalled that before 9/11, Pakistan was the official refuge and recruiting ground for the bin Ladens of Saudi Arabia, the Omar Sheikhs of Britain, the Abu Zubaidas of Egypt, the Namanganis of Tajikistan, the Hanbalis of Indonesia and the even the Dawoods of Bombay. After 9/11, however, not only have these troublemakers evaporated, the religious parties have been sufficiently discredited to embolden the Musharraf government to roll back some of the more repressive so-called “Islamic” practices against historically oppressed and exploited sections of society like women and non-Muslims. In fact, after the suppression of the extremist clergy and their militias, the judiciary has felt safe enough to issue “Islamic” verdicts based on humanism.
However, the unintended consequences of 9//11 continue to shape Pakistan and the world. At home, a pariah general has become a trusted friend and ally of America, enabling the military in general and him in particular to bid for political institutionalization and longevity at the expense of civilian supremacy and democracy. Abroad, the pre-emptive passions unleashed by 9/11 in America, in Israel, in India, have made the world more unstable by sanctioning double standards in pursuit of unilateralist national security obsessions. In particular, the imminent American attempt for a “regime change” in Iraq could be fraught with far-reaching geo-strategic changes in the Middle-East and beyond which might presage a new era of war, boundary change and ethnic, religious or cultural cleansing. Only time will tell whether the world is a safer and surer place after 9/11.
(TFT Sep 20-26, 2002 Vol-XIV No.30 — Editorial)
Friend today, foe tomorrow
The United States was Saddam Hussein’s biggest supporter during his long war against Islamic Iran in the 1980s. In fact, Western companies supplied key components of Iraq’s military arsenal and Western governments turned a blind eye to the deployment and use of chemical weapons by Iraq against Iran. But today, Saddam Hussein is the personification of “evil”, his “weapons of mass destruction” (for which there is no credible evidence) have to be “unilaterally” destroyed, and his “regime” must be “pre-emptively” changed by force. Where else have we witnessed such a cynical about-turn in international relations?
In Pakistan, of course. For forty years, Pakistan was America’s “most trusted friend and ally” in its war against the “evil” communist empire. This “enduring friendship” (an echo of the current “enduring freedom” campaign against “terrorism”) prospered especially in the 1980s when our then military regime embarked on building a nuclear arsenal and “jihadising” state and society — the very elements of extremism that today threaten the West. Then, one fine day when the cold war was sputtering out— on September 9, 1990, to be exact – America announced that Pakistan had crossed the “nuclear red light”. It cut off all assistance and demanded that Pakistan freeze, cap and roll back its nuclear programme. In due course, it heaped sanctions on Pakistan and nudged it to comply with the new Western buzzword of electoral “democracy”. In fact, less than three weeks before the civilian coup and military counter-coup in Islamabad in October – on September 26, 1999, to be exact – a “senior” State Department official in Washington warned against a military takeover in Pakistan, emboldening the then Pakistani prime minister to try and oust the army chief who had “sabotaged” his US-sponsored peace initiative with India by triggering Kargil. It was therefore understandable why, after he seized power, General Pervez Musharraf was regarded as a pariah by the West and his regime subjected to a strong dose of sanctions for derailing “democracy”. But the worst snub was delivered in May 2000 by an American president who spent five merry days in India praising its “great democracy” and its Hindu BJP government (which nuclearised the subcontinent and provoked religious passions in the region) and five tense hours in Islamabad castigating Pakistan’s military strongman for the country’s manifold failures and deficiencies.
Then came September 11, 2001, and the pariah Pakistani General became a “trusted friend and ally” (where have we heard that phrase before?) in the West’s “war against terrorism” (substitute for “war against communism”). Presidential waivers against nuclear proliferation were swiftly granted in Washington and Congressional sanctions were thoughtfully lifted. Soon thereafter, billions of dollars in outstanding debts were rescheduled by the West, fresh loans were offered, military supplies were restored, and a stream of long lost Western friends flowed into Islamabad for brazen photo-ops with our dashing military strongman for standing with them in their hour of need. Suddenly, “democracy” in Pakistan became a lost cause, with General Musharraf being warmly congratulated for brilliantly “empowering the people” by “restructuring” the political system of Pakistan.
However, with regard to civil society, insult was added to injury when Western diplomats gamely began to tick off the “plus” points of the military government (“good governance”, “economic restructuring”, “free press”) against the failures and excesses of previous “democratic” regimes of the 1990s (“corruption”, “economic meltdown”, etc), the bald conclusion being that a “good” military government was better than a “bad” democracy – a notion that turns conventional wisdom on its head and leads to absurd conclusions. India is hugely corrupt and inefficient, but would the West condone an army coup to despatch the world’s “largest democracy”? Much of Latin America is plagued by bad democracies and failing economic systems that are constantly seeking financial bailouts by Western financial institutions, but is the US harking back to the good ol’ days of Noriega and Pinochet? Indonesia is wracked by bitter ethnic, political and religious strife, but the US is not hankering for another Suharto, is it?
This new-found Western “love” for General Musharraf should not turn his head and lead us to greater tragedy. Remember General Zia ul Haq? When his services were no longer required, he was cast away. Don’t forget Osama bin Laden. He was once a great “freedom fighter” against communism. Today he is the most wanted “terrorist” in the world. And the Taliban? In 1995, the US was negotiating with Mulla Umar on behalf of Unocal for oil pipeline rights through Afghanistan. Today he is a “fugitive from justice” and his country has been bombed back to the stone age. Likewise, the international agenda requires the services of General Musharraf and he is part of their “solution” today. Tomorrow, the nuclearised, jihadised, anti-India, Pakistan army will revert to being part of their “problem” and another “regime change”, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, will be thought necessary. That is when Pakistan will need a strong democratic consensus to fortify itself against another cynical about-turn by the international community in pursuit of its vested interests. And that is why General Musharraf’s exclusivist “military democracy” will wither on the vine along with him if it isn’t swiftly transformed into an inclusive popular democracy based on truth and reconciliation.
(TFT Sep 27-03 Oct, 2002 Vol-XIV No.31 — Editorial)
In the eye of the storm?
Last Tuesday, two Muslim “suicide-terrorists” attacked a Hindu temple in India’s Gujarat state, killing 30 innocent persons. Mr L K Advani slammed General Pervez Musharraf for instigating the attack. “They had planned this for some time”, he thundered. Hindu extremist groups immediately called for a nationwide strike in protest. Next day, unknown terrorists attacked a Christian social welfare organisation in Karachi, killing seven. This was the sixth attack on Christian and Western targets in Pakistan this year, which have killed more than 40 people. Only two days earlier, Lt Gen (retd) Moinuddin Haider, the interior minister, had blithely stated that “India and not Al-Qaeda, was behind the spate of terrorist attacks” in Pakistan against Western and Christian targets, including the 200 or so cases of bomb explosions in different parts of the country in the last three years.
As India and Pakistan knock each other for sponsoring terrorism, the violence in Kashmir continues unabated, with the toll of “collateral” damage rising by the day. India accuses Pakistan of infiltrating jihadis across the Line of Control. Pakistan routinely denies the charge. Meanwhile, a million soldiers of two nuclear armed armies stare down their gun sights, ready to press triggers at the slightest provocation. How long can this “bloody” tit-for-tat “standoff “ last?
Two recent developments seem significant. The US ambassador to India, Mr Robert Blackwill, has confirmed that Pakistani infiltration has risen in the last month. Islamabad has howled in protest and suggested Mr Blackwill may be a “victim of Indian propaganda”. But this snub has backfired. The US State Department insists that Mr Blackwill’s observations were “cleared” by Washington. That means that the US accepts the Indian allegation against Pakistan. This could be ominous. It follows earlier claims by Mr Richard Armitage, the US deputy secretary of state, that General Pervez Musharraf made a private and public pledge to “permanently block” infiltration across the LoC. But that’s not all.
India claims that the first two rounds of elections in Kashmir have been “free and fair”, with a credible voter turnout of over 40% that vindicates its policies in the state. Pakistan and the All Parties Hurriyat Conference stoutly deny this claim. They say the elections are a “sham”, with turnout between 3 –10 % in most constituencies. Independent Indian sources like the Coalition of Indian Society confirm that there was “widespread coercion by the security forces on the people to cast their vote”, along with significant voting “malpractises”. But the problem is that the US doesn’t concur with this Pakistani view of “sham” elections. Instead, it has praised India for reviving the electoral process. So there are two disagreements between the US and Pakistan.
Behind these US-Pak differences lies a more fundamental divergence of approach on the matter of Kashmir. The US, like India, wants to make the LoC a permanent border between the two countries and let New Delhi sort out its Kashmir problem “internally” by an “election-cum-repression” strategy. Thus it wants Pakistan to permanently end its jihadi infiltration into Kashmir. But Pakistan views this approach as part of the problem and not the solution. It thus follows that while stopping infiltration can only be a temporary respite to enable a conducive environment for tripartite negotiations between India, Pakistan and the Kashmiris to change the status quo, it cannot be prolonged to enable India to spurn talks with Pakistan by consolidating its internal “repression-cum-election” solution. Thus if Pakistani infiltration had significantly diminished between March and June, this was meant to signal an opening for India by Pakistan in which to start the process of tripartite negotiations in search of a solution for Kashmir. And if infiltration has increased since June, this is meant to signal Pakistan’s determined opposition to any attempt by India to exploit the Pakistani gesture by “going it alone” via the “elections-cum-repression” route in the expectation that the US can “account” for Pakistan. But can the US do that?
Under the present circumstances, probably not. Washington’s alliance with Islamabad against Al Qaeda will hold in the short term, encouraging Islamabad to demand a quid pro quo from Washington in terms of mediating the Kashmir dispute with India (and executing policies that compel such attention) rather than agree to concede India’s unilateralist viewpoint. In the event, Washington may have no option but to assure India of its longer term strategic support for its status quo “solution” even as it is unable to effectively censure Pakistan for sabotaging such “solutions” during its shorter-term tactical alliance period.
But if the US plays a passive and balancing role rather than an active one in favour of either country in the short term, Indo-Pak relations are bound to deteriorate. Both will seek to advance their interests. This danger would increase if the US attacks Iraq and is diverted from keeping a lid on Indo-Pak hostilities. Indeed, the situation could become perilous if India is emboldened to act militarily against Pakistan. Forget about the implications for South Asia. Coupled with the expected anti-American blowback from the war against Iraq, this would be the perfect setting to embroil the US in many new and dangerous wars at home and abroad.
(TFT Oct 04-10, 2002 Vol-XIV No.32 — Editorial)
Don’t do it, General Sahab
The press is up in arms against a package of “press laws” in the offing, one of which relating to defamation has been hastily promulgated. The All Pakistan Newspaper Society says these laws are “illegitimate, unethical, unconstitutional”. And now that General Pervez Musharraf is imperiously signing on the dotted line, we urge him to reconsider.
His government has garnered much goodwill at home and abroad by allowing a relatively free press to function and it would be silly, in fact stupid, to squander it on the eve of the government’s departure by provoking a bitter backlash – the APNS has vowed “to roll back these absurd, preposterous and uncivilised pieces of legislation masquerading as press laws”. After all, in a perverse sort of way, the Pakistani press has been a great “defender” of the military regime by constantly challenging the “sham” democracy of the “corrupt” politicians who “paved the way” for the generals to take over. To be fair, General Musharraf should admit that, by and large, he and his colleagues have had a “good” press personally, even though some journalists have not always agreed with the government’s political and economic policies. In fact, neither Benazir Bhutto nor Nawaz Sharif was as lucky, even though both had excellent personal relations with the leading owner-editors of the country and constantly showered them with assorted favours. General Musharraf would also do well to recall that when he overthrew Mr Sharif, the press played a significant role in telling the international community how repressive and autocratic the former prime minister had become, why no one was ready to shed tears at his sullied departure and why the military takeover was “welcomed” by many sections of society.
Regarding the press laws, the facts are as follows:
Senior representatives of the press sat down with top government officials over many months to hammer out a mutually acceptable compromise law aimed at regulating the printing and publishing of newspapers, books, etc. Why has the government now unilaterally decided to make amendments in the approved draft? This is a breach of trust and no excuse – that “these are minor amendments” – will suffice. Indeed, if these are minor amendments as claimed, all the more reason that the ministry of information should have sought the green light from the APNS before fiddling with the approved text. In fact, the “minor” amendment, which gives unacceptably sweeping powers to the newly formed District Coordination Officer, radically changes the spirit of the agreed draft law. But that’s not all.
There was also an agreed draft of a proposed Press Council to mediate conflict between the press and aggrieved parties, both government and private. Again, unilateral changes have been made in it sneakily which alter the bipartisan balance of the Council as originally envisaged and give the government a bigger say in deciding how many people and what sort of people will come to sit in judgment over alleged press indiscretions. As the APNS rightly put it: “Can the creation of a self-regulating and autonomous Press Council with one government representative out of 17 members merely exercising moral authority as originally agreed, be unilaterally converted by the Cabinet into a body in which the government appoints 9 out of 19 members and transforms it into a Press Court with wide ranging powers to cancel newspapers or ban them, constitute a ‘minor’ matter”?
Worse, much worse, the government has unveiled a new defamation act that hasn’t been discussed with the press at all, let alone approved by it. In fact, the press only got to know of it when it was leaked by some conscientious bureaucrat, implying that the government was hoping to give a departing kick to the press.
To be honest, this law smells very much like an anti-terrorist act aimed at getting “results” against the accused who are presumed to be guilty unless proven innocent. It mocks the law and blackens the faces of those in the ministries who drummed it up. Why do we need a new law when there is an existing defamation law that follows the strictures of other democratic countries and has been tried and tested in the High Courts and Supreme Court of Pakistan? And if the problem is not with the existing law but with the courts that take forever to conclude a case, shouldn’t the emphasis be on reforming the lumbering court system rather than fiddling with the law? Now that it has been enacted in the backdrop of our litigious culture, such a law will break the back of the free press in Pakistan. That is why even lay journalists across the country are joining hands with owner-editors to lay siege to it.
General Musharraf is about to hand over many powers to the very politicians he despises and accuses of being corrupt and irresponsible. He should therefore be thinking of empowering the press to help him hold the “new democrats” accountable. Instead he is seeking to cripple the press. Strange are the ways of simple, well-meaning soldiers. They still don’t know how to distinguish between friend and foe. They still don’t know how to distinguish between short-term contingencies and long-term interests. General Sahab, please don’t do it.
(TFT Oct 11-17, 2002 Vol-XIV No.33 — Editorial)
Whither Musharrafic democracy
General Pervez Musharraf promised to hold elections before the end of 2002 and he has kept his word. If he had so wanted, he could have deferred the polls on one pretext or another without worrying too much about the strictures of the Supreme Court (which takes a “pragmatic” view of the law of necessity) or censure of the international community (whose love for democracy is adulterated by practical considerations) or threat of political agitation (getting the voters out will be no mean task, forget about lighting fire on the streets). So let us give credit where it is due.
But the other side of the coin is smudged. General Musharraf had also vowed not to let Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif run for office and he has not relented despite the fact that both (Benazir more than Nawaz) still enjoy mass support and on that count alone had a right to contest the elections even if they didn’t deserve to do so. In fact, he has gone to extraordinary lengths to deny their rights, including a constitutional amendment to bar them from becoming prime minister for a third time.
General Musharraf had also explicitly determined to refashion the political system to reflect “true” rather than “sham” democracy. While we share his sentiment regarding the sham democracy of yesterday, his “true” democracy of tomorrow stands the very notion on its head and make us apprehensive. The core element of democracy, irrespective of the presidential or parliamentary nature of the political system, is civilian supremacy. But “Musharrafic democracy” grants an institutional political role to the armed forces by permitting the National Security Council to put a gun to the head of every parliament, prime minister and chief minister and order them to do its bidding. What if they still don’t?
“Musharrafic democracy” lays down a host of preconditions to preclude such a possibility. It requires that no political party or group, least of all the PPP or PMLN, should be able to get a majority in parliament and strike out on its own. This, in turn, requires a degree of pre-poll rigging – using the intelligence agencies, the NAB, the courts and the central and provincial administrations to split the PMLN, bar Bhutto and the Sharifs, prop up the PMLQ, and encourage dissenters from all the “opposition” parties to stand as pro-Musharraf “independents” – to produce “positive” results conducive to Musharrafic democracy.
Secondly, it requires that under no circumstances should any conceivable grouping of opposition parties, especially between the PPP and PMLN, be able to muster a 2/3rds parliamentary majority to overthrow the constitutional amendments that form its bedrock. This also means that the hand of the newly formed “internal security” apparatus will become more and not less ubiquitous after the elections in continually “managing” the parties and parliaments in defence of Musharrafic democracy.
Third, it requires the continuing financial and political support of the international community, especially the US, so that the constitutional instability built into such an unnatural structure is not allowed to adversely impact the economy and provoke a populist backlash against its creators. This, in turn, means that Musharrafic democracy must deliver the strategic requirements of the international community, especially the US, at home and in the region and contend with its unpredictable consequences and backlash, or choose a more autonomous and conflictual path and risk a destabilising rupture as happened with previous military dictators.
This is a tall order. It involves continual juggling with slippery politicians, fickle foreign powers, unpredictable judges, argumentative journalists and restless masses, elements that combine to defy the Manichean black and white, managerial perspective of soldiers. What if the throw of the voters’ dice defies the “laws” of Musharrafic democracy and provokes a desperate numbers game in Parliament that discredits the whole process?
Our history shows that coalition governments in centralised systems have rarely been stable just as strong single-party governments in autocratic cultures have seldom been democratic. The problem with Musharrafic democracy is that it is fated to clutch at the worst of both such worlds for survival. If General Musharraf is to remain the real source of power, it will be necessary to fracture the polity so that no strong, organised political challenge can be mounted to him institutionally. But a fractured polity in a contentious political structure is a recipe for instability just as coalition governments under consensually built political systems are evidence of functioning democracies.
General Musharraf has been wrongly advised to marginalise the two mainstream parties for purposes of stability simply because they remain synonymous with their flawed leaders. It should have been the other way round. If circumstances have propelled him to Islamabad, he should have got the two errant but charismatic leaders to play by the agreed constitutional rules of the game (as General Waheed did in 1993). He should then have returned to Rawalpindi instead of staying on to rewrite the rules and knock out the two leaders and parties from the new game. Sooner or later this core truth will out. When it does, we hope that the well-meaning, moderate and pragmatic General Musharraf is able to grasp it and make amends.
(TFT Oct 18-24, 2002 Vol-XIV No.34 — Editorial)
The buck stops at General Musharraf
For better or for worse, General Pervez Musharraf must pick up the tab for the MMA’s feast of votes. He allowed the mullahs to vent fire and venom at public rallies and exploit anti-American sentiment in the country. But he restricted the moderate PPP and PMLN from reaching out to their voters. He hobnobbed with the MMA leaders and boosted their political credibility. But he blasted the PPP and PMLN and forced their leaders into exile. He approved madrassa “graduates” even as he downgraded madrassa education. But he shaved off a large chunk of non-graduate moderates from the political scene. He bailed out sectarian militants and pitted them against the mainstream parties. But he dragged PPP and PMLN leaders to NAB prisons and blocked their electoral campaigns. Worse, he secretly nudged the religious parties to unite under one banner and cash in their votes but ruptured the PML and PPP so that their voters were rent apart.
In the event, the MMA mustered a maximum of 10% (2.9m) of the votes cast (29.5m) for the National Assembly, up from about 7% (1.4m for all religious party candidates) of the total vote cast (20.3m) in 1993 (in 1997, the Jamaat-i-Islami boycotted the polls). This suggests that although the total vote bank of the religious parties has doubled in numbers (by 1.5m) over 1993-2002, at least 40% of this 1.5m (600,000) is due to an increase in the number of their natural voters owing to population growth as well as to a reduction in the voting age from 21 to 18 years and only 60% (900,000) is due to the autonomous increase in the vote bank of the religious parties based on a shift of voter preferences from the mainstream parties to the religious parties. But a 60% preferential increase of the vote bank of the religious parties amounting to less than 1m voters out of nearly 30m (3.3%) has led to a situation in which they have upped their tally of NA seats from 9 out of 207 in 1993 (4.3%) to 45 out of 272 (16.5%) in 2002, which is an increase of nearly 500% in their total number of NA seats and a jump of nearly 400% in their political stake in the national assembly!
So there it is. Thanks to General Pervez Musharraf’s anti-PPP/PML and pro-America policies, coupled with his constitutional tinkering (an increase in constituencies and a reduction of the voting age), about 1 million voters have changed loyalties, jumped ship and created havoc for the mainstream parties. It may also be noted that, generally speaking, the voter turnout was lower in constituencies won by the MMA (average turnout in NWFP, Balochistan and FATA was 29.5%) than in those in which the mainstream moderate parties won (average turnout in Punjab and Sindh was 42.3%). This suggests that General Musharraf’s relentless harangue against “corrupt politicians” led many previous or potential supporters of the PPP/PML/ANP to stay at home in the borderlands of Pakistan and waste their vote, thereby indirectly giving a fillip to the MMA whose conservative but aggressive voters brushed aside the weak and splintered vote bank of the others.
In many ways, therefore, the MMA’s situation today is akin to the PML’s situation in 1997 when the bulk of the PPP vote sulked and stayed at home rather than switch to the PML while the PML voters came out in their usual strength and swept the NA with a 2/3rd majority in the lowest-ever election turnout (35%). But this also suggests that if the PPP was able to make a significant comeback and redeem the situation in 2002, the MMA need not be here to stay forever, especially since its “sweeping victory” is based on a shift of voter preferences of less than 1m out of 72m Pakistanis. So where do we go from here?
It is best to leave the MMA to its own devices in the NWFP so that both those who have voted for them and those who shirked their responsibility to vote should get a taste of the mullahs’ medicine. Elsewhere in the provinces, one should stick as close as possible to a healthy compromise between the wishes of the voters and the necessities of competitive rather than combative or manipulative politics. Similarly, the grand national interest as opposed to the miniscule mullah sentiment would seem to extrapolate a coalition government that excludes the mullahs from the federal government. They are entitled to sit on the opposition benches as behoves their contrary opinion and minority status without undue support from the chair in both houses of parliament. But will this happen?
Left to their own grubby ways, the mainstream politicians will ally with the devil if necessary to get a slice of the action, irrespective of the stability and welfare of the country. Therefore the buck will still stop at General Pervez Musharraf. If he doesn’t want Pakistan to reap the whirlwind of what he has sown, the cynicism and adventurism of the establishment must stop.
(Oct 25-31, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 35 – Editorial)
Knocking heads
Who will be the next prime minister? Is this a matter of idle curiosity or does it matter in the larger scheme of things planned by General Pervez Musharraf & Company?
General Musharraf has recently avowed “neutrality” in the selection of the prime minister and the formation of the government in Islamabad. Indeed, he has absolved himself of responsibility for the delay in the formation of the new government and spurned the suggestion that various government agencies are working to promote or induce a prime minister and government of his choice.
This is a strange spin on his confessed role as Midwife-in-Chief of the new system in the offing. Surely, one can logically conclude that if he wants to stay in charge and ensure “continuity”, as he has insisted time and again, and for which reason he has gone to so much trouble to design and cobble a new political system and enable the PMLQ to win the most seats in parliament, he would be a hands-on president at all times, especially now when firm direction is needed to steer all the players in the “right” direction under the “right” leader.
Subterfuge is the order of the day. If that were not the case, the Legal Framework Order wouldn’t have been so careful in giving General Musharraf the right to stipulate when the first and second sessions of the national assembly will be held after the conclusion of the general elections. The first session will swear in the MNAs under the umbrella of the LFO and elect the Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the House and the second session will choose the Leader of the House (Prime Minister) by a majority of the votes of the assembly through a secret ballot. Should the first session prove unproductive because it cannot determine the Speaker and Deputy Speaker, there would be no reason to notify the second session and a constitutional deadlock would follow. And if the first session is productive but the second session is not – meaning that no party nominee can muster a majority – then there would be another constitutional deadlock. In the event, and in order to be failsafe, General Musharraf would either have to dissolve the assembly and order fresh elections or amend the LFO to enable himself to nominate a person, whether or not he or she is a member of the national assembly, who, in his discretion, is likely to command a majority of the votes of the assembly and give such a person a specified time frame in which to obtain such a majority.
Therefore, in order to avoid any constitutional deadlock which discredits his carefully constructed system at the very outset, it makes eminent sense to avoid setting a date for a meeting of the national assembly until General Musharraf has secretly nominated the right person for the job of prime minister and secretly helped him or her to obtain the support of a majority of MNAs before the national assembly meets for the first time.
But that is not General Musharraf’s only requirement. The political and economic edifice crafted by him needs stability for credibility and longevity. That means that the coalition federal government must not only stand the test of time under a wise and enduring prime minister but also that such a prime minister should see eye to eye with General Musharraf on all critical matters. Under the circumstances, how can General Musharraf risk the luxury of “neutrality” in the stitching up of the new coalition government under a new prime minister? How can he not take responsibility for the delay in the formation of the government when it is positively against his interests to give a free or ready hand to the various parties to make and break coalition governments and prime ministers, not just to mock his new system but perhaps to challenge it as well? No, the next national assembly cannot meet until the whole “workable” dispensation is in place – prime minister, NA speaker, Senate Chairman and Chief Ministers of all the provinces.
In the final analysis, however, the decision will hinge on General Pervez Musharraf’s assessment whether it is better to have the MMA in the federal government or out of it. And if the MMA is to be kept out, whether the PPP should be in or out of the loop. The question of who will be prime minister and what sort of government we will get will follow a resolution of these issues rather than precede it. Until then, heads will not be knocked together in parliament.
Dr Khalid Ranjha, the federal law minister, says there is no legal bar on anyone who has twice been a provincial chief minister to become prime minister. This may give Mr Zafarullah Jamali some cheer, particularly since he has obtained the backing of Chaudhary Shujaat, the king-maker in the King’s Party. But it is still too early to predict the outcome. Other scenarios favour Mr Farooq Leghari or Mr Khurshid Kasuri, both good candidates. The possibility of a dark horse winning the race cannot be ruled out either.
(Nov 01-07, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 36 – Editorial)
Contemptuous and cynical
We have survived the nasty time of General Zia ul Haq. We have stumbled through the hopeless government of Benazir Bhutto. We have fought the despotic regime of Nawaz Sharif. Fortunately, General Pervez Musharraf’s administration is not as malevolent as Zia’s, nor as flaky as Bhutto’s, nor indeed as miserable as Sharif’s. But it is by far the most contemptuous and cynical of them all. Consider.
General (retired and resigned) Tanvir Naqvi’s constitutional amendment package ran into 86 full pages. The regime’s attempt to overhaul the constitution demonstrated its utter contempt for it. But when there was a public outcry, the proposals were cynically whittled down and the perpetrators of the outrage skulked away to bide their time.
The Election Commissioner had also explicitly stated that ministers should resign their posts well before the elections if they wanted to contest them. Some did, but others just didn’t give a damn, as for example, Sindh provincial minister Arbab Ghulam Rahim, who served on the Soomro cabinet until the very end and won NA-229 Tharparkar I. Now a clutch of serving federal ministers is contesting for the Senate elections and to hell with the EC’s orders.
General Musharraf has signed more Ordinances in the last two weeks than in the last two years. Some are fairly innocent, affecting industrial relations, health, banking, etc. But many impinge on important matters of public interest that have been promulgated without any public debate at all. We refer specifically to controversial amendments in the Criminal Law Reforms Ordinance, University Foundation Ordinance, Defamation Ordinance, etc. Worse, much worse, are cases in which stark political motivation has prompted extraordinary changes to facilitate General Musharraf’s sneering game plan. This, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had allowed General Musharraf to change the law only for the purposes of the “ ordinary orderly running of the state”. The record cries out for notation.
- The earlier law banning anyone from holding the office of CM or PM more than twice was Benazir-Nawaz specific. But this was buttressed as late as October 19, nine daysafterthe general elections, with an amendment making it mandatory for contestants to the Senate to apply in person to the EC, just in case Shahbaz Sharif and/or Kulsoom Nawaz (or any other personas non grata)got it into their heads to try and sneak into the Upper House in absentia at the nth minute.
- On the night of October 9, a day before the general elections, General Musharraf was pleased to decree an unconditionalextensionof three years in the tenure of all judges of the High Courts and Supreme Courts. No reasons were given for this act of unprecedented generosity. But it did create the perception that the judiciary’s back was being scratched for cooperating with the junta beyond the call of justice and fair play.
- The government amended the Legal Framework Order 2002 in the early hours of October 10, the day of the general elections, to allow independent candidates to join any political party within three days of winning the elections. “The move was calculated”, as one columnist put it, “to help the government-supported PMLQ party” which has since grabbed “18 out of 21” such independents, making a veritable mockery of the natural numbers game in parliament.
- Since October 12, when the legal writ of the regime may be assumed to have ended, a spate of amendments have descended upon Pakistan’s unwary and unworthy politicians to steer them along the true path. Mir Zafrullah Jamali’s ambitions to become prime minister have beenspecificallyaccommodated by amending the law that bans those who have twice held the office of CM and PM from filling either slot for the third time. The latest law that bans anyone who has lost the general elections from contesting for the Senate is aimed at knocking out many troublesome politicians from across the divide, not least a gang of Sharif loyalists including Raja Zafarul Haq and Tehmina Daultana, as well as a coterie of independent minded Sharif haters including Fakhr Iman and Abida Hussain, etc. For good measure, ineffectual “leaders” like Mian Azhar have been scuttled to clear the way for Mr Jamali while irksome nationalists like Asfandyar Wali, who thought they had a deal going with General Musharraf, have been carelessly discarded. Finally, fear of the MMA has led to a new decree banning FATA MNAs from joining any party or group, which goes against the new law enabling independent MNAs to join political parties.
The numbers game is not over by any stretch of the imagination. The next law will doubtless enable MNAs to switch party loyalties on “matters of conscience” so that “forward blocs” from the opposition can be facilitated for the smooth running of the next PMLQ government.
General Pervez Musharraf is marrying the much married and divorced Muslim League. He is also making a house of cards for his bride. But when the bridal suite begins to crumble, as indeed it must, the PMLQ will desert the general as surely and swiftly as she has done many past masters.
(Dec 27, 2002-Jan 02, 2003, Vol – XIV, No. 44 – Editorial)
Forgive us our trespasses
General Pervez Musharraf made a number of candid remarks at a speech in Islamabad recently. These comments open a window into the mind of the most powerful man in Pakistan. Unfortunately, some are ominously off target.
“Pakistan”, explained General Musharraf, “is an imperfect society”. “I am also an idealist … but when I see the imperfect environment I realise that idealistic solutions will not work … (thus) when idealism and pragmatism clash, I believe in following pragmatism”. This is a theme to which General Musharraf constantly returns, as if not just to explain some of his more controversial policies and somersaults but also to justify them. His earlier arguments were couched in the discourse of “changing ground realities”. The ground reality has changed, so policy must be changed. Perish the thought that the policy in question might have been wrong in the first place because policy makers hadn’t done their homework or because they had clutched at false assumptions.
Of course, pragmatism is a wonderful thing. It is pragmatic to rub shoulders with crooked politicians who do your bidding blindly but idealistic to hobnob with them if they don’t, never mind how “unfair” or “unjust” or “discriminating” or even “immoral” such political behaviour may seem, regardless of whether politicians or generals indulge in it. It is also pragmatic to change the law or suspend the constitution when it suits you and idealistic to entrench the law and uphold the constitution when it doesn’t, never mind what harm such capricious notions of justice and fair play do to the social psychology of the state and its institutions. And if the end always justifies the means, or if the end is to be determined by one man in his finite wisdom, however good and sincere his intentions, what is all the fuss about institutions, checks and balances and accountability?
Then there is the big bad press. From Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif to General Musharraf, it remains every ruler’sfavourite whipping boy. Of course, Mr Sharif simply adored the press when he was in opposition and Ms Bhutto was in government and vice versa. And of course, General Musharraf just loved it when the press informed the world just how bad Mr Sharif was and how good General Musharraf might turn out to be. Alas. Has the “ground reality” changed, as it inevitably does, and is it time to become pragmatic and crack the whip again?
“We have given maximum freedom to the media but it always paints a bleak picture”, said the good general. Then, warming to his theme, he muttered, “Sometimes I ask myself whether I should have given freedom to such an extent because newspapers distort the facts.” Here is the threat to reveal the iron fist beneath the velvet glove. “The enemy lies within” and it apparently includes journalists “who are sitting abroad and working against the interests of the country”.
A graver charge-sheet against the press than “the enemy within” has not been assembled. However irresponsible, the press has fought for its freedom and paid the price for it time and again. Nor is freedom anyone’sto give or allot like a corner plot of land. Freedom is humankind’s inalienable fundamental right. Autocratic rulers come and go but the cry of freedom remains undiminished and unvanquished. Sometimes soldiers used to taking and giving orders cannot understand how civil society is supposed to function, but that doesn’t alter the ground reality. It is also worth asking just how much “press freedom” actually exists under the Musharraf regime.
To be sure, there was greater press freedom in the first two years of the Musharraf regime than in the last year of the Sharif regime. It is also true that General Musharraf has “allowed” a relatively freer regime in the public sector than ever before. But whatever his personal inclinations, the fact is that Mr Sharif began to lean on the press when the going got rough for him and the press began to reflect the ground reality in 1999. Equally, the “free” press was General Musharraf’s best friend when he was flogging his “idealism” and promising to break with the unholy past in 1999. But now that he is being as “pragmatic” as his predecessors, doesn’t the press have a right to lament his loss of innocence?
The fact is that more journalists have been secretly whisked away and beaten up or warned under the Musharraf regime than under the Sharif regime. The fact is that the recent amendments in press laws are a step back from the freedoms enjoyed under earlier regimes. The fact is that the new anti-defamation law threatens to be the blackest law in the history of the press in Pakistan, not least because the editor-in-chief, editor and chief reporter of a leading paper have been dragged before an anti-terrorist court under it. Is this a record that does General Musharraf proud?
We believe General Pervez Musharraf is a decent, good, liberal and well-meaning man who has Pakistan’s best interests at heart. But if some of us don’t always reflect this belief, we may be forgiven our idealistic trespasses in the face of changing ground realities.
(Dec 06-12, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 41 – Editorial)
Economic prospects and political alignments
Prime minister Zafarullah Jamali’s unthinking utterance about restoring Friday as the weekly holiday at the behest of the mullahs is most unfortunate. It shows how clueless he is about the ways in which our domestic economy and national well-being are critically integrated with and linked to the global market via trade and aid and why it is necessary to stay in tune with international financial practices.
Mr Jamali’s misplaced zeal for the MMA can create problems in the economic reform programme so painstakingly initiated three years ago by General Pervez Musharraf. The new prime minister, it seems, is all too willing to make untoward concessions to the MMA, including a commitment to implement various impractical recommendations of the Islamic Ideology Council, in exchange for its political support in Islamabad. Does he know, for example, how necessary and hard it was for the Musharraf government to manipulate a reversal of an earlier decision by the Shariat Bench of the Supreme Court that equated “interest” with riba and outlawed it at the behest of the IIC and Federal Shariat Court?
Let’s face it. The MMA is not good for business and the economy. Its leaders thunder about keeping women out of the work force in many sectors, discourage tourism, seek to institutionalise smuggling and gun-running, outlaw interest, encourage default on foreign debt, threaten to kick the IMF and World Bank out of Pakistan, and disrupt and censor the entertainment industry. These are all negative measures that don’t inspire confidence. And it’s not as if the mullahs are all work and no play – it’s more like all preachers and no workers. In fact, not one MMA-MNA or MPA has formulated a single positive policy proposal to spur trade and investment in the provinces under MMA control now. Nor, for all its moralistic sermonising, is “corruption” a real issue for the MMA. The stunning speed with which two MMA leaders convicted for corruption were sprung from NAB prisons in Balochistan even before the ink on the MMA’s accord with Mr Jamali was dry is noteworthy. Indeed, the MMA’s demand that the Frontier Corps should be subservient to the provincial government should not be construed as some principled requirement of provincial autonomy. It is solely aimed at ensuring that institutionalised smuggling of petroleum and other items from Iran should not be disrupted.
We live in interesting times. The stock market jumped at the conclusion of the elections peacefully but plunged when the MMA swept two provinces and grid locked government formation in Islamabad. Since then, the market has been nervously watching for signs of unease in international credit rating agencies, financial donors and Pakistan’s strategic partners like the USA and EU which have quietly expressed misgivings about the manner in which election results have been contrived. This is hardly a conducive environment for investing in the future. But there is much more at stake than meets the eye.
The “grand economic achievements” of the Musharraf regime flow from a political change in the strategic environment in which Pakistan is situated. Despite two years of Musharrafic economics, the fact is that until 9/11 forex reserves were barely US$1 billion, foreign debt was a whopping US$38 billion, debt payments amounted to a crippling US$4 billion a year, IMF assistance was barely US$500 per year, the fiscal deficit was as high as 7.5% of GDP, exports were hardly US$9 billion a year, remittances were under US$1 billion a year, the currency had fallen to Rs 68=US$1, privatisation had stalled, foreign direct investment was a trickle at less than US$250 million a year, large scale manufacturing growth was rock bottom at 1.5%, and domestic investment had shrunk to below 12% of GDP. Then came 9/11. When General Musharraf swiftly about-turned politically, the international community rewarded Pakistan by re-profiling US$12 billion in debt and nudged donor institutions to increase economic assistance by over 200%. The American anti-terrorist crackdown on money laundering and havala transfers led to a shift of remittances from unofficial to legal channels, burgeoning the forex balances of the State Bank of Pakistan, and the inflow of dollars from foreign bank accounts of Pakistanis liable to scrutiny by American agencies flooded the forex market and upped the value of the rupee. With a surge in economic confidence, foreign buyers now stepped into the market to buy United Bank Ltd and got ready to pick up PSO, HBL, etc.
The necessary conditions for economic revival are finally at hand only because the domestic political environment has been suitably aligned with the international community after 9/11. But the sufficient conditions for take off into self-sustained economic growth (rising domestic and foreign investment, employment and poverty alleviation) await appropriate confidence-building measures and consolidation of this political relationship. That is why it would be tragic not just from General Musharraf’s personal point of view but also from the point of view of Pakistan’s national interests if the budding relationship between the PMLQ and the MMA, or indeed the political and economic antics of the MMA on its own, were to cast a shadow on the hard-won prospects of the economy by alienating the international community or driving a wedge between Pakistan and the US that would lead to a reversal of Pakistan’s fortunes. Forewarned is forearmed.
(Dec 20-26, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 43 – Editorial)
What a pity!
After three “comfortable” years at the crease, General Pervez Musharraf has handed over the bat to Mr Zafarullah Jamali. In the event, it is only natural that he should wish to tally his score while making sure that Mr Jamali is able to build on it. How did General Musharraf fare?
Ruling by decree is always less “problematic” than ruling by consensus. That is why General Musharraf had few difficulties promulgating nearly 300 Ordinances in three years. But the true measure of a leader or government doesn’t lie in any such dubious records. Nor is it incumbent on the ease or difficulty with which he or she is able to survive in a dictatorial dispensation. It is, in fact, measured by two yardsticks: the courage and efficiency with which hard but necessary economic choices are mediated and institutionalised in a longer term perspective of national power; and the ability and willingness to ground such economic restructuring in a stable and democratic political framework that is conducive with the broad aspirations of the people.
The Musharraf regime has heaped laurels upon itself by a favourable comparison of various economic statistics before it took power in 1999 and after it relinquished it in 2002. This exercise certainly has propaganda value. For instance, it is heartening to be told that the SBP’s forex reserves were barely equivalent to one month’s import bill in October 1999 but have now burgeoned to account for ten months of imports. Remittances have also ballooned nearly three times since 1999. But it is not terribly enlightening to flog such figures without putting them in a proper context. Much of the good news is a consequence of an unplanned political somersault by the military regime last year as a result of 9/11 which led to an unprecedented economic bailout of Pakistan by a grateful international community rather than any intended or direct result of economic planning at home. Indeed, if that hadn’t been the case, the one true barometer of the economy – the exchange rate – wouldn’t have depreciated from Rs 54:1US$ in late 1999 to Rs 68:1US$ in late 2001 before climbing back to Rs 58:1US$ in the last twelve months. Nor should it be necessary to point to short term “achievements” like these when, by its own admission, the Musharraf regime is only really concerned about the long-term nature of its reform programme and is exhorting people to bear with it until it delivers fruit.
Indeed, the true economic achievements of this regime are quite laudable by any standards. Certainly, the broad parameters of absolutely necessary economic restructuring in the last three years are writ large. The State Bank is more autonomous and efficient and transparent today than ever before. That is a great achievement. The Securities and Exchange Commission is setting new standards in establishing and enforcing its regulatory writ. That is a most critical development for strengthening the market economy. The ongoing reform of the banking structure, including a rationalisation of the loan portfolio, is noteworthy. The attempt to rationalise the tax structure and reform the CBR, however insufficient, is a step in the right direction. WAPDA’s ability to get private power producers to reduce the rate at which they sell power to the government has appreciably reduced the long-term burden on the exchequer. The opening up of the telecommunications sector to private initiative, however lumbered, is the need of the hour. The pruning of Pak Railways, however painful, was long overdue. And so on.
It is on the political front, however, that General Musharraf’s record is bad. Forget about the “over-killed” referendum. Or the much-flaunted local empowerment system that is already being downgraded. These things don’t much matter to the economy. What matters is the development of a stable democratic system which enjoys broad domestic and international legitimacy so that the good economic reforms initiated three years ago can find root in it and be institutionalised. And it is on this score that the greatest doubts persist.
General Musharraf’s “boys” have been instructed to prop up the PML(Q) by hook or by crook to the exclusion of other deserving contenders for sharing power. For instance, the PPP has got more votes than any party in the country, yet it has been kept out of the loop This is a repeat of past military follies that first led to the creation of the MQM, then the Nawaz League and later the Haqiqis, all of whom began as being part of the military’s solution and ended up as being part of the country’s problem. The religious parties, too, were originally part of the MMA (Military-Mullah Alliance) solution. Today they are part of the problem. This approach won’t work because it leads to a dead end. The need of the hour is to incorporate all the elements of national power, including the mainstream political parties and their leaders, into a coherent and workable whole in the long term rather than to dissipate them at the altar of political expediency in the short run as in the past.
General Pervez Musharraf’s economic reforms are worthy. His political opportunism is not. A sound economic base cannot be sustained by such a wobbly superstructure. What a pity.
(Nov 29-Dec 05, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 40 – Editorial)
Good men all
Is General Pervez Musharraf pleased with the way his “boys” have managed to kickstart the new political system? We don’t know. But we imagine he must have misgivings at the very least, partly because of who’s in and who’s out, and partly because his dispensation lacks a moral underpinning. Unfortunately, too, General Musharraf cannot possibly be comforted by the fact that he has lost much personal goodwill since his disastrous referendum was followed by the most blatant micro and macro manipulation in Pakistan’s recent political and legal history.
The MQM is probably indespite its latest threats and the PPP is still outdespite its wishful thinking, even though the exiled leader of the former is charged with terrorism and murder while the exiled leader of the latter is only alleged to be corrupt. But the price that may have to be paid for the votes of the MQM in Islamabad could be prohibitively high. Never mind that the army’s intelligence agencies will have to bid farewell to the Haqiqi in Karachi (it was used by them to crack down on the MQM in 1992 and assiduously nourished since then); the real worry is that an opportunist alliance with the MQM at the expense of the PPP might degenerate into the same sort of unholy nexus that brought the city of Karachi and the province of Sindh to their knees from 1990 to 1992 and spawned violent terrorism, repression and instability until 1995.
The PPP is out, not just in Islamabad but also probably in Sindh, even though it was able to obtain more votes than any other party not just in the country but also in the province. This seems politically “un-natural” because General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto share the same forward-looking, modern, internationalist agendas. It is even more intriguing when you consider the perception that the gulf of morality and righteousness that apparently separated them personally has evaporated in recent times, with the one looking worse and the other looking better than before. This is partly the fault of General Musharraf who seems to have developed some sort of unwarranted personal “fixation” against Ms Bhutto; and partly the fault of Ms Bhutto who may have coveted too much too soon. This relationship is hurting the PPP by forcing defections from its ranks, which is not a healthy political development. But it is also shoving General Musharraf into the arms of potentially dysfunctional allies.
The MMA, however, is both in and out. It is inwhere it matters to it – in the NWFP and Balochistan. In both provinces, it will have full political freedom to advance its holy agendas and undermine Pakistan’s international commitments. And it is outin Islamabad, where it will exploit its parliamentary platform to thunder against the “betrayal” and “treachery” of General Musharraf’s federal government and embarrass it domestically. Indeed, if the MMA can obtain the slot of the leader of the opposition in parliament, there are no prizes for guessing how it will use this privilege to gridlock the National Security Council so beloved of General Musharraf. More portentously from General Musharraf’s point of view, the MMA is determined to erode the sanctity of the two pillars on which his political survival depends: the office of the COAS and the LFO. Should General Musharraf be compelled to take off his uniform before the rules of the new game have been consolidated and institutionalised, or should he dilute the LFO before his political alliances have naturally evolved and matured, he would be a sitting duck before such motivated opponents. The irony is that just as General Musharraf seems to have taken a personalaversion to Benazir Bhutto rather than to the PPP, the leaders of the MMA have concluded that he personallyand not the army institutionally is unacceptable in their scheme of things.
The larger international environment in which General Musharraf’s domestic political agenda is rather precariously placed cannot be ignored for too long either. The coming war between America and Iraq is bound to stir deep and widespread rage in this country. But General Musharraf’s Pakistan depends on the economic and political support of the US while Pakistanis generally view Iraq as bearing the brunt of America’s hostility to Islam. If the MMA is able or enabled to exploit this sentiment, General Musharraf would be the big loser. The more the MMA rails against him and tries to destabilise him, the more the international community will question his political dispensation and alliances and lose confidence in his ability to run Pakistan effectively. This international perception would have repercussions far beyond the immediate, and highly dangerous allegations like transfer of nuclear know-how or technology to North Korea, or fears of Pakistan’s nuclear programme falling into the “wrong hands”, could acquire menacing proportions.
General Pervez Musharraf is a good man who started off well with much goodwill. Then he became infatuated with the dang fangled notions of the good man who conjured up a new political system for him. The advice of another good man plunged him into the referendum. A third good man has now shoved him into the lap of the hardworking Jats of the Punjab for political salvation. Need we say more?
(Sep 06-12, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 28 – Editorial)
Dangerous political vacuum
General Pervez Musharraf says Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif wanted to make deals with him, which he piously shunned. There was a time when this spiel probably appealed to Pakistanis disenchanted with the country’s two main parties, but after the referendum, the manipulation of local governments, visibly selective accountability, and the selective rejection of nomination papers for the October election, it no longer rivets public attention or gives the general the aura of legitimacy he craves. In fact, after three years of Musharrafics, Pakistan’s tainted politicians have been rebaptised into popularity. After the rejection of Benazir Bhutto’s papers, there have been protests in Karachi and Lahore, and Nawaz Sharif’s transparently disingenuous “gesture” of withdrawing his papers in sympathy with Ms Bhutto, has gone down well with the electorate. This is a measure of how much the general’s credibility has taken a beating.
Had General Musharraf been a romantic one would have accepted his statements. But he is highly pragmatic when it comes to removing threats to his power. Why then his posture of “not doing deals” with “discredited” politicians? The fact is that Musharraf is both things, pious and pragmatic, and this imbues his actions with ambivalence. Had he been as pragmatic at the beginning as he has been in manipulating the forthcoming elections, he could have got the Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan Peoples Party on board his proclaimed agenda to liberalise the country and put an end to extremism. But he was a “purist” of the Imran Khan variety at the beginning, refusing to have any truck with the tainted. However, he later rallied many of the same ilk to give shape to his plan of the post-2002 dispensation. But after the King’s Party had come into being, he once again allowed his habitual ambivalence to prevail. Amidst rumours of dubious envoys flying to Jeddah, the King’s Party was on tenterhooks: was he really with the PML (Q) or would he ditch them?
General Musharraf has created a huge political vacuum in Pakistan by decapitating the PML (N) and the PPP. Everyone is now clawing for supremacy in this space and chaos reigns even amongst the ranks of those who initially supported him. The Mutahida Majlis Amal (MMA), composed of many of the military’s favourite zealots, took the anti-American plank for some time, then developed cracks and now looks exhausted. Imran Khan and his Tehrik-e-Insaf thought the general was on the same wave length as themselves but they fell victim to the general’s ambivalence and moved aside accusing his principal secretary of collusion with the PML (Q). Following that, Imran Khan and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain of the PML (Q) publicly exchanged charges of corruption which did not redound to their electoral advantage. The Chaudhry, bemused by the many-sidedness of the general, first lashed out at what he thought was his secret deal with Shahbaz Sharif, then went public with his opposition to Musharraf’s Afghan policy. Imran Khan had already expressed his bitterness about the “betrayal” of the Afghan people by Musharraf. And a “liberalised” Allama Tahirul Qadiri doesn’t know where to go after breaking away from the rest of the parties under Islamabad’s tutelage.
It appears that the PML (N) has made a gradual comeback against its breakaway faction which many in Pakistan now consider contaminated by contact with the military. Similarly, the PPP (Parliamentarians) expect to do well while its two breakaway factions, led by Farooq Leghari and Aftab Sherpao, may win some seats. Thus, after the elections parliament will be populated by a motley crew with no single-party in a clear majority. This is supposed to suit the General-President down to the ground because parliament will look to him and his operatives to put together a strong majority to form a government.
What is likely to happen is that no one will be happy with the state of affairs, just as no one is really satisfied with the house that General Musharraf has built, not even, increasingly, the Americans, who think that he is half-hearted or simply duplicitous. Therefore, the next parliament will be an extremely noisy house in which cantankerous politicians will produce poisonous headlines on a daily basis, new press laws notwithstanding. General Musharraf’s new Afghan and Kashmir policies, which whet the American appetite without satisfying it, might well be the shoal on which the new dispensation could run aground. Politicians being politicians, the disgruntled ones will undermine the General’s paramountcy within the system by crying sellout to the Americans with no one to defend him in the cabinet to come. Not only will Pakistanis see this spectacle, the military and the international community too will clearly discern the confusion and lack of direction in Pakistan.
General Musharraf must guard against the rebuke he might earn in the US next week for manipulating the elections in Pakistan while he complains about the coming “rigged” election in Indian-Held Kashmir. The international press is in lockstep over the way Pakistan’s two main parties have been disabled just before the October elections. Going it alone after October 2002 on the basis of a few constitutional amendments is going to be perilous both for General Pervez Musharraf and for Pakistan.
(June 07-13, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 15 – Editorial)
Keep your fingers crossed
General Pervez Musharraf hopes his Almaty trip will yield dividends even though there was “no eye-contact”, let alone a handshake, with Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee. Pakistan, he said, was ready for “unconditional” talks with India. This offer follows an earlier commitment not to allow infiltration across the LoC. Together, the two commitments constitute an unprecedented peace package offering. How’s that?
Until now, Pakistan has always set the pre-condition that the Kashmir dispute should figure prominently in any dialogue. Also, Pakistan has never accepted the charge of cross-border infiltration, let alone commit itself to ending it swiftly. Indeed, the Agra dialogue was jettisoned by General Musharraf when the Indians countered with the demand to stop “cross-border terrorism”. Now Pakistan has conceded both Indian points unilaterally but India refuses to de-escalate and begin talks.
India says it will wait and see if General Musharraf makes good his promise. Meanwhile, it wants joint Indo-Pak border patrols across the Line of Control for verification purposes. This is a curious demand. Surely, if India can claim to know when cross border infiltration takes place, it should also know when it isn’t taking place. In fact, given that both armies are bristling with indignation and itching to have a go at each other, this is the sort of measure that may well provoke conflict rather than build confidence. So there is more to it than meets the eye.
This proposal was mooted after the Almaty conference declared a distinction between legitimate liberation struggles for self-determination against foreign occupation and illegitimate separatist struggles within internationally recognized territorial state boundaries. The Kashmir struggle falls into the first category for Pakistan and into the second for India. But if Pakistan were to accept joint border patrols along the LoC, India could argue that the LoC has been de facto treated like an international border, implying thereby that Kashmir is a part of India and the struggle in Kashmir is illegitimate.
This is not the first time India has floated such proposals. One such was the idea that India would offer visas to visitors from Azad Kashmir at border crossings along the LoC. If Islamabad had accepted this, its state practice would have legitimized Indian-held Kashmir as an undisputed part of India. Meanwhile, India continues to spurn international monitors along the LoC because it doesn’t want to internationalise the Kashmir dispute.
This Indian position has now become more untenable than ever before. The world is having nightmares about nuclear war in the region and international emissaries are rushing to South Asia to advise restraint. Yet India deludes itself into believing that the issue is still bilateral. Nuclear weapons and nuclear wars are international, global concerns. At the very least, a nuclear war between India and Pakistan would have a radioactive fallout on neighbouring countries. The irony is that it is India’s chilling threat of war that has internationalized the issue. Under the circumstances, India’s joint-border patrol proposal is aimed at shifting the goal post of dialogue rather than concretizing it.
Indeed, there are fears on at least two counts here. One, of course, is that India may shift the goal post and make a return to dialogue more difficult rather than easier. This could be done by offering unworkable or unacceptable formulas as pre-conditions for dialogue, e.g., a ceasefire by the Kashmiri insurgents, a repudiation of Pakistani involvement in a dialogue between New Delhi and the All Parties Hurriyet Conference, etc. In the event, Pakistan would be compelled to make its own demands and the whole effort at dialogue would be buried beneath a heap of pre-conditions and counter-preconditions. The second fear is that rogue elements in Pakistan and/or Indian-held Kashmir not in the control of General Musharraf’s intelligence agencies could strike out on their own and succeed in driving a blistering wedge between India and Pakistan. This has happened in the past – indeed is the very reason for the Indian troop buildup – whenever a foreign peacemaker of repute has descended on New Delhi to try and make it listen to reason. But India has always clutched at the “Pakistan-hand” theory even when the terrorist act has been patently against the interests of Pakistan. With senior American officials expected this week, it is anybody’s guess what lies in store for Indo-Pak relations in the short term.
Meanwhile, the post 9/11 world has concluded that Pakistan’s Kashmir policy of the last decade has “failed” because its reliance on militant Islamic jihad has shorn it of international support. In fact, the international community wants General Musharraf to take an immediate and unilateral about-turn on Kashmir policy as he did in the case of Afghanistan. Herein lies an acute dilemma not just for General Musharraf personally but also for the Pakistan army and the Pakistani nation. Can the quest for “ Kashmir banega Pakistan” be given up in any way? If not, what are the internal and external consequences for Pakistan? If yes, how is the process to be the successfully choreographed? If ever there was a turning point in Pakistan’s history, it has now arrived.
(Nov 22-28, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 39 – Editorial)
Gen Musharraf must compromise with Parliament
When Mr Zafarullah Khan Jamali was elected Leader of the House by 172 votes on Thursday – a mere six votes more than the 166 needed out of the 330 who have taken oath – he seemed mightily relieved. Indeed, that is why he thanked so many people by name, including several two-bit party “leaders”, for helping him scrape through with the skin of his back teeth. But he could not muster the courage to name two critical allies without whom he would have been whistling in the dark: Mr Altaf Hussain, who is accused of terrorism, murder, etc, and suffers self-exile, but who agreed to hand over 19 votes to him; and Mr Faisal Saleh Hayat, who is weighted down by the NAB, but who provided 11 turncoat votes to tilt the scales in Mr Jamali’s balance at the last minute. Ironically enough, though, Mr Hussain and Mr Hayat have one thing in common: each is at the mercy of the man to whom Mr Jamali owes his greatest debt – General Pervez Musharraf , who broke every rule in the book to ensure his “win”.
The next step is for Mr Jamali to take an oath as prime minister and follow that up by a vote of confidence of a majority of the members of the national assembly within 60 days. Should he do so immediately after being sworn in, he will require a miminum of 166 out of 330 votes. But if he waits until twelve new members have been elected in the bye-elections and sworn in, he will have to account for at least 172 in a House of 342. In any event, that should not pose any serious problems for him in the short term because his mentors will make sure that the PMLQ and its allies win at least 8 out of the twelve seats in contention. But what then? Will the MMA or PPP join Mr Jamali’s dubious coalition and make it stable and strong? Or is he fated to confront a strong and stable opposition instead which will send his government scurrying for cover at the drop of a hat?
The lucid speeches made in the national assembly by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Qazi Hussain Ahmad following Mr Jamali’s “thank-you” note suggest he is in for a rough time. The MMA and PPP leaders are sticking to their guns: they say they don’t accept the LFO and they won’t allow him to be president and army chief at the same time. This means they want him to come to the national assembly to negotiate the terms of his presidency and the scope of his powers as a civilian president. The MMA also intends to push for an “Islamisation” of state and society. But more critically, the MMA is dead set on embarrassing General Musharraf vis a vis his multi-faceted alliance with the United States. It may be noted that Mr Jamali studiously avoided risking any remark on these subjects. In fact, he was conspicuous by only noting China as a “friend”, even though he must be aware, like most others, that the substance of the economic “achievements” touted by General Musharraf in his address to the nation on Thursday night has flowed in large measure from the United States and the western international community after 9/11 when Pakistan and its military leader were nudged to transform themselves from a “failing state” with a “pariah dictator” into a “trusted ally” and “warm friend” respectively.
Fortunately, though, the mood in the National Assembly is still one of moderation and compromise. Mr Jamali was careful to point out that he would behave “democratically” with friends and opponents alike. The same tone was adopted by the MMA and PPP leaders who spoke on the occasion, even though they did not spare the Musharraf regime for midwifing the birth of the PMLQ and Mr Jamali. Indeed, in a subtle, behind-the-scenes compromise missed by most pundits, the opposition both rejected the LFO and accepted the legitimacy of the 11 votes cast by Faisal Saleh Hayat and Co that clinched the prime minister’s slot for Mr Jamali. This amounts to a contradiction in terms. If the MMA/PPP reject the LFO, they must logically also reject the suspension of the constitutional clause banning floor crossing decreed by the LFO, which means that the opposition should have demanded that the 11 votes cast by the turncoats be declared null and void by the Speaker. If the Speaker had acceded to the demand (unlikely), Mr Jamali wouldn’t have got a majority. If the Speaker hadn’t, the opposition could have boycotted the election process. In either case, General Musharraf would have had a right royal crisis on his hands. But that didn’t happen, suggesting that the opposition wants this parliament to survive and fight.
This is a good time for General Pervez Musharraf to demonstrate the same maturity as the opposition. He should climb off his high horse and make a historic compromise for the sake of the “true democracy” he professes. This can only be done by negotiating a permanent peace with parliament as a duly elected civilian president with some of the “stabilising” powers he seeks. The alternative is constitutional gridlock and political instability.
(Nov 08-14, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 37 – Editorial)
Winners and losers
The government has postponed the first session of the national assembly by a week. It claims it did so because the leaders of the main political parties had so demanded. In fact, statements to the effect from Chaudhary Shujaat Hussain, Makhdoom Amin Fahim and Hamid Nasir Chattha were flashed on the 9 pm news on PTV last Tuesday. But the twist in the tale is that Mr Fahim denies making any such demand and Ms Benazir Bhutto has accused the government of manufacturing it in order to malign the politicians for continuing to squabble.
The fact of the matter is that General Pervez Musharraf is in a royal fix. Two weeks ago, (TFT Editorial: Knocking heads, Oct 25) we pointed out that given the numbers game in parliament and the views of the PPP and MMA on civil-military relations and foreign policy respectively, “it was against his interests to give a free or ready hand to the various parties to make or break coalition governments and prime ministers”. We concluded that “it makes eminent sense to avoid setting a date for a meeting of the national assembly until General Musharraf has secretly nominated the right person for the job of the prime minister and secretly helped him or her to obtain the support of a majority of the MNAs before the national assembly meets for the first time”. Indeed, we argued that “the next national assembly cannot meet until the whole ‘workable’ dispensation is in place – prime minister, NA speaker, Senate Chairman and Chief Ministers of all the four provinces”. But our well-meaning analysis was lost on the General Musharraf’s whiz kids who confidently announced a national assembly session on Friday 8 November thinking they had already stitched up everything.
But the truth of the matter is that, despite careful orchestration and calibration of political parties and candidates, the glorious uncertainties of electoral politics can rarely be forecast. That is why the opposition parties didn’t boycott the process, despite provocation by NAB and circumvention by specific anti-personnel laws. But now it is time to take fresh stock.
Q: Why has the assembly session been postponed at the last minute?
A: Because the PMLQ doesn’t have the numbers to make a government without the PPP or the MMA at the moment.
Q: Why doesn’t the PMLQ ally with the MMA and be done with it?
A: Because the MMA wants Maulana Fazlur Rahman as prime minister.
Q: What’s wrong with him as prime minister?
A: The MMA is a red rag to General Musharraf because it opposes his economic and political reform programme, especially his pro-American stance in foreign policy. It would also send out all the wrong signals to Pakistan’s potential domestic and foreign investors by reinforcing the negative image of Pakistan abroad.
Q: What if the MMA gives up its demand for prime minister and settles instead for the speakership of parliament, the chief ministership of the NFFP and high stakes in the governments of Balochistan and Sindh?
A: Any high stakes alliance of the MMA with the PMLQ will severely dent General Musharraf’s domestic and international credibility and lead to continuing deadlocks and instability in government.
Q: So why doesn’t the PMLQ kiss and make up with the PPP?
A: One good reason. Ms Bhutto wants to nominate the PM, have all PPP bigwigs in detention freed, and be allowed to return to Pakistan and clear her name in the high courts. This is an unacceptably tall order of humble pie for General Musharraf and his self-righteous generals to stomach so quickly.
Q: So why doesn’t Ms Bhutto stop flirting with Maulana Fazlur Rahman and tone down her demands?
A: Because as long as she is perceived to be deadly serious in propping up Maulana Fazlur Rahman, she may expect to get a better deal from General Musharraf than if she were to ditch the MMA and clutch at the first offer from GHQ.
Q: What if General Musharraf should call her bluff?
A: Then she may carry out her threat to install an MMA prime minister in parliament on the grounds that it is better to have fought and won or lost than never to have fought at all and stayed put in the dog house.
Q: So what will General Musharraf do?
A: He will talk and fight with her – negotiate an alliance and whittle down her demands while holding out the threat of activating a suitable floor crossing law to cut her party down to size. Meanwhile, he will encourage the PLMQ to try and wean the MMA away from the PPP by hook or by crook.
Q: So what’s going to happen eventually?
A: If both Ms Bhutto and General Musharraf don’t miscalculate their strengths and weaknesses, a PMLQ-PPPP coalition government may be in the offing, followed by suitable adjustments in Punjab and Sindh. But if either overplays his or her hand, both will be losers, she in the short term and he in the medium term. In the long term, of course, Pakistan will be the real loser. Hopefully, by the time the national assembly is called next week the writing on the wall should be clearer.
(Jan 17-23, 2003, Vol – XIV, No. 47 – Editorial)
The Situation Room
BBC Four has recently produced a chilling docudrama titled “The Situation Room-April 2004”. It is about how the United States might respond in the event of a war between Pakistan and India that threatens to end in a nuclear holocaust. The events described in the film are fictional but the dangers discussed are very real.
The drama unfolds in a predictable manner. The Lashkar-e-Taiba assassinates the Indian defence minister in New Delhi. Outraged, India retaliates by ordering air strikes across the Line of Control in Azad Kashmir. Pakistan launches a counter attack. Soon both armies have crossed the international border and are engaged in a full-scale conventional war. However, before long, the weighty Indian forces are able to cut across and seize the Multan-Karachi road, threatening to besiege Karachi. Pakistan’s military machine is exhausted and the Pakistani president-chief of army staff picks up the phone and tells the American president that he will press the nuclear trigger unless Indian forces inside Pakistan halt in their tracks. The American president orders an emergency meeting of the National Security Council in the Situation Room of the White House that is used for crisis management.
BBC Four has directed the film in a novel fashion. First, the actors are all real and powerful political players who have been in crisis situations before. The US president in the film is played by Rick Inderfurth (former Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia), the secretary of state is played by Tom Pickering (former Assistant Secretary of State), the vice-president is Bob Oakley (former US ambassador to Pakistan), and so on. Everyone in it has been a key decision maker in the US administration at some time or the other. Second, it appears that there was no formal script for the film. The actor-players were given the “facts” of how the crisis developed and told to hammer out their candid responses before the camera on the basis of their experience and knowledge, as though in a real life crisis situation. The manner in which they lay out their options, no less than their conclusions, is stunning.
- Since the US cannot possibly “take-out”allof Pakistan’s nuclear weapons swiftly or with any degree of certainty, it will not even try to do so because that might actually trigger a Pakistani nuclear attack on India.
- The US will lean on India to halt its march on Karachi by giving concrete assurances of “operational action” against Jehadi forces in Kashmir and Pakistan. Indeed, the US will make clear to India that it will compel Pakistan to satisfy Indian demands and concerns regarding cross border infiltration and guarantee to India that Pakistan will carry out the measures. However, should India still disregard American advice and promises and persist in its military option against Pakistan, the US will use military force against Indian forces in Pakistan in order to stop Pakistan from resorting to nuclear weapons. But it will also “break some things in Pakistan” in order to balance its action against the warring sides.
- Having staved off nuclear war, the US will forcefully address the underlying causes of Indo-Pak conflict. It will force both sides to withdraw. It will compel Pakistan to erase the Jehad. And it will ask India to address the problem of Kashmir.
This is not an implausible scenario. We came pretty close to something like it in 1999 and then perhaps again in late 2001 or early 2002 when India claims it was “provoked” by Pakistan to mobilise forces for an all-out war with Pakistan. On both occasions, Pakistan is alleged to have made a veiled nuclear threat, nudging the Americans to intervene and pressurise India against the option. Certainly, in 2002, we know that under American pressure General Pervez Musharraf made a promise to halt the export of “terrorism” from Pakistan to any country in the world, including India. The recent exchange of statements by the then Indian army chief (who says that India was ready to launch “hot-pursuit” operations last January) and our own General Musharraf (who says he threatened an “unconventional” war in retaliation) confirms not only that the scenario in the Situation Room is real enough but that it could have an unprecedented ending too.
In fact, that is the one major problem of the script. We are told that the drama in the Situation Room is played out in the aftermath of successful American action against Iraq and North Korea which has demonstrated American power and the resolve to use it if necessary. But what if US policy turns out to be a failure in both situations? Indeed, what if the US resolve to use force against India in order to stop Pakistan from using nuclear weapons in the final analysis is lacking when the time comes?
The film closes on a frightening note: “At some point in the future, nuclear weapons will be used in the region”, concludes the American president matter-of-factly, “If we can do anything to stop that from happening we should give it our best shot.” But that is hardly reassuring. Thus there are lessons in this film for the flawed establishments of Pakistan and India.
(April 04-10, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 6 – Editorial)
Two cheers for the MMA
THE MUSHARRAF-JAMALI government has succeeded in obtaining a relatively mild unanimous resolution in the Senate that merely expresses “shock” and “dismay” at the war in Iraq and “deplores” its coming. This will doubtless be paraded as an achievement of sorts. The religious parties, we will be told, seemed bent on at least “expressing shock and horror and disgust” at the war and were determined to ‘condemn” the US and UK. In fact, their fiery speeches in the Senate had threatened to append a long list of demands to their resolution, including a boycott of US goods, an exit from an alliance with America against Al Qaeda and an end to the use of Pakistani airbase facilities for American troops fighting the Taliban-Al Qaeda nexus in Afghanistan. But the government has conceded nothing of the sort. Indeed, it will be stressed that by avoiding any fiery resolution against the US, General Musharraf’s pro-US policy since 9/11 will continue to serve the best “national interests” of the country.
It is, of course, no secret that for a host of non-sustainable reasons the PPP under Benazir Bhutto doesn’t overtly want to be seen in Washington as an anti-US party. So a mild anti-war resolution was probably what it wanted. But why did the MMA agree to a diluted resolution in the end? Did the government secretly pay a price for the MMA’s cooperation by agreeing to concede the role of the leader of the opposition in both the Senate and the National Assembly to Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani and Maulana Fazlur Rehman/Qazi Hussain Ahmed respectively? Or is a deal being worked out between the MMA and the Musharraf-Jamali government to yield not just a constitutional compromise vis a vis the LFO in time to come but also a working understanding that the rump Pakistan Muslim League of Nawaz Sharif and the “parliamentarian” PPP of Benazir Bhutto will be further marginalised from the political system? In other words, is the future political landscape of the country being chiselled by the military establishment to produce a configuration of the right in which the two party system is represented not by the “anti-military” representative forces of the PMLN and PPP but by the pro-military, manufactured forces of the MMA and PMLQ?
Certainly, the MMA parties have been strategic allies of the military establishment since the time when their covert support was critical to the military’s “national security agendas” in the region. Even now they are needed to create the international perception that the military is the only moderate and credible force in the country with whom the USA can do business. This has been achieved by destroying the overtly pro-West, pro-peace-with-India, mainstream parties of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif who were the main recipients of the vote bank of Pakistan and enabling the anti-India, anti-USA, MMA and PMLQ to fill the vacuum created by their forced erosion or ouster. The problem is that instead of state-to-state international relationships being defined by a balance of interests, the Military-MMA alliance seeks to define them on the basis of a balance of “nuclear and Islamic” terror. Is this in the national interest of Pakistan?
We think not. At the very least, the arrangement is a sure-shot recipe for continuing domestic instability and international insecurity. The MMA constantly seeks to implant its authority over the military and mould it according to its worldview. Should it succeed in so doing, it will drag Pakistan into the eye of an international storm and confirm fears that Pakistan’s weapons of mass destruction have fallen into the “wrong hands”. Equally, the MMA’s lingering hatred for General Musharraf personally and continuing attempts to deprive him of his uniform are aimed at precisely this objective – to remove him from the scene so that it can make decisive militant inroads into the military. It doesn’t much matter whether the MMA is likely to succeed or not in the short term. What matters is the perception that it is poised to become the most formidable force in the country.
The MMA’s birth and current centrality in Pakistani politics is due to General Musharraf. But if the MMA is poised for a great leap forward, thanks must go to President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. The “million men” marches commandeered by the MMA are a sign of the times. Given the unjust war against Iraq, the political space usurped by military governments or autocratic regimes allied with the US is in “danger” of falling into radical anti-West, Islamicist hands rather than mainstream, moderate and democratic forces.
Pakistan’s predicament is particularly worrying. With Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto becoming increasingly irrelevant, if the general elections were held tomorrow the MMA would do a Turkey in Pakistan. Two critical differences would then tilt the scales against Pakistan. The Pakistani Islamicists are not half as enlightened or moderate, and the Pakistan army not half as secular, as their respective Turkish counterparts. When will General Musharraf transcend his personal likes and dislikes for the sake of this country? When will President Bush and PM Blair be ousted so that the world can become reasonable again?
(Feb 07-13, 2003, Vol – XIV, No. 50 – Editorial)
MUSHARRAF’S DILEMMA
GENERAL PERVEZ MUSHARRAF’S recent trip to Russia has been billed as “historic” by the usual Foreign Office suspects. But, for once, they are right.
He is the first Pakistani leader ever to have been invited for a friendly state visit to Moscow. That is why, even though the trip was more symbolic than substantive, it is historic enough.
With hindsight, however, we can also say that the visit was fifty years overdue. If, after independence, we had been more “neutral” like India, we might have escaped the crippling dependence on the United States that has shaped, some might say “warped”, our history as a neo-colonial “front line state”. Indeed, “neutrality” might have prohibited the rise of the military as the sole custodian and determinant of our “national security”, strengthened democracy, and made peace, rather than war, the natural state of being with our neighbour to the east.
The remarkable thing is that even after the value of our other “friendships”, like that with anti-America, communist China, was amply demonstrated, our leaders failed to apply the lesson and carve an opening to Moscow until now. Worse, prodded by the US, our military leaders sanctioned a proxy war with Moscow in the 1980s whose crippling legacy of Islamic fundamentalism, radical sectarianism, drugs and Kalashnikovs has come to haunt our new generations.
An opportune moment to redress the imbalance arose in 1987 when Moscow went to Geneva to negotiate an accord for an orderly retreat from Kabul. Alas. The civilian prime minister, Mohammad Khan Junejo, who lent a shoulder to the Geneva Accords over the head of the military dictator General Zia ul Haq, and who might conceivably have opened up Moscow to Pakistan just as ZA Bhutto had opened up China before him, was pre-emptively sacked for displaying such foresight.
By 1989, discerning political analysts could conclude that the old USSR was coming apart and the Cold War was sputtering out. Having quit Afghanistan in 1987, the US was already packing its bags in Pakistan. That was a good time to start the “patching-up” process not just with the new Moscow but also with the old New Delhi.
But a band of military adventurers had other ideas. They wanted to conquer Afghanistan, dominate Central Asia and carve a green crescent from Turkey to Chechnya. Accordingly, a doctrine of “strategic depth” in the west and low-intensity warfare in the east was fashioned with the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul and the jihadi lashkars in Kashmir.
However, on two occasions at least, civilian prime ministers woke up to the exorbitant costs of this doctrine and tried to change course. But they were painted as “national security risks” and swiftly despatched.
In 1989, Benazir Bhutto sought to rein in the erstwhile conqueror of Jalalabad, General Hameed Gul, and tie the peace knot with India’s Rajiv Gandhi. But she was tarred by the brush of un-patriotism and sacked for her concerns.
Then Nawaz Sharif tried it in 1997 with IK Gujral but he was pushed into tit-for-tat nuclear tests by the military. When he persisted, he was prodded into Kargil in 1999 and destabilised. “Our boys” thought the Lahore Summit was a total “sell-out”.
In the next two years, the Pakistani nexus with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the freedom fighting jihadis in Kashmir increased manifold, even as the blowback of sectarian warfare and the rise of the religious right began to endanger the country.
Then came 9/11.
Confronted by Washington, General Musharraf wisely about-turned on our Afghan policy. And since the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Afghan Mujahideen and Kashmiri jihadis were all cut from the same anti-Western cloth, it was time to start thinking of how to wrap up our pro-active Kashmir policy before it ended undermining dividends reaped from abandoning the Afghan policy. But unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.
It takes two hands to clap. Devising new foreign policies requires enabling environments both at home and abroad. Thus a suitable new Afghan policy still awaits appropriate ethnic input by the US in Kabul. Equally, unless India is amenable to a fruitful dialogue, the diplomatic “flexibility” shown by General Musharraf since January 2002 will remain in vain.
This is where Moscow assumes relevance. Pakistan seems to be encircled by many Russian “friends”: a hostile Northern Alliance government in Afghanistan, suspicious Central Asian states in the north, an uncooperative Iran in the west and a deadly India on the east. But if Moscow were a little less tilted against Pakistan, Islamabad could make necessary adjustments to its foreign policy in the region without too much upheaval.
Here is the dilemma. If India is agreeable to a realistic dialogue, perhaps peace can be negotiated without redrawing boundaries. Similarly, if Kabul is able to co-opt representative Pakhtun elements, al-Qaeda can be swiftly mopped up. But in the absence of progress on either front, the proposed Pakistani agenda can be derailed by rogue elements inside the state and non-state actors outside it.
The emergence of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan and the fiery insistence of the Kashmir jihadis that they are readying to carry the war from Srinagar to New Delhi are manifestations of General Musharraf’s nagging problem.
(Feb 21-27, 2003, Vol – XIV, No. 52 – Editorial)
Why is the Muslim world quiescent?
OVER 88 PERCENT OF THE people of the Muslim world are reported to be anti-America. But the response of Muslim states and Muslim masses – the so-called Muslim Ummah – to the proposed American war plans against Muslim Iraq has been relatively lifeless. Last weekend, nearly 30 million people, mostly non-Muslims, thronged over 600 towns and cities, mostly in the Christian west, to protest the threat of war on Iraq. The irony should not be missed. In Cairo, just 600 Egyptians turned out to protest, surrounded by 3,000 policemen. In fact, by way of brave contrast, there were over 2,000 anti-war Israelis in Tel Aviv, considerably more than the anti-war demonstrators in Lahore last week.
Part of the explanation for the stunning “silence” in the Muslim world lies in the fact that the Muslim masses are not generally used to expressing their mass views by way of protest marches and demonstrations. Their repressive leaders simply won’t let them. The “Muslim world” after all mainly comprises monarchies, military dictatorships and “guided” democracies (ala Pakistan). Western-type democracies with free elections, accountable institutions and conscious civil societies in which debate, discussion, criticism and non-violent protest are essential ingredients of politico-cultural discourse, are sorely missing.
In fact, transition from the Islamic empires of yore ruled by “oriental despots” masquerading as khalifas and Zil-e-Elahikings (soldier-rulers claiming to be shadows of God on earth) has given way to nation-states without democratisingor civilianising political structures. Thus the modern Muslim state today is characterised by masses who have been so depoliticised and disempowered by the state for so long that they are “politically fatigued” and inclined to be “pragmatic” rather than politically aggressive or action oriented.
Indeed, those who seek to protest against the authoritarian state are stamped as fitna (mischief makers) because both “stability of the state” and “obedience to the ruler” are “Islamic” virtues to be rewarded, while protest and disagreement are treacheries to be rooted out. This is why street protests are invariably thwarted by armed security forces. In other words, the concept of “democratic entitlement” – we are the sovereign people – that broadly characterises the secular democracies of the west and was much in evidence last Saturday in London, Paris, Rome and New York as a defining moment in the contemporary political culture of the west is critically missing in the “Muslim world”.
Worse, the neo-colonial “Muslim” regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Emirates, etc, are all pro-America because they are critically dependent on America rather than on their own people for economic sustenance, political legitimacy and stability. This makes it all the more difficult for relatively ineffectual and “suspect” civil groups to mount any effective challenge to the state or its foreign allies. Any domestic protest against America or American interests in much of the Muslim world is often construed by the local pro-American Muslim regime as an attack on itself that is to be countered by suitable, repressive “law and order” measures. The only noteworthy protests in the Muslim world so far have been in Baghdad and Damascus where the anti-American authoritarian states managed to whip up over 200,000 protestors apiece, or in Indonesia where there is a strong Islamic movement at odds with the pro-America national regime.
A third factor is also relevant. Many “Muslim” countries are riven by bitter and often violent disputes between various Islamic sects or ethnicities. This makes it difficult to forge a united front against commonly perceived outside foes. Similarly, the struggle between secular and Islamic forces within such countries is sometimes so marked that they cannot arrive at a common platform to protest a mutually perceived injustice.
Pakistan, of course, betrays evidence of all these factors. Its people have been “depoliticised, dis-empowered and fatigued” by long periods of authoritarianism that have undermined the impulse for freedom and democracy. Its regimes have been consistently pro-America because America still remains the most important source of military and economic aid with which to stand up to “arch-enemy” India and protect its “national interests” thus defined. And the divide between the Islamic and secular forces is still strong enough to thwart an outright poll victory for the anti-America Islamists and preclude a joint anti-American platform of the “secular and the sacred”.
Therefore it is likely that the public policies of Muslim nation-states will be guided by the defined “national interests” of the ruling oligarchies of each state and not by any mass emotional recourse to the imagined interests of the non-existent Muslim Ummah. But underlying it all, one factor will probably dominate the private discourse of Muslim nations and ruling elites: the spectre of an American war on Iraq that might lead to hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim deaths and thereby unleash the accumulated rage of the Muslim masses not just indirectly against America but also directly against the despotic domestic regimes that support, and are propped up by, America.
This is why no Muslim ruler, whether friend or foe of America, wants this war. The dilemma for the pro-America, non-democratic, dependent Muslim nation-state is how to help avoid war without irrevocably alienating America or support it without risking the fury of the repressed masses.
(Feb 28-March 06, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 1 – Editorial)
Pakistan’s choice
AFTER STALLING TO GET A GOOD deal, Turkey is ready to host over 60,000 American soldiers for the imminent American war against Iraq. This despite the fact that Islamists dominate Turkey’s government and parliament, and most Turks are opposed to the war. So much for morality, international justice, and even populism versus plain, cold-blooded national interests. Far from being in a position to alienate Washington, Turkey stands to reap a financial package in excess of $ 25 billion – not exactly peanuts. Thus, Turkey’s government has determined that the best thing is to negotiate “yes” Much the same sort of thing can be said for most other “Muslim” countries, especially those in the Gulf where American troops are stationed. They simply cannot afford to ignore “national interests”. The only question that remains is will America go to war under the umbrella of an UNSC resolution or will it go it alone?
Interestingly, America has not asked the UNSC to approve a new resolution sanctioning war on Iraq. Instead, it has now tabled a draft resolution claiming that Iraq has not heeded the “final” ultimatum laid down in Resolution 1441. This implies that Washington is afraid of triggering a veto by France, China or Russia on a direct war resolution. But if its new formulation is approved, America will get a peg on which to hoist a war with the help of Britain, a few European countries and most Muslim states in the Gulf.
In Pakistan, General Musharraf’s government is guarding its vote close to its chest. But the arguments against supporting America have all been trotted out. One view is that if India can get away with officially saying “no” to the US, so too can Pakistan. But the comparison is wrong. India is not in the UNSC therefore its “no” is of no immediate concern to the US. But in searching for some sort of greenlight for war, Pakistan’s vote could become critical.
Another theory is that any direct or indirect support for America’s preemption doctrine will rebound to Pakistan’s disadvantage because it is next on Washington’s “hit-list” of rogue countries that have to be “sorted out”, and Washington will be emboldened to apply the doctrine to Pakistan after it has finished with Iraq. But there is no evidence that this reflects American thinking of the near future. Indeed, the argument is inherently flawed because a denial of Pakistani support will likely strengthen rather than weaken the alleged American view that Islamabad needs to be sorted out.
A third perception is that we should not ally with America because America is unreliable and all alliances with it in the past have proved “troublesome” for Pakistan on one score or another. This is an argument for being independent and autonomous like France or China or Russia with which no one can disagree in theory. But unfortunately, in practise we are not even a patch on these countries, given the objective stranglehold of America on our economic and political life, much like Turkey and many of the other Muslim states. Thus this is easier said than done, especially if one is sitting on the outside and can afford the luxury of such party political or human and moral judgments.
Some recapitulation of events may help. Resolution 1441 was unanimously approved by the 15 UNSC members. But its provisions were so tough that they made the next resolution on war almost certain. In fact, even Syria, the only Muslim state in the Council at the time, voted “yes” because it did not want to reap the negative fallout of international political isolation – a decision it later tried to obfuscate. This suggests that dependent or weak nations do not want to be isolated at the UNSC to prevent any irrevocable damage to their national interests, especially in relation to other states that seek to isolate and undermine them, as, for example, India has been bent upon doing to Pakistan since 9/11.
Fortunately, however, it now seems that Resolution 1442 will not directly ask members to vote for or against war. This should let Pakistan off the hook because it won’t have to officially sanction war against Iraq. But there will be pressure on it not to vote “no” because that would seriously anger the US. America has to gather at least nine yes-votes out of 15 in the UNSC. If the three vetoing powers and Syria abstain, the count of nine yes-votes out of 11 will become crucial and Pakistan will come under American pressure.
The choice then will be between a “yes” that would please America and enable Islamabad to negotiate a good deal with it in its national interests like Turkey, or abstain and flog its decision as “political necessity” to America and “political expediency” to the home audience. This abstention route would have the advantage of not antagonising America by derailing its objective. But it would not have the advantage of reaping any reward for pleasing America. In the end, war will probably come to Iraq whichever way Pakistan votes.
(Jan 24-30, 2003, Vol – XIV, No. 48 – Editorial)
What a relief!
PRIME MINISTER ZAFARULLAH Jamali’s “relief” package of Rs 5 billion for 2.5 million families amounts to Rs 200 per family or about Rs 22 per person. If this is to be the sole such “relief” package this year, Mr Jamali’s largesse is less than 75 paisas per day per lucky person. A beggar makes ten times as much in less than one tenth of the day. But Mr Jamali is a politician. He has his hand on the pulse of the wretched people. Thus he wonders whether wheat and sugar prices can be reduced to alleviate their hardship.
“No,” explains Shaukat Aziz, his clever finance advisor. “The struggling farmer wants higher prices for wheat and sugar and the government doesn’t have the money to subsidise the urban consumer by forking over the difference between the high price demanded by the farmer and the low price to be charged from the consumer.”
“Can we do something about the crippling power rates”, asks Mr Jamali. “No,” says Mr Aziz, “WAPDA and KESC would then pile up greater losses and become bigger burdens on the cash-strapped treasury.”
“What about a reduction in the price of petrol,” asks Mr Jamali exasperatedly. “Alas,” sighs the finance advisor, “the price of petrol has risen markedly in international markets, a disruption is feared on account of the impending war in Iraq, we have only stocks to tide us over for one month, and last but not least, a consumption tax on petrol is an important source of revenue for the government which is desperately trying to enlarge the kitty so that it can cover its administrative costs, defense outlays and debt payments without having to borrow too much money from the banks.”
“OK, I understand,” says Mr Jamali, “I’ll settle for a pocketful of the huge amounts of money remitted home by Pakistanis abroad in recent times.”
“You’re joking, sir, that money was intended for the relatives of Pakistanis abroad and has gone straight to them”, explains Mr Aziz.
“Is there anything I can do for the poor?” asks Mr Jamali, “What about that big pile of forex reserves that President Musharraf keeps talking about, can I take a slice of that, please?”
“No,” snaps the finance advisor, “that money is to be invested in a safe haven abroad by the State Bank in order to establish the credit worthiness of the country.”
“But what’s the point of being credit worthy when you keep saying we want to pay off our debts and not borrow any more money,” Mr Jamali wants to know.
“You just don’t understand, do you, sir,” hisses Mr Aziz, “we need to borrow low interest money in the short term so that we can pay off high interest debt in the long term.”
“No, I really don’t understand,” admits Mr Jamali. “President Musharraf says he’s worked wonders in three years. The IMF confirms Pakistan is moving in the right direction. You claim that GDP is poised for take-off. Yet there are more poor people in the country today than ever before and unemployment is rising. So what’s the solution?”
“I’m afraid there’s no quick fix,” confirms Mr Aziz. “We need to encourage domestic and foreign businessmen to invest in the country so that industries are set up, jobs are created and poverty is alleviated.”
“But isn’t reducing the interest rate from 20% to 10% a sufficient incentive for businessmen to borrow and invest,” queries Mr Jamali.
“Apparently not,” admits Mr Aziz, “the domestic investor has adopted a wait-and-see approach.”
“But what is he waiting for,” asks Mr Jamali.
“He’s waiting to see if your government survives, sir, and whether its economic policies will not just be a continuation of earlier policies but will survive long after its gone.”
“That’s a tall order,” frowns Mr Jamali. “What about the foreign investor? Why isn’t he rushing to Pakistan now that we are front-line allies of the USA and democracy is back in the country?”
“Well, sir, the foreign businessman is waiting for the domestic businessman to take the plunge first. Also, foreign investors are a bit shy of front-line states inhabited by jehadists and al-Qaeda terrorists and mad mullahs whose leaders hurl threats of nuclear war between Pakistan and India every now and then.”
“Ah ha,” says Mr Jamali, “so that’s the real issue. Have you told President Musharraf about this?”
“No sir, I haven’t,” explains Mr Aziz, “It’s all related to national security issues of which only he knows best.”
“OK, OK,” nods Mr Jamali. “Meanwhile, can’t you cut some unnecessary expenditures and divert funds to me for poverty alleviation?”
“No sir, I can’t cut military expenditures because the army won’t like it and General Musharraf will get angry at me; I can’t cut back on debt payments because the donor countries won’t like it and the IMF will get angry at me; and I can’t cut back on administrative costs because the horde of ministers, and ministers of state, and parliamentary secretaries and MNAs and MPAs and Nazims and civil servants won’t like it and then you will get angry at me.”
“Good God man,” exclaimed Mr Jamali, “I never knew it was so simple. It’s a relief to have you onboard. Can you spare Rs 5 billion please?”
(Jan 31-Feb 06, 2003, Vol – XIV, No. 49 – Editorial)
Is Pakistan next?
ALTHOUGH WORLDWIDE OPPOSITION to an American attack on Iraq is mounting, most Pakistanis think it imminent. Most also believe that Saddam Hussein, while no angel, is “innocent” of the grave charges levelled against him by the US. Why then is America bent upon “taking out” Saddam? Several explanations exist, from materialist theories of oil, imperialism and domination to subconscious Muslim anxieties of 21st century crusades against Islam. But behind them all lurks a more fundamental fear: “After Iraq, will Pakistan be America’s next target?”
This question raises other, more basic questions: Why, when US-Pak relations are better today than at any time in the last decade, should this question be asked at all? Indeed, why aren’t people in overtly anti-US states like Iran and N Korea afraid that their country might be “next”? Clearly, if the problem is one of oil resources or imperialism, Pakistan should not figure in any American equation at all since it has no oil and is not equipped to challenge American power. Equally, if the matter is one of an American crusade against Islam, all Muslim countries should be on the American hit list rather than only Pakistan. Is the fear, then, based on some subliminal truth about some dimension of our “otherness” that is cause for serious concern in America?
Talking to a “soft”, handpicked audience the other day at the Governor’s House in Lahore, it is significant that when this very question (“Is Pakistan next?”) was asked of General Pervez Musharraf, he is reported to have deflected the issue by urging Pakistanis to be “realistic”, “unemotional” and “pragmatic”. It should be noted that General Musharraf has been wont to clutch at such words whenever he has felt the “need” to try and make a paradigm shift in the strategic or political discourse of the nation. The last time he pledged to do so was after 9/11 when Pakistan was nudged from being a “pariah” state in the direction of becoming a “front-line ally” of the US. The current subliminal question must therefore stem from a vague notion that perhaps the time has come to redeem the promise or confront the threat (depending on which side of the fence you’re on) of a paradigm shift announced a year ago.
The country-specific sources of potential US conflict with Pakistan in the future cannot be ignored. First, more than any country in the world, and for a host of domestic and foreign reasons, Pakistan has become home to the most virulent anti-American forces in the world, ie, the remnants of Al-Qaeda and outcrops of Taliban ism. Every day brings fresh headlines of Al-Qaeda activists and Taliban supporters detained or questioned in Pakistan. Now we hear of running battles between American troops and pro-Taliban forces in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan. If the suspicion should take hold that Pakistan isn’t doing enough to snuff out such forces or worse that Pakistan may be abetting them to protect its “geo-strategic Pakhtun interests” in Afghanistan, as opposed to the Tajik-Uzbek alliance sponsored by America and supported by India, severe strains could be imposed on the US-Pak “partnership”. In other words, if American notions of “stabilising” and “nation-building” in Afghanistan should come to clash with Pakistani notions of its “strategic backyard”, there could be trouble.
Second, Pakistan has an unmatched c apability of feeding into America’s fear of weapons of mass destruction falling into the “wrong hands”. Like many other Muslim countries, Pakistan is swamped by anti-Americanism. But unlike any of them, including Iraq, it has tested nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Worse, it is seriously thought to have transferred nuclear know-how to N Korea for material or strategic gain. Finally, it is the only country in the world where widespread notions of violent Islamic jihad against the infidels include not just Hindu India but also Christian America and Jewish Israel. More ominously, such notions are endorsed by increasingly powerful, Taliban-like religious parties who are contending for the commanding heights of government and state in the country. Thus is the question of “Is Pakistan next?” linked in the American mind with the question of “What if Pakistan’s nuclear weapons fall into the wrong hands?” In this context, “wrong hands” would not only mean any and all “foreign hands” but also “anti-American Pakistani hands”, which in turn would encompass anti-American Pakistani hands in the military and its intelligence services as well as among the jihadi and religious parties.
Let’s face it. Pakistan’s India-centric national security policies (nuclear weapons, strategic depth, Islamic jihad) have unwittingly brought the country into the eye of a gathering storm. General Musharraf senses this new “ground reality” and is desperately trying to steer a safe course. But he is juggling too many old and new vested interests for comfort. His problem is accentuated by a stricken economy, a wobbly “democracy”, an aggressive religious front, and an intransigent India. For all these reasons, if Pakistan is not to be the “next” American target, he will have to show greater wisdom and more political courage in breaking with the past than he has demonstrated so far in trying to make a new Pakistan.
(March 14-20, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 3 – Editorial)
Pakistan’s pragmatism
The arrest in Rawalpindi last week of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the world’s most wanted Al-Qaeda terrorist after Osama Bin Laden, couldn’t have been better timed from Islamabad’s point of view. It quickly shifted the spotlight from allegations against Pakistan that it had transferred nuclear technology to North Korea in the mid 1990s to its current “unstinting” support for the US in the war against terrorism. “Fantastic”, said President George W Bush.
To drive the point home, the ISI held an unprecedented press briefing for foreign journalists in Islamabad and boasted how the operation to net Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had been executed by the Pakistanis without any significant help from the FBI. Of course, it’s a different matter that the journalists came away convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had been caught earlier than claimed by the government and that his formal arrest and gifting over to Washington was timed to deflect or offset the US pressure on Pakistan to support the proposed Anglo-American draft resolution paving the way for a war against Iraq.
The Americans have leaned on Pakistan because its vote could critically tilt the balance in the UNSC. President Bush has called General Musharraf and General Tommy Franks and Christina Rocca have visited Islamabd. American officials have “leaked” statements that Pakistan’s refusal to support the resolution would be construed as an “unfriendly” act by Washington. It has also been pointed out that the rewards of allying with America — so far, over $1 billion in aid, renewed IMF and World Bank soft lending, international debt-rescheduling of over $12 billion and the promise to write off $1 billion in US debt – could now conceivably be at risk. The gist of the message was conveyed recently by a smiling American think-tank “expert” on CNN: “General Musharraf has to decide whether France can keep him in power”.
Now we have been formally told by the prime minister, Zafarullah Khan Jamali, that it would be “very difficult for Pakistan to support war against Iraq”. Earlier, General Pervez Musharraf had told the American president that his “hands are full”, a reference to the public and institutional pressure that has been building up on him by his pro-America stance. An unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism is sweeping the country. Some of the biggest-ever anti-US, anti-war rallies have been held in the country and more are planned. Much the same anti-US sentiment prevails across the benches in parliament. Editorials continue to flay America’s pre-emption doctrine for “attacking Islam”. Pakistanis are also afraid that “after Iraq, Pakistan might be the next American target” because it too has weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, which rightwing American experts fear could fall into the “wrong” hands.
Some Pakistanis argue that, since war is inevitable, Pakistan should support the US in exchange for more “rewards”. But most are against the motion for two main reasons. The idea that Pakistan might become the only Muslim nation in the world voting for a war against another Muslim country is generally unpalatable. Then there is the fear that if Pakistan were to support the doctrine of pre-emption, it could become its victim if arch-enemy India, with whom relations remain hostile, were emboldened to try and cut Pakistan down to size. These arguments are weighty.
Washington had asked Pakistan to make up its mind and let it know its decision in advance so that it could plan accordingly. The answer was first given by Mr Jamali in parliament last Monday when he said that “Pakistan is against war and it will not support any war intentions against Iraq”. Until now, Pakistan has argued that the UN inspectors must be given more time to determine whether or not Iraq is complying with resolution 1441. Therefore it appeared likely that Pakistan’s government would abstain from a yes or no vote rather than risk the ire of the Pakistani public or the US. Indeed, General Musharraf was hoping that both sides would “understand” his compulsions to clutch at pragmatism in the “national interest”. But chances are that a reprieve, however temporary, may now be in the offing.
A flurry of last-minute negotiations is in evidence at the UNSC. Two ideas are being flogged to bridge the gap dividing the Big Five. First, delaying the deadlines for all ultimatums to Iraq. Second, creation of a set of “guideposts” that Iraq must traverse in the interim one by one. Hans Blix has drawn up a list of 29 “clusters” of unresolved issues for Iraq to resolve. If Iraq fails to do so demonstrably under a strong force of inspectors, then “serious consequences” could accrue. A Russian proposal is also on the table which would place UN troops on Iraqi territory to enforce inspections and disarmament. And the “six undecideds” have apparently proposed extending the deadline for 45 days. This strategy, which has the support of almost all except the minority “coalition of the willing”, is aimed at delaying the onset of war and finding the space to disarm Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussain by other means.
Under the circumstances, and irrespective of whether or not war is inevitable, Pakistan has done well not to take a hasty decision in favour of the war-mongers.
(March 28-April 03, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 5 – Editorial)
Truth is the first casualty
AS IMAGES OF HURTLING missiles and fiery explosions try to crush us in the comfort of our drawing rooms, we must resist mistaking illusion for reality, message for medium, in the Anglo-American war against Iraq. Are we getting the full story? Can there be a war without the body bags of soldiers, without the mangled bodies of civilians? Or is truth always the first casualty?
Recently, one outspoken and graphic American website was shut down with the following notice: “We are sorry to notify you of suspending your account because of inappropriate graphic materia l… As ‘NO’ TV station in the US is allowing any dead US solders or POWs to be displayed, we will not either.”
Earlier, however, most networks had shown five scared US POWs as well as US Marine fatalities in Nasiriyah in Iraq. Then US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld indignantly claimed that “the Geneva convention doesn’t allow” this sort of thing, nudging the networks not to show captured or killed Coalition Forces soldiers. These were the same networks that continued to show blank and fatigued Iraqi POWs with their hands tied behind their backs, squatting or lying face down. Amazingly, when CNN recently grilled the Arab channel Al-Jazeera on why it continued to air such footage, the Al-Jazeera spokesman asked in turn why US stations were still broadcasting footage of Iraqi POWs. “Because their families wouldn’t be watching”, responded CNN’s Aaron Brown aggressively, as though the CNN broadcast is not available to Iraqis at home and abroad who may have relatives in the Iraqi armed forces.
Mr Rumsfeld’s attempt to clutch at the Geneva Convention is also pathetic. America is the principal accused not just in this illegal war against Iraq but also in the Bush administration’s refusal to abide by the international criminal court of justice and its attempt to undermine the United Nations and destroy every international treaty that impedes its attempts to run the world. In fact, as George Monbiot of The Guardian notes, the American prison camp in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where 641 men are held breaches at least 15 articles of the third Geneva convention. American claims that these are “unlawful combatants” and not POWs are ridiculously self-serving. Indeed, the Iraqis can make the same claim more justly because the US invasion of their country is illegal.
Mr Monbiot notes that this redefinition breaches article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (al-Qaeda) must be regarded as prisoners of war. He refers to Jamie Doran’s film Afghan Massacre, which is the story of over 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pakhtuns who surrendered before General Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance at Kunduz on November 21, 2001. Most were dead upon arrival in the American guarded Sheberghan prison, 80 miles away. The US special forces instructed Dostum’s men to “get rid of them before satellite pictures can be taken”. Doran says a Northern Alliance soldier told him: “I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner’s neck. The Americans did whatever they wanted”. Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers with the corpses, then driven to a deserted place called Dasht-i-Leili and, in the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead were dumped into ditches. The German newspaper Die Zeit, the US group Physicians for Human Rights and our own Asma Jehangir have all investigated the claims and concluded that American soldiers in Afghanistan were culpable of war crimes.
Over 500 journalists from major networks are “embedded” with the Coalition forces. Thus it is not surprising that international media objectivity about the war is sorely lacking. During the fight for Basra, for example, one embedded journalist explained how the British shelling of the city was aimed at the Iraqi army “which was firing on the citizens of Basra in order to quell a popular uprising” – a great explanation for the civilian casualties resulting from the British bombardment.
But sometimes the media is an unwitting and welcome instrument in capturing the truth as well. As Doug Ireland, an independent American journalist points out, when General Tommy Franks was recently asked during a briefing in front of the cameras whether he was surprised by anything in the war, Franks said he wasn’t because the war had been in the planning for “at least a year.” This faux pas contradicted President Bush’s repeated assertions that “everything possible” had been done to avoid war. Yet not one reporter present was bold enough to point out the contradiction. Now Time magazine has just published more evidence that the decision for war was taken at least as early as March 2002. “F—k Saddam. We’re taking him out,” Times quotes Bush as telling three US senators at a White House meeting then. Much the same sort of craven media deference is evident during White House briefings to the media.
“In Iraq, the Bush administration has beaten the press at its own game. It has turned the media into a weapon of war”, admits the New York Times. Is it any wonder then that half the world is turning to Al-Jazeera?
(March 07-13, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 2 – Editorial)
We want Imran Khan
THIS IS THE BEST TEAM EVER assembled,” boasted General Tauqir Zia, chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, on the eve of the Pakistan cricket team’s departure for South Africa to play in the World Cup last month. Accordingly, as befitting a “great” team, laurels were heaped on a clutch of talented but aging superstars at the cricket stadium in Lahore.
Maestro Wasim Akram was just dying to rip through his 500th victim. Macho man Shoaib Akhtar wanted to prove he was the fastest bowler in the world. Wunderkind Inzimam ul Haq had shed 10 kilos in his quest for the Holy Grail. Muscleman Shahid Afridi was raring to have a mighty go at the Indians. And wily Waqar Younus was licking his lips in anticipation of his reverse-swinging yorkers. Vintage experience was mixed with youthful exuberance, individual talent was tossed with team spirit, to promise another glorious World Cup victory for Pakistan. In the event, however, Pakistan caved in with a whimper long before the men could be separated from the boys in the super sixes. The hurt is not that Pakistan lost but that Pakistan should have lost without putting up a worthy fight.
Several well meaning and knowledgeable people, including former captains Imran Khan, Asif Iqbal and Intikhab Alam, had cautioned against too much hype or optimism in view of the team’s rather dismal performances in recent months. That was good advice. Others had wondered whether the combination of old and new was balanced enough for conditions in South Africa. But all this was inevitable, old hat. Neither the old nor the young clicked. Waqar’s captaincy – team selection, bowling changes, batting orders, field placings, guidance and advice on and off the field – was uninspiring, if not downright insipid.
Our fielding was below par. Bowling was wayward and individualistic. Batsmen threw away their wickets because they weren’t playing according to any collective plan. Even bearded Saeed Anwar, who seemed to have been snatched from the jaws of the Tableeghi Jamaat, had to huff and puff his way to a dubious century.
The real problem, of course, is neither General Tauqir Zia’s suitability for the job of PCB chairman, nor the individual weaknesses of this player or that. Also, we should not wag a finger at any of the coaches, analysts, managers and advisors who accompanied the team. Everyone gave sincerely of themselves at all times.
The real problem has to do with the mindset of the players. They are not sufficiently trained to plan and execute strategy. They are not adequately trained for fierce competition at the highest level in all matches. And they are not sufficiently disciplined to accept a fallible peer as group leader. That is why they play and behave as unpredictable individuals on and off the field during cricketing tours. How does one change the status quo?
Imran Khan has long argued that cricket organisation and structure in Pakistan is out of sync with world realities. He believes that the best way to motivate players and train them to compete fiercely at all times is to put them under the glare of public floodlights constantly. Without big crowds to cheer them on, even budding and talented cricketers wither on the vine. But the manner in which domestic cricket is organised precludes both cheering crowds and motivation. How can the everyday public be enthused about, or demonstrate loyalty to, a PIA or Habib Bank “team”? By and large, world sport is organised on a city, state, region or provincial basis, thereby channelling various forms of sub-nationalistic crowd loyalty into player motivation. But not so in Pakistan.
One reason for this may have had to do with funding and sponsorship of teams and playing grounds but that is no longer a valid enough excuse, given the myriad forms of fundraising and sponsors now available to event managers and the advent of a local and city government system under the new political dispensation. When cricket lovers become emotionally involved in supporting their local or city or provincial teams, the players will learn to compete and excel and teams will learn to fight their way to the top of the league. That is the way to cobble a great and motivated “national” team with talented players and an inspiring captain instead of herding individuals together and telling them to go and fight as a team.
“Heads will roll,” said Waqar Younus resignedly at the conclusion of his short trip to South Africa. And so they should, starting with the great has-beens including Waqar himself. General Tauqir Zia and the Pakistan Cricket Board should also throw in the towel gamely. Their best was not good enough. It is also ridiculous for the PCB to try and save its skin by announcing the proverbial “three-man committee” to determine what went wrong and dole out punishments to the guilty, as though this defeat in cricket is like a defeat in an Indo-Pakistan war which requires experts to flush out the truth about each battle.
It is never too late to take the right decision. General Pervez Musharraf should request Imran Khan to take over the PCB and put his vision into practise. We can only go up under his inspirational leadership.
(March 21-27, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 4 – Editorial)
Iraq revisited
THE ANGLO-AMERICAN WAR ON Iraq in 1991 was markedly different from that today. In 1991 the war was provoked by Saddam Hussein. But today it is a pre-meditated act by George W. Bush. In 1991 there was a broad consensus under the UN in its favour. But today the broad consensus under the UN is against it. In 1991 the objective was to undo an act of aggression by Saddam Hussein against Kuwait. But today the objective is to change the Saddam Hussein regime by an act of aggression by the US. In 1991 there was no public protest against the war, either in the West or the East, before or after the war. But today the thunderous protest across the world has preceded the war in an unprecedented manner. In 1991, the Iraqi army was over a million-strong with a bristling armour and air force. But today, thanks to the UN inspectors and sanctions, the Iraqi army is barely a quarter of its old strength. Finally, in 1991 the war was fought under the rules of international law in an environment free of extraneous factors that could lead to a bitter blowback for the aggressor. But today the US aggression feeds “civilisational-clash” theories and threatens to disrupt the world order. For all these reasons, it is 2003 and not 1991 that can legitimately lay claim to being a definitive moment in history.
The Anglo-American axis claims it is fighting a just, moral and legitimate war. That is not true. There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein represents any credible threat to the US or Britain or that it is in any way linked to Al-Qaeda. It is claimed that Iraq is in possession of banned weapons of mass destruction. That is not true. The weapons inspectors have not been able to unearth any such astounding weapons in ten months of renewed and detailed investigation. (Indeed, it is the US army that says it will use depleted uranium (DU) ammunition in the coming conflict). It is argued that UNSC resolution 1441 is sufficient to warrant an attack on Iraq. That is not true. If that had been the case, why did the slim “coalition of the willing” try so hard to obtain UNSC sanction for war under a new resolution? It is claimed that the Anglo-American patience with Iraq has run out after 12 years of failed disarmament. That is not true. More than 30 years ago the UN asked Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. But Israel continues its settlement policy and flouts dozens of UN resolutions without risking the wrath of the Western powers. Finally, “just” parallels are being made between military action today in Iraq and that in Kosovo some years ago outside the framework of the UN. But these comparisons are unfair. With the vetoing exception of Russia, military action in Kosovo had multinational support across the globe – in NATO, in the EU, in the OIC, in the NAM – while military action in Iraq today lacks the support of any of these organisations.
Anyone who has read Bob Woodward’s best selling apologia on “Bush’s War” in Afghanistan published last November should not be surprised by this end-result. The book explains how President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld were keen on “sorting out” Iraq outside the framework of the UN after 9/11 but were dissuaded from doing so by Secretary of State Colin Powell who assured them he would obtain the same legitimate cover for American action as in the case of Afghanistan. But Mr Powell’s failure to do so has hardened the “resolve” of the Anglo-American axis to trash the UN, divide the EU, split NATO and “go it alone”. This was the advice proffered by Henry Kissinger to them: America can remain a superpower only if it shows the “resolve to act” in its own self-interest irrespective of international law. Indeed, if international law doesn’t suit the superpower, a new pre-emptive doctrine of action must be inserted into it to suit America.
Robert Fisk, that great and courageous journalist, has recently warned that in the aftermath of war the glue that holds Iraq together will come unstuck and there will be nothing left to hold people together. “The nightmare is not so much the cruel bombardment of Iraq as the growing conviction that the Anglo-American invasion will provoke a civil war, of Shia against Sunnis, of Sunnis against Kurds, of Kurds and Turkomans”. The pillage of Baghdad awaits the new conquerors.
America supported Osama bin Ladin’s jihad against the “evil Soviet empire” in the 1980s. Today OBL is the most wanted man in the world in America’s “war against terror”. America also supported Saddam Hussein against Iran in the 1980s. Today Saddam is being equated with Hitler and Milosovich in America’s “war against the axis of evil”. Will Iran and North Korea be next? But the war in Iraq will spawn a thousand OBLs across the Islamic world and American allies, like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, will also find themselves in the eye of the gathering storm. The doctrine of “pre-emption” awaits its most fearful and treacherous application and blowback yet.
(April 11-17, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 7 – Editorial)
BJP is bad news for India
IT SEEMS THAT MR YASWANT SINHA, the Indian foreign minister, has taken a leaf out of the book of George Fernandes, his war-mongering colleague in the Indian defense ministry. It was Mr Fernandes who threatened to “wipe Pakistan off the face of the planet” following India’s nuclear tests in 1998. Now Mr Sinha is resorting to the same sort of “diplomatic terrorism” against Pakistan in a bid to provoke Pakistani leaders into saying or doing something outrageous that will make the world recoil. We recall how General Pervez Musharraf unwittingly stirred a hornets’ nest in Washington and London some months ago when he said that Pakistan would use “unconventional methods” (he meant guerilla warfare behind enemy lines based on motivated jihadi forces) to counter any “pre-emptive strikes” by India against Pakistani forces in Azad Kashmir. Mr Sinha has recently taken to suggesting that Pakistan is a fit case for pre-emptive strikes by India on the basis of the same logic that the US has apparently applied to Iraq.
The Pakistani foreign office has duly rebutted Mr Sinha in the nicest possible way. It says that if any country is a deserving case for a pre-emptive strike because it has not obeyed UN Security Council resolutions like Iraq, it is India that has brushed aside UNSC resolutions on Kashmir. It has pointed out that Pakistan is not a lame duck like Iraq and that India is likely to get as good as it gives in any conflict. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has also cautioned Mr Sinha against any adventurism. And he has done so without resorting to the sort of linguistic terrorism being brandished from across the border. Unfortunately, however, our information minister, Sheikh Rashid, has stooped to the same level as Mr Sinha by lashing out at him. This was entirely avoidable, especially since by so doing he has fallen headlong into the trap laid by Mr Sinha.
However, the best riposte to Mr Sinha has come from Washington. Far from a wink and a nod, which is what Mr Sinha perhaps expected, Washington has pulled the plank from his argument by expressing its total abhorrence of any parallels between Iraq and Pakistan. Indeed, it appears from the US statement (that India should start talking to Pakistan) that the boot is on the other foot.
Here lies the rub. The BJP government in India is not interested in talking to Pakistan. In fact, it is doing everything possible to stall the demand for unconditional talks made by Pakistan and supported by the world community. Indeed, by all accounts, the BJP government is only interested in fanning anti-Muslim, anti-Pakistan flames in the country for purely domestic and party political reasons. The tragedy is that the BJP is bent upon equating its narrow party interests with the larger national interests of India and is extending the former at the expense of the latter. Most middle-class Indians don’t realise this fact, gripped as they are by the 1950 leftovers of nationalism, but they should, for the sake of their secular democracy and national well being.
The “threat from India” has long been the theme song of the Pakistani establishment led by the military. Much international goodwill and domestic welfare has been sacrificed at its altar. Of late, however, the military under General Pervez Musharraf has felt the pangs of a failing economy burdened with debt and defense expenditures and decided to pitch for a generalised peace with India. Unfortunately, however, India is currently saddled with the BJP that is desperately struggling to retain its political foothold in the country and can think of no better way to do so than by fanning the flames of religious apartheid and portraying the current Pakistan of General Musharraf as a bigger-than-ever threat to India.
Consequently, the roles have been reversed. The Pakistan military establishment wants to show flexibility on Kashmir and move ahead with the peace agenda unconditionally. This is the opposite of what it has said and done in the last ten years. On the other hand, the BJP wants to maintain a warlike situation between the two countries and refuses to talk to Pakistan except on the pre-condition of an end to “cross-border terrorism”. This is the opposite of what every Indian government before the BJP has said and demanded.
It seems to be finally dawning on the Pakistani establishment that the twentieth-first century will be an era of cold-blooded pragmatism in which passionate nationalism and purist ideology will be heavily discounted. That is good news for Pakistan. The tragedy is that the BJP has arrived so belatedly at the gateway to power in India that it is still clutching at the coattails of nationalism and religious ideology. That is bad news for India.
The last word on this subject belongs to Arundhati Roy, the celebrated Indian novelist. “ Whenever hostility between India and Pakistan is cranked up, hostility toward Muslims grows. Increasingly, Indian nationalism means Hindu nationalism, which is based not on self-respect, but on a hatred of the ‘Other’ – not just Pakistanis, but all Muslims. The parallels between contemporary India and pre-Nazi Germany are chilling, but not surprising”…
(April 18-24, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 8 – Editorial)
Limited options
POLITICAL STORM IS THREATENING to uproot General Pervez Musharraf’s blueprint for ruling the country from “on-top”. In the event, he may be hoisted by his own petard.
General Musharraf claims to be an all-powerful president on the basis of last year’s “presidential referendum” and the Legal Framework Order (LFO) under which 29 constitutional amendments were unilaterally framed, general elections were held and current parliaments constituted. Not so, protests the strong opposition comprising the MMA, PPPP and PMLN. Their argument is that General Musharraf must be elected president by parliament; that he cannot remain the army chief; and that some of his powers (especially those related to the sacking of the cabinet and parliament) obtained via the National Security Council must be curtailed. The net result is that, six months after coming into being, parliament is still unable to function. Under the constitution, the president must address a joint session of parliament after the general elections and at the beginning of each year. But the opposition is bent upon physically obstructing General Musharraf from addressing parliament because it doesn’t accept him as a legitimate president and it doesn’t consider his LFO to be a legitimate umbrella for his absolutist powers. In fact, the combined opposition is threatening to join hands with lawyers’ associations across the country (who are also opposed to the LFO) so that they can jointly channel the prevailing anti-US sentiment in the “million marchers’ against General Musharraf.
But this latest twist in Islamabad was foretold. Indeed, from time to time, we advised General Musharraf that, for a host of reasons, the political dispensation and three-party parliament midwifed by him were likely to resist his schemes much more than the lone King’s Party parliament nurtured by General Ziaul Haq in 1986 which didn’t survive its creator. For instance, we wrote in our editorial of October 19, 2001 (‘Dangerous political vacuum’): “General elections are within sight. If mainstream moderate politicians and parties are sidelined, a dangerous vacuum will be created. Pakistanis might then vent their rage at America by sweeping the fundamentalists and anti-West elements into office…that would spell a greater national disaster than the disaster General Pervez Musharraf has just averted (by abandoning the Taliban)”But General Musharraf spurned the advice, sidelined the PMLN and PPP and enabled the MMA to stampede into parliament.
In another editorial on March 29, 2002 (‘Ho Hum Referendum’) we advised against the referendum. “No number of dubious referendums and unilateral constitutional amendments will make General Musharraf more or less legitimate than he is today. If that is so, why go though an exercise that is totally discredited in this country…”But General Musharraf jumped into the referendum, hurt himself badly and is now lumped with a strong parliamentary opposition that has rubbished the referendum. Indeed, we added in the same editorial that “the cleanest, most desirable route is to hold a national, all parties conference, seek the approval of the representatives of the people of Pakistan for making necessary constitutional amendments to enable the sort of broad constitutional checks and balances proposed by General Musharraf and others to be implemented, hold free and fair elections and get a new parliament to ratify the agreed amendments. That is the only form of truth and reconciliation that will work and endure during General Musharraf’s time and after his departure”.
By July 2002, however, we were deeply worried by the direction he was taking. This is what we editorialised on July 5, 2002 (‘Another blunder?’) “General Zia was supported by all the parties except the PPP. He held non-party elections that returned a pliant parliament. But the system broke down under the weight of its own contradictions. Under the circumstances, how will General Musharraf fare? He has alienated all the significant parties of the country and the next parliament won’t be such a pushover. The best thing is for him to compromise with the PPP and PMLN and ally with them”. But General Musharraf was still not in a listening mood.
Subsequently, the general election results were far from satisfactory even from General Musharraf’s point of view. We noted the growing opposition to the LFO and advised General Musharraf accordingly in our editorial on November 22, 2002 (‘Gen Musharraf must compromise with parliament’): “He should climb off his high horse and make a historic compromise for the sake of the “true democracy” he professes. This can only be done by negotiating a permanent peace with parliament as a duly elected civilian president with some of the “stabilising” powers he seeks. The alternative is constitutional gridlock and political instability”
Barely six months later, we are on the brink of political breakdown. If the Afghan war led to a surge of electoral sentiment in favour of the MMA, the Iraq war has enabled them to field ‘million marches’. Bad politics by General Musharraf has also pushed his best potential ally — the PPP — into the opposition camp. His options are limited. He can compromise with the combined oppositionists on their terms now or suspend parliament and face their wrath on the streets tomorrow. A journey that began in good faith is in danger of being derailed by several ill-advised decisions. What a pity.
(April 25-May 01, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 9 – Editorial)
Only one way out
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.
(May 02-08, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 10 – Editorial)
Indo-Pak peace: compulsions and dividends
THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT INDO-Pak tensions are set to abate. The bad news is that the promised thaw could be elusive, with powerful vested interests on both sides vying to throw a spanner in the works.
Obviously, behind-the-scenes American channels have been working overtime to facilitate the tentative moves by both sides. On March 31, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said that “the whole of the subcontinent’s problems” are part of the US’ “broad agenda”. Nor was it a coincidence that Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian Prime Minister, made his opening move in Kashmir on April 18 even as his confidante and national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra, was parleying in Washington. The US played a good hand by withdrawing Mr Robert Blackwill, the overly anti-Pakistan US ambassador to New Delhi, as an indication of its resolve to balance both sides of the equation. And the clincher will probably come next week in the form of Mr Richard Armitage, deputy to Mr Powell, who helped cool down tempers twice in the recent past. Significantly, Mr Armitage is expected to nudge both countries into some confidence building measures like a restoration of trade, travel and full diplomatic links, before slipping into summitry mode later in the year.
Several questions arise. How come Mr Vajpayee has ever so subtly shifted from India’s post-Kargil 1999 aggressive stance and held out an olive branch to Pakistan? How come General Musharraf has discreetly offered to reverse Pakistan’s aggressive post-1990 Kashmir-focussed stance vis a vis India? How come the Americans are stepping into the fray much more assertively than in the past? Clearly, there must be something in it for all three parties.
The Americans don’t want a conflict on their hands in this region while they are embroiled in the Middle East and West Asia (Afghanistan and Iraq). That means they want to restore the South Asian status quo ante. That means they want India to forget about grasping at any pre-emptive logic to attack and destabilise Pakistan and change the status quo. But that also means that they don’t want Pakistan to continue provoking India in Kashmir by fuelling militancy in a bid to change the status quo. But why should India and Pakistan listen to Washington?
Pakistan is still dependent on American support and goodwill for the wellbeing of its economy. It is also hoping to receive military aid from America. Hence this is a classic, short-term, carrot-and-stick situation. For India, however, there are carrots galore in store. A longer-term strategic economic and military partnership with the US long coveted by the rising Indian bourgeoisie cannot be spurned easily. In Pakistan’s case net losses may accrue, and in India’s case net gains may be lost, if the Americans are openly thwarted.
But forget the Americans. There is something in this intrinsically for both countries. Pakistan and General Pervez Musharraf both stand to gain from reducing tensions with India. For one, the Pakistani economy’s revival is dependent on fiscal space for development expenditures and poverty alleviation. But continuing defense expenditure overruns on account of border hostilities with India would put paid to General Musharraf’s efforts on that score. Equally, the buoyant stock exchange, the improving environment for privatisation based on foreign investment, and the budding domestic investment climate would all evaporate if the spectre of conflict were to reappear on the horizon. A failing economy would also adversely impact General Musharraf’s political agenda. On the other side, India and Mr Vajpayee would stand to lose if the dividends following the relatively successful recent elections in held-Kashmir were to be sacrificed at the alter of renewed desperation on the part of the Kashmiris following an increase in Pakistan-supported violence in the valley. Equally, Mr Vajpayee would lose the goodwill of ordinary Indians still keen on peace with Pakistan but also desirous of a largely homespun settlement in Kashmir that seems within their grasp. Both these establishment approaches also seem to correspond to the feeling among ordinary Pakistanis of putting “Pakistan First” (which expressly means putting Kashmir on the back burner) and the feeling among ordinary Indians of getting rid of their “obsession” with Pakistan (which expressly means focussing on global outreach). Pakistan has accordingly stopped talking of the UN resolutions on Kashmir. It has also stopped talking about Kashmir as the “core” issue. In other words, it has gone back to the pre-Kargil Lahore Summit formula of February 1999. All that remains is to exchange India’s demand for a permanent end to “cross border” infiltration with a composite dialogue with India which meaningfully leads to a peace dividend in which the people of Kashmir can also participate voluntarily and democratically in any decision regarding their future.
The substance of this exchange can be discussed behind the scenes. But for the public confidence building process to begin, face saving on both sides requires at least a statement from General Musharraf disavowing the export of terrorism (as he did in January 2002) and a statement from Mr Vajpayee confirming that the Kashmir dispute is open for negotiations between India and Pakistan and between India and the Kashmiris. How about it, gentlemen?
(May 09-15, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 11 – Editorial)
Talking peace, risking war
PUBLIC SENTIMENT IN PAKISTAN is overwhelmingly for peace with India. The attrition of the decade-long Kashmir jihad has been on both India and Pakistan but statistics show that Pakistan has gone belly-up politically and economically while India has mixed high growth rates with a burgeoning of Hindu fundamentalism. Most Pakistanis welcome free trade with India when it is properly explained to them. Dr Ishrat Hussain, governor State Bank of Pakistan, acknowledged reality recently, “If direct trading relations are established between India and Pakistan, production costs will decline, consumers will benefit from cheaper products and trade within the South Asian region could expand by 10 % to 15 % within the next five years. There is a lot of trade taking place through third countries like Dubai in the UAE and Singapore. This raises costs. In the rest of the world regional trade is expanding and it is one of the major stimulants that insulates countries from global recessions”.
Despite such glimmers of rationality, hawkish wisdom would not have Pakistan talking to India but relying on international support to make it cough up Kashmir. To get international support, it says, highlight the Kashmir problem. Anybody who matters politically in Pakistan, and his aunt, has participated in this “highlighting” business at the cost of millions of dollar. The fact is that every time Pakistan highlights the Kashmir “cause” it loses international support. Last time General Musharraf did it at Kargil Pakistan became a pariah state. The other paradox is even more horrendous and should be prevented from casting its shadow on South Asia: every time the two countries talk peace they risk going to war. Mr Vajpayee’s Lahore visit led to Kargil; General Musharraf’s Agra visit led to India massing its army on the border with Pakistan.
Sanity is located outside South Asia. It is clear that the pressure on India and Pakistan to talk has come from the United States and Europe who think that the next Indo-Pak stand-off will lead to war which may quickly go nuclear. After the 2001 massing of Indian troops on the Pakistani border, there are many military experts who agree with this, but no one is willing to change his calcified approach to a problem that has held Pakistan back. However, given the world’s irresistible “encouragement”, India and Pakistan are being dragged to the talking table. In the meanwhile, confusion reigns in both New Delhi and Islamabad. Only an expert on the absurdity of Indo-Pak relations can see the method in this madness.
Mr Vajpayee made his famous speech about talks with Pakistan on April 18 but on April 19 added the “conditionality” of Pakistan stopping its “cross-border” infiltration. On the Pakistani side, the PM Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali said all the nice things he normally says but then called in the parliamentary opposition and agreed on a position on Kashmir that will foredoom the talks if they ever take place. Foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri stubbed his toe saying Pakistan wouldn’t mind starting free trade with India before the Kashmir dispute was resolved. The Foreign Office came on line the next day saying he meant only Pakistan trading gas with India from the trans-Afghan pipeline that may never be built.
The opposition that went to see PM Jamali came out of his office transformed. The “secular” political parties have suddenly become hawks although two of them were removed from power by turns for being soft on India. The acting boss of the PML-N Javed Hashmi promised the nation that he would not allow the Jamali government to settle the Kashmir dispute on the basis of the Line of Control. Mr Hashmi is standing in for former premier Nawaz Sharif who got Mr Vajpayee to travel by bus to Lahore and sign the Lahore Declaration. The MMA remains hawkish on India because its “muscle” (read jihadi organisations) comes from keeping the pot boiling in Kashmir. The Jama’at-e-Islami says it is getting ready to put up the kind of street fight it organised when Mr Vajpayee last came to Lahore. Is it possible that General Musharraf actually wanted to hear that?
Just as there are vested interests in Pakistan holding back Islamabad from committing the heresy of deviating from a failed policy, so in India, the Shiv Sena is telling Mr Vajpayee to organise his own cross-border terrorism against Pakistan and send in Hindu suicide-bombers to kill Pakistanis instead of talking to them.
The common man in Pakistan has lost interest in this pantomime. Textbook nationalism may make him mouth opinion that favours the hawks but the average citizen has borne the brunt of Pakistan’s Kashmir policy for too long and wants the economic noose around his neck loosened. Seen in the light of public sentiment and economic necessity, all the hawkish wisdom in Pakistan has become ridiculously paradoxical. We can only hope that while talking peace India and Pakistan will not be risking war.
(May 16-22, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 12 – Editorial)
May God have mercy on us all
ALARMING DEVELOPMENTS ARE beginning to creep upon us surreptitiously.
It began in Lahore a couple of months ago. Suddenly, someone began to tar the bright young faces of women on billboards advertising toothpaste, shampoo and cooking oil. Then we were stunned to read about a petition by a couple of men purporting to be the conscience of the nation’s morality. They had sought, and obtained, from a court of law an order banning the construction of a proposed “food street” in the city. Apparently the site of the proposed street to be transformed from a dirty, dung-ridden alley into a brightly lit, shop-lined walkway was found to be “objectionable”. The street is behind the perimeter wall of the great mosque near the “red-light” area of the old city. Now, in the latest of these moralistic stirrings by city “notables”, we hear of the frenzied response of the pious administration of Punjab University to censor allegedly “obscene” words, lines and passages in books of English literature prescribed as texts.
On the face of it, the act of spoiling billboards seemed like a spontaneous bout of vagrancy. No one seriously claimed responsibility or explained the motives behind it. Indeed, when the police nabbed a couple of youngsters red-handed, they were simply reprimanded and let off the hook. But now we learn that the “face” disease has broken out in the North West Frontier province. Alarmingly, offending billboards have been pulled down or wrecked, with scant regard for the financial losses to businessmen. Worse, the provincial Amir of the Jamaat i Islami, Mr Sabir Hussain Awan, an MNA, has not just taken responsibility for ordering this action via the zealots of the Shabab-i-Milli (the youth wing of the parent party) but seems downright self-righteous about it. “We asked the district administration to remove these billboards”, he thundered, “when it didn’t, we had to remove them forcibly ourselves”. It is understood that the Jamaat MNA considers such toothpaste posters “evil” and “un-Islamic”. Can we then presume that the same logic will now be surreptitiously applied to all product advertising in the print and electronic media so that in the bitter end the fundamentalists will force the hijab on every female in the country?
The fanatical behaviour in the matter of the “food street” in Lahore’s “red-light” area is equally disturbing. The petitioners argue that “the innocent youth” of the country would be attracted to the “food street” and fall into the erring ways of the area. This is a load of crap. The red-light area already boasts some of the finest eateries in the city, including one in the heart of the area run by an acclaimed artist. Nor would the red-light area have become a greater “den of sin” by the arrival of an upmarket food street in its vicinity. If anything, perhaps, it might have been nudged to clean up its act in keeping with the spirit of the times. It bears reminding, of course, that the red light area has braved the most tyrannical and hypocritical of regimes to retain its original character in an undying tribute to the great historic city of Lahore.
The Punjab University’s attempt to “purge the English syllabi of obscenity” is straight out of the middle ages when book burning rather than book reading was the accepted norm. Among the targeted texts are some celebrated classics of English literature like Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott, The Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and so on. According to university sources, “the orders have come right from the top”, implying the Presidency. The whisper goes that the wife of a former army general raised the matter with the President’s good wife, who referred it to the President himself. In due course, a call from the Presidency woke up the registrar and the vice-chancellor of the university, both retired army officers, who entrusted the job of cleaning up the English language to a certain Dr Shahbaz Arif. Dr Arif claims that the word “rape” in The Rape of the Lock evokes “a negative image”. He says he will try to change this image or recommend some other book. “There are so many vulgar words, concepts and thoughts in the current English curriculum that they can ‘induce’ our youngsters to erroneous thoughts and ways, and there are ideas and concepts that don’t jibe with the ideology of Pakistan”. Among the many objectionable words listed by the great scholar of Islam and defender of Pakistan are “vodka, wine, whiskey”. But for some strange reason, words and phrases like “ cock a gun” or “cock an ear”, or “crowing cocks” and even “cockpits” are also under scrutiny. (see The Rape of the English Language by Ejaz Haider on page 7 of TFT this week).
We are appalled. It is bad enough to be ruled by cocksure generals. Now we are to be taught English language and literature by the cocky wives of cocksure generals. May God have mercy on us all.
(May 30-June 05, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 14 – Editorial)
Which MMA?
THE MUTTAHIDA MAJLIS-E-Amal’s unprecedented electoral strides are due largely to the Pakistan military establishment. This nexus between the military and the mullahs (Military Mullah Alliance) is the “other’ MMA that defines the ideological-security parameters of the military-bureaucratic state establishment of Pakistan. Their relationship is best articulated by putting certain current developments in a political context.
The MMA government of the NWFP has tabled a Shariat Bill seeking to amend 71 laws as advised by the Islamic Ideology Council. The new law will be implemented by a committee of hardline mullahs who will freely use the organs of the state to enforce their fanatical definition of “what is good and what is bad” in society. The bill follows a campaign of vigilante action by extremists of the Jamaat-e-Islami in the province who first defaced and then wrecked advertising hoardings displaying the “visage” of women. It is linked to the Jamaat’s attack on other policies and practices that allegedly smack of moderation or tolerance in any form – a witch hunt against the English language at the Punjab university, a blockade against the construction of a food street in the vicinity of the Grand Mosque in Lahore’s old city, the attempt to replace English with Arabic as a compulsory subject in higher education, and so on.
Although the opposition in the NWFP assembly has objected to the shariat bill, its voice is much too weak to carry conviction. Well-meaning NGOs and other civil society organizations like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan are alarmed. But the mullahs see them as outposts of western imperialism and are targeting them no less as vices to be abolished. The interesting point, however, is that there hasn’t been a squeak out of the federal government in Islamabad whose “boss”, General Pervez Musharraf, is proud to bill himself as the great and enlightened voice of moderation, flexibility and modernity in the country.
In fact, far from criticizing the MMA or reining in its militants, the military’s intelligence agencies have worked overtime to pave the way for their forceful entry into the corridors of power. Indeed, even as we write these lines, the military leadership is trying to woo the MMA to give up its personalized opposition to General Musharraf in exchange for a freer hand to run their governments with greater federal financial support. Why does the military see Pakistan’s religious forces as allies to be cultivated and used even though it knows that they are inimical to the sort of modern, moderate and flexible civil society that wannabe Ataturks among the military yearn for? What is the relationship between the MMA’s relentless drive for Islamisation and the military’s domestic and regional agendas?
The general perception is that many Islamic norms, values and symbols in policy-making and law derive from the force of ascendant Islamic movements in the country that are forcing their ideas on ruling regimes (General Musharraf’s) and politicians (PML-Q). But self-propelled Islamic activism only partly explains this trend in Pakistan. As the scholar and political scientist Vali Nasr has explained, the Pakistani military’s acquiescence to Islamisation actually transcends its fear of it by seeking opportunities in it to establish the military’s hegemony and expand its control over society. While the MMA has been given the political space to mobilize Islamic symbols and tenets (destroying billboards, extolling the veil, etc), to exploit anti-Americanism to garner votes, and to formulate Islamic laws as in the NWFP to make inroads into civil society, it has been ensured that Islamism is only opposed to civil society transgressions of the national security state and not to military hegemony or extensive state intervention in the economy and society. Indeed, the military-bureaucratic state is constantly trying to harness the energies of Islamists to subdue the political opposition and to expand state power. Islamisation has therefore become a proactive process rather than a reactive one in which the military-bureaucratic state’s interests continue to serve as a causal factor. This happens first through the appropriation of the Islamic discourse, through PTV and state owned and controlled media, and then through implementation of Islamic policies, as happened during Ziaist times and is now taking place in the NWFP and Balochistan. That is why both periods of Islamisation have been periods of unprecedented expansion of military power. The need for increasing revenues for enhanced military budgets rather than large-scale poverty alleviation, coupled with the requirement of political hegemony, has led the military-bureaucratic state to create and interact with the “other” MMA. Can this “other” MMA last?
The first cracks are beginning to appear. The religious forces are no longer interested only in challenging attempts by the state to become less ideological and more secular in the new global WTO village. They are now seeking to challenge the state’s monopoly over political control. The MMA’s strategy of forcing General Musharraf to take off his uniform is aimed at achieving this objective.
The continuing tragedy is that neither General Musharraf nor the mainstream political parties currently realize who stands to benefit the most from their mutual hostility and antagonism.
(June 13-19, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 16 – Editorial)
Musharraf’s dilemma
GENERAL PERVEZ MUSHARRAF candidly told a bristling convocation of bearded notables in the NWFP recently that the Talibanisation of Pakistan is not desirable because it is not in the country’s interest. Correct. He said that beards and shalwar-kameez and even the veil did not denote greater piety than shirts and trousers and natural modesty. True. He suggested that Islam is not an intolerant religion and advised that there should be no coercion in its prescriptions. Wonderful. Governance, he explained, is more about providing health and shelter and jobs and education and security to the people and less about ramming a narrow, suffocating and punitive moral code down their throats. Right. But at no time has he ever said what he might be compelled to do if the MMA doesn’t toe the modern and moderate line.
General Musharraf, it may be recalled, had dared say the same sort of things before a gathering of neo-con lawyers in Lahore a day earlier. His theme is: “We need a pluralistic, modern and progressive vision of Islam to guide us in the footsteps of our founders”. No sane and sensible person can disagree with him. But many people do wonder why it has taken him so long to call a spade a spade.
Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s dismissive comment is interesting: “Musharraf is preparing the ground for his forthcoming trip to the United States”. The suggestion here is that while General Musharraf remains keen on a political alliance with the MMA in order to resolve the LFO issue in his favour, he has recently taken to drumming up his liberal and anti-MMA credentials in order to please the mullah-hating neo-con regime in Washington. In other words, that he is a two-timer to his jackboots.
The reality, however, may be more complex. In his personal demeanour, General Musharraf remains a modern, moderate and sincere man with the anti-mullah sensibilities of a majority of similarly inclined Pakistanis. But when his memorable statement about emulating Kamal Ataturk, followed by the cute picture of Dot and Buddy under each arm, became the bete noire of the mullahs three years ago, he was advised by the “agencies” to treat discretion as the better part of valour. Much the same sort of advice was given to him when his natural human instincts led him to order a review of the discriminatory blasphemy law. On both occasions, the “agencies” did not wish to jeopardise the dividends from the historical military-mullah alliance, externally in pursuit of “national security” goals in Afghanistan and India and internally in maintaining political hegemony over civil society. Later, however, when sectarianism reared its ugly head, the intellectual confusion in the man became manifest – he wanted to separate the anti-people fanatics (sectarians) from the pro-state ones (jihadis) and go after the former while defending the latter.
In pursuit of this neat compartmentalisation, he asked Mullah Umar not to provide sanctuaries to the sectarian extremists and hand them over to Pakistan. But this attempted “dialogue” didn’t get far – at the time, Mullah Umar and the Deoband-inspired Taliban were actually busy carrying out their own brand of sectarianism against the besieged Shiite Hazara of Afghanistan. The “agencies” were not fully on board either because some of the jihadis and Afghan mujahideen came from the very sources that were fanning sectarianism in the country.
Then came 9/11. When the Taliban spurned his advice to ditch OBL and reform themselves, he weighed in with the Americans against them. When the “agencies” resisted this about-turn, he changed their leadership. When the mullahs roared their disapproval, he put their leaders behind bars. He even went so far as to condemn certain acts of “terrorism” against civilian targets by the jihadis in Indian-held Kashmir. For a moment, it seemed that he had crossed the Rubicon and decided to strike at the very roots of mullah power and Talibanisation.
But once again that was not to be. Misplaced political necessity stayed his personal instinct. The general elections were at hand and the PPP and PML-N had to be stopped in their tracks. Thus the MMA was given a free hand to fill the political vacuum. But this effectively blackballed the development of the political consensus based on a relatively liberal worldview that he advocated. Worse, the “moderate” parties that he had banished were now compelled to join hands with the MMA and challenge his legitimacy as both president and army chief.
Meanwhile, the contradictions in his approach to party politics at home and his liberal worldview have been exacerbated by the demands of the international community whose economic and political support is important to him. The world wants the MMA out. But General Musharraf is compelled to keep it in for personal and jihadi reasons. The world wants to see a restoration of democracy under General Musharraf’s umbrella. But the MMA is both anti-democratic and anti-Musharraf. The longer General Musharraf prevaricates, the greater his personal and the country’s problems. It is time for him to resolve the contradictions in his approach and steer the country unequivocally in the direction of the progressive Pakistan he constantly talks about. For starters, he could make sincere efforts to build peace with India and the PPP/PMLN on a “live and let live basis”.
(June 20-26, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 17 – Editorial)
At the crossroads
THREE YEARS AGO, AN AMERICAN president (Bill Clinton) was reluctant to spend more than five hours in Pakistan. In fact, he refused to publicly shake hands with General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. Today, an American president (George W Bush) has invited the coup-maker (whose name he couldn’t recall three years ago) to his presidential retreat in Camp David reserved for the chosen “friends” of America. How times have changed since 9/11.
If the blame for Pakistan’s international isolation following the 1999 Kargil misadventure and the coup can be laid at General Musharraf’s door, the fact is that the turnaround in Pakistan’s fortunes since 9/11 is a direct result of the general’s wise decision to change course on certain old, hurtful foreign policies. Specifically, the timely bailout from a disastrous pro-Taliban Afghan policy, coupled with an aggressive hunt for Al Qaeda terrorists, has endeared General Musharraf and Pakistan to the international community, especially to Washington. However, kudos is also due General Musharraf for daring to take one step back – abandoning the decade-long establishment policy of putting pre-conditions (Kashmir-first) for a peace dialogue with India – in the hope of leaping two steps forward (building confidence via a composite dialogue and offering to go mid-way for an enduring and realistic solution on Kashmir) with India.
However, it is also true that General Musharraf’s experiment with guided democracy at home hasn’t handed him the legitimacy he craves. Indeed, his cynical manipulation of “ground realities” (rigged referendum and discredited elections) to entrench himself in power has been at the cost of critical national institutions like the judiciary and the centrist two-party system. But that’s not all. The unprecedented rise of the religious right at the expense of the mainstream parties is a potential time bomb at the heart of the political system. This has policy reverberations at home and abroad. At home, it is undermining General Musharraf’s guided democracy and structured economic policies. Abroad, it is threatening to erode his new foreign policy initiatives vis-à-vis Afghanistan, India and America. The MMA is therefore the most menacing crack in the edifice that General Musharraf is trying to build. Does he realise this?
Yes and no. Old habits die hard. The mullahs have been in alliance with the military since the time of General Ziaul Haq, first as mujahideen allies in the fight against the Soviets; later against the anti-Pakistan regimes in Kabul; and then as jihadis in the fight against Indian oppressors in Kashmir. So it is difficult to overnight scuttle forces that have been an integral part of the military’s foreign policies. In the current circumstances, however, they are also an important adjunct to General Musharraf’s policy of keeping his two nemeses (Bhutto and Sharif) out of political reckoning. But the mullahs’ dogged resistance to General Musharraf as army chief and president is objectionable because it is not grounded in any democratic principles enshrined in religious politics. Instead, it emanates from their fear that his foreign policy innovations regarding Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, India, America and the Middle East will eventually diminish their role as an evergreen ally of the Pakistani establishment.
It is in this context that General Musharraf’s recent outbursts against the MMA’s religious politics, as well as his high profile two-week-long visit to the UK, USA, France and Germany, should be evaluated.
On the one hand, he is aghast at the anti-LFO and Islamisation policies of the MMA that are surefire recipes for political instability and economic disruption at home. On the other, he is telling the international community that he should not be pushed into making unilateral concessions to India and hasty compromises with the Northern Alliance-dominated regime in Kabul because a religious-cum-establishment backlash could drastically hurt both his and Pakistan’s prospects. Indeed, his frustration at a lack of sincere reciprocity from India, coupled with unfulfilled expectations of greater patience and generosity (military and economic) from the international community, are manifestations of his current problematic. He wants the MMA to accept him as both president and army chief in exchange for the material fruits of office in two provinces; but he doesn’t want the MMA to rock his negotiations with the international community, India and Afghanistan aimed at entrenching his bid for legitimacy and longevity.
In London, Washington, Paris and Berlin, General Musharraf will be thumped on the back for his help in the international war against Al Qaeda terrorism. Economic and military aid will also start flowing, partly as a reward for past deeds and partly as an incentive for doing more in the future. Three themes will dominate the advice of the international community: make peace with India, don’t destabilise Afghanistan, and roll back the tide of radical Islamism in nuclear-armed Pakistan. The longer General Musharraf prevaricates on these scores, caught between his soldierly instincts and his political vision, the greater the chances that his economic and political agendas will be dislocated and he will end up as the biggest loser of all. It is in this sense that General Pervez Musharraf, no less than Pakistan, truly stands at the crossroads. His promises of today must become the country’s commitments of tomorrow.
(June 27-July 03, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 18 – Editorial)
Work in progress
AS EXPECTED, GENERAL PERVEZ Musharraf has received the red carpet treatment in Washington. Most world leaders are not feted at Camp David by the American president. The international media has also wooed him as never before. In addition to the US$1 billion in debt write-off last year from Washington, he has now got Pakistan another US$3 billion, half of it in desperately needed military equipment for the first time in 15 years. The icing on the cake is President Bush’s description of him as a “courageous” man “who wants to build a moderate and tolerant Pakistan”. All this is a reward for standing solidly behind President Bush’s “war against terror” since 9/11.
As expected, too, the opposition at home has pooh-poohed his achievements. One party stalwart says Pakistan has been “short changed” by the US because a Pentagon study calculates Pakistan’s costs after 9/11 at about US$10 billion. Another accuses General Musharraf of “selling-out” to the Americans, implying that his foreign policies are in America’s interest rather than in Pakistan’s. President Bush’s sidestepping of the democracy issue worries true liberals as much as it does Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. On the F-16 count, however, everyone is dismayed because the issue has become a symbol of “national pride” more than “national defense”.
No matter. The truth about General Musharraf’s trip to the US is more complex than his detractors or supporters make out. The fact is that the US considers General Musharraf its “best bet” in Pakistan for the foreseeable future for good reason. General Musharraf didn’t bat an eyelid before facilitating the collapse of the Taliban regime in Kabul. He did much the same when he offered an unconditional and composite peace dialogue with India, thus paving the way for the withdrawal of Indian troops from the international and Kashmir borders and reducing the chances of conflict. Nor did he think twice before leading the hunt for Al Qaeda fugitives in Pakistan and turning them over to the US after they had been nabbed. General Musharraf has also given firm commitments that Pakistan will not proliferate nuclear weapons technology, especially to North Korea or Iran, both of whom are in the gun-sights of the USA. What more could Washington ask for? But the best part of all these initiatives is that they are as good for Pakistan as they are for the US.
However, Washington sees all this in the context of “work in progress”. General Musharraf is expected to do much more to help quell the recent Taliban uprisings in the tribal areas of Pakistan against the US-supported Hamid Karzai government in Kabul. But this is not something that can be wrapped up quickly, considering the fiercely independent and conservative nature of the armed tribesmen of these areas. So progress will have to be demonstrably manifest. Similarly, the peace process with India is stalled for want of sufficient evidence of a lid on Pakistan-based jihadis fomenting insurgency in Kashmir. Everyone admits that cross-border infiltration is much reduced. But a permanent end to it is probably not possible – if only because it would be bad tactics to give up a weapon of the struggle unilaterally – except after a reasonable compromise has been reached over the Kashmir issue with India on the table. So this issue too will continue to crop up in the foreseeable future and Pakistan’s calibrated approach will be measured by the degree of success it achieves in moving the peace dialogue forward with India. Then there is the nuclear issue. Pakistani denials notwithstanding, Washington believes that Pakistan’s military establishment has exported nuclear know-how to North Korea in exchange for missile technology in the past. It doesn’t want this sort of thing happening ever again, given its fear of nuclear weapons falling into the “wrong” (state or non state terrorists) hands. Although the chances of Pakistan crossing this red light are slim, there is now the added fear that Pakistan could fall into the “wrong” (fundamentalist) hands and thereby endanger American and Western interests in the region and the world. All these issues – Jihad, Taliban, Al Qaeda, religious fundamentalism, nuclear weapons – are interlinked in the American mind. So progress on all these areas will be the yardstick by which Washington will measure General Musharraf’s utility and the rewards that will be dished out to Musharraf’s Pakistan will be commensurate with his personal performance on these fronts.
The aid package is all about carrots and sticks. It is spread over five years. This means Congressional and Presidential approval will be needed every year. On the other side, the F-16s have been withheld but not irrevocably denied. Military equipment can be finally bought, but only if it serves Pakistan’s defensive rather than offensive capability. The free trade agreement will also have to be negotiated step by step in the years ahead. And the movement towards institutionalising a western-type democracy must be palpable so that Pakistan doesn’t have to depend on the infallibility of one “courageous” man to deliver the goods in the end. Considering that Pakistan not so long ago was a “pariah state” with a “useless dictator”, this is not a bad beginning in the right direction after all by General Pervez Musharraf.
(June 06-12, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 15 – Editorial)
Predictable outcome
LET US ADMIT SOME FACTS. THE governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, Dr Ishrat Husain, remains refreshingly candid about the state of the economy. In fact, the SBP’s quarterly reports on the economy since Dr Husain’s arrival on the scene have undergone a transformation of sorts. The reports now note most positive and negative factors impinging on the economy and frankly discuss its weaknesses and strengths. This approach is quite unlike that in the past in which official SBP documents preferred to obscure or conceal uneasy facts rather than face them squarely. Dr Husain has also been much more accessible to the informed public than his predecessors – his discourses at seminars and conferences are cogent, well argued and well publicised. All this is laudable. Of course, Dr Husain’s task has been made easier by the fact that the government of General Pervez Musharraf has institutionally enabled the SBP to act with greater scope and autonomy than ever before.
Let us also admit that the finance minister, Mr Shaukat Aziz, is a consummate communicator. His picture adorns the pages of newspapers with unfailing regularity. He is cool customer who is rarely flummoxed by cleaver or aggressive hacks. But his approach to selling policy is also different from that of his predecessors. There is greater transparency in the targets set and claims made by the finance minister. For example, a month ago we knew more from him about what the next budget would look and feel like than we used to know from his predecessors a month after their budgets were unfurled. Here’s an example: until recently, Mr Aziz was claiming that his ministry would meet the GDP growth target of 4.6%. However, on the eve of the publication of the Economic Survey which presents updated statistics on the economy, it transpires that GDP growth could actually be closer to 5%. Now that’s a remarkable revelation. In the old days, we would have been told a year before the event that GDP would definitely grow by 5% in the next fiscal year and then be told in June that for various unavoidable reasons it had fallen to 4.5%. Of course, Mr Aziz’s task of steering clear of falsehoods has been made easier by the fact that the government of General Pervez Musharraf has stuck like glue to the well known guidelines of the IMF and World Bank.
In fact, whether some of us like it or not, and for various necessary reasons, it is this single achievement – sticking to the IMF programme – that is unprecedented. And it is this prescription which has made economic life all too predictable. So now we know what the next budget will generally have to say on various matters. Development spending will increase by about 20% as compared to last year’s target and by over 30% as compared to actual development expenditures last year in order to alleviate rising poverty and spur demand-led growth especially in the agriculture, public works and housing sectors; revenue collection will be targeted to increase by over 10% and the fiscal deficit should come down to under 4%. The automobile assembly sector could very well benefit from tariff reductions; banks will be pleased by a couple of points reduction in tax rates to offset declining profits from low interest rates; the cement industry should delight in the end of central excise duty; elsewhere, tax subsidies will be reduced, but no new taxes are anticipated. GST exemptions will face stringent tests. Defense expenditures will rise by about 10% compared to last year’s target, but these will be justified on the basis of current overruns which will make it look as though they have been more or less frozen for next year in real terms.
All this, of course, is predicated on the assumption that Mr Aziz will be thumped a grand welcome by the PMLQ and its allies when he stands up in parliament to deliver his rehearsed address on June 7. But on this score, at least, misgivings abound. Certainly, if there is no deal with the MMA before then on the LFO, Mr Aziz may have to postpone his budget speech to a less inauspicious day. Equally, if a deal with the MMA is clinched but still leaves the PMLN and PPPP bristling with outrage, Mr Aziz may find the going tougher than did either President Ghulam Ishaq Khan or President Farooq Leghari when they were confronted by a hostile opposition during their address to a joint sitting of parliament. We also find it difficult to imagine Mr Aziz squirming in the uncomfortable shoes of either of his two predecessors Makhdum Shahabuddin and Sartaj Aziz who had to brave a raucous opposition to the bitter end of their budget speeches.
One thing is intriguing. Mr Aziz has confidently announced the date and exact hour for unveiling the Economic Survey 2002-03 and Budget 2003-04 in Islamabad. The basis of this confidence is unclear. Maybe this is the government’s way of bluffing the opposition into a deal on the LFO at the last minute. But if it isn’t, Mr Aziz is being less transparent than is his wont about his fallback position.
(Aug 01-07, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 23 – Editorial)
There lies the rub
THE MMA HAS GIVEN US ITS perspective on a proposed deal in the offing with the government. But the government is not denying or confirming anything. The prime minister, Zafarullah Jamali, has, however, offered to hold talks with the PPP’s Amin Fahim and PMLN’s Javed Hashmi in an effort to bring the two oppositionists into the equation as well. This would suggest that Mr Jamali wants to manufacture a broad consensus with the MMA and the ARD so that the final solution has the signature of all the political parties of Pakistan. So far so good. But where will it all end?
The MMA and the government have clearly agreed on some major points. (1) A constitutional amendment bill (15th amendment?) will be floated in parliament (like the 8th constitutional amendment bill between General Zia ul Haq and the Junejo-led parliament in 1985) to incorporate the elements of a “deal” on power sharing between 2/3rds of the elected parliament and the “un-elected” president. By so doing, the government will concede that the LFO is NOT part of the constitution. This would be a victory for the opposition because this is what it has unanimously long claimed.
(2) This amendment will indemnify and legitimise most, but not all, of the acts of General Pervez Musharraf’s regime since he seized power in October 1999, including the rules and regulations under which the general elections of 2002 were held.
(3) Among the sections of the LFO that will NOT be legitimised in the new constitutional amendment will be sections that deal with: the National Security Council; the presidential referendum; the president’s power to sack the cabinet, government and parliament without any repercussions on his own tenure; the three year extension in tenure given to senior judges, etc.
(4) General Musharraf would seek election as president of Pakistan for five years via the various assemblies as laid down under the original constitution and his presidential status under the referendum would be de-legitimised. (General Zia did not have to seek election under the 8th amendment which accepted his presidential status as a “given” factor.)
(5) Under the new amendment the duly elected president (General Musharraf) would be entitled to dismiss the government and the parliament but the dismissal would be subject to the approval of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. If the SC does not uphold the decision, the president (General Musharraf) will have to quit.
Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Maulana Fazlur Rahman would also like us to believe that General Musharraf has agreed to the following proposals to be incorporated into the amendment: (a) He will agree now to shedding his uniform in October 2004. (b) He will stand for election as a civilian president after October 2004 and remain president for five years hence, ie from October 2004 to October 2009.
But this is still doubtful. If General Musharraf has accepted this solution, it would be another major victory for the opposition. In the event, however, and more significantly, it would also make nonsense of all the reasons that General Musharraf has given to justify why he cannot today give a date for taking off his uniform later.
It would therefore seem that there may still remain one mighty point of contention between the negotiators: the announcement of the date on which General Musharraf will take off his uniform. Is it possible that a subtle variation on the theme might lead to the final solution? For example, General Musharraf might only be agreeable to accepting a date in October 2004 for the announcement of a date in 2005 or 2006 (before the next general elections in 2007) on which to shed his uniform. This would give him greater political leverage in the next year or so than that accorded by the MMA’s proposal. In the meantime, he can seek election as president via the parliamentary route as proposed by the MMA. A simpler version of this would be for General Musharraf to become an elected president immediately following a constitutional amendment along the above lines in which he is obliged to take off his uniform before a cut-off date a year or two hence. In other words, instead of remaining an army chief and an un-elected president until 2004 as proposed by the MMA, he could become an elected president right away and remain army chief also for a year or two hence.
The other unresolved issue pertains to the PPP and PMLN. Will they go along with any of these proposals? We doubt it. General Musharraf has time and again heaped scorn and derision on the leaders of these two mainstream parties that among them received a majority of the vote in the last elections. He has refused to offer them any respite. If he wants their thumb imprint on any constitutional amendment, he will have to go the extra mile and offer them a grand truth and reconciliation package that promises to rehabilitate them. And we don’t think he is big enough to do that right now. But without them on board, anything that he and the MMA do separately or together will not be institutionalized in the political structure of Pakistan. And there lies the rub.
(Aug 08-14, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 24 – Editorial)
Noble vision Vs political expediency
GENERRAL PERVEZ MUSHARRAF’S tour de force with Lahore editors last Monday spanned a framework of geo-economics, geo-politics and geo-strategy in which he outlined his vision of Pakistan as a country that was “secure”, “stable”, “democratic” and “prosperous”; a country that practised “enlightened moderation”, a nation that was “profitably integrated” with the world community. He believed that such national nirvana could be achieved by “exploiting” the great “opportunities” on offer since 9/11 in particular, which had catapulted Pakistan into the “epicentre” of a circle marked by China, India, Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the ME. He identified four conditions for success: a “friendly domestic environment”, “political stability”, “economic certainty” and an appropriate “infrastructure network” of transport and communications. The potential image of Pakistan that he sought to convey was that of a “pivotal” state at the hub of a regional galaxy that was a “bridge” to other galaxies in an expanding universe. Wonderful.
But General Musharraf is a realist. He warned about the obstacles in the country’s path. “Some people have put their foot on the brake”, he objected. They were principally those “ religious extremists, sectarianists and terrorists” who had created a “negative perception of Islam, the Muslim ummah and Pakistan” as “hubs of intolerance, fundamentalism and terrorism”. And what should be done about such people who had pushed Pakistan and the ummah to the “crossroads”? He was brutally candid: “We must stop mosques from preaching hatred. We must finish off the religious extremism of an active minority. And we must get the silent majority to stand up and be counted”. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful.
General Musharraf articulated a progressive vision for Pakistan in his first speech to the nation in 1999. By June 2001 he was ready to assail religious extremists. In January 2002 he promised that Pakistan would not allow terrorists to tar its image. And he did his bit to flush out Al Qaeda terrorists from their hideouts in the country. But the fact that he continues to return to this subject with increasing frequency confirms that the core problem of religious extremism and intolerance persists in the body politic of Pakistan. Why is he unable to come to grips with it and root it out?
The “problem” of political Islam – which is what sustains religious extremism – is imbedded in the very notion of the state that General Musharraf has inherited, over which he absolutely presides and which he resolutely defends. This state is still guided by a particularly vested interpretation of the Objectives Resolution of 1949 moved by Liaquat Ali Khan in March 1949 rather than by the visionary speech to the Constituent Assembly in August 1947 by the Quaid i Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. As several ‘objective’ historians have noted, Mr Liaquat Ali Khan was primarily concerned with diverting public attention from democratic constitution making. His administration tried to “Islamise” the government by means of the Objectives Resolution in order to demonstrate for purposes of legitimacy that steps were being taken to create an “Islamic state” even before a new democratic constitution was drafted. He also hoped that this approach would help him garner support for the Muslim League. In other words, political opportunism or expediency rather than political vision is embedded in the post-independence state of Pakistan.
With the exception of the state under General Ayub Khan, the route to “state-hood” is littered with politically expedient Islamic markers for legitimising dictators and autocrats. Z A Bhutto’s political expediency led to the outlawing of the Ahmedis as Muslims, a ban on alcohol and the declaration of Friday as a national holiday. Then came General Zia ul Haq, whose litany of politically expedient Islamic measures included the punitive Hudood Ordinances, the Islamic jihad in Afghanistan, the Federal Shariat Court, the blasphemy law, Islamic revisions in the education curricula, federal grants to mosques and madrassas, and Islamic reform of the economy (zakat deductions, the ban on interest as riba, etc), culminating in the 8th amendment which formalised the Islamisation of the state by placing the Objectives Resolution of 1949 firmly at the heart of the constitution. During this era, the doors of state institutions – army, bureaucracy, judiciary, police, state colleges and universities – were thrown open to the religious parties and groups politically allied to General Zia. Later, Nawaz Sharif, a Zia protégé, unfurled the Shariah 12th amendment bill in 1991 in deference to his ISI-crafted Islami Democratic Alliance (IJI).
What has General Musharraf concretely done to turn back the tide of political Islam and religious extremism in the country? Nothing. He has not removed Islamic jihad from his lexicon of national security policies; he hasn’t even been able to make procedural changes in the blasphemy law that nourishes the most negative foreign perceptions. Worse, his own brand of personalised politics of legitimacy is leading to alliances of political expediency with the religious parties and undermining the image of Pakistan abroad.
In short, there is a serious dislocation between General Musharraf’s noble vision and his expedient political deeds. In effect, he is buying short-term tactical stability at the expense of longer-term strategic instability. With the historic Military-Mullah Alliance (MMA) alive and kicking, how can he expect us to stand up and be counted among his ranks?
(Aug 15-21, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 25 – Editorial)
Okara peasants, military and national interest
THERE IS A NEW TWIST IN THE unending and sordid saga of the plight of the tenants of Okara Military Farms (OMF) in Punjab: General Pervez Musharraf has taken it upon himself to defend the army’s honour and conduct which has been denounced by human rights organisations at home and abroad. But from General Musharraf’s passionate advocacy of the righteousness of the Rangers’ cause, two perceptions emerge. First, that he has been briefed only by the brass of his own constituency and hasn’t personally heard the heartrending story from other side. Second, that this one-sided briefing has convinced him that the NGOs who are supporting the cause of the Okara peasants have some sort of conspiratorial vested agenda that is unpatriotic and/or anti-national. This hectoring is most unfortunate. We had earlier implored General Musharraf to play the role of the honest broker and clean out this festering sore. But by rushing to premeditated judgment in favour of his own boys, he is guilty of putting the army’s corporate interests above the national interest. (Incidentally, it doesn’t always occur to stupid civilians that the army’s interest = the national interest.)
Worse, there is a belated attempt to obfuscate the matter. General Musharraf claimed that the Punjab government, rather than the military, would reap the benefits accruing from the lease of the Okara farmland to the military. This is a very strange statement indeed. Why should the military lease the land if it doesn’t make a worthwhile profit from it? Indeed, why should anyone rent or lease anything at all if it doesn’t bring many benefits over costs? The gist of General Musharraf remarks amounted to this: first, that the peasants would be better off in financial and security terms under the new system proposed by the military; second, that the Punjab government would be better off in financial terms from leasing the farms to the military and getting the tenants of the military to accept the terms and conditions of the new contractual system being imposed on them. In other words, the peasants and the Punjab government, rather than only the OMF enterprise, would be better off under the new system. But the problem is that the peasants who eke out their livelihood from the land don’t think they will be better off in the end. Also, it is intriguing why the Punjab government, which owns the lands in question and is said to reap dividends from the OMF’s lease of it, is strangely silent on the issue.
Worst of all, the arrogance of the OMF can be gauged from the text of some letters written by senior officials to relatives of the allegedly offending tenants threatening them in clearly unlawful terms. We are in possession of two letters sent to the OMF “employees”, dated Aug 26, 2002, and Jan 24, 2003, by the farm officer, a major. These show the mindset of the military authorities towards the Okara tenancy issue in particular and civil-military relations in general. In one of the letters, the major writes in English: “It has come to our notice that your parents/relatives living in chaks of Mil Farms are involved in anti-state activities. You are directed to motivate your parents/relatives to desist from anti-state activities and to co-op with the Pakistan Army and Pakistan Rangers. If you will not do this for the state, appropriate disciplinary action will be taken against you.”
Anti-state activity? Appropriate disciplinary action? Since when has the peaceful defense of property rights by organised persons become anti-state activity? By this criteria, all trade union activity should be branded as anti-state activity and uprooted from the constitution. At any rate, the language and meaning of the letters leave little to the imagination. This is the sort of letter an occupation force official in Israel might write to a colonised citizenry in Palestine. Along with the legal threat of being declared a “subversive” element, there is also a very visible physical threat contained in the letters. With Okara still under some sort of military siege, and several resisting tenants killed during protests against paramilitary forces in the last two years since the dispute has been brewing, what sort of “disciplinary action” is the OMF thinking of taking against its hapless “employees” and their relatives/parents?
The real issue should be put in a historical context. The Punjab government, or the state, is the owner of the lands in question. The military is the landlord by virtue of having leased in the land from the owner many decades ago. And the landlord, as was the custom in feudal times of yore, enabled the peasants to till the land on the basis of the rules of tenancy in which payment was made to the landlord according to the prevailing sharing rates (batai) in kind rather than in money terms. But now the landlord has woken up to the fact that tenancy is a relatively inefficient system of cultivation compared to the wage labour contract system that is the hallmark of the efficient capitalist system of production. In other words, instead of seeking fixed rents, the landlord is in pursuit of increasing profits. And this can only be done if the tenants can be transformed into wage labourers and control of the land, including the right to decide what to plough and how to till the land and what sort of investments to make on it, can revert to the landlord. In short, the military landlord with tenants wants to become a military capitalist with employees. And everything is being done to compel the tenants to sign on the dotted line of a contractual system that fulfils these objectives. A study of world history, however, reveals that the process of transformation of feudal, semi-feudal and pre-capitalist forms of production and social relations in agriculture into capitalist ones is not only inevitable but also painful. It involves the dispossession by the landlord-turned-capitalist of the serfs, semi-serfs and tenants from the land that they and their families have tilled for centuries and their transformation into “free” contractual wage labourers on the farms or in factories in the urban areas. This process may be relatively peaceful if it is stretched over centuries (as happened in England and Europe during the industrial revolution) or it may be violent if it is sought to be accomplished in a short time (Mexico). But it is always painful for the peasant because it wrenches him away from the land to which he has been tied for centuries for better or worse. The tenant is tied to the land by virtue of his common law and natural rights, he cannot be locked out or sent away. But the wage earner is “free” (to be hired or fired) under the capitalist system. Under the old pre-capitalist regime, the landlord has no incentive to invest in the land because his share of the produce is fixed. Under the new system, the capitalist is inclined to invest in the land because the increase in productivity due to increased investment in the land accrues proportionately more to him than to the wage labourer because it also incorporates the return to capital that the capitalist invests in the land. This transformation process is continuing in large areas of rural Pakistan where landlords are gradually becoming capitalist farmers and tenants are either becoming wage labourers or being evicted from the lands and replaced by wage labourers. But it doesn’t make the headlines for two reasons: the tenants are not organised to resist, and the landlords are not a corporate faceless entity with whom the peasants have no political, cultural or social ties. However, in the case of the tenants of the OMF, there is a history of organised peasant resistance to displacement and there is a military force that wants to speedily claim its capitalist “rights”. Hence the violence and the negative publicity attached to the case. In fact, if a multinational corporate enterprise had been in the shoes of the OMF, we dare say that the judiciary, far from studiously dragging its feet on the issue, might even have come out in support of the tenants! Thus we have a situation in which the peasants have historical and natural rights to land which is owned by the state and legally leased to the OMF, an entity with certain entitlements and rights akin to those of modern owners of property. Under the circumstances, there are three possible “solutions” to this crisis. The OMF can continue to use the coercive power of the state to enforce the new and more profitable capitalist system that it has in mind. In the event, however, it will continue to be seen as an autocratic, unfair and rich giant that is trampling on the poor peasants of Okara. Can any national army be so oblivious of the feelings of its own impoverished citizens that it can ride roughshod over them? Another solution is for the military to rein in its lust for profits and more profits, cancel the lease, and leave the peasants to their wretched fate. This will ensure that the military is not blackened any further. The best solution, of course, is for General Musharraf to hold a public kutcheri in Okara in association with the chief minister of the province and hand over title deeds of the land to the tenants: land to the tiller, as it were. And the OMF may be reimbursed for its loss of existing and potential profits from this lease by an equivalent grant in kind or cash either from the provincial or military budget. At the end of the day, imagine what a landslide of goodwill will be heaped on General Musharraf and the military. In short, General Musharraf will have found a solution embodying the interests of the poor, the military and the nation; in short, the true national interest. The military should not make this issue a matter of corporate pride for one main reason: the military is more an element of the state that is supposed to protect and enhance the welfare of its subjects than it is a private corporate enterprise in search of profits at the expense of its citizens. Indeed, no national army can afford to lose the goodwill of citizens. That is why we would like to be happily disabused of the notion that the employment of feudals as junior partners under martial law regimes has introduced a feudal streak into the military mind as well. How about it, General Musharraf? Can you be bigger than the chief of the army?
(July 04-10, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 19 – Editorial)
Huffing and puffing
THE DECISION BY THE PESHAWAR High Court to deny graduation status to a Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal MNA holding a “sanad” from a religious seminary is theoretically fraught with serious consequences. It can potentially pave the way for the disqualification of most MMA wallahs, thereby triggering a grave crisis of democracy. It is curious that the government should have pulled out all the stops to obtain such a judgment – no less than the Attorney General of Pakistan was roped in to do the needful – precisely when the clash between the MMA and General Pervez Musharraf over the LFO was threatening to get out of hand. The MMA, it may be recalled, had already threatened to take to the streets in protest over the way it is being constantly thwarted by General Musharraf over this issue. Now its ire has been fuelled by the PHC judgment because it strikes against the MMA’s parliamentary raison d’etre. Have tensions between General Musharraf and the MMA reached breaking point? Should the PPP and PMLN rejoice in the reopening of political space?
Not at all. A petition has been pending in the Supreme Court of Pakistan against equating a religious degree with an accredited university BA degree. Yet neither the highest court in the land, nor the petitioner, seems in any great hurry to conclude the issue. Nor, strangely enough, did it occur to the PHC to save itself the time and trouble by simply passing on the petition before it to the SC for adjudication. Instead, the PHC suddenly decided to shift into top gear and lay down the law. So we now have a situation in which a high court has swiftly held against the MMA but a much superior court is taking its time on the same issue. The conclusion is obvious enough: the PHC judgment is a warning shot from General Musharraf against the MMA’s bow. It says “Watch it, if one of you can be disqualified, all can be disqualified”.
But, of course, the government is not about to unleash the honourable Attorney General of Pakistan against the MMA in the SC right away. Why should the SC rush to judgment if the ever-pragmatic MMA heeds the PHC warning and behaves itself in and out of parliament? After all, the honourable court has been sitting on a couple of critical petitions, including one against the ISI for political bribery, for many years.
Indeed, we may now expect the honourable courts in all the provinces to forward any new petitions on the issue to the SC so that they can all be clubbed together according to law and kept pending or adjudicated upon as required by the shifting “ground realities”. The courts, it may be noted, have historically been pro-stability, whether in upholding the status quo or helping nudge it in the “right” direction. Therefore no mass disqualification of the “sanad” holding MMA-wallahs is in the offing immediately. In the event, the MMA protest march on Friday (today) may be more about huffing and puffing than about bringing the house down.
Since 9/11, General Musharraf’s sense of timing has much improved. Omar Sheikh, the alleged killer of American journalist Danny Pearl was arrested just before General Musharraf embarked on a foreign trip. A couple of high profile wanted Al Qaeda terrorists were nabbed in Karachi on the eve of another foreign hop. The anti-terrorist court conviction against three Pakistanis was announced on the eve of his meeting with the leaders of the European community last week. And now the PHC judgment comes on the heels of his warning to the MMA, while he was in the USA, that the Hisbah bill endorsing the vice and virtue committee and police will not be tolerated by the federal government. Understandably, therefore, the MMA government in the NWFP has quietly shelved the project for the foreseeable future.
Clearly, General Musharraf is still more comfortable dealing with the shrill but ineffectual MMA devil that he thinks he knows and thinks he can tame than he is doing business with the moderate PPP and/or PMLN which lay claim to be populist parties with the potential to unseat him from power. Indeed, General Musharraf went out of his way during his recent foreign trip to blast both parties and their exiled leaders in front of expatriate Pakistanis and foreigners alike. “These parties take dictation from abroad” he thundered self-righteously, blithely ignoring the fact that he had himself exiled the leaders of these parties to foreign climes in the first place.
This makes the position of the PPP and PMLN rather problematic – witness the cold-blooded arrogance of the federal government in deporting the womenfolk of the Sharifs following the recent anti-Musharraf statements by the Sharif brothers. If these parties ally with the treacherous MMA, they simply play into its hands by forcing General Musharraf to give the mullahs an even larger slice of the power-cake than they currently have. But if they don’t, they enable General Musharraf to consolidate his monopolistic hold over power and sideline them from politics altogether.
(July 11-17, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 20 – Editorial)
Common Pak-Afghan goals
THE RANSACKING OF THE Pakistani embassy in Kabul last Tuesday was done by well-organised and suitably armed mobs instigated by official Afghan interests. Placards emblazoned with the words “we condemn Pakistan’s attack on our territory” and “Pakistan is the creator of the Taliban” were giveaways. On the face of it, this incident is a logical culmination of the process of estrangement and alienation between the two governments that began some months ago following an increase in the frequency of attacks against the US-Afghan security forces in Afghanistan by suspected Al Qaeda-Taliban remnants hiding in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan. When the Afghan president, Mr Hamid Karzai, was in Islamabad last month, he raised his concerns with General Pervez Musharraf, going so far as to give him a list of persons “wanted” by Kabul who are thought to have taken sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Unfortunately, the Pakistan authorities have consistently refused to acknowledge the existence of any such list, let alone make any efforts to try and nab the people wanted by Mr Karzai’s government. Therefore some sort of angry Afghan “reaction” should have been anticipated by our intelligence agencies.
A couple of weeks ago, Mr Karzai received complaints from his defence minister, Mohammad Fahim, who represents the Pakistan-hating Northern Alliance, that Afghan security forces chasing Taliban insurgents were fired upon by Pakistani border guards. Although the Pakistani Foreign Office denied the charge, Mr Karzai came under domestic pressure from Mr Fahim to tick off Pakistan. An excuse was provided by remarks made by General Musharraf while abroad that the government in Kabul was not in full control of the country, partly because of erroneous American policies aimed at propping up the various warlords for short-term gains. Mr Karzai said that General Musharraf’s remarks were “a matter of regret and sadness” for him. In fact, however, Mr Karzai’s discomfort did not reflect on the veracity of General Musharraf’s remarks – which accurately indicated the ground reality in Afghanistan — as it did on his frustration with Islamabad’s continuing reluctance to take action against Al Qaeda-Taliban elements who are using Pakistan’s borderlands as base areas from which to launch hit-and-run raids against the Kabul authorities.
Islamabad’s response to these Afghan allegations was two-fold. It sent units of the Pakistan army to the tribal borderlands ostensibly to secure these areas from Al Qaeda-Taliban remnants. But the suspicion remains that the troops are meant to ensure that any hot-pursuit operations by the US-Afghan security forces across Pakistan’s borders will not be allowed. This has heightened fears in Kabul that perhaps Islamabad means to nurture the ethnic Pakhtun resistance to the Tajik dominated government in Kabul. Islamabad has also annoyed Kabul by suggesting that the recent acts of sectarian terrorism in Quetta, in which dozens of Shias were killed, may be the handiwork of hostile Afghan elements in cahoots with India’s RAW intelligence agency bent upon destabilising an already prickly Pakistani borderland province. Islamabad has recently protested the newly established Indian consulates in the Afghan areas ringing Pakistan, arguing that these are likely to become spy-dens aimed at undermining Pakistan. But no one in the Pakistan security agencies has bothered to explain why the Northern Alliance dominated Afghan government, in which the Shia Hazara of Afghanistan have ministerial stakes, should wish to instigate terrorism against the Shia Hazara of Pakistani Balochistan.
In the event, it is probably the Afghan defense minister, Mohammad Fahim, who has sought to extract mileage by instigating the mobs against the Pakistani embassy. In so doing, he has created a rift between. Mr Karzai and General Musharraf. Mr Karzai was on the verge of extracting an abject apology from General Musharraf for his insensitive remarks about the weakness of the Karzai government when the embassy incident compelled him to instead offer his profound apologies to Islamabad. The incident reflects on the continuing power struggle in Kabul between the Pakhtun Karzai and the Tajik Fahim. According to Afghan-hands, Mr Fahim’s motive is to delay international funded reforms in the Afghan defense ministry aimed at reducing the influence of his Tajik loyalists and broadening the ethnic base of Afghanistan’s new National Army that is being trained and organised by US military advisors. Mr Fahim has stonewalled these efforts by making sure that the Americans continue to see him as the only one capable of meeting the challenge posed by Al Qaeda-Taliban elements. Rising Pakistan-Afghan tensions also serve him well. They hinder the aid and reconstruction efforts of the Afghan government in cooperation with the international community in south Afghanistan. They stop the process of the Tajik militia’s disarmament. And they create obstacles in the path of cooperation between Afghan-American forces and the Pakistan army aimed at tackling the menace of Al Qaeda in the borderlands of the two countries.
General Musharraf and President Hamid Karzai have a common interest in stabilising Afghanistan and broadening the ethnic base of its government while they go about ridding it of Al Qaeda-Taliban elements that spell trouble for both. But the current state of tense Pak-Afghan relations negates their common goal. The sooner they make serious and sincere efforts to redeem the situation, the better.
(July 25-31, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 22 – Editorial)
The pragmatic mullah
MAULANA FAZLUR REHMAN S/O Maulana Mufti Mahmud, has thrown his friends and foes into a spin. He went to India without much fanfare. But he was briefed by the ubiquitous “secret agency” for three hours before his departure. Soon, however, it was revealed that he had sought a security escort from the Indian government and been denied his request. But just as his detractors at home and in India were beginning to cluck in disapproval, it transpired that the Maulana had wrangled a high profile meeting with no less than Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Indian prime minister, who has so far refused to meet General Pervez Musharraf. But before the tremors could pass, the newspapers were awash with photos of the Maulana ensconced in the company of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the Indian leader of the opposition and president of the Congress Party. Thereupon one important meeting was heaped upon another with VIPs like Mr I K Gujral, the former Indian prime minister and foreign minister; with Mr Natwar Singh, the Congress ideologue and former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan; with Mr Malayam Singh Yadev, the Samajwadi Party leader, and with Mr Vishnu Hari Dalmia, the chief of the hard-line, anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim VHP. More significantly, the Maulana is said to have had a lengthy chat with Mr Ram Jeth Malani, chief of the Kashmir Committee established by Mr Vajpayee, and also with Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, the leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. This is an enviable track record for a one-week trip to an “enemy” country that has hitherto perceived the Maulana and his bearded cohorts as fire-spitting, India-hating fundos who furnish much of the cannon-fodder for the holy war or jihad in Kashmir.
In fact, the Maulana was more than just an unlikely apostle of peace with India when he broke the news that Mr Vajpayee would visit Pakistan next January for the SAARC summit in Islamabad, a signal craved by our foreign office. He assured the Indians that he was all for the Simla accord on bilateralism and against third-party mediation, especially by the wicked Americans, in the Kashmir conflict, thereby shrugging off General Pervez Musharraf’s oft-repeated assertion exactly to the contrary. And he told the Kashmiris that any solution acceptable to the three parties to the conflict would be acceptable to his party and followers, thereby trashing the official Pakistani line based on the UN resolutions of 1948. He was at his diplomatic best when he candidly admitted that while Pakistan had failed to seal infiltration routes into Kashmir the bigger Indian army had fared no better. He also fended off the usual Indian wish about the chances of Pakistan and India becoming one big, great country all over again by saying that this was a “grand, fanciful and utopian idea” that could be better addressed if and when the leaders of the people of both countries were able to sit around a table and chew on it.
All in all, it was a consummate performance that portends the Maulana’s future role in the national politics of Pakistan. He didn’t go without a brief from General Musharraf. But he wasn’t just General Musharraf’s man. That is a throwback to the time when he was Benazir Bhutto’s chosen chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the National Assembly in the mid 1990s but remained very much his own man during his travels abroad. Wait for the next news bulletin. Maulana Fazlur Rehman might soon be breaking bread with Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan. Where is all this leading us?
It is common knowledge that the Jama’at-e Islami chief, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, doesn’t quite see eye to eye with Maulana Fazlur Rehman on many matters, among them being the issue of whether the MMA should remain in opposition to the government in Islamabad (upon which arises the question of who should be the leader of the opposition in the national assembly, Qazi Sahib or the Maulana) or whether the MMA should do a deal with General Musharraf over the LFO that catapults it into the pre-eminent position currently occupied by the disloyal People’s Party “Patriots” who are disliked by their current PMLQ hosts no less than by their erstwhile PPPP parents. It is also no secret that the Maulana is a cunning negotiator who is inclined to clutch at his power base in two provinces even as he eyes a foothold in Islamabad. After all, it is not everyday that his party, the JUI, can aspire to a national pedestal. The last time it made such an attempt – in 1971 when his party was in the charge of his respected father, the venerable Maulana Mufti Mahmud – its miscalculation led to the summary sacking of its coalition governments in the NWFP and Balochistan and the imprisonment of its leaders by a popular dictator.
Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s India yatra is significant because it reveals him to be a most pragmatic politician. That is exactly how General Pervez Musharraf likes to bill himself. Therefore in this age of pragmatism we are likely to see a lot of the two of them.
(May 23-29, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 13 – Editorial)
Ruling the roost
GENERAL PERVEZ MUSHARRAF must be at his wit’s end. The LFO issue has become a millstone around his neck. And it just won’t go away by a wave of his army short stick as he had once imagined it would. The MMA, despite its doves (JUI) and hawks (JI), has not yet budged an inch on when he should take off his uniform. The PPP and PML-N are proving even more stubborn. They want to link the fate of their exiled leaders to that of the LFO. As the deliberations have come to nought, the pressure on General Musharraf to find a way out has reached breaking point. The budget is due in a couple of weeks. It must be approved by the ruling party. Failure to do so will amount to a veritable vote of no-confidence in the Jamali government. But before then, General Musharraf, if he claims to be president of Pakistan, will be obliged to address a joint session of parliament. Neither will be possible if a 2/3rd parliamentary vote solution to the problem hasn’t been found by then.
General Musharraf has had a couple of rounds of discussions with his own army cabinet of corps commanders. Doubtless they have been suitably briefed by the ubiquitous ISI on all the available options. So they must have chalked out the best and most feasible option from their point of view, along with a couple of quick fall-back, second-best positions. What can we make of it all, and where are we headed?
General Musharraf can take one of two straightforward routes out of the present LFO crisis. He can probably negotiate a deal with the MMA to take off his uniform within a stipulated time frame of a year or eighteen months, because that is the maximum he is likely to extract from Qazi Hussain Ahmed (who is actually offering no more than a couple of months). Or he can probably do a deal with the ARD (read PPP and PML-N) which lets leaders like Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif off the hook in time to come, and gets him more than a couple of years as both army chief and president (they are actually demanding that he take off his uniform immediately). Which road will he take?
As matters stand, possibly neither. He might well perceive a solution of the problem in an entirely different perspective. For instance, he might try and do a deal with Shahbaz Sharif (with the tacit backing of Nawaz Sharif but without any direct, overt or short term role for Nawaz) which unites all factions of the Muslim League and considerably strengthens his hand in parliament while holding out some federal carrots for Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the Jamiat i Ulema i Islam (JUI)-dominated provincial governments in Balochistan and the NWFP in exchange for the JUI’s support in parliament over the LFO. But this would mean contriving a split not only within the ARD between the PPP and PML-N but also within the MMA between the JUI and the JI. And that won’t be as easy as it sounds.
Or he might opt for suspending parliament until the politicians are ready to play ball on his terms. He could then rule with or without the current Jamali government and lean on the courts to support him. But this route will actually exacerbate his legitimacy crisis and compel the combined opposition to whip up street agitation against him and destabilise the country. It will also be an admission of failure on a grand scale. He is the architect of the current dispensation and he will be held responsible at home and abroad if it comes crashing down. Certainly, the press won’t take kindly to his viewpoint pinning all the blame on the politicians. And the international community will hold a grudge against him for doing so.
Also, one thing is clear. Whatever option he cares to execute, there is no getting away from the fact that his absolute power will be reduced in the event of any “compromise” or “give-and-take” with any of his protagonists just as much as his legitimacy (source of power) will be diminished if he takes a non-democratic deviation from the constitution. At any rate, there will be a considerable dilution of his hold over the country when he does take off his uniform, which he is bound to do sooner or later. So, if his longer term personal fate is unavoidable, why not relax and institutionalise a useful and enduring transfer of power immediately to those civilians who are most inclined to heed the new geo-strategic realities on the ground?
What is at stake is an institutionally enduring system that is much larger than General Pervez Musharraf and/or the Pakistan army. When Generals Ayub Khan and Zia ul Haq exited, their “guided democracy” and Islamic shoora respectively died with them despite the fact that each had ten long years to institutionalise them and couldn’t because they were not prepared to share power democratically while they lived and breathed as presidents of Pakistan. That is a lesson that General Musharraf needs to quickly imbibe if a workable system is to be orchestrated for the future of Pakistan under him as president of Pakistan.
(Aug 22-28, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 26 – Editorial)
Hold them accountable
IT IS NOW NEARLY ONE MONTH SINCE the oil tanker Tasman Spirit ran aground in one of the harbour channels of Karachi port and began to spill oil, slowly poisoning the marine environment and making human life uncomfortable for inhabitants in its range. In any civilised country, the government of the day would have moved heaven and earth to contain the environmental damage, salvage the oil, investigate and fix responsibility, obtain damages and compensate those adversely affected by the disaster. But not in Pakistan. In fact, the two institutions at the core of the debate, the KPT and PNSP, have not even bothered to tell us the gist of their investigations, let alone take any responsibility for the incident. And the Pakistan Navy, which is supposed to rule the waves of Karachi’s shorelines, has been strangely silent all this while. It is as though the PN has decided to stay clear of this mess instead of getting its hands soiled and risking censure. This is, to say the least, behaviour unbecoming of a national security institution – after all, when the Pakistan army gets involved in flood relief or disaster work, it jumps in and does what it can for its citizens instead of pointing the finger at errant or negligent civilian institutions and staying clear of them.
By now several questions have been raised. The vessel contracted by the PNSC is said to be at least 25 years old. Is that within acceptable seaworthy age limits? Was the vessel being navigated from the channel to the berth at high tide as required for a tanker of its size or was it brought in at the middle of the ebb tide when the chances of running aground were higher, especially if that channel hadn’t been dredged as required from time to time? Is the technical and professional staff at the KPT trained to cope with such cases or is the KPT a sinecure for Pakistan Navy personnel who have missed promotion and been shunted to cushy jobs in the civilian bureaucracy? If there weren’t a sufficient number of adequate tugs from the Pak Navy at hand to tug the tanker to safety, why wasn’t an SOS sent for help from Dubai?
There are also many issues related to the oil spill. How many metric tonnes have already spilt into the sea? How many metric tonnes have been salvaged into other tankers? How many are still in the hold of Tasman Spirit? Will these be salvaged or not? What concrete steps are being taken to make sure that the oil is neutralised? Why weren’t “floating walls” (with rope, canvas sheets, floats, bamboo sticks and weights, etc) built as soon as possible after the oil spill in order to contain it? Why did the KPT wait until August 7 – a full ten days after the ship ran aground on July 27 – to order the transfer of the oil to Pak Navy ships? If local experts were either not sufficiently trustworthy or not available, why did it take the KPT weeks to fly in the foreign experts?
A couple of high-ranking officials and one minister have been making clucking noises about the relief effort underway. But frankly speaking, it has all been rather pathetic. We imagined that General Pervez Musharraf or Mr Zafarullah Jamali might have taken the trouble to go to Karachi and lend their personal and federal shoulder to the job. But that didn’t happen, suggesting they have more important things to do with their precious time than to waste it on an unprecedented ecological disaster such as this one. How sad. Worse, piddling sums are being mentioned in connection with the damages to be sought from the owners and/or insurers of Tasman Spirit when the cost of the salvage operation to the government is going to be many times these amounts, forget about the untold loss to marine life in the area. Most surprising of all, some press accounts of what went wrong and who is responsible skirted the real issues and didn’t enlighten us about the nature and scope of the disaster. Similarly, the dismal response of PTV and Pakistan Radio is worth noting. Why weren’t their reporters on the job telling Karachiites the latest news on the operations at sea? Why weren’t they issuing news bulletins telling citizens how to cope with the situation in their areas?
There are lessons in this disaster for many people and institutions. But whether these will be learnt or not remains to be seen. Fortunately, however, some prominent people of Karachi have spoken out, and others have even got together and approached the courts to redress their grievances against the government and the state. This is a good sign, even if nothing concrete comes of it. If more citizens were at least prepared to stick their necks out and cry “murder” when their rights are trampled upon or they are victims of government negligence or incompetence, the unaccountable institutions of the state would wake up to their responsibilities and put their houses in order. That is why we cannot afford to let them off the hook this time round.
(Sep 05-11, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 28 – Editorial)
Come clean
A REPORT IN A HONG KONG-BASED magazine claims that several officers of the Pakistan army have been detained by the authorities and are being interrogated for alleged links with extremist organisations, including Al Qaeda. The ISPR has acknowledged the arrests but tried to put a business-as-usual gloss over them in an effort to underplay their significance. Another report in a Pakistani newspaper says at least 16 officers and NCOs (non-commissioned officers) were captured by the Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan’s Zabul province. According to the story, the captured soldiers were later taken in by the FBI which brought them to the Shahbaz Airbase in Balochistan from where they were handed over to the Pakistan army. Yet another report in another Pakistani newspaper puts the number of army officers and men arrested at 20 and speaks of two groups of army personnel, one with alleged links to Al Qaeda and the other, incredibly, with alleged links to India. Understandably, the ISPR has trashed such reports as “concocted” and “baseless”.
Meanwhile, the American TIME magazine has came out with a fascinating review of a new book “Why America Slept” by Gerald Posner which alleges that Pakistan’s late Air Chief Marshal, Mushaf Ali Mir, not only knew about Al Qaeda’s plan to attack targets in the United States but actually helped them with money and logistics. The source of this information, says Mr Posner, is a statement to US authorities by Abu Zubayda, a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, who has been in US custody since last year. Clearly, this is explosive stuff.
Unfortunately, the allegations are very damaging to the Pakistan army even if they are totally untrue. A US government official has described the contents of the book as ‘absurd’. The charge against the late Air Marshal Mir has also been denied by Islamabad, though, interestingly, the ISPR also tried to block the AFP story from being placed in Pakistani newspapers. And in at least one case, it did succeed in blocking that part of the story which dealt with Abu Zubayda’s alleged statement regarding Air Marshal Mir.
In many of these allegations, Islamabad deserves the benefit of the doubt. Even so, it is important to consider some potent facts.
Pakistan’s sustained involvement in Afghanistan, Kashmir and other “hot spots” is no secret. Indeed, a former DG-ISI, Gen Javed Nasir, proudly deposed before a court sometime ago that his credentials were impeccable because without his efforts the Bosnian Muslims could not have bled the Serb brigands. He made it possible, he claimed, by smuggling weapons to the Bosnian Muslims despite a United Nations ban on arms transfers to all protagonists in the civil war-torn region. Closer to home, in Afghanistan, the Pakistan army and its intelligence services are known to have supported, armed and reinforced the Taliban militia before 9/11. At the time, the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Masoud had frequently accused the Pakistan army of actually infiltrating its soldiers and officers into the ranks of the Taliban who were fighting his troops in Afghanistan. Some such claims were exaggerated but not all were simply anti-Pakistan propaganda. Indeed, within the framework in which various contenders were jockeying for power in Afghanistan through their proxies, Pakistan might have found it to its advantage to induct some of its own military elements to boost the Taliban offensive, especially since the Northern Alliance was being supported equally directly by Russia, Iran and India. In fact, the five Iranian diplomats killed in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998 were Revolutionary Guard officers based in that city, liaising with the Northern Alliance. Ironically, after the United States reversed its Taliban policy, US military personnel too began contacting the NA. In fact, there is now much open information on how the US had begun to plan any future operations against the Taliban, especially following its tomahawk attacks on a camp in that country during President Clinton’s tenure.
There is therefore sufficient evidence to suggest that some Pakistan army officers did imbibe the extremist ideology of groups they were “handling” and did things that were strictly against “good order and military discipline”. It appears that over time their loyalties tended to shift from the military itself to a supposedly higher goal. This was natural. Rogue elements are an unfortunate by-product of covert operations and no intelligence agency and military in the world involved in such operations over an extended period of time can remain immune from this phenomenon. But in the case of the Pakistan army we fear that the renegade officers jumped their brief, at times in clear violation of the country’s interests, because they came to look upon this “conflict” in a “civilisational” rather than tactical or even strategic perspective. The consequences of this streak becoming more pronounced in the military should have been of serious concern to the top brass. But they were ignored for opportunistic reasons.
Fortunately, however, General Pervez Musharraf has tried in recent years to purge the army of such misguided elements. But more needs to be done. And instead of trying to obfuscate the facts and sowing the seeds of misinformation, the army’s spokesmen should come clean and allay our fears.
(Sep 12-18, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 29 – Editorial)
What the country needs
IS THERE, OR IS THERE NOT, A FINAL deal between General Pervez Musharraf and his ‘friends’ in the Muttahida Majlis Amal which enables the ‘Musharrafian political system’ to be anchored in a stable and enduring Pakistani reality that can be proudly shown off to the world? The perennially cynical will respond with a resounding ‘no’ while evergreen optimists will claim that it is ‘inevitable’. Certainly, the newspapers have been of no help. One day the headlines proclaim that a ‘deal’ has been clinched. The next day the ‘deadlock’ seems unbreakable. How many times have we been told by spokesmen of the MMA that the government has all but signed on the dotted line, only to be rebuffed by someone from the government’s side who insists that the ‘core’ issue of General Musharraf’s uniform is ‘not negotiable’. The problem of credibility has also been accentuated by the presence of so many ‘sole spokesmen’ on the MMA’s side like Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, Hafiz Hussain Ahmad and Liaquat Baloch. On the other benches we have so far had the pleasure of the company of Mr Zafarullah Jamali and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. Now Senator S M Zafar, advocate par excellence, has acquired a brief on behalf of the government and Mr Tariq Aziz, the genial right-hand man of General Musharraf, has entered the fray to ensure that his friend’s interests are not bartered away cheaply. Are we then on the verge of a historic ‘breakthrough’?
The MMA has demanded that Mr Jamali should convene a meeting of the heads of the parliamentary parties prior to his departure for the US. Reason: such a meeting should ‘build’ on the ‘accord’ reached between the government and the MMA on the package of constitutional amendments, especially on the Legal Framework Order, and afford legitimacy to it. Apparently, Mr Jamali was expected to announce a date for such a meeting some days ago. But he hasn’t. And that suggests that either his ‘boss’ is not in favour of parleying with the likes of the PML-N and PPP or that the two have spurned the idea. Certainly, the walkout by the parliamentary opposition last Tuesday barely five minutes after the National Assembly had opened would suggest that not all is well, despite the ‘accord’ reached in Lahore last week.
How can it be? General Musharraf’s intense personal dislike of Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif, to whom the two parties are captive, has become a millstone for the proposed Musharrafian system. Between them, the two parties were able to garner more votes than all the other parties in the country in the last elections. And the fact remains, whether we like it or not and however corrupt or fascistic she or he may be, that if both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif could return to Pakistan, they would be welcomed by hundreds of thousands of supporters. So how can we have a stable and enduring political system that excludes these two parties? Recall: General Zia ul Haq’s carefully crafted ten-year system collapsed the day he exited because it had sought to exclude one popular leader. How then can the Musharrafian system be sustained if it seeks to exclude not one but two such leaders and parties? If, God forbid, something were to happen to the lynchpin of this system, the two politicians would catch the first flight to Lahore and take charge of the popular will even before the huddled corps commanders of the Pakistan army had arrived at any decision on how to move forward. This leads to some serious questions.
While the hostility between General Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif is perfectly understandable – it was, after all, a matter of life or death – it is not clear why General Musharraf should so ‘hate’ Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari. It certainly cannot be all about ‘corruption’ – there are, after all, several dubious politicians in the present administration. Is it the slight felt by General Musharraf many years ago when he was DG-MO and was snubbed by Ms Bhutto during a briefing at GHQ? We cannot imagine this to be the case – General Musharraf is not a petty or vindictive man by nature; indeed, on more than one occasion he has simply scowled, shrugged his shoulders and agreed to live and let live with some of his shrillest critics. Perhaps he thinks Ms Bhutto ‘unpatriotic’ for divulging ‘state secrets’ involving certain rigidly held views in the Pakistan army. But this argument can hardly be upheld in the face of the global communications revolution that is sweeping the world in which the ideas of civilian supremacy and ideological freedom are at the heart of the debate.
The time has therefore come for General Musharraf to shed his commando boots and don the apparel of a statesman by acts of inclusion instead of exclusion. He has done a great job of stopping Pakistan from hurtling into the abyss of failed statehood. He must now make the transition from appointed chief of the army to elected chief of the country so that the Musharrafian political and economic system can be institutionalised. That alone will be a true memorial to his services to Pakistan.
(Aug 29-Sep 04, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 27 – Editorial)
Find a modus vivendi
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, GENERAL Pervez Musharraf and his hand-picked prime minister, Zafarullah Jamali, are not exactly getting along like a house on fire. General Musharraf is, like most soldiers, a no-nonsense, no loitering, never-say-die sort of chap. Mr Jamali, on the other hand, like most politicians from a tribal, semi-feudal background, is an overly self-effacing, bear-hugging, lumbering sort of fellow, in a floating world. When Mr Jamali got his job he was asked how he might fare, considering that a decade earlier, another hand-picked prime minister (Mr Mohammad Khan Junejo) had been given his marching orders by his “boss” (General Zia ul Haq) when he got too big for his boots. Mr Jamali’s response was disarmingly candid. “I know who the boss is,” he said with a soft smile. Of course, no one, including Mr Jamali stopped to wonder what might happen if, far from stepping on the toes of his boss, he might be too small to fit into his boots.
Although Mr Jamali hasn’t been saddled with much responsibility for running government – General Musharraf holds the reins to the core ministries and the ministers report directly to him – it hasn’t been an easy act to follow. In fact, the game was rigged against poor Mr Jamali from Day One. The cabinet was selected for him by his boss. So if it doesn’t heed the prime minister, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. And his goal – get the LFO incorporated into the wretched Constitution hook, line and sinker – was also firmly set for him by the boss. But if the dogged Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal has dug its heels in and Mr Jamali’s rigid boss won’t take off his uniform come hell or high water, what can the hapless prime minister do? Worse, there are too many cooks in the kitchen for comfort. And some of them are staking out the lie of the land.
The leading contenders for Mr Jamali’s job are Mr Farooq Leghari and Mr Humayun Akhtar Rehman. Mr Leghari has much experience and sobriety, and will not be averse to the sort of political shenanigans that the job entails. Equally, Mr Rehman will be out to prove himself as the reliable son of a “silent soldier” who once bossed the boss. But at the end of the day, people will ask how their “brief” is going to be any different from the one handed to Mr Jamali. Surely, the cabinet will still reflect the compulsions of the ruling coalition which is handicapped by its dependence on PPP turncoats and several two-bit parties. Surely, the mullahs of the MMA will not abandon their goal of getting rid of the “American stooges in uniform”. And surely, the boss will continue to stick to his uniform till kingdom come. So how is the constitutional deadlock going to be removed by a change of face in the prime minister’s house?
The frustration in Rawalpindi is palpable; if a new prime minister is only going to prolong the agony of an unworkable parliamentary system, why not wrap it up and start all over again? One way to do that would be to suspend the federal and provincial parliaments and rule by presidential or gubernatorial decree until the MMA can be dragged off its high horse and/or the PPP/PML-N can be cajoled to come to heel before the boss. But that route could run into international barriers if it does not deliver democratic governance within a short time frame. The other way out would be to ask the perennial jadugar Sharifuddin Pirzada to rig up a permanent presidential system that dispenses with the niceties of power sharing between a president and a prime minister and enables General Musharraf to be both army chief and president at the same time, perhaps like Field Marshal Ayub Khan in the 1960s. But the problem with this situation is that, as in the case of Ayub Khan, it will last only as long as General Musharraf does, and when the party is over the country will be up for grabs all over again.
No, we’re afraid General Musharraf has been hoist by his own petard. The system that he crafted with the help of the ubiquitous ISI is not working. The MMA that he nurtured is not co-operating with its creator. The political parties that have been thrown up or out are in disarray or hostile to him. Worse, far worse, the Ataturkian promise of reform and modernity that raised such high hopes initially has withered on the vine, depriving the general of the support of the silent majority at home and the broad community abroad that might have sustained him in time to come. He may be the boss alright, but if he doesn’t pull some rabbits out of his hat soon enough, he may not be the boss for too long.
We reiterate. There is one naturally political alliance that can work for Pakistan, given the international environment and domestic configuration of forces. And that is an understanding between the Pakistan Army and the mainstream political parties. General Pervez Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto must transcend their personal agendas and jointly find an institutional modus vivendi out of the deadlock.
(Sep 19-25, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 30 – Editorial)
General Musharraf’s exuberance
LAST MONDAY A DAM OF DISCORD burst in three out of four provinces after General Pervez Musharraf went on national radio and TV and said he intended to build a couple of dams, including the highly controversial Kalabagh Dam, to cater for the country’s future water needs. Everybody and his aunt from Karachi to Khyber are up in arms, especially since the assemblies of Sindh, Balochistan and the NWFP have already passed resolutions rejecting the Kalabagh dam.
But the opposition’s ire is not unexpected. It rightly believes that it was unfairly done in by General Musharraf’s intelligence agencies before, during and after the general elections and is therefore ready to clutch at anything to undermine and destabilize him. But the stunning silence of the pro-Musharraf parties and provincial governments in Sindh and Punjab and Balochistan is surprising. Not one ruling-coalition politician has dared to line up behind General Musharraf and speak out openly in support of the Kalabagh dam.
Why, then, has General Musharraf raked up such a thorny and emotional issue, especially in the midst of crucial make or break negotiations with the MMA on the LFO? It is also surprising that he should think nothing of upping and outing to the USA after rousing such destabilizing sentiments. Is he clever or stupid, brave or foolhardy? Actually, the opposition thinks he’s quite cunning. “It’s a sneaky attempt to divert attention from the main constitutional issues in Islamabad to more mundane and provincial matters,” they charge. Is that right?
We don’t think so. To begin with, the “water problem” is neither provincial nor mundane. In fact, it is central to Pakistan’s prosperity because we are, and will remain for a long time, predominantly an agrarian country. If this issue was relevant in the 1980s when the Kalabagh dam was first conceived, it is critical today. There is not much point in dredging up the statistics to prove how water is, and will be, the core issue of the economy. If we take cultural emotionalism and historical distrust out of the equation, what do we find? We are plagued by floods and drought; our existing reservoirs at Mangla and Tarbela which regulate the water-flows in our canals for irrigation are silting up faster than they can be dredged; and the snow cap is melting not just in the Himalayas but across the icy poles. In the future we will need more regulated water supplies than ever before. But the capacity of our existing water resource base will have greatly diminished when we need it most. So the answer is: more reservoirs. And we must move fast.
But the “diversion” theory doesn’t hold water for other reasons too. General Musharraf is given to straight talking and shooting from the hip. At no time in his four year political career has he ever resorted to “deception” or “diversionary tactics” to achieve dubious ends. In fact, his refreshingly candid and embarrassingly blunt approach marks him as a totally different kettle of fish from General Zia ul Haq who always lied with a smiling face and always spoke with a forked tongue. This would suggest a simpler, and perhaps more dangerous, explanation for his “speech”.
For three years before the general elections, General Musharraf ran the country single handedly and took all decisions without having to worry too much about his actions or explain his motives or be accountable. Sometimes his policies were unpopular – as, for example, the IMF-assisted belt tightening economic programmes and his strategic, pro-American turnabout on Afghanistan and the Taliban after 9/11 – but that didn’t bother him too much, let alone stop him from doing what he thought needed doing, because he was convinced they were necessary and good for the longer term health of the country. But now things are different and it is showing in his demeanour. Is General Musharraf so frustrated by the incompetent and scheming politicians in his government and so irritated by the negativism of other politicians in opposition to him that he has decided to get on with governance without them if he cannot do so with them? This would suggest that he doesn’t much care any more whether parliament is truly functional or not as long as he retains the executive authority and power to run Pakistan as he likes in certain critical areas of the economy and national security. “The army is solidly behind me”, he said recently. As if to make his point stick, he ordered another round of retirements, promotions and transfers in the army high command last Monday.
General Pervez Musharraf clearly means business as far as the water issue is concerned. But before his exuberance gets the better of him, he might consider one critical factor: if he were to start building any major dam without cobbling a genuine political and national consensus, he runs the risk of spending colossal sums of money on a project which would most certainly run aground as soon as he exits from the apex of power at any time before the project is up and running in the next ten years. Surely that is not the sort of legacy he wants to leave behind.
(Dec 05-11, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 41 – Editorial)
Good man, bad assumptions
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.
(Nov 07-13, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 37 – Editorial)
Ironies of history
A potted history of treason and sedition trials in Pakistan is instructive. The Rawalpindi Conspiracy in 1951 implicated a group of army officers and civilians. Among them was Faiz Ahmed Faiz who later came to be hailed as Urdu’s greatest post-independence poet. In the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case of 1973, there were two governors, two chief ministers, dozens of MNAs and MPAs. Many were later re-elected and became federal or provincial ministers. Also included was Habib Jalib, who was later acclaimed as our greatest modern Punjabi poet. In 1981, Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto, along with 33 other PPP leaders, were sentenced to death for sedition. All were subsequently freed, a few won seats in the 1988 elections and Murtaza was elected to the Sindh provincial assembly in 1993 and became a Sindhi nationalist leader. In the Attock Conspiracy case in 1984, Mustafa Khar figured prominently. Later, he became a federal minister not once but twice.
Among latter-day media offenders, two stand out. Maleeha Lodhi was accused of sedition in 1992 by the Nawaz Sharif regime because she published a hostile poem in The News. She has since served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the US under the Bhutto and Musharraf regimes and is now posted to London. TFT‘s editor Najam Sethi, too, was a victim of Mr Sharif. He incurred Mr Sharif’s wrath when he tried to expose his corruption to the BBC in 1999. Mr Sethi was accused of treason but the episode made him a cause celebre, won him two prestigious international awards and made him an editor twice over.
And now for Javed Hashmi. The case is full of ironies. Mr Hashmi was once, like his mentor Nawaz Sharif, a great favourite of the military, having been plucked from obscurity by the Zia regime in the early 80s and transformed from a student leader facing a murder charge into a national leader in the Majlis i Shoora. Ever more loyal than the king, however, Mr Hashmi was also conspicuous in his condemnation of Mr Sethi in 1999. And the lawyer currently defending him, Mr Zafar Ali Shah, was then the lawyer prosecuting Mr Sethi not just for sedition but also for “not being a Muslim”, both charges that were rubbished by the relevant courts.
But Mr Hashmi is not the first person to be charged thus by the Musharraf regime. Rashid Azam, a journalist, and a couple of activists of the Baloch National Party are in prison in Quetta facing sedition charges for distributing an “objectionable anti-army” calendar. We also hear that the loyal Jamali government is thinking of arresting a couple of other trouble-makers from the PMLN and PPP on similar charges. Why, in view of the historical background of such farcical trials, is General Musharraf reacting in such knee-jerk fashion?
Clearly, he is either feeling so strong that he has become arrogant and is oblivious to public backlash. Or he is feeling vulnerable and wants to appear strong. In either case, his concreteness is misplaced. It is his quiet strength and apparent humility that has endeared him to many and served him well thus far. If he is stung by allegations of rifts within the army over his policies, then he should address the root cause of the problem (his policies or those who disagree with him in the army) rather than arrest and silence the messenger. As the adage says: sticks and stones ….
But there is a larger issue at stake here. When religion and politics mix, each is subverted. Similarly, when organs of the state like the army get involved with politics, they subvert the political system no less than they subvert themselves. Why doesn’t anyone in the civilian democracies of USA or UK or Europe or even in India criticize their army like many do in Pakistan? How can any army perceived to be a perennial usurper escape the opprobrium that is attached to usurpers? If there is an increasing tendency among our mainstream politicians to abuse our army, to humiliate it and run it down, the reason is obvious enough. The military is again trying to hog the country; and General Musharraf is refusing to co-opt the main players and give them a stake in the system. In the event, the system is getting more repressive and arbitrary instead of more representative and functional.Indeed, the more General Musharraf tries to clean it up and stabilize it, the more tainted it becomes, one lie being inevitably heaped upon another and so on. That is why even small manifestations of an arrogance of power – like the traffic cops who were smacked by the khakis recently in Lahore and Multan – become giant transgressions of justice and accountability. When civilians and civil society are so humiliated, browbeaten and sidelined, what should we expect from them?
Mr Hashmi’s frustration is explicable. General Musharraf’s angry reaction is counterproductive. The continued exile of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, as well as the seven year long incarceration of Asif Zardari without conviction, should end. The sooner the army and its generals as well as our political parties and their leaders come to terms with history and current realities, the better it will be for Pakistan.
(Nov 14-20, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 38 – Editorial)
Back of beyond?
The federal interior ministry has reportedly dispatched a most “immediate” letter to all “relevant departments” across the country ordering them to put a lid on fashion shows and other such “objectionable” displays of “vulgarity” at hotels and public places that “militate against our national culture and Islamic values”. Apparently, no less a personage than the great Zafarullah Jamali, the busy, do-gooding prime minister of Pakistan, was seized of the necessity to protect the fragile morals of this Great Nation of Pious Believers. This “directive”, it is learnt, was apparently provoked by a recent fashion show at the Lahore Fort in which shimmering female models in glittering dresses from Muslim Turkey swept across the stage, subverting nearly 400 members of the “horribly westernized elites” of Lahore. Another fashion show at a “posh” hotel in Islamabad a couple of days ago was the last straw that broke Mr Jamali’s inflexible back.
A resurgence of self-righteous public piety in the name of Islam began with the Taliban in Afghanistan a few years ago when music and film and sport and all other manifestations of leisure were banned. The virus spread to Balochistan and the Frontier and provoked our own band of holy warriors to wage a violent jihad against video, cassette and TV shopkeepers. Next in the firing line were billboards across the country advertising such seditious products as milk and soap and toothpaste. Epidemic proportions were reached when a couple of Lahore’s most pious citizens petitioned the High Court to stop the beautification of the environs of the Great Mosque in the old city on the plea that the lights would attract the youthful hoardes to the area and erode their morals. The ever-alert District Coordination Officer pitched in and banned all stage shows in theatre halls for reasons of “vulgarity” and “obscenity”.
Then suddenly, like manna from Heaven for the starving masses, the gates of the Lahore High Court were flung open by a couple of discerning judges and a most judicious verdict was pronounced. “Obscenity” and “vulgarity” are relative terms in time and space that have not been sufficiently defined in our law books, observed their honourable Lordships, so instead of wasting everyone’s time trying to be holier than thou the administration was advised to concentrate on municipal matters of greater concern like garbage disposal, poverty alleviation, job creation, education and crime.
Accordingly, the scene of the crime then moved to Karachi university where enraged “student” mobs belonging to Pakistan’s leading religio-political party ransacked the Visual Arts department because it was holding classes in music and sculpture and drawing during the holy month of Ramadan when “otherwise kosher activities become haram”. We were immediately reminded of the high sounding morality brigade in the English Department of the Punjab University who took refuge earlier this year behind some khaki’s pips to try and “cleanse” the great classics of English literature of all “objectionable” matter therein.
Is it Mr Jamali’s intention to transform Punjab and Islamabad and Sindh into wastelands like the NWFP and Balochistan so that the world’s perception of us as the back of beyond is reinforced? Or is the cunning prime minister taking a leaf from the dog-eared book of Mr Akram Durrani, the newly bearded chief minister of the NWFP, who is offering a “vice and virtue committee” along with a clutch of suffocating laws to the citizens of his province instead of roads and jobs and hospitals and education and economic uplift? What is it about politicians and rulers who are wont to pander to the lowest common denominator of shrill minorities when they should be concentrating on weighty issues of everyday life and death relating to the silent majority?
The desertification or impoverishment of leisure – and therefore of culture — in any society is a manifestation of insecurity and introversion. But when this landscape is flattened by fiat, decree or vigilante action, as in Pakistan’s case, it demonstrates a frightening intolerance on the part of government and state that threatens to violate the rights and freedoms of citizens. Coming amidst General Pervez Musharraf’s continuing exhortations for “moderation and enlightenment in Islamic lands”, his own government’s slide into cultural medievalism is especially alarming.
We are bothered that “Musharraf’s Pakistan” is under attack from reactionary forces in and out of government and he is doing nothing about it. If Mr Jamali’s most recent decree had been only misguided but well meant, he could have been forgiven his transgression.
But it is suggestive of an entrenched negativist mindset stuck in medieval grooves harmful to Pakistan’s national interests. Instead of pandering to this mindset, the state needs to attack and uproot it from our textbooks, from our Pakistan Television programmes and from our educational institutions. We must stamp out vigilante action. We must make the organs of the state more tolerant of dissent. We must build a composite culture of liberal, egalitarian and tolerant values. Our belief systems should be informed by light and rationality rather than crippled by superstition and darkness. Things must always be discerned in shades of being rather than frozen in black and white.
For only Allah knowest all and only Allah is infallible.
(Nov 21-27, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 39 – Editorial)
Writing on the wall
Last week the government of General Pervez Musharraf announced a ban on three jihadi outfits which were earlier banned by the United States. As if on cue, the police swooped down upon them, “sealed” their offices and detained dozens of their activists. Their bank accounts were ostensibly “frozen”. This is supposed to be another historic blow against extremism and terrorism. Rubbish.
General Musharraf’s thunderous assertions are sounding like a scratched 78 rpm record. Two years ago, we received a blast of the same banalities. The Jaish i Mohammad, Sipah i Sahaba, and Tekrik i Jafaria were “banned” by Pakistan (after they were outlawed by the United Nations Security Council), their offices “sealed”, their leaders arrested and their empty bank accounts frozen. Soon thereafter, everyone was released, the three parties renamed themselves as Khuddam ul Islam, Millat i Islamia and Islami Tehrik respectively and were allowed to function, recruit people, collect funds for jihad, publish their journals and give rousing sermons against all infidels. In fact, Maulana Azam Tariq, the leader of the renamed Sipah Sahaba, was encouraged to contest the 2002 general elections and “helped” to become a member of the National Assembly so that he could duly provide “that crucial single vote” enabling Mr Zafarullah Jamali to scrape together a government. Similarly, Allama Sajid Naqvi, leader of the Tehrik i Jafaria, alias Islami Tehrik, was allowed to contest elections and become a respectable member of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal. And Mr Masood Azhar, the leader of the Jaish, alias Khuddam, was encouraged to preach jihad and collect funds all over the country. In fact, in a brazen display of bonhomie with the khakis, he recently preached his doctrine of jihad in a grand mosque in the very heart of Lahore’s military cantonment. The pattern has become predictable. Whenever American pressure to clamp down on extremism breaches a threshold noise level, Islamabad is quick to offer a sop. In January 2002, it was President Bush and last week it was Nancy Powell, the American Ambassador to Islamabad. In between these two bans and many meetings of “pious people” drummed up by the government to “tackle religious extremism”, we have been subjected to gruesome sectarian killings in Quetta and Karachi which have been squarely laid at the door of one or another such organisation.
Meanwhile, the world is increasingly convinced that Pakistan is the original home of radical Islam and terrorism. A recent poll in the EU claimed that 48% of the respondents thought Pakistan was a threat to world peace. This perception hasn’t been helped by the fact that the Musharraf government has made no effort to stop local jihadi leaders from their violent tirades against the “West and all infidels”. What is so special about these Islamic groups that the Pakistan army cannot countenance an end to them? Why must ordinary, moderate Pakistanis, and the world at large, continue to pay the price for their extremism and radicalism? When will the Pakistani state realise that the price of mollycoddling them has become prohibitively high?
The answers are obvious enough. Radical Islam has served to keep the Pakistan army in power (even when it is not in office). It has provided the jihadi cannon fodder for keeping the Kashmir issue alive, which in turn has sustained long-term hostility with India, which in turn remains the raison d’etre of soaring defense expenditures. Radical Islamists have also helped to weaken the thrust of the mainstream, moderate, political parties that have come to challenge the Pakistan’s army’s self-proclaimed role as the primary motive force of this country. But will this formula work as effectively for its patrons in the future? No.
First, radical Islamists are increasingly forging their own national, regional and global long-term agendas that don’t square with the short-term imperatives of their military patrons. Indeed, some of them have enormous potential to destabilize their creators – as Mulla Umar did to Musharraf’s Pakistan and Osama bin Laden has done to the House of Saud in Arabia. Another major attack by Al Qaeda in the US or in Britain or in Europe would likely unleash dire consequences not just for Muslim peoples all over the world but also for Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Within the region too, the jihadis have enormous potential for destabilization – as we saw when they attacked civilian targets in Kashmir and New Delhi and provoked the Indians in December 2001 to march their army to the border with Pakistan and threaten all-out war. Another such attack could plunge the region into crisis and conflict. Second, the record shows that radical Islam is incompatible with nation-building, democracy, universal human rights and economic development – critical elements of the new world order. It perpetuates a clash of civilizations and is inimical to global stability. If Pakistan continues to harbour radical Islamists in its midst the price will surely become prohibitive.
If General Pervez Musharraf can read the writing on the wall and act to uproot extremist “Islamists”, he will do himself, the Pakistan army and the Pakistani nation great good. But if he is guided by the same provincial notions of national security, army infallibility and military ascendancy as in the past, then we have all had it.
(Nov 28-Dec 04, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 40 – Editorial)
So many questions, so few answers
General Pervez Musharraf has once again surveyed the Pakistani landscape and arrived at some interesting conclusions. One, he feels that there is no serious external threat to the country. If India embarks on a massive arms buying spree, Pakistan will respond in kind to maintain the conventional balance. Two, he believes Pakistan could be seriously hurt by three internal weaknesses: (a) lack of political stability created by the continuing conflict over the Legal Framework Order; (b) provincial disharmony, especially over the water issue in Sindh and the bad law and order situation in Balochistan wrought by the sardars; (c) religious extremism and violent sectarianism which is “capable of destroying us”.
The thrust of General Musharraf’s prognosis seems correct. All these factors form part of the equation representing Pakistan’s “state of being”. But his “solutions” beg some questions. In General Musharraf’s book, India seems the only possible external threat to Pakistan. But, following 9/11 when the USA threatened Pakistan with “either you’re with us or you’re against us”, is that realistic? Is it inconceivable that the USA might one day pose the biggest threat to Pakistan if Islamabad were perceived to be aiding or abetting Islamic terrorists? What if there were another big terrorist act in America in which some footprints led to Pakistan? Already, as General Musharraf has acknowledged, there are powerful voices in America asking whether “Pakistan is a friend or foe” for much the same reasons. For example, is Pakistan harbouring the Taliban resistance? Did it provide nuclear know-how to Korea and Iran? Is it doing enough to flush out Al-Qaeda from its tribal borderlands?
But leaving aside such scenarios, we must ask whether the potential threat from India should be met mainly by exploiting the newly generated fiscal and forex space in our economy to maintain the “arms balance” (another phrase for “arms race”). Can we “afford’ this? Wasn’t our nuclear deterrent supposed to rule out precisely such a crippling arms race with India? Shouldn’t the fiscal space be used instead to generate economic growth, jobs, infrastructure, education, health and empowerment of people so that a robust economy rather than a bloated army becomes the central element of national power?
General Musharraf’s assessment of Pakistan’s internal fissures is also problematic. It is true that the LFO is an impediment to political stability. But the idea that stability can be bought by resolving the LFO only with the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal is wrong. The MMA is, by definition, a specific product of the peculiar external circumstances impacting on Pakistan’s border provinces in the wake of 9/11 coupled with the internal political vacuum created by General Musharraf to keep the PPP and PMLN out of the reckoning. In other words, the MMA is the product of an abnormal and contrived situation. Hence it cannot be the peg on which to hang solutions for long term, institutional stability. That can only come about via a modus vivendi between the armed forces of Pakistan and its two mainstream political parties. But on that score, regrettably, General Musharraf has nothing original to offer.
General Musharraf’s answer to the bad law and order situation in Balochistan in which nearly 90% of the province’s territory is classified as “B” grade no-go area is: “We’ll sort them out”. By “them” he means a clutch of mischievous tribal sardars who are apparently inimical to the “national interest”. How many times have we heard this facile description of the problems of Balochistan and their solution? General Ayub Khan ordered the bombing of Balochistan; Z A Bhutto sent 100,000 troops to pacify the province; and General Zia ul Haq tried to buy it off with a few ship building contracts and a sprinkling of jobs in the federal bureaucracy. But the province is as anarchic and backward as ever; and alienation from the central government runs high. Sorting out a couple of frisky sardars will not resolve anything. Similarly, the water issue in Sindh cannot be washed away by undertaking some interactive trips to “explain the issue objectively” even as the representative leadership of Sindh is incarcerated or exiled for politically opportunistic reasons.
General Musharraf is absolutely right in his assessment of the myriad dangers to Pakistan from religious extremism. But apart from exhorting “enlightened moderation”, he has done little to effectively tackle societal intolerance and immoderation. The problem is not just one of some extremist groups in society who need to be “sorted out’ by a combination of better intelligence and select repression. Thanks to General Zia ul Haq, it pervades the “modern” Pakistani mindset and is institutionally rooted in many organs of the state. That is why the unfortunate perception is solidifying that General Musharraf is playing games whenever he announces yet another “crackdown” on extremist elements in Pakistan.
In short, General Musharraf seems acutely aware of the central problems facing Pakistan. But his well-intentioned solutions remain essentially short term survival tactics. What is needed is a longer term visionary strategy for Pakistan.
(Oct 03-09, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 32 – Editorial)
Musharraf’s Pakistan
General Pervez Musharraf has had a good trip to the USA again. He has some very powerful friends in DC who continue to appreciate his help in the war against Al-Qaeda terrorism. And, as usual, there was good news to report on the eve of his visit to the USA last month: 19 foreign students in two Karachi madrassahs were hauled up, one of whom is a younger brother of the much dreaded terrorist, Hambali, who has bombed sites across South East Asia, killing scores of foreigners. Apparently, hundreds of foreign students in several thousand religious seminaries have fled, or are now running away, to foreign shores because it has got “too hot” in Musharraf’s Pakistan. When he was in NY last month, General Musharraf made all the right sound-bytes: extremists were giving Islam and Muslims a bad name; Muslim states must avoid confrontation by espousing moderate values. Etc. Wonderful.
Meanwhile, the Pakistan’s defence secretary has told us that the Pentagon is ready to upgrade our 26 F-16s, help us buy 14 more from Belgium, and sell surveillance equipment to match India’s recent purchases from Israel. This US$341 mn package is supposedly separate from the US$1.5 bn weapons grant promised by President Bush earlier. And US AID officials say they are already working with Shaukat Aziz to determine how much of the US$1.5 bn economic grant offered by President Bush is to be spread between poverty alleviation and debt write-off. Excellent.
We now learn that Mr Zafarullah Jamali, General Musharraf’s hand-picked prime minister, has been “received” well in Washington. He has adequately delivered his Musharrafian brief and, if we are to believe official Pakistani wire sources, President Bush thinks that “democracy was functioning well in Pakistan”, notwithstanding the bloody-minded Commonwealth. Great.
But there are some distinctly uncomfortable tidings as well. Al-Qaeda is exhorting the faithful in Pakistan to get rid of General Musharraf. Since there have been a couple of assassination attempts on General Musharraf by similarly induced warriors, this latest “order” is disturbing. (It is just as well that Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Maulana Fazlur Rehman have swiftly distanced themselves from it.)
General Musharraf’s powerful Western friends are also expressing some visible disquiet over his handling of certain “problem areas”. Are there elements in Pakistan’s national security establishment, they ask, who don’t always see eye to eye with General Musharraf on how to deal with Al-Qaeda/OBL? Or the Taliban who are carrying out raids on American and Kabul forces from hideouts in the tribal areas of Pakistan? Or the jihadis who continue to cross over into Kashmir and risk provoking an Indo-Pak war? Has Pakistan helped N Korea and Iran acquire nuclear know-how? Can it be trusted not to ever do so again? Is there a democratic deadlock in Pakistan that might augur ill for the stability of the Musharraf regime? Certainly, the publication of a couple of new books, followed by leaks from declassified American intelligence documents, detailing past contacts between Al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s security establishment have muddied the waters. Unfortunately, too, and despite strong denials from the Pakistani foreign office on all such suspicions and allegations, the perception of past wrong doing by the Pakistani national security establishment persists in counterpart establishments of the West. The most recent statement by the US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, on the eve of his visit to Islamabad, that elements in the Pakistani military may not be fully on board with General Musharraf, is only the latest in a series of similar fears expressed by powerful policy makers in America. Nor can the views of influential papers like the Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, etc, which continue to wonder whether Musharraf’s Pakistan is a “friend or foe”, be shrugged away as insignificant.
Worse, much worse, are the views of those Western critics who allege that, far from being at variance with General Musharraf, the security and intelligence establishment in Pakistan is solidly behind him, suggesting that perhaps General Musharraf himself is playing some sort of “double game” with the West. Isn’t it Pakistani state policy, they ask, to keep OBL and the Taliban alive and kicking so that America remains committed to Musharraf? Isn’t it state policy, they insist, to keep the stream of jihadi infiltration into Kashmir flowing so that India remains bogged down in the valley?
But the most troubling issue of the future is this: what if President Bush should lose the elections in America next year, as some pundits are predicting, and is replaced by a Democratic administration whose perspective on most foreign policy issues, including interests and assets in Pakistan, is radically different from his? In the event, General Pervez Musharraf will come under renewed pressure to change, and change fast, so that the “right answers” are available to all the questions raised above. After all, the goodies promised by President Bush are subject to Congressional approval every year. And we know how convenient it remains for any American administration to put the blame on Congress if it cannot fulfill an earlier administration’s promises. Might it not therefore be a good idea to order a serious review of domestic and foreign policy options straight away?
(Oct 10-16, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 33 – Editorial)
Holier than the Pope?
The chairperson of the National Commission on the Status of Women (NCSW), Justice (retd) Majida Rizvi, addressed a meeting of citizens in Lahore last week and explained why the Commission has recommended the repeal of Hudood Laws in Pakistan. These were enforced by General Zia ul Haq in 1979 as ordinances.
The contradictions in the “blind” enforcement of these Islamic provisions reduce justice to a farce. The 15-member committee set up by the NCSW to prepare the report on the repeal showed the following pattern of opinion: 12 favoured repeal, two wanted the Hudood amended to remove contradictions, one wanted the recommendations “given effect”.
According to the press, when the Commission’s report was made public last month, the only nay-sayer in the Committee was chairman of the Council for Islamic Ideology (CII), Dr S M. Zaman, who didn’t want the Hudood laws changed. But then the CII has recommended the most blatantly extreme legislations to further Islamise Pakistan. The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal vows to implement the CII’s recommendations thus far shelved by a shell-shocked government.
The last Commission under Justice (retd) Nasir Aslam Zahid had recommended similar reform in 1997 but its report joined others in the dustbin, starting with the one prepared by Begum Zari Sarfaraz under orders from Zia ul Haq himself. The latest report is supposed to go before the National Assembly where the MMA is rampant while the opposition parties, the Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League (N), are not interested in losing ground among the masses by endorsing it. The PML(N) can hardly go back on its Islamic agenda which included separate electorates and the dreaded 15th Amendment that would have outdone the clergy in its extremism. And the less said about the PML(Q) the better in matters of Islamic reform because its leaders have made an art form of hanging on to the coat-tails, first of General Zia, then of the jihadi clergy.
Parliament is poised to tear the Report to pieces. Prime Minister Jamali’s government will probably sit on it pretending to prepare a suitable legislative document and may in the end consign it to oblivion. Meanwhile, the impression is being created that a majority of Pakistanis is opposed to tampering with the Hudood Ordinances, with less than 20 percent in favour of amendments, as per a recent independent TV channel program. And this with the public knowing next to nothing about the laws, and labouring under the mistaken illusion that repealing General Zia’s diktat would somehow be violative of Divine Will. The clergy too has gone to the press growling that any change in the said laws would be opposed tooth and nail.
We know that most Pakistanis will favour the recommendations of the Report if properly explained its contents. For instance Dr Kausar Firdaus of the Jamaat-e-Islami who participated in a TV discussion with Justice Majida Rizvi on 23 September conceded that the ordinances would have to be amended to meet the demands of justice. The main reason for repealing the Hudood Ordinances is that this would allow the courts to consider cases under the more rational Islamic principle of Tazir. Since Tazir gives more latitude to the court it can help avoid that which literally binds the judges to handing down maximum punishments without considering any mitigating factors.
What are the Hudood Laws’ contradictions? If a woman alleging rape is unable to bring four male witnesses to the act she can attract the mischief of the Hudood under Zina and may be lashed or stoned to death simply because she has owned up to being violated. On the other hand, when men accuse women of fornication and fail to prove it, they are not subjected to “qazaf” and punished for wrongful accusation. Sections of the Hudood and Tazir laws covering traditional personal laws are applicable to non-Muslims as well, but non-Muslims, together with Muslim women, are not allowed to become witnesses under the Islamic Law of Evidence. Non-Muslims are not allowed to be presiding officers in court when their co-religionists appear before it under Hudood.
Pakistan has been consistently embarrassed by the law of “rijm” or stoning to death. It is accepted in Pakistan as a “hadd” (Quranic punishment) without emanating from the text of the Quran. The country’s higher judiciary has given two contradictory decisions on its validity. Although General Zia enforced “rijm”, Pakistan has so far avoided stoning anyone to death for fear of being globally ostracised. The Pakistani clergy was greatly embarrassed this year when Iran abolished the punishment after stoning a few innocent women to death.
As Justice Rizvi’s Report says, why not get rid of a bad law if you can’t implement it? Why should General Zia’s ordinances be considered sacrosanct to the extent that removal of their flaws is considered violative of divine injunction? We know that if the MMA comes to power in Pakistan it will imitate the Taliban and stone people to death in public to show how pious Pakistan is. But that is not how other Islamic countries think. Egypt’s Al Azhar has allowed “riba” (bank interest) which is anathema in Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia says it will allow the accused to bring their lawyers into Islamic courts. Are we in Pakistan holier than the Pope?
(Oct 17-23, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 34 – Editorial)
6/10 for General Musharraf
General Pervez Musharraf’s regime is four years old. In the political history of any long-established and secure nation, that should not amount to more than a footnote. But because Pakistan is at the “crossroads” once again in its brief life, it should mean a great deal. An assessment is also needed in view of the lofty and wonderful objectives that General Musharraf set himself in his inaugural speech to the nation shortly after he seized power in 1999 and then again after he half-transferred it to hand-picked civilians in 2002. For what it’s worth, here’s a mark-sheet.
General Musharraf’s pet theme remains the economy. And rightly so. If the economy is hemorrhaging, it’s cause for alarm. If it’s not growing fast enough to swallow population growth, alleviate poverty and fulfill rising middle-class expectations, it’s a source of alienation, frustration and disgruntlement. On the first count, General Musharraf deserves good marks. Restructuring and pruning was long overdue. It is already yielding dividends in the form of significantly increased tax revenues and diminished costs of public sector enterprises. Today’s belt tightening can theoretically be translated into tomorrow’s spending spree. That is good. On the second score, he’s made a dent – GDP growth is finally up to 4% and the forecast is better still. This is not bad compared to an average of 3% growth per annum for the last decade or so. But there are no assurances that growth of over 6% pa — which is what we need — will, or can, be institutionalized on the basis of these policies. And, as everyone knows, much of the “stimulus” so far, like rising forex reserves, reduced foreign debt interest payments, high property prices, buoyant stocks and shares, has come from extraneous factors like foreign debt write-offs, economic grants and an international crackdown on hundi traders. Unfortunately, however, these factors are not strong enough to trigger a discernable trend of rising domestic investment to initiate take-off into self-sustained growth. And there’s the rub. Private domestic investors are still reluctant to repose any trust and confidence in General Musharraf’s agenda. And until they do, he cannot claim any distinction on this front.
The lack of sustainable economic success is a direct result of General Musharraf’s bad political policies. The local government scheme is not working. The referendum was a farce. The elections were flawed and yielded troubling results. Parliament remains deadlocked. The provincial government in Sindh is the laughing stock of the country; the reunited Muslim League is hopeless; the federal government is bogged down in Balochistan and the NWFP; and the poor prime minister is slowly drowning in his own humility. If, on the face of it, everything seems stable because the general’s corps commanders are not muttering, because his DGs ISI and MI are all in line, because the masses are not revolting on the streets, because the international community is behind him, so what? What did it take for the world of General Zia ul Haq to come crashing down in the blinking of an eye when he was no more useful? More critically, what is the weight and substance of General Zia’s legacies today? How is history treating him?
General Musharraf lays claim to successful foreign policy management. But this is certainly not true for the first two years of his rule. In fact, that was the time when General Musharraf’s Pakistan was not acceptable as a member of the Commonwealth, when he was largely viewed as the “pariah leader of a pariah state”, when an American president was not even prepared to shake hands with him in public and India was ready to wage war on Pakistan. But 9/11 changed all that by giving him an opportunity that he was swift to exploit. For that decisive act in the true national interest, he deserves kudos. It restored Pakistan’s standing in the international community and eventually got India off its back; it also gave a desperately needed fillip to the failing economy. That said, however, a dialogue with India has failed to materialize and tensions remain problematic. At the same time, suspicion is mounting in Washington that General Musharraf’s Afghan and Al-Qaeda policies are not totally upfront. And the Commonwealth is still not persuaded that democracy has adequately returned to Pakistan to warrant its re-entry into the club.
Yet it is precisely in the lack of sufficient and positive connections between these half-successful economic and foreign policies and the failed domestic political policy that General Musharraf’s, and by association, Pakistan’s, lingering problems are situated. Domestic and foreign investment will not return to Pakistan’s economy and boost its prospects, and Pakistan will not be accepted as a bonafide member of the international community, until all sources of political instability, domestic and foreign, especially those related to radical Islam and jihad, are removed conclusively and definitely from the Pakistani landscape and its foreign policy reflects the needs of the future instead of the obsessions of the past.
Until he mends his policies sufficiently, we cannot give General Pervez Musharraf more than six marks out of ten. The consolation prize is that few, if any, of his predecessors since independence have scored as high.
(Oct 24-30, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 35 – Editorial)
Whose enlightenment?
General Pervez Musharraf’s ringing plea for “enlightened moderation” in the religious and cultural beliefs and practices of Muslim nations, states and societies has found ready endorsement among many Muslim rulers. This isn’t surprising. Gridlocked between angry but popular Islamic radicals who seek to vent their hates and passions, and fearful but powerful international secularists who control the capitalist world, third world Muslim rulers are wont to cringe at the prospect of taking sides. Many are autocrats or dictators alienated from their own people and underpinned solely by the economic and military support of the West. This makes their balancing act between domestic sensibilities and foreign requirements quite precarious.
Of course, it wasn’t always like this, especially in Pakistan. Until the mid 1970s, Pakistan was a relatively moderate Muslim state. But the Afghan jihad in the 1980s changed it beyond recognition via a combination of militant Islamic jihad, a ruthless military dictator and a secular opportunistic West. Matters worsened in the 1990s when a clutch of Pakistani generals redirected the unemployed jihadis in pursuit of “national security” objectives to the east and west of the country. The problem arose because the jihadis were not remote-controlled robots. They had a mind of their own and sectarian, national or global agendas to flog. So the sectarian lashkars joined hands with the mujahideen and Al Qaeda to forge a united front against local and foreign infidels. In due course, Pakistan came to be racked by violent passions, religious strife and reciprocal state sponsored terrorism. “It’s a small price to pay for national security” said the glib generals. Discerning Pakistanis who objected to this exorbitant price were dubbed unpatriotic, national security risks. The West turned a blind eye because it was all happening in a long abandoned and far away junkyard. Then came 9/11 and the world was turned upside down. Of course, 9/11 was inevitable, given the concoction that had been brewing for a decade. The shocking thing is that it came like a bolt from the blue.
The first Pakistani to rethink terms and conditions was General Musharraf. That must have required much courage on the domestic front and some pragmatic thinking about means and ends internationally. But even he was not prepared to go far enough to try and dismantle the jihad entirely within the country. Worse, having sidelined the mainstream political parties, he was compelled to facilitate the success of the religious fundamentalists in the general elections of 2002. Pakistan had come full circle. As he talks self-righteously about enlightened moderation and rails against the extremists, we need to ask what General Musharraf has done subsequently to turn the tide of radical Islam back in this country.
Has he had the courage and conviction to uproot the mischief of the Hudood ordinances and the blasphemy law? Has he rolled back the thunder of the Council of Islamic Ideology? Has he disarmed the Federal Shariat Court? Has he revamped the madrassahs? Has he stopped the mosques loudspeakers from spewing religio-political hate? Has he revised the core curriculum of our “educational” institutions so that they can no longer pump ideological poison into the body politic of this nation? Has he ordered PTV and PBC to exercise “enlightened moderation” in their hourly discourses on religion and everyday life? Has he cleansed the organs of the state – in particular the army, bureaucracy and judiciary – of all unenlightened and immoderate “elements” who conspire against his worldview? Has he empowered liberal or mainstream elements and parties of society to recapture the ground lost to religious fanatics? Has he doled out bagfuls of dollars for the alleviation of poverty and illiteracy, which stalk our society and are among the root causes of alienation, frustration and desperation among the subaltern and lumpun classes? Has he shackled the fundamentalist vigilante squads rampaging against billboards, cable television, films and music? Has he decreed against the obscurantists who want to censor books of English literature, ban song and dance on the stage and excise plays? Has he stamped out honour killers, acid throwers and rapists who profess religious piety or uphold “Islamic” laws in their defence?
The impulse for “enlightened moderation” must come from the lofty towers of the state just as the passion for fundamentalism is derived from its nasty bowels. Talk of the divisions within Islam and rhetoric about its destructive impotence alone will not bring about unity in the ranks of Muslims or turn back the tide of hate and vengeance that threatens to engulf us all. Words must be matched by deeds, deeds and more deeds. One false edifice has to be dismantled and a worthy one has to be constructed in its place. This de-construction has to begin with the organs of the state and permeate down to the people. It cannot be done overnight but a definite and determined start has to be made.
On several occasions in the last four years, General Pervez Musharraf has indicated he is aware of these problems and conscious of the direction in which the solutions lie. But his cold practice remains far short of his worldly promise and rhetorical flourish. It is time he made genuine and visible amends. Unless this enlightenment dawns on him, we will continue to be an immoderate state and nation.
(Oct 31-Nov 06, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 36 – Editorial)
Puerile behaviour
The Indo-Pak seesaw is a frustrating game. In 1990 Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi all but resolved the Siachin issue and put Kashmir on the backburner. But Mr Gandhi didn’t have the courage to cement the deal. In 1997 Nawaz Sharif and Inder Kumar Gujral agreed on eight working groups to discuss all outstanding issues, including Kashmir. But Mr Gujral lacked the will to lock in the deal. In 1999 Nawaz Sharif and A B Vajpayee signed on the dotted line at Lahore for a composite dialogue on all issues, including Kashmir. But General Pervez Musharraf sabotaged the summit by staging Kargil. Then came Agra in 2001. General Musharraf now went the extra mile and agreed to the need for a composite dialogue with India in which Kashmir figured as a central if not core issue. But Mr Vajpayee put a dampner by precondioning a halt to alleged cross border infiltration by Pakistan.
As the two sides paused to re-consider their next moves, 9/11 changed the equations all over again. With Pakistan distracted by Afghanistan, India sought to exploit the situation by threatening war. But Pakistan weathered the storm and compelled India to change tack again. Last April, Mr Vajpayee offered his “hand of friendship” to Pakistan by resuming the bus service from New Delhi to Lahore. Pakistan sincerely reciprocated with a list of potential confidence building measures, including a return to the path of dialogue abandoned at Agra. But New Delhi would have none of it. Now, many months later, India has claimed another “12-point historic opening”.
Some of the measures are uncontroversial. More rail and road links. A new ferry service between Bombay and Karachi. Restoration of over flight rights and air links. A liberal visa regime. Etc. But the new proposal for a bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad is transparently malafide. It is clearly meant to clinch a new state practice which treats the disputed Line of Control in Kashmir as a settled border between India and Pakistan. Apparently, this proposal has the backing of the international community which is keen to freeze matters in Kashmir along the status quo so that the two sides can stop rattling sabers once and for all. But India is still refusing a dialogue for conflict resolution.
Islamabad has “calibrated” its response because it is irked by New Delhi’s attempt to make capital out of proposals originally advanced by it. Adverse statements by India’s foreign and defense ministers clearly show how they were meant to placate the international community and lacked sincerity. Indeed, it seems that the BJP would have loved nothing better than for Pakistan to reject the proposals and lose the PR game.
Of course, Pakistan has not fallen into that trap. But it has seemingly countered with a wish list of its own that runs into 13 points compared to 12 by India, a case of classic one-upmanship. This impression is reinforced by offering to treat 40 Indian children free of cost in Pakistani hospitals compared to 20 Pakistanis in Indian hospitals. Indeed, Pakistan has amended certain tricky Indian proposals “creatively”, as in proposing UN officials at the immigration crossings along the LoC for Kashmiris with “UN documents” on the proposed Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus, and in offering 100 scholarships for Kashmiri students to study at Pakistani professional colleges, as well an offer to treat “disabled Kashmiris” and assist “Kashmiri widows and rape victims”. Islamabad has also decided to delay talks for a restoration of bus and rail links until after talks with India on a restoration of air links and over flights in the first week of December, suggesting that if the first round fails to satisfy Pakistani conditionalties on over flights, the second round may be postponed.
And so it goes on, payment back in the same khota coin, stupid bloody mindedness by both sides. We would have liked to see transparently good and sincere proposals from India in the first place that could have been reciprocated by Pakistan in the same spirit. What is stopping India from unilaterally restoring the rail, bus, air and diplomatic links that it unilaterally cut off in 2001? What is stopping Pakistan from granting MFN status to India when India granted it to Pakistan many years ago? Is this time for rigid cost-benefit analysis by both sides or is it time for generous give and take?
Unfortunately, this is neither the beginning nor the end of the seesaw game. The war in Kashmir is getting increasingly bloody. The fear is that another bloody incident could throw a dangerous spanner in the works and make the current proposals look not just totally misguided but also misplaced. What then? Will India mobilize its army all over again and threaten Pakistan? Will Pakistan respond by hinting at a nuclear holocaust?
There is no alternative to an immediate and composite dialogue between India and Pakistan on all disputes, including Kashmir. This is what India said for ten years but Pakistan rejected by imposing pre-conditions on the dialogue. This is what Pakistan is saying now but India rejects by imposing pre-conditions on a dialogue. How sad and unfortunate that both nations have now been reduced to such puerile behaviour.
(Sep 26-Oct 02, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 31 – Editorial)
Games nations play
A firecracker went off with a big bang in a plaza somewhere in the sprawling jungle of Karachi, the South African Cricket Board had kittens and promptly cancelled a cricketing tour to Pakistan. Is that fair? Do the rules of the game allow for such capriciousness? Did the South Africans or the Australians or any of the cricketing heavyweights cancel their tours of India, for example, when Gujerat went up in flames and thousands of people were terrorized and killed by fanatical Hindu mobs in a month long orgy of violence and hate? Or when the Hindu fundos went on an assassination spree against Christian priests and missionaries in southern India? How much more absurd that Sri Lanka of all countries should try and exploit the situation by offering to host international cricket matches between Pakistan and other countries on its “neutral and safe” venues when that country is still racked by a civil war in which hundreds of bombs have exploded all over the pearly isle killing thousands of people in the last decade? Indeed, it may well be asked, what, if anything, has the crime rate in a city or the state of law and order in a country got to do with hosting and playing cricket or, for that matter, any sport, in public?
The questions against the South Africans and the Sri Lankans, etc., all seem cogent and powerful. Unfortunately, however, they beg the issue and are, therefore, quite wrong and misplaced.
The South Africans and the English and the Australians and the New Zealanders are scared of playing in Pakistan because they believe that they might become the target of criminals and terrorists in Pakistan. In other words, they fear the religious terrorists who have publicly proclaimed their hatred for the West, and vented their rage by kidnapping and decapitating Western journalists like Danny Pearl in Karachi, bombing Western technicians outside five star hotels in Karachi and gunning down Western diplomats and their wives and children in churches in Islamabad.
Westerners fear fire breathing mullahs in Karachi and Peshawar who regularly give fatwas for jihad against the West and against people and things Western. They fear the fundamentalist Pakistani supporters of the Taliban who are out to exact revenge for the Western assault on their regime in Afghanistan. They fear the Arab, African and South East Asian warriors of Al-Qaeda (Saudi Arabia), Gamaat al Islamiyya, Al-Jihad (Egypt), Jamaat i Islamiya (Indonesia), Islamic Army of Aden (Yemen), Fighting Islamic Group (Libya), Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (MU), Armed Islamic Group (Algeria), Akhwanul Muslimeen (Sudan) and other radical “Islamicists” who are embedded in the 4,000 madrassahs and seminaries of Pakistan and learning how to wage jihad against the West. Of the 5,86,000 students currently enrolled at Pakistani madrassahs, nearly 17,000 are foreigners.
And these fears are not unjustified. The aims and objectives of these groups have been published in books and periodicals which are for sale over the counter. And their practices are not hidden. These are a far cry from the Hindu fanatics in India who actually want to have a strategic relationship with Western states and cultures, or the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers who are actually receiving economic aid from Western countries and donor agencies. That is why, despite the civil strife and bad law and order and crime situations in many countries of the world, it is only Islamic countries racked by radical, anti-Western Islamic movements that attract adverse travel advisories, inhibit Western tourists, thwart Western capital and scare away Western sportsmen.
More significantly, that is also why the problem of such countries, in which Pakistan has unfortunately come to be included, is not just one of “false image” or “misperception” created by unrepresentative minorities which can be “corrected” by savvy media handling and clever projection, a common enough refrain in overly “patriotic” drawing rooms bursting with businessmen hungry for foreign investment, partnerships and franchises or army messes bristling with self-righteous and moralistic do-gooders and go-getters. The problem is that for the average Western diplomat or businessman or sportsman, he or she is more likely to be the object rather than the subject in most places and situations in Pakistan. And that is a distinctly uncomfortable, even fearful, prospect for most citizens of the West.
The South Africans have fortunately been persuaded to rejoin cricket in Lahore and Pindi if not Karachi or Peshawar. If they do not encounter any threats from radical Islamicists, their tour should encourage other cricketing countries to play the game in Pakistan. But if they do, we shall be swiftly relegated to the bottom of the heap of pariahs all over again. Isn’t this a fragile and uncertain future?
A majority of Pakistanis wants to interact with the West and profit from it. But a powerful and rampant minority is determined to thwart this ambition. Until we uproot this minority from our midst and reclaim the political and cultural space that rightly belongs to us, we shall continue to find ourselves in no man’s land.
Cricket can be a metaphor for politics. We must play by the rules of the game in the game that nations like to play.
(Dec 12-18, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 42 – Editorial)
US-Pak: strategic friends or tactical foes?
The US-Pakistan relationship in Afghanistan could become choppy. Each player has intrinsic national interests. Some of them are unpalatable to the other. Thus far there have been no antagonistic contradictions but things are heating up and may have serious repercussions.
The US had three quick objectives in Afghanistan: to defeat the Taliban, to establish a puppet regime, and to exit with men and materials into Iraq. In the event, the Taliban regime is no more and a puppet “Afghan” regime is in place. But President Hamid Karzai’s regime isn’t stable because of warlordism and resurgent Talibanism. Nor is it national, dominated as it is by non-Pashtuns. Thus NATO has had to intervene and hundreds of millions of dollars are now in the pipeline for constructing an Afghan nation-state. Clearly, the emphasis has shifted. The main aim now is to construct an Afghan national army and a democratically elected national government in the next nine months that can be billed as at least one foreign policy “success” in President Bush’s election year.
This American short term goal is dependent on several swift achievements: a presidential constitution; sanctioned by a representative loya jirga; followed in June 2004 by free, fair and credible national elections, in which Mr Karzai is duly elected as president; and a national army that can enable his writ to be established across Afghanistan. In pursuit of this composite goal, Washington has launched two major offensives: Operation Avalanche is the biggest “Get Taliban” military operation since 2001; and Pakistan is coming under pressure to flush out troublesome anti-Karzai elements in the borderlands.
This quick-nation-building approach in Afghanistan tailored to specific Bush interests in 2004 is problematic for Afghanistan and Pakistan and therefore for America itself. Afghanistan is no longer the “nation” it once was, having splintered into warring tribes, ethnicities and sub-nationalities since foreign intervention triggered off “the great game” all over again in 1979 and subsequently rent the Afghan state asunder. Creating a functioning national state in the current situation and in this nine month time frame is impossible. The Afghan “national army” is all of 6000 soldiers; the Afghan civil bureaucracy in Kabul is run by imported Afghans; and the international money that was promised to underpin this effort has stalled. Nor is there any certainty that the promised constitution will materialize without rigging the loya jirga and that the run up to the elections will be smooth.
Powerful voices against this artificial and hurried American approach are already being raised by neutral and discerning observers. For example, Mr Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Special Representative to Afghanistan, has said that “the elections scheduled for June 2004 should be postponed until the right conditions have been created to hold them”. Among his concerns are critical facts: the Kabul government that will underwrite the proposed elections, and the official media that will propagate them, and the army that will provide the umbrella, are all factional rather than national in character, which means that representative and democratic results can be ruled out in the current circumstances. Thus while the American emphasis on a national Afghan entity is very welcome and American moves are in the right direction, the time frame and the methods whereby these are to be accomplished are all wrong. The strategy is tailored to the Bush administration’s own electoral needs next year rather than the long term interests of the Afghan people objectively. Therefore the end is most likely to be subverted by the means.
But Washington is not currently inclined to see matters this way. Indeed, at least one powerful think tank (Council on Foreign Relations, New York) has opined that unless Islamabad actively helps the Americans flush out Taliban and anti-Karzai elements operating out of safe havens in Pakistan’s borderlands, the US-Pak relationship could be impaired, with serious consequences for Pakistan.
But Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan, however badly defined or articulated, cannot be shrugged away at the altar of American interests. Forget about ‘strategic depth’ and that old nonsense. At the very least there is an unsettled border issue (Durand Line); and the volatile Pashtuns who straddle both Afghanistan and Pakistan are a majority “nationality” in the NWFP and a majority nationality in all of Afghanistan. Both facts raise the spectre of separatism in Islamabad. On top of it, Pakistan’s national security establishment has “invested” 25 years in trying to cobble an Afghan state sympathetic to, and dependent upon, Pakistan. How can Washington expect Islamabad to blithely support American short term ends in Afghanistan unless these are also in line with Pakistan’s longer term concerns if not interests?
The Americans, in effect, are trying to consolidate a factional state system in Kabul that Pakistan had also tried to foist and failed, albeit with different partners. A far better American approach would be to bring Pakistan into the loop as a strategic partner in the rebuilding of Afghanistan’s national state, thereby transforming a potential liability into a valuable asset. This can be done, for starters, by transforming the existing US-Afghanistan-Pakistan Tripartite Commission from a tactical to a strategic meeting point.
(Feb 27-March 04, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 1 – Editorial)
Benazir Bhutto’s future
Nawaz Sharif’s silence is understandable. He is a prisoner of General Pervez Musharraf and the Saudi government. Shahbaz Sharif’s squeamishness is also explicable. He is a prisoner of Nawaz Sharif and General Musharraf. The Sharifs would like to do a deal with General Musharraf that enables them to return to Pakistan and participate in politics freely. So they are not hurling abuse at General Musharraf.
Like the Sharifs, Benazir Bhutto too is in forced exile, facing personal and party persecution at General Musharraf’s behest. Like them, she would love to negotiate safe passage to Pakistan, freedom for her husband and another shot at the premiership. What then accounts for her recent thunder against the Pakistani military leadership in general and General Musharraf in particular? Does she know or sense something that makes her response so different from that of the wily Sharifs? Or is she simply up the creek without a paddle?
Benazir Bhutto is speaking freely about the travails of Pakistan under military dictatorships. She has charged Dr A Q Khan with covering up for General Musharraf’s nuclear omissions and commissions. She says she was approached several times when she was prime minister in 1988-90 by military officials and scientists seeking permission to export nuclear technology to Iran, Iraq and Libya but she turned them down. Clearly this is a line of confrontation with General Musharraf and the military rather than that of sullen acquiescence as adopted by the Sharifs. Is there a good political explanation for it?
General Musharraf is bitterly hostile to Nawaz Sharif for well-known reasons. But Shahbaz Sharif is apparently welcome to re-enter politics if he can make an irrevocable break from his father and elder brother. But Sharif Jr. remains very reluctant to take the plunge. Meanwhile, General Musharraf’s task has been simplified by the ever-fickle Muslim League. For the nth time in history, it has bolted into the embrace of a military dictator. But Ms Bhutto’s case presents a lingering dilemma for General Musharraf.
Despite a clutch of whimpering turncoats, the PPP is not susceptible to a grand hijacking like the PML. Nor is Ms Bhutto prepared to hand over her party to General Musharraf in exchange merely for personal clemency. She will settle for nothing less than the right to return to Pakistan and lead her party without encumbrance. Indeed, she may well now think that the tide has turned and sooner or later General Musharraf will see the necessity, if not wisdom, of clinching a compromise with her. Two new factors are probably responsible for this perception.
The powerful international community has come to demand that all manifestations of radical political Islam, especially in nuclear Pakistan, should be extinguished. The end of the line for Al Qaeda and the Taliban was pronounced two years ago. Now the time is nigh for the jihadis. Tomorrow, it will have to be bye-bye to the MMA. So General Musharraf is going to get into a bind. Having committed himself to doffing his army uniform, he will be besieged by the grand opposition next year unless he is able to dilute its strength or increase his own. The only way he can do that is to win over the PPP to his side. If he dithers, the international community will nudge him in that direction. Following the assassination attempts on his life there is a widespread international viewpoint that he will remain vulnerable for time to come. Should he be eliminated from the reckoning in any way, the argument goes, his one-man, one-party system will collapse and Pakistan could plunge into unacceptable instability and anarchy. Hence, it is concluded, it is imperative for purposes of institutional continuity and stability that General Musharraf should build an alliance with a mainstream, pro-West, relatively liberal party like the PPP that is able to see Pakistan through its critical years.
Ms Bhutto has read the situation. She is telling General Musharraf that everyone – Pakistan, the international community, the Pakistani military and General Musharraf personally – would be better off if he were to do a fair deal with her. She is also trying to belittle or erode his international credentials in order to make herself more credible. This is the stuff of power politics. Talk talk, fight fight. General Musharraf should appreciate such tactics for he is himself a past master at them.
Ms Bhutto recently said that she sensed new elections in the air. This fits in with her analysis. General Musharraf’s options are bound to diminish as the time nears for taking off his uniform. He can either subject himself to a steady erosion of authority in the next year or two at the hands of a resurgent and possibly belligerent parliament. Or he can sack parliament, suspend the constitution, retain his uniform and hold a new round of elections in a year or two in which the PPP is allowed to contest more freely as the second “loyal” mainstream party, while the mullahs are banished to the Netherlands where they belong. In any event, the future of Benazir Bhutto and the PPP will probably not be as dark as their recent past.
(Feb 20-26, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 52 – Editorial)
Cricket is the biggest CBM
The Indian prime minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has done another deed that will not be lost on all peace loving people in India and Pakistan. In the face of reports that Pakistan remains at risk from terrorist attacks, especially in the wake of the steps taken by the government of General Pervez to cleanse its Augean stables, he has brushed aside the reservations of the Indian establishment and some members of his own party, and given the green signal that everyone in India and Pakistan, including the two Cricket Boards, were eagerly anticipating. The Indian cricket team will visit Pakistan next month. One can gauge the Pakistani public’s response to Mr Vajpayee’s decision from the TV interviews taken in the streets of the country: everyone has praised him for taking a step that is surely going to improve relations in a sector that India holds dear — people to people relations. This is happening after 1989, the year that marked the beginning of trouble in Kashmir and forced the two countries to allow sport to become a victim of politics.
The question of security was first raised tentatively by the Indian captain Saurav Ganguli. Later, the chief of the Board of Control for Cricket India (BCCI), Mr Jagmohan Dalmiya, asserted that no one would be forced to tour Pakistan. An Indian team of security experts then visited Pakistan and looked up the venues and found them to be okay, barring a few adverse observations on the venues at Karachi and Peshawar. Then Mr Ganguli conceded that no one in his team had objected to the tour and that he was willing to take the team to Pakistan. Suddenly, all the misgivings gave way to a feeling of confidence. Of course, Pakistani and Indian cricket enthusiasts have never accepted the need for any of the bans in the past. In fact, over the past decade, whenever the topic came up, the Indian government lost support at home among lovers of cricket. Indian fans realised that Pakistan had visited India once and that India had to make a return visit to a country, even though the reports from there were not always good. But everyone was in favour of taking the risk. Now Mr Vajpayee has made us realise that you can do nothing positive unless you are prepared to take some risk.
Risk can also be balanced by economics. There is big money in Indo-Pak cricket and this is so especially in India, which has venues to stage at least five test matches and crowds to overfill the stands. On the last occasion when our cricketers played in India everyone came away with enough money to build houses. The Boards got their share of the money and became solvent. In the case of the BCCI, it was put well on the way to becoming the richest Board in the world. In recent times, apart from commercial considerations, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) wanted a return visit to enable it to come out of its ‘jihadi’ eclipse. It tried its best, with the help of Islamabad, to get India to come; but to no avail. As other tours too got cancelled, the PCB sank into financial trouble. It threatened repeatedly to complain to the International Cricket Council (ICC) but the atmospherics with India were bad after 9/11 and got worse during the subsequent standoff between the two countries. So it was not simply a case of Pakistan not qualifying as a venue; it became a question of India getting the next Pakistani tour. In this context, Mr Dalmiya was always game to play but always at cross-purposes with the government in New Delhi. Meanwhile, the people in India and Pakistan were increasingly sure that they wanted the tours to resume. They were not interested in talking about any risk factor.
In the event, clearly thereal persuasion behind the Indo-Pak cricket green light is bilateral rivalry. It originates in politics but, like all sports, it gets transformed into goodwill and ultimately becomes a Confidence Building Measure positively affecting politics itself. The fact that Pakistan is keen to play a very strong Indian team that defeated it decisively in the last World Cup is extremely significant. On the Indian side, after the team’s recently concluded tour of Australia, the crisis of confidence in the Indian cricketers regarding Pakistan has been banished. Now the Indian team is the favourites and Bishen Singh Bedi no longer thinks that Indian players have a ‘mental block’ about Pakistan. That is why the Pakistanis are practising frantically with left-arm fast bowlers to cope with the Zaheer-Nehra-Pathan left-arm trio. Yet, the ‘jazba’ or the will to win on the Pakistani side, continues to be the exciting factor in the new Indo-Pak cricket relationship.
The ‘clash’ is the magical aspect of the game. The two sides somehow must remain capable of defeating each other to retain the interest of their big fan following. Pakistan’s cricket team may be in a state of eclipse after its New Zealand tour, but its ability to surprise with bowlers like Shoaib Akhtar remains intact. The cricket-watchers of India and Pakistan have learned to admire each other’s cricketers despite the rivalry in the field. Just as Imran Khan used to be an icon in India in his heyday, Sachin Tendulkar is a hero in Pakistan and his latest statement that he will very much be in the team going to Pakistan has exhilarated the Pakistanis. That is why it is very important now that the cricketers should behave with extreme caution and tact in the field, knowing that the game is going to play an important role in the improvement and normalisation of relations between the two countries.
(March 19-25, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 4 – Editorial)
Abandoning jihad
Certain Quranic verses have been expunged from a textbook on Biology for Class XI. Apparently, these tended to suggest that jihad was obligatory on all Muslims. One could, if that was the intention, also misconstrue from them that Jews and Christians were permanent enemies of Islam. Therefore their deletion should have been welcomed by everyone. No one wants the Holy Quran to be exploited for mischief by anti-state elements.
However, the opposition parties led by the MMA walked out of the National Assembly in protest when the federal education minister, Zubeida Jalal, explained why the verses had been expunged. The MMA’s response was expected. It has a strong vested political interest in “Islamising” everything under the sun, including biology and science. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the Amir of Jama’at-e Islami and acting president of the MMA, is the thin end of the MMA wedge. He has called on all students to “shield Islam from the Western, secular onslaught”. But is the issue really related to Islam?
No. The MMA, for all its religious brouhaha, is basically a political entity. It had no qualms in striking a deal with General Pervez Musharraf on the Legal Framework Order. In order to advance its political agenda, it even ditched the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy. This deal has enabled it to get space to maximise its political advantage in the two provinces of the NWFP and Balochistan where it rules the roost. But in order to retain its orthodox religious voter, it is compelled to maintain its armoury of religious symbols and ideas. It is also obliged to pose as the genuine opposition to a military dictator who increasingly comes across as a liberal and secular man. Hence its attempt at every turn to oppose General Musharraf, especially on all the good work he is doing to cleanse Pakistan of religious extremism.
It is amazing, though, that in this ruckus no one has asked the relevant question of how mention of ‘jihad’ is compatible with the biology syllabus? How, and why, did these verses find their way into the biology textbook? Clearly, this question hasn’t been asked because the answer is bound to lead to embarrassing disclosures about how the state has systematically indoctrinated its citizens over the past quarter century by means of a particularistic exegesis of Islam since the time of Zia ul Haq. This process has given a political handle to religious parties and it makes sense from their perspective to not lose it. But the cumulative impact of this policy of indoctrination has been disastrous for Pakistan. It was meant to put down the liberal-left in Pakistan on the one hand and prepare the youth for jihad to push a certain “national-security” paradigm centring on ambitions regarding Afghanistan and India on the other. But it was a Faustian bargain since it resulted in the loss of internal sovereignty by the state and the rise of anarchic tendencies based on a millenarianism that has no tolerance for the state’s about-turn in the new reality of today.
This trend runs contrary to the modern notion of the nation-state and hinders its capacity to exercise effective domestic control or even calibrate its external policies. One of the worst fallouts of this indoctrination has been to compromise the integrity of the territorial state itself. Since every state is wedded to the idea of self-defence and advancing its interests, it is interesting that the rightwing should emphasise ‘jihad’ as the only way of doing it. It is important to remember that there is no juridical consensus on who can declare jihad – is it the state or can any individual or group ask the Muslims to do jihad? But the balance tilts in favour of the state and for good reason, too: if individuals can be given even a slice of the state’s monopoly of violence, it would sound the death knell of the state. This is why in practice the Islamic states have always guarded their sovereignty ruthlessly.
The present trend is born of special circumstances in which the Pakistani state establishment was a willing player. But now that the circumstances have changed, the state finds it difficult to alter course because in pursuing these policies it unwittingly ended up strengthening those non-state elements whose interests are linked to the continuation of those old national security policies in which they had a degree of autonomy and leverage from the state.
One thing is clear. Recent bomb attacks and other terrorist acts show that the idea of jihad is totally misplaced and is doing great harm to Pakistan. But the rightwing is in no mood to voluntarily vacate the political space it has captured in the past 25 years. The only hope for the government, therefore, is to co-opt other political parties that appreciate General Musharraf’s vision of a modern state. But the problem is that these parties cannot come into play until General Musharraf decides to change the rules of the game in which they have been pushed into the wilderness instead of being brought into the centrefold.
(March 26-April 01, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 5 – Editorial)
General Musharraf’s Faustian bargains
The military operation in South Waziristan against hostile Al-Qaeda terrorists has drawn flak from the opposition, in particular from the MMA that claims to represent public sentiment in the tribal areas. This is not unexpected. The operation is being conducted at the behest of the Bush administration and everyone in the tribal areas hates Uncle Sam. But human rights groups have also demonstrated their ire at the loss of innocent civilian lives caught in the crossfire. In fact there are many liberals who are demanding that the army should cease operations and get out of the tribal areas immediately before an unprecedented blowback plunges the country into a new crisis. Why should we help fight America’s war, why should we do its dirty work, it is angrily asked? Why, indeed?
For starters, if we didn’t, America would most certainly do the job itself. Like it did in the Taliban’s Afghanistan after 9/11 with B-52 bombers, and precision bunker busting bombs, and helicopter gunships and even cruise missiles. And what can we do if it were to apply its pre-emptive doctrine to our tribal areas? Twiddle our thumbs like we did when American cruise missiles were winging their way to Afghanistan over sovereign Pakistani airspace in 1998 in search of Osama bin Ladin’s training camps? Take on America militarily for violating our territorial sovereignty? Protest on the streets and burn the American flag? Go to the UN? But if this is not the time for a replay of the impotent passion and rage that sparked a foolish stampede of tribal lashkars from the tribal areas in aid of the Taliban after the American bombing started in 2001, it is certainly time to absorb a couple of basic truths: one, our tribal areas are flush with terrorists from Arabia, Africa, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Sinkiang, etc, all with Al-Qaeda links; two, we should be as opposed to Al-Qaeda terrorism as America is and as determined to rid our country of this scourge as America is. Indeed, in this context, America’s war is our war. If the local jirga system is unable or unwilling to act against powerful local mercenaries in cahoots with the terrorists, then the Pakistani military must get on with it. If Afghanistan was unacceptable to the world and to us as a base area for Islamic terrorism, how can we then allow our tribal areas to become another Afghanistan?
For opportunist reasons, the “federally administered” tribal areas remain an anachronism of history, thwarting our nationhood. On the inexplicable pretext of “preserving the tribal way of life”, the state of Pakistan has actually reduced these territories and their people to 19th century museums flush with stinger missiles, rocket launchers, mortars, artillery, electronics and automobiles. Local warlords thrive and posture as gentry and parade in our national parliaments as political worthies to be feared, spoilt and cultivated. Meanwhile, the economy of these areas is linked to Afghanistan more than it is to Pakistan, even as criminals in Peshawar and Karachi are linked to the tribal areas through the provision of effective escape routes, hospitalities ands hideouts, and even as the drug laboratories of these areas lure millions of unsuspecting Pakistanis into the vicious drug trap. All this must change. Pakistan simply cannot afford to live with the concept of the autonomous tribal areas. And if this is a compelling moment in history to extend the writ of the Pakistan state, we should grit our teeth and bear it rather than whinge about it in misplaced concreteness.
Of course, this does not absolve the Pakistan military of criticism aimed at its methods. For one, the high level of military casualties is quite stunning, suggesting bad intelligence and worse military tactics. We are talking here of a few hundred armed terrorists versus many thousands of Pakistani soldiers. Then there was the inexplicable allusion to Aiman Al Zawahiri, the right hand of OBL, who was officially said to be hiding in the Wana area, which held out the promise of a big catch for the Americans. Why did we have to say this, even if it was true to the best of our intelligence? Now that he seems to have escaped through a “labyrinth of tunnels”, we have egg on our face. General Pervez Musharraf is in an unenviable situation. This year presents many difficulties for him. He must clean up Pakistan’s act on the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda terrorists who have taken refuge in our country. He is obliged to uncover all evidence of the nuclear proliferation racket of Dr A Q Khan and hand it over to the Americans. He must reign in the bristling Kashmiri jihadis so that the peace process with India is not derailed. In many ways, each self created problem’s solution involves some sort of Faustian bargain in which General Musharraf will have to sell a little bit not only of his own soul but also that of the military to the Great Satan. It is a task in which he should be assisted, not undermined, in the larger interest of Pakistan.
(April 16-22, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 8 – Editorial)
Confusion worst confounded
Last week was bizarre, even by Pakistani standards. The Supreme Court said that Shahbaz Sharif, like all Pakistanis, was at liberty to return to the country, subject only to the “law” of the land. In other words, he could return but face arrest if there was any criminal case against him, or be deported into exile if there was a legal contract to that effect. But Mr Sharif, who had fretted long and agitated hard to establish this very right to return to his homeland, is still nowhere in sight. Why, it may be legitimately asked, did he go all the way to the SC if he was not ready to get on a plane and fly back to Pakistan? He has always said that he is ready to face arrest and trial. So what’s the delay? At least, before the judgment, there was some ambiguity about this issue and he could be tangential about it. But now people are muttering that he is afraid of being arrested and that his chest thumping was a “drama”. This is bad politics on Shahbaz Sharif’s part.
On its part, the government has not fared any better. The prime minister, Zafarullah Jamali, is on record as saying time and again that Mr Sharif is free to return to the country and face the law. But the redoubtable information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, is wisely following in the footsteps of President General Pervez Musharraf who keeps referring to some “agreement” signed by all the Sharifs in which they have apparently signed away their rights to return to the country and participate in politics for ten full years. In other words, Shahbaz cannot return to the country until the end of 2009. The Sharifs deny any such agreement exists. But the truly weird aspect of this whole affair is that the government, far from establishing that this agreement is in the nature of a legal and enforceable contract, refuses even to be drawn into making such an agreement public. To all intents and purposes, therefore, the government’s deportations to date of members of the Sharif family are apparently “illegal”. And the Sharifs are seemingly “cowards” for not taking the first flight out of exile and courting arrest in Pakistan.
Then there is the extraordinary issue of General Musharraf’s army uniform. Last year, he agreed that he would not remain army chief and president after 31st December 2004. This commitment was enshrined in the constitution by means of the 17th amendment. In due course, he sought and received a vote of confidence as president of Pakistan. Then he said he wanted to chair a National Security Council so that he could lord it over the prime minister and his cabinet of ministers. So the National Assembly has duly voted on his pet bill and the Senate is lining up to follow suit. But having obtained everything he said he ever wanted, he wants more, like Oliver Twist.
Here is confusion worst confounded. Mr Jamali wasn’t too happy about the NSC proposal. He thought it would erode parliament’s supremacy. But when his cabinet members proved more loyal to General Musharraf than to him, he bowed to the inevitable and started clucking approvingly. Meanwhile, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal is howling in protest, despite the understanding with General Musharraf last year that it wouldn’t support or oppose the NSC bill. What’s even more ridiculous is the sight of President General Musharraf (General President Musharraf, actually) presiding over cabinet meetings alongside Mr Jamali, a travesty of the parliamentary system of government if ever there was one.
Meanwhile, we have read a string of statements on the question of General Musharraf’s uniform from the president and prime minister to the ministers of information, law, defence and interior, all of which are clearly at odds with one another.
The PM has said that he is sure General Musharraf will keep his commitment. But he has also said it is solely up to General Musharraf whether or not he keeps his commitment. The law minister has said that General Musharraf is obliged by the 17th amendment to stick to his commitment. But he has also said that he never said that. Worse, he is part of a team of “Patriots” (PPP turncoats, actually) that went to General Musharraf last week and exhorted him not to take off his uniform in the “national interest”, the wretched constitution be damned. The information minister has now informed us that this controversy is unnecessary and premature because General Musharraf will most “certainly quit” his uniform. Alas. General Musharraf is not so sure. He has told BBC that he is thinking about the issue and will take the decision at the right time after taking everything into account, which really means that if he can find a way of being both army chief and president next year, he will grab it.
Pakistan’s politics is degenerating into a farce. Since General Musharraf has often meant well and done well, the tragedy is that some of his solid achievements are being seriously undermined and eroded by his cynical experiments and insecurities.
(April 23-29, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 9 – Editorial)
So many unanswered questions
The PPP and PMLN take orders from abroad,” accuses General Pervez Musharraf, implying that both parties are working against the “national interest” and should be spurned. Who forced the two leaders into exile in the first place? Who refuses to let them return to their homeland? Who blackmailed their party men into desertion and facilitated their floor crossing in parliament? “Leave the uniform issue to me,” insists General Musharraf, “I will decide when the time comes.” Why should the issue be left to him? Who made a public pledge that he would shed it before the year was out? Who said that one of the intents and purposes of the 17th amendment was that it would facilitate the transition to a civilian president? “The MMA has gone back on its agreement with me on the NSC,” argues General Musharraf, “I am within my rights to change my mind on the uniform issue too.” Who brought the MMA into power? Who argued that it was better to have them p*****g inside the tent than outside? “The NSC is a consultative body,” assures General Musharraf, “it will work under parliament.” Who is chairman of the NSC? Who has the discretionary power to sack everyone who sits in it? Who has the power to sack parliament? “I want to bring the army in so that it can be kept out,” reasons General Musharraf. But the army is already in trade, industry, banking, property, telecommunications, agriculture; it is in the police, in the universities, in the ‘civil’ bureaucracy, in public corporations, in real estate, in short it is everywhere. All this happened when it was presumably “kept out”. What will happen when it is “brought in”?
General Musharraf isn’t the only one who has a lot of questions to answer. The prime minister, Zafarullah Jamali, cannot dodge a few of his own too. Why does an elected PM allow an unelected president in an army uniform to preside over cabinet meetings? Why does Mr Jamali argue that “arbitration and plea-bargaining to persons charged with corruption is itself a kind of institutional corruption” when his own cabinet coalition contains persons with NAB cases against them, when his own parliamentary majority was cobbled on the basis of persons who had defaulted on bank loans?
Chaudhry Shujaat, the president of the PMLQ, recently delivered a nugget: “The PPP should not be represented in the NSC because it is an anti-national security risk.” Which party received the largest number of votes in the last national election despite rigging, blackmail and bullying by the government? Which party would have naturally been in line to post the leader of the opposition in the national assembly if dozens of its members had not been illegally bribed or cajoled to croaa over to the treasury benches? If the combined opposition should nominate the leader of the PPP in the house as the leader of the opposition, how can Chaudhry Shujaat keep the PPP out of the NSC?
Mr Shahbaz Sharif should answer some questions too. “I’m dying to return home and serve my country,” he has declared time and again. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he has shouted from the rooftop. Now the Supreme Court has told him he’s free to return but he’s still dragging his feet. Why, if he wasn’t sure of his position, did he go to the Supreme Court in the first place? Why is he now saying that he will not return unless Nawaz Sharif permits him to do so?
Not to be left behind are Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari. Why are they refusing to go to Switzerland to contest the charges against them? Why, if they are not guilty as charged, are they refusing to confirm that the millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts do not belong to them and can be repatriated to Pakistan?
Pakistan’s institutions also need to do some explaining. Why is the Supreme Court still sitting on the ISI case of bribery and electoral rigging in 1990 lodged by Mr Asghar Khan many years ago? Former DGs of intelligence agencies have a lot to answer for too: for example, the 1991 botch up that led to the assassination of President Najibullah and allowed a political vacuum to be created that sustained the factional warfare between northern and southern warlords for control of Kabul; the hasty recognition of the Taliban government in 1997 and the unqualified support to it thereafter to the exclusion of the Northern Alliance; the creation of jihadis as an instrument of state policy against India in Kashmir, regardless of the blowback via sectarianism and terrorism on domestic stability; and most recently the creation of the MMA to fill the vacuum left by the ouster of the two mainstream parties.
Every major politician and institutional leader is to blame for the mess Pakistan is in. That is why we have long advocated a process of truth and reconciliation between politicians, generals, bureaucrats and businessmen in the larger national interest. But far from heeding this, our polity seems to be headed in the opposite direction. How can any nation be built and sustained on lies, hypocrisy and opportunism? General Musharraf should review his political strategy. Much depends on his wisdom and less on his sincerity.
(Aug 16-22, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 25 – Editorial)
The “real” terrorist network
The latest “revelation” from Islamabad is that the terrorists who spilled innocent blood in Murree and Taxila this month belonged to only one organisation, the banned anti-Shia sectarian outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Earlier, the murder of Daniel Pearl was also officially pinned on the LJ. The curious thing is that only a year ago, the LJ was not officially centre-stage. It was said to be a “peripheral” organisation that allegedly focused only on sectarianism while the other well-known militias were busy fighting for Islam well beyond the neighbourhood. But now we have been informed that the LJ has been up to other kinds of terrorism too, that the LJ was closely associated with al-Qaeda and received money from OBL. The name of a new organization, al-Umar, cropped up lately but was suppressed because the policy is to dump everything on the LJ, thereby making it the fall guy for others who are not to be targeted for one reason of state or another.
The terrorist network may be much bigger and wider in Pakistan than is suggested by this focus on the LJ. But one reason why the LJ is being isolated and attacked is to create the perception that the government is winning the war against terrorism and we can relax. The LJ’s founder, Riaz Basra, has been knocked off by the police and his successor, Akram Lahori, is in custody, singing like a canary. But we can’t help wondering whether this singing is on the basis of a musical score that is intended to save the necks of a lot of people, including the “handlers” who had convinced the people of Pakistan that the Jihad was “pure and spiritual”. The LJ was “separated” from its parent organisation but two other jihadi organisations have sprung from the same parent and are now under global ban as terrorists. Are these organisations separate entities or are they the footprints of an extremely protean single entity strongly entrenched inside the organs of the Pakistani state? Here’s a frightening glimpse of the length and breadth of the interconnections.
As reported in Khabrain, “FBI and Pakistani intelligence agencies arrested an Egyptian Arab named Hisham al-Wahid from Saudi Arabia and brought him to Pakistan. He guided the agencies to Gaggar Phatak in Karachi from where, behind the police station in a garage, three activists of Jaish-e-Muhammad and two of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi were arrested. These activists belonged to Sargodha and had been trained at the Akora Khattak seminary of Maulana Samiul Haq. These activists then guided the police to a bungalow in Gulshan-e-Hadeed in Steel Town from where the police arrested one Iraqi and two Yemeni Arabs. All of them belonged to Al Qaeda and were working in a poultry farm owned by a man from Nazimabad. The three Arabs spoke fluent Urdu, Balochi and Pashto. From them the police recovered three satellite mobile phones, two laptop computers, four ordinary computers, four mobile phones, four sub-machine guns and six magazines. The police also searched Mujahid Colony Nazimabad and arrested Rafeequl Islam of Sipah Sahaba. It recovered cassettes showing Mullah Umar and Osama bin Laden and books on jihad from Nazimabad. Rafeequl Islam acted as a communications man for the jihadi network in Karachi. The same day the police discovered a large cache of arms and rocket launchers of Russian make from Kachra Mandi behind UBL Sports Complex.”
Obviously, it isn’t just the LJ that is connected with OBL and al-Qaeda. All three persons freed from Indian jails after the Kandahar hijacking of an Indian airliner two years ago went on to acquire their own militias, with Umar Saeed Sheikh leading the Jaish after its leader’s arrest. Two of them are now in Pakistani jails and the third one is getting interviews published in Pakistan from somewhere in Kashmir, but his militia, al-Umar, is emerging as OBL’s fourth proxy. After the Murree carnage, one leader of a banned militia was reportedly arrested because he was found traveling in the area at the time of the terrorist strike. Whoever got the report of his arrest printed in the press also volunteered the additional information that he was being kept under house arrest. The truth of the matter is that his “handlers” had let him live in opulence with the money he got from OBL (Osama’s gift to him of a dozen double-cabin pickup trucks was reported by the press). The Murree killings were so blatant that it was decided to make a show of arresting him. No one cared to look at the contradiction that if the man was under comfortable house arrest in Islamabad, how could he be found driving in the vicinity of Murree?
This subject is not closed. A British organisation says it has proof that over US $ 1 billion were sent annually from the United Kingdom to the organisations led by these gentlemen. Even if a fraction of this money was sent, we have a serious problem on our hands. With judges inclined to run away from cases involving these jihadis and the state continuing to adopt a hands-off policy for dubious reasons of “national security”, the problem of terrorism in Pakistan is far from being tackled in a meaningful way.
(Aug 23-29, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 26 – Editorial)
War and peace
Three good persons from India recently came to Pakistan to help launch Daily Times, a liberal English newspaper from Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi. Narasimhan Ram is the forthright editor of Frontline, a journal of integrity. Shekhar Gupta is the expansive editor-in-chief of The Indian Express that is published in eight editions. And Arundhati Roy is the little big woman whose mesmerising prose and breathtaking vision is a source of inspiration to so many around the world. That they came at a time of heightened Indo-Pak tensions was creditable. That they chose to talk of peace when the ruling Hindu-BJP in India is obsessed with talk of war was courageous. We salute them. We also salute the thousands of Pakistanis who thronged the seminars to welcome the visitors and applaud the demand for peace.
But Indo-Pak peace is as elusive as a chameleon. Whenever it seems within our grasp, it manages to transform itself into war. The fifty-five year post-independence history of both countries is littered with lost opportunities for peace followed by outbreaks of hostility. The record of recent times is especially depressing. In late1989, Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi almost clinched an accord on Siachin. But, faced with general elections, Mr Gandhi couldn’t make it stick in India. The next six years were full of acrimony. In 1997, Nawaz Sharif and I K Gujral reached an understanding on how to tackle the full range of issues bedeviling relations, including Kashmir but not limited to it. But Mr Gujral felt compelled to backtrack when confronted with the prospect of a resurgent BJP in the 1998 elections. Then came the nuclear blasts and the “desert shook” in India while the “whole mountain turned white” in Pakistan.
Fortunately, though, the war paint was peeled off by both sides when the Lahore Summit rolled round in 1999. Nawaz Sharif agreed not to be dogmatic about Kashmir and Atal Behari Vajpayee went to the Minar-i-Pakistan to assure Pakistanis that India had no malicious or evil designs on their country. But did we bury the hatchet for all times to come? No. Pakistan’s Kargil adventure scattered the prospects of peace so carefully nurtured at Lahore a few months earlier. Two bad years followed. Then came Agra in 2001. But once again peace proved abortive when General Musharraf’s personal success proved to be Pakistan’s collective loss. The flexibility over Kashmir offered by General Musharraf was spurned by Mr Vajpayee at the altar of “cross-border” infiltration.
Since then, Mr Vajpayee has become a bit of a warmonger while General Musharraf is sounding like a peacenik. India’s army has maintained a continual and unprecedented threat along the border and innocent villagers on both sides are falling in the artillery duels between the two sides. Fresh hope was injected into the equation recently when the US stepped into the fray and tried to pry the two sides apart. This was followed by General Musharraf’s unprecedented offer of unconditional talks with India, coupled with verifiable assurances that Pakistan would do its utmost to plug cross-border infiltration into Kashmir. What more could India want?
The BJP wants to hold elections in Kashmir in September-October of this year. It says these shall be free and fair. And it doesn’t want Pakistan to interfere in the process, let alone instigate the Kashmiris to boycott them. But it refuses to concede that Kashmir is a trilateral issue which will not be “solved” by keeping Pakistan out of the loop while putting most of its eggs in the basket of Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference rather than in the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. This suggests that the BJP is not sincerely interested in finding a solution to Kashmir, not even one within the ambit of India’s constitution, and is merely playing for time in order to relieve the international pressure on it.
Recent developments strengthen this perception. The Ram Jethmalani committee sponsored by New Delhi to talk the APHC into contesting the elections has recommended that the elections be postponed so that more time is available to iron out the differences and problems between the contending sides. But Mr LK Advani, India’s deputy prime minister, has not only rejected the proposal but also accused General Musharraf of pressurising the APHC to boycott the elections. So what else is new? Did he expect that General Musharraf and the APHC would roll over and play dead so that New Delhi can walk all over the Kashmiris as in the past?
Under the circumstances, we might conclude that the war in Kashmir could be part of the “solution” rather than part of the “problem” for the BJP. The more the Hindu right in India slips in popularity, the more it whips up war hysteria against Pakistan and the Muslims of India. And with elections in ten more Indian states forecast for next year, the BJP will not risk lowering the anti-Pakistan hype in the foreseeable future so that it can retain its Hindu vote-bank.
This doesn’t bode well for peace. Mr Richard Armitage, the US deputy secretary of state, is on his way to the region for the umpteenth time to try and knock sense into both countries. We wish him luck.
(Dec 13-19, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 42 – Editorial)
Brave new order
Our new prime minister, Mir Zafarullah Jamali, is an unpretentious man. He seems to have his feet planted firmly on the ground. Not for him the histrionics of a prime ministerial address to the nation on TV and radio upon assuming power and making wild promises to the masses. Indeed, when one evergreen media sycophant recently advised him to do exactly this, he humbly held out his hands and replied: “What’s the point of it? I have nothing to offer the people at the moment”.
Nor is Mr Jamali billing himself as the great white hope of true democracy, like some people we know. Asked whether the anti-floor-crossing law was good or bad, he said it was good, and then added sardonically: “Because it’s so flexible”. Of course, the law is not flexible. Far from it. But the government is “flexible” in its application of the law. The law is conveniently “suspended” in order to encourage all the necessary Forward Blocs to be consolidated before it is applied with full force to close the doors behind the fleeing deserters. In Mr Jamali’s political survival manual, such floor-crossing is a matter of “conscience” in the best traditions of governance. To clinch the issue, he likes to point out that if a British prime minister could rule for four years with a majority of one, why can’t he? Of course, he hastens to add with a straight face, he is hoping to enlarge his majority in due course.
Mr Jamali’s brutal realism, however, can be disquieting, depending on which side of the fence takes your fancy. When he set out to woo the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal in Peshawar two weeks ago, he assured the mullahs that he saw no great hurdles in reverting to Friday as the weekly holiday. They were delighted. We weren’t. However, now that he no longer needs them, he acknowledges the wisdom of sticking to Sunday. “I never said that I would make Friday the weekly holiday”, he claims, without blinking an eyelid. We’re pleased, of course, and the MMA is not. What will transpire in the course of his quest to enlarge his parliamentary majority is anybody’s guess. Mr Jamali’s largesse of Rs 10 million per MNA should certainly help, even if it turns General Naqvi’s much-touted local bodies system on its head.
The small matter of freeing supporters of the MMA from prisons in Balochistan and the NWFP doesn’t even provoke a raised eyebrow from our gentle prime minister. Indeed, when two former provincial ministers convicted by NAB were required to be freed from captivity in exchange for the MMA’s cooperation in helping form the Balochistan government, Mr Jamali shrugged off the concession as a necessary “discretionary parole”. Such kindly “discretion” is unfortunately not yet necessary for the likes of Asif Zardari et al. But if proof were ever needed of the immorality into which NAB has sunk, we need search no further.
It turns out that Ms Nelofar Bakhtiar, the newly appointed advisor to the prime minister for Women’s Development and Social Welfare with the status of a minister of state, was convicted to six months imprisonment for contempt of court in November 1995 by the Lahore High Court and her appeal is pending in the Supreme Court. Inexplicably, however, the Election Commission allowed her to contest the elections, while prohibiting a few other politicians, including the gallant Chaudhry Akhtar Rasul, who were convicted of the same offence from following suit. Worse, Ms Bakhtiar’s presidential appointment as an advisor to the federal government follows her defeat at the hands of Sheikh Rashid, our dashing information minister, and mocks the very spirit of the law that prohibits those who lost the general elections from contesting any public office. If many “losers” cannot contest elections, and if anyone “acting in any manner prejudicial to the integrity and independence of the judiciary, or who defames or brings into ridicule the judiciary …is not qualified to hold any public office”, how can this particular “loser” be appointed to such an august post? Surely, the lady’s relationship to the president’s right-hand man is not purely coincidental?
Mr Jamali has won his prime ministership with no small thanks to NAB. If Mr Aftab Sherpao was instrumental in cutting the PPP down to size in the NWFP, Mr Faisal Saleh Hayat played a critical role in pushing Mr Jamali past the finishing line. Both gentlemen were at one time hot favourites with NAB. Needless to say, NAB has never dared cast anything but a benevolent eye towards the Chaudhrys of Gujrat who are both Kings and Kingmakers in this brave new order.
Curiously, though, no one in the media is seriously outraged by this brazen display of public immorality. And why should they be? Morality went out of politics a long time ago. There was a brief flurry of hope when General Pervez Musharraf stormed onto the stage in 1999. But even he is not thumping his chest in self-righteousness any more.
Mr Jamali must be flushed with adrenalin. Good luck to him. Having chosen to share power with the MQM and MMA, he will not feel the need to look out for the real opposition to government and country. It will be sitting beside him with daggers drawn.
(Dec 19-25, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 43 – Editorial)
Era of mullah-coddling is over
General Pervez Musharraf is an extraordinarily lucky man. His narrow brush with death last Sunday cannot be shrugged away any longer like the earlier two premeditated attempts on his life. Thirty seconds apparently made all the difference. In the first attempt in 2000, a car packed with explosives along the route of his motorcade in Karachi failed to explode because the remote controlled triggering device malfunctioned at the last minute. In the second attempt also in Karachi in 2002, his security forces swooped down on two would-be assassins hours before they had planned to move a rocket launcher and mortar into position to attack his motorcade. This raises several important questions.
Is General Musharraf bent upon riding his lady luck until she runs out on him? Or is he going to do something about it so that he lives to tell the tale of reforming Pakistan? More specifically, does General Musharraf understand that the issue no longer concerns his own life or security measures designed to protect him personally from an assassin’s bullet or bomb but has now become a strategic policy matter of life or death for the new Pakistan that is struggling to be born? Let’s face the facts.
Since the late 1970s, the Pakistan army has maintained a mutually profitable relationship with Islamic elements in the country. The Islamicists have offered two critical inputs to the military: they have provided armed manpower for the military’s security agendas in the neighbourhood, as in Afghanistan since 1979 and in India since 1989. And they have been ever ready to join hands with the military to undermine popularly elected and mainstream civilian governments inimical to the military’s corporate view of Pakistan’s interests in one way or another. Examples of the latter assistance proliferate. In 1977, the Nizam i Mustafa movement that shook Z A Bhutto’s government and set the stage for the seizure of power by the military; in 1990 the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad came to the rescue of the military by thwarting Benazir Bhutto’s bid to return to power after she had been sacked by President Ishaq Khan at the behest of General Aslam Beg; in 1999 during Nawaz Sharif’s summit with Atal Behari Vajpayee in Lahore, the mullahs rampaged on the streets of Lahore after the military determined that Mr Vajpayee’s “peace offerings” were not in Pakistan’s interest. Kargil was the straw that broke the civilian government’s back. And so on.
In exchange, the military has afforded the Islamicists space in the organs of the state (like the army, intelligence agencies, bureaucracy and judiciary) as well as in the country’s educational and ideological institutions and structures. In the latest round, the mainstream parties were kept out of the political loop by enabling the Muttahida Majlis i Amal to bag 60 crucial seats in the federal parliament and form governments in two out of four provinces. All this while, the relationship between the mullahs and the military rested on one basic understanding that reflected the nature of state power: the military would call the shots in all critical matters and the mullahs would never challenge its national security worldview or compulsions.
But that relatively stable equation was seriously jolted by what happened on 9/11 and subsequent events in the region and beyond. Pakistan’s military establishment was compelled by the United States to abandon its Islamicist friends or allies in and out of government in Afghanistan. This led to much heartache and even resentment among Pakistan’s jihadi circles and their Al Qaeda friends who had taken refuge with them. The resentment was transformed into resistance when the military was compelled by the US to start targeting Al Qaeda elements and their supporters and sympathizers in Pakistan. The resistance then came to be focused on the person of General Musharraf who seemed to symbolise the gradual pro-West about-turn that Pakistan was taking under his leadership. Eventually a consensus solidified among all armed and unarmed Islamicists in Pakistan that General Musharraf was trying to make a permanent strategic virtue out of what had originally seemed to be temporary tactical vice. Certainly, by stressing the need for a moderate and enlightened Islam at peace with itself and with the rest of the world, including live and let policies with India, and insisting that the threat to Pakistan was internal rather than external, economic rather than political, General Musharraf seemed to be getting ready to cross the Rubicon. This “Islamicist” consensus in the country was henceforth articulated at two levels: the insistence by the MMA that General Musharraf should be stripped off his army uniform forthwith; and renewed attempts by armed “Islamic” terrorists to assassinate him. How should General Musharraf respond to this threat?
One way of addressing this question is to ask what might happen to Pakistan in the event that General Musharraf is eliminated from the scene violently and unexpectedly. Clearly, the army could either reclaim all power under a new chief unilaterally “elected” by itself and go on to suspend or abrogate the constitution, prime minister and parliament. In the event, it could press ahead with General Musharraf’s reformist agenda by cutting the “Islamicists” down for good in and out of state and government, thereby ensuring international support for the economy and keeping the country afloat; or the army could go the other way, strengthen its “Islamicist” credentials by allying with the mullahs and jihadis, restore a state of hostility in the region and incur the wrath of the international community as a dangerous foe rather than uncertain friend. The latter option would obviously be disastrous from Pakistan’s point of view. In the other post-Musharraf option, the army could retreat to the barracks and decide to exert covert power (as it decided to do in 1988 after General Zia’s sudden exit) while enabling the MMA and PMLQ to join hands, thereby further enlarging the ideological and religious space available to the most reactionary elements in the country. This would be a most unstable arrangement and one that would eventually accentuate Pakistan’s problems at home and abroad, a sort of slow rather than sudden death.
This analysis suggests that far from compromising with extremist Islamicists at this critical juncture either by enabling them to become partners in government and thereby thwarting the democratic impulse or by handling them with kid gloves when they seek or threaten to shred him, General Musharraf should start planning on doing the exact opposite. He must compromise with the mainstream parties to turn the tide of extremist political Islam irrevocably back. The era of mullah-coddling is over. Pakistan’s national security strategy should not require their domestic and regional “services’ any longer to extend its outreach or protect itself from anyone else’s hegemony. Robust political democracy and rapid economic growth are the two pillars on which Pakistan’s national security will ultimately come to rest. The Pakistan army should recognise the imperatives of the new post-cold war, post-9/11 age, and step smartly into line. This is the only way it can help create and defend the economic budgets it requires for its own sustenance as well as those for the welfare of the nation. That is why General Pervez Musharraf cannot be true to himself any longer without also being true to Pakistan. That is why he cannot think of subjectively defending himself without also objectively defending Pakistan. That is why his personal security cannot be strengthened merely by cracking down on avowedly explicit foreign Al Qaeda elements inside Pakistan without at the same time uprooting all domestic manifestations and outcrops of extremist religious thinking and acting in the country.
(Feb 01-07, 2002, Vol – XIII, No. 49 – Editorial)
Destiny and fate
General Pervez Musharraf is increasingly looking more like a brave helmsman than a great soldier. The ghost of September 11 – anti-American terrorism at home and in neighbouring Afghanistan – has been laid to rest. The Indian threat of war has been blunted for the time being by muzzling the local jehadis. The downslide in the economy has been halted by the successful solicitation of foreign aid, debt re-scheduling and debt re-profiling. Having thus made the transition from a pariah state usurper to an international partner and regional statesman, he is now ready to lap up the icing on the cake – a state visit to Washington as a guest of President George W Bush.
This is an extraordinary turnaround. It is remarkable because of the swift manner in which a lack of strategic vision has been compensated for by a decisive dose of political realism. Rarely in the annals of Pakistani history has dire necessity been so swiftly accommodated as common virtue. But hark. Therein could lie the seeds of despair if a measure of history is not taken.
General Musharraf has publicly said that he means to rule for another five years at least as president and army chief rolled into one. Indeed, the good general sincerely believes and says that “the country needs” him above anything and anyone else. This is a man who is already thinking of himself in terms of destiny and not fate. So be it. If he is wise and generous and brings peace and prosperity to this land, his hopes may bring welcome relief for the populace as well.
But it would be a mistake to see the beginning of the story as its end. Seen in the light of historical irony, some of these statements sound more worrying than assuring. Recall. Shortly before the polls for 1977, a supremely confident Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told friends that he expected to rule for twenty-five years. In the event, twenty five years were eclipsed into five months when he fell from power and twenty five months before he faced the gallows. Recall, too, the audacious manner in which General Zia ul Haq booted out a prime minister and parliament in early 1999 and didn’t live to regret his arrogant decision five months later. And let us not forget that Nawaz Sharif was talking in much the same sort of language in 1999 (Amir ul Momineen) before fate intervened and put him in his rightful place.
That is to say, if General Musharraf’s reign is marked by an arrogance of power and opportunist bent of mind rather than a disposition in favour of democratic power-sharing and farsightedness, it is bound to flounder. The three gentlemen referred to above had deluded themselves into believing they were justified in decreeing sweeping changes in the body-politic of the state and civil society because they were the long-awaited saviors of the nation. But if they had set more modest goals for themselves, including an honourable and democratic exit strategy, they might have fared better both in personal and institutional terms.
Seen in this light, the electoral amendments that are flying thick and fast and the sweeping constitutional changes on the anvil raise a host of apprehensions. There has been no significant independent discussion with the representatives, actual and potential, of civil society and the people of Pakistan about what is needed and what is workable. There is no credible attempt to make a level playing field for all politicians and parties, irrespective of caste, colour or creed. Indeed, if anything, the opposite is truer, that a stage is being set for fully-managed and pliable parliaments in Islamabad and in the provincials capitals of the federation. Equally, if a King’s party has not been officially announced, it has not been officially denounced as well – the efforts to cobble a grand Muslim League of Yes-Men without the nettlesome Nawazites are all too familiar. Finally, the attempt to whittle down the PPP is becoming obvious, the leading player nominated in this political treachery being none other than Aftab Sherpao. But even Mr Sherpao cannot be trusted to do the needful without ensuring a degree of compliance, courtesy NAB (a 1996 case has been dug up against him). What manner of “deals” have been suggested and cemented with the Wali Khans and Saifullahs of the NWFP, whose scions have tasted the bitter fruit of NAB and then been let off rather suddenly, also doesn’t require a leap of the imagination. The appointment of the former chief justice of the supreme court who helped legitimize the military government as the new chief election commissioner is equally evidential.
If General Musharraf’s windfall political profit is owed to pressing and rather pointed American requirements as much as it is owed to his own dexterity, he should start thinking of a time in the not too distant future when the hand of the great benefactor will not be there to bless him as advisedly. State interests change with changed circumstances, and circumstances may change without notice, as we all know only too well. That is when the brave helmsman will need more than just a clutch of soft hands on deck to traverse the ocean between fate and destiny.
(Feb 08-14, 2002, Vol – XIII, No. 50 – Editorial)
Cleanse thyself
The case of the missing American journalist Danny Pearl is intriguing. He is the Bombay bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. Mr Pearl disappeared from Karachi on January 23. At first it was rumoured that he was trying to locate Dawood Ibrahim, the former Bombay underworld Mafioso who is on the run from Indian authorities and is reportedly in Karachi. It was feared that Mr Pearl might have been “wasted” for trying to step in where even fools would fear to tread. This view gained currency when another journalist, Ghulam Hasnain, who works for a foreign magazine, also went missing for two days around the same time in Karachi. Mr Hasnain had written an article for a local magazine some time earlier exposing Mr Ibrahim’s underworld nexus in the city. It was feared that he might have incurred the wrath of the powers-that-be who wanted to stitch up his mouth because the Indians were clamouring for Mr Dawood’s return. So when Mr Hasnain reappeared two days later, his stony silence confirmed this line of thinking.
But when Mr Pearl remained missing, the supposed link with Mr Ibrahim snapped. Instead, it was now revealed that he had been on the trial of the American shoe-bomber Richard Reid which had led him in the direction of a certain Mr Mobarak Ali Shah Gillani whose terrorist Tanzeem al-Fuqra organization based in Pakistan had been outlawed by the US some time ago. The subsequent arrest of Mr Gillani by the Pakistan authorities seemed to clinch the argument.
However, a new angle now crept in. Mr Mobarak was said to have made some calls to important people in India. The “Indian hand” seemed to lurk behind another fact: Mr and Mrs Pearl’s Karachi host turned out to be an “Indian” lady who had allegedly overstayed her visit to Pakistan without getting a visa extension from the ministry of interior. This prompted General Rashid Qureshi, the top government spokesman, to hint darkly at an Indian conspiracy behind Mr Pearl’s kidnapping. The same fears were alleged by Pakistan’s foreign minister Abdul Sattar who suspected that India’s RAW had planned the whole thing in order to defame Pakistan.
While all this was going on, the Wall Street Journal received an e-mail ultimatum demanding the return of the Pakistani terrorists detained in Cuba and the delivery of F-16 aircraft to Pakistan in exchange for Mr Pearl’s release. The name of the group making the demand (National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty) was most curious since it was unlike that of any Jehadi or non-state actor. Also, by digging up the issue of the aircraft, the group seemed to go out of its way to suggest a link of sorts with Pakistani officialdom. A second e-mail extended the ultimatum and changed the conditions: the group now wanted the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mulla Zaeef, released by the Americans in exchange for Mr Pearl. But when Mr Zaeef’s family disavowed any relationship with the group or its latest demands, the matter was brushed aside. The story then hovered on the brink of a tragedy when someone called up the police and said that Mr Pearl had been killed and his body dumped in some Karachi graveyard. An unidentified body of a “white man” was soon discovered, prompting the world media to announce the death of Mr Pearl.
Fortunately, that was not true. In fact, Mr Moinuddin Haider, the interior minister, has now raised hopes by claiming that Mr Pearl is alive and should shortly be a free man. No one can make such a claim unless he is already negotiating with the kidnappers. This means that the government and FBI teams tracking this case know more than they have revealed. The recent arrest of Sheikh Umar Saeed in Karachi could be a pointer in the right direction. Mr Saeed is the former London School of Economics graduate who became a Kashmiri mujahid, tried to kidnap foreign journalists in India some years ago, was caught and imprisoned and then freed from an Indian jail via the 1999 hijacking of an Indian plane, after which he conveniently “disappeared”. He is also wanted for his links with Mohammad Atta who masterminded the suicide attack on the World Trade Centre. Is it possible that Mr Pearl’s ordeal has to do with his discovery that certain terrorist groups banned or wanted by the government are still alive and kicking, thanks to the protection of rogue elements in the intelligence organs of the state? That would also explain why the government has been able to track down the culprits and is hoping to conclude it on a favourable note before General Pervez Musharraf embarks on his state visit to Washington.
We hope and pray that Daniel Pearl is alive and will be a free man shortly. But there are no guarantees. This episode is a timely reminder that the terrorists and religious extremists spawned by the state over a thirty year period will not be crushed by thundering speeches and well-meaning arrests alone. The state will have to cleanse itself before it can clean up anybody else.
(Feb 15-21, 2002, Vol – XIII, No. 51 – Editorial)
Strengths and weaknesses
General Pervez Musharraf has made a number of candid statements recently that provide a valuable insight into his mind. Since he is expected to be in charge of Pakistan for an untold period ahead, they may be worth dissecting for more than their intrinsic value.
He recently told an American journalist that “the three most difficult decisions in his life” were the about-turn on Afghan policy shortly after September 11, the crackdown on religious extremists that followed, and the handshake with the Indian prime minister at the SAARC summit in Nepal last month as a gesture of friendship. We empathize with him entirely.
No Pakistani politician, let alone an army chief, has ever had the guts to call a spade a spade on each of these issues. Indeed, most have blithely supported the opposite initiatives in order to further short-term personal ends or long-term state goals, which is why these “problems” acquired such significant proportions in the first place.
But in General Musharraf’s case, too, it may be noted that when he took power he was gung-ho about a hands-on Afghan policy, a hands-off fundo policy and a no-holds barred India policy. And why not? The three postures are interlinked. If you want to bleed India, you need the jehadis. If you need the jehadis, you have to condone their religious intolerance and sectarianism in Pakistan. You also have to train them in Afghanistan. And if you need Afghanistan, you have to condone the Taliban and turn a blind eye to their friends in Al-Qaeda. Everything, clearly, hinged on our India policy.
But in a curious way, it wasn’t India that triggered the need for these difficult decisions in the opposite direction. It was, in fact, America who demanded that Pakistan help catch the Al-Qaeda tail that was wagging the Afghan dog. But helping America go after Al-Qaeda meant going after the Taliban who were protecting them. Going after the Taliban meant going after the religious extremists and jehadis who supported them in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And going after these elements meant antagonizing or alienating important elements of the anti-India strategy network, including sidelining its most ardent traffickers in the army and intelligence agencies. Therefore it is difficult to escape the suspicion that the “hand of friendship” to India was a direct and necessary diplomatic consequence of this dialectic, which included a military threat from India, rather than the effect of any change of heart in General Musharraf’s institutional view of India-Pakistan relations.
This impression would unfortunately seem to be reinforced by General Musharraf’s speech in Muzaffarabad on 5 February (Kashmir Day) in which he reiterated Pakistan’s long-standing official position that the fighting in Indian-held Kashmir was the result of an indigenous insurrection that deserved Pakistan’s support. As a worried editorial in the Washington Post on the day of General Musharraf’s meeting with President George W Bush pointed out, “the problem is that Pakistani governments for years have used this formulation as a cover to foment and supply the Kashmir insurrection”. The WP also feared that the crackdown on religious extremists and jehadis was not uncompromising as officially billed since “many of the militants have been allowed to remain free in exchange for lying low”. Such fears were heightened when General Musharraf blamed India for conniving the kidnapping of the American journalist Danny Pearl – “an irresponsible and implausible suggestion that is not backed by evidence” according to the WP. In the event, feared the WP, “where the extremists’ cause intersects with that of Kashmir, Musharraf may feel tempted to pull his punches”.
We hope not. The decisions General Musharraf has taken may have been difficult, given his institutional training and motivation, but they were the correct decisions to take in the long-term interests of the country. Therefore, as a logical follow through, the Pakistan army must decisively break with theories of strategic outreach, stop molly-coddling the jehadis and make durable peace with Pakistan’s neighbours. But much more than that could be at stake. An alliance between the jehadis and the intelligence agencies in the past was used to undermine democracy and politicians and stake out a permanent political role for the armed forces in the body politic of the nation. This must stop. Civil society and the military should join hands to break from the past rather than woo the fundamentalists and extremists to undermine each other as in the past.
General Pervez Musharraf has also claimed that God has ordained him to be President. Of course, as Believers, we know that not a leaf stirs without divine intervention. But much more than that is implied by the president’s statement. It suggests a delusion of power that is totally unacceptable in a society struggling to find rational, democratic moorings. It reminds us of the Amir ul Momineen status sought by Zia ul Haq and then Nawaz Sharif in their quest for absolutism before they fell from grace. It is not a thought that we would wish to associate with General Musharraf. His strength lies in his vulnerability to civilian notions of freedom and moderation and not in his rigidity as a military dictator.
(Feb 06-12, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 50 – Editorial)
What is the “national interest”?
Among President General Pervez Musharraf’s many winning ways is his ability to talk straight and stay cool. This is a welcome relief from the hypocritical doublespeak of politicians. We can therefore hope that he won’t get too hot under the collar by some candid comments from us.
A pardon for Dr A Q Khan was apparently unavoidable. We are told that Pakistanis perceive him as a national hero, never mind that this perception was assiduously manufactured, never mind that this was at the expense of several brilliant but unsung Pakistani scientists and organizations, never mind that lesser mortals acting on Dr Khan’s instructions have been given no such grand reprieve, and never mind that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who envisioned the nuclear programme in the first place and can lay claim to be Pakistan’s most popular prime minister ever, was sent to the gallows by General Musharraf’s military predecessor General Zia ul Haq on the dubious evidence of a cowardly approver. General Musharraf has also reportedly decided not to deprive Dr Khan of his billions in ill-gotten wealth, never mind that two twice elected prime ministers have been exiled and disqualified from political office for stealing much less, never mind that NAB has hunted down scores of businessmen and civil servants for lesser crimes, and never, never mind that the official hunt is still on to compel foreign banks to cough up the relatively piddling sums gulped by all these undesirable elements. General Musharraf’s response is that, all things considered, a swift pardon was in the “national interest”.
That may or may not be the case. Certainly, the controversy over who and how many people and institutions were culpable, who was made the fall guy, and why, will inevitably spill over into the history books. Meanwhile, it is time to dissect one fundamental question: What is the “national interest”?
Apparently, every military coup d’etat was in the national interest, never mind what happened to democracy. The Islamic jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan was in the national interest, never mind its crippling legacy of sectarian warfare, drugs and Kalashnikov culture. The support for the Taliban regime was in the national interest for six years, never mind that it plunged Pakistan into the eye of the storm only days after 9/11. The jihad in Kashmir was in the national interest for over a decade, never mind that the deaths of tens of thousands of Kashmiri and Pakistani jihadis have been in vain because it is no longer in the national interest. The Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report was buried in the national interest, the Ojri camp was covered-up in the national interest, the testing of the nuclear bomb was in the national interest, the subsequent freeze on forex accounts was in the national interest, the Kargil adventure was in the national interest, and Nawaz Sharif’s exile was in the national interest.
Who determines the national interest? The rulers determine it, of course. War mongering is therefore in the national interest and the peace dividend is not. Accountability of politicians and civil servants and businessmen is in the national interest, but accountability of generals and judges and nuclear scientists is not. So it goes on, ad nauseam. And now General Musharraf is thundering against the Pakistani media for “damaging the national interest” by publishing “foreign-inspired” stories about the proliferation affair.
General Musharraf is a hard man to please. He likes to boast of the free press in Pakistan as one of his great achievements. Then he rails against it for not behaving like the gagged press in Iran and Libya and North Korea. Does he think that the American press which is lampooning the American government for screwing up in Iraq and getting its soldiers killed there is unpatriotic and acting against the American national interest? Does he think the BBC was acting against the British national interest when it alleged that Tony Blair had “sexed” up the inspector’s report on Iraq? The problem with most dictators, benevolent or otherwise, and most democrats, autocrats or not, is that they think they are infallible, that they know best, that what suits them personally suits the national interest.
But the business of a free press is to hold rulers accountable, to challenge their self-righteous notions of right and wrong. One way of doing this is to present the people with as many facets of any situation as possible and let them determine where the truth lies. Another way is to make assessments of the national interest that are independent of particular individual or institutional or class or ethnic or regional or sectarian vested interests and concerns. This is a complex process in which debate and discussion are of the essence. Attempts to muzzle any divergence of opinion tend to defeat the very purpose of locating the real and enduring “national” interest in any situation.
We do not doubt General Pervez Musharraf’s integrity or patriotism. But he shouldn’t doubt ours either. The army and its generals cannot be allowed to have a monopoly over determining the national interest. In fact, history suggests that they have been wrong more often than right in defining and defending it.
(Feb 13-19, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 51 – Editorial)
The four problems we face
In his usually precise and lucid way, General Pervez Musharraf has outlined four main international perceptions that are damaging Pakistan’s image and credibility abroad. While he has refrained from explicitly admitting that the image may simply reflect unsound ground realities and bankrupt domestic policies, he has left no doubt in anyone’s mind that Pakistan needs to address these problems sufficiently in order to repair this negative image. Failure to address and resolve these issues could seriously impair Pakistan’s economic and political prospects in the first decade of the 21st century.
The first issue, of course, is nuclear proliferation. Pakistan is guilty as charged of proliferation. In the current international environment of fear and insecurity provoked by Al-Qaeda, Musharraf is also right in telling us that taking refuge behind emotional outbursts of nationalism, imagined notions of Islamic ummah and outdated concepts of state sovereignty will only make matters worse. Indeed, realpolitik demands that we don’t harp too much on the niceties of international law. Might is also right. We simply can’t afford to lecture the international community on morality or double standards. Therefore we must repair and limit the damage before the problem spins out of control. In other words, we must first come clean, then establish failsafe mechanisms to ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. Therefore to accuse General Musharraf of being an American “puppet or stooge” who is bent upon rolling back Pakistan’s nuclear programme just because he is telling us the harsh truth and acting to avert a brutal beating is stupidity or motivated dishonesty. Barring his stubborn refusal to hold army officers accountable, and some domestic media mishandling, he has securely drawn the international line in the sand between cowardly capitulation and foolhardy provocation.
The second issue is Islamic militancy and terror. Notwithstanding the injustice inflicted on some Muslim peoples, if anyone is fueling the theory of “clash of civilizations” it is Islamic extremists. Pakistan and its Islamists in particular seem to be host to the worst manifestations of ignorance, immoderation and terror. Therefore General Musharraf is right when he exhorts us to be moderate and enlightened, emphasizing peaceful coexistence rather than violent separateness. But he is wrong to ask our underdeveloped civil society to undertake ijtihad and debate in order to turn back the tide of radical political Islam. The fact is that the exhortation to ijma and ijtihad and reconstruction of the teachings of Islam began to fall on deaf Muslim ears many centuries ago. Certainly, there is no such tradition in sub-continental Islam which one can clutch in the face of this extremist onslaught. Radical political Islam in Pakistan is a direct outcome of the Pakistani military’s misplaced strategic priorities over at least three decades. It was thrust upon us by General Zia ul Haq and subsequent army chiefs have either sought to exploit it or conveniently looked the other way. Therefore General Musharraf will simply have to turn the tide back by the same sort of decree and brute force methods by which it was manufactured and nurtured by his predecessors in the first place.
The third issue is war or peace with India. Two new factors have changed the historical equation. First, the arrival of nuclear weapons in our hands has made the region less rather than more secure. It has encouraged us to undertake Kargil-like adventures and sponsor low-intensity conflict. But this strategy has not yielded Kashmir to us despite exacting a huge cost in men and materials and national security. Two, the deadly mix of radical Islam, international terrorists, military dictatorship and nuclear proliferators in Pakistan has put us on the spot and deprived us of any international sympathy in our raging conflict with democratic India. So we must embrace the doctrine of peace and compromise instead of war and inflexibility. General Musharraf is right to move in this direction and needs our full support. Allegations of any “sell-out” on his part are preposterous.
The last issue pertains to our perceived support for Taliban remnants which are said to be hiding in Pakistan’s borderlands and destabilizing the American sponsored Karzai regime in Kabul. Pakistan’s interest lies in securing a stable pro-Pakistan, Pashtun dominated government in Kabul. But until now, this requirement seemed lost on the Northern Alliance dominated Kabul government and its American supporters. However, political and ethnic equations are changing in Afghanistan and the more they change in the right direction the less Islamabad will be wont to support the remnants of the Taliban who have taken refuge in Pakistani territory. So General Musharraf is right in stressing that a stable and strong Karzai regime is in the long term interests of Pakistan. The sooner the perception is overturned that the military or ISI is protecting and nurturing the Taliban, the better. And this won’t happen by putting journalists in jail for trying to uncover the truth. It will happen only when the evidence is loud and clear that Pakistan is acting forcefully against the Taliban.
One of General Musharraf’s great qualities is his remarkable ability to blast his way out of trouble whenever it comes his way. If he could combine that with a bit of vision to change policy before trouble arrives in full force, we would all be better off.
(Feb 14-20, 2003, XIV, No 51 – Editorial)
Musharraf’s dilemma
General pervez musharraf’s recent trip to Russia has been billed as “historic” by the usual Foreign Office suspects. But, for once, they are right.
He is the first Pakistani leader ever to have been invited for a friendly state visit to Moscow. That is why, even though the trip was more symbolic than substantive, it is historic enough.
With hindsight, however, we can also say that the visit was fifty years overdue. If, after independence, we had been more “neutral” like India, we might have escaped the crippling dependence on the United States that has shaped, some might say “warped”, our history as a neo-colonial “front line state”. Indeed, “neutrality” might have prohibited the rise of the military as the sole custodian and determinant of our “national security”, strengthened democracy, and made peace, rather than war, the natural state of being with our neighbour to the east.
The remarkable thing is that even after the value of our other “friendships”, like that with anti-America, communist China, was amply demonstrated, our leaders failed to apply the lesson and carve an opening to Moscow until now. Worse, prodded by the us, our military leaders sanctioned a proxy war with Moscow in the 1980s whose crippling legacy of Islamic fundamentalism, radical sectarianism, drugs and Kalashnikovs has come to haunt our new generations.
An opportune moment to redress the imbalance arose in 1987 when Moscow went to Geneva to negotiate an accord for an orderly retreat from Kabul. Alas. The civilian prime minister, Mohammad Khan Junejo, who lent a shoulder to the Geneva Accords over the head of the military dictator General Zia ul Haq, and who might conceivably have opened up Moscow to Pakistan just as za Bhutto had opened up China before him, was pre-emptively sacked for displaying such foresight.
By 1989, discerning political analysts could conclude that the old ussr was coming apart and the Cold War was sputtering out. Having quit Afghanistan in 1987, the us was already packing its bags in Pakistan. That was a good time to start the “patching-up” process not just with the new Moscow but also with the old New Delhi.
But a band of military adventurers had other ideas. They wanted to conquer Afghanistan, dominate Central Asia and carve a green crescent from Turkey to Chechnya. Accordingly, a doctrine of “strategic depth” in the west and low-intensity warfare in the east was fashioned with the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul and the jihadi lashkars in Kashmir.
However, on two occasions at least, civilian prime ministers woke up to the exorbitant costs of this doctrine and tried to change course. But they were painted as “national security risks” and swiftly despatched.
In 1989, Benazir Bhutto sought to rein in the erstwhile conqueror of Jalalabad, General Hameed Gul, and tie the peace knot with India’s Rajiv Gandhi. But she was tarred by the brush of un-patriotism and sacked for her concerns.
Then Nawaz Sharif tried it in 1997 with ik Gujral but he was pushed into tit-for-tat nuclear tests by the military. When he persisted, he was prodded into Kargil in 1999 and destabilised. “Our boys” thought the Lahore Summit was a total “sell-out”.
In the next two years, the Pakistani nexus with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the freedom fighting jihadis in Kashmir increased manifold, even as the blowback of sectarian warfare and the rise of the religious right began to endanger the country.
Then came 9/11.
Confronted by Washington, General Musharraf wisely about-turned on our Afghan policy. And since the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Afghan Mujahideen and Kashmiri jihadis were all cut from the same anti-Western cloth, it was time to start thinking of how to wrap up our pro-active Kashmir policy before it ended undermining dividends reaped from abandoning the Afghan policy. But unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.
It takes two hands to clap. Devising new foreign policies requires enabling environments both at home and abroad. Thus a suitable new Afghan policy still awaits appropriate ethnic input by the us in Kabul. Equally, unless India is amenable to a fruitful dialogue, the diplomatic “flexibility” shown by General Musharraf since January 2002 will remain in vain.
This is where Moscow assumes relevance. Pakistan seems to be encircled by many Russian “friends”: a hostile Northern Alliance government in Afghanistan, suspicious Central Asian states in the north, an uncooperative Iran in the west and a deadly India on the east. But if Moscow were a little less tilted against Pakistan, Islamabad could make necessary adjustments to its foreign policy in the region without too much upheaval.
Here is the dilemma. If India is agreeable to a realistic dialogue, perhaps peace can be negotiated without redrawing boundaries. Similarly, if Kabul is able to co-opt representative Pakhtun elements, al-Qaeda can be swiftly mopped up. But in the absence of progress on either front, the proposed Pakistani agenda can be derailed by rogue elements inside the state and non-state actors outside it.
The emergence of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan and the fiery insistence of the Kashmir jihadis that they are readying to carry the war from Srinagar to New Delhi are manifestations of General Musharraf’s nagging problem.
(Jan 25-31, 2002, Vol – XIII, No. 48 – Editorial)
No politics without politicians
The military is unveiling its proposed constitutional and electoral changes in the run-up to the general elections later in the year. But apart from the PML Yes-Men, the popular political reaction has not been enthusiastic, even though there are obvious merits in specific provisions. The abolition of the separate electorate system is an unequivocally good step. It will bring the minority non-Muslims back into the political mainstream, which is what was desperately needed. Similarly, by increasing the number of parliamentary scats for women, the government has moved to try and redress an historical injustice. This is also to be welcomed as an attempt to remove apartheid in one particular form. Also, no serious objection may be raised to the addition of certain privileges for “technocrats” who are unable to participate in the political life of communities because the electoral route is closed to them for a host of reasons. But what on earth does the government mean to achieve by insisting that only graduates may contest elections?
If by “graduation” we mean education and education is supposed to lead to a lack of corruption and better morals. then we are barking up the wrong tree. The most successful crooks are invariably quite educated, which is what white-collar crime is all about. So clearly that is not the intention. Indeed, since nearby 80% of the population of this country is illiterate, this scheme will disenfranchise all except the graduated few (under 10%) from holding senior positions of public office. Surely, that cannot be the objective of a regime which professes “true democracy”. So what is the game alb about?
We cannot escape the conclusion that a general link may have been found between “education” (university graduation) and political moderation. between religious bigots and extremists (especially those begotten by madrassas) on the one hand and progressive Muslims with a degree of education on the other. That is to say that in one swoop the military may be seeking to clip the wings of the extremist religious orthodoxy in the most uneducated and peripheral areas of the country and among the most militant sections of the population (excluding the Jama’at-e-Islami, which ranks among the mainstream parties), paving the way for a brand of politics that is both modern and moderate. Of course, this move will also disqualify about half of the last assembly of parliamentarians and, with the rest already in the grip of NAB, pave the way for a fresh. more youthful and enlightened start. A most original idea, and one whose repercussions could have significant implications for the political development of the country.
This would suggest that the main issue is the unwillingness of the military to take the mainstream opposition politicians and political parties into confidence about how and to what extent it intends to share power with the moderate civilian leaders of tomorrow.
It is true, of course, that many politicians are thoroughly corrupt and discredited. But that is no reason to say that politics without politicians is more desirable than politics with politicians. In the final reckoning, it is the politicians who have the vote of the people, and they are the ones who will have to make the system work and deliver. By the same token, the military’s record in government has been disastrous. True, such periods have been marked by relatively insignificant doses of overt corruption. But the mindless political and military adventures of various juntas have irreparably damaged this country. Indeed, the military’s creeping political ascendancy has been singularly responsible for the failure of the state to manufacture a credible nationhood. Certainly. no military leader has ever won the trust and confidence of the people of Pakistan. Nor is one about to in the short term, irrespective of his sincerity and righteousness. Why then should the military exclusively make and unmake laws and constitutions? If war is too serious a business to be left solely to generals, there is even less reason to entrust the art of politics to them exclusively.
A good example of how military self-righteousness and personal sincerity can mar the political and economic landscape is available in the shape of the confusing local self-government forms unfurled by the military in the last two years. It also needs to be recognized that if certain people and their policies are now acquiring heroic proportions, this is ironically due more to their sense of survival rather than to any innate sense of vision.
The greater misfortune may be that having made virtue out of necessity, there is no visible attempt to recognize necessity for what it is – the opposite of freedom. Hence the peoples’ representatives are not to be given the freedom to choose a political system that suits them. Instead, the representatives are to be veiled according to predetermined criteria and an appropriate system is to be thrust upon them. Haven’t we been down this failed route before?
The government has some good ideas up its sleeve. It should discuss them with the mainstream politicians and win their approval. That is the only way to stake sure that the system now being devised is not aborted by its forced practitioners after the manufacturers have long gone, as inevitably they must.
(Jan 02-08, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 45 – Editorial)
Success and failure of General Musharraf
After one fitful year of stop-go threats and negotiations, General Pervez Musharraf has finally obtained the consent of most members of Parliament to be president of Pakistan. In exchange, the MMA has got his agreement to give up the post of army chief within the year. He has compelled the MMA to agree that the LFO was a part of the constitution. But the MMA has forced him to dilute his discretionary powers as president. He has secured a formal degree of longevity for his cherished local bodies system. In the bargain, the MMA has ensured that the judges of the superior courts (those who supported General Musharraf) will not serve a day longer than their original tenure. And so on. The net result is that the yearlong LFO-deadlock in parliament is over.
According to General Musharraf, these developments should (a) strengthen democracy and (b) set the stage for desperately needed political stability needed to steer the country out of rough waters. But we have serious reservations on both counts.
Of course, the current dispensation appears more “democratic” than the one it has supplanted, if only because the numbers and agencies’ game has rendered parliament less dysfunctional. But this is a warped “democracy” in which the elections were so pre-rigged as to exclude the two most popular leaders of the country and their parties from the reckoning. Surely, by strengthening such an unnatural “democracy” General Musharraf is further distorting the political system rather than straightening out its internal tensions and contradictions. Indeed, in critical ways, the Musharrafian system today corresponds closely with the Ziaist system in 1988, the only difference being that whereas General Zia’s political and constitutional distortions were related to keeping one popular leader out of the loop, General Musharraf’s distortions have confined two popular leaders to the wilderness.
This leads directly to the conclusion that the Musharrafian system is dangerously unstable. Its longevity and stability depend on two critical factors: (1) that General Musharraf should not meet the same fate as General Zia (2) that his carefully constructed parliament should not meet the same fate as befell General Zia’s carefully nurtured Majlis-e-Shoora in 1988. But if the first is a sincere prayer, the second could be a forlorn hope. Consider.
Unlike Zia’s Majlis-e-Shoora which backed him to the hilt on all critical issues, the current parliament is likely to demonstrate bitter divisions over all major domestic and foreign policy initiatives taken by General Musharraf so far. Indeed, the MMA and the ARD are likely to use the platform of parliament to try to derail or stonewall many significant and necessary policy shifts by General Musharraf. They will criticise ongoing IMF programmes that impose a degree of hardship on the people; they will pick holes in major privatisations, thereby muddying the field for future projects; they will shriek against any vigorous crackdown on the jihadis; they will oppose Pakistan’s cooperation with the US in the war against terror; they will equate Musharraf’s “flexibility” on Kashmir with “treason”; they will resist attempts to moderate political Islam by any means; they will accuse Musharraf’s of “betrayal” when he tries to clean up and rationalise the control and command structure of Pakistan’s nuclear programme; they will undermine efforts to empower women; and so on. The MMA’s hostility will be partly out of ideological conviction and partly in order to draw mileage from the anti-American, religious-nationalist sentiment awash in the country. Meanwhile, the PPP and PMLN will join hands with the MMA partly out of political opportunism and partly out of bloody-mindedness against General Musharraf for having excluded them from the mainstream.
The role of the PMLQ will be dubious too. Many PMLQ stalwarts sport beards in their stomachs if not on their faces, so they will probably be more inclined to compromise with the MMA rather than defend many of General Musharraf’s policies with any great gusto. Similarly, while they may tread cautiously until General Musharraf is still in uniform, they are likely to be egged on by their own ambitions and by the opposition to try and break free from the presidential straitjacket in 2005. That is a surefire recipe for the sort of political trouble and instability that marred the decline of democracy in the 1990s with the sackings of prime ministers and parliaments, ousters of presidents, unpredictable and controversial judgments by the supreme court and pressure on army chiefs to resign or take over.
Therefore we should seriously worry about what 2004 has in store for us. If, God forbid, something were to happen to General Pervez Musharraf, his system would collapse like a house of cards. There is no knowing whether a restive army would take over, or which way it would bend; or whether a simmering parliament would reassert supremacy and what it might do. Nor is it clear whether General Musharraf will be temperamentally able to live with an increasingly frustrating and aggressive parliament. Certainly, if he is compelled to pack up his own system before he is compelled to take off his uniform next year, we would be back to the beginning without having learnt one important lesson: if nature abhors a vacuum, political systems abhor unnatural dispensations with greater spirit and vigour.
(Jan 09-15, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 46 – Editorial)
Self-redeemed moderates
President Pervez Musharraf should be pleased as punch. In one month, he has had two brushes with death and lived to tell the tale. He has resolved the year long Legal Framework Order deadlock in the National Assembly by means of a consummate deal with the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal. He has become a constitutional president of Pakistan by a novel but legitimate device. And, despite the expected hiccups, he has helped open a new chapter in peaceful relations with India.
To be sure, the President Musharraf that we saw in a dark suit happily fielding questions from the press at the conclusion of the SAARC summit last Tuesday was a very different man from the aggressive General Musharraf in camouflage green who had pooh-pooed the composite dialogue advocated at the Lahore summit in 1999, who had launched Kargil and who had once said he would never talk to India unless it was prepared to talk about the core issue of Kashmir and Kashmir alone. It was also a different Musharraf from the one who went to Agra in 2001 but walked out in a huff when the Indians insisted on putting a clause on terrorism into the proposed joint statement. On Tuesday January 6, 2004, the joint statement stressed the need for a composite dialogue on all issues and was conspicuous by the insertion of President Musharraf’s personal reassurances in regard to stomping out terrorism from Pakistani soil. Well, well, well.
We are delighted at the outcome of the SAARC summit. It has taken Pakistan fifteen years to realize that India cannot be bled to concede Kashmir. And it has taken India that long to realize that it cannot hold on to the status quo in Kashmir by force. It has taken Pakistan’s hardliners a long time to realize that a buoyant economy and not war in Kashmir is the lifeline to building a modern nation-state just as it has taken the Indian hardliners a long time to realize that a state of unresolved war with a wronged neighbour is not good for the emerging market-big power status that India seeks for itself in the world.
The success of the latest Indo-Pak initiative has depended on several factors. Flexibility on both sides was, of course, on top of the list. General Musharraf has rightly abandoned Pakistan’s maximalist position based on the UN resolutions while Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has correctly accepted that the issue of Jammu and Kashmir will have to be resolved to the satisfaction of both sides, implicitly admitting Pakistan’s right to be part of the equation of any solution.
Thankfully, too, hawkishness was not paraded as a sign of patriotism. General Musharraf says this is a great victory for the moderates, suggesting that the tap of militant jihad in Kashmir will finally be turned off. Prime Minister Vajpayee has agreed to the peace dialogue with Pakistan beginning next month, only a couple of months ahead of India’s general elections, suggesting that Paki-bashing will not be exploited by the BJP to garner votes from hard line Hindus.
Secret diplomacy away from the prying eyes and hype of the media was the third factor in achieving this win-win result. Since last April when Mr Vajpayee offered a conditional hand of friendship to Pakistan, and in subsequent offers of confidence building by both sides, the footprints of the Indian prime minister’s national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra, and that of the secretary to the National Security Council of Pakistan, Tariq Aziz, have been all over the capitals of the world. In recent times, the DG-ISI, General Ehsan ul Haq, has also quietly lent his shoulders to the task at hand. That is just as well. The ISI’s self-conferred epithet of Invisible Soldiers of Islam is definitely out of fashion in these times.
Finally, the role of the international community, especially the United States of America, in constantly nudging both sides, should not be underestimated. Strong denials from both countries are perfectly understandable. They are awash in anti-Americanism and it would have been unwise for the US to have been seen as a strong, upfront player. That is why Moscow and Beijing and London were also brought into the loop to help both countries stay on track. The US has told New Delhi that if it wants a long term strategic partnership with Washington, it will have to get its act together in the region instead of constantly nuke rattling with Pakistan. And it has told Pakistan that if it doesn’t want to be hauled over the coals for proliferating nuclear know-how, it must wind down the jihad business, turn back the tide of radical Islam and make up with India. The dividends for India of heeding, and the costs for Pakistan of spurning, American advice cannot be ignored by either.
Of course, strong vested interests on both sides will try and derail the proposed dialogue. Pride and prejudice, the weight of history, and stubborn point-scoring bureaucracies will thwart progress at every step. But if both leaders and peoples persist in their quest, the blocks of peace will fall into place slowly but surely. The one positive factor in the peace process is the rational transformation of the institutional hardliners in both countries – the army in Pakistan and the BJP in India—into self-redeemed and even self-righteous moderates.
(Jan 16-22, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 47 – Editorial)
All tacticians, no strategists
Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif are not amused. President General Pervez Musharraf has usurped a key element of their political agenda – peace with India — without as much as a nodding ‘thank you’. Worse, the world is lauding General Musharraf’s ‘courage and statesmanship’ while the two ‘popular’ leaders who paid the price of dismissal by the military for advocating it in the first place continue to languish in the wilderness.
Mr Sharif’s peculiar circumstances forbid him to voice his protest freely. So he has merely chafed at the Indians for befriending the “architect of Kargil” and warned that General Musharraf’s agreements would not outlast him. Meanwhile, loyal lieutenants like Zulfikar Khosa and Saad Rafiq have slammed General Musharraf for “admitting that the freedom fighters and jihadis of Kashmir are terrorists”. In short, the PMLN has not welcomed the peace dialogue initiated by President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee.
Ms Bhutto’s position is more “flexible” (here’s that wonderful, born-again word again!). She welcomes the peace dialogue because she considers herself its original architect. But she warns India and the world that General Musharraf is a great tactician and is merely “using the peace moves to appease international pressure”. She reminds us that “the Indo-Pak peace talks are taking place when the Taliban are regrouping and Pakistan is investigating allegations of sale of nuclear technology by its scientists”. Meanwhile, Aitzaz Ahsan of the PPP wonders why parliament was not consulted by General Musharraf. Indeed, in an attempt to sow discord among Musharraf’s partners in government, Mr Ahsan expresses regret (!) that the prime minister, Zafarullah Jamali, was “humiliated” because he was not taken into confidence by General Musharraf in the final stages of the agreement.
The position of the two mainstream parties and their leaders is perfectly understandable if not always justifiable. For well-known reasons, Mr Sharif hates General Musharraf. He knows that as long as the military man is around, his own fate is bleak. Therefore he will do anything to undermine his nemesis. That is why every Musharraf success, even when it is in the national interest, is tarred with the brush of failure by the PMLN lest it strengthen him.
Ms Bhutto’s case is slightly different. She doesn’t hate General Musharraf. In fact, she would very much like to work with him. She had fervently hoped that he would make a political alliance with her to strengthen himself against Mr Sharif, just as General Zia ul Haq had done with Mr Sharif against her two decades ago. But that has not happened. General Musharraf’s terms were unacceptable to Ms Bhutto. He wanted to do a ‘soft deal’ with Mr Amin Fahim and the PPP to the exclusion of Ms Bhutto and Mr Zaradari which would have effectively banished them from the reckoning for at least five years. She refused, suspecting an attempt not just to remove her from the political scene but also to usurp her party. In the event, General Musharraf has used the same stick of corruption to flog both Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif, making a deal with the mullahs in the bargain. Ms Bhutto is therefore warning the world that he is grooming the MMA to take over the government in a “soft revolution”.
“The mainstream parties are being kept out and the marginal parties are being brought into the power equation”, argues Ms Bhutto. “Musharraf’s covert agenda coincides with the mullahs’ overt agenda. Musharraf has a double agenda: his tactical agenda is to adopt the policies of the PPP to throw dust in the eyes of the democratic forces. His strategic agenda is to further the aims of the MMA and the MQM that pit him against the PPP because he wants to tell the world that the choice in Pakistan is between military dictatorship and dictatorship of the religious forces.”
Ms Bhutto’s analysis is obviously self-serving. It suits her to warn the world not to trust the “two-faced General Musharraf” by putting all its eggs in his basket. But a critical element of what she says is true enough. General Musharraf’s insistence on keeping the PPP out of the loop has led him to bring the MMA into the equation. However, the MMA is not General Musharraf’s poodle. Far from it. It has an agenda all of its own in which General Musharraf is to be excluded from the equation. Thus we have a situation in which both General Musharraf and the MMA are engaged in extracting mileage from their alliance with each other without giving up their independence or initiative. In other words, and contrary to Ms Bhutto’s analysis, it is a tactical rather than a strategic alliance between General Musharraf and the MMA.
In 2004, this Military Mullah Alliance is bound to unravel in view of its inherent contradictions. That is when General Musharraf’s domestic and international space to maneuver will be threatened. That is also when he will need to reconsider the utility of having the PPP as a partner rather than as a protagonist against him. Ms Bhutto would therefore be advised to bide her time and play her cards with greater tactical dexterity than before.
(Jan 23-29, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 48 – Editorial)
India and Pakistan should purge their lying textbooks
India and Pakistan are gearing up to normalise relations. Therefore voices should be raised in both to undo the brainwash that has bred the hating generations that still favour deadlock and war. Both sides have promoted anti-‘other’ textbooks to poison young minds. New Bollywood films have ridiculously unbelievable scenes of Pakistani satanism and Indian derring-do. Scholars in both countries have lighted this perverse phenomenon. Therefore if both countries and peoples want to step into the new millennium with positive economic prospects for South Asia, they must purge their textbooks and propaganda tools.
Indians and Pakistanis have been victims of a peculiar “nation-building” process after 1947 in which they have “built” their two nations in conflict with each other. The events emphasised in one’s textbooks have been either ignored or glossed over by the other. The “distortion” that pits the two stories against each other is more or less equal on both sides. The only difference is that in India, where freedom of expression has rarely been curtailed, the distortion is indirect and subtle, whereas in Pakistan, where ideology has made everything unsubtle, it is blatant and even comic at times.
This is not surprising. When the Cold War was on, America and the Soviet Union also fought their textbook wars. Soviet textbooks presented a blatantly doctored history and were exposed to ridicule in the Western world. But there was subtle misrepresentation in the projection of “the evil empire” in American textbooks too. Indeed, there were two kinds of “consensuses” in the United States: “history is really what we have in our textbooks, and that the Soviet textbooks are all propaganda”.. A similar “twin” consensus exists in India about Pakistan.
Just as a human child is “socialised” by his parents through a certain process of conditioning to elicit obedience from him/her, so too nation-states undertake conditioning to produce obedient citizens. They use history to create a uniform mind (national identity) and contrive a carefully ‘cultured’ version of it in their school textbooks. Thus India and Pakistan have “defined” each other forever in their textbooks and citizens in both are inclined to forestall knowledge by claiming that they already know each other. As Indian scholar Krishna Kumar (his Pakistani counterpart is historian KK Aziz) wrote: “Both countries live with the assumption that they know each other. The ‘other’ after all is a former aspect of the ‘self’. There is no room for the curiosity that ‘foreignness’ normally awakens. Physical vicinity compounds this feeling. If India and Pakistan were geographically apart, there might have been a chance for the kind of anxiety that lack of news about a hostile relative residing far away causes. India and Pakistan are politically so far apart and culturally and geographically so close that there is no room for an ‘epistemic’ space between them”.
Here are some examples of how textbooks distort history. The Indian side focuses on the earlier part of the lives of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Allama Iqbal, while the Pakistani side looks only at the later parts. Looking at Sir Syed as a ‘reformer’, the Indian textbook ignores his campaign for the “other nation” while the Pakistani side looks away from his religious work because rationalism is heresy in its master narrative. Both sides ignore how he felt about the Mutiny of 1857 because both have looked at it selectively to peg their theory of “independence struggle” to it. The historian Majumdar wrote that there was “an absence of nationalism” in the revolt of 1857. But who has listened to him? The biggest nugget of the two master narratives is the Partition of Bengal. The Indian version is that it was the most blatant example of how the British practised the doctrine of ‘divide and rule’. The Pakistani version says the Bengali Muslims were united in their support of the division effected by Lord Curzon and that it was the protest against it by the Hindus which united the Muslims against them. The Indian version takes no account of the Muslim reaction to Curzon’s measure and gives the impression that Hindus and Muslims were united in their opposition to the Partition.
Pakistani textbook historians ignore the fact that Jinnah attended the 1906 session of the Congress and wrote the speech of its president Dadabhai Nauroji that called Partition a “bad blunder”.. The same kind of loss of focus happens to Indian textbook historians when they write about the Khilafat Movement and ignore what happened to Gandhi’s Muslim followers after Gandhi called off the Movement following the Chauri Chaura incident in 1922. Neither do they note the not-so-smooth tenor of relations between the two communities during the heyday of the Khilafat Movement.
The Indian textbook highlights history selectively. Up to the Lucknow Pact of 1916 and the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, all is well, but after the call-off of the Khilafat Movement, the account is skimpy. The period from 1922 to 1930 is missing because this is when Hindu-Muslim relations worsened. The Nehru Report of 1928 is glossed over in India while the Pakistani textbook focuses sharply on the Report because it triggered Jinnah’s response in his Fourteen Points. The Civil Disobedience movement called by Gandhi is skipped by Pakistani textbooks which focus instead on the Round Table Conferences in London, which Indian textbooks ignore. Surprisingly, the 1935 Government of India Act is not the most discussed item in Indian textbooks because it retains separate electorates. The year 1940 is a purple patch in Pakistani books but Indian textbooks focus on Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience once again to blink the Lahore Resolution. In modern times, the history of wars and conflict has been equally “distorted” by both sides.. For example, Pakistani children are taught that India was solely responsible for dismembering Pakistan in 1971 while Indian kids learn that Pakistan is solely responsible for stirring militancy in Kashmir and that there is no indigenous resentment against India. And so the falsehoods go on.
In India and Pakistan, the “master narratives” clash because the stories are moulded by a sense of the end result. A kind of teleology impinges upon events. India looks at independence with “a teleological sense of achievement along with a terrible sense of loss and sadness” whereas Pakistan’s master narrative contains “a sense of self-protection and escape”. Thus the two nations go on fighting each other because their textbooks teach antagonistic versions of history.
There is a SAARC resolution on record about the purging of lethal textbooks in all member states. This is the time for India and Pakistan to appoint a joint commission of neutral and objective experts to disinfect their textbooks and reintroduce truth in a region where war would have been impossible without lying to the people.
(Jan 30-Feb 05, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 49 – Editorial)
Nuclear shenanigans
Pakistan’s nuclear programme and scientists are in the gun-sights of the sole superpower. Allegations of wrongdoing (proliferation) are slowly hardening into undeniable facts. Iran and Libya have got off the hook but screwed us in the bargain. Our footprints have even been discerned on the tarmac of Pyongyang’s airport in North Korea. In the event, Islamabad is desperate to limit damage and “close” this potentially explosive case. To this end, General Pervez Musharraf’s strategy seems twofold: admit a degree of guilt but absolve the state by attributing it to a few greedy and wayward scientists. This is savage and naked realpolitik: among the targeted fall-guys is, Dr A Q Khan, the state-acclaimed “father of the Islamic bomb”.
Pakistan’s nuclear programme had survived international pressure until now for several reasons. First, it was supposed to be India-specific. Therefore as long as the world was prepared to accept India’s nuclear programme, it could hardly trample on Pakistan’s nukes. Second, it was supposed to be a defensive deterrent and not a weapon of threat in an aggressive adventure. In other words, it was supposed to keep the peace, not precipitate war, in the region. Third, it was shrouded in secrecy. Indeed, a degree of ambiguity was deliberately cultivated by the state to maximise its deterrent value for India while minimising its threat value for the rest of the world. Fourth, Pakistan’s frontline status in the cold war compelled the “free” world to turn a blind eye to it.
But problems began in the late 1980s, and one by one these benign conditions started to fall by the board. In 1987, following India’s aggressive intents in Operation Brasstacks, Dr A Q Khan seemingly lost his cool and exploded with the scoop of the decade (“We’ve got the bomb”!) before the bewildered Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar. That was the end of the theory of plausible ambiguity. Then the cold war came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spotlight was turned on Pakistan. In April 1990, Washington dispatched Robert Gates of the CIA to the sub-continent when it suspected a nuclear conflict in the offing following Pakistan’s fuelling of low-intensity conflict in Kashmir. This implied that the development of nuclear weapons had emboldened rather than restrained Pakistan from adventuring in the region. Therefore in September 1990, the US ambassador to Islamabad, Robert Oakley, accused Pakistan of having “crossed the nuclear red light” and the Bush Sr administration slapped economic and military sanctions on Pakistan. For the next four years, Washington tried to pressurise Pakistan to “freeze, cap and roll back” its nuclear programme in exchange for a restoration of mutually profitable ties. But Pakistan refused to accept a rollback. Instead, it claimed it had frozen its programme. More critically, it insisted its programme was under tight controls and proliferation was out of the question. But telltale signs to the contrary were aplenty.
In 1991, COAS General Aslam Beg advised Nawaz Sharif to sell nuclear know-how to Iran. The idea was spurned, according to Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and Ishaq Dar of the PMLN. But the nuclear rogues were not to be thwarted. In the mid 1990s, following a series of carefully planted “nationalistic” articles in the press advocating sale of nuclear technology to offset American economic and military sanctions, a full-page advertisement appeared in a national daily hawking nuclear wares to the world at large. When the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad erupted in protest, the nuclear rogues seemed to beat a hasty retreat. But now it transpires that in fact they did quite the opposite: they simply went underground with their business.
Dr A Q Khan has been at the heart of our nuclear programme. His secret “successes” made Kahuta Research Laboratories an unaccountable state institution within the larger, unaccountable praetorian state of Pakistan. Dr Khan has accumulated extraordinary wealth in pursuit of his nuclear dream. He has funded self-serving seminars and books. With the help of pliant journalists, he has bankrolled his image as “the father of the Islamic bomb” so that no one can dare accuse him of any wrongdoing. When colleagues like Dr Munir Ahmad Khan and others in the atomic energy establishment protested his dubious “dealings”, he connived to have them shunted aside as “American
agents”. Those in the media who wondered about his newfound wealth and questionable ways were accused of being “unpatriotic”. Every army chief and every general who headed the strategic nuclear establishment knew much was amiss but preferred to turn a blind eye “in the national interest” to Dr Khan’s comings and goings. But when the national interest changed, efforts were speeded up to quietly wean KRL away from critical elements of the programme and hand these over to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. Indeed, General Pervez Musharraf was the first army chief who actually confronted Dr Khan and was stunned by the revelations of impropriety.
General Musharraf is absolutely right to insist upon a detailed investigation into the matter, partly to assuage international proliferation concerns and partly to devise better mechanisms of command and control in the future. Both individuals (scientists and generals and civil servants and politicians) and state institutions (intelligence agencies, media, defense organs) are guilty to a greater or lesser extent. He is also right in suggesting that such things happened because of the intrinsic secret nature of the programme and Dr Khan’s pivotal role in it from the outset. But he has omitted to note the most critical factor in such reckoning: the unaccountable status of the Pakistan army as the guardian of our nuclear programme and its overbearing control of civil society. In the final analysis, the buck stops at GHQ rather than at any particular army chief.
At the moment, however, too much is at stake for the state and nation to accommodate some of the more self-righteous protests of so-called “nationalist” elements in our media against the investigations (“debriefings”) underway. To punish some or all of the rogue scientists and army officers or not to punish anyone at all is also not the real issue because the problem is symptomatic of a deep political confusion about the nature of the Pakistani state and society, the role of the armed forces and the “ideology” of Pakistan. But while we mull over how to address such weighty issues, we must urge the government of the day to close this dangerous file as quickly as possible. In this context, General Pervez Musharraf needs all the support he can get from us in cleaning up this act effectively and laying the international community’s suspicions and fears to rest.
(July 18-24, 2003, Vol – XV, No. 21 – Editorial)
All the poorer for it
A couple of years ago, an unemployed, alienated young man named Munawar Mohsin in Peshawar escaped into the underworld of drugs and ended up as a mentally unhinged inmate of Peshawar jail. Released some months later, he scraped around for a living, eventually landing a part-time “job” at The Frontier Post, ostensibly “editing” the Letters Page. The fp is an English-language paper in great financial and political difficulties — a small circulation, huge accumulated losses, and an owner-editor who is behind bars allegedly for drug smuggling but actually for stepping on the toes of the powerful intelligence-cum-narcotics agency establishment. The paper is barely able to sustain its desultory daily routines.
One day, Peshawar was ablaze with news that the fp had printed a blasphemous letter by a foreign, non-Muslim reader against the Holy Prophet (pbuh). Enraged mobs comprising zealots who could barely read or write English, egged on by various “enemies” of the fp, attacked and burnt down the fp. The managing editor of the fp, who was in Islamabad that day, rushed to Peshawar, issued an apology and ordered an internal inquiry. But the government sprang into action and ordered the fp to close down. The police now swept down on harried staffers and slapped warrants of arrest on the managing editor, the news editor (who was in Lahore that fateful day), the fellows in charge of the computer system and the night shift and, of course, the mentally unsound Munawar Mohsin. The managing editor went underground, the news editor escaped to the usa and the police dragged the others off to jail.
No one bothered to ascertain the facts of the case. As usual, several letters were received by e-mail that night. As usual, most related to routine departmental complaints, suggestions for stories, political opinions. As usual, Mohsin was tired and depressed. As usual, he didn’t read through all of them. As usual, it never occurred to him, as it still doesn’t (and wouldn’t) to any Muslim journalist or reader, that a blasphemous letter could conceivably be sent for publication by anyone in the country. And, as usual, since most of the technical and production staff in most newspapers in Pakistan (regardless of whether they are in English or Urdu) is clueless about the English language, the letters page was printed with dull abandon.
To be sure, Mohsin should have risen to his responsibilities and scuttled the poisonous letter at first sight. But if he didn’t, it was a case of sheer negligence, no more. In the event, since there were obvious extenuating circumstances, he was liable to punishment commensurate with carelessness, and no more. None of the others was even remotely responsible for Mohsin’s negligence. The wretched managing editor and news editor were not even in Peshawar that day; and the others were not responsible for the Letters Page. Yet the police stood by and allowed the mobs to vent their spleen. Then the cops went hell bent for leather and arrested every FP staff member in sight. At one time there were eight accused in this case, six of whom were put in prison on “death row’.
In due course, however, the government came under pressure from press bodies and human rights organisations. It relented and ordered an inquiry into the incident. The inquiry commission perused Mohsin’s past history of drug abuse and mental instability and determined that, in view of the clear extenuating circumstances of his state of being, he had been merely negligent. The others were not guilty as charged. Thereafter, however, the presiding judge in the court took over. He ignored the findings of the inquiry commission, satisfied himself that Mohsin was not mentally unsound and convicted him of wilfully committing blasphemy.
The judge’s conduct was not unpredictable. In similar situations, most judges have actually succumbed to the religious pressures of the situation and delivered much the same verdict. Several alleged blasphemers have been shot dead after they were acquitted. At least one high court judge has been assassinated for standing up to the religious extremists. And most judges upon whom such blasphemy cases are thrust tend to go out of their way to demonstrate their personal piety and religious loyalty by handing down the death sentence to alleged blasphemers of all shades and creeds.
Munawar Mohsin is the latest in a long line of unfortunate Pakistanis who have fallen victim to the ruthless religious politics of the blasphemy law. Not to be forgotten is Dr Younas Sheikh, a professor at a medical college who was accused of blasphemy nearly three years ago by a clutch of overzealous students and sentenced to death during an in camera trial in prison, while his lawyers were harassed with fatwas of apostasy and threatened along with their families. Dr Sheikh’s case is still pending, despite desperate appeals from human rights people far and wide.
At one time, General Pervez Musharraf was inclined to make some necessary procedural amendments to forestall the mischief of the blasphemy law by vested interests. But the politics of “ground reality” and “pragmatism” has overcome his natural human instincts for compassion and justice. And we are all the poorer for it.
(June 21-27, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 17 – Editorial)
Conservatism or dynamism?
It is not unusual for the finance ministry to blow its own trumpet about “investor-friendly” budgets and so on. But it is unusual for the business community not to crib about some feature or the other of every budget, which is the case this year. In fact, Mr Shaukat Aziz’s latest budget has been described as “listless” rather than “crippling”, which is not such bad news after all, given a cheerless situation all round.
The good news refers to a clutch of “incentives” for capital markets and investments ranging from a continuing rationalization of withholding tax and excise duty structures and a reduction of the customs tariff to a small but significant lowering of the corporate tax rate and an extension of the self-assessment income tax regime. The decision to promote Gwadar as a free-trade zone with special investment incentives is also welcome, even though the benefits of this initiative will not be forthcoming for many years until after the infrastructure for the region is up and running and the economic climate has so dramatically changed that foreign investors are running up and down the length of the Balochistan coastline with a happy eye to profits rather than dodging bullets and bombs. The same sort of response may be forecast for the new trade liberalization regime vis a vis Afghanistan, the economic reconstruction of which remains subject to the uncertainties of political consolidation in an environment of war, warlordism, foreign occupation and ethnic strife.
The bad news is the adverse impact of GST on edible oil and on utility services. But if the net result of these is a rationalization of the consumption patterns of the rich more than of the poor, some good may come of it in terms of tax collection. The truly controversial aspects of the budget relate to its various assumptions and projections. For instance, tax revenues are projected at Rs 460 bn, up by about 15% on the actual amount of less than Rs 400 bn collected last year. This is ridiculous. Despite or because of NAB, tax revenues haven’t grown beyond 8% any year for many years. Has this experience been blithely shrugged away or is there some devious jugglery afoot? The record suggests that every year the government sets an overly unrealistic GDP growth target and then budgets for tax increases that are based on an “autonomous” growth of revenues on the basis of that projected economic growth rate. But when the economic growth rate refuses to come anywhere near the projected target because investment remains stagnant, tax revenue targets are periodically revised downwards followed by consequent reductions in the allocations for the public sector annual development plan. But this year, much more than the usual assumptions will be challenged.
For one, the assumption that GDP will grow from 3.5% last year to 5% this year is totally unwarranted. There is no evidence that investors are tripping over themselves to build new factories or increase production runs. Nor is there any likelihood that exports will become the engine of domestic growth – a quick economic recovery of the advanced countries is not assured by any stretch of the imagination. That would suggest that, despite lower import duties, aggregate demand in the economy is not likely to rise by much. This means that revenues from relatively inelastic imports may decline instead of increasing as projected, thereby putting additional strain on the aggregate tax revenue targets and, by implication, on government spending on the social sector.
Another moot issue relates to allocations for defence. The point is not that higher defence expenditures are unjustified, because in the current circumstances they may even be necessary. The point is that every year an attempt is made to hide the true extent of such expenditures in the budget because supplementary budgets are available, no questions asked, to do the needful when required. Thus we are told that defence expenditures have actually fallen in this year’s budget (Rs 146.02 bn) compared to the revised figures for last year (Rs 151.6bn). But last year’s budgeted defence allocation was Rs 131.6 bn while supplementary grants amounted to about Rs 20 bn, or an increase of about 15% over and above the budgeted amount. So we may expect more or less the same to happen this year – which means that by June 2003 the defence budget should have ballooned to about Rs 165 bn or so, which means further reductions in social sector expenditures. And so on.
Meanwhile, there is no sign of the Rs 100 bn dividend from the external debt-rescheduling granted by foreign donors. One might have hoped that not all of it would be consumed by a rise in defence spending and a reduction of the fiscal deficit. In fact, a substantial increase in public sector spending, coupled with significant corporate investment incentives, a policy of much lower interest rates, and greater spending powers to the middle classes, might have been a good tonic to spur aggregate demand and revive the economy.
But that isn’t likely to happen until Mr Shaukat Aziz takes off the robes of a conservative banker and dons the garb of a dynamic finance minister.
(June 28-July 04, 2002, Vol – XIV, No. 18 – Editorial)
Function and exploitation
The old tiger of Balochistan, Nawab Akbar Bugti, is no pushover. Dogged, arrogant, foolhardy, he has chewed more politicians than anyone else. The exception was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who succeeded in stoking the Nawab’s fiery ambitions and manipulated him to split and undermine the Baloch tribal-nationalist movement in the 1970s. In recent years, shunned by his Baloch comrades and estranged from Islamabad, Nawab Bugti has retreated into a sullen and isolated splendour, growling his presence from time to time and keeping a tight rein over the Bugti tribe.
Now he is in the news again. Reports say Bugti tribesmen have amassed around Sui in Dera Bugti and are taking pot shots at the oil and gas pipelines of the OGDC, allegedly at the behest of Nawab Bugti. But Mr Bugti claims they are retaliating against broken pledges by the federal government regarding welfare issues of employment, workers’ salaries and benefits, pensions, etc. The OGDC submits that crores have been paid against such claims but the Bugti tribesmen, acting through their trade union Nawab, are accusing the federal government and the OGDC of reneging on various contracts and agreements signed with them in the past.
Islamabad is apparently at its wits end about what to do. The oil and gas sector is the only sector to receive a dose of foreign investment this year and the last thing this financially strapped government wants is an unruly insurgency in the oil and gas lands on its hands. So the OGDC has dangled some carrots for the Nawab while the federal government has unleashed a stick with which to browbeat the rebels. Contingents of the Frontier Corps, along with elements of the Bhambore Rifles, Loralai Scouts, Chagai Scouts, Sibi Scouts etc have “gheraoed” Nawab Bugti’s lair and are itching to rout the frisky Bugtis.
There are two ways in which people can react to this situation. They can say they are sick and tired of “tribal Sardars holding the state to ransom” and standing in the way of the state’s centralizing and leveling mission in pursuit of a “unified and enlightened” nation. Such people see backward remnants and aggressive defenders of tribalism as an obstacle to progress measured in terms of transiting from pre-capitalist social structures based on special bilateral agreements and arrangements to market economies based on universal, contractual laws. In this perspective, Nawab Bugti and his tribes are anachronistic blackmailers who should be dealt with ruthlessly by the state so that the multinational oil and gas companies can get on with their job.
Then there are those who, like their opportunistic political predecessors, would rather buy off the Nawab and his Bugtis for a token in ransom rather than incur their wrath and be compelled to take military action against them. No one really wants to draw attention to yet another fault line in the country’s body politic.
Neither side is completely right or wrong. But both seem unaware of the peculiar strains of Baloch nationalism that still impinge on such issues and create the conditions for national distrust and disunity. Consider.
The Baloch believe that Balochistan “state” acceded to Pakistan in 1947 as a sovereign entity with defined rights. Among these, they claim, was the right to hugely benefit from its natural resources, including oil and gas. But since these have been effectively usurped by Islamabad which has denied any form of royalties to the province on the exploitation of these resources, political and economic struggles to reclaim such rights and privileges are not only justified but necessary. Of course, Islamabad has not helped matters by adopting “double standards” and conceding a percentage of royalties to the NWFP on the federal exploitation of its water resources. Thus when Nawab Bugti exhorts Islamabad to cough up in Sui, he evokes a degree of sympathy from his fellow Baloch and provokes a wave of outrage against Islamabad from his fellow Bugtis.
Islamabad tends to be on a short fuse when it is ruled by the military. This is especially true of insipient provincial or tribal rebels with or without a cause because the military’s “civilizing and nation-building” view of itself is so powerfully and self-righteously imbedded in its approach to political issues. But this is a classic case of false consciousness. True, states have had to be cobbled together. But it is truer still that nations have evolved voluntarily over time.
Thus the use of the stick against the Baloch in general and the Bugtis in particular should be avoided, irrespective of Nawab Bugti’s histrionics. Similarly, instead of opportunistic agreements to appease the Bugti tribes or silence Nawab Bugti, Islamabad might be advised to better define and build provincial rights and benefits into the federal constitution so that the provincial government rather than the federal government is responsible for “trickling-down” the benefits of exploiting the natural resources of any state or province. Indeed, if Akbar Bugti is to be the last Nawab of the Bugti tribe who combines in himself the dual power of function and exploitation, the state of Pakistan should strive to become the first Sardar of the Bugti tribe which retains the power of function and gives up the power of exploitation.
(March 05-11, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 2 – Editorial)
Mr Aziz and Dr Husain’s advice
Two recent economic issues cry out for comment: the launch of Pakistan’s US$500 mn Eurobond by the finance minister, Shaukat Aziz; and the plea of the Governor of the State Bank, Ishrat Husain, for an end to the IMF programme in Pakistan.
Like most government decisions, the launching of the Eurobond was an in-ministry fait accompli. There was no serious debate about its pros and cons in parliament or in the media or at domestic trade and commerce forums. Mr Aziz took the decision in his own wisdom. He then took a road show abroad and quickly sold the idea to foreign portfolio managers. Indeed, even the idea of swapping the relatively expensive fixed issue @ 6.75% for one with a lower floating rate of around 4.50% occurred to him after the bond was hugely oversubscribed.
The arguments in favour of Mr Aziz’s Eurobond have been trotted out endlessly: it is meant to replace Pakistan’s expensive debt with cheaper debt; and it is expected to signal greater confidence in Pakistan as an emerging market for foreign capital market investors. But critics are right to ask whether this is the best way to achieve these objectives. We have forex reserves of about US$12 bn. We have invested a large chunk of these abroad at less than 2%. Why then are we floating the Eurobond to borrow at over twice the rate at which we have invested much of our forex reserves? Is this level of US$12 bn an optimal level of reserves for Pakistan according to some established balance of trade or payments formula? Why not reduce the level of our reserves by a few billion to retire relatively expensive existing debt instead of floating expensive new debt to retire still more expensive existing debt? Furthermore, the government has received considerable concessional loans in the recent past. Thus the stock of relatively expensive foreign debt is probably not so great that it cannot be wiped out by a chunk of the reserves. And as far as the issue of building foreign investor confidence in Pakistan is concerned, we cannot help note that the Eurobond’s oversubscription was in response to not just the high coupon rate offered but an effect of our existing forex reserve position, stable currency and our commitment to the IMF stabilization programme which is reflected in B++ international credit ratings rather than the cause of it all.
This brings us squarely to the continuing rationale for the belt-tightening IMF programme that has also paradoxically increased unemployment and poverty. While appreciating the need for the IMF programme in the last four years, Dr Ishrat Husain has listed compelling reasons for saying bye-bye to it now. Pakistan’s external account is satisfactorily restructured; a debt reprofiling and repaying strategy has reduced the debt service burden on the budget from 66% of forex earnings to less than 25%, suggesting that there is no longer a bottomless debt trap; workers remittances at about $3.5bn a year or three times the pre-1999 level are expected to stay stable in the future; the trade gap has been diminishing and this trend is not expected to be reversed; forex reserves are above optimal levels; the fiscal deficit will be down to 3.5% of GDP next June. And so on.
But investment and growth are not picking up significantly. Thus it may be time to trigger a jump in development spending in order to tackle poverty and employment. There is no risk, argues Dr Husain, that doing so would jeopardize the gains of the past. Tax collection has increased by over 60% in the last four years and the trend is irreversible since it is based on hard times rather than good times; public sector organizations are on the mend; and fiscal discipline has been institutionalized. The IMF has helped shape our new economic reality. But political will and consensus are now required to reap the benefits of the reform in the past few years. The IMF cannot help us on that score.
But do we just need to dispense with the IMF and apply prudent economic policies to take off into self-sustained growth? No. Those are just the necessary conditions. Among the sufficient conditions are political stability and continuity at home and optimal integration into the world community. But on this score, there are still many ifs and buts. What if the peace dialogue with India is derailed by the jihadis and we run headlong into conflict again? What if President Pervez Musharraf is run out? What if the nuclear proliferation issue should re-surface with a vengeance? What if another murderous attack by Al Qaeda on America leads to a severe backlash against Muslims in general and Pakistan in particular?
As long as General Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan is dependent on one-man, one-party rule which is in turn dependent on short term external goodwill and benevolence, the path to self-sustained economic growth will remain littered with thorns. Having successfully accomplished the necessary economic turnaround, General Musharraf needs to think about establishing the sufficient political conditions that will make it sustainable in the longer term. If only Mr Aziz and Dr Husain had the requisite qualifications to give him some good advice on this score.
(March 12-18, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 3 – Editorial)
May the best team win – more than just cricket depends on this cliché
India’s cricket tour of Pakistan means many things to many people. It means India will play Pakistan in Pakistan after nearly a decade and a half. That’s a record of sorts. It means that India is in with its best ever chance to win a One-Day and/or Test series against Pakistan in Pakistan since this is arguably its best team ever. If that happens, that will be a record too. But if it doesn’t, it will still be a record for Pakistan to retain its unbeatable scorecard against India in Pakistan. Then there are bound to be record crowds, record ticket sales, record media relays and record PCB revenues. A record number of Indians, including journalists, will cross the border by foot, rail and air. At the end of the day, many more records are bound to be broken on the ground, there is such an abundance of talent in the Indian teamsters and so much grit in the Pakistani youngsters.
But this tour is not just about cricket and sport. It is a metaphor for high politics as only the establishments of Pakistan and India can contrive despite themselves. It follows in the wake of nuclear rattling by both not so long ago. It reflects the tactical and strategic compulsions of the hardest of hardliners on both sides. It opens the floodgates to unprecedented people-to-people contacts and bonhomie. And it posits the greatest threat to the Indo-Pak peace process launched only a short while ago.
Everyone in Pakistan wanted this series to go ahead. We are crazy about cricket in general but we are insane about Indo-Pak cricket. However, the Pakistani establishment desperately wants to exploit the occasion to relay a critical message across the world’s television screens: come one, come all, this is a safe and sporting country. Pakistan’s image has taken a nasty battering in recent years. We are trying to beat the image back into shape. So we have marshaled the best security in the world – fit for a president on the hit list of Al-Qaeda, no less – to make sure that nothing goes wrong.
On the Indian side, too, the passion among the people is much the same: let’s play – the game. But serious doubts have been expressed by well-meaning persons about two risky aspects of a tour on the eve of the Indian elections. What if India should lose to Pakistan and the defeat have an adverse impact on the BJP’s electoral prospects? What if an act of terrorism should lead to a loss of Indian lives and/or a midway cancellation of the tour, derailing the peace dialogue so painstakingly cobbled by both sides recently? In the event, however, India’s prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, has crossed the Rubicon. Has he risked his all or nothing on a cricket series with the old enemy?
It would be a mistake to imagine that all will go well as hoped or planned. Indeed, going by the past, the chances are that the odd bomb or two will go off somewhere or the other – just as one did in Rawalpindi only three days before the match. The chances are the crowds will riot in some stadium stand or the other. The chances are the police will lay into the crowds somewhere or the other. The chances are that cricketing tempers will fly over some umpiring decision or the other. The chances are that some match will be called off for a short or long time while the situation is brought under control. The chances are that conspiracy theories about match-fixing and team selection will still do the rounds. In other words, the chances are that if anything can conceivably go wrong it might actually go wrong. Does this then mean that the cricket tour should never have been organised at this time and that Mr Vajpayee’s decision is bound to rebound on him?
No. Mr Vajpayee seems to have realised two major Indian truths. One: if the BJP is to consolidate its position as the other mainstream national party, it must dilute its overt Hindu stance and woo a slice of the Muslims of India into its fold. There is, after all, one nation in India, not two. Therefore the peace dividend with Muslim Pakistan is as critical to his national reckoning in the future – the feel good factor – as the fearful communal war-mongering was in the past.
Two: if terrorism in Kashmir can be factored into the Indo-Pak confidence building process as a potentially destabilising factor to contend with, there is no reason why terrorism in Pakistan cannot be factored into the same equation without derailing the process. In other words, despite the small print in the contract brandished by the PCB and BCCI about calling off the tour under certain conditions, there is a lot at stake for both countries in concluding this series without being swayed by certain provocations.
Wonderful. May the best team win. More than just cricket depends on this old cliché.
(April 30-May 06, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 10 – Editorial)
Wanted: judicial activism
The Supreme Court of Pakistan has handed down two interesting judgments recently. Both are sufficiently ambiguous to suggest that the court has thrown up a couple of balls but expects others to catch them in flight and carry them to the goalpost.
The first judgment upholds every citizen’s fundamental right to live and return to his homeland. But it adds the caveat: “subject to law”. Surely, this was unnecessary since every right is subject to law and circumscribed by it anyway. So what could the court possibly have in mind in the case of Shahbaz Sharif’s impending return that it hasn’t spelt out clearly?
Clearly, the government can arrest Shahbaz Sharif when he lands on Pakistani soil on the basis of one charge or another, true or trumped. The law will then be invoked when the case is framed and submitted to scrutiny by the courts. But given past experience in general and that of Asif Zardari in particular, troublesome politicians can generally be kept behind bars on one lawful pretext or another for as long as the government likes. However, this doesn’t seem to bother Mr Sharif. He has said that he is ready to face arrest and contest the charges against him. What he doesn’t want is to be put on another flight out to Riyadh, there to face irrevocable social captivity like his elder brother and father. Therefore the issue of “deportation” is at the heart of the matter not just for him but for the government as well. Having allowed Mr Sharif the right to return to his country, has the SC enabled the government to deport him out of the country lawfully?
There is no specific law under which a Pakistani citizen who has not committed a crime abroad and who is not subject to any extradition treaty can be lawfully deported. To be sure, we have had cases of extradition (Ramzi Yusuf et al) in which Pakistani citizens were nabbed and rather arbitrarily, some would say unlawfully, handed over to the US government which wanted to try them for specific crimes. But in the case of Mr Sharif, he has committed no crime for which he may be “wanted” by the Saudi Arabian government and for which it might be prepared to lay the evidence before a relevant court of law in Pakistan.
Of course, the government may argue, as it has done so far, that Mr Sharif would breach an “agreement” by returning to Pakistan, thereby enabling the government of Pakistan to deport him to Saudi Arabia. What is this “agreement”? Is it a “sovereign” agreement between two countries to which the Sharifs have appended their signatures without coercion and which is subject to international law? Or is it a breach of a three-way “contract” between the Sharifs and two governments which is subject to domestic and international law? Thus, if the government is readying to deport Mr Sharif it should also get ready to contend with questions such as these when it is called upon to present its evidence and defend its action in the SC. In the event, given the dubious nature of the so-called “agreement” that cannot apparently be made public, the SC’s stricture of “subject to law” may come to apply more to the government than to Mr Sharif.
The SC has stirred another important subject recently. The case before it related to a man who had been convicted by an anti-terrorist court of kidnapping a woman and forcing her to sign a cheque. After his appeal was turned down by the High Court, he approached the victim and struck a compromise with her. Her lawyer relied on Islamic law to make his defence. He argued that the Holy Prophet (pbuh) forgave a Hindu (sic) woman who had killed his uncle Hazrat Hamza. But the judges turned down the plea. They argued that those convicted of terrorism cannot be given the benefit of compromise or personal arbitration because they are perpetrators of “crimes against society”. In fact, one of the judges on the bench said that parliament should legislate on such matters in order to curb the menace of terrorism.
This judgment raises important questions. Why should these observations relating to “crimes against society” apply only to judgments of anti-terrorist courts and not to those delivered under the Hadood laws? Both sets of laws are the product of parliament. Why is “diyat” acceptable under Hadood and not under “terrorism”? Why can men who violate the rights of women under Hadood be let off on the basis of a compromise with aggrieved woman while men who commit lesser crimes under the anti-terrorist laws are denied the relief of an out-of-court compromise? Aren’t crimes against women crimes against humanity and society? Isn’t it time to challenge the Hadood laws on the basis of the SC’s latest utterances?
The senior judiciary is guilty of many acts of omission in the past. It is time it delivered some good acts of commission.
(June 04-10, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 15 – Editorial)
Jamali’s days are numbered
The loudest whisper in Islamabad is that General Pervez Musharraf wants his handpicked prime minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali to pack up and leave. We understand that General Musharraf would rather that Mr Jamali did so “voluntarily” instead of waiting to be pushed out. Mr Jamali’s original sponsors, the irredeemable Chaudhrys of Gujrat, are also keen to turf him out. But Mr Jamali is dragging his feet and seems faintly defiant. “The time for taking lessons is over”, he said recently. This is the same Mr Jamali who said shortly after he became prime minister that he would definitely avoid the fate of Mohammad Khan Junejo because he would never cross his “Boss” How times and people change despite the best intentions in the world! But what has poor Mr Jamali done to deserve the Heave-Ho?
He certainly hasn’t done enough to endear himself to General Musharraf. Mr Jamali’s lumbering style doesn’t sit well with his Boss’ management gurus who are obsessed with “good governance”. But surely Mr Jamali’s traditional tribal/feudal background was not a closely guarded secret from those who put forward and approved his candidature? In fact, it was one of Mr Jamali’s political virtues that he hailed from a relatively impotent Baloch tribe which had taught its scions the value of flexibility and good public relations for purposes of survival in a rough neighbourhood. General Musharraf wanted a pliant, dependent prime minister and the redoubtable Chaudhrys presented him one. So what are they cribbing about now?
General Musharraf was probably irked by Mr Jamali’s lack of enthusiasm or motivation in helping him bridge the Legal Framework Order divide last year after the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal refused to budge on the issue of the LFO until General Musharraf agreed to say when he would doff his uniform. Indeed, an unfortunate impression may have been created that Mr Jamali secretly sympathised with the MMA’s demands because they gelled with his own ambitions for autonomy from an overbearing president. It is also understandable why Mr Jamali would have wanted some of the trappings of office if not power to bestow patronage on his political supporters and preen himself as befits a prime minister. But this “facility” was constantly trimmed by General Musharraf’s powerful right-hand man, Tariq Aziz. This must have provoked Mr Jamali to complain to his Boss about “interference” from his “handlers” which in turn probably provoked them to start gunning for him.
Against this background, Mr Jamali’s political death wish manifested itself in a cabinet meeting called to discuss the viability of a bill on the National Security Council sought by his Boss. With his cabinet colleagues nervously looking over their shoulders, Mr Jamali proposed to dilute the scope of the NSC and was roundly rebuffed. Tales were carried to the Boss about how someone was getting too big for his Baloch chappals. There was incredulous muttering, conclusions were drawn. As a last ditch shot, Mr Jamali made a desperate bid to seize the secretaryship of the unified Muslim League in order to build a political base for himself. But the wily Chaudhrys were simply too smart for him. Indeed, neither the Chaudhrys nor the Boss was in any mood to allow him even a toehold in their new party, let alone the most important slot in it. The main purpose of unification is to enable the PML to become the sole vehicle for the fulfilment of General Musharraf’s budding plans for the future in which the prime minister may be relegated to the status of a presidentially appointed state functionary as in France. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain is merely keeping the top seat warm for General Musharraf and making sure the second slot remains his for the asking – Mushahid Hussain has no popular constituency and can be shoved aside at will. There is no role for the likes of Mr Jamali in this agenda.
So if the time has come for Mr Jamali to bid adieu after the budget session is over, we might ask where General Musharraf intends to take Pakistan before the year is out. The exit of a handpicked PM so soon in the game points to the failure of General Musharraf’s artificially propped-up system. So will he sack everyone and start all over again? Are his evergreen advisors recommending a presidential system a la France with the same degree of blind enthusiasm with which they recommended the pathetic referendum and the failed current dispensation? It must be a tempting proposition: any change that scuttles the MMA will have the approval of the international community, any change that enables General Musharraf to become a directly elected president will empower him enormously and give him longevity, and any change that improves the “performance” of government to “deliver” will endear him to the masses especially since the economy is poised to leap into “self-sustaining” growth.
Has General Musharraf swallowed this idea hook, line and sinker? How will another system be institutionally immune from an assassin’s bullet or bomb? The timing and manner of Mr Jamali’s departure will suggest what the Boss has in mind and what fate lies in store for this hapless country and its wretched people.
(June 11-17, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 16 – Editorial)
Fate of Sindh
A brief history of the politics of Sindh province sheds light on who is responsible for its plight and why. It also suggests an improbable way out of the quagmire.
Before Gen Zia ul Haq usurped power, Sindh was generally free of religious, ethnic or foreign-inspired terrorist strife. Then Gen Zia hanged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and created the MQM to counter the PPP in Sindh so that he could divide and rule. In 1983, the MQM rescued him from the MRD by stopping Karachi and Hyderabad from lining up behind the rural protest. This fertilised the seeds of ethnic conflict between Sindhis and Mohajirs and nurtured the urban-rural divide.
Generals Aslam Beg and Hameed Gul followed the same strategy after 1988. In pursuit of personal ambitions, they nudged the MQM to stab the PPP government in the back during the 1989 Midnight Jackals no-confidence operation. When that failed, the MQM went on the warpath against the PPP, tearing asunder Karachi and Hyderabad, and paved the way for Ms Bhutto’s sacking in 1990.
Gen Beg took money from Habib Bank and Mehran Bank to rig the 1990 elections and keep the PPP out of power in Sindh and Islamabad. He fished Jam Sadiq Ali out of exile and helped him cobble a government in Sindh with the MQM. But in just two years the Jam Sadiq-Altaf Hussain alliance plunged Karachi and rural Sindh into violent anarchy. So Gen Asif Nawaz was given the green light to “clean-up” the mess.
After Ms Bhutto returned to power in 1993, she was faced with a resurgence of MQM inspired terrorism and re-launched the clean-up operation with the help of the politically neutral army chief, Gen Abdul Waheed. Later, Gen ® Naseerullah Babar used the Rangers and police to much the same effect. By the time she left, Sindh was at peace again.
However, a destabilising new element was again injected into the Sindh equation by General Pervez Musharraf when he determined to set up a new political system based on empowerment of local government within the matrix of his personal political agenda. Having determined to keep the PPP out, and distrusting the MQM, he wittingly opened up political space for the MMA to capture Karachi after a boycott by the MQM. But by the time the general elections had rolled up, the MQM and General Musharraf had clinched a mutually opportunistic deal. In exchange for supporting the PMLQ government in Islamabad, the same MQM against whom three army chiefs before General Musharraf had railed was handed over the governorship of Sindh and made a critical partner in the Sindh government. But this has provoked acute tensions between the MQM and MMA in urban Karachi and between the MQM and PPP in rural Sindh. The situation is untenable because the PPP is the largest party in Sindh and the MMA is the ruling party in Karachi but both are out of the provincial and administrative loop of rural Sindh and urban Karachi respectively.
General Musharraf has tied himself up in knots. Now he cannot antagonise the MQM in Sindh because that would spell the end of his government in Islamabad. So he has sacked the non-MQM chief minister and is hoping another one will “manage” the situation better. At the same time he is hoping to consolidate his alliance with the MQM when the local elections roll around next year. But a victory of the MQM in Karachi will be at the cost of the MMA, in particular the Jama’at-e Islami, which is bound to fiercely resist relinquishing power, as demonstrated by the violence in the recent by-elections in Karachi. Therefore, General Musharraf may eventually have to nominate a military governor to try and undo the disastrous effects of his political handiwork. But that will only bring him full circle to the beginning. This is what happens when a fractured polity, as in Sindh, is exacerbated by the politics of exclusion at the altar of personal ambition instead of being nudged into peaceful competition by the politics of inclusion at the altar of the national interest.
Conclusion: Gen Zia ul Haq and Gen Aslam Beg screwed up Sindh and Karachi for personal political reasons by excluding the PPP from its rightful stake in the province. But Generals Asif Nawaz, Abdul Waheed and Jehangir Karamat tried to undo their predecessors’ disastrous legacies because they were politically neutral and had no personal political ambitions. Gen Musharraf’s position is untenable: he is compelled by circumstances to keep the PMLN at arms length but his hostility towards the PPP defies political explanation. For a host of domestic and international reasons, the PPP is ideally placed to be his natural political ally. Yet a personal pique against Ms Bhutto has rendered General Musharraf’s political somersaults ineffective in the national interest.
The PPP and the MQM will have to learn to share power in Sindh effectively, and General Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto will have to work together in Islamabad before Karachi can be reprieved and Pakistan can breathe freely again. Since that is unfortunately not yet on the cards, both the city and the country will continue to suffer the adverse consequences of a well-meaning but hopelessly misguided man on horseback.
(June 18-24, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 17 – Editorial)
Fate of ‘enlightened moderation’
No one can quibble with President General Pervez Musharraf’s plea for “enlightened moderation” in Pakistan and the Islamic world. It is also good to know that the OIC has seen the wisdom of his formulation. Pan-Islamic fanaticism and extremism have seriously injured the Muslim nation-state and international law governing nation-states by conjuring up a clash of civilisations. The injury to the Muslim nation-state is both from the inside and the outside. On the inside it is manifested in an erosion of secular law, culture and economy. On the outside it is a result of new pre-emptive doctrines that seek to erode the Muslim nation-state’s sovereignty and undermine international law. Within the Muslim nation state, fanatics and extremists think on the basis of an ahistorical approach. To their minds, the interests of the religion conflict with the interests of the nation-state and therefore the former should take precedence over the latter. Within the non-Muslim nation-state, they put the nation-state first and religion second.
But, to be meaningful, good intentions must transform rhetoric into action. And action must begin at home. On that score, General Musharraf’s record is poor. The attack against fanaticism and extremism must concentrate on its roots as well as its most overt and ugly manifestations. To be sure, fanaticism and extremism are born in the crucible of illiteracy and unemployment, hence the problem can be tackled in the long term by promoting rational science-based education and providing jobs (the ‘Zubeida Jalal approach’). But it is by no means a sufficient and swift answer. All the leaders of the religious extremist and fanatic groups are at least technically well-educated and moneyed. Many of their rank-and-file hail from middle class backgrounds, especially those based in the West. Such movements are also flush with money, partly from collections and donations and partly from illegal sources (drugs trafficking, smuggling) or preferential aid and commerce (handouts from official state ministries, supplementation of mosque properties into shopping centres, etc). Hence a roots-first approach must incorporate a more meaningful and effective bricks-and-mortar philosophy.
In Pakistan this would mean that the ministry of religious affairs should stop handing out money to mullahs and madrassahs and mosques pending a thorough regulatory accountability of these institutions for purposes of enlightened reform. It would mean that official Zakat and Baitul Mal funds should be distributed through the aegis of only those institutions that have passed the rigorous test of moderation. It would mean that illegally constructed or amended mosque structures should meet the same fate as other illegal non-religious constructions. It would mean strict audits of religious institutions registered as charities or trusts and quick prosecutions in the event of breaking the law. It would lead to a visible crackdown on criminal authors, printers, publishers and distributors of material subverting the philosophy of ‘enlightened moderation’. It would provoke the swift incarceration of inflammatory religious ideologues during mosque sermons. But most importantly, this would mean the state itself will have to get out of the business of legislating on the basis of any particular exegesis of Islam. There is a spectrum of laws to deal with such issues. But the Pakistani state has perverted these laws to suit its strategic purposes in the past. It must now about-turn to accommodate the needs of ‘enlightened moderation’.
General Musharraf has done nothing so far on any of these accounts.
A roots-first approach must also incorporate a counter-attack on the pervasive state culture and politics that promote extremism and fanaticism. This culture is the result of daily injections of irrationality, rage and self-righteousness into the body politic of Muslim nations by their states in many different ways. In Saudi Arabia it was part of a Faustian bargain in which the House of Saud exchanged control of religion, education and culture with the Wahhabi establishment for state power and Saudi Arabia’s fabulous oil wealth. In Pakistan, the military’s Faustian bargain involved exchanging control of religion, education and culture with the mullahs for their support to the state’s ‘regional’ objectives as well as to the army’s requirement of blocking the development of a democratic, accountable and representative political system in which civilian supremacy is the norm rather than the exception. What has General Musharraf done to reverse these trends in the cause of ‘enlightened moderation’?
Little. General Musharraf has reined in the jihadis. But he has made no move to disband them. General Musharraf has abandoned the Taliban in Afghanistan. But he has not cracked down on them in Pakistan. More significantly, General Musharraf is still putting his faith in a rotten political alliance with the mullahs instead of the anti-mullah mainstream parties and leaders who are natural political votaries of ‘enlightened moderation’.
General Pervez Musharraf’s failure to practice the politics of ‘enlightened moderation’ is based on his personal need to remain in power at all costs and the military’s insistence on ruling and running Pakistan at all times. Both personal and institutional interests are therefore in antagonistic contradiction with the requirements of ‘enlightened moderation’. Indeed, a necessary condition for enlightened moderation in Pakistan is that the military should concede political supremacy to the civilians and the author of enlightened moderation, General Musharraf, should become the vehicle for concluding such a national Compact.
(May 07-13, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 11 – Editorial)
Inspired outrage
The cover of a recent issue of an Indian newsmagazine shows a casual group of young Pakistani women in T shirts and jeans atop the roof of a popular café in the old city of Lahore with the illuminated minarets of the Badshahi mosque in the background. Like the cover, the article inside on “Beyond the veil – days and nights in urban Pakistan” has provoked our moral brigade to vent its spleen in the local print and electronic media. They claim that it paints Lahore as an immoral city by concentrating on the lifestyles of its decrepit elites instead of giving a rounded portrait of the eminent city and its historic culture. Some of the rage is also directed at those “socialite” Pakistanis who played gushing hosts to Indian visitors during the recent cricket series and allegedly reinforced such perceptions. The outrage is all the greater because the unprecedented affection and hospitality showered on the visitors by Pakistanis seems to have been repaid by them in the form of reinforced prejudices and distortions about Pakistan in the Indian mind.
These allegations fit the adage of giving a dog a bad name and shooting it. In a nutshell, the article is a “nightcrawl through citscapes in Pakistan” which “yields a surprising yet strangely familiar snapshot album. A Lahore that’s Delhi’s immediate kin, and Karachi, Mumbai’s distant cousin” Is that an unfair comparison? The article says Indian cable TV is popular entertainment, that modern Pakistani girls wear ‘western’ clothes but are not a regular sight on the streets, that fashion shows are not very different from those in India except that mini-skirts and swimsuits are missing on the catwalk and fashion shows have never been disrupted by the moral brigade as in India occasionally, that General Musharraf is popular among young upscale businessmen and professionals who admire his battle against the mullahs, that trendy restaurants are all the rage with the young even though they don’t serve booze, and so on.
Isn’t all this fair comment? A reference to Lahore’s heera mandi and its insipid nautch girls was inevitable, as was dining out in the famous Food Street, but what’s so wrong about that? Snapshots about how the other half lives are captured in scenes of open rooms in the environs of the old city in which people sit and watch Indian video films or young men shoot pool and bet on games. The article sympathetically notes that “with the coming of General Musharraf’s rather practical governance, those rare house sniffs by cops and the street checks to seek out drinkers for eventual fining, imprisonment or Islamic lashings have virtually been abolished” A truer and unprejudiced snapshot for the English reading Indian public couldn’t have been constructed.
Perhaps the pious in our midst would much prefer visiting journalists to paint Pakistan like a sort of Afghanistan – where bombs go off regularly killing fellow Muslims and foreigners alike, where Islamic jihadis in camouflage sport guns and rocket launchers and strut about threatening everyone, where black-shuttlecocked women ply the streets like penguins. Certainly, that’s an image of Pakistan which has sometimes been flogged by eminent western writers in eminent western newspapers. In fact, not so long ago, an article on Karachi in a leading western newsmagazine did just that, portraying the city as infected with terrorists, kidnappers, criminals and unholy mafias, unsafe for visiting businessmen and sportsmen — a perception that eventually led to the cancellation of proposed cricket test matches in the city for security reasons. But surely that’s not what we want the world to think, do we? Aren’t we keen to tell the world that we are as normal and moderate and welcoming and fun-loving and safe and profitable as any emerging-market middle income country in the world?
In part, at least, the furore seems politically inspired. Leading the nasty charge is a rabid anti-India (read anti-Hindu), “thekedar of Pakistan” newspaper whose other virtues are being pro-Nawaz Sharif and anti-General Musharraf. It has been particularly harsh on General Musharraf for wanting to play ball with America and for his flexible and pro-peace policy vis-à-vis India. It has distorted the article in question to try and erode the public goodwill for General Musharraf’s India policy. In part, too, this is simply a case of sour grapes for some frustrated Pakistani hacks who were not invited to, or missed out on, the social GTs where much harmless fun was had by all. There is a surfeit of such pious, self-righteous, killjoys in the Land of the Pure. But their bark is worse than their bite and we should learn to shrug them off.
The fact is that the new-generation Indians who came to Pakistan were overwhelmed by our natural hospitality. The fact is that they universally went back with wonderful memories of Pakistan and Pakistanis. The fact is that they wrote enthusiastically about their trip. The fact is that their writings are serving to erode the prejudices of past generations and reversing the negative image of Pakistan as a land of raving fundamentalists who oppress their women. The fact is that they will become Pakistan’s best ambassadors to India. What more can the cause of peace require?
(May 14-20, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 12 – Editorial)
Return of the native?
The government has used a sledge hammer to try and swat a fly. In the process it has trampled over the media, locked up politicians, roughed up protestors, blocked streets, barricaded the airport, disrupted flights, and cocked a snook at the judiciary. It’s not looking good, is it? Shahbaz Sharif has been catapulted into the popular imagination beyond his wildest dreams. He will come to haunt his detractors and they will come to rue their ham fisted approach.
The Sharifs have time and again proved themselves to be a most cunning and duplicitous political family. Their meteoric rise in the 1980s was owed as much to mock humility and sham obsequiousness at the altar of the civil-military establishment as to base financial shenanigans. However, once in power, they turned on the very army chief (Asif Nawaz) who as Chief of General Staff had helped thwart the destabilizing moves of his boss (Aslam Beg). Then they focused their sights on a president of Pakistan (Ghulam Ishaq Khan) who had conspired to install them into power. When the gambit backfired, they sidled up to another president (Farooq Leghari), nudging him to pave the way for their re-entry into the corridors of power. Before long, however, they allied with another army chief (Jehangir Karamat) to show their second presidential benefactor to the door. A year later they sacked their second military benefactor. Soon, however, they were conspiring to oust their third army ally (Pervez Musharraf) by stroking the ambitions of his subordinates. And if it hadn’t been for a combination of unforeseen circumstances, coupled with a bad selection of the proposed new army heiracrhy, they would have succeeded in their conspiracies. In the latest episode, they have played their cards shrewdly again.
The Sharifs agreed to a ten year exile in exchange for political clemency. It was a desperate deal for desperate men in desperate times. Like all such past deals, it was bound to be retracted. But General Musharraf didn’t formulate a good strategy to counter them. In the event, they have gained valuable mileage while he is looking like a political novice obsessed with mere survival rather than positive longevity. How’s that?
The Sharifs tested the waters by means of a two phase, two track policy: In phase one- track one they tried to loosen the bonds of their “agreement” by sending members of their family to Pakistan on one pretext or another; in phase one-track two, they tried to create and exploit the perception that Shahbaz Sharif had no hand in the Get-Musharraf coup of 1999 so that General Musharraf could be “softened up” and an opening created for Shahbaz. This strategy succeeded to such an extent that Shahbaz was able to “escape” Saudi Arabia last year for America with the covert “blessings” of General Musharraf. In Phase two-track one, Shahbaz Sharif built a new media image for himself as a great nationalist and patriot and administrator who was dying to return home and face the consequences. These tactics also bore fruit when General Musharraf began to toy with the idea of making up with Shahbaz on the condition that he should make a clean break with Nawaz. Emboldened, the Sharifs launched phase two-track two – Nawaz would maintain a stunning silence while Shahbaz would gear up a media campaign to return to his beloved country and face the consequences. Accordingly, the media was wound up and an appropriate reference made to the Supreme Court. The government’s disarray in the face of this cunning Sharifian strategy was reflected in myriad hot and cold ways. The stage was set, the audience was assembled and the spotlights were turned on for friend and foe.
Shahbaz Sharif was once a political minnow in the shadow of his demagogic brother Nawaz Sharif. He struggled to create a political career for himself while Nawaz was first CM Punjab and then PM Pakistan. But it wasn’t until 1997 that Nawaz relented under his father’s pressure to make Shahbaz CM Punjab. But since two swords couldn’t be jointly sheathed, Nawaz kept the reins of the Muslim League firmly in his own hands, relegating Shahbaz to the position of a glorified provincial administrator instead of allowing him to manufacture a popular political constituency of his own.
But all that has changed now. With Nawaz out of the reckoning, the Sharifs have successfully manufactured Shahbaz as a courageous and clever politician in the popular imagination. The idea also is that since Shahbaz doesn’t carry the opprobrium attached to Nawaz in many Pakistani minds, especially to those in the civil-military establishment and the independent media, he will be an ideal candidate to flog after General Musharraf has been inevitably hoist by his own petard and his covenant with the Sharifs is no longer valid.
After Nawaz and Benazir, we now have two new “courageous heroes-in-waiting”: Asif Zardari and Shahbaz Sharif. Whatever General Pervez Musharraf may say and feel and do, the fact is that more than ever the future belongs to the mainstream PPP and PMLN. The sooner he accepts this fact and realigns himself on the basis of ground realities rather than personal dislikes, the better for himself and for Pakistan.
(Feb 09-15, 2001, Vol – XII, No. 50 – Editorial)
Reason and irrationality?
The facts relating to the Frontier Post episode on January 29 expose the degeneration of state and society in Pakistan. Indeed, for those who, like General Pervez Musharraf, are concerned about the adverse perceptions of Pakistan abroad, this case reveals what is wrong with us.
First: It is inconceivable that any sane Muslim could actually blaspheme against Allah or the Prophet (peace be upon him). It is doubly inconceivable that he/she would deliberately publish a blasphemous statement made by anyone else, not least because the punishment for this offence is death. But if a mad man were to commit this offence, the punishment for it in any civilised society would be confinement to an asylum for treatment rather than death at the hands of a frenzied mob. But we do things differently here.
Second: The blasphemous letter from an American Jew got through the defences of the concerned editor for three main reasons. (a) It was received by e-mail, which meant that it didn’t have to be scrutinised and then typed. (b) Its headline (Why Muslims hate Jews) was the stuff of everyday views in this country, which meant that its chances of being glossed over were greater than if it had been the other way round (Why Jews hate Muslims) (c) It was in English which, unfortunately, is not even a sufficiently-grasped second language for a majority of the writing and subbing staff of many such newspapers (a former editor of the FP in Lahore likes to recount fearful stories of how many reporters were inclined to file copy in Urdu, which then had to be translated into English by only marginally better English writers). This is a good example of what can go wrong when information technology is expected to interface efficiently with a barely literate society.
Third: The mobs that burnt down the press the following day comprised zealots who hadn’t even seen the letter because they couldn’t read or write a word of English. Indeed, if they’d been instigated to murder, they would have done so blindly. But they were neither herded to an asylum, nor booked for arson. Such is the sorry state of law enforcement in our country.
Fourth: General Pervez Musharraf was quick to denounce the publication of the letter as an unacceptable transgression of “press freedom”. That the case had nothing at all to do with press freedom was obvious enough. But General Musharraf’s readiness to tar and feather the press at the first available opportunity reveals his basic hostility to the idea of fundamental rights. Indeed, it is clear that the supergenerals tolerate a free press not because they sincerely believe in its virtues but because the existence of a free press generates desperately needed brownie points for them from the international community. At least there should be no illusions on this score.
Fifth: The role played by PTV was extremely negative. The pictures and commentary on the national Khabarnama were designed to fuel outrage against the alleged perpetrators of blasphemy rather than urge restraint and uphold law and order. Interestingly enough, though, five people were killed the same day in Quetta as a result of police violence against a crowd of demonstrators protesting the dismal drought conditions in Balochistan that have wrecked the lives of countless unfortunate citizens. But there was not one word on Khabarnama about their grievous fate. When the medium is the message in this increasingly violent and fanatical country, why should we blame foreigners for portraying and perceiving us as we really are in everyday life?
Sixth: The local general was more loyal than the Chief. The administration charged seven persons, including the chowkidar of the press, with blasphemy, arrested them, closed down the paper, blacked out its web-site, escorted another mob to attack a cinema in the area the following day, arrested six more persons from the FP’s Urdu publication Maidan and shut it down. Such imprisonment is euphemistically called “protective custody” in this country. It means that instead of protecting you by dispersing the lawless mob, the state is ready to abuse your freedom by putting you into prison.
If the events of January 29/30 have deservedly marred the image of the government and people of this country, we might say a silent prayer for a ray of sanity in its aftermath. A commission of inquiry has been established to sort out this mess. The leaders of the religious parties have been persuaded to cool tempers (indeed, they are now wont to claim that they fell into a trap set by Islam-hating Jews – incidentally, an unrepentant Brooke BenDzac has now e-mailed newspapers crowing that the reaction to his letter proved the point he was trying to make). And chances are that all but one or two of the accused journalists will shortly be set free.
Civil society is increasingly held hostage by religious fanatics in Pakistan. So-called “Islamic” laws, which distort reality, hinder rather than help progress. In an age of reason and rationality, General Musharraf’s Pakistan is out of step with the rest of the world.
(March 09-15, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 2 – Editorial)
Borrow more not less
Why aren’t foreign investors interested in Pakistan? The Economist recently commented on the prospects of foreign investment in emerging markets on the basis of an opinion survey of 135 key executives of the world’s biggest 1000 companies. “Size matters”, it said, adding “China and Brazil, two big emerging markets that are expected to grow quickly, now occupy the second and third spots” in the preferential scale of foreign investors. India is among the top seven. But Pakistan, with a population nearing 150 million, is nowhere in sight, despite the fact that all but four emerging markets in the poll were smaller in size than Pakistan. Clearly, if size matters, it isn’t critical at all. What is?
“General economic performance and exchange rates” are important confidence-building factors, argues The Economist, quoting Brazil’s GDP growth of 4.4% last year on the back of a surge of 7.5% in industrial production. This makes sense. The east Asian tigers – Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore – who were in desperate waters not so long ago are back in business, having recently stabilised their exchange rates and posted growth rates of 6%-12%. In contrast, Pakistan’s GDP is languishing at about 3.5%, large-scale industrial production is stuck at below 2% and its rupee is devalued by over 13% every year.
Curiously enough, though, even these two factors may not be critical. Turkey is in The Economist’s list of 25 top emerging markets when Pakistan is not, even though its size is less than Pakistan’s, its interest rate is several thousand percent, inflation is about 80% per annum, industrial production was minus 4.2% last December and its trade balance was minus US$ 27.4 billion last November.
Statistics reveal an interesting common factor among the 25 top emerging markets. Irrespective of economic performance, exchange rate stability or size of the country, all of them boast significant levels of forex reserves. China was second in the emerging market list and first in the forex reserve category (US$164 billion); Turkey was 22nd but had reserves of US$ 19 billion. India was 7th but its reserves topped US$ 37 billion. Hong Kong was last with reserves of US$ 106 billion! In fact, only Hungary had reserves of under US$ 11 billion.
Compare this to Pakistan’s forex reserves of only US$ 1 billion last December. In fact, we have been on the brink of financial default for many years, but acutely so after May 1998 when we tested the nuclear bomb, froze forex deposits and betrayed the confidence of Pakistani and foreign investors alike.
The level of forex reserves is a good barometer of the potential health of any economy because it reflects its ability to pay back royalty, dividends and interest on loans. It enables free outward movement of capital, which is a pre-requisite for greater foreign investment inflows. What economic strategy will ensure a respectable level of forex reserves?
The prevailing wisdom is that we should focus on reducing our “crippling international debt”. But, all other things being equal, foreign debt reduction should lead to forex reserve reduction rather than the other way round. Nor is debt a bad thing necessarily. In fact, some of the most indebted countries of the world are among the richest or most dynamic emerging markets of today. It is one’s ability to pay back debt that matters to foreign investors and creditors. Thus, the higher the level of forex reserves, the greater the credit worthiness of the country and potential inflow of foreign investment.
There are two major ways to build forex reserves. By exporting more than importing. But we can’t do this overnight, given the lack of a sufficiently developed human resource base necessary to make the changeover from an import-dependent economy to an export-led one. The other is to create an economic and political environment in which people want to send money for savings and investment in Pakistan rather than one in which everyone wants to hoard, hide or take it out of the country.
But we cannot hate or spurn the international community while we beg it to bail us out of our misery. We cannot hover on the brink of financial default while we ask foreigners to invest in our country. We cannot turn a blind eye to religious extremism and indulge in regional warmongering and expect international secular democrats to support us. We cannot pretend to locate our problems in South Asia while we search for solutions in the Middle-East. We cannot posit a political defiance of the West on nuclear-related issues while we pretend a tactical economic alignment with it.
We can attract foreign capital and know-how to Pakistan by creating a healthy level of forex reserves. This can be done by persuading the international donor community to write off a chunk of our international debt or to radically reschedule it. Or, better still, by getting it to lend us more money rather than less on even more favourable terms so that we are able to capture the space required to restructure our economy for self-sustained growth. But this, in turn, can only be predicated on an assured, long-term strategic partnership with the West as in the case of Turkey. Nothing less will suffice.
(March 16-22, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 3 – Editorial)
Strategic depth or isolation?
“The Taliban’s Buddha-bashing is un-Islamic, argue Islamic scholars and religious leaders across the world. It is illegal, claim international jurists. It is unnecessary, irrational, unreasonable, stupid, nay barbaric, say others. Indeed, not one word in defence of this senseless destruction has been uttered by anyone outside Afghanistan. Yet the Taliban are defiant. Why’s that?
When the rag-tag armies of the Taliban first swept across the war-ravaged plains and mountains of Afghanistan in 1995-96, they were motivated more by their desire to wage war for the purposes of peace than by any madrassah -inspired zeal to enforce a particular “”vision”” of Islam. But, prodded and propped up by Pakistan, they ended up conquering nearly all of Afghanistan in the next two years. Subsequently, they sought to acquire legitimacy, or reinvent themselves, primarily in the garb of an Islam in which pre-Islamic tribal custom and primitive rituals, superstition and ignorance, all jostled for supremacy with ordained notions of equality and social justice. Thus, even as Pakistan turned a blind eye or condoned their retrogressive actions, one Taliban decree followed another in banning music, shaving heads, outlawing female education and employment, cutting-off hands, and even stoning alleged adulterers to death. In due course, the inability of the Taliban (and their Pakistani handlers) to erect an efficient, moderate and consensual political and administrative system in multi-ethnic Afghanistan and their increasing frustration at being denied international recognition created a propensity for negative or punitive measures in order to entrench themselves domestically.
Unfortunately, the international community’s attitude towards the Taliban hasn’t helped in moderating their beliefs. After walking out of Afghanistan at the end of the cold war, the West has made no serious institutional effort to engage the Taliban in the economic and political reconstruction of Afghanistan as a gateway to the mineral-rich region of Central Asia. On the contrary, it has rained cruise missiles on Afghanistan and thwarted the Taliban’s attempts to demolish their opponents. In fact, the latest episode of Buddha-bashing may be seen in the light of the UN sanctions on the Taliban regime last January. How’s that?
The UN sanctions were applied when drought and famine stalked Afghanistan, when millions were faced with starvation, fuelling the exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Pakistan. The aim of these sanctions is to weaken the Taliban’s hold on Afghanistan, partly by provoking internal instability and partly by denying them Pakistani military assistance in the forthcoming spring offensive by the Northern Alliance led by former Afghan president Burhannudin Rabbani (whose non-existent government is still recognised by the UN as the legitimate government of Afghanistan). These sanctions have been followed by three major acts of defiance, frustration, resentment or anger by the Taliban: Osama Bin Laden’s marriage was internationally publicised, as if to say “”up yours””; a massacre of Shi’ite Hazaras was blithely condoned, as if to say “”who cares””; two women were executed for alleged adultery, as if to say “”so what”” and now the Buddhas so beloved of the international community have been demolished, as if to say “”damn you.””
The latest provocation is particularly instructive. Five years ago, Mulla Umar had decried the Taliban zealots who ransacked Kabul Museum and destroyed priceless artefacts; last year he set up a committee to review the case of “”idol-worship””; five weeks after the UN sanctions, on February 26 this year, and despite acknowledging that there are no Buddhists in Afghanistan, he issued his fatwa and refused to back down when the world roared in outrage.
Pakistan’s cynical attitude to Afghanistan and its opportunist relationship with the Taliban is also responsible for the current impasse. In pursuit of dubious notions of statecraft, Islamabad has relentlessly, and often recklessly, sought to make Afghanistan a subservient client state. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was Pakistan’s first blue-eyed boy. But when he failed to deliver, a “”historic accord”” was clinched with Burhanuddin Rabbani. But when Rabbani demonstrated that he had a mind of his own, Islamabad was quick to clutch at Mullah Umar. Now Mulla Umar has become unpredictable and unreasonable but there is no fall-back or forward position for Pakistan as it writhes uncomfortably in the glare of international censure. Indeed, even though Islamabad claims that it did more than anybody else to dissuade the Taliban from carrying out their threat to demolish the Buddhas, the world has reserved its harshest criticism for Pakistan as the “”sole defender and supporter of the extremist regime in Afghanistan””. The fear is that Islamabad could be further isolated as moderate Muslim nations scramble to evade the fallout of the Taliban’s extremist version of “”Islam”” that borders “”international terrorism””, as the European Union fulminates about Pakistan’s failure to exercise its “”considerable and unique influence”” with the Taliban, and as the United States weighs its options to bomb Osama Bin Laden out of Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s Afghan policy is an unmitigated disaster. The Taliban blowback in the form of sectarian and jehadi inspired violence continues to exact a heavy toll of civil society in Pakistan. Now it is threatening to push us into the eye of an international storm. The sooner we change our misplaced notions of outreach, the better. The blowback of vague “”strategic depth”” is certain strategic isolation and despair.
(Feb 16-22, 2001, Vol – XII, No. 51 – Editorial)
Far reaching repercussions
The Sunday Times of London has recently published a story that damns politicians and state institutions alike in Pakistan. The report suggests that an official of the Intelligence Bureau was ordered in 1998 by the head of the Accountability Bureau, Mr Saif ur Rehman, to tap the telephones of Justice Abdul Qayyum of the Lahore High Court (illegal order by politicians, illegal implementation by IB). The IB official later pocketed the tapes and decamped to London, eventually handing them over to the British newspaper. If true, the conversations between Justice Qayyum and Saif ur Rehman, Khalid Anwar (then law minister), Mrs Abdul Qayyum and others are fascinating because they reveal the political bankruptcy of the system and those who are elected or nominated to make it work.
The tapes suggest that Justice Qayyum was bullied by the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his minions into convicting former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and her spouse Asif Zardari for corruption in 1999. This means that – irrespective of the substantial evidence laid against the two accused – the trial wasn’t conducted entirely in a free or fair manner as required by law. Ms Bhutto shrieked as much during and after the trial but critics, including TFT, dismissed her allegations against Justice Qayyum as inconceivable. Hence when the review petition comes up for hearing before the Supreme Court on February 26, the court will be hard put to choose between acquitting the couple or ordering a fresh trial. If it clings to a third option – upholding the verdict – it risks being tarred by the same brush.
The role played by each of the actors merits comment. Nawaz Sharif ordered Saif ur Rehman to bug the judge and Mr Rehman had no qualms in barking compliance to the head of the IB who did likewise to his subordinate staff. Everyone acted illegally down the chain of command. Mr Rehman, in particular, stands out like a sore thumb. He is earlier known to have boasted that the “”judges were in his pocket””. Apparently, Mr Sharif also leaned on the then chief justice of the Lahore High Court, Justice Rashid Aziz, to advise Justice Qayyum to do the needful or else. The Supreme Judicial Council needs to take a careful look at this allegation.
The law minister, Khalid Anwar, acted in a deplorable manner. What is wrong with asking a judge to hurry up, he asks. Nothing, if this is done in open court and in a transparent fashion. But it is immoral it if it is done amidst dire threats brandished by officials at the Prime Minister’s behest. Mr Anwar also claims that his government never authorised the IB to wire-tap the judges. Nonsense, says former chief justice Sajjad Ali Shah, who reports that when a bug was discovered on his phone, Mr Anwar advised him not to make an issue of it. We might also recall that this is the same gent who, as President Farooq Leghari’s council in 1996-97 in the Bhutto dismissal case before the Supreme Court, cited phone tapping of judges by the Bhutto regime as a major justification for her government’s ouster.
Finally, there is the judge in the dock. By all accounts, a most competent and learned man, indeed one on whom undue reliance has been thrust by politicians and judges alike in politically sensitive or legally complex cases. But the tapes have compromised his position. He could try and ride out the vicious gossip or he could call it a day and quietly fade away. If he chooses the first route, the law would require him to face the Supreme Judicial Council and explain his situation.
One last matter. The timing of the revelations – just before the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear Benazir Bhutto’s review petition – and the dubious role of the IB Deputy Director (how has he suddenly acquired a conscience?) is thought to cast doubts about the veracity of the tapes and the allegations flowing from them. Not so. The tapes are authentic enough. If they weren’t, every one of the alleged culprits would have tripped over the others to sue the Sunday Times for millions of pounds in criminal defamation and the judges involved would have hauled up everyone in sight for gross contempt of court.
Nor should it matter whether the spook in question received a hefty cheque or a promise of some lucrative posting in the future for allowing his conscience to get the better of him. The fact is that Ms Bhutto has cunningly exploited the counter-evidence at her disposal for maximum effect like a true politician who may be down but refuses to be out.
This case could have far-reaching repercussions. It might give Ms Bhutto a new lease of life. It might stiffen the resolve of lawyers and politicians to agitate for democratic revival and accountability. And it might embolden the judiciary to redeem itself by standing up a little bit to the government.
(Jan 19-25, 2001, Vol – XII, No. 47 – Editorial)
Unholy wars
Religio-political forces in Pakistan, which have been molly-coddled by civilian and military governments since the time of General Zia ul Haq, constitute a double-edged weapon. On the one hand, they are propped up as an integral element of a “national security strategy” devised to secure some sort of military advantage in Afghanistan and political leverage in Kashmir. On the other, they are visible threats to the fabric of democratic government and civil society in the country. In fact, as the world recoils from an image of Pakistan wrought by such gun-toting fundamentalists bent on waging jehad against the West, the price of this dubious state strategy becomes prohibitive.
Nothing demonstrates this more forcefully than the increasingly threatening postures adopted by some such elements. Certainly, it is questionable whether the Jamaat i Islami is within its constitutional rights to exhort the corps commanders of the Pakistan Army to remove the COAS from office (in effect, stage a coup d’etat). Worse, nothing undermines the efficacy of the state or erodes the writ of law than a policy of “selective appeasement” as demonstrated by a meeting between the Lahore Corps Commander and the leader of the Jamaat i Islami on this issue.
Other worrying examples abound. Alarmed by the spectre of JI and other religio-political activists rampaging on the streets, the government was quick to backtrack on procedural modifications to the controversial blasphemy law, in the process losing considerable credibility at home and abroad. Yet when some minority and human rights organisations decided to march peacefully in Karachi the other day against the excesses of such laws and the injustice of the separate-electorate system, the police was ordered to beat them black and blue and arrest them in the scores. If the first was an act of capitulation disguised as a “tactical retreat” (“we don’t want to open unnecessary fronts”), the second was a manifestation of might against right in defense of a dubious “law” and a non-existent “order”.
Equally illuminating was the government’s response to a threat by another religio-political group – the Tanzimul Akhwan – to march on Islamabad and demand the enforcement of shariah. The groveling attitude of the officials who met with the leaders of this group, including a federal minister, and promised all manner of concessions to them confirms our fears just as much as it raises their hopes – demand a mile and you will be a given a yard; and every yard is another step along the route to capturing state power. Therefore we are not at all surprised that the interior minister, Gen (retd) Moinuddin Haider, was told to buzz off when he ever-so-gently chided the bearded ensemble at Akora Khattak not to perpetuate a negative or bad image of Pakistan.
General Moinuddin Haider, like his boss General Pervez Musharraf, is among the best faces of this regime. Both are temperate and pragmatic persons, who prefer not to speak with forked tongues even when real politik demands otherwise. Indeed, one of their strengths is their ability to project a degree of sincerity or compulsion in what they do or don’t do. That, however, is precisely why they are not hot favourites with the likes of Qazi Hussain Ahmad or Maulana Sami-ul-Haq. But the issue here is not one of personalities. It is one of approach. If the military establishment, of which both Generals are card-carrying members, is so dependent on religio-political groups for its long-term (this is the critical factor) foreign policy agendas in the neighbourhood, why should it clamp down on its allies at anyone’s insistence or instigation? The fundos know this and have time and again shown an inclination to exploit this factor to the hilt. Indeed, that is why it is increasingly looking like a case of the tail wagging the dog rather than the other way round.
This could have adverse short-term consequences for national security apart from the insidious longer-term damage to state and society. A case in point relates to the peace process initiated by New Delhi with the backing of the United States. We do not know whether India is sincere or whether it is posturing. But one thing is already clear: whichever side is perceived to sabotage the process by adopting an unduly intransigent attitude at any stage of the game will be condemned in the corridors of power all over the world. Thus aggressive posturing for maximum negotiating strength by either side is fraught with risk. In India’s case, a denial of visas to the Kashmiri leaders or a continuing refusal to agree to a meeting between its prime minister and the Pakistani chief executive, without sufficiently valid or palatable reasons, would hurt its cause. In Pakistan’s case, diminishing returns are bound to set in if suicide attacks by the Mujahideen continue on key military or civilian targets in India, thereby giving India a good excuse to abandon the peace process and hold Pakistan responsible for its breakdown. Thus the link between the Pakistani state and religio-political elements could spell trouble for the country on more than one count if it is not firmly calibrated. The moot question is whether Islamabad has the will and ability to do that.
(Jan 26-Feb 01, 2001, Vol – XII, No. 48 – Editorial)
Hunter and hunted
Benazir Bhutto has recently remarked about a functioning intelligence-agency state within the dysfunctional state of Pakistan. She refers to the insidious role of the ISI and the MI in “hunting” democratic governments, in running amok in pursuit of a national security agenda “at variance with the popular will” and in “dividing the civilian popular base by holding out to those who cannot win – the promise of power without legitimacy”. She says she was overthrown in 1990 because she chose to dictate her own security agenda. But because the liberal forces which “should have stood by” her failed to do so, she accepted a “historic compromise” by following the security agenda of the agencies in her second stint in office. “I accept my part of the responsibility but others must own up to theirs”, she says.
Much of what she says about the agencies’ dirty tricks during her first term in office is well known and true enough – the shenanigans of the “midnight jackals”, Brig Imtiaz Billa and Major Amer, in destablising her government; the “poisonous” stories of handing over lists of Sikh terrorists to India; the reluctance of the army chief, General Aslam Beg, to salute her and his role in egging on the MQM to split with the PPP and create violent disturbances in Karachi; the role of a serving corps commander and Nawaz Sharif in persuading Osama Bin Ladin to help finance a no-confidence motion against her by sending a cheque for US$ 10 million to General Aslam Beg personally; etc. If she had dilated on how the agencies rigged the 1990 elections to keep her out, how Nawaz Sharif was chosen by Lt General Hameed Gul and Ghulam Ishaq Khan to be PM above Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, how banker Yunus Habib was nudged to give crores to the ISI and how Lt General Asad Durrani, DG-ISI, forked over hard cash to Nawaz Sharif, General Aslam Beg and many others to ensure ‘proper results’ in the 1990 elections, she would have made a formidable case against her detractors.
Ms Bhutto, however, is guilty of selecting her facts to suit her case. She doesn’t acknowledge, for instance, her own secret attempts to turn the tables on Nawaz Sharif by pushing General Aslam Beg in the direction of a coup against the Sharif government in July 1991. Nor does she note how the then Chief of General Staff and COAS-designate, General Asif Nawaz, along with the then DG-IB, Brig Imtiaz Billa, joined hands to thwart General Beg’s threatening moves against a civilian government just prior to retirement. Indeed, after General Asif Nawaz became army chief and developed differences with Nawaz Sharif in 1992, Ms Bhutto redoubled her efforts to establish contact with him and try to pressurize him to get rid of Nawaz Sharif (remember the abortive “long march” in November 1992?). Thus if Ms Bhutto was done in by the national security wallahs from 1988-90, the fact is she did not hesitate for a moment in joining hands with them to try to destabilise and overthrow an elected government when her own turn came to live in opposition from 1990 to 1993.
Ms Bhutto is quite elaborative about what happened to her during her second time in office from 1993 to 1996. She claims that “everything was fine when Lt General Javed Ashraf Qazi was my DG-ISI” until “an officer called (Maj Gen) Shujaat was installed (in the ISI) and all our troubles began”. But she doesn’t explain why and who installed him, nor why, when General Qazi was such a goodie-goodie in her books, he retained Lt Gen Shujaat despite her objections. She says she tried to persuade the next DG-ISI Lt Gen Rana (“good man but quite simple”), and the Defence Secretary, to remove Lt Gen Shujaat but in vain. How was this possible, we wonder, when the Defence Secretary was her own man, the DG-ISI Rana was a “good man” and the COAS General Abdul Waheed was well-disposed towards her, apart from being a non-interfering sort of fellow.
Most surprisingly, Ms Bhutto lambasts Lt General Mahmood Ahmad, DG-MI in 1996 and currently DG-ISI, for conspiring against her, even though at the time she admits she “kept quiet”. Later, however, when Lt Gen Mahmood allegedly continued with his conspiracies, she asked General Jehangir Karamat, the then COAS, to explain Gen Mahmood’s conduct and rein him in, upon which the COAS is said to have written a letter to her saying that if she didn’t trust him he would be happy to resign. But she didn’t ask him to resign. Nor did she insist as PM that Gen Mahmood ought to be sacked or transferred. Yet she now wants General Mahmood to “explain to the nation at whose behest he did these things”.
Ms Bhutto’s story gets more confusing in 1996. She says that Gen Karamat told her in August that, according to Gen (retd) Hameed Gul, President Farooq Leghari was ready to sack her but was simply waiting for a direct nod from General Karamat. Then she says she learnt that General Mahmood, the DG-MI appointed and retained by General Karamat despite objections by her, was urging President Leghari to get on with it even as President Leghari was offering gulab jamans to her and reminding her that she was his “sister” and he was “ ghairatmand”and General Karamat was offering to “mediate” between her and her president. She also refers to “some foreign bankers” (Mr Shaukat Aziz, who was also friendly with her, was one such) who called upon General Karamat and told him that the economy was on the verge of defaulting. She says that when she asked General Karamat to go to President Leghari and “ask him point-blank” whether he intended to dismiss her government, she was faced with the stunning murder of her brother Murtaza Bhutto.
Ms Bhutto blithely “exonerates General Karamat and the military as an institution” and lays the blame at the door of “President Leghari in collusion with rogue elements of the intelligence and security apparatus” for her government’s dilemmas during her second stint. Yet she cannot explain why COAS Abdul Waheed wanted a Brigadier accused of sedition “to be hanged” whereas COAS Karamat wanted him “spared”, nor why COAS Waheed had no objections to the pursuit of an enquiry against former DG-ISI Lt Gen Asad Durrani for disbursing ISI funds to politicians in 1990 while COAS Karamat advised against it. The best part of this story claims that “ they changed my military secretary after telling me it was a routine change and when the COAS tried to send me a message (on the night of her government’s sacking), he could not get through and when the COAS got in touch with the defence secretary, he too could not get in touch with me”. This is ridiculous. Who are “ they”, if not the COAS and Defence Secretary? Nor is it conceivable that the army chief and defence secretary tried to contact her but couldn’t get through, despite all the hot lines and open phone lines and couriers at their service. As for not proceeding against Lt Gen Asad Durrani, Ms Bhutto has conveniently forgotten to mention one salient fact which might shed light on her indecision – Lt General Asad Durrani was “sacked” from the army in 1993 by General Abdul Waheed after it transpired that he had conspired with Ms Bhutto against PM Nawaz Sharif after Mr Sharif sacked him as DG-ISI in 1992 for running with the PM and hunting with the COAS General Asif Nawaz. Thus Lt General Durrani was not kosher when he was conspiring with Sharif and General Beg to keep Ms Bhutto out of office in 1989-90 but he was a “friend indeed” when he was conspiring with her against Nawaz Sharif in 1992-93!
Ms Bhutto’s story is part truth, part fiction. The truth is that the intelligence agencies undermined her government for various reasons during her two stints in office. But it is fiction to claim that they did so as “rogue elements” without the knowledge and approval of each army chief. The truth also is that if she was the hunted, she was not averse to being the hunter in turn. The truth admittedly is that a section of the liberal intelligentsia did not stand by her. But the fiction is that it did so for personal, false or whimsical reasons – indeed the truth is that she was abandoned because there were credible allegations of corruption against her.
But there is also a broader and more unpalatable truth at stake. The intelligence agencies are an organic and integral element of the military establishment at the apex of which sits the COAS with a rigid perspective on the constituent elements of national security. Therefore as long as the military’s view on such matters is at variance with the popular will as reflected in the views of a freely elected government, PM and parliament, there will be no political stability in this country. Both politicians and generals, past, present and future, should try to resolve this dilemma via a genuine Truth and Reconciliation Commission rather than continue to snipe from behind a façade of make-belief.
(Aug 27-Sep 02, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 27 – Editorial)
Pakistan between east and west
Pakistan’s relations with India on the east and Afghanistan on the west are not exactly brimming over with mutual trust and confidence. The outlook after the first round of dialogue with India is not optimistic. Equally, glowing pictures of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, embracing General Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad don’t reveal the true extent of mutual suspicion and “differences” between them. Who’s at fault?
Indo-Pak relations are not just bedevilled by a history of bad blood. The replacement of the BJP by the Congress in India has also disjointed the proposed dialogue. Mr Vajpayee’s Pakistan-initiatives could not be misconstrued as a sign of ‘sell-out or weakness’ owing to the strong BJP’s ultra-nationalist outlook. But the same cannot be said of the weak Congress government of Mr Manmohan Singh. The Indian prime minister constantly has to watch over his shoulder at the party president, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, who in turn constantly has to watch over her shoulder for much the same reasons that stopped her from herself becoming prime minister in the first place. It also takes time for a change of guard to come to grips with a complex and tricky inherited agenda. Why then is the Pakistani side demonstrating a degree of impatience with India based on its “inflexibility” in the first round of talks? Why, indeed, is Islamabad now insisting on a “timeframe” for the settlement of the Kashmir dispute when the two sides have not even begun to chew on the softer bones of contention in the composite dialogue?
One aspect of the explanation is obvious. Since the new Indian government has shown no sign of even wanting to talk to Pakistan about Kashmir, let alone demonstrate any willingness to compromise on the issue, the Pakistani side is trying to get the talks on Kashmir moving at least by demanding a “timeframe” for its resolution and linking progress on other issues like trade with that of movement on the K issue. Unfortunately, however, the Indians have perceived this Pakistani strategy as “unfair pressure tactics” tantamount to imposing “pre-conditions” on the dialogue and reacted by countering allegations of “cross-border terrorism” once again. Worse, both sides have degenerated into public statement-mongering despite an agreement to stay clear of potentially damaging one-upmanship.
But there may be a more serious concern lurking behind Pakistan’s impatience to get on with talks with India, especially on Kashmir. It is not inconceivable that General Pervez Musharraf has finally realised that the unholy links between Al Qaeda and the jihadi groups, sectarian factions and religious parties of Pakistan are seriously injurious to Pakistan’s health. But he is constrained from “packing up the jihad” until the K issue is on an irrevocable path to resolution since the jihad is the most potent card in Pakistan’s arsenal of negotiating tools with India. This would suggest that both countries have to be sensitive to each other’s domestic requirements, concerns and sensitivities even as they redouble their efforts to speed up the composite dialogue on all eight major tracks simultaneously. In the event, India should open the K issue for talks immediately and Pakistan should not stop holding the other issues hostage to progress on the K issue alone.
Much the same sort of problems beset Pak-Afghan relations. Islamabad is accused of abetting the Taliban resistance to the US-propped Karzai regime. Such allegations are indirectly routed through the US ambassador in Kabul and through the American media. But if neither Mr Karzai nor Washington has been too sensitive to Pakistan’s concerns and interests in the region – the need for a government in Kabul to suitably accommodate the ethnic Pashtuns who constitute a majority of the country – why should Islamabad play ball with them? Until recently, Mr Karzai was as cosy as a bug in a rug with the Northern Alliance which in turn was allied to India. The Americans, meanwhile, didn’t care two hoots about Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan. All they wanted was to showcase some “nation-building” in Kabul and it didn’t much matter whether it was good or bad for the region. In the event, if Islamabad has been compelled to play the distasteful Taliban card to compel Mr Karzai to build bridges with the Pashtuns and extricate himself from the grip of the Northern Alliance warlords, who can blame it? Hence it would make sense for Kabul and Washington to sit with Pakistan and cobble a joint medium-term strategy for stabilising Afghanistan rather than for any party to go it alone in the face of resistance from the others.
General Pervez Musharraf bargained away a slice of his institutional soul on Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 when he ditched the Taliban. His newly articulated flexibility on Kashmir suggests that he is ready to risk another such slice for the sake of peace with India. These are no mean concessions, given decades of institutional investment in such causes. On top of it, General Musharraf has risked his life by ordering these about-turns. That is why it is time New Delhi and Kabul and Washington conceded some diplomatic space to him in the region so that he can create the required political space at home and realign Pakistan’s sights in the new world order.
(Aug 13-19, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 25 – Editorial)
Happy Birthday Pakistan
There are two ways of looking at Pakistan on its 57th birthday. One, we can view it statically as a dysfunctional state system in which the social, political and economic indicators of progress like law and order, justice, provincial autonomy, security, health, education, employment, representative government, accountability, national consensus, social cohesion, civilian supremacy, all remain dismally poor. General Pervez Musharraf calls this the “half-empty glass” approach – the negative factors may be true but don’t tell the full or ‘real’ story of Pakistan today.
Two, we can look at Pakistan dynamically as “a work in progress”, a nation in the throes of dialectical change, moving painfully, haltingly towards a self – sustainable future. In this scenario, there is movement in the direction of higher economic growth, expanding private sector, freer media, bigger development expenditures and greater regional and international cooperation. More critically, we may even discern an extension of the “writ of the state” across the social and geographic landscape of the country aimed at curtailing the armed non-state actors who have usurped many of the rights of civil society in the last three decades. The dynamics of this state “deconstruction” – the “half-full glass” approach – could arguably constitute the elements of a welcome and necessary paradigm shift in the nature and functioning of the Pakistani state. Is this true? Which picture of Pakistan reflects its situation accurately?
A dynamic approach is always more realistic than a static one. While indicators of the level of state functionality are important, what is more important is to uncover the nature and direction of change in these indicators and to ascertain whether or not this change is temporary and expedient or intrinsic and enduring. How does Musharraf’s Pakistan score on this front?
General Musharraf’s 1999 coup was not premeditated as a harbinger of any reformist change, let alone paradigm shift, in Pakistan’s polity. In fact, his first two years were marked by concerns of personal survival and maintenance of the national status quo. If 9/11 hadn’t happened, compelling him to change some elements of his foreign policy, we might have continued going down the tube. But while General Musharraf was compelled to jettison or sideline oppositionists in his kitchen cabal, he was still not prepared to foreclose the era of jihad in the region by non-state actors. In fact, he was adamant that the Kashmir jihad could be clinically separated and de-linked from the Taliban-Al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11 and continued as before. This “institutional” thinking led to the “national” failure at Agra, which triggered the jihadi attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi, which provoked India to a year-long eye-ball confrontation with Pakistan, which jeopardised the economic prospects of the country at the very time when crucial economic space was available as a result of cooperation with the USA. This chain of events compelled a shift in Pakistan’s foreign policy and led to the opening with Atal Behari Vajpayee in 2003 that was eventually translated into a “composite” rather than “core-issue” dialogue with India. General Musharraf’s strength lay in understanding the compulsions of state craft when confronted by the force of necessity rather than in anticipating and foreclosing the correct options at every point as acts of conscious reformist zeal or vision.
This conclusion is best substantiated by the manner in which General Musharraf has handled his domestic, compulsion-free agenda. A classic status quo military strategy was followed to undermine the mainstream parties and ally with the religious parties in the elections of 2002. But soon thereafter the regional peace dialogue was joined with the international war against terrorism. However, when this agenda began to supersede the Islamic-jihadi paradigm, it provoked hostility from the MMA, jihadis and Al Qaeda. This culminated in assassination attempts on General Musharraf, his Karachi corps commander and his prime minister-in-waiting, compelling him to extend the war against Al Qaeda terrorism to the domestic non-state Islamist actors long nourished by the military for its “institutional” needs.
General Musharraf’s call for “enlightened moderation” in the affairs of state and society is a measure of his conclusions and convictions at the end of his compelling journey so far as leader of Pakistan. His new policy framework is externally manifested in the form of a serious peace dialogue with India, an unprecedented flexibility on Kashmir, an unremitting hostility towards Al Qaeda and a profitable alliance with the US. Domestically, it is marked by a crackdown on Islamic terrorism, by attempts to initiate curriculum reform and negotiate revision of the Hudood and other anti-women laws. The establishment, finally, of an enlightened Council of Islamic Ideology is a forerunner to a similar refurbishment of the Federal Shariat Court. All these acts reinforce each other and constitute the core of his new state philosophy. Are they, however, sufficient to enforce the paradigm shift necessary for self-sustainable growth of the Pakistan-nation-state?
No. While the direction of change is right, the momentum of change is too slow and awkward and unsure to constitute a critical and irreversible mass. In addition, two core elements are still missing from the equation. First, the jihadis have not yet been “packed up”. Apparently, the military’s argument is that until a “satisfactory solution” on Kashmir is found, this card cannot be abandoned unilaterally. This reflects an unfortunate hangover of institutional thinking at variance with the national interest formulated under the new rubric of “enlightened moderation”. The sooner General Musharraf realises this, the better. Certainly, the jihadis are in no two minds about packing him up along with his enlightened views. The cost of obtaining a solution to Kashmir on the back of the jihadis has proven both elusive and exorbitant. It is time to give up this failed strategy unilaterally. Second, the MMA has also got to be packed up so that the doctrine of “enlightened moderation” can take root across the country. But this cannot be done by force. It can only be done democratically on the basis of a new round of free elections in which room is made for the moderate mainstream parties to naturally pack up the reactionary politico-religious parties.
As long as General Pervez Musharraf’s agenda doesn’t address these two core concerns, his doctrine of “enlightened moderation” will remain an opportunistic philosophy incapable of protecting, enhancing and projecting the true national interest. Indeed, the proof that General Musharraf is finally his own man rather than a man of necessity only, and that Pakistan is irrevocably embarked upon a journey of creative rediscovery on its 57th birthday under his leadership, will only come when he moves pre-emptively to resolve these two issues of his own free will. Then the glass will truly be “half-full” and it would be an exhilarating experience to drink from it.
On that optimistic note, Happy Birthday Pakistan!
(Aug 20-26, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 26 – Editorial)
Corrupting “corruption”
Dr Asif Zardari’s lawyers have at last admitted that the multi-million dollar Rockwood Estate or “Surrey Palace” in the UK belongs to their client. They say the money from the sale of this property should go to Mr Zardari. Understandably, neither Mr Zardari nor Benazir Bhutto, nor indeed any of their busybody spokespersons, has denied this new twist in the facts. But we recall the days nearly a decade ago when Ms Bhutto, as prime minister of Pakistan, defiantly stood up in parliament to deny that she or her husband knew anything about the Surrey Palace, let alone have any financial stake in it. Such staunch denials were religiously flagged by the routine remark that “we don’t care who sells it to whom”. But now they desperately do.
The government has long alleged that Mr Zardari and Ms Bhutto were partners in “plundering” Pakistan and stashing their “loot” abroad via front companies and lawyers. There are several ongoing corruption cases in Pakistan against the couple. A case involving illegal kickbacks and commissions is also pending against them in Switzerland. At first, they ignored it on the grounds that they were not involved. Later, after receiving a suspended six-month jail sentence, they decided to contest the judgment.
This acknowledgement raises an important question whose answer affects the nature and scope of politics in Pakistan. Will it have an adverse impact on the other corruption cases against them and dent their personal and party reputations, credibility or popularity among their supporters at home and abroad?
The answer, regrettably, is “no”. Corruption is no longer a critical or even important issue in Pakistani politics. When anyone who’s anyone in government and opposition is perceived to be more or less “corrupt” – corruption having acquired a meaning beyond the purely illegal monetary context and come to imply many other illegal, bad and hypocritical actions like electoral rigging, institutional unaccountability, constitutional deviation, etc., — then “corruption” loses its sting and becomes a flaccid non-issue. This is how the graph of “corruption” has risen and fallen.
Ms Bhutto’s first government was widely perceived as corrupt. That is when Mr Zardari acquired the soubriquet of Mr Ten Percent. When her government was sacked, it was the most credible charge against her. Soon, however, Nawaz Sharif was also enmeshed in similar charges (motorway kickbacks, loan defaults, industrial empire building, plot scams, etc). Then Ms Bhutto won a second term and again succumbed to the lure of the lucre. The Surrey Palace scandal broke, followed by others in which commissions and kickbacks were prominently highlighted. “Corruption” became such a big-time media issue that both the ruling PPP and the PMLN opposition were compelled to float committees and bills against it in parliament. That is the time when Mr Imran Khan launched his political career as an urban “anti-corruption crusader” and Transparency International awarded Pakistan the dubious honour of being the second most corrupt country in the world after Nigeria. When Ms Bhutto was sacked in 1996, her government had plumbed to the lowest depths of popular alienation and disillusionment.
Interestingly, though, “corruption” was still far from becoming a clinching issue with the rural masses. Party machines, organisation, group loyalty, money, local politics and critical state-establishment backing mattered more. That is why Imran Khan lost his electoral deposit in the 1997 elections and Nawaz Sharif romped home with a two-thirds majority in parliament. In later years, notions of “corruption” were corrupted by Mr Sharif when his “accountability commission” under the corrupt loan defaulter, Saif ur Rehman, became a synonym for “victimisation”, political opportunism and repression. The same fate befell General Musharraf’s NAB after it excluded the military establishment from its ambit and later became a weapon in the hands of the junta to make and break political groups and parties. The net result of the withering away of corruption as a political issue was evident in the pre-poll rigged 2002 elections in which the “corrupt” PPP still received the largest number of votes of any party in the country. The concept of corruption was finally trashed when the “corrupt” Mr Zardari couldn’t be convicted for corruption in a corrupt political system run by a corrupt establishment and he was transformed into a martyr by his seven-year prison term without a conviction. No wonder then that he has had the audacity to openly claim rights to the Surrey Palace today. Even the idle chattering classes are not amused by such news any more.
The next general elections should bear out this conclusion. If General Musharraf were to accept the assumption that the final accountability commission in Pakistan is the court of the untutored and unwashed masses of Pakistan rather than the self-righteous military establishment-admittedly a rather heroic assumption – the pious MMA will be whittled down to size and the wretched Peoples Party and PMLN under their “corrupt leaders” will win hands down. That is why a process of national reconciliation is the need of the hour rather than hypocritical finger-pointing at one another in the hamaam.
(July 02-08, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 19 – Editorial)
Fated to shape up or ship out
Two weeks ago we wrote explaining why “the time had come for Mr Jamali to bid adieu after the budget session is over” ( TFT No: 15, June 4-10, 2004, Editorial: “Jamali’s days are numbered”). We argued that Mr Jamali had lost the confidence of both his “boss” General Pervez Musharraf and his “benefactor” Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. The “boss” was frustrated when Mr Jamali wasn’t much help in resolving the logjam with the MMA over the LFO. The “boss” was irked when Mr Jamali balked at approving the NSC bill in cabinet. The “boss” was furious when Mr Jamali publicly insisted that the “boss” would take off his uniform before the year was out even as the “boss” himself was plainly reluctant to uphold his own pledge. Meanwhile, Mr Jamali needlessly stepped on the toes of the benefactor’s ‘benefactor’ Tariq Aziz by questioning his right to be secretary of the NSC. The benefactor, too, was aghast when Mr Jamali made a bid to curry favour with Pir Pagara and tried to get a toehold in the Muslim League. No, the fellow had become unpalatable to both his boss and benefactor. He had been chosen because he was a non-entity tribal chief from a non-entity province who was expected to be a non-entity prime minister who left the business of ruling the party to his benefactor and the business of ruling the country to his boss. If he had remained true to expectations, he would still be here. But the lesson that the “boss” has imbibed is obvious: once a politico, always a despised politico. Hence his choice of Mr Shaukat Aziz, technocrat par excellence, as the next prime minister without a party or even a political constituency to flog.
The quick sacking in succession of two of the most docile, handpicked, politicos in the business, Ghulam Maher, the former Sindh chief minister, and Zafarullah Jamali, implies a big no-confidence vote by General Musharraf in his own political system. The selection of Mr Aziz confirms General Musharraf’s cynical disregard for one and all of the 190 ‘pro-Musharraf’ elected political representatives of the people of Pakistan in the national assembly. Not one among them can claim to enjoy the trust and confidence of his/her unelected and unrepresentative “boss”. Further proof of the continuing breakdown of the Musharrafian system is provided by the failure of the architect to cajole the MMA’s Maulana Fazlur Rehman to sit in the NSC, despite having blatantly rigged his nomination as leader of the opposition in parliament, as well as by the refusal of the NWFP chief minister Akram Durrani, to participate in the proceedings of the NSC. No wonder, General Musharraf is having serious qualms about taking off his uniform from whence flows all his power. What next?
In the short term, we shall probably have to witness the sorry spectacle of Chaudhry Shujaat, an interim prime minister in a non-interim dispensation, learning how to carry the mantle of a prime minister on behalf of a prime minister-in-waiting. Then we may expect the opposition parties to gang up against Mr Aziz and throw mud at him. Also, since it is no longer a question of whether Mr Aziz will win or lose a seat in parliament – he must win – his election will surely be dogged by allegations of rigging and his subsequent conduct will be fogged by lack of legitimacy. In time to come, the fact that Mr Aziz, as prime minister of Pakistan, is not also the leader of the ruling Muslim League, will take a heavy toll of the new political arrangement and compel General Musharraf to change tack again.
Meanwhile, the MMA may expect to be next in the firing line. General Musharraf’s ire is evident. But there is no easy way out of his dilemma. Having embraced the MMA and ‘kicked’ out the Bhutto PPP, he is now fated to bear the slings and arrows of his erstwhile fundo ‘non-allies’ or swiftly pack them off. One way out would be to create a rift between the two leading fundos Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Maulana Fazlur Rehman. Another solution would be to contrive a legal judgment against the fundos for electoral disqualification on account of their inadequate religious “sanads” (degrees). The MMA could also be uprooted by sacking the NWFP assembly, allying with the ANP, buttressing the PPP-Sherpao and PML, and selectively rigging the new provincial elections. But each such step would amount to another big vote of no-confidence in the Musharrafian system without guaranteeing unmitigated long-term success and certainty.
So General Pervez Musharraf is coming full circle. Along the loop he has sacrificed or jettisoned many friends because their advice or practice was not opportune enough. Among these may be counted those who made the 1999 coup, those who drafted the local government system, those who fashioned the NAB, those who drafted his original liberal manifesto in 1999, and those who gave the Pakistan military its nuclear wherewithal to stand up to India. Now it is the turn of the civilians in his loop. Before General Pervez Musharraf is through reinventing the political system, they had better shape up if they don’t want to be shipped out.
(July 09-15, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 20 – Editorial)
Organic nexus between culture and cultural
heritage is missing
The federal government has apparently prepared, with the help of UNESCO and several professionals of repute, a draft of a proposed ‘Cultural Policy’ for Pakistan. A seminar was held in Lahore the other day to debate the scope and contours of such a cultural policy. The ‘road show’ is now headed for Peshawar where it will unveil its ideas and solicit recommendations from noteworthy ulema. The plan is that once all the provinces have been ‘consulted’, an integrated ‘cultural policy’ framework can be established.
The media has not been formally provided copies of the draft for comment. Therefore we are obliged to refer to sketchy news reports about the seminar and the ideas floated therein. Why, we might ask, did no one think fit to make a distinction between a national ‘culture policy’ and a ‘cultural heritage’ policy? The two concepts are interlinked but separate. Culture is an amalgam of historical legacy and contemporary trends which people claim to own. But cultural heritage, or what a nation or people have inherited from the past, may or may not be the source of inspiration for a nation’s contemporary worldview, depending on the nature of the political ideology in vogue. How, then, can we have a viable policy on cultural heritage without placing it in the context of a national cultural policy?
We might also ask why everyone seems to be talking of a policy about how to physically treat our cultural heritage as a value-neutral, bricks and mortar object – on how to renovate and preserve historical monuments, erect statues, dig up archeological sites, display artifacts, build up museum collections, etc – but no one has had the guts to initiate a discussion about what should constitute the elements of a ‘national culture’ in Pakistan in which we can proudly own up to our historical legacies as constituting an integral dimension of our national character and psyche. How can we discuss how best to ‘preserve’ our cultural heritage when it has been drilled into us for the last thirty years that we must not own up to much of it because it is not Islamic? Would such a discussion in our environment be branded by vested ‘cultural’ interests as being orchestrated at the behest of supposedly ‘anti-Pakistan’, ‘foreign’, ‘liberal’ or ‘secular’ elements who are out to ‘subvert’ the ‘ideology and integrity of Pakistan’?
Indeed, a policy on cultural heritage can only logically flow from a political and philosophical understanding and acceptance of what constitutes our national ‘culture’. In other words, we must first come to terms with the concept and definition of ‘culture’ in modern-day Pakistan before we can adequately define a policy on how to treat our ‘cultural heritage’. The physical treatment of cultural heritage – preservation, display, etc – cannot be torn out of the context of how we view and own it in the larger context of our everyday lives and state philosophies.
Many questions arise. Is our Pakistani culture rooted in a multi-religious, multi-dynastic and multi-civilisational South Asian experiences born of the socio-political convulsions of state and society or is it an expression of a monolithic, relatively arid Middle-Eastern culture? Is it an exclusive articulation of predefined and preconceived ‘Islamic’ values or is it an amalgam of ancient pre-Islamic rites and non-Islamic rituals, medieval Islamic values, modern secular-colonial practices and post-modern globalising tendencies? Should we accept honour killings, child marriages, bonded labour, mass rapes, etc as valid outcrops of our social culture? Should we spurn classical South Asian dance and music as alien transgressions on our Islamic culture which are as abhorrent as modern western ones? Which, if any, constitutes a significant element of our contemporary composite culture – Hollywood, Bollywood or Lollywood? Should we preserve Islamic monuments but destroy non-Islamic ones and burn down shops selling video movies and music? Should we open classical ‘Indian’ music academies to both sexes while forbidding five star hotels from opening discos in their basements? Should we teach ‘modern’ art in our national arts colleges while forbidding our art galleries from displaying figures on canvas?
A by-product of this one-dimensional and hypocritical debate on ‘cultural policy’ is related to ‘tourism policy’. This can be summed up in one banal sentence: spruce up the historical monuments, get the ‘rest houses’ ready, pave the mountain roads, and never mind that the ‘politico-Islamic culture’ of the country is fiercely opposed to the unfettered enjoyment of leisure in a safe and secure environment. Try flogging Pakistan’s beautiful mountainous areas as tourist havens when world press headlines are screaming about the country’s Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, kidnapping, sectarianism and nuke rattling.
When the misguided ‘Islamic’ Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, their ‘cultural policy’ was clearly aimed at fiercely disavowing Afghanistan’s ‘cultural heritage’. We too in Pakistan have suffered from a similar disorientation between cultural policy and cultural heritage since General Zia ul Haq’s exploitation of Islam. It is time we set matters right. One of the integral elements of enlightened moderation is to fashion a true cultural policy that proudly owns up to its living and breathing cultural heritage and integrates it into our everyday lives.
(July 23-29, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 22 – Editorial)
Lessons and legacies of Kargil
The Kargil misadventure in 1999 continues to haunt Pakistan’s soldiers and politicians. When and by whom was the military plan made? Who decided (and why) that the time had come to implement it? Was prime minister Nawaz Sharif sufficiently briefed on all aspects of the operation, including contingencies, failsafe and fall-back positions, tactical versus strategic gains or losses, etc? Who sought American mediation when the conflict was spiraling out of control? What are the current legacies and future ramifications of Kargil on Indo-US-Pak relations, on the issue of nuclear deterrence, on the status of the Kashmir conflict, and on the civil-military relationship in Pakistan?
We know that the Kargil plan was dusted off the shelves and updated for discussion following a change in government or army high command. On each occasion the core argument in favour was that a successful seizure of the Kargil heights would lead to a significant tactical advantage for Pakistan over the only ground supply route Indian forces can use to bring in supplies to the most remote eastern part of Kashmir. By advancing onto these mountaintops overlooking the Srinagar-Leh highway, it was argued that Pakistan would be in a position to weaken Indian control over a significant part of the contested province. On each occasion, however, the idea was abandoned for being too provocative or risky since it meant breaking the traditional ground rules governing the withdrawal of both armies from their most advanced positions in the mountains to avoid the difficulties of manning them during the winter and then returning to them in the spring.
But this changed in late 1998 after four particularly hawkish army commanders and one remarkably dim politician came to form the core constellation of power in Islamabad. SSG Commando extraordinaire, General Pervez Musharraf, was appointed chief of army staff; a future coup maker, DG-ISI to-be and Taliban-supporter, General Mahmud Ahmed, became corps commander, Rawalpindi; General Javed Hasan, an opinionated former Military Attaché in Washington, was put in charge of the Force Command Northern Areas; and General Mohammad Aziz Khan was transferred from heading the Kashmir Division in the ISI to the elevated rank of Chief of General Staff in GHQ. The icing on the cake was PM Nawaz Sharif with an attention span of three minutes.
The plan to go ahead was probably clinched by this military clique on or about the time of the Lahore Summit between Nawaz Sharif and Atal Bihari Vajpayee in January 1999. That would explain the visible hostility of the brass to the Indian prime minister’s visit and the provocative attitude of the Jama’at-e Islami in Lahore. Mr Sharif was thereafter conned into accepting its need partly by the deceptive argument that a successful operation in Kargil would strengthen his hand in negotiating a pro-Pakistan solution to Kashmir with the Indians (during one ‘briefing’ he is said to have actually asked how far Srinagar was from Kargil and whether there was any possibility that Pakistani forces could actually seize it by surprise) and partly by denying him a full and unequivocal brief on the cons of the operation and its possible aftermaths and repercussions. The fact that the operation was kept logistically secret even from the chiefs of the air force and navy in its planning stages confirms this line of reasoning. In other words, the prime minister of Pakistan and the two other service chiefs were treated strictly on a “need-to-know basis”.
The Kargil operation was brilliantly executed because most of the Kargil heights were seized without a shot being fired. But, as in 1965, the brass didn’t adequately reckon on the Indian response. When the Indians woke up and tried to retaliate, they got the worse end of the deal, as anticipated. But as their casualties mounted, the demand grew for mobilising and throwing the full force of their military machine, including the air force, into the battle, including the idea of opening other more advantageous fronts against Pakistan. The Pakistani military had hoped that the conflict would be limited to the LoC at worst (where its position was favourable) while the nuclear deterrent was expected to stop India from precipitating full-scale war. In other words, it was presumed to be a win-win situation for Pakistan.
Unfortunately, however, the potential role and assessment of the United States was not correctly sufficiently inputted.”The United States was alarmed from the beginning (by) the conflict because of its potential for escalation into nuclear cataclysm”, writes Bruce Reidel, the special National Security assistant to President Bill Clinton who had a ringside view of the 4th July 1999 talks between Nawaz Sharif and the American President in Washington. “The nuclear scenario was obviously very much on our minds. Since the surprise Indian tests in May 1998 the danger of a nuclear exchange had dominated American nightmares about South Asia… In the new post-May era we confronted the reality of two nuclear tested states whose missiles could be fired with flight times of three to five minutes from launch to impact. One well-informed assessment concluded that a Pakistani strike on just one Indian city, Bombay, with a small bomb would kill between 150,000 and 850,000 alone Given these consequences for escalation, the US was quick to make known our view that Pakistan should withdraw its forces back behind the Line of Control immediately. At first Rick Inderfurth and Undersecretary Thomas Pickering conveyed this view privately to the Pakistani and Indian ambassadors in Washington in late May. Secretary Albright then called Sharif two days later and General Tony Zinni, who had a very close relationship with his Pakistani counterparts, also called Chief of Army Staff General Musharraf. These messages did not work. So we went public and called upon Pakistan to respect the LOC. I laid out our position in an on-the-record interview at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. The President (Clinton) then called both leaders in mid-June and sent letters to each pressing for a Pakistani withdrawal and Indian restraint.”
In consequence, he concludes, “ the Pakistanis and Indians were both surprised by the US position: Pakistan because Islamabad assumed the US would always back them against India and India because they could not believe the US would judge the crisis on its merits, rather than side automatically with its long time Pakistani ally. Both protagonists were rooted in the history of their half-century conflict and astounded that the US was not bound by the past.
The unprecedented American public tilt in favour of India upset the grand Pakistani plan. General Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif were obliged to seek a face saving retreat from the LoC. That is when the Pakistan army’s casualties soared. The question then arose of who would take the rap for a failed politico-military operation. That was when the seeds of irreconcilable discord were sown between the prime minister and his advisors and the Kargil generals led by General Musharraf. Each feared the other would oust and disgrace them. Therefore each began to manoeuvre for his safety. When Mr Sharif tried to meet with certain corps commanders, General Musharraf sidelined or ousted them. In a last ditch effort, prior to launching his coup against General Musharraf, Mr Sharif dispatched Shahbaz Sharif to Washington in September 1999 where he extracted a public statement from a senior unnamed American official that “a military takeover in Pakistan would not be tolerated” by Washington. Then Nawaz Sharif struck. But he hadn’t reckoned on the fact that with General Musharraf away in Sri Lanka the “Kargil boys” – Generals Aziz and Mahmud – were ready and waiting to counter him.
Kargil has left a significant clutch of legacies. First, as a deterrent against full-scale war, the nuclear bomb on the shelf actually emboldened the Pakistanis to launch an aggressive incursion in Kargil. However, the fact that the United States didn’t recognise the deterrent value of the nuclear bomb and could compel its counter perception to prevail on Pakistan, meant that the bomb had no effective or operational deterrent value in certain strategic circumstances such as in Kargil. Second, it brought the Pakistan military back to power in a domestic and international environment ill-suited to it (the economy was in a bad way, President Clinton lectured General Musharraf for five hours in 2000 and the Commonwealth booted Pakistan out) and by a strange twist of events (9/11) enabled it to extend its stay in the new environment best suited to it. Third, it enabled India and the US to strike an unprecedented strategic long-term bargain which is likely to transcend the current favourable US-Pakistan equation to be reviewed after the worst of the war against terrorism is over. Fourth, it has compelled a significant shift in the Pakistan military’s approach to and attitude towards India and Kashmir. The military establishment has come full circle by going back to the Simla Pact of 1972 in trying to resolve Kashmir by means of a bilateral dialogue with India rather than by means of jihad or multilateral diplomacy and third party mediation. In other words, Kashmir is no longer the core issue for dispute resolution as fervently argued by the military establishment in the last fifteen years. Fifth, Kargil has definitely pricked the bubble of the Pakistani military’s propagandistic and self-induced triumphalism over the “cause” of Kashmir. The world is in favour of the status quo on the LoC and even China has abandoned Pakistan on this front. If Kashmir was the unalterable internal “solution” for the cause of military paramountcy in Pakistan until Kargil, it will henceforth have to be seen as the external “problem” to which a compromise resolution can be found.
General Pervez Musharraf’s military takeover was a direct result of Kargil. But it was a reactionary act by desperate men in suspicious times. It could not have been sustained if it had not been for a chain of events unleashed by 9/11. Fortunately, however, the combination of Kargil and 9/11 has compelled the powerful Pakistani military establishment to finally countenance a necessary paradigm shift abroad. The beneficial consequences of this are already apparent on the external front. But Kargil is destined to compel another paradigm shift at home. This will become obvious on the domestic political front once the overriding benevolence of the international community towards the Pakistani military leadership begins to fade in the aftermath of the war against terror. In the event, General Musharraf will be compelled to redress the political imbalance in civil-military relations and harmonize it with the rest of the world.
(July 30-Aug 05, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 23 – Editorial)
Moral outrage should cut both ways
In the last twelve months or so, hundreds of thousands of black Muslims and some Christians have been killed, raped and brutalised by Arab Muslim Janjaweed militia squads in the western region of Darfur in Sudan. Call it “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide, the fact is that the blood of the black Muslims is being spilt in a sea of ethnically different Arab peoples and lands. Sudan is ruled by President General Omar Al-Bashir who, in alliance with radical Islamic forces, seized power from a democratically elected government in June 1989 and invited Osama bin Laden to set up his first Al Qaeda base in that country.
Gen Al-Bashir refuses to take responsibility or do anything to halt the ethnic cleansing. He says quite blithely that the international community is merely trying to divert attention from Iraq. This has provoked the American Congress to label the crisis as “genocide” and compelled the US and EU to mull UN sanctions on Sudan. But China and Russia have vetoed the move. Meanwhile, the British and Australians have said they are ready to intervene with thousands of troops under a UN peacekeeping umbrella. But everyone is wary of contemplating another aggressive foreign intervention – however pressing or emotionally justified – in a Muslim land after the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus enter General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.
Mr Colin Powell’s call for Pakistani mediation and assistance in resolving the crisis in Sudan has been echoed by the governments of Finland and Sweden. Recently, Mr Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, weighed in with the same request in Islamabad. Apparently, General Musharraf’s call for ‘enlightened moderation’ in the Muslim world, coupled with his help in the war against Al Qaeda terrorism and conditional nod to providing Pakistan troops to Iraq under a UN umbrella, has endeared him to the international community as the one Muslim leader who can be trusted to be a willing and able, albeit temporary, ally in the UN Security Council. True to form, General Musharraf has picked up the phone and urged President Al-Bashir “not to allow the situation to spin out of control in order to save Sudan and the international community from a grave tragedy”. In effect, the message that he is sending is that if the government of Sudan is not able to stop the massacres in Darfur and implement its commitments to the UN, the international community may be compelled to intervene by means of UN sanctions or UN direct military intervention, which would have far reaching and grave implications not just for Sudan but also for the world at large. His effort is aimed at “creating more diplomatic space for solutions that avert the need, rationale or threat of sanctions” or direct intervention. Meanwhile, Pakistan remains actively engaged in discussing the draft text of a pending UN resolution on the situation in Darfur.
But why should the non-Muslim world turn to the Pakistani general for help in this matter? Where is the angry and articulate Arab League that is constantly thundering against the excesses of Israel? What has happened to the self-righteous Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) that pretends to uphold the cause of Muslims all over the globe?
The Arab League sent a mission to investigate the excesses in Darfur. It reported “gross human rights violations” in a member state. Then it retracted its statement under pressure from Sudan. Sudan is also a member of the OIC. Why isn’t the OIC talking to President al-Bashir? Surely this is the time to tell Sudan to stop the genocide if it is to avoid an assault on its sovereignty by a coalition of foreign forces mandated by the UN? The OIC is in the habit of being outraged when Muslims are being done to death by a non-Islamic state. Yet when it comes to the accountability of an Islamic regime or state, it is strangely silent. Surely moral outrage should cut both ways.
The same can be said of Muslim media and civil rights groups that remain blind to death and devastation in a “brotherly” Muslim country. How many “concerned” Muslims in Pakistan or elsewhere in the Islamic world know or care that Muslims in the far away, oil-rich, Darfur region in Sudan are killing fellow Muslims by the thousands so that they don’t have to share the bounty of Allah?
How many pious mullahs are exhorting the faithful to protest this genocide of Muslims by Muslims like they did when the infidel Serbs were slaughtering the Bosnian Muslims in Europe a decade ago, or like they do when the Zionists of Israel bomb the Palestinians out of hearth and home or the imperial Americans send cruise missiles on the trail of Osama Bin Laden and invade Iraq? How many resolutions have our great and Islamic parliaments passed against the Muslim perpetrators of this slaughter in the Sudan? The tragic answer to all these cries in the wilderness doesn’t need to be spelt out. We Muslims are outraged by the shameful acts of infidels but blind to the bloody transgressions of our own faithful followers.
(Sep 03-09, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 28 – Editorial)
A layman’s guide to Azizianomics
Our latest Prime Minister and economic czar, Shaukat Aziz, claims that in five years he has so turned the economy around that we don’t need the crutches of the IMF any longer. This is partly true. Mr Aziz was certainly quick to exploit the marvelous economic opportunity provided by billions of dollars in financial relief from a grateful international community following General Musharraf’s political turnaround after 9/11. But if General Musharraf’s politics hadn’t overnight become right, no amount of economic wizardry by Mr Aziz would have yielded such a bonanza. Undeterred, Mr Aziz has now set his sights higher. He says that the agricultural sector will grow by 8% this year and thereafter. Is he whistling in the dark?
In 57 years of Pakistani history, except for three abnormal years (1884-85, 1991-92 and 1995-96) when the agricultural growth rate was above 8%, the average rate of growth of the agricultural sector has been 5.1% in the Ayubian “green revolution” 1960s, 2.4% in the Bhuttoist “socialist” 1970s, 5.4% in the Ziaist “Islamic” 1980s, 4.4% in the Nawaz-Benazir “democratic” 1990s and only 1.2% in the last four years (2000-04) under the stewardship of Messrs Musharraf & Aziz. How on earth does Mr Aziz now expect us to visualize an 8% leap of faith in the agricultural sector in 2004-05 and thereafter?
Mr Aziz has offered the usual homilies about how 60% of the population lives in the rural areas and must be looked after. There is talk of improving the infrastructure of the agricultural sector, of building dams and reservoirs. There is mention of increasing rural credit and raising support prices of agricultural crops. And so on. But all this is old hat. It is tinkering at the margins of rural society like every “Economic Czar” has done down the line from Ishaq Khan, Mahbub ul Haq, V A Jaffery and Sartaj Aziz. And “trickle down economics”, as we all know, is not the answer to our problems of poverty and human underdevelopment – over 30% of all Pakistanis still live below the poverty line and about 25% are barely above it.
Agricultural growth is dependent on three broad factors. The first, of course, is the weather. In the absence of adequate water control resources to offset draught and floods, this element can shift the average growth rate up or down by as much as 2% any year. But there is not much that Mr Aziz can do about this in the short term other than pray for manna from heaven.
The second is the social and political power structure in the rural areas – roughly translated as ‘semi-feudal’ – that acts as a powerful institutional brake on the forces of market production. Absentee landlordism, rentier crop-sharing systems and land fragmentation – in short, oppressive pre-capitalist farming systems and repressive social class structures – remain a millstone around the neck of the Pakistani peasant. But no economic czar to date has ever dared to talk about land reform in order to unleash the productive potential of the peasant. Mr Aziz is no exception to maintaining this status quo.
The third is economic incentive policy. Mr Aziz certainly has some leverage here but it is circumscribed by the pressure to reduce price and export subsidies and lower import tariffs on agricultural products. What else is there?
Finance ministers and prime ministers love to talk about rising development budgets as panaceas for poverty alleviation and economic growth. Mr Aziz is no exception. Every year in the past four years he has told us that the development budget is going up substantially. But the true picture has turned out to be somewhat different. Development expenditure was 7.3% of GDP in the 1980s and 4.7% in the 1990s. Under Mr Aziz’s stewardship, it has fallen from 3.4% of GDP in 1998-99 to 3.0% in 2003-04. On the other side of the equation, current expenditures (or the money spent by the government on preening itself) have remained consistently high at 17.6% of GDP in the 1980s and 19.4% in the 1990s. These current expenditure percentages are 18.7% of GDP in 1999-2000, 17.2% in 2000-01, 18.8% in 2001-02, 18.6% in 2002-03 and 17.5% in 2003-04. Howwzat?
Mr Aziz has said that his government has placed human development at the centre of economic planning. He insists that the three key areas of human development, namely education, health and population welfare, will attract “significant attention” from the government. We welcome this sentiment. But, in view of our past experience at the hands of economic czars echoing their respective masters’ voices, much more than words of wisdom will be needed to steer Pakistan’s predominantly agricultural economy up to a self-sustained and consistent growth rate of over 8% a year. The latest news is that the Indus River System Authority (IRSA) has issued an unusual warning that Pakistan cannot ignore. It says that the country’s water reservoirs contain only half the water they should contain on the eve of the ‘rabi’ sowing season; and this has happened for the first time in the country’s history or at least since the construction of the Tarbela Dam. Good luck Mr Shaukat Aziz.
(Sep 10-16, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 29 – Editorial)
Bleak outlook
Friends and foes alike of prime minister Shaukat Aziz are appalled by the size of his new cabinet. Unflattering comparisons are being made with the cabinet of interim prime minister, Balkh Sher Mazari, in 1993 that was stuffed with worthies of every shade and feather. Mr Aziz’s coop boasts 32 federal ministers, 26 ministers of state, 34 parliamentary secretaries, 34 chairmen of standing committees, 2 federal-minister-status heads of special commissions and 3 advisors with the rank of federal ministers. At least 12 more ministers of state remain to be inducted along with 2 more advisors. This will be supplemented by top appointments of sifarshis to at least 12 state-run corporations. All in all, about 140 parliamentarians out of the 190 or so who voted for Mr Aziz in the national assembly will be ‘accommodated’ in some slot or the other with requisite perks and privileges paid out of the public exchequer – and that excludes the dozen or so senators who have already made the grade and have not been counted in the tally above. Phew!
This raises several important questions: who among General Pervez Musharraf, Shaukat Aziz and Chaudhury Shujaat Husain ordained the need for such a large cabal, and why? Who has done the selection and placement, and why?
The nature and scope of this cabinet is clearly dictated by the peculiarities of the current political arrangement in which the ruling troika is very different from past troikas. Earlier, the ruling troika comprised the prime minister, president, and army chief, with the latter two being passive stakeholders with little say in cabinet formation. Since the prime minister was also party president, all he had to do was to accommodate his party which was the source of his strength. Also, since there was no coalitionto cobble, cabinet formation was relatively free of hassles. But the current troika comprises the president who is also the army chief, the party president, and the prime minister (who is not party president). In this case, the president and army chief General Pervez Musharraf, far from being a passive stakeholder as in the past, is the lynchpin, verily the Lord and Master, of the new coalition system in which the Muslim League is rubbing shoulders with the PPP “deserters”, National Alliance and MQM. So he has dictated who among the ruling party and coalition groups are to be included. Equally, the party president, Chaudhry Shujaat Husain, is the number two stakeholder without whom the Muslim League would have been factionalised and weak after the exit of Nawaz Sharif. Since his job is not just to reward those Muslim Leaguers who have betrayed Nawaz Sharif but also to unite the Muslim League and make it stronger than ever in time for the next elections, Chaudhry Shujaat’s recommendations could not be spurned. That left the wretched prime minister in the wilderness. But Mr Aziz should consider himself lucky to have been chosen as such in the first place despite his singular lack of political base or parliamentary rapport. In the event, he will be content with some advisors and state ministers to run the economic ministries. Thus unprecedented coalition building, coupled with the demands of the new troika, explains the bloated cabinet of today. Mr Aziz is hoping that it will facilitate the ride of his life by keeping everyone busy on meeting ‘targets’. However, the greater likelihood is that it will make the notion of ‘good governance’ so beloved of General Musharraf the laughing refrain of the nation.
More to the point, though, the treatment meted out to Faisal Saleh Hayat and Zubeida Jalal is significant. Both were on the hit list of the Jama’at-e Islami. They had annoyed Qazi Husain Ahmed uniquely – Mr Hayat by accusing the JI of sheltering Al Qaeda terrorists and Ms Jalal by ordering that references to the jihad be removed from primary textbooks. Their shunting is a major concession by General Musharraf to the MMA. Ms Jalal is replaced by Senator Javed Ashraf Qazi, the former DG of the ISI, handpicked by General Musharraf, and Mr Hayat by Aftab Sherpao as Interior Minister. Mr Qazi is blunt, conservative and pragmatic. The MMA and its former “handler” will get along just fine. On the other side, Mr Sherpao, a conservative Pashtun, will be able to handle Wana and the tribal areas with greater “sympathy” than Mr Hayat could ever muster. So Mr Sherpao and the MMA will also get along just fine.
The extent to which this concession to the MMA will adversely impact General Musharraf’s “policies” of “enlightened moderation” and “war against terror” will be known when he announces his intention to retain his uniform. If the MMA’s protest is lukewarm, it will mean that the Military-Mullah Alliance is safe and sound and General Musharraf has once again sacrificed his credibility at the altar of cynical political opportunism. But if the MMA’s protest is violent and parliament is brought to a standstill, it will mean that General Musharraf may have to stitch up his system all over again. In short, on both counts, the outlook for reform and regeneration of Pakistan as a stable and modern nation-state still remains bleak.
(Sep 24-30, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 31 – Editorial)
Musharraf: renaissance man?
General Pervez Mushrarraf claims that he is a “marked” man. If he were to quit as army chief, he asserts, the “renaissance” that he is leading in Pakistan might be seriously jeopardized. Is this correct?
Certainly, the general environment in Pakistan is not as stifling as it has been under past military and civilian leaders. The media is lively. Art, music and theatre are trying to break free of conservative restraints and political censors. Universities seem keen to shrug off decades of ideological trappings. Businessmen are pleased by the state’s retreat from the domain of free enterprise. The foreign-funded, liberal NGOs are not labouring the virtues of family planning, universal education, women’s empowerment, etc under dark shadows. Zealots have been cautioned against defacing pretty faces on hoardings. New years parties are not held hostage by militant “vice and virtue” squads of the self-righteous. Best of all, the newly furnished Council of Islamic Ideology – the bane of every modern, moderate or enlightened Muslim in the past three decades – has actually criticised the attempt of religious extremists to foist the “Hasbah” law on us.
But does this amount to a true “renaissance”? No. For that two developments must be self-evident. First, the state’s active support to a social and economic reform programme must be based on voluntary impulses that are consciously and generously articulated. Second, the elements of any “renaissance” must be irresistibly rooted in national institutions, social ideas and democratic political processes. On both counts General Musharraf’s score is not heartening. His current emphasis on “enlightened moderation” and the war against extremism is externally dictated and not internally inspired. It is based on the law of necessity rather than any spontaneous state impulse for modernity and freedom. Nor is this state attitude a result of a democratic or civil society intervention. Worse, it is far from taking root in national institutions and remains devoid of any fervent national input or civilizing idea or Islamic ijtehad. In other words, General Musharraf is not a patch on Kemal Ataturk, whose clear and conscious vision and relentless practice initiated a reformation of Turkey from a backward and defeated outpost of empire into a modern and vibrant nation-state.
Still, clichés apart, necessity is the mother of invention. Indeed, war and compulsion were two of the greatest catalysts of historical change which later acquired a life and momentum of its own and marked a watershed in the life of nations and peoples. Therefore, despite the noted aversions and conditionalities, it is still worth asking if General Musharraf the perpetrator of the war in Kargil, the usurper of civil power, the enthusiastic supporter of the militant jihad in Kashmir, the architect of the political Military-Mullah Alliance of recent times – can midwife the birth of a new republic of Pakistan. Certainly, he now imagines himself capable of, and willing to play, such a role. His recent reference to a “renaissance” in Pakistan and his allusion to President General Charles de Gaulle, the architect of the Fifth Republic in France, are pointers in this direction. Of course, the parallel is wrong because De Gaulle was not a serving general when he became the president of France. In fact, General Musharraf might have clutched at a better historical marker in General Napoleon Bonaparte, whence the term “Bonapartism” which denotes usurpation of a state in disorder by a soldier driven by the force of circumstance.
This brings us full circle to General Musharraf’s formulation: he needs to be a powerful general in order to be an effective President of the new democratic Republic-in-the-making of Pakistan. How should the liberals respond to him?
Their dilemma is obvious. They are unhappy at the primacy of military over civilian power because it negates all the ‘principles’ of representative political democracy. But they are happy at his attempt to make Pakistan a less intolerant and more moderate country. Thus it depends on how liberals perceive the principal antagonistic contradiction in Pakistani state and society. If they see it as one of dictatorship versus democracy, then they will remain against General Musharraf as long as he retains his uniform. If they see the issue as one of turning back the tide of political Islam, then they will continue to support General Musharraf in and out of uniform.
However, both factions miss the critical connection between their opposite positions. If General Musharraf is committed to “enlightened moderation” either because he believes in it or because he is an opportunist, the fact is that in order to achieve his objective he will have to necessarily democratize the Pakistani polity so that the mullahs are ousted from power by the secular or mainstream political parties. In other words, General Musharraf will have to undo the Military-Mullah Alliance and replace it with the Military-Mainstream Alliance if he wants to survive personally and/or effect the reformation of state and society. That is why liberals ought not to get fixated on the uniform. Instead they should concentrate on pushing General Musharraf in the right direction. This can be done by supporting him when he tries to disentangle himself from the suffocating embrace of the mullahs and criticizing him when he drags his feet on bringing the mainstream and representative parties back into business.
(Sep 17-23, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 2 – Editorial)
Popular scores vs favourable ratings?
General Pervez Musharraf is about to renege on his pledge to quit the post of Chief of Army Staff before 2005. He is abetted by the PPP deserters, the former prime minister-in-attendance as party whip and the former finance minister as the new prime minister-in-tow. Last week he claimed that 96% of Pakistanis wanted him to remain COAS. On cue, the official news agency then dug out a six month old American survey on world attitudes towards the US in which it was also noted that 86% of all Pakistanis viewed General Musharraf “favourably”. This statistic was juxtaposed with a so-called joint survey by a domestic news agency and an obscure Islamabad newspaper to claim that nearly 70% of Pakistanis wanted General Musharraf to be both President and COAS. Now the Punjab Assembly has given him a resounding two-thirds thumbs-up in the “national interest”.
This demonstration of civilian servility isn’t surprising. Barring honourable exceptions, it is characteristic of Pakistani politicians. If civilians haven’t always connived in military takeovers, they have certainly flocked to dictators after the event. Still, it is nauseating for parliaments to demean themselves by renouncing the very principles of democracy and civilian supremacy they are supposed to protect and uphold.
General Musharraf’s perception of “popularity” is a more interesting concern. When he seized power, he was welcomed by the domestic media and the religio-liberal opposition because they despised Nawaz Sharif for his bid to grab all power. But he was shunned internationally and President Clinton refused to shake his hand in public. How times have changed. The home media is crying out for more democracy and the religio-liberal opposition is baying for his blood. Meanwhile, the international community, especially the US, is lauding him to the high heavens as the ideal leader of the Muslim world.
Nonetheless, the suggestion that 86% Pakistanis think “favourably” of him should not be confused with the thought that 86% might vote for him in a free and fair election, or that the “favourable” sentiments of 86% Pakistanis can be translated to mean support for him as army chief in the foreseeable future, or even that they approve of his current “guided democracy, pro-US” policies. Indeed, the “favourable” factor probably doesn’t extend to his war against Al Qaeda since the American survey also noted that 65% of all Pakistanis viewed the terrorist Osama bin Laden “favourably” and that nearly everyone in Pakistan hated the Americans. In net terms, that would mean that no more than 21% (86% minus 65%) of Pakistanis view General Musharraf’s pro-America and anti-al-Qaeda policies “favourably”. In a free and fair election, this sentiment would spell curtains for him. How, then, is the “popularity” factor to be distinguished from the index of “favourability”?
With General Musharraf, what you see is what you often get. His sincerity, integrity and devotion to Pakistan are irreproachable. He is not as vindictive, callous or uncaring like many of his political predecessors. Certainly he is more enlightened and moderate than most. Charges of nepotism or personal corruption cannot be laid at his door. One cannot lavish such praise on even our most “popular” politicians. When Pakistanis say they think of him “favourably”, it is these virtues that spring to mind. Just imagine what would happen if his “personally favourable” factor could be superimposed on to his “policy popularity” chart to yield a good “political popularity” graph? How can that happen?
If General Musharraf sticks to his uniform per se, it will make him less, not more, popular politically. This is because civilians may bow and scrape before the high and mighty military out of fear, or opportunism, or a bit of both, but deep down in their hearts they detest being lorded over by unrepresentative, unaccountable, self-righteous and arrogant men in uniform. Nor can a military-bureaucratic system of technocratic government, however statistically efficient, provide an answer to the everyday problems of ordinary people. “Democracy” to folks is not about “press freedom” or “civil rights” or “professional merit”. Far from it. It is about reposing trust in those politicians who, regardless of personal flaws, can and will politically mediate the everyday conflict and chaos of a dysfunctional state system in which sheer existence is predicated on the four pillars of “nalka, naukri, thana and katcheri” (literally, the tap, the job, the police station and the courts). It is in this context that mainstream political parties which service these four-pillars of people’s sifarish breathe life into the political system and those that stand on piety like the religious parties of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, and those that stand on national security like General Musharraf’s army, or those that flog anti-corruption manifestos like Imran Khan’s Justice Party can never win the votes of the people.
The conclusion is obvious enough. The sooner General Musharraf says bye-bye to his unholy alliance with the MMA, the sooner he stops goading Pakistanis into empty national security paradigms, the sooner he abandons his unaccountable democracy which is neither terribly efficient nor too people-oriented, the quicker he will become truly popular. An alliance with the mainstream, moderate and pro-people parties would do him and the country much good. His favourable personal ratings would then be transformed into democratic popular scores.
(Oct 01-07, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 32 – Editorial)
Hype and reality
Before 9/11 General Pervez Musharraf was perceived internationally as a “pariah” leader of a “rogue” state. But last week in America he was on an unprecedented high as Western leaders called him a “true friend” and heaped accolades on him. Everywhere, he billed himself as a reformer, a moderate and enlightened leader of the Islamic world. The hype reached a crescendo when India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, claimed to open a “historic new chapter” in relations with Pakistan based on the “sincerity and boldness of General Musharraf”. The icing on the cake was the killing in Nawabshah of Amjad Faruqi, the “most wanted” Al-Qaeda terrorist in Pakistan. Clearly, it’s time to separate the hype from reality.
General Musharraf admits that Amjad Faruqi was responsible for attempts on his life. He was the chief operative of Abu Feraj, the top Al-Qaeda Libyan hiding in Waziristan. So we can rejoice in his elimination. But hold on. Wasn’t Faruqi flushed out of the house of a leader of the Jaish-i-Mohammad, a jihadi outfit? Didn’t he begin his career by joining Harkatul Ansar, the jihadi militia that emerged after a merger of Harkat Jihad-e-Islami with other Deobandi militias? Wasn’t his uncle Hanif already a member of Harkat-e-Jihad Islami which also became the leading militia under the Taliban? Didn’t he go to Afghanistan in 1986 for training as a jihadi? Didn’t he join the sectarian Sipah Sahaba and later the sectarian Lashkar-e-Jhangvi? Didn’t he go repeatedly to Afghanistan to widen his links with Al Qaeda? Wasn’t he involved in the attack on the American consulate in Karachi and in the attack on Islamabad’s Protestant Church two years ago? Indeed, wasn’t Faruqi also one of the jihadi hijackers of the Indian airliner whose passengers were held hostage until jihadis like Omer Sheikh and Maulana Masood Azhar were freed from Indian jails in 2000? Didn’t Omer Sheikh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Amjad Faruqi jointly plan the kidnapping of the American journalist Danny Pearl in 2002 who had nothing to do with Kashmir or India? Didn’t Faruqi behead Pearl?
The point here is not to establish why Faruqi and the others were such wanted men. The point is to trace their natural transition from sectarian and/or state-sponsored anti-India jihadis to anti-American Al-Qaeda operatives who are all out to get General Musharraf.They all struck roots in the state-sponsored jihad in Kashmir and later naturally branched off into the Al-Qaeda orbit.
But there’s more to it. Faisal Saleh Hayat, the former interior minister, has publicly accused activists of the Jamaat-i-Islami, a component of the Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA), of sheltering wanted Al-Qaeda terrorists. Some professional doctors are also mixed up with these parties of the MMA and Al-Qaeda. This implies an unholy alliance or link between the anti-India jihadis, the anti-American Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the anti-Musharraf MMA.In their eyes, the war against the “infidel Hindus” is part of the war against the “infidel Westerners” and their “American stooge” Pervez Musharraf and his “puppet” Shaukat Aziz.
General Musharraf’s reaction to all this is: “I cannot pack up the jihad until the Kashmir issue is resolved”. But if the Kashmir issue hasn’t been resolved by jihad in the last fifteen years despite tens of thousands of deaths, how much longer will we have to wait for General Musharraf to find a solution to Kashmir so that he can “pack up” the unholy rectangle of jihad, Al-Qaeda, Taliban and MMA – political Islam which is out to get him and Pakistan?
General Musharraf has had problems in coming to terms with reality. There is confusion in his mind about the role of political Islam in nation building and national security. At Agra in 2001 he set up Kashmir-related preconditions for a dialogue. Then, faced with the prospect of war in January 2002, he promised not to export jihad. By January 2004, he had abandoned the core issue approach and opened a composite unconditional dialogue with India. Some months ago he unilaterally shrugged away the UN resolutions. However, two months ago he inexplicably insisted on a “timeframe” for a solution on Kashmir. But last week in New York, he was crowing about a “historic breakthrough” with India without a word about timetables or simultaneity of conflict resolution. Meanwhile, there is no word on the fate of the jihad or the MMA.
His ambivalence towards the MMA is astounding. He nurtured the mullahs at the expense of the PPP. Then shook hands with them over the LFO and gave them a seat in the NSC, plus governments in two provinces. But this is the same MMA that is viciously opposed to his American friends, that is aiding and abetting the anti-American Taliban, that provides succour to the jihadis, that refuses to sit in the NSC with him, that wants him to quit the army, that harbours the terrorists. As if that wasn’t enough, he has now conceded a role to the MMA in resolving the “terrorist” issue in Wana.
If this isn’t confusion worst confounded, it can only be rank opportunism. Sooner or later, Musharraf will have to clear the cobwebs of his mind. That is when, we hope, reality will get the better of hype and we shall finally see the way forward.
(Oct 08-14, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 33 – Editorial)
Shuffling the armed forces
Formal merit or seniority hasn’t figured in the recent shuffle of the high command of the Pakistan army by General Pervez Musharraf. The new vice chief, Gen Ahsan Saleem Hayat (former corps commander Karachi), is down the seniority list, as is the new Chairman of the Joint Staffs Committee, Gen Ehsanul Haq (former DG-ISI). But then that’s the way General Musharraf has always worked. Loyalty and a meeting of minds have always been more important considerations for him than formal traditions or institutional niceties.
After General Musharraf became army chief in 1998 – superceding a few generals – he promoted Maj-Gen Aziz Khan to the top slot of the Chief of General Staff, a job normally reserved for the senior most Lt Gen. But Gen Aziz’s posting was especially significant – as later events in Kargil were to demonstrate – because he was then in the ISI looking after Kashmir and it was unprecedented for an ISI Maj-Gen to be promoted and then asked to shift to GHQ in such a high decision-making capacity. Over the course of the last five years, General Musharraf has shunted, transferred, promoted, sacked or retired scores of army officers in order to suit his idea of the sort of army high command that Pakistan needs. That is why when it was time for some of the top dogs to go home they did so without a whimper because they had once been beneficiaries of General Musharraf’s systematic largesse.
Musharraf is not vindictive or petty. When he parted ways with Generals Mahmud Ahmed (then DG-ISI) and Usmani (then Deputy COAS) shortly after 9/11, he did so because he no longer saw eye to eye with them on critical matters affecting his perception of “national security”. Rather than be hamstrung in national policy making by his personal debt to them (one saved his life and the other helped bring him to power in October 1999), he gently but firmly relieved them of their duties. Both were said to be bitter at the way they were abruptly sent home. But Gen Musharraf did not hold that against them. He offered Gen Usmani any sinecure he wanted after retirement but Gen Usmani went into a silent sulk. Gen Mahmud bristled for a while but then accepted a sinecure as head of Fauji Foundation, a prized post-retirement position for any general. Similarly, Gen Aziz Khan, who was the sole survivor of the troika that brought Gen Musharraf to power, was shunted upstairs to the position of the CJCSC and now upon retirement may hope to get a prized position, possibly as president of Azad Kashmir. In similar vein is the appointment of Gen (retd) Jehangir Karamat as Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington. General Musharraf was not General Karamat’s blue-eyed boy or anointed successor in 1998. So he didn’t owe his former ‘chief’ anything. But he hasn’t allowed that to stand in the way of selecting General Karamat as Pakistan’s ambassador to the US because he thinks Karamat is the right man for the job at this juncture. The same sort of generous treatment can probably be expected for Lt Gen Javed Hasan, the fourth in the Kargil quartet, after his decision to stand down. Maj-Gen Hasan was the commander of the Northern Artillery that conducted the Kargil Operation in 1999. After the debacle he was promoted to Lt Gen and sent to lie low as head of the National Defence College. Early this year he was made a corps commander. Now he will probably get a plum civilian posting. Similarly, the appointment of Gen Kayani as DG-ISI is significant. He was DG-MO before becoming a corps commander for a short while. He shares general Musharraf’s political outlook and will be a strong right-hand man at a time of strategic shift.
General Musharraf has never hesitated to shuffle his command structure when he has thought it warranted. But he has always rewarded friends and loyalists while acknowledging merit. That is probably why there is no sign of internal discomfort or unease or criticism in the sweeping changes underway in the Pakistan army today. Of course, the fundamental factor for stability is the rigid discipline and organisational ethos of the armed forces. That is why there has been no significant muttering in the ranks when the heads of the three services are all muhajirs – the air chief Kaleem Sadaat and the navy chief Karimullah are both muhajirs like Musharraf himself.
There is another imperceptible process underway in the armed forces under Musharraf. This is the quiet but definite weeding out of officers who do not share General Musharraf’s philosophy of “enlightened moderation” and political pragmatism in the dangerous age of power-pre-emption. In a critical sense, this is a reversal of the policies of General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s who favoured an overt display of religiosity and ideology in his officers and rewarded them for it.
All this is good for the stability and well-being of the armed forces. The problem is that Musharraf’s large-heartedness does not extend to the politicians who are out of favour with him. It is this factor that makes it difficult for him to resolve the question of national stability.
(Oct 22-28, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 35 – Editorial)
General Musharraf’s options
General Pervez Musharraf is miffed at the “undemocratic attitude” of the opposition in parliament. What, may we ask, has the feeble opposition done to incur the displeasure of the high and mighty General?
Members of the opposition comprising the MMA, PPP and PMLN are reported Thursday October 14 to have angrily denounced the bill enabling General Musharraf to be both army chief and president of Pakistan for another three years. They shredded the bill after the Speaker of the National Assembly blithely cut short a fiery debate on the subject and railroaded the law. Parliament resounded with cries of “No Musharraf No” and “Go Speaker Go”; a no-trust petition against the Speaker signed by 106 parliamentarians was thrust into his hands, and the opposition stormed out. Later, a boycott of parliamentary proceedings was ordered that is threatening to spill over into the streets after Moharram. What’s going on?
On December 31, 2003, General Musharraf made a deal with the MMA. The Legal Framework Order was legalised in exchange for a constitutional clause disallowing anyone from simultaneously holding the office of president and army chief after December 31, 2004. Subsequently, however, General Musharraf and the MMA became mutually acrimonious. The MMA opposed the National Security Council, a pet Musharraf project, while the General flirted with the idea of remaining army chief for three more years. Each accused the other of reneging on the deal.
But surely that’s not the issue. At issue is General Musharraf’s public pledge to relinquish his powers as army chief in order to supervise Pakistan’s transition to a full-fledged democracy as a civilian president as envisaged under the constitution. It is important to point out here that, as it is, the civilian president, under the present 17th amendment constitution, is armed with powers under 58 2 B to sack parliaments and prime ministers at his discretion and his hand-picked provincial governors have the same powers to sack elected local and provincial dispensations. The civilian president also has the power to appoint all service chiefs without as much as a glance at the prime minister. Why on earth then does General Musharraf insist on clinging to his uniform?
“The national interest demands it”, he claims. “Pakistan is going through a critical phase”, he argues. What is the national interest? Why does it require him to be army chief and president? What phase is Pakistan experiencing? Why does it need him rather than anyone else as army chief to see it through? He hasn’t bothered to explain. Nor have his minions who mouth the same platitudes. Isn’t this a vote of no-confidence by him in his hand-crafted democracy-system? What does he have to fear from his own handpicked army chief? Or does he think that even his chosen army chief might disagree with him on critical policy issues and undermine him in time to come? If this be the case, then it makes nonsense of General Musharraf’s claims of institutionalising the system so that it can function without him personally in the saddle. How then is he any different from Generals Ayub Khan and Zia ul Haq whose carefully assembled political systems perished along with them because they had not institutionalised them? We have already had a taste of the inherent flaws in Musharraf’s system (the selection and sacking of Zafarullah Jamali as prime minister). What more is in store for us?
The opposition is threatening to boycott parliament and follow it up with street agitation just like it did throughout 2003 when the war over the LFO was raging. At that time General Musharraf was faced with a choice: he could either send everyone packing or compromise with the opposition and make parliament functional. He chose the latter course. What will he do now?
General Musharraf can reorder martial law or fresh elections. But if he opts for martial law, he will be back at the beginning, riding an even more ferocious tiger than before. And if he opts for a new election, he will have to reverse his pro-MMA and anti-PPP policies if he wants to avoid his current fate. But that will bring him back to his current dilemma: he cannot be pro-MMA because of the anti fundamentalist demands of the international community and he cannot be anti-PPP because of the pro-consensus demands of the domestic situation.
General Musharraf can still give up his uniform before the cut-off date of December 31, 2004. This will diffuse a politically perverse situation and win him laurels. It will also demonstrate his faith in his system and determination to make it work. Then the only thing he would have to do to make everything work – on the basis of a broad, enlightened, moderate, mainstream consensus – is to pry apart the PPP and the MMA by stretching his hand out to the former and letting go of the latter. This has nothing to do with the good and bad points of the PPP or its leaders. It has everything to do with the fact that it remains the most popular party in Pakistan and no national consensus on contentious issues is possible without its participation. It is as simple as that, simpler in fact than making peace with India.
(Nov 05-11, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 37 – Editorial)
Is a Musharraf-Bhutto rapprochement on the cards?
Senator Mushahid Husain has called upon the government to release Asif Zardari, Javed Hashmi and Yousaf Raza Gilani from prison as part of a “confidence building process to reduce political tensions at home and pave the way for national reconciliation”. He also advised NAB to practise “across-the-board accountability” by nabbing “the thieves in the opposition and in the government”. So far so good. But then came the sting in the tail. Mr Husain stoutly defended General Pervez Musharraf’s bid to cling to his uniform. He used a novel argument: “Let the Musharraf establishment clean up the ugly mess left by the Zia establishment”. Predictably, therefore, Mr Husain laid into certain army chiefs and generals who had manipulated politicians and politics “for their own short term political benefits”. Inevitably, former premiers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were also hauled over the coals because they had played footsie with the “establishment”.
Mushahid Husain is secretary-general of the PMLQ. He was slotted in this important position by the Musharraf “establishment” (what a curious name for the military) for his energy, intellect and pragmatism, and tasked with strengthening the current establishment’s “one-party” democracy system. So he has not made this statement out of the blue. Indeed, he could not have made it without the establishment’s prodding. It is therefore a most significant peep into the establishment’s mind and raises some critical questions.
Is there a sincere realisation in the Musharraf-establishment that the “one-party” democracy system has failed to deliver and a national reconciliation is therefore in order? But if that is the case, why did the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, appear to dampen such prospects by saying that the matter of the freedom of these three gentlemen was in the hands of the courts and not in the domain of the government? Clearly, the intervention by Mr Aziz exploits the government-party separation quite adroitly by leaving the political initiative firmly in the hands of the government without closing the door to the inducements offered by the party secretary-general.
Should we therefore look at Mushahid Husain’s intervention as a tactical manoeuvre to sideline the troublesome MMA and scratch the back of the PPP in a scramble to soften opposition to General Musharraf’s decision to be both army chief and president of Pakistan? Have we forgotten that precisely such tactics were employed by the Musharraf establishment in 2003 when it pried apart the MMA from the PPP-PMLN and persuaded the mullahs to help pass the 17th constitutional amendment legitimising “one-party democracy”? Certainly, Mushahid Husain’s attempt to link these proposed CBMs to the requirement that General Musharraf retain his powers as army chief for another three years, lends credibility to this line of reasoning. It is also certain that if the opposition doesn’t break ranks, General Musharraf will find himself with a dysfunctional parliament and possibly even agitation on the streets, compelling him to rethink the utility of his “one-party democracy” system.
According to informed sources, the government is already talking to Ms Bhutto along these lines. In exchange for supporting General Musharraf’s bid to be both army chief and president, and cooperating with him on a host of controversial issues that include building the Kalabagh Dam, she has apparently been offered a deal whereby (a) Asif Zardari can be bailed out of prison (b) she can return to Pakistan and contest the cases against her freely without fear of being harassed or arrested (c) she can become chairperson of the Senate (d) she can be assured of fair elections in 2007. Apparently, the government wants a decision from Ms Bhutto one way or the other before Eid so that it has sufficient time to gear up its forces to do whatever is necessary to ensure continuity and stability before the cut-off date of 31st December 2004.
A recurring theme of our editorials since 2000 has been the need for a grand truth and reconciliation process between the establishment and the political leaders of Pakistan in the grand national interest. Another significant TFT argument has been the requirement of a working relationship, if not an alliance, between a reformed military establishment and a reformed Peoples Party of Pakistan that cements their common current objectives in pursuit of an anti-mullah, moderate, modern, Pakistan aligned profitably with the international community and at peace with its neighbours, especially India. But General Musharraf has rubbished such ideas until now, on one occasion quite rudely threatening to “kick Bhutto and Nawaz”. If he now realises that the “ground reality” has changed and demands joining hands with one of them and creating a “two-party democracy”, it is only because as a pragmatic survivor a political about-turn comes as easily to him as a military salute.
The odds of an effective Musharraf-Bhutto rapprochement are even. Neither side trusts the other. General Musharraf is a military chameleon. Ms Bhutto is an artful operator. There are many ifs and buts in the reckoning. However, one thing is for sure: the last thing that General Musharraf needs or Pakistan can afford is a political deadlock which scatters parliament to the wind, forces the liberal Peoples Party into an embrace with the immoderate MMA and stiffens opposition to critical national projects on the agenda of the day.
(Oct 29-Nov 04, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 36 – Editorial)
The far mountain
General Pervez Musharraf is acting like the proverbial cat among the pigeons. He has once again scattered friends and foes at home and abroad by his latest utterances on how to resolve the Kashmir dispute – “identify the region, demilitarise it and change its status”. His “2+5 region” formulation is lucid, focused, and positive. But many questions arise. Is it old wine in new bottles? Is he sincere in making it? Is it a tactical political move for personal or institutional reasons or does it reflect a strategic vision-change in the national interest? Is the timing right or wrong? Is it aimed at Pakistanis at home or the Indians next door or the international community abroad? What are the prospects of success or failure?
At least seven Kashmir “options” are posted on a BBC website. Certainly, after the Lahore summit in February 1999 Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif and India’s prime minister Atal Vajpayee used retired civil servants and personal confidantes Naiz Naik and RK Mishra respectively to secretly explore a couple of options, especially the “Chenab” solution. It is therefore interesting that the “option” implied by General Musharraf today on the basis of his “2+5 region” formulation is partly a variation of the same Chenab theme and partly an extension of it. (See details in the article by Ejaz Haider elsewhere in this issue of TFT) It also follows at least two rounds of secret talks between the Pakistani NSC secretary Tariq Aziz and the Indian NSC advisor JN Dixit, and is a response to the Musharraf-Manmohan one-on-one meeting in New York in September during which the Indian prime minister explicitly challenged the Pakistani president to articulate what particular “option” he had in mind.
What is new is the fact that General Musharraf has explicitly addressed the Indian refrain against a “religion-based” option by talking of “homogeneous ethno-geographical regions”. What is unprecedented is that instead of only conveying his option secretly to India via interlocutors he has opened it up for public debate in Pakistan. What is remarkable is the courage with which he has offered to reciprocally demilitarise the “regions” as a prelude to a final settlement rather than as a consequence of it.
Questions about General Musharraf’s sincerity, of tactical versus strategic considerations, of timing, and of aims and objectives are all interlinked. However, his route, trajectory and cause can be gleaned from recent history. As an army chief in 1999, he sabotaged the Lahore summit at Kargil. As a coup maker in 2000, he was insistent that he wouldn’t dialogue with India unless it was ready to resolve the “core” dispute of India. But as a national leader in 2001, he was ready to show “flexibility” in talks with India. In fact, he stunned a group of select Pakistani editors prior to his departure for the Agra summit in India by arguing that without “flexibility” – an abandonment of the maximal positions by both countries – there could be no forward movement in dispute settlement. In Delhi he similarly stunned a group of select Indian editors when he publicly posited his “four-step” approach to conflict resolution – step one, start a dialogue; step two, reflect the ground reality by focusing the dialogue on Kashmir and bringing the aggrieved Kashmiris into the loop; step three, link progress on other contentious issues with that on Kashmir; step four, eliminate maximal solutions to Kashmir unacceptable to either of the three parties to the dispute and start exploring the remaining options on Kashmir. Three years later, after the failure at Agra and a near-war with India, he has returned to his original fourth-step by unilaterally abandoning Pakistan’s maximal position and unilaterally formulating a three-point “option” approach to core dispute-resolution.
General Musharraf’s ascension from army chief to national president during a critical five-year transition phase in Pakistan has affected his perspective on many issues, in particular those that impinge on Pak-US and Pak-India relations. Two critical questions immediately arise. Has this been a linear and predictable development? Is this perspective-change based on short-term tactical reasons or are long-term strategic considerations at the root of it?
A mathematician or statistician would plot General Musharraf’s statements and movements on Indo-Pak relations in the last five years as a graph of anti-India bellicosity and draw a straight line though the high and low points of the curve to determine whether or not there is a long term trend in greater or lesser hostility. If no such trend can be discerned, the conclusion would be that his stop-go movements amount to opportunistic and tactical steps. But if the trend is positively skewed in the direction of détente with India, then the conclusion would be that his meanderings represent tactical adjustments to a changed strategic perspective or vision of ground realities. What does the record show?
India spent 18 months after General Musharraf’s coup d’état in coming to terms with the fact that it would have to deal with him rather than any elected civilian democrat in continuing the peace process started at Lahore in 1999. By the time the invitation for Agra arrived in Islamabad, thanks to some behind-the-scenes international diplomacy, General Musharraf had already softened his rigid stance by calling for “unconditional talks, anytime, anywhere” Domestic considerations played a big role in his changing perspective. He was beginning to realise that even an accidental conflict with India, let alone one provoked by Pakistan, would derail his reform programme – especially his economic agenda that was critically dependent on American support and goodwill through the IMF – and undermine the stability and longevity of his non-representative regime. So the hard-liner general quickly donned the habits of a national leader and switched from a policy of “fight-fight” via the jehadis in Kashmir to one of “talk-talk, fight-fight” with India. Accordingly, in 2000, there was a unilateral announcement of a brief ceasefire in Kashmir by the Hizbul Mujahideen. The five-hour hectoring visit to Pakistan by President Bill Clinton only served to highlight General Musharraf’s strategic predicament.
But if General Musharraf’s moves were still tactical, India’s response was not dissimilar. After five decades of studied “neutrality”, India was ready to woo America into a strategic relationship with it tilted against Pakistan. So India reciprocated the Pakistani moves and ordered a ceasefire of its security forces in Kashmir In due course, each side tried to outdo the other in its efforts to woo the US by various “peace overtures” Pakistan offered a partial withdrawal of troops along the border and unilateral restraint, while India offered to start talking to the Kashmiris. Meanwhile, the war in Kashmir continued to rage.
In 2001 India dramatically offered talks at Agra. Its invitation followed two significant overtures. The first by India was in the form of unexpected support to President Bush’s ballistic missile development programme, which enormously pleased the Americans. The second was by America which facilitated a high profile visit to Washington by India’s foreign minister Jaswant Singh, and similarly high profile visits to New Delhi by US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage and the then head of Centcom, Gen B J Shelton. The Indian invitation to General Musharraf was also preceded by threatening war games along the border with Pakistan and buttressed by aggressive attempts to fence the LoC in Kashmir and end the ceasefire in the valley. India too was tactically readying to “talk-talk-fight-fight” The ambiguity of their respective tactical positions was demonstrated time and again. India proposed talks in the context of the bilateral Simla Agreement and the Lahore Summit in which Kashmir didn’t much figure. This compelled Pakistan’s foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, to start back-pedalling into the “core-issue” approach by insisting on the context of all previous agreements on Kashmir, which included the UN resolutions. This provoked Jaswant Singh to say, on the eve of the Agra summit, that while Kashmir could be discussed, it could not be negotiated away since it was “an internal matter” of India. Under the circumstances, it is worth asking with the benefit of the hindsight whether the military commanders of Pakistan and the political leaders of India were at that time ready to affect a strategic shift in their perspective of Indo-Pak relations.
There were two contradictory signals coming from Pakistan. One was General Musharraf’s unilateral demonstration of “flexibility” in dialoguing with India. The other was his manifest determination to keep fighting the jihad in Kashmir. Similarly, on the Indian side, the agreement to talk was offset by the imposition of a counter-precondition pertaining to the centrality of cross-border terrorism. In the event, the dialogue at Agra failed to clinch and both sides degenerated into “fight-fight” The jihadi attack on the state parliament in Srinagar in October, followed by another on the national parliament in December, provoked India to move its army to the border and threaten all-out war with Pakistan by the close of the year.
Meanwhile, 9/11, 2001, was already changing each country’s strategic perspective of the other. While Pakistan was tactically keen on suing for peace with India as it readied to tackle the domestic blowback from its support to America in Afghanistan, India was interested in tactically exploiting the American doctrine of unilateralism to bolster its case against Pakistan’s indirect interference in Kashmir. Both sides were clearly still in tactical mode. An interesting insight into General Musharraf’s confused perspective at the time can be gauged from an incident that took place during a meeting in Islamabad between General Musharraf and a select group of Pakistani editors a few days after 9/11. After General Musharraf had finished explaining the need for an urgent about-turn on the Taliban policy “because the ground reality had changed”, one editor asked him whether or not he also believed that the new ground reality would inevitably have an adverse impact on his pro-jihad policies, which would in due course turn the jihadis against him and compel him to take off his ‘kid-gloves’ against Islamic extremists of all shades. General Musharraf was outraged and stormed out of the conference in a huff. Indeed, well into 2002, despite a tactical call to end all cross-border support in January 2002, with the Indian army breathing down his neck he was still inclined to privately insist that there was no question of wrapping up the jihad. That is probably why he saw no reason to change his domestic political strategy of scuttling the pro-peace-with-India mainstream political parties and enabling the pro-jihad Islamic parties of the MMA to enter and claim a big stake in parliament. The fact that he was ready to do a subsequent deal with the MMA over the LFO instead of one with the PPP in 2003 demonstrated his changing tactical modes and static strategic perspective on national and international issues.
Four years down the line, however, the inexorable logic of 9/11 and his support for, and dependency on, Washington, followed by the dangerous Dr A Q Khan fiasco last year, has brought him squarely face to face with the new strategic ground realities. Ground-reality #1 is that the war against the Taliban has had to be logically extended to the war against Al Qaeda terrorism. Ground reality #2 is the fact that Al Qaeda is organically mixed up with Islamic extremism of all kinds in Pakistan, whether in the form of violent sectarianism, or non-state actor jihad, or anti-American political Islam in the form of the MMA. Ground reality #3 is that militant Islam wants to assassinate him physically while political Islam wants to deprive him of his powers and erode his liberal, pro-West policies. Ground reality # 4 is that he cannot therefore be strategically anti-Taliban and anti-sectarianism while being tactically pro-jihad and pro-MMA. Ground reality #5 is that the Pakistan Army’s corporate interests continue to lie in an alliance rather than a rupture with Washington. Ground reality #6 is that, sooner rather than later, therefore, there will be a rupture between General Musharraf’s Military and Political Islam and the historic Military-Mullah Alliance will be strategically tested.
Determining evidence of this strategic rupture will come in the form of two positive developments: an alignment and accommodation of the military with the pro-West mainstream liberal political forces to develop a representative national consensus on many contentious domestic issues – including the civil-military relationship – along with a strategic shift in establishing longer term peaceful relations with India and Afghanistan. The Military-Mullah Alliance will have to be irrevocably replaced by the Mainstream-Military Partnership.
General Musharraf’s political system is inherently unstable. His alliance with the MMA is falling apart by the force of strategically changed regional realities. His economy won’t be strong enough for a long time to withstand any major internal or external political jolts to the system. He cannot but be aware of all this. Meanwhile, the peace dividend to Pakistan – and therefore to the Pakistan Army – from burying the hatchet with India beckons in the form of lucrative regional oil and gas pipelines, motorways and preferential trade blocs – what General Musharraf’s handpicked whiz prime minister Shaukat Aziz confidently calls “mutual dependencies”.
“Mutual dependencies” among old enemies? This is a new political language. This is a new national strategy. A “solution” on Kashmir would certainly cement it. But no progress on such a regional agenda is possible without the fulfilment of three domestic preconditions: General Musharraf will have to put down stiff, even violent, opposition from the old guard in and out of the institutions of the state; he will have to woo the mainstream representatives of civil society to help him cobble the required national consensus; and in order to do so he will have to share power with them.
The Pakistan military is a major beneficiary of the conflict structures of the past. It can capture the peace dividend in the future only if it can strategically reduce its military demands over Kashmir and its political demands over civil society. The year 2005 should show the way ahead. General Pervez Musharraf’s new and open policy options on Kashmir are only the first halting steps in that direction. Much more rocky ground will have to be covered, especially domestically, before he can climb the far mountain.
(Feb 23-March 01, 2001, Vol – XII, No. 52 – Editorial)
Fighting over scarce resources
In 1935 the USA built its famous Hoover Dam and then proceeded to build 2,000 smaller dams on the same river to regulate water in times of plenty and scarcity. The objections of the affected states were quickly addressed, followed by enduring agreements. The run-up to the Aswan Dam in Egypt in 1959 was more difficult because it required an agreement between two sovereign countries, Egypt and Sudan. But that too was achieved – local Egyptian objections pertaining to hydrology were resolved by resorting to international expertise on the subject. But in Pakistan, which signed an agreement with India over water-sharing rights in 1962, non-sovereign provinces can unfortunately claim the longest deadlock in the country’s history over an equitable and efficient division of waters that has effectively embargoed any national effort to meet the critical challenge of global climatic change in times of economic scarcity. This is what happened.
The 1962 agreement with India was based on one major compromise: the waters of the eastern rivers – Ravi, Sutlej and Bias – would go to India and those of the western rivers – Indus, Jhelum and Chenab – would flow through Pakistan. Since the loss of the eastern river water was expected to devastate southern and eastern Punjab on Pakistan’s side, two major link canals were required to divert the waters of the Jhelum and Chenab into these rivers. In turn, the Jhelum and Chenab rivers were to be compensated by diverting water from the Indus via the Chashma-Jhelum and Taunsa-Punjnab link canals. The system was rounded off by building two water storage reservoirs at Mangla (1967) and Tarbela (1976) for use in times of water abundance and scarcity.
There was no significant expression of provincial discord over this arrangement at the time because there were no provinces in the country under General Ayub Khan’s prosperous one-unit west Pakistan. Subsequently, however, when a federal constitution was approved in 1973 under prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a Sindhi, the need arose to devise and clinch a provincial water-sharing accord because Sindhi representatives felt that their province had been deprived of its “rightful” share of Indus river water following the 1962 treaty with India and the diversion of the waters of the “Sindhi Indus” to the “Punjabi rivers”. Unfortunately, however, Mr Bhutto, who was ideally placed to devise and sanction an equitable and efficient water accord, didn’t have the vision to do so during his tenure. Attempts to set up commissions for securing an accord in 1980 and 1983 during the Zia ul Haq regime foundered on the rock of Sindhi distrust or NWFP dissent. Another opportunity was lost when Mohammad Khan Junejo, a Sindhi, was prime minister from 1985-88. Then, under the Nawaz Sharif regime which controlled all four provinces in 1991, a “historic” water accord was signed by all the chief ministers.
Some critical facts about this March 1991 accord should be noted since its alleged violation by Punjab in recent months is the cause of bitter provincial squabbling at a time of water shortage in the country. The accord came after much argument, with the Punjab chief minister Ghulam Haider Wyne finally relenting to a new water sharing formula favourable to Sindh only after the approval by the other parties of a priority clause permitting the establishment of new water reservoirs which would lead to an increase of at least 10% in the quantity of water available throughout the year and help supplement Punjab’s relative loss of “historical” share-rights to Sindh and the NWFP under the accord. Although a dam at Kalabagh was not explicitly mentioned at the request of the Sindhi and NWFP chief ministers Jam Sadiq Ali and Mir Afzal Khan respectively, it was clearly understood that both would prepare the provincial ground for such a project and Mr Sharif would announce it within the month. In the event, however, Mr Khan reneged from the deal by getting the NWFP assembly to vote against the Kalabagh Dam project while Sindh chief ministers Jam Sadiq Ali and later Muzaffar Shah began to drag their feet. Subsequently, neither a Sindhi prime minister (Benazir Bhutto) nor a Punjabi (Nawaz Sharif) was able to cobble a consensus over the Kalabagh Dam project. And ten years later, with no additional reservoirs established or in the offing and a water shortage on its hands, Punjab stands accused by Sindh of subverting the 1991 accord by diverting significant quantities of water from the Indus to its five rivers.
The problem is accentuated by the fact that not only have new water reservoirs not been built to address the problem of water shortage but the old ones have been allowed to silt up, choking critical downstream channels, especially in Punjab. Thus when agriculture is badly affected by low rainfall and low flow in all the rivers, as in recent times, Sindh is quick to level allegations of “water theft” against Punjab. It may be recalled that parts of both Sindh and Balochistan were struck by drought and famine-like conditions last year and Sindh is fearful of the same fate this year too. In fact, the Sindh government has asked its farmers not to expend too much acreage to the province’s most important crop, rice, because of its high water requirements. But the fact is that Punjab’s rice and cotton crops are also at risk in the south where drought has been persistent and river water discharge at its lowest in decades.
As Sindh and Punjab continue to wrangle over the apportionment of river water, the prediction is that in the next three years the catchment area of the Indus system will suffer from low rainfall and lead to drought in the two provinces. Ominously, the United Nations has synchronised its warning about a global shortage of water at the same time as the water crisis in Pakistan.
Sovereign states often do not pay heed to global factors but move selfishly to grab scarce resources at the expense of their neighbours. But Pakistan has the dubious distinction of settling the scarce-water issue with hostile India (despite the rhetoric that the enemy could and would use Kashmir to choke off Pakistan’s water supply) while creating a kind of civil war over the division of waters among its constitutent federating units. So intense has been the war of words over water between Punjab on the one hand and the NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan, on the other, that no new water reservoirs have been built in the country since 1974. Pakistan is therefore in an unenviable energy nut-cracker: it can’t have nuclear energy because of an external embargo, and it can’t have hydel energy and irrigation because of an internal embargo.
The ruling elites of Pakistan have a way of creating crises that allow no resolution. Problems much smaller than the river-water dispute have been allowed to fester because deadlock serves some vested interest or the other. Now most solutions seem difficult, if not impossible, because the time for implementing them is rapidly passing. In terms of the water problem, large dams, in particular, are no longer internationally popular and global citizens’ movements are ready to fight such projects tooth and nail wherever they are discussed. Thus if it is not easy to counsel international arbitration to the provinces of a sovereign state, the fact is that even if the provinces were to agree to submit to such an arbitration and come to an agreement, Pakistan will still find it difficult to raise the money for big dams in the next decade or so without major shifts in the way it is perceived by international money-lenders whose geo-strategic concerns are blithely spurned by our national security establishment.
If Pakistan were a genuine federal democratic republic following realistic and consensual policies at home and abroad, it could get many of its necessary infrastructure projects, including irrigation dams, off the drawing boards. Equally, a bleak economic outlook will fuel inter-provincial, inter-class and inter-ethnic distrust and conflict.
The fact is that a bankrupt economy can be significantly improved only with international help. If this were to be forthcoming, it would lessen the political pressure on the provinces for making a political cult out of economic disagreement. But as things stand, the government in Islamabad has no resources with which to attract the wrangling provincial establishments into a water-sharing agreement. Problems pushed under the carpet since the 1970s have now become crises that brook few amicable solutions. The water dispute, in particular, is potentially explosive. If famine and large-scale movements of population become an annual feature in the years of scarcity ahead, not all the nuclear weapons in our arsenal, nor all the jihads in Kashmir and Afghanistan, will preclude civil war-like conditions in the country.
(Nov 02-08, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 36 – Editorial)
Afghan roadmap needed
Has the supercharged US military-intelligence machine got bogged down in Afghanistan? Despite the bombs and high-gadgetry homing devices poured over Afghanistan, the “tenacious” Taliban seem unrepentant. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden has gone underground, literally, but not before threatening to ignite the ground under the feet of the “aggressors”. Americans are therefore bracing for another terrorist attack.
Critics argue that the American carrot-stick strategy of trying to bomb and bribe the Taliban has failed to bear fruit. Further evidence of failure relates to the CIA’s botched attempt to stir rebellion against the Taliban via commander Abdul Haq who was armed only with satchels full of greenbacks before he was betrayed, captured and executed. It is therefore concluded that this war or campaign is going to be a long and nasty one, with some people apprehensive about a right-wing military coup against General Pervez Musharraf. Leading this pack is the irrepressible American journalist Seymour Hersh who says that special American troops are rehearsing how to “take out” Pakistan’s nuclear programme should General Pervez Musharraf be ousted from power.
Like many others, General Musharraf had hoped that the American military campaign would be short, swift and sharp, leading to the installation of a friendly broad based government in Kabul before public opinion turned irrevocably hostile in Pakistan. But this hasn’t happened. In fact, local religious parties have swelled their ranks and are flexing for a showdown with the government, with a few actually trying to subvert the army. This has prompted General Musharraf to sweep the decks and bring moderate and pragmatic army officers into positions of responsibility in place of the more ideological or politically ambitious ones who originally installed him in power. The prospect of a longer than anticipated war with rising “collateral damage” (what a callous phrase!) and an attendant popular backlash in the country has also fueled speculation that he might seek to mend fences with certain politicians in the national interest of Pakistan.
But General Musharraf is reasonably sanguine that he has taken the right decision and the storm will pass. He is hoping for positive results in Afghanistan even as he digs in for a longer haul. Is his guarded optimism justified?
As everyone knows, two salient facts stand out about the American campaign against OBL, Al Qaeda and the Taliban so far. First, the Americans have said from Day-One that this is the beginning of a multi-faceted and prolonged war against Al-Qaeda and its ilk. So if there are any qualms about the lack of progress until now, people should be patient. Second, the Americans have merely tried to “soften” up the Taliban rather than seriously finishing them off. They are concentrating on knocking out the Taliban’s logistical support and heavy weapons instead of indiscriminately carpet-bombing their troop concentrations. There are two reasons for this: the Taliban’s heavy armour and logistical bases must be knocked out before the Americans can establish a couple of secure bridgeheads for “boots on ground” and intelligence operations; and the NA has to be kept at arms length from Kabul until a broad based government acceptable to Pakistan and the rest of the regional players has been cobbled and installed in the capital. What are the prospects of that happening soon?
Pro-Taliban commentators say the Taliban will never surrender to the Americans. But might they not switch in sufficient numbers if the conditions were right? General Musharraf’s rather coy remark recently of impending switches and defections among the Taliban should not be ignored. Perhaps the hiatus in the war provided by Ramadan will be a cover for achieving this objective. Voices in the American establishment are already saying that Washington may have missed the import of the Taliban’s early statements suggesting that they would have no serious objections if the Americans could “take out” their honourable guest without direct reference to them.
A couple of days ago some American soldiers and advisers were attached to contingents of the NA facing Mazhar i Sharif. This significant development suggests that further pressure will be brought to bear on the Taliban’s front lines by a targeted dose of carpet-bombing while propelling the NA’s ragtag army into effective military action. Equally critically, the presence of the Americans is meant to make sure that the NA’s troops do not commit atrocities after they capture the city. The same sort of pressure on the Taliban and restraint on the NA may be evident along the Kabul front in weeks to come. In fact, the Americans may be preparing the ground to hold the NA in check while readying a UN sponsored military force to occupy Kabul as soon as possible.
Fortunately, civilian casualties in Afghanistan are still much less than originally anticipated. But these will surely mount as the war is extended. Islamic passions are bound to be further inflamed. That is why the Americans and Pakistanis must extract maximum mileage from the onset of Ramadan. The sooner the political essence and organisational structure of a new government in Kabul is agreed upon between the contending powers, a roadmap, as it were, the quicker the Taliban can be swept aside and the bombing brought to an end.
(May 28-June 03, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 14 – Editorial)
His Majesty’s loyal opposition?
General Pervez Musharraf constantly exhorts everyone to project Pakistan as a “progressive, open-minded state” that practices “moderation, tolerance and enlightenment”. Last week he reiterated that “religious fanatics won’t be allowed to rule the country”. Said he: “This was the vision of the Quaid i Azam and we will continue to transform this vision into reality.”
Alas. The reality doesn’t gibe with his vision.
There have been at least three attempts by religious fanatics to knock off General Musharraf. The intelligence agencies know that the would-be assassins are members of, or have strong links to, well known militant religious organisations based in Pakistan. Yet the leaders of these groups are free to roam about and make virulent speeches against General Musharraf’s “enlightened” policies. What’s stopping him from shutting them up? Is there some perceived military-institutional or personal-political interest at stake that General Musharraf is protecting, even at risk to his own life?
The evidence suggests that the historical Military-Mullah Alliance (MMA) is alive and kicking. It was actively nurtured in the 1980s by General Zia ul Haq to flog the establishment’s regional ambitions in Afghanistan. But this was at the expense of the Pakistan Peoples Party and civil society at home. In the 1990s, the MMA’s regional ambitions were focused on jihad in Indian-held Kashmir. Thus the Bhutto government was dismissed at its behest in 1990 for being “soft’ on India and the Nawaz government met the same fate in 1999 for objecting to Kargil. Since then, the MMA has been flushed out in the open: both Bhutto and Sharif have been banished, their parties cut to size and the Muttahida Majlis i Amal (MMA) not simply enabled to form governments in two provinces but also to preach and practice its version of “fundamentalist Islam”. In the latest deal, the MMA’s Maulana Fazlur Rehman has been chosen by General Musharraf to be the “loyal” leader of the opposition, prompting the good maulana to claim at a rally in Karachi that “the MMA is the alternative government-in-waiting”.
The government has broken every rule in the book to foist the Maulana as Speaker of the National Assembly. But the Rules of Business in the NA say that ” Leader of the Opposition means a member who in the opinion of the Speaker is for the time being leader of the majority of the members in the opposition”. Thus the Maulana’s claim of 68 votes currently should have been matched against 79 by the PPP-PMLN’s Amin Fahim. Instead, the Speaker accounted for Maulana Rehman’s 87 votes 14 months ago during the election of the prime minister and not the PPP’s largest tally of 81 at the time of oath taking. Why this hanky-panky?
The answer is that the Military-Mullah Alliance in 2002 had to be micromanaged into becoming the Musharraf-Maulana Alliance in 2004 to ensure one key objective by each player: General Musharraf needed the support of the MMA for the 17th amendment and Maulana Fazlur Rehman wanted to become leader of the “alternative government in waiting”. That deal has now come to fruition by hook and by crook.
But the underlying tension between General Musharraf’s “vision and reality” — his abhorrence of the fundamentalism of the mullahs and fanatics versus his personal-political need to make alliances with them – is bound to become acute over time. Just as the jihadis who are part of the MMA are out to get General Musharraf, the MMA continues to attack him relentlessly. “The terrorists are not in Wana”, thundered Maulana Fazlur Rehman after being informed of General Musharraf’s decision to make him ‘prime minister in waiting’, “the terrorists and murderers are in Musharraf’s cabinet, government and Governor’s House”. How can the contradictions in the emerging scenario be ignored? Maulana Fazlur Rehman is now obliged to sit in the supra-cabinet National Security Council to which he is vociferously opposed, and pay obeisance to General Musharraf whose uniform he seeks to dismantle in order to weaken his grip over the military.
In short, the religious parties are all for the institutional Military-Mullah Alliance but against the person of General Musharraf while General Musharraf is personally against the mullahs and all for the Musharraf-Maulana Alliance! That is why General Musharraf rails against religious extremists while making alliances with them and that is why the mullahs rail against General Musharraf and seek fresh alliances with the military at the same time.
This “balancing act” is fated to fail for two fundamental reasons. One, the current domestic and international environment requires a stable political alliance in Pakistan between the moderate military establishment and the moderate mainstream parties rather than a continuation of the Military-Mullah Alliance which has outlived its historical utility. Two, the Musharraf-Maulana Alliance’s short-term utility is going to be constantly eroded from within by the longer-term institutional compulsions of both partners. When the rift occurs, General Musharraf will have two options. He could swallow his pride and go with the institutional tide for mainstream pluralism and democracy. Or he could opt for the one-party, one-leader, one-state solution by sidelining parliament, provinces and all opposition political parties. The latter would be far removed from the vision of the Quaid that he so fervently espouses.
(Nov 19-25, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 39 – Editorial)
Back to the dark ages?
General Pervez Musharraf’s project of “enlightened moderation” continues to face opposition from conservative and religious opinion in the country. But the irony lies in the fact that the fiercest resistance comes from those elements of state, government and society with whom he has made political alliances to sustain his regime. For example, when he first mooted a procedural revision of the blasphemy laws in order to strip them of mischief, the Jama’at-e Islami threatened to riot on the streets. General Musharraf backtracked hastily and then went on to clinch a far-reaching understanding with the Mutahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) which gave birth to the notion of the “other” MMA or Military-Mullah Alliance.
Last April, the Sindh High Court took the courageous decision to outlaw the “jirga” system prevalent in rural Sindh on the grounds that many of its judgments, in particular those that discriminated against women, violated national laws. But a majority of Sindh MPAs thought otherwise and defied the court. They drafted a law propping up the jirga system and then backdated it to negate the court’s judgment. But before the bill could be enacted, news of this skullduggery spilled over into the media and set alarm-bells ringing in human rights organizations and aid-giving international agencies. This compelled Ms Nilofer Bakhtiar, the prime minister’s advisor on women’s affairs, to step into the fray and state categorically that the federal government would not allow Sindh to legalise the jirga system. As if to prove its credentials, the federal government later legislated a bill outlawing “honour killings”, a widely prevalent practice that is equally widely sanctioned or condoned by tribal jirgas or traditional panchayats across the country. Interesting enough, the chief minister of Sindh, a Musharraf appointee, and the Jama’at-e Islami, which forms the opposition in Sindh, are jointly agreed that the jirga system is beneficial, as are the MMA government and the pro-Musharraf MPAs of the Muslim League opposition in the NWFP and the MMA-Muslim League government in Balochistan. Punjab is the only province where pro-jirga sentiment in the assembly is kept in check by the sensible chief minister, Pervaiz Elahi.
The jirga, or council of elders, is a traditional practice that goes back to tribal society when the modern nation-state had not yet been created. Its main function was to resolve local conflict and ensure stability of the social order of tribal confederacies. Consequently, its views were in conformity with societal norms and culture, however oppressive or inequitable or women-centred these may seem today. But the formation of the modern nation-state is always based on the universalisation, formalisation and codification of laws that apply everywhere and to everyone under its territorial jurisdiction. However, this process has not always proceeded smoothly or evenly, especially where the transition to the nation-state has been an abrupt, swift or enforced process. In such cases, different sets of laws, traditions and cultural practices are often layered above one another, sometimes in harmony but more often in conflict. The problem in Pakistan is compounded by at least three sets of “national” identities: a Muslim identity that confuses Islamic religious practices with pre-Islamic societal and cultural traditions; a colonial heritage that transposes Anglo-Saxon laws on this volatile base; and a post-independence Islamic jurisprudence that runs parallel to this structure and sometimes cuts right through it. Currently, an element of reaction has come to characterise it, both in terms of the Pakistani state’s attempts to align with the international community to protect and stabilise itself and the angry anti-West sentiments of Pakistanis who want to defy Western-sponsored globalisation.
Jirgas in Pakistan have sanctioned gang-rape, swara (gifting girls to clear debts), honour-killings, stoning to death for adultery, etc. They have outlawed NGOs, sanctioned closure of music and video shops and inspired fundamentalists to deface billboards. In short, far from providing a modicum of stability and harmony in local society by mediating conflict judiciously, jirgas have provoked “law and order” situations whenever and wherever they have decreed. Indeed, it is a myth that the jirga still adjudicates on the basis of custom. The truth is that the jirga favours whoever is in power and metes out kangaroo-court punishments to innocent individuals. That is why it is also important to identify who is trying to revive the jirga system and who is ignoring the fact that the police – an instrument of the state – has been ousted from its jurisdiction in many parts of Pakistan.
The jirga in non-tribal societies such as Sindh and Punjab (where it is called panchayat) is simply a perverse tribalisation of the state. In Balochistan and the NWFP, jirgas are instruments in the hands of powerful reactionaries determined to resist the writ of the modern nation-state by trying to drag us into a quasi-judicial quagmire. In the final analysis, a jirga is a violation of the constitutional edict of the separation of the judiciary from the executive that forms the bedrock of the modern nation-state. General Musharraf has his job cut out for him. He should stop his political partners as much as his oppositionists from dragging Pakistan back into the dark ages.
(Nov 12-18, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 38 – Editorial)
The world according to Bush
The MMA has won the world election for the president of America.
We refer, of course, to the Moral Majority of America or Moral Middle America. But mistaking it for a distant cousin of the Muttahida Majlis Amal of Pakistan might not be such an unforgivable sin under the circumstances. Never before has such an unprecedented swing been so critically dependent on the “moral brigade” of America nearly 18% of all American voters voted for Bush only because of their “moral” views against gay rights, abortion, etc. Never before have middle American states voted so solidly against the liberal peripheral states. Never before has any American election gripped the rest of the world like this one as though it were a matter of life and death for every citizen of the world outside America regardless of caste, colour or creed. Never before has the overwhelming sentiment of the world against George W Bush been so arrogantly spurned by a majority of Americans. Never before has the bitter division inside America been as remarkable as the fearful divide between George W Bush’s America and the rest of the world. And never before was such an issue-oriented election fought in such a personality-obsessed America.
In 2000 George W Bush lost the popular vote but still won the election. However, in 2004 George W Bush won only 51% of the vote but also won both Houses of Congress and is poised to dominate the Supreme Court. When was the last time an American politician seized control over all three branches of the state and negated the principles of separation of powers enshrined by America’s founding fathers? How will the world fare in the next four years?
Most people believe that President Bush will continue to wreck international law and order, alienate world public opinion, fuel anti-Americanism across the globe and give succour to Islamic terror. In this scenario, Osama bin Laden will be gloating over his successful strategy of dividing America and isolating it in the world. But is President Bush as stupid as he looks and sounds? Will the “ground realities” at home and abroad allow him to run amuck as feared?
President Bush will certainly throw everything he’s got into Iraq and Afghanistan to stitch up two bleeding wounds. He will back Ariel Sharon’s two-state solution in the Middle-East at the cost of the Palestinians. He will forcefully pursue “the war against terror” in the Muslim world. In so doing, he will vindicate the “clash of civilization” thesis, making Muslims in America and abroad angry, fearful and vengeful. But will he open another military front against Iran over its nuclear programme? We think not. Will he insist on bilateral negotiations with N Korea and hold out the threat of military action? We don’t think so. Will he extend the doctrine of unilateralism to embrace significant new military adventures across the globe? Probably not. Whatever his own inclinations and those of his neocon advisors and friends, the “ground realities” – an unprecedented budgetary deficit, a weakening dollar, a massive overstretch of precious American boots and an agonisingly divided nation – will be important causes of restraint. By the same criterion, and for much the same reason, his rhetoric could be quite aggressive. Indeed, in order to avoid physical actions around the globe he may seek to employ the most hostile threats and postures.
Europe will be circumspect, to be sure, hoping to draw Bush out instead of fencing him in. The UN has no option but to follow suit. But South Asia may actually benefit from a Bush presidency.
The Indian ruling elites see this as a great opportunity to establish the strategic relationship they have long sought with America. That’s why the Bombay stock market soared 1.5 points after the Bush victory. This inclination will be strengthened by the views and actions of the 2 million-strong Non-Resident Indian (NRI) community in the US which is America’s richest ethnic group with increasing sympathy for Bush’s conservative agenda. No wonder Indian leaders and strategic thinkers are already smacking their lips in anticipation. Who cares whether lay Indians like Bush or not?
Similarly, the perspective of the Pakistani elites and state favours a Bush presidency even though most Pakistanis abhor the man and his policies. Greater American economic assistance, military aid and trade facilitation are on the cards in exchange for increased cooperation in turning the tide of radical Islam, stabilizing the Hamid Karzai regime in Afghanistan and building peace with India – three areas in which success is desperately required by the Bush administration to vindicate electoral promises and actualize threats. Surely, when push comes to shove and concrete jobs are on the line, most Pakistanis will curse Bush for propping up the Musharraf regime and hurting Muslims even as they line up to grab the goodies from rising economic growth and trade, greater moderation in every day life and enduring peace with neighbours east and west that result from Bush pressures and policies in the region.
However the landscape shapes out and whatever the legacies, we can be sure of one thing: the world will be in terrifying flux during the next four years.
(Oct 26-Nov 01, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 35 – Editorial)
India’s error
New Delhi’s behaviour is startling. Two years ago, it didn’t want to talk to General Pervez Musharraf because he was a military dictator and the architect of Kargil. But that didn’t cut much ice with observers. N Delhi’s historical record shows its readiness to cosy up to dictators when it suits its interests. Certainly, India had no problems dialoguing with General Ayub Khan with whom it signed the historic Indus Waters Treaty in 1962, and with General Zia ul Haq with whom it enjoyed cricket diplomacy in 1987. The former, it may be recalled, went to war with India in 1965 while the latter stirred up the Khalistani separatists in Indian Punjab in the early 1980s.
Last year, New Delhi was ecstatic when US President Bill Clinton spent five days lapping up India and five hours badgering Pakistan. In particular, the spectacle of Indian MPs literally tripping over themselves to paw Mr Clinton in the Indian parliament was inexcusable. Even in the heyday of US-Pak relations in the 1960s, when Pakistan was an American client state, such toadying was never sanctioned in Islamabad. And this fawning India was the same independent India that once led the non-aligned movement of the third world.
Early this year, however, India’s prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee suddenly decided that General Musharraf was kosher for talks. Perhaps Mr Vajpayee sought to curry favour with the new Republicans in Washington by portraying himself as a man of peace. Unfortunately, however, the BJP hardliners derailed his planned diplomatic coup at Agra by fishing out the concept of “cross-border terrorism” at the nth minute in exchange for conceding the centrality of the Kashmir dispute between the two countries.
But if Agra did not cement an immediate agreement, it did not preclude one in the near future either. Indeed, the requirement of incorporating “cross-border terrorism” into the diplomatic loop totally rejected by Pakistan did not stop Mr Vajpayee and foreign minister Jaswant Singh from accepting a Pakistani invitation for talks in Islamabad. In fact, early post-Agra statements from them suggested that they saw wisdom in continuing the talks about peace-talks. All this was said and done because it was correctly recognized in India that a failure to achieve an understanding with General Musharraf was likely to strengthen the militants in Kashmir and prolong the insufferable insurgency. Meanwhile, both sides continued to feign a stout defense of their uncompromising position over Kashmir. Thus when the Kashmiri militants attacked military targets and provoked “collateral damage”, N Delhi renewed its attempts to crush them without bringing Pakistan into its direct firing line.
On September 11, however, the world changed in many ways, not least for India. As the US thundered “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” and vowed to wage an infinite war against the Taliban, al-Qaida and all those abetting them, India saw a perverse opportunity to embrace the United States and isolate Pakistan. Suddenly, even before Presidents Bush’s words had stopped ringing in the ears of its Western allies, India was ready to offer airbases and anything else the US so desired in its war against “terrorism”. It was an act of incomparable obsequiousness ill-befitting India. Therefore the humiliation and anger and hurt that has followed America’s spurning of India in favour of Pakistan has begotten a new anti-Pakistan belligerence from India that began by welcoming Colin Powell with an unprovoked barrage across the LoC and is now threatening to spiral out of control in Kashmir.
The anti-Pakistan rhetoric that has followed is a matter of grave concern. The return of the cavalier George Fernandes as defense minister also suggests that India is tilting in the direction of destabilizing Pakistan by undermining General Musharraf. Apparently, its thinking is that it’s now or never. In other words, it believes this is the time to wake up the world “to the terrorism spawned by Pakistan in Kashmir” and get it to collar Islamabad. Hence what was kosher yesterday (talking with General Musharraf) is not kosher today, not in Pakistan and not at the UN next month.
This is misplaced strategy on the part of India. It means that the Hindu Fundos in India are unwittingly playing into the hands of the Islamic fundos in Pakistan. The Jaish-i- Mohammad, for instance, has upped its attacks on civilians in Kashmir in order to put General Musharraf on the mat. Other fundo organizations are openly trying to subvert the Pakistani army and unleash an Islamic coup. Their purpose is the same: create mayhem and rage, then try and seize the Pakistani state.
Seen in this context, the current poverty of philosophy in India is both self-insulting and self-injuring. If a couple of thousand Islamic fundos in Kashmir are a millstone around India’s neck, a couple of million Islamic fundos in Pakistan could trigger a nuclear war in the region. The sooner India recognizes the truth of current realities —including the injustice in Kashmir — the better. N Delhi should therefore start talking to Pakistan again as soon as possible since there is no better-placed or flexible Pakistani than General Pervez Musharraf with whom to clinch an honourable and equitable compromise.
(Oct 05-11, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 32 – Editorial)
Stand up and be counted
September 27 was billed as a day of national solidarity. On that day General Pervez Musharraf asked the people of Pakistan not so much as to choose between the Taleban and America as to stand up and be counted in the ranks of those who oppose extremism and reject narrow-minded isolation. Accordingly, notable rallies were held across the country.
Two salient facts about these rallies stand out. The religious parties were conspicuous by their absence. And the mainstream political parties, especially those who have incurred the military government’s wrath on more than one count like the Peoples Party and the MQM, were very much in attendance. Thus while the mullahs are burning effigies and threatening jehad against the government for upholding the national interest, the politicians have set aside their quarrels with General Musharraf and are backing him to the hilt in this difficult moment for Pakistan.
There is a lesson in this for the wise men and women of General Musharraf’s government. During a national security crisis, internal political differences should be sacrificed at the altar of the supreme national interest. Our difficulties have just begun and the worst is yet to come. If the politicians have understood this point and demonstrated wisdom by supporting General Musharraf, the government should reciprocate by building a formal national coalition to steer the nation-state into safer waters. This is a time to close ranks, a time for international credibility and not domestic accountability.
There are lessons to be learnt also by Pakistan’s perennial Establishment. The most important is that the tail should not wag the dog. In our case, this means that foreign policy should not dictate how Pakistan is domestically organized and run. Islamabad’s swift about-turn on Taleban policy in the face of viable threats to our domestic economy and nuclear assets is therefore commendable, as is General Musharraf’s speedy invitation to ex-Afghan King Zahir Shah for emissary-level talks in Pakistan. But this is a moment not just for adjustment to pressing foreign realities. It should also be a time for serious introspection about what sort of nation-state and civil society we want to build and how we want to integrate with the rest of the world in a mutually profitable, creative and enduring enterprise.
Therefore it is not only the Pakistani Establishment that has to make its choices. It is also us, the elites and the middle-classes, who must choose the kind of society we want to build. We have to choose how we want to live and what sort of country we want to hand over to our children. We must ask ourselves certain crucial questions: Can we afford the kind of isolation that was imposed upon Afghanistan? Can we live the way the Afghan population has lived under the extremist Taliban? If the answer to both these questions is no, then we have made our choice. We want to be part of the world, we value freedom, we want to be prosperous and we want our children to have a future with choices.
For too many years, the elites in particular have had their golden parachutes on the ready. They have lived luxurious, alienated lives in Pakistan and banked their money abroad. Their children have sought educations abroad (mostly in America) and gone on to find gainful employment (mostly in America). Do the elites now realise that there are no safe havens left? Do they realise the enormity of the fact that we are now to be judged by the colour of our skin and the sound of our names in the coveted West of our dreams? If the elites don’t build a modern and moderate Pakistan, they will find all doors closing on them abroad. So instead of seeking slippery toeholds abroad, the elites must more firmly stake their interests at home.
The middle classes, who were all lining up for immigration visas, must make their choices too. They cannot opt for western countries with hatred in their hearts for secular values and free cultures. In fact, those who’ve already made their lives and jobs abroad must realize that a judicious integration with the world is necessary if they are to escape the disastrous consequences of racial attacks and suspicions that are before them today. All expatriates should shed political hypocrisy and retreat from the mental ghettos in which they survive.
Finally, every Pakistani needs to confront the challenge of violent religious passion in an age of reason, rationality and science. For too long the moderate silent majority has shirked its responsibilities. For too long, the Establishment has condoned the growth of violent militias. For too long, the judiciary has cowered in fear of reprisals. For too long, the politicians have made political alliances detrimental to the interests of the nation-state. For too long, we, the nation, have unthinkingly foreclosed our options for a truly satisfying nationhood.
If, as many are wont to claim, today is a critical moment in our history, let us join hands in defining it afresh. Having betrayed our forefathers, let us not now betray our grandchildren. Let us stand up and be counted as an articulate and confident majority in search of a modern Pakistan.
(Dec 07-13, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 41 – Editorial)
Revive commitment to free press
Among the few enduring strengths of this country is a free and vibrant press. To those who have not lived under the shadow of dictatorship or don’t know this country well, this fact is taken for granted. But for much of the time since independence in 1947, the press has been in chains. And it was only in 1988, after Gen Zia ul Haq perished, that the first gust of freedom blew our way. This was owed in no small measure to a repeal of the notorious Press and Publications Ordinance (PPO) enacted by General Ayub Khan in the early 1960s in which the press was treated in the manner of a subversive native element in a repressive colonial state.
The repealing Ordinance, appropriately called the RPPO, was promulgated by a caretaker regime only days before the elections of 1988 which Benazir Bhutto was expected to win. To be sure, the press had bravely fought for freedom and deserved its rights. But the anti-Bhutto establishment that had denied such rights earlier was now quick to open the floodgates of the printed word. Cynics said the establishment wanted to “exploit” a free press to undermine the new democratic government in the offing and there was much proof of such manipulation in the years to follow, with clever journalists becoming witting tools (information ministers, press secretaries and attaches) in various civilian dispensations. But in due course sections of the press were able to shrug off the persistent demands of overbearing governments and stand on their own feet. A proliferation of newspapers and magazines since then has made it almost impossible to “control” the press effectively, though, of course, this has not stopped any government from offering “press advice” or using various levers of power (inducements and threats) to try and keep editors and publishers in line. This was especially evident during the “democratic” regime of Nawaz Sharif from 1997-99 when the stick was applied more ruthlessly to newspapers and journalists than at any time since the Zia years.
Indeed, one of the “blessings in disguise” inherited by the coup-makers of 1999 was a free press which told the world how the country had suffered under Mr Sharif and why no one shed any tears for the not-so-dearly departed “democrat”. It was a bizarre situation: an elected prime minister had been deposed by the military; but instead of a chorus of press voices condemning the unconstitutional act and fearing the worst, free-minded journalists were inclined to weigh their words in “explaining” away the military intervention when they were not openly justifying it. No leader has kicked off with so much press hostility against a departing one and so much support for a new one than General Pervez Musharraf.
It is, of course, to General Musharraf’s abiding credit that his government has not taken any steps to try and gag the press. In fact, he has been wise to exploit the international goodwill generated by the existence of a lively press in the country. Certainly, the hostility of the international community to the Kargil coupmakers was assuaged in no small measure until recently by elements of the free Pakistani press. But there have been some disquieting developments since General Musharraf has acquired greater legitimacy at home and abroad and demonstrated a swaggering confidence in his own ability to hold sway.
Thankfully, though, the incidents are few and far between as yet. Irritation at stupid questions during press conferences and anger at awkward ones. Accusations against journalists and hostility towards critics. Standard Operating Procedures in regard to snubbing “negative” reporting. And so on. But that is how it always begins, doesn’t it? When rulers are insecure, they are keen to woo the press. When they become supremely confident, they are likely to become intolerant of a boisterous press. But overconfidence has rarely yielded “positive” results. Indeed, as our own history testifies in the case of Bhutto II and Sharif II, it has led to fatal ends. Therefore greater personal tolerance and political modesty may be a preferred course of action for leaders seeking to retain support and ensure longevity.
General Musharraf’s attention is required in one other matter. The RPPO was allowed to lapse unlegislated by the Sharif regime. Therefore there is a legal vacuum in the law regulating the press. The 1960s PPO is dead and buried but the 1990s RPPO is not alive and kicking. The problem has been accentuated since the provincial governments were rendered clueless about their prerogatives under the new local government’s charter of rights. It is therefore imperative that the federal cabinet should breathe new life into the RPPO quickly before some blundering official trips the wire and embarrasses the government by clamping down unnecessarily on a publication or some frustrated publisher prints a new title without “official” permission. The RPPO, we understand, has been approved by the ministries of information and law and only needs the cabinet’s green light. Can we expect General Musharraf to revive the RPPO immediately as a sign of his personal commitment to a free press in this country?
(Dec 14-20, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 42 – Editorial)
Afghanistan: what next for Pakistan?
Except for the core troika in the Northern Alliance represented by Mr Abdullah Abdullah (foreign minister), Mr Younas Qanooni (interior minister) and General Mohammad Fahim (defense minister), no one in Afghanistan is particularly pleased with the power-sharing formula hammered out in Bonn. The “troika” has hogged all the important posts and is now manipulating internal and external policies with a view to influencing the Loya Jirga when it meets six months down the line to construct a longer-term government. Forget about the majority Pakhtuns who have been given no more than a token representation in the form of the prime minister, Hamid Karzai. Even old NA allies like the Uzbek warlord, General Rashid Dostum, in the north and the former president of Afghanistan, Burhanuddin Rabbani, are grumbling.
It is, of course, the fate of the Afghan Pakhtuns that concerns Pakistan for many reasons. The Pakhtun south is predictably split. If that seems to be an unfortunate Pakhtun characteristic, the contrast in the political behaviour of the other ethnic communities of Afghanistan is quite remarkable. In the old days when everyone was fighting the Russians, the Uzbeks stuck together and General Dostam was able to sway all incoming governments in his favour with his 40,000 strong army. He was available to the communists of the PDPA for “use”. Then President Mujaddidi made him his own top general. The Tajiks also stuck together and created the second largest army of Afghanistan under commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. In contrast, the majority Pakhtuns tended to split into separate parties and behaved as if their Pakhtun identity did not really matter. Although this characteristic made them amenable to their ISI and CIA “handlers”, this kind of divide and rule strategy yielded no permanent loyalties and everyone knew that everyone was in the game for his own dirty purpose. Indeed, Pakistan may have played it domestically as a holy jehad but it was a cruel dog-eat-dog game on the ground. Therefore when the Taliban entered the arena and united the Pakhtuns in 1996, the situation gradually slipped out of Pakistan’s control and the tail began to wag the dog. Over the years, the heady feeling that Pakistan finally had Afghanistan as its own backyard while no other country could even sustain an embassy in Kabul became a soporific that closed Islamabad’s eyes to the future.
If the fear of a “Pakhtun split” once again is real, nothing else on the ground is what it was when Pakistan went in with the Taliban and thought it had the field to itself. All the foreign embassies are soon going to be back in Kabul. The UN is going to be more influential than in the past as Bonn has demonstrated and its clout will be felt just as soon as British, European and Turkish “boots are on ground”. Above all, a lot of international money is going to be spread around, not so much through the biased parties in the Kabul interim government as through international agencies that are likely to concentrate on humanitarianism and social development rather that politics. The hope is that as this money is funnelled to the grassroots, it might lessen the intensity of the potential Pakhtun splits in the south of Afghanistan. In the event, this would contrast sharply with what happened to the money when it was given to the ISI for distribution among the mujahideen during the war against the Soviets.
Pakistan’s bugbear in Afghanistan has been India. But that policy of seeing red every time any Afghan is seen shaking hands with the Indians must be given up and a new non-ISI policy initiated to work on the emerging Tajik leadership on the basis of the transit trade facility that Pakistan can always use as leverage. India will remain marginal even after the end of the war. Its entry in the Afghan arena was a kind of tit-for-tat for the flanking move the ISI was making in Bangladesh, a flawed policy based on the assumption that Mrs Hasina Wajed was pro-India. In fact, India’s role in the new Afghanistan is bound to subside as Kabul will be inclined to act more and more in light of the advice offered by those who fund it. The biggest counter in Pakistan’s favour and against India is that India has exclusively backed the Tajiks while the stage must inevitably be set for the Pakhtun majority to reassert itself through the Loya Jirga next year.
Ironically enough, the fact that Afghanistan has gotten out of Pakistan’s stranglehold should go in favour of Pakistan. A large number of countries contributing to the reconstruction of Afghanistan should prevent it from becoming a battle-field for India and Pakistan. Therefore the sooner Pakistan recognises this reality, the better. It is the consolidation of internal rather than external control that should matter to us. A policy shaped passively on the belligerence of Islamic extremists posing as friends of the Pakhtuns in Afghanistan is a bad policy. India’s undue interference in Afghanistan can best be countered by aligning with the international community whose clout will be focused on keeping Afghanistan away from fundamentalist terrorism.
(Dec 26, 2003-Jan 01, 2004, Vol – XV, No. 44 – Editorial)
Inching forward
General Pervez Musharraf has remarked that Pakistan would be prepared to show some flexibility in a dialogue with India by setting aside the “either Pakistan or India” UN Resolutions on Kashmir if New Delhi was also flexible and abandoned its maximal position that Kashmir is an integral part of India. This has stirred contrasting sentiments in both countries.
At home, the prime minister, Zafarullah Khan Jamali, has voiced the nauseating mantra that “there is no change in Pakistan’s policy based on the UN resolutions” and the opposition has bloody-mindedly accused General Musharraf of “treachery”. Mr Jamali should have recognised the value of the idea floated by his “boss” and backed it to the hilt. Similarly, a loyal opposition conscious of the national interest would not have dared to spike this profound proposal.
In India, the Vajpayee government was, at first, strangely silent. One explanation for this was offered by an Indian analyst. He said that General Musharraf’s “dramatic” announcement had “once again stolen the thunder from New Delhi” in the eyes of the international community and brought Kashmir “back to centre-stage”. “If matters reach a dead end at the SAARC summit, it is game, set and match to Musharraf because he can announce to the world that he did try to bring about a rapprochement but it is India that has played the spoilsport”. This was a back-handed compliment to General Musharraf. It assumed he was only interested in playing to the galleries and not sincere in seeking a solution to a nettlesome problem. This has now scared Mr Vajpayee into retreating to his old shell. He says that he will agree to a dialogue with Pakistan only if it stops “cross-border” terrorism. That is a regression from the Indian position taken some weeks earlier that the infiltration tap had dried up and the Pakistani mindset had changed.
Who is sincere and who is not, tactics or strategy, only time will tell. But General Musharraf has certainly come a long way since Kargil. Shortly after seizing power, in a TV interview with BBC he rubbished the Lahore Summit and insisted he wouldn’t dialogue with India until it was ready to concede the centrality of the Kashmir dispute and focus on the core issue. But by the time he went to Agra in 2001, he was ready to show an astonishing degree of flexibility by accepting the original Indian formulation of an unconditional and composite dialogue on all issues, including Kashmir, simultaneously. That was also the first occasion when he publicly, though implicitly, set aside the UN Resolutions by admitting before a group of Indian editors that many options could be considered following a dialogue that progressively discarded all maximal options unacceptable to India, Pakistan or the Kashmiris until one could be found acceptable to each of the three parties. Was he sincere in his Agra initiative? We don’t know because the Indians slapped an unacceptable condition on the proposed dialogue and derailed Agra. Indeed, six months later, in an effort to squeeze mileage out of the new international mood after 9/11, New Delhi galvanized its army and threatened Pakistan with war. If anyone was lacking in sincerity, it was certainly not General Musharraf.
Mr Vajpayee has taken two years to demonstrate a readiness to smoke the peace pipe with Pakistan all over again. This has set the stage for encouraging agreements on resumption of trade, travel and diplomatic links before Mr Vajpayee and General Musharraf meet early next month. Unilateral concessions by both sides on some issues have paved the way for the SAARC summit. But a unilateral concession by General Musharraf to move beyond his implicit formulation at Agra and formally set aside the literal UN resolutions on Kashmir in the interests of a significant dialogue signals an unprecedented opening for all three sides. How each side handles it will show who is sincere and who is playing games.
Until now, the Indian position has been that Kashmir is an integral part of India and the only dialogue that India is interested in is one in which trade figures significantly and in which the problem is redefined as one of “cross- border terrorism” rather than one related to the rights of the Kashmiri people. In other words, its formulation has been to consolidate the status quo along the LoC into a de-jure border and be left alone to deal with the Kashmiris. This has provoked the Pakistanis to try and enforce a change in the status quo by aiding and abetting the resistance movement against the Indian state in Kashmir. What General Musharraf is now offering is a compromise framework for peace and stability based on a resolution of core and conditional issues for both sides that transcends the rigid positions into which both India and Pakistan have boxed themselves.
Who has vision, who is courageous, who is a statesman, who is playing games –we don’t know the answers to these questions. But we can hope, can’t we, that both Mr Vajpayee and General Musharraf shall inch forward unilaterally to demonstrate their mutual sincerity of purpose, breadth of vision and political courage.
(Dec 03-09, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 41 – Editorial)
Win-no loss approach on Kashmir
As predicted, the peace process in South Asia has been snagged by several persistent factors. First, there is India’s rigidity on the status quo in Kashmir. Pakistan has tried every trick in the book to shake or bend it and failed. Second, Pakistan’s irredentist claim on Indian-held territory lingers. But no modern sovereign nation-state has voluntarily relinquished territory through dialogue alone, however unjustly held the territory in question. Third, there are several contending Kashmiri groups vying for influence and power, including within the pro-Pakistan Hurriyet Conference, who violently disagree on the current reality and future status of Kashmir. Fourth, the international community and the current world climate militate against provocative or precipitate action by the two nuclear-armed states just as much as they do against the exploitation of militant Islam by Pakistan to achieve nationalist state ends. That means jihad can no longer be seriously used as a weapon of coercion in the discourse on Kashmir. Fifth, Pakistan stands to gain more from any “peace dividend” than India. The respite from long-term warring would dilute Pakistan’s obsession with “national security” and create the political space to develop stable, democratic and civilian institutions. Equally, the economic resources resultant from an end to the arms race could be productively employed in development and poverty alleviation.
So if all this is clear, what’s the way ahead? Let’s get concrete. Let’s follow General Pervez Musharraf’s recommended approach to solving Kashmir and see where it takes us.
A UN-conducted plebiscite is unacceptable to India. We should forget about it. A status quo vis-à-vis Kashmir is unacceptable to Pakistan. They should forget about it. They don’t want any further international partitions on religious grounds. All right. We can talk about regional and contiguous areas along ethnic lines within Kashmir. We don’t want them to take away “our” Azad Kashmir and Northern Areas. That should be fine with them as long as we say we won’t take away “their” J&K. Neither wants an independent Kashmir because we would “lose” Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas and they would “lose” J&K. Here’s one way out of the dilemma.
How about Pakistan redrawing some boundaries and changing the status quo within Pakistan in relation to Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas, and India redrawing some boundaries and changing the status quo within India in relation to J&K? How about Pakistan annexing the re-demarcated Northern Areas, and India annexing the re-demarcated Jammu and Ladakh regions, as separate provinces and states within their respective federations, leaving the status of a re-demarcated Azad Kashmir within Pakistan and a re-demarcated Kashmir region which includes the Valley but is not limited to it within India to be determined jointly and in association with the Kashmiris of these two areas? How about this “two-in-one Kashmir” region with soft internal borders whose Pakistan and Indian parts are separately administered by Pakistan and India respectively on the basis of separately signed deals with the two countries on the degree of autonomy to be leveraged for each part until 2050, with the option of continuing with the arrangement, or becoming one independent entity, or joining either India or Pakistan, by 3/4th vote in 2050? War in the first fifty years since independnce hasnt delivered a solution. Maybe peace in the next fifty can deliver one. This would be a “win” situation for the Kashmiris and a “no-loss” situation for both India and Pakistan that reflects modern ground realities rather than the unfinished business of partititon. If all protagonists could move towards this end and arrive there by 2010, the resolution of the other vexing issues between them could be less roublesome and more immediate.
The peace dialogue appears to be getting bogged down because both sides are spinning different interpretations on the “composite” theme. Pakistan wants “progress on Kashmir” before it will open up the track on trade and transit routes. India wants to go slow on Kashmir and push trade and transit instead. Pakistan wants the gas pipeline project to stand alone but India is linking it to the MFN trade status. Pakistan is threatening multilateral intervention on the water disputes because India is balking on bilateral solutions. Both are going ahead with the arms race. Gen Musharraf is visibly irritated and Dr Manmohan Singh is obviously frustrated. This is ominous.
India and the international community must understand that the “CBM-first” process in S Asia cannot yield the conditions in which all lesser issues can be discussed and resolved now while Kashmir is taken up later. There are two main reasons for this. First, India is rightly perceived as a potential, if not actual, regional hegemon. Second, India has helped dismember Pakistan. These conditions of acute distrust and hostility were not present when the “CBM approach to conflict resolution” was successfully applied in Europe in the 1970s. Equally, Pakistan must realise that the “Kashmir-first” approach is going nowhere. Therefore both sides should (1) de-link issues from one another and (2) move simultaneously on all of them (3) without the expectation that resolution is likely to be simultaneous on all of them. If the “win-no loss” approach advocated above on Kashmir is undertaken, it would be possible for both sides to have their cake and eat it too.
(Dec 10-16, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 42 – Editorial)
Play the game!
First Pakistan’s security, then democracy.” Thus spake President General Pervez Musharraf. His words of wisdom were presented not to a servile Pakistani audience of hangers-on or media sycophants but to top-notch American and British policymakers and media watchdogs for whom “democracy” is sacrosanct. Far from demurring, they laid out the red carpet for the general and clucked in appreciation at his “sagacity and courage”. Indeed, even the wretched Commonwealth that had so hectored and harassed him before 9/11, 2001, for “lack of democracy”, has scurried out of sight.
Our local pundits who said that the general might doff his uniform have egg on their face. “Parliament has requested me to stay army chief”, he rubbed it in. It is not lost on anyone that parliament has passed the two-offices bill and the Senate Chairman, a civilian to boot, has signed it as acting president. So General Pervez Musharraf hasn’t even dirtied his hands in securing his terms. To give the devil his due, not bad. Not bad at all.
This puts a twist on recent speculations on the need for a “deal” between General Musharraf and the mainstream parties for institutionalizing real democracy. If parliament is solidly with him and the international community is backing him to the hilt, why should he worry about what a couple of jailed or exiled politicians have to say, let alone do any “deals” with them?
Pakistan has been stuck in the decrepit groove of “security first, then democracy” since independence at the behest of military dictators. But the notions of “national security” and “democracy” are not exclusivist or contradictory. Nor does one take precedence over the other. Indeed, “security” depends on a degree of “democracy”; democracies are less inclined to go to war than dictatorships. For instance, our two wars with India in 1965 and 1971 were directed by military dictators while Kargil was ordered by General Musharraf.
The general says “national security” demands that the project of peace with India should be addressed sincerely and the war on terror be pursued relentlessly. But on both counts the record of civilian democrats is much better than that of military dictators. Both the Bhutto 1 and Nawaz 2 “democracies” were keen on making peace with India but they were sabotaged by the military. Yet the military under General Musharraf has shown greater “flexibility” (opportunism) on both issues than the two politicians might have dared to hope. Similarly, on the issue of the “war on terror”, the military’s jihad adventures in Afghanistan and Kashmir ostensibly for “national security” have actually resulted in the wave of extremist political Islam that is terrorizing us and the international community. Why then do Bush and Blair pander to Musharraf?
The international community sees Pakistan under Musharraf as “a work in progress” that should be “handled with care”. Publicly they are inclined to flatter him (personally) and appease him (economically and militarily). But privately they constantly urge him to “do more”. This is a wide ranging policy prescription for waging war on terror, compromising with India, propping up Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, uprooting the Taliban, reforming Pakistan’s education system (especially the madrassas), halting nuclear proliferation and institutionalizing mainstream democracy so that “progress” can be embedded into our system. The international community does not wish to remain critically dependent on Musharraf alone . These goals are reflected in existing and proposed American laws that seek to ensure that Pakistan (with or without Musharraf) remains on the straight and narrow.
Under the new American law (HR 4818) passed on November 20, 2004, Pakistan’s educational reform programme will be overseen by the Committees on Appropriations and International Relations of the House of Representatives and the Committees on Appropriations and Foreign Relations of the Senate. The new US law defines “education reform” as including “efforts to expand and improve the secular education system in Pakistan, and to develop and utilise a moderate curriculum for private religious schools.” Similarly, the proposed new Bill S2845 lays down that the US should in particular provide assistance “to encourage and enable Pakistan to continue and improve upon its commitment to combating extremists; to seek to resolve any outstanding difficulties with its neighbours and other countries in its region; to continue to make efforts to fully control its territory and borders; to progress towards becoming a more effective and participatory democracy; …to take all necessary steps to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction; to continue to reform its education system; and to, in other ways, implement a general strategy of moderation.”
This suggests that the MMA mullahs are right in fearing that their long term game is over. Equally, the PPP is right in hoping that the time for an institutional rapprochement with the military is nigh. All that remains is for the key actors to enact the drama. Therefore it is no longer a question of whether or not General Musharraf will take off his uniform or hold fresh elections. It is only a question of when he does both. And that will depend on how all the domestic and international players play the game in 2005.
(July 16-22, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 21 – Editorial)
Welcome to the doghouse, Mr Aziz!
The nomination of Shaukat Aziz as prime minister is controversial. Some people are happy, others are put off, most are simply evincing cynicism or opportunism.
The business elites are generally pro-Mr Aziz even though the small traders and shopkeepers are more sarcastic than supportive. The international community should appreciate one of its own ilk compared to the clueless Mr Jamali or the embarrassingly uniformed General Musharraf. So too should most middle-class Pakistani expatriates. They remain more concerned about the positive personal image that Pakistan’s leaders present before the foreign community of their employ rather than their institutional or democratic or representative credentials in their country of origin. But nationalists and Islamists of all hue are outraged by the military establishment’s most recent foreign ‘import’ just as much as democrats and civil society representatives are stung by the fact that the establishment could not find a single party political representative from among all the members of the national assembly.
General Pervez Musharraf, we believe, is not exactly brimming with self-satisfaction at the recent turn of events. True, Mr Aziz is not likely to carve a political role or base for himself that might conceivably unnerve his ‘boss’, like Mr Zarfaullah Jamali did when he tried to dilute the NSC or claim a stake in the Muslim League. Nor is Mr Aziz inclined to be suicidal. He does not have, like Mr Jamali, any political background or constituency to nurture. But let’s be clear about another thing. Mr Aziz is not General Musharraf’s original or first choice. If he had been, he would have been given a winning Muslim League ticket for the National Assembly and nominated as PM instead of Mr Jamali right after the elections. Indeed, he is probably not even General Musharraf’s fall-back prime minister. If he had been, he would have at least been elected to the assembly in the first place rather than relegated to the senate.
No. Mr Aziz’s unexpected nomination implies only that General Musharraf has recently about-turned on his original political strategy for prolonging his rule in Pakistan. The original strategy envisaged a vibrant local government base controlled by his provincial, non-political Governors coupled with a pliant federal parliament dominated by him as President. It was in that representative but controlled environment that Mr Jamali, a weak politician, was chosen to do the President’s bidding so that a ‘functioning democracy’ could be showcased to the world at large. It was also in the same context that General Musharraf was persuaded to doff his uniform once his strategy had started to yield dividends.
But things have gone awry for General Musharraf. His non-party local government system has become entangled with his party political provincial dispensation and been cut down to size, especially in Sindh. More significantly, the federal parliament and two provincial ones are more unruly and obstreperous than he might have expected. Certainly, his preferred first choice of opposition, the MMA, has proved more daunting than the Pakistan Peoples Party, as is evident from the hard time the mullahs have given him on diverse issues such as the LFO, NSC, Pakistan’s alliance with Washington, Islamic immoderation, etc.
Faced with such obstacles, General Musharraf has shifted into lower political gear (hence Mr Aziz) and is clinging to his uniform once again. It is a measure of his singular lack of confidence in his own political dispensation that he cannot trust his own Pakistan Muslim League to provide the required prime minister and he is afraid of his own army and so cannot take off his uniform. It may be noted in parenthesis that when Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain called a meeting of the parliamentarians of the PML to solicit two safe seats for Mr Aziz, the MNA from Bhakkar stood up and flatly refused to make way for him; another quipped that Mr Aziz should be allotted one of the reserved seats for women (desk thumping) and a third suggested that he should be sent to fight from Wana (catcalls and applause).
Finally, the selection of Mr Shaukat Aziz as prime minister rather than a politician-cum-professional like Humayun Akhtar Khan or Dr Hafeez Sheikh or Mohammadmian Soomro, implies a serious rift in the Musharraf camp. On one side are those who advised him to take the path of the referendum, spurn the PPP, embrace the MMA and seek a non-political prime minister. They are now asking him not to take off his uniform. On the other side are those who advised him against the referendum, who don’t like the mullahs, who want to enlarge and institutionalize the democratic and representative space available in the country and who therefore want him to take off his uniform and consolidate his position as a civilian president. In time to come, this rift may entail some casualties in General Musharraf’s inner cabal which will have a bearing not only on the route he takes subsequently but also on Mr Aziz’s future role in it.
Meanwhile, Mr Aziz should buckle his seat belt for the ride of his life. Mock humility and good PR skills are not likely to be a sufficient substitute for sharp political maneuvering and cunning manipulation born of years in the doghouse of ‘representative’ politics.
(Oct 15-21, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 34 – Editorial)
First or second class
Five years ago General Pervez Musharraf made many promises. He has kept some and broken others. He has faced many problems. Some he has resolved while others remain. Some people are happy with him, some are not. How should one objectively grade his performance? What will be his legacy when he departs?
Six broad achievements can be credited to General Musharraf. First, the economy was in the dumps in 1999. Today it is growing at 6%. We have a stable currency, a buoyant stock market, rising tax revenues, high forex reserves and home remittances. Inflation remains manageable. Manufacturing growth is poised to leap ahead while the agricultural sector boasts the best cotton crop in over a decade. Privatisation is proceeding apace. Regulation is being strengthened. Best of all, the IMF is packing its bags. Sure, the compulsions of 9/11 have much to do with the turnaround but if the opportunities hadn’t been grasped and exploited, and the unpopular belt tightening not taken place, we would still have been floundering.
Second, relations with India have improved significantly. This seemed impossible in 1999 when General Musharraf was still insisting on a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir before anything else. But that position was wisely abandoned step by step in order to try and reap the dividends of peace today. It required courage to be flexible on such an emotional national issue. Sure, there is a long way to go before this peace can be institutionalised, but at least a firm commitment has been made.
Third, the press is freer today than it was under the so-called “democratic” regime of Nawaz Sharif. There are no significant witch-hunts or trumped up cases. Indeed, the Musharraf regime has opened up the electronic media to the private sector without too many ifs and buts. This reflects confidence and wisdom, both of which were in short supply in the democratic 1990s.
Fourth, General Musharraf held the elections in 2002 as promised. This is much more than can be said of his military predecessors. True, there was pre-poll rigging, but when have we ever held an election in the last fifteen years when credible charges of rigging before, during and after the elections weren’t made?
Fifth, General Musharraf has successfully rehabilitated Pakistan in the comity of nations. We are back in the Commonwealth and world leaders continue to beat a path to the presidency. The journey from a pariah nation to a pivotal country has been eventful and productive. It has led to a reduction of our external debt and a restoration of aid and trade facilities.
Sixth, the policy of war against terrorism and promoting enlightened moderation is both wise and beneficial. True, we face a violent blowback in the form of desperate sectarianism, suicide bombings and assassination attempts. But it is better to confront and slay these monsters today than to postpone the day of reckoning. The country has paid a very high price for promoting non-state actors to further dubious national security causes.
The other side of the coin is equally significant. First, General Musharraf’s attempt to keep the mainstream parties like the PPP out of business continues to extract a heavy price. The MMA is a direct beneficiary in and out of parliament. This has put a spoke in the natural wheel of political development. And it continues to undermine the policies of moderation and war against terrorism advocated by General Musharraf. It is not possible for him to turn the dangerous tide of radical political Islam without support from the mainstream Peoples Party and without getting rid of the MMA through a free and fair election.
Second, and this is linked to the first point, he has broken his promise to quit as army chief. He feels insecure because he cannot trust the MMA not to undermine him and he cannot trust the PPP to side with him. In the event, this is a retreat of the process of democratisation that is necessary for the country in the longer term.
Third, and this is linked to the second point above, there is no institutional stability in the political edifice Musharraf has erected. If something were to happen to him – and this is not a theoretical issue in view of the assassination attempts on him political power would be up for grabs instead of flowing naturally and constitutionally from parliament and political parties. Pakistan cannot afford to begin experimenting all over again. There is no credible or workable succession mechanism on offer. If Musharraf wants to leave a good legacy, he will have to address this concern.
Finally, the bonhomie with the US and the international community cannot be taken for granted. A time will come when democracy and nuclear proliferation will surely return to the forefront of the world agenda again. General Musharraf has so far only postponed the day of reckoning rather than resolved these issues once and for all.
But six out of ten is not a bad score. By our standards it is a first division. By international standards, however, it is only a middling second class.
(Dec 17-23, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 43 – Editorial)
Straws in the wind
Mr Asif Zardari and Ms Benazir Bhutto have made some statements recently that should make us sit up and take note. Similarly, the MMA’s anti-Musharraf movement seems to be a lot of huffing and puffing without any real attempt to bring the house down. What’s going on?
Mr Zardari predicts that general elections will be held in 2005. He hasn’t explained why, but then politicians are past masters at transposing fervent hope for cold reality. He sees his freedom after eight years of incarceration not just as a measure of his own vindication but also as a sign of his party’s resurgence in the wake of General Musharraf’s presumed “political compulsions”. In the same breath, however, Mr Zardari, has announced that Ms Bhutto is not terribly keen on ascending the prime ministerial throne for the third time and that Mr Amin Fahim is their chosen candidate for the job. The statement is significant. It obliquely concedes General Musharraf’s stance that he may be prepared to reconcile with the PPP but will not consent to a third Bhutto premiership.
Mr Zardari says there is no “done” deal. But Ms Bhutto has not denied that parleys are continuing. Now she claims that General Musharraf wants American approval for a presidential system in Pakistan. True or not, the fact is that General Musharraf is actually running a presidential system right now by virtue of being both president and army chief. Indeed, he would love to institutionalize it by becoming a directly elected president with the same constitutional clout that he currently enjoys.
This conclusion is reinforced by General Musharraf’s macho style of aggressively presiding over cabinet meetings in military camouflage while a meek prime minister in civvies sits alongside. He is also wont to appear in natty civilian suits on public occasions. In other words, he’s an army chief in uniform when a display of brute power and unquestioned authority is needed and a president in civvies when he is in a cajoling or solicitous mood. More significantly, General Musharraf also seems to think that he is hugely popular not just abroad but also in Pakistan. How else can one explain his determination to hold a presidential referendum in 2002 despite the weight of history and good advice to the contrary by close friends? How else can one account for his statement that “96% of Pakistanis” want him to be both army chief and president? Now that he has got a pat on the back from the Transatlantic trio of Bush and Blair and Chirac, he is likely to relish this perspective more than ever before.
In order to contest direct presidential elections, General Musharraf would first have to amend the constitution by a 2/3 majority. But he cannot do this without support from the PPP. Is all this talk of “national reconciliation”, therefore, a harbinger of a deal on the presidential system? We think not. The PPP would be insane to sign a short term deal which would amount to selling its long-term party-soul to the devil. Alternatively, of course, he could wrap up parliament and unilaterally hold a direct presidential election. But that would bring him face to face with the same dilemma of illegitimacy that marred his referendum in 2002 and has dogged him since.
No. President General Pervez Musharraf’s best bet is to continue wearing two hats for as long as possible. Equally, the best bets of the PPP and MMA hinge on their ability to force him to quit as army chief. But there’s the rub. The PPP and MMA are ideologically at each other’s throats even more than they are at General Musharraf’s. Indeed, both would love a relationship with the military that puts them squarely in the front seat while conceding national security decision making to the military from the back seat. That is the arrangement Ms Bhutto had with the military in her second term and that is the arrangement the MMA has sought with the military in its first term in power. But that is exactly what General Musharraf has personally denied Ms Bhutto until now and that is precisely what he has progressively reneged on with the MMA in the last two years under international pressure and new regional realities.
The PPP wants to be soft on General Musharraf in order to squeeze some political space from him via new elections. But the MMA fears new elections because it is bound to lose its current space. The MMA betrayed the PPP when it signed on the LFO. Now the PPP will not risk an alliance with the MMA unless it guarantees fresh elections. Does this mean General Pervez Musharraf is sitting pretty at least until 2007?
No. The basic flaw in his system is getting aggravated. There is no succession principle enshrined in his dual role as president and army chief. If something were to happen to him, the whole system would be up for grabs. And that is not a prospect his two critical constituencies the military and the international community are likely to appreciate for longer than necessary. That is why talk of deals and protests and threats is likely to do the rounds in 2005 without any end in sight.
(Dec 24-30, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 44 – Editorial)
A tough act to follow
Mr Asif Zardari was back in the jug last Tuesday after an anti-terrorist court in Karachi inexplicably ordered the cancellation of his bail on the eve of his departure for Islamabad. Fortunately, however, the Sindh High Court quickly overturned the lower court’s ruling and set Mr Zardari free. But the whole episode has left a bad taste in the mouth. Worse, it has only served to undermine General Pervez Musharraf’s efforts for a modicum of decency and stability in the country. What’s going on? Who panicked? Who delayed the PIA flight carrying him to Islamabad? Who ordered his arrest? Who ordered the police to rough up the PPP procession at Islamabad airport?
Mr Zardari’s “popularity” is unnerving some people. Despite eight years in prison without a conviction, the broad smile has never faded from his visage. Despite enforced isolation from family and friends, he has not made one bitter or vengeful remark against General Musharraf or his many detractors. Despite being dragged to servile courts across the country, he has hobbled in and out of police vans with stoical resignation, dripping sarcasm and irony at the state of “justice” in the country but never once abusing or lashing out at the judges in court. Hundreds of supporters, high and low, swamped Bilawal House for days after he was released from prison. Thousands welcomed him as his motorcades snaked through rural Sindh. Last week he was getting ready to dance bhangras in the Punjab. Clearly, the Sindh government is responsible for the fiasco in Karachi and the Punjab government is guilty of high handedness at Islamabad airport.
The Sindh chief minister, Ghulam Arbab Rahim, has publicly warned Mr Zardari to be careful about his security lest he be assassinated. Mr Rahim also has the most to lose from any “reconciliation” between General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto because it would certainly lead to a PPP-dominated government in Sindh. Equally, the Chaudhrys of Punjab cannot possibly warm to “reconciliation” because they would lose their pre-eminence in Islamabad and even possibly Punjab despite the hard work they have done in the last five years to shore up the Musharraf system. This would explain why Chaudhry Shujaat Husain is inching toward the MMA by conceding the latter’s demand for a column on religion on Page One of the machine-readable Pakistani passport.
Therefore Ms Bhutto is right in asserting that Mr Zardari’s harassment is aimed at wrecking the process of reconciliation initiated by General Musharraf and flogged by his team comprising Mushahid Husain, Sheikh Rashid, Kabir Wasti, et al. Indeed, Mr Wasti, a senior VP of the Muslim League, has openly contradicted Chaudhry Shujaat Husain by arguing that the Muslim League has not succumbed to the demands of the MMA on the passport issue.
In all this General Pervez Musharraf has been a silent spectator. Nor has there been any comment from Mushahid Hussain whose bold remarks last month launched the debate about reconciliation in the first place. Is it possible that General Musharraf may conceivably disapprove of what happened last Tuesday in regard to Mr Zardari but doesn’t want to publicly criticize his provincial administrations lest it further sap their confidence and trigger fresh stories about rifts in government that may weaken his own hold over power?
We shall hear from the horse’s mouth soon enough when he addresses the nation. However, some conclusions may be drawn. First, as long as he is army chief and president, General Musharraf’s personal position is unassailable, barring any untoward act of assassination. Second, the MMA is not likely to go so far against General Musharraf as to provoke a dismissal of its governments in the NWFP and Balochistan. Third, the PPP is more likely to cut a soft deal with General Musharraf rather than a hard one with the MMA. Fourth, the international community is concerned about a lack of succession principle in General Musharraf’s system and wants him to institutionalize some liberalization for greater depth and longevity, not least in terms of the war against terror, normalization with India and roll back of political Islam in Pakistan. Fifth, there is an imperative to keep the economy on a high growth platform so that both rising defense expenditures and better poverty alleviation measures can be sustained through the budgets. This would be seriously jeopardized by political instability triggered by domestic or foreign policy debacles flowing from a lack of sufficient political consensus over General Musharraf’s policies. Hence, there is an overwhelming need to reconcile with the mainstream and liberal PPP at the expense of the MMA.
General Musharraf is known for taking swift and bold decisions when ground realities change. This happened at the juncture of 9/11 and he was not found lacking. It is happening again now. So he must close some old chapters and open new ones. This means that he should reassure and strengthen the PML instead of pandering to its fears and complaints. It also means that the liberal and pro-West PPP should be drawn into the loop without “surrendering” to its populist demands and claims. Between fighting friends and foes, it is a tough act to follow.
(Jan 12-18, 2001, Vol – XII, No. 46 – Editorial)
Leaf from Bangladesh
Last week, two courageous judges of the Bangladesh High Court in Dhaka, a man and a woman, handed down a judgment of great significance to all Muslim-majority countries that claim democratic statehood. They said that religious fatwas or edicts purporting to be Islamic law issued by maulvis, maulanas, muftis or other religo-political leaders are illegal and should be liable to punishment as any other illegality. The court had taken notice of the plight of a rural housewife who was verbally divorced by her husband and then forced to marry another as decreed by a local mullah.
It held that ” fatwa means legal opinion which means legal opinion of a lawful person or authority. The legal system in Bangladesh empowers only the courts to decide all questions relating to legal opinion on Muslim and other laws in force…we therefore hold that any fatwa including this one is unauthorized and illegal…Giving a fatwa by unauthorized person or persons, even if it is not executed, must be made a punishable offence by Parliament immediately…” The court admonished the District Magistrate who did not take “cognizance of the said offence under Section 190 of the Code of Criminal Procedure” and hoped that this would serve “once for all as a warning to the other district magistrates, magistrates and police officers”.
In parting, the court wondered “why a particular group of men, upon getting education from madrassas or forming a religious group, are becoming fanatics with wrong views” and suggested that perhaps there might be a “defect in their education and their attitude”. It then went on to recommend the introduction of the Bangladesh Muslim Family Ordinance in the curriculums of madrassahs and schools as well as during Friday prayer sermons. It suggested a “unified education system and an enactment to control freedom of religion subject to law, public order and morality within the scope of Article 41(1) of the Bangladesh constitution. “The state must define and enforce public morality. It must educate society”, held the court.
According to Amnesty International, “dozens of fatwas are issued each year in Bangladesh by the rural clergy at village gatherings after receipt of complaints, usually against women who assert themselves in village family life. They impose flogging and stoning and other humiliating punishments such as shaving of heads, insults and beatings. They are also often involved in their execution”. The motive, says AI, is often financial because fatwas can be a source of income for the fatwabaz (those in the business of issuing fatwas) who justify their deeds in the name of religion. At least 10 women have committed suicide or been killed as a result of such fatwas in the last two years.
Fatwa is an old Islamic instrument of expressing religious opinion based on the “school of thought” of the mufti ( fatwa -giver). The mufti was once a state officer who gave official state opinion when the state was represented by an Amirul Momineen. Today, however, the state in most Muslim countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan is represented by a host of institutions whose scope is defined in a Constitution, among which parliament is the sole law-maker and giver while the judiciary is the sole interpreter and opinion-giver of all laws. In modern parlance, if parliament is the Amirul Momineen, the courts are the grand muftis. Therefore there is no room for mullahs or anyone else to issue fatwas or edicts purporting to have the weight of Islamic law behind them.
The practice of issuing fatwas was never altogether abandoned by the mullahs in most Muslim countries even after they adopted democratic statehood. In due course, sectarian and “school” differences of opinion gave rise to various types of fatwas, usually of tafkir (apostasy) of rival sectarian leaders. In the sub-continent, for example, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the great Muslim modernizer of the 19th century, was subjected to a number of “united fatwas ” of many “Islamic” schools of thought. Nor was the great 20th century poet Allama Mohammad Iqbal spared.
In Pakistan, the fatwa has come to mean an opinion, exhortation or command issued by an individual, group or party whose belief structure is based on any one of the various sects of Islam. So we have dissenting fatwas on foreign policy, murderous fatwas against the United States, threatening fatwas against various women and human rights NGOs, etc. We can even recall a particularly bullying fatwa against our courageous colleague, Ardeshir Cowasjee, issued by a mullah in Karachi at the behest of a former chief minister of Sindh who was annoyed with the columnist for opposing his land-grabbing schemes. In essence, such fatwas are attempts to silence dissenting opinion by inciting the public to violence against the target.
Unfortunately, our courts have rarely demonstrated the same courage vis a vis such fatwas as the Bangladesh High Court. Nor has the Pakistani state successfully learnt to cope with the phenomena of fatwas, some of which have damaged the credibility of the country and served to create a “negative” image abroad by encouraging violent vigilantist practices and undermining the writ of the state. Therefore we should take a leaf from the Bangladesh High Court judgment and set our house in order.
(May 21-27, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 13 – Editorial)
Lessons of India
The Indian general election has provoked a range of questions whose answers have a bearing not just on India’s politics but also on that of Pakistan and by association on the spectrum of Indo-Pak relations. Why, in the first place, did the pundits get it so wrong?
The Indian media has several characteristics that impinged on its objectivity and competence. One, it is owned by big business which is generally more supportive of the BJP than of Congress – as the plunge of the Indian stock market last Monday demonstrated. This may have inclined the media to portray the BJP’s “Shining India” campaign with a greater degree of authenticity and applicability than warranted. Two, the Indian media is run largely by the urban middle classes that have benefited from the pro-market privatisation policies of the BJP. This may have inclined them to transpose their particular experience of relative well-being and upward mobility on to the masses in the countryside whose lot has evidently not improved. For example, there is not a single senior journalist of Dalit origin in India. How can the Indian media then claim to have its finger on the pulse of the “people”? Three, despite professional claims, pollsters tend to be urban-biased. They are not geared to assessing the degree of rural respondent truthfulness, especially of minority and oppressed communities, which is affected by an array of historical factors that incline them to be more guarded and deceptive about their opinion than their “freer” higher caste urban counterparts. Conclusion: the “Shining India” campaign was so successfully mediated among the one-third “haves” of India that it alienated the two-thirds “have-nots” of India. This translated into a victory for the Congress-Left alliance, despite the “un-Indian-ness” of Sonia Gandhi.
Second, why did Sonia Gandhi refuse the coveted crown of prime ministership? The fear that three earlier Gandhis (Mahatma, Indira and Rajiv) fell to religious or ethnic fundamentalists and a fourth was a distinct possibility may have been one reason. But if this factor wasn’t sufficient to dissuade Sonia Gandhi and her two children from openly canvassing for the Congress when she was subjected to ferocious personal attacks by supporters of Hindutva, or of openly admitting earlier that she wasn’t interested in the job when there was a high probability of being physically eliminated, it certainly couldn’t have been an overriding reason now. No, it has to do with trying to cobble a path on how to rule and run a secular India when corporate and establishment Hindu passions are running so high. It has to do with restoring confidence in the economy when the new polity is threatened by leftwing, anti-business rhetoric. It has to do, ultimately, with sacrificing personal ambition and vindication at the altar of the national interest.
“Power in itself has never attracted me, nor has position been my goal”, she has explained, “we have waged a successful battle but we have not won the war” for a strong, secular and stable government. Mrs Gandhi clearly thinks that the current Congress-Left alliance government will not be terribly stable or productive and will have to yield to new general elections sooner than later. In the event, she has removed herself from the centre of power so that she is not tainted by its failure to deliver a workable proposition. In other words, she will prepare to win the war in the next general elections. It is a great and wise decision.
The lessons for Pakistan are clear. First, all government claims of unprecedented economic turnaround will amount to naught if the “other” Pakistan marked by poverty, unemployment, insecurity and alienation continues to be left out. Don’t forget, General Ayub Khan’s “Decade of Development” in the 1960s laid the basis for the break-up of the country because it led to increased class polarisation and regional inequalities. Second, the BJP’s rout implies that political religion is not a substitute for community empowerment or well-being, nor a cement for modern nationhood. This has negative ramifications for the ideology-brigade in Pakistan’s media and military-bureaucratic establishment. Third, it shows up Pakistani leaders who put personal ambition or greed above the consensual national interest. What if Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were to publicly disown interest in becoming prime minister again? What if General Pervez Musharraf were to unconditionally shed his uniform? What if the military-bureaucratic oligarchy were to abandon its misplaced “national-security” obsessions and start thinking of a “social security” state for the “have-nots” of Pakistan?
Finally, developments in India will impact on Indo-Pak relations. Yes, there is a popular desire for peace and party political consensus for dialogue on both sides. But an unstable coalition government with multiple centres of power and policy is going to buffeted by a hardline Hindu opposition in India. This will preclude any “headway”, let along “breakthrough”, in mediating the core conflict with Pakistan that tries to change the status quo.In other words, Pakistan’s patience on Kashmir will be sorely tested.
General Musharraf is soon scheduled to review foreign policy options, especially Indo-Pak relations, in the aftermath of recent developments. If he were to learn only selective lessons from India’s experience, it would be a great shame for Pakistan.
(Nov 26-Dec 02, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 40 – Editorial)
The road map is clear
Asif Zardari’s freedom is well earned. It is also very welcome. It doesn’t now matter whether or not he is guilty as charged in any of the cases against him. The fact is that he has served a longer prison term as an innocent man than might have been deserved by a common and convicted murderer. Mr Zardari’s unflinching courage in the face of his ordeal at the hands of not one but three governments since 1996 will stand him in good stead. Even his worst critics and fiercest detractors cannot but admire his cheerful resilience.
Benazir Bhutto has claimed that Mr Zardari’s freedom is a blow for justice. By that she was certainly not referring to the credibility of our judiciary. It has taken our good judges eight unending years to grant him bail in eight politically motivated cases. Indeed, as one judge of the supreme court remarked, the “BMW case” was initiated by the government after he had obtained bail in seven cases. Of course, no one asked why it took the court so long to come to make that damaging observation. Equally, a remark by the Sindh chief minister is telling. “Something is going on”, he admitted glumly, “other wise a case could have been swiftly lodged to keep him behind the bars”. True.
Two weeks ago, we wrote to say that Senator Mushahid Husain’s statement calling for “confidence building measures” – including the release of Mr Zardari between the government and opposition ostensibly aimed at “reconciliation in the national interest” was an admittance of new ground realities. But we did wonder whether the government was cynically aiming to divide and rule or whether it sincerely wanted to set Pakistan’s political system in order. Now we must get to grips with the issue.
In 2002 General Musharraf embarked upon a military-mullah alliance when the contours of the blowback of 9/11 were not yet sufficiently clear to him. He thought he could separate the Taliban in Afghanistan from the jihad in Kashmir. He was wrong. He thought he could separate sectarian Islam from political Islam. He was wrong. He thought he could ally with the MMA and cobble close relations with America and peace with India. He was wrong. He thought he could wring the opposition by virtue of being both army chief and president. He was wrong. Times have radically changed. Simply put, the continued resurgence of Pakistan as a “pivotal state” in the region in the post 9/11 era demands a rollback of political Islam in all its ideological and economic manifestations. Hence the Military-Mullah Alliance is old hat. The new requirement is that of an institutionalized and stable Military Mainstream Alliance that satisfies the economic aspirations of Pakistanis and dovetails into the political requirements of the international community. The key words are stable and institutional. There is no way that the concept of “Enlightened Moderation” in the hands of General Musharraf alone can yield the required goal. Indeed, General Musharraf’s system is so critically dependent on him personally (hence the need to retain both hats as army chief and president), and he is such a proclaimed physical and political target for the fundamentalists, that the notions of institutionalization and stability are already stretched to breaking point. Under the circumstances, if he insists on trying to run a one-party system by dividing and ruling, he will be proven wrong again. The fact is that General Pervez Musharraf’s “true democracy” system is crumbling. He is a moving target. There is no succession principle. Parliament is teetering on breakdown. His mullah partners have become an unacceptable liability. He must therefore salvage a “second best option” quickly.
As we have argued time and again, and irrespective of Benazir Bhutto’s past performances, the PPP and not the MMA is a natural political ally of the Pakistan army in the post 9/11 era. Despite every trick in the trade to divide and weaken it, the PPP remains the most popular liberal national party in the country. Similarly, despite three decades of elected civilian rule, the army remains the steel framework of Pakistan. The time is therefore propitious for them to join hands to enable an efficient power-and policy-sharing arrangement as a first step in the direction of a full-fledged, stable, institutionalized, representative democracy in the country.
To be sure, Asif Zardari’s new freedom cannot be part of any new deal between the government and Ms Bhutto. Mr Zardari has already paid a price for his alleged misdemeanours. If his freedom had come about seven years ago, we might have presumed a definite trade-off. But now it can only be, as Mushahid Husain suggested, a confidence building measure as a prelude to a deal rather than as a part of it. The deal, when (not if) it is clinched, will surely enable Ms Bhutto to return to Pakistan and lead the People Party in person again. Whether or not there will be new elections soon, as Mr Zardari has predicted, or whether Ms Bhutto will be prime minister for the third time, or whether General Musharraf will be army chief and president for a while longer, are options that are going to fly about in the wind for some time to come.
(Dec 31, 2004-Jan 06, 2005, Vol – XVI, No. 45 – Editorial)
Musharraf’s Pakistan 2004-05
How has Pakistan Inc fared under CEO President General Pervez Musharraf? What can we expect from him next year?
The Economy
For Good: GDP growth is over 6% and cotton production is over 12 million bales the highest in a decade. Exports and imports are buoyant, the currency is stable, and forex reserves of US$11.5 bn, and home remittances of nearly US$2 bn in the first half of the current fiscal year, are impressive. Tax collections are rising. Total external debt is about US$34 bn, no more than before. The IMF has gone.
For Bad: Inflation is up to 9%, the highest in a decade. Unemployment and underemployment have risen. Income inequality has worsened. Poverty alleviation strategies have not yielded visible benefits. Direct foreign investment was about US$400 mn July-December, which is quite pathetic by emerging market standards and shows a lack of long term international confidence in our economy, despite short term improvement in credit ratings. On top of it all, we expect to spend more money on buying arms for the military – up to US$3 bn than ever before. Most social indicators of national health remain abysmally poor.
The Political Scene
For Good: General Musharraf enjoys greater legitimacy at home and abroad than last year, partly because of the passing of the 17th constitutional amendment and partly because of his new foreign policies. Pakistan is back in the Commonwealth. A thaw has been affected with the mainstream PPP at home and with the “old enemy” India next door. Pakistan has got back into the good books of the sole superpower (although it’s a moot point whether that is good or bad!). The print media is freer than under the Nawaz Sharif regime and a transparent policy is being followed in opening up the electronic waves.
For Bad: General Musharraf has broken his public pledge to quit as army chief. This has eroded his credibility. He has sacked one hand picked prime minister, shunted another, and appointed a third, in the space of three months. This shows a distinct lack of confidence in his own system. The continuing tension between the provincial and local governments, followed by the recent announcement of non-party local elections later in 2005, confirms this perception. There is no succession principle in his system. This means that if something were to happen to him, every significant appointment, policy and undertaking would be up for grabs. His inability to substitute the military’s traditional partnership with the religious parties with one with the mainstream liberal PPP in strategically changed circumstances shows an inherent weakness and contradiction in his system. He cannot sustain a liberal and moderate agenda at home and a flexible and pragmatic foreign policy abroad without the right supportive partners in parliament and government. Selective repression in the media and continuing administrative apathy about human rights violations has tainted his reputation. Violent sectarianism is still rife. Crime has risen across the country. Sub-nationalism in Balochistan is acquiring threatening dimensions. There is no national consensus on major issues of dams and water and revenue sharing among the provinces.
Civil Society
For Good: General Musharraf’s “vision” of “enlightened moderation” is welcome. The “cultural” environment is less suffocating. Women’s participation in professional life is not officially frowned upon. The government is not insensitive to crimes against women and minorities. A law has been passed against honour killings. A commission of human rights has been proposed. Fundamentalist religious edicts and fatwas are generally ignored. Parliament has passed a resolution owning the famous “secular” speech of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid i Azam, to the Constituent Assembly in 1947, extolling the virtues of being free citizens of Pakistan without regard to caste, creed or colour. The courts are being nudged to shed their neo-conservatism. Al-Qaeda terrorism and jehadi fervour has diminished.
“Enlightened moderation” exists in theory but not in practice. Madrassa reform has been put on the back burner. Education revamp is mired in bureaucratic wrangling and niggardly resource allocation. The government has been cowardly in backtracking before the mullahs on the issue of blasphemy and the column for religion in the new passports. The bill against honour killing is full of holes. The pro-Quaid resolution in parliament was missing from PTV Khabarnama but overplayed on PTV World, suggesting mere show value. Judicial reform and speedy justice is nowhere in sight.
OUTLOOK for 2005
The economy will grow without significantly denting poverty. Relations with India will improve without breakthroughs on Kashmir. Political rapprochement will be primarily aimed at divide and rule rather than any genuine power-sharing. The religious parties will huff and puff but won’t be able to bring General Musharraf down. His personal security will remain the weakest chink in his armour. He will not anticipate major problems or find solutions to them like a great statesman or visionary leader. But like a true commando-General he will decisively blast his way out of trouble when he gets into it. Therefore we may expect his policies to remain long on tactical retreats and dubious advances in response to changing ground situations but short on strategic vision in anticipation of irrevocably changed longer term realities.
(April 06-12, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 6 – Editorial)
Restrain them, General
The good news is that the number of journalists imprisoned for various alleged offences in 131 countries of the world declined from 87 to 81 in 1999-2000. The bad news is that there were over 600 cases of media repression, including assassination, assault, imprisonment, censorship and bureaucratic harassment involving trumped-up tax-evasion charges, crippling libel suits and prolonged advertising boycotts. Worse, 24 journalists were killed last year in the line of duty — 16 in cold-blooded murders in which most of the murderers went scot-free.
The worst offenders were drug cartels in Columbia, crime syndicates in Russia and state-sponsored death squads in Sierra Leone. The Report suggests that journalists were more likely to be imprisoned in China (22 last year) and murdered in Columbia (34 in the last decade) than anywhere else. Among the other pariah states inimical to a free press were the Ukraine, Mozambique, Venezuela and almost all dictatorships in the so-called “Islamic” Middle-East. The worrying details are listed in the annual report of the influential New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
The CPJ notes, however, that some progress has been made in defending press freedom across the world. This is proof that organisations like the CPJ, Amnesty International and other human rights watchdogs devoted to exposing abuse and rousing opinion against acts of oppression and repression, have distinctly served the cause of press freedom. But “outrageous abuses of the media continue as governments achieve their repressive goals with more sophisticated techniques of harassment”. How has Pakistan’s press fared under the military regime?
Decidedly better than under the last representative government when horrendous tactics were used to try and silence the independent press. In fact, the Nawaz Sharif government lost the support and sympathy of key countries when it tried to gag journalists and papers in Pakistan. By the same token, General Pervez Musharraf has earned grudging support from the international community for his hands-off-the-press policy so far. In fact, he is quick to flaunt press freedom as a key element of his novel “return-to-true-democracy” agenda.
But a degree of disquiet, even alarm and fear, is in the air. Last September, Gen Musharraf denounced journalists for planting stories at the behest of the deposed prime minister. Challenged to prove his allegation, the good general angrily pursed his lips but declined to comment. Then, last November, 3 employees of a daily paper in Karachi died in an inexplicable bomb explosion in their office. Words of sympathy and solace apart, the regime remains totally disinterested in investigating the incident, tracking down the culprits and determining motives. Around the same time, an army monitoring team unthinkingly trampled all over the offices of another paper in Karachi, creating quite a stir among journalists. Earlier, in May, violent mobs attacked and ransacked the office of a newspaper in Karachi while the police stayed put. In between all this, a Sindhi journalist was murdered by a local Mafioso who bought his way to freedom and a newspaper in the northern areas was banned while its editor was hounded out of the area for arousing the wrath of the local military commander.
It is, however, the sacking of the Frontier Post in Peshawar by zealots some months ago that has tarred the painstakingly contrived press-friendly image of this regime. PTV couldn’t hide its glee at the desperate plight of the paper and its journalists. And the Peshawar administration seemed to freeze in its tracks at the wondrous scene of gutting printing machines but swept the streets in search of the blaspheming journalists. Even the CE couldn’t restrain his impulse to signal good riddance to bad rubbish!
Now a senior reporter of The News in Islamabad, Mr Shakil Sheikh, has been badly roughed up by unknown assailants. Mr Sheikh has pointed a finger at those who don’t like his reports. Who are these people? How are they able to roam the streets of Islamabad in unmarked four-wheel drive jeeps? What are the boot-mark injuries on his back supposed to imply? Does he know or suspect their identity but doesn’t want to remark upon it? The journalist community is buzzing with speculation but no one is naming names, explaining motives or investigating the facts in print. Indeed, a curious new development seems to have tainted sections of the press. It is the realisation or fear that if it tramples on the boots of the powerful men in khaki by exposing nepotism or lack of transparency or moral turpitude (thank God, there is no overt corruption so far), there may be scant legal protection in its hour of trial.
This does not bode well for the regime. When the press is afraid to freely air its news and views, a whispering campaign can prove deadly because there is no official or public defense against it. In time, the world will wake up to the plight of the local press and General Musharraf will lose the key to his showcase of democracy. Restrain the rogue elements, General, before they stir a hornets’ nest and harm you irretrievably.
(April 13-19, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 7 – Editorial)
One possible script
If a black cat can have up to nine lives, Benazir Bhutto must wonder why she can’t be blessed with a third one at least. Why not, indeed?
The recent supreme court order for a retrial of the SGS/Cotecna corruption case against her and Asif Zardari proves that the high court trial in 1998-99 was rigged by Nawaz Sharif. Certainly, Saif ur Rehman’s abject “apology” to Mr Zardari recently is evidence of his objectionable role in the matter.
Ms Bhutto can also safely assume that the retrial will keep her on the front pages for a long time. Her review petition for acquittal will take some weeks. If she wins, well and good. But if she loses, the question of the “competent court” in which the trial is to be held will have to be addressed. However, the old accountability law under which she was tried in the high court has given way to the NAB ordinance under which the government will want to seize the issue. But Ms Bhutto is likely to challenge this assumption. That should consume some more energy. At any rate, the NAB ordinance is already being thrashed in the supreme court where, let alone the judges who are perceptibly hostile to it, even the attorney-general is embarrassed to own up to its draconian provisions. Thus a watered-down accountability ordinance should afford her personal relief as well present opportunities to fortify her legal defence.
Much, of course, will depend on the supreme court’s detailed logic when this is made public. In turn, Ms Bhutto’s defence will depend on whether the court has attached any relevance or significance to the conduct of the high court judges as demonstrated by the scandalous tapes, or based its judgment on the procedural unfairness of the trial. Additionally, the question of whether there is to be a trial from scratch or whether only certain aspects of recording and appreciation of evidence are to be redressed will impact on the duration of the retrial. Finally, both sides are likely to appeal galore as the case trudges all the way back to the supreme court. Does this mean that Ms Bhutto can afford to relax?
Hardly. General Khalid Maqbool, the head honcho at NAB, was forewarned. So he is forearmed with a clutch of brand new charges against Ms Bhutto and Mr Zardari. He says that if the lady thinks she can set a free foot in Pakistan she is sadly mistaken. Ms Bhutto, of course, understands the language of the generals only too well and has calibrated her response accordingly. Disclaiming a quick return to Pakistan, she has ordered her party stalwarts to make haste for London for a meeting to determine an appropriate re-entry strategy for her. Meanwhile, delighted with the PPP’s improved showing in the Punjab during the second stage of the local elections, she has nudged Nawabzada Nasrullah to test the waters by attempting a second public plunge on May Day. Her approach is failsafe because she has learnt her lessons well.
In a predominantly two-party system, post cold-war nature abhors a political vacuum just as much as it abhors attempts to fill the vacuum by a non-representative third party. Thus the vacuum engineered by Ms Bhutto’s ouster in 1990 was filled by Mr Sharif, the one by Mr Sharif in 1993 by Ms Bhutto and the one by Ms Bhutto in 1996 by Mr Sharif in 1997. So she is basically telling the generals that they should make a deal with her to fill the current vacuum. But General Pervez Musharraf thinks otherwise. He believes that instead of filling the vacuum in the old political system it is time to sweep the old system aside by creating a new one which is based on the two popular parties but without their acknowledged leaders so that he can become the kingpin instead of either of them.
This is a novel idea. It departs from Zia ul Haq’s non-party model by trying to reinvent the Pakistan Muslim League without Nawaz Sharif while holding out the possibility of working with the Pakistan Peoples Party without the Bhutto-Zardaris. But it is far from being accomplished. Indeed, the inability of the pro-Musharraf PML dissident group to fire the imagination of the Pakistani public, coupled with the supreme court’s judicial reassertion and an aggressively pro-democracy international environment, has enabled Ms Bhutto to deal herself a good hand. She means to throw everything she can muster at General Musharraf so that she can get a better deal from him than Nawaz Sharif. What’s possible?
Protestations for the sake of form notwithstanding, General Musharraf is not averse to political deals when the alternative is less palatable. Thus the greater Ms Bhutto’s success in making a real public comeback, the better the deal she can hope to get from General Musharraf. At the very least, she has to make a real nuisance of herself so that Mr Zardari is let off and a front-row seat is reserved for the PPP in the next national assembly without Ms Bhutto. That, at least, is one possible script. But Pakistani scripts are notoriously susceptible to the mercurial Pakistani weather.
(April 20-26, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 8 – Editorial)
Duplicity all round
United Bank Ltd has just petitioned the supreme court (SC) to review a sweeping decision by the SC’s Shariat Appellate Bench (SAB) in December 1999 which equated interest with riba, outlawed all interest-based financial systems and transactions as “un-Islamic”, proposed new Islamic financial institutions and economic laws, and set June 30th, 2001, as a cut-off date for implementing its order. However, the UBL petition does not directly challenge the definition of riba approved by the SC, nor its blanket equation with interest in a capitalist, free-market system. It merely argues that the SC went beyond its constitutional jurisdiction in proposing certain types of Islamic institutions and laws to replace the ones in place currently because only parliament is authorised to make laws and establish new institutions.
Since the matter is sub judice, we will not discuss the legal merits of the petition. But the duplicitous manner in which successive governments, including this one, have dealt with this critical issue cries out for comment. It is also necessary to reiterate that in the current international environment of fear and loathing for the wave of religious extremism threatening to engulf Pakistan, this could become a matter of life and death for our struggling economy.
In 1991, the Federal Shariat Court (bequeathed by a military dictator) was prodded by “Islamic ideologues” in Nawaz Sharif’s Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (both created by the military) to declare interest as riba and ban all interest-bearing transactions as un-Islamic. The FSC was emboldened to do so by Mr Sharif who had not only handpicked its chief judge but also amended the constitution to incorporate shariah as “the supreme law of the land”. However, Mr Sharif was forced to reconsider his decisions when his finance minister, Mr Sartaj Aziz, was collared by members of the Aid to Pakistan consortium in Paris in 1992. Therefore, as a sop to aid donors, the government reluctantly appealed the FSC decision in the SC. But as a sop to the Islamic ideologues propping up the IJI government, no serious effort was made to overturn the decision. Indeed, interminable delays were sought by the petitioner and granted by the SC, even though the law expressly said that the review petition should be disposed of within six months.
The hypocritical conspiracy launched by Mr Sharif continued under Benazir Bhutto from 1993 to 1996. In fact, she left the case in cold storage because she didn’t want IJI ideologues baying for her blood. But the mood became decidedly chilling after Mr Sharif returned to power in 1997, packed the SAB with hard-line Islamic judges and, in a shocking U-turn in 1998, withdrew his pending 1991 appeal against the FSC judgment. A proposal to amend the constitution and make himself Amir ul Momineen followed, but was thankfully blocked in the Senate. Undaunted, he moved a local court to throw out a London court’s order to pay about US$ 30m in principal and accumulated interest on a loan his father and brother had taken from a middle-eastern bank a long time ago. His lawyers argued that interest was un-Islamic and the local court accepted their plea. Simultaneously, the Sharifs approached the Lahore High Court to waive all interest payments on the billions of rupees in bank loans outstanding against them. Indeed, the farce soon threatened epidemic proportions when Mr Saif ur Rehman, a Sharif henchman, also requested the High Court to waive interest charges on his Rs 1 billion bank dues.
No less stunning was the manner in which the SAB reacted to the government’s decision to withdraw its 1991 appeal. Instead of dropping the matter as is the norm in such situations, the court summoned “financial experts” and “Islamic jurists” to enlighten it. In due course, a detailed anti-interest judgment was delivered in the absence of any appellant or respondent in the case!
The timing was curious, to say in the least. It came at a particularly difficult time for the country and new government. The former was crying out for foreign investment and the latter was desperate to project a modern and moderate face of Islam to the outside world. Instead, it seemed to make Pakistan look like the Plague.
Curiosity, however, gave way to disbelief when General Musharraf casually shrugged it away. Disbelief turned to shock when Mr Shaukat Aziz ordered his minions to start fashioning the tools of Islamic finance ordained by the SAB. And shock turned to horror when both gentlemen unflappably told the donor community that the judgment would neither apply to foreign financial transactions nor jeopardise the World Bank funded programme for financial and judicial sector reforms along the lines of a modern free-market economy.
The faces have changed but the pretence and opportunism remains the same. UBL’s feeble petition at the last hour does not ask the SC to re-examine the fundamental issue of equating all forms of interest as riba that lies at the heart of the matter. This is a delaying tactic. At best, it will sow more financial confusion when the appeal is finally adjudged. At worst, it will enable a Damocles-like sword to be hung over us as we seek integration in the global economy.
(April 27-May 03, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 9 – Editorial)
A small beginning at least
As navy chief (1994-1997), Admiral Mansoor ul Haq’s corruption preceded him. But evidence of commissions and kickbacks was hard to come by, so he remained at large, perennially cosying up to the First Husband, Asif Zardari, and flouting all rules and regulations. However, if TFT couldn’t name names, its back page was heavy with innuendo and allusion about the navy chief’s mischief.
TFT took the plunge during the interim government of President Farooq Leghari in 1996 when it lent its pages to l’enfant terrible of the Pakistani press, Ardeshir Cowasjee, because his own paper was reluctant to print his commentary on the affairs of the navy. After the first article appeared, there was a howl of protest from naval headquarters. The PM’s staff wondered how a paper belonging to the PM’s advisor — TFT’s editor was then on loan to the federal cabinet – could target serving member(s) of the government and bring the armed forces into “disrepute”. Undaunted, TFT went ahead and published a second article by Mr Cowasjee. This now became the object of sharp remarks from the navy chief at a private dinner in Islamabad hosted by the PM in which the president, service chiefs and the advisor were all present.
However, to be fair to the armed forces, it must be admitted that the ISI had also submitted a dossier on Admiral Haq’s doings and undoings to the PM’s secretariat. But the prevailing view among the other service chiefs and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee was that Admiral Haq was giving the forces a bad name, so he should be eased out (not sacked), citing ill-health rather than misdemeanour. In the event, however, the Admiral’s plea that he should be allowed to stay on until he had married off his daughter was readily accepted.
There are a number of incredible aversions in this account. First, it is difficult even under a democratic government in Pakistan for the press to level serious charges of corruption or impropriety against senior members of the armed forces, let alone serving service chiefs, because of a habit of self-censorship and hangover of fear inherited from the long night of military Raj.
Second, there is no civil tradition of putting senior armed forces personnel on trial for corruption or misuse of power. Indeed, the rule is that the civil order must remain at arms length from armed forces personnel, serving or retired, high or low, irrespective of any crimes that they may have committed. Thus, if Admiral Haq was unharmed as navy chief, we only have to recall the case of General Aslam Beg who, after retirement, was condoned by the chief justice of Pakistan after he had publicly confessed (thereby committing contempt of the supreme court) how, as army chief in 1988, he had leaned on the supreme court not to restore the national assembly but to order new elections. General Beg it was, too, who had revealed how he and the ISI split the proceeds from a highly dubious financial handout by banker Yunus Habib in 1990 for the purposes of rigging the elections to keep Benazir Bhutto out of power. Finally, it was General Aslam Beg who received a US$10 million cheque in his personal name from Osama Bin Laden in 1990 for the same objective. The civil and army high command has known this fact from Day-One but no one has had the courage to cleanse the stables.
Third, every accountability law passed by the civilians has steered clear of the armed forces on the pretext that their in-house accountability process is failsafe and transparent, even though the truth is patently otherwise. Indeed, even Mr Saif ur Rehman had to wait after Admiral Haq was eased out of office before he could even contemplate an investigation against him. In the event, Admiral Haq was allowed by Mr Rehman to leave the country even though he should have been a prime candidate to top the ECL list. If all this is true, why has the military government sought Mr Haq’s extradition from the USA?
Clearly, General Pervez Musharraf is hugely embarrassed that NAB’s draconian outreach doesn’t extend to the armed forces, more so because General Mohammad Amjad, the first head of NAB, was in favour of casting his net over certain fellow khakis. But accountability of army generals is not quite the same thing as that of navy admirals. Also, Mr Haq’s links with Mr Zardari are a special attraction. In fact, TFT has learnt that the government sought Mr Haq’s extradition only after he spurned the offer of a deal with NAB whereby he might have avoided a tortuous trial if he had returned the kickbacks and implicated Mr Zardari in the submarine deal.
Explanations apart, we welcome the government’s efforts to drag Mr Haq back to Pakistan. His extradition and trial will set new precedents. In the future, every civilian or khaki crook will suffer a recurring nightmare wherever he or she is holed out. That may not be a sufficient deterrent against high level crime but it is a beginning in the right direction at least.
(Aug 10-16, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 24 – Editorial)
What law and whose order?
General Pervez Musharraf is enraged by terrorists. He says he wants to don his SSG uniform and blast them all to smithereens. We share his sentiment. But we are not terribly enthused by the government’s stale “law and order” approach to the problem.
Many of these terrorists are motivated by religious passions. Others are clearly agents of foreign powers seeking to destabilize state and government. Together, they have laid our country low. Foreign tourists and businessmen are afraid to visit Pakistan or invest in it. Enforced work stoppages in the wake of terrorist violence greatly hurt the economy. The targeting of Shia professionals, especially doctors in Karachi, has scared them into seeking refuge abroad. In short, an environment of violence, fear and loathing has confirmed the awful perception of Pakistan abroad.
The worst offenders are religious fanatics. Last year, over 300 Pakistanis died at their hands. This year, the score already exceeds 150. Karachi is the current hot spot and Shias are the main target. For weeks TFT has reported on what is brewing in the city, why the police is unable to handle the problem, why the issue defies purely administrative measures. Yet the government’s fixation on dusting curative prescriptions off the shelf rather than attempting preventive solutions, despite the continuing failure of this approach, suggests that the state is tied up in knots.
To be sure, the government could do worse than ban sectarian parties and “de-weaponize” society, improve intelligence gathering and motivate the police. But is that all that needs to be done?
Did General Musharraf’s order to hang Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, who assassinated an Iranian Consul General in 1990, deter the banned Lashkar-i-Jhangvi from killing dozens of Shia leaders subsequently? Has General Moinuddin Haider’s “de-weaponisation” campaign deterred the terrorists from using deadly weapons? Has any government’s “sincere” exhortation to shun sectarian strife ever led to any meaningful results? Has the continuing re-organisation and revamping of the police and administration succeeded in deterring terrorist violence? Indeed, on a general note, it is worth asking whether the voluminous criminal procedure code (law) has ever deterred hardened criminals and motivated terrorists from committing crimes?
The fact is that no administrative force can ever be sufficiently equipped or motivated to match the raw passions of religiously blinded warriors or foreign-inspired mercenaries. The fact is that the theory of deterrence is fine as far as it goes logically and rationally, but it doesn’t go too far when it is countered with the opium of the masses. The fact is that every government since the time of General Zia ul Haq has been helpless in the face of the sectarian menace because he stripped the constitution of its secular spirit and enabled pan-Islamic ideas and religious leaders to erode the hitherto neutral organs of the state like the army, ISI, judiciary, police and political parties. The fact is that when a nation-state so dominated by one religious sect makes it a matter of policy to sustain and promote the religious ideas and beliefs of the majority sect, we cannot expect it to stay neutral in passionate schismatic disagreements between the various sects. The fact is that powerful elements in the state apparatus, even when they disagree with majoritarian sectarian prejudices, are ever ready to condone or ignore them for so-called “strategic” external policies. The fact is that our strategic foreign campaigns and wars are not being fought by professional soldiers of our army but by religiously inspired warriors belonging to the majority sect and dominant provinces. The fact is that the sectarian militants are neither Mohajirs nor Sindhis but hail from the Punjab and NWFP which also supply a majority of the manpower of the army, bureaucracy, police and judiciary. The fact is that the weapons of war are stored by the religious warriors not in safe homes or underground cellars which can be raided by the police but in places of worship and indoctrination where no unholy encroachment may be made. The fact is that there is an organic link between sectarian violence in Pakistan, the rise of indigenous religious militias to overwhelm infidel peoples and places and the retaliatory “foreign-hand” behind inexplicable acts of terrorism in Pakistan.
Generally speaking, when we talk to army officers, civil servants, judges and journalists, we are struck by the similarity of their views with ours regarding concerns about the dangerous domination of Pakistan’s civil and security discourse by the warriors of the majority sect. Yet when we talk to the same set of people in the loop of the national security establishment led by the intelligence agencies, we find a reproachful shrugging away of the problem. It is as though “it is a small price to pay for our security” which cannot be entrusted to the faint-hearted. Is that a fair response?
No, it’s not. The price is getting beyond our national outreach. The poverty of state philosophy is impoverishing us in myriad ways, of which the current exodus of doctors, scientists, businessmen and capital is only its most cruel manifestation. Thus General Musharraf would do well to reflect on the real and underlying causes of terrorism instead of fuming mistakenly about it.
(Dec 21-27, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 43 – Editorial)
Fresh start needed
Pakistan’s military leaders have had a propensity for adventure unmatched by other dependent states in the modern age. Irrespective of the rights or wrong of the issue, Pakistani army generals provoked military conflict with India in 1965, 1971 and 1999. In the process, Pakistan has had to sign unequal ceasefires (Tashkent), submit to humiliating surrenders (Bangla Desh) or accept forced withdrawals (Kargil).
It was, however, General Zia ul Haq who believed that Pakistan was in a win win situation in Afghanistan. But he was wrong. If the legacy of the various wars with India is a reinforcement of historical pride and prejudice, the legacy of our “involvement” in Afghanistan is even more pervasive and poisonous. It has derailed the post cold war impulse for political democracy, created the demon of bloody sectarianism, raised the spectre of violent fundamentalism, stamped a militaristic ethos on society and created a powerful but unaccountable state within the state.
The ISI’s writ has spread far and wide, at home and abroad. Indeed, in recent times, an unprecedented and worrying development had begun to manifest itself with senior ISI operatives being invited as a matter of state policy into the precincts of GHQ and civilian government and also slotted into senior command positions in the army and vice versa. This was in sharp contrast to the situation before our involvement in Afghanistan when no more than Brigadiers ran the ISI and army chiefs tended to frown upon overly active roles for former ISI-types in regular army matters. Thus the ISI was actually poised to become a state in itself and for itself if the Afghanistan debacle hadn’t compelled General Musharraf to rein it in and freeze its more adventurous external operations.
Clearly, the ISI’s twenty-year “adventure” in Afghanistan is the worst thing to happen to Pakistan’s state and society in fifty years of independence. One dismal but stark manifestation of this fact is that our army now has to defend not just our eastern borders with India as part of an old historical reality but also our western border with Afghanistan as part of a new self-inflicted injury. Latest reports say that we have been obliged to move over 50,000 soldiers and 150,000 para-military troops to the border with Afghanistan in order to stop infiltration of Al-Qaeda terrorists into our tribal areas. And we are being obliged to do this in a security environment in which India is threatening to overrun our borders in hot pursuit of “terrorists” allegedly trained and supported by us while the international community is clucking in sympathy with its plight.
If there is a silver lining in the cloud, could it be, ironically enough, General Musharraf? Here is a man who has acted decisively and courageously to win international support for Pakistan’s ailing economy by swiftly abandoning a thoroughly bad foreign policy in Afghanistan. He has also held out an olive branch to India by showing flexibility on Kashmir, even though India hasn’t yet had the sense to recognize the true value of his initiative. He has reined in the ISI by suitable postings, transfers and retirements. He has shunted intractably rigid-types from GHQ. And he has risked the wrath of the religious extremists by clamping down on them in the national interest. This is a great start in the right direction. But much more needs to be done to reverse the tide.
Let us admit it. After Afghanistan, our biggest foreign policy failure is in Kashmir. From 1947 to 1965, we beseeched the UN to grant us Kashmir in vain. We then tried to stir revolt in the valley and triggered a destabilizing war with India. After 1971, we buried the Kashmir issue at Simla and forgot about the UN resolutions abroad. We then woke up in the 1990s to foment trouble in Kashmir after New Delhi had made a mess of things in the 1980s. In the last ten years, we have exported Islamic revolution to Kashmir and provoked untold brutalities on the Kashmiris by India’s security forces. In exchange, we have paid the price of urban terrorism in Karachi and elsewhere sponsored by India. We have undermined civil society and democratic pluralism by relinquishing political space to extremist jehadi organizations. We have piled up debt in order to fuel the cold war with India and scared away potential foreign investors. And we have pulled the rug from under the feet of elected political representatives who dared to think of smoking the peace pipe with New Delhi. Now we are being pushed into a conflict with India by the very extremists who have already dashed our hopes in Afghanistan. Isn’t it time to change a policy of perennial warring with India into a policy of enduring peace with our neighbours?
We have barely managed to survive a highly destablising debacle in Afghanistan whose end is not yet in sight. But we might not be so lucky in the event of a conflict with India over Kashmir. Putting Pakistan first means doing it not just vis-á-vis Afghanistan policy but also vis a vis Kashmir policy. Nothing less than that will constitute a safe and secure fresh start for the country.
(Jan 05-11, 2001, Vol – XII, No. 45 – Editorial)
Pragmatism and reality
If General Pervez Musharraf were to survey the political landscape of the year gone by, he would discern the dos and don’ts of dog-eared experience. Indeed, if he were a good leader, he would take some lessons to heart and mould them into the building blocks of political wisdom.
Shortly after he seized power, General Musharraf announced sweeping measures to satiate the thirst of the masses for “ruthless accountability”. A year later, the missionary zeal of the early months exemplified by General Mohammad Amjad has given way to the cheerful pragmatism of General Khalid Maqbool. But the damage to business confidence will not be easily repaired.
General Musharraf was equally hard on former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Instead of initiating corruption cases against him in which conviction merited a few years in prison, the government went for the jugular by indicting him in the airplane hijacking case where the offence was liable to the death penalty. In the event, letting him off the hook at the altar of pragmatism has elicited a heavy toll of General Musharraf’s credibility.
Other examples of rigid positions buffeted by the cold gust of reality come to mind. We recall how General Musharraf once pursed his lips and declared that he wouldn’t talk to India unless it was prepared to negotiate the “core” issue of Kashmir above all else. But after listening attentively to the geo-strategic concerns raised by President Clinton during his five-hour stopover in Islamabad in April last year, the good general was ready to meet the Indian prime minister unconditionally for talks “anywhere, anytime”, in pursuit of regional peace. Indeed, his pragmatic flexibility in recent times has diminished his government’s international isolation significantly.
Much the same sort of diagnosis can be made about the government’s economic and financial claims. There is no question about devaluation, we were told last year. Now we know that there was no way out of a hefty devaluation this year. Similarly, the dispute with Hubco was supposed to have been settled even before Mr Shaukat Aziz was sworn in as finance minister. Yet the ink is still not dry on an agreement penned last month. Equally, the IMF was supposed to weigh in a year ago with billions of dollars in funds for poverty alleviation. Now we realize how lucky we are that a few hundred million dollars were granted last month on promise of exceptionally good behaviour.
Tall claims were also made about the scope and impact of local elections. Nothing less than a radical alteration of the political landscape of traditional heavyweights and perennially crooked politicians belonging to the mainstream parties was promised. But if the first phase of the six-month long ordeal is anything to go by, nothing could be further from the reality. The rural and urban elite that the self-righteous generals so love to hate has rebounded with a vengeance and thwarted their ambitious plans to create a middle-class constituency in their own image. The government will now review the extent of power that should rest with these councilors when it should have been the other way round in the first place. What possible legitimacy or longevity can such airy-fairy devolution plans realistically claim?
Clearly, the key words are pragmatism and reality. The key issues – whether relating to devolution of political power or economic well being or sustainable foreign relations – cry out for a heavy dose of both. Will the Musharraf government temper its various policies accordingly in the future?
The prospects seem better than before. There is an increasingly realistic appreciation among General Musharraf and his military colleagues of the manner in which the concerns of the domestic business community and the international political community impinge on the well being of Pakistan. We welcome this development. The strains of pragmatic flexibility are also evident in a review of national security policy in Islamabad currently underway. This too is good news. But certain critical areas now cry out for the same realistic approach.
The question of the restoration of parliament is hanging fire despite firm denials by General Musharraf that it might soon return to business as usual. We see no reason for such strong denouncements of the idea, especially since stranger somersaults have been witnessed in recent times. Indeed, a diplomatic silence would be preferable since it would enable General Musharraf to retain some realistic options in his clutch without having to eat humble pie later. Similarly, there is no point in constantly thundering about an unrealistic three-year mission-statement or agenda when the remains of bigger pundits than General Musharraf are littered all over the political graveyard that is Pakistan.
It has taken General Pervez Musharraf over a year to become pragmatic and realistic. It would be marvelous if he could take under a year to clinch a pragmatic restoration of civilian rule in 2001 rather than in 2002. More crucially, if he can bring himself to sponsor a realistic solution of the Kashmir dispute, Pakistanis will remember and thank him for generations to come.
(Feb 02-08, 2001, Vol – XII, No. 49 – Editorial)
How utterly wrong
General Pervez Musharraf was supposed to pay a visit to Kabul many months ago, ostensibly to try and talk some sense into the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan. But General (retd) Moinuddin Haider, the interior minister, is going instead on “mission impossible”.
Iran was once provoked to consider flattening the Taliban. But it changed its mind when the enraged Taliban swarmed to the Iranian border instead of retreating to Kandahar. Then President Clinton rained cruise missiles on them for hosting Osama Bin Laden. But this was like water off a duck’s back. Meanwhile, President Putin of Russia has blown hot and cold over the destabilizing impact of Talibanism in Chechnya and some central Asian republics but it has not made an iota of difference in Kabul. Now the Taliban face a host of American sponsored UN sanctions that will make life uncomfortable for everyone in Afghanistan. But they remain defiant. Indeed, they are hoping that the US will eventually engage with them, recognize them as the legitimate government of Kabul and do business with them.
Meanwhile, the supergenerals of Pakistan have trotted out a list of dos and don’ts for Mullah Umar, partly because Islamabad pretends to be concerned about the blowback effects of Talibanism as manifested in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in general and Islamic sectarianism in particular in Pakistan and partly because it is posturing (“we’re doing our best to moderate them”) for the sake of appeasing the international community. What is right or wrong with Pakistan’s Afghan’s policy?
The supergenerals maintain that Islamabad has always played favourites in Afghanistan because it needs an unequivocal ally in Kabul who provides “strategic depth” to Pakistan in its regional framework. But no one has ever explained what this high sounding “strategic depth” is really all about. If it means a friendly state in Pakistan’s backyard where we can park a couple of airplanes in time of war with India, no one can quibble with that. But an anarchist friendly state in Kabul with a crippling blowback impact on Pakistan’s civil society at the expense of an old and civilisational friendly state like Iran is hardly good strategy. Nor does it make sense for a country with a critically ailing economy like ours to alienate the oil-and-gas rich central Asian republics (who yearn for a mutually profitable relationship with Pakistan) for the sake of friendship with a highly dubious and impoverished regime in Afghanistan.
But the supergenerals may have another notion of “strategic” interest in mind when they view the pros and cons of supporting the Taliban of Afghanistan. Indeed, General Musharraf may have been thinking of some such strategic notion when he recently said that Pakistan had to be friends with the Taliban because they were comprised of ethnic Pakhtuns who formed the main ethnic community of our own NWFP that borders Afghanistan. This leads us to postulate the supergenerals’ strategic thinking that a strong Pakhtun state in Afghanistan would suit Pakistan immeasurably more than a weak Pakhtun on non-Pakhtun state. Is that right?
No, it isn’t. First, we need to make the distinction between a strong and weak state in Afghanistan irrespective of its ethnic composition. Then we have to ask whether a strong state in Afghanistan suits us more than a weak one. Thus a weak state in Afghanistan which is dependent on Pakistan is surely better from our point of view than a strong state which competes with us for regional influence or makes bold to ally with other powers in the region. Finally, we have to ask whether a strong Pakhtun-dominated state in Afghanistan suits us more than a weak, non-Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan. For those who haven’t followed the march of history, a weak non-Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan has never posed any threat to Pakistan because it has neither had any ideological bearings or religious extra-national ambitions nor any ethnic or sub-nationalist stirrings. On the other hand, whenever there has been a strong Pakhtun dominated state in Afghanistan, whether secular-centrist as under President Daud or secular-leftist as under President Nur Mohd Taraki or Hafizullah Amin or Najibullah, its government has been compelled by the logic of its own composition to pander to ethnic nationalism by supporting Pakhtun separatism (refusal to accept the Durand Line) or try and export religious fundamentalism (Talibanism) to the NWFP and Balochistan. If Mr Ajmal Khattak, who was the first politician to be graced by a meeting with General Musharraf, knows all about the first sort of anti-Pakistan, Pakhtun Afghan state, Maulana Samiul Haq knows all about the latter sort of potentially anti-Pakistan, Pakhtun Afghan state. This would suggest that a strong Taliban state in Afghanistan, which combines the worst elements of ethnic Pakhtun nationalism and religious exclusivism, would eventually pose a threat to the territorial integrity and political solidarity of multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian, democratic Pakistan.
Afghanistan under the Taliban therefore poses a greater potential danger to Pakistan than it does to any other country in the world. But while the world is up in arms against a regime that provides sanctuary to all the religious extremists of the modern century, our supergenerals insist upon lecturing us about the necessity of the Taliban. How completely, utterly wrong they are.
(Jan 04-10, 2002, Vol – XIII, No. 45 – Editorial)
Diminishing returns for flexing muscle
India is threatening to wage war against Pakistan for “aiding and abetting terrorism” in Kashmir, territory held by India but hotly disputed by Pakistan since the independence of both nations in 1947. India’s view is that if America can attack Afghanistan for hosting Al-Qaeda terrorists, why can’t India follow suit against Pakistan for sustaining Islamic groups bent on “terrorist” violence in Kashmir?
But this argument is a non-starter. The fact is that the United States had obtained three UN Security Council resolutions sanctioning the Taliban regime in Afghanistan before September 11 and two more later before it took the decision to attack Kabul. Washington also had full NATO support. In India’s case, no such legal backing or world support is available. In fact, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, key players in the anti-Afghan coalition, have firmly advised against such an adventure. Nor can the fighting in Kashmir be classified in black and white terms, as in Afghanistan’s case. The Taliban regime was not recognized by the United Nations. In the case of Kashmir, however, there are several UN Security Council resolutions going back to 1948 urging India to hold a plebiscite to determine whether the Kashmiris want to stay with it or join Pakistan, resolutions which India has blithely spurned. That is why Pakistanis insist that the jihadis in Kashmir are not terrorists but freedom fighters seeking Kashmir’s liberation from India.
India’s attempt to ratchet up its military might to put pressure on General Pervez Musharraf to stamp out pro-Kashmir groups based in Pakistan could also create problems all round.
First, no Pakistani ruler could survive the backlash from the public and the military if he were perceived to have “betrayed” the cause of Kashmir by bending before India. So beyond a point the more India relies on military muscle to “persuade” Pakistan to rein in the jehadis, the greater the chances that such tactics might backfire by provoking Pakistan to lash out in anger. That is why when General Musharraf decided to swing behind the allies against the Taliban he was careful to create the domestic perception that he did so because he thought it was in Pakistan’s best interests rather than because America had put a gun to his head.
Second, General Musharraf has already risked much by alienating powerful religious forces in Pakistan after aligning with the West over Afghanistan. His personal security has had to be increased after certain domestic forces have begun to target him as their enemy No. 1. Thus Indian actions might destabilize him and therefore Pakistan just when the West needs a reliable partner.
Third, by ferrying half a million men under arms to the Pakistani border, India has forced Pakistan to thin its 200,000 strong paramilitary force plugging the Afghan border. This means that Qaeda terrorists still holed up in the Tora Bora mountains will find it easier to sneak into Pakistan and hide until the American storm blows over. Surely, that is not what Washington wants.
Fourth, General Musharraf is not like Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban regime, who refused to act against the terrorists. On the contrary, he has reiterated his resolve to root out religious extremism in Pakistan. A month ago he froze the assets of several terrorist groups and arrested the top five leaders of the anti-America and pro-Kashmir jihadi parties in the country. Now he has detained leaders of the two militant organisations named by India and the United States as responsible for the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13, even though neither country has provided evidence of its claims. And General Musharraf has revamped the external operations of the Interservices Intelligence directorate, which is credited with backing the “terrorism” in Kashmir, so that its policies are in line with those of the government of Pakistan. What more could New Delhi or Washington have asked for and got immediately?
Finally, India should remember that Pakistan is not as defenseless as Afghanistan was against America, nor as helpless as the Palestinians against Israel. The Pakistani army has given as good as it has ever got from India during times of military conflict. And Pakistan is a nuclear power that will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons should India threaten to overrun it.
Under the circumstances, even an accidental or limited war could get out of hand, with dangerous consequences for the entire region.
General Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India are scheduled to attend the SAARC meeting in Nepal this Thursday. India should stop thundering about war and use the occasion to start talking peace with Pakistan.
India’s political aims in Kashmir may be better served by patiently strengthening General Musharraf’s hand in his fight against all forms of religious extremism than by foolishly pushing him to the wall. Nuclear weapons apart, Muslim Pakistan’s last line of defense against Hindu-majority India is an Islamic jihad on a national scale. That is exactly what the fundamentalist forces in Pakistan want to exploit, not just against liberal democratic elements within Pakistan but against infidel India and the hated West as well.
(Jan 11-17, 2002, Vol – XIII, No. 46 – Editorial)
Together or separately
Who is the most popular politician in the country? Nine out of ten people will probably say “Benazir Bhutto”, even as most will remind you that she is corrupt and incompetent. That is to say that most of the nine wouldn’t actually vote for her, with some absenting themselves from the polls as usual and others voting against her on some principle or the other. Ask them about Nawaz Sharif and they are likely to shrug contemptuously, “He’s finished”, implying that not only is he corrupt but also out of the political reckoning, hence not worth commenting upon. Talk about Pervez Musharraf and the remarks are likely to be as diverse as the class composition of the sample polled. “At least he’s anti-fundo” (professional types); “He’s not corrupt” (urban middle-classes), “He’s a survivor” (retired army officers); “What’s he ever done for us?” (working classes); “He’s the devil in disguise” (mullahs); “He’s got the wrong team” (big business); “He’s got it in for us” (traders) – none of which is exactly a good barometer for domestic popularity. How does all this translate into practical politics in the months ahead?
There are some people who want General Musharraf to postpone the general elections and rule without the politicians. But their arguments are either self-serving (“The politicians are corrupt and incompetent”) or misplaced (“The country cannot afford democracy at this critical juncture”). Fortunately, all accounts so far suggest that General Musharraf intends to keep his word and elections will be held before the year is out. What is less clear is how democratic, free and fair these will be in the prevailing circumstances and who will be allowed or banned from participating in them and how power will be shared between the army and the politicians.
It is clear that General Musharraf means to sit in the driving seat. The constitution is to be amended for this purpose. We shall see a super presidential National Security Council lording it over the prime minister and his cabinet. A degree of proportional representation may be decreed along with an enhancement of the seats in parliament so that no party can whip up a majority; apart from the power to confirm a prime minister, the president may also demand the right to nominate members of the cabinet; and so on. But all these calculations would amount to nought if a popular but corrupt politician like Benazir Bhutto were to sweep the polls and refuse to play ball with General Musharraf. So, for starters, she has to be kept out of the game and her Pakistan Peoples Party is to be isolated and divided so that it cannot muster the strength to upset General Musharraf’s apple cart. How is this to be done?
Recent political maneuverings are a sign of things to come. The PPP is now in the anti-Musharraf Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, now out of it, depending upon its state of negotiations with the government. General Musharraf has a straight-forward formula: Bhutto is corrupt and incompetent; she was prime minister twice and didn’t mend her ways; hence she doesn’t deserve a third chance. If the constitution has to be amended to keep Bhutto and Sharif out, it will be done by decreeing that no one can be elected or become prime minister three times in a row; but since the PPP is a valid enough national party, it will be accommodated in Islamabad and wherever else it deserves, depending upon how many votes it has managed to pull.In the meanwhile, the government will do whatever is needed to ensure that the PPP is kept in its place. This will be done by stringing an anti-PPP coalition made of PPP renegades (Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, etc), PML-N renegades (Mian Azhar et al), Pashtun and Baloch opportunists (Begum Nasim Wali Khan, Akbar Bugti, etc), and perhaps even the MQM if it is ready to accept terms and behave itself. And if, despite everything, the Bhutto factor still seems to threaten General Musharraf’s blueprint, then the elections will be rigged selectively to guarantee “positive” results.
Isn’t all this familiar? Did we not see the same sort of strategy in 1990 when President Ghulam Ishaq and General Aslam Beg contrived to thrust Nawaz Sharif and Jam Sadiq Ali on Islamabad and Sindh respectively and had to follow it up with the most disgraceful politicking to keep the PPP at bay? Nor should it be forgotten that puppets have a habit of pouncing on their string pullers with devastating effect – Junejo on Zia, Nawaz on Ishaq, Leghari on Bhutto, Osama on the CIA, Bhindranwalle on Gandhi, etc. It is far better to make realistic compromises and rule as democratically as possible. That is why Ms Bhutto should be given a personal face-saving exit from office while enabling the PPP to make a deserving institutional entry into power. We have bitter experience of rigging and no establishment has ever prospered by such tactics.
Together, General Musharraf and the PPP can walk the straight and narrow as prescribed by the modern world and construct a new Pakistan. Separately, they are bound to flounder.
(Jan 18-24, 2002, Vol – XIII, No. 47 – Editorial)
A great beginning
All except religious extremists have hailed General Pervez Musharraf’s recent speech. The Americans approved it. The Indians welcomed it. Domestic liberals delighted in it. Politicians lined up behind it. The media appreciated it. And the public has breathed a sigh of relief after it. He has averted a terrible war and put the lid on religious strife in the country. That’s a great beginning.
The speech, read as a manifesto, has two aspects: domestic and foreign. Each is significant, but the foreign element is mainly responsible for its timing and thrust. The suspicion is that without unbearable military pressure from India and compelling diplomatic advice from the US, it might not have been made at all or certainly not at this time and in this form. After all, some of us have pleaded for much the same sort of forceful state intervention and policy change in the national interest for donkeys of years but been sidelined as “negative” and “unpatriotic” elements by the very patrons of the “new” Pakistan.
This is not to say that General Musharraf has acted only because a gun was put to his head. Indeed, there is evidence to show that he has long thought of moderating Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies in line with present economic and geo-political realities. But there is also contrary evidence to suggest that he was thwarted from doing so by military advisors and civilian colleagues to whom he was personally indebted in some way or by whom he was intellectually overawed, or a bit of both.
We might recall that in his first speech to the nation on October 12, 1999, General Musharraf had instinctively and spontaneously framed the right questions about Pakistan’s crises and hinted at the right answers in an Ataturkian fashion. But thereafter certain khaki colleagues prevailed upon him to make conservative “tactical readjustments” on many issues, the retreat on the blasphemy law being one of the most objectionable. In due course, his frustration and anger with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the sectarian parties and groups at home also became increasingly obvious. Yet, even as he rejected the “strategic depth” doctrine of his predecessors vis a vis Afghanistan, he was unable to fully break free of the “national security” doctrines regarding India into which most army officers are straitjacketed as a matter of training and motivation.
In fact General Musharraf was most intransigent in the case of India. At first he pooh-poohed the Lahore Summit, saying he wouldn’t talk to India until it was ready to principally discuss the “core” issue of Kashmir in the light of the 1948 UN resolutions. Then he went so far as to stamp jihad as a “legitimate” weapon in the Kashmiris’ struggle for freedom and self-determination, irrespective of the source of that jehad. Fortunately, however, by the time of Agra a degree of realism had naturally crept back into him and he was ready to discuss all options with India. But he was prevented by his glib “nationalist” hawks from cementing an agreement with India. Provoked by Pakistani insistence on the centrality of Kashmir, India countervailed with the unprecedented centrality of “cross-border terrorism” to it and wrecked the Summit. The loss of an agreement in Agra is acutely felt in Islamabad because General Musharraf has had to say that Pakistan and Pakistanis will not sponsor or support any jihad on the soil of any country. This is a unilateral commitment not to export militancy of any kind to India (what India calls “cross-border terrorism”). India has yet to concede a dialogue focused on the Kashmir dispute in exchange.
If a Pakistani about-turn on a ten-year Afghan policy was an immediate response to the events of September 11, there are two additional political turns evident from General Musharraf’s latest speech. One, a retreat to the pre-1989 “hands-off Kashmir” policy negotiated with India at Simla in 1972 and in Lahore in 1999. Two, a commitment to return to the modern, moderate and progressive Pakistan envisioned by the Quaid-e-Azam in 1947, with General Musharraf seemingly categorical in burying the notion that Pakistan might become a theocratic state. Both steps are in the right direction.
If the force of military habit and political insecurity marks the early Musharraf, the force of circumstance and political maturity is writ all over the late Musharraf. But administrative regulation of the madrassa and the mosque is only a half-curative measure. The organs of the state — the military and its intelligence agencies, the judiciary and civil services, the public universities, colleges and curricula, the state controlled and patronized media, etc – which have jointly spawned politico-religious indoctrination for elusive “national” or “ideological” interests since General Zia ul Haq have all got be to purged as well. And these vested interests will not go without a bloody fight. On the preventive side, too, nothing less than universal education, gainful employment and health security is needed, which means a substantial economic revival programme. And that is not going to be available on a platter.
There are miles to go and promises to keep. Only time will tell whether or not General Pervez Musharraf was the man of the hour.
(June 22-28, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 17 – Editorial)
So what’s new?
General Pervez Musharraf’s ascent to the Presidency shouldn’t come as a surprise to discerning TFT readers. Three months ago, we editorialised ( Trussed up like a President, TFT March 2-8, 2001), that he was “readying to don the mantle of the President of Pakistan” and wondered whether “the simplest way would be for him to follow in the footsteps of Caesar, Napoleon or Ataturk — having seized the crown, he could put it on his head, change his tunic and announce: ‘ l’etat, c’est moi!’” (‘I am the state’). Should this happen, however, we noted advisedly, that “he would have traversed a much trodden path in Pakistan’s sad history during which the Presidency has housed all sorts of conspirators (Iskander Mirza, Ghulam Ishaq Khan), usurpers (Generals Ayub, Yahya, Zia), stooges (Chaudry Fazal Elahi, Rafiq Tarar), misfits (Farooq Leghari) and witnessed or sanctioned all manner of political instability or perversion”.
Last week ( Action wanted, TFT, June 15-21, 2001), we thought D-Day could be round the corner. “General Musharraf is not on a weak wicket any longer. He has rung changes in the army’s high command so that all critical slots are manned by hand-picked generals loyal to him. He has neutralised India and the international community by initiating the regional peace process and buckling down to IMF conditions. He has assuaged the prickly domestic business community by nudging NAB to focus on the public sector while restraining the ubiquitous CBR from fishing in troubled waters. And he has successfully unleashed the process of local elections, thereby isolating the traditional political parties in the run-up to the general elections next year. If ever there was a budding Bonaparte in Pakistan, it is General Pervez Musharraf”.
That is exactly what General Musharraf has now done — put the crown on his head rather than wait to be crowned. Having scratched the back of the international community by ticking off the fundos, freezing defense expenditures and reaffirming faith in IMF-dictated policies in the new budget, he must be pretty sure of getting away with his audacious fait accompli.
Barring an accident, he probably will. Nawabzada Nasrullah & Co will rant. Benazir Bhutto will shriek. Nawaz Sharif may squeak. Qazi Hussain Ahmad will bluster. But who cares? The Commonwealth will protest. The EU will condemn. But so what? The Japanese and Americans will cluck disapproval, urge him to note their concerns and continue doing business with him. And General Musharraf will start sprucing up in sherwanis and suits for his forthcoming visit to India so that he is accorded a reception befitting a head of state legitimised by no less an august body than the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Meanwhile, the people of Pakistan will wake up and go to sleep as usual, as though they’ve seen it all before.
Beyond that, there will be other milestones to cross. The move will certainly be challenged and clever legal arguments will be aired in the courts. But a judiciary that has taken oath under the PCO and legitimised the coup, and a Supreme Court whose chief justice has sworn in the new president, are hardly likely to undo their own decisions.
Nor is the fate of the PML(LM) a moot issue any longer. The decision to put the suspended assemblies out of misery will force many Nawaz dissidents to stand on their own feet and face the competition for the hearts and minds of the voter squarely. Others may join the cabinet to improve their prospects. It also means that the confusion and uncertainty about whether or not the next general elections will be held as promised before October 2002 has been removed. Finally, the news that General Musharraf will remain the Chief Executive implies that there will be no interim prime minister — until a new one is nominated by an elected parliament next year and is asked by President Musharraf to demonstrate a vote of confidence prior to becoming the chief executive atop a cabinet of elected ministers.
In the months ahead, we may witness some new constitutional developments that don’t necessarily clash with the guidelines of the supreme court of Pakistan. The National Security Council headed by the president may be further institutionalised, ostensibly in the interests of “national security”. The provincial elections may be staggered one by one, presumably to get a better “handle” on the provinces. An element of proportional representation may be brought into the general election process supposedly to provide for greater “electoral fairness”. The president may acquire the power to sack the prime minister and his cabinet without simultaneously sacking the parliament for purposes of “electoral stability”. The president may transfer some of the subjects of the concurrent list to the exclusive domain of provincial parliaments in order to massage the hurt egos of the provinces in the face of strong local governments. And the next national and provincial assemblies may come to resemble a cluster of fractured groups and alliances rather than abodes of the two mainstream parties so that the president can exploit their differences and lord it over them.
So what’s new? The sordid game has begun all over again. The message is clear. Those who don’t like it can lump it.
(Dec 28, 2001-Jan 03, 2002, Vol – XIII, No. 44 – Editorial)
Indo-Pak follies
As India ferries its tanks and missiles to the border to “teach Pakistan a lesson” for “meddling in Kashmir”, it might sensibly pause to consider its error. One nuclear power can’t possibly teach another nuclear power any “lessons” through war. Nor can it rest assured that its military intervention will have “limited” objectives. Escalation is inevitable when each side is able and willing to hit back, as both India and Pakistan discovered to their mutual discomfort in the Kargil conflict.
Equally, Pakistan’s old strategic doctrine of supporting proxy wars in India’s periphery, especially through an Islamic jehad in Kashmir, so that the conventional military balance is restored to more manageable proportions, is out of sync with recent realities. In particular, the post 9/11 world sees Islamic jehad as pure terrorism that must be stamped out everywhere.
We said as much over a year ago (TFT Editorial “Start talking”, April 7, 2000): “The greater the losses of India at the hands of Pakistan inspired jehadi forces in Indian-held Kashmir, the greater the chances that New Delhi will be provoked into launching a war against Pakistan…. In the event of such a conflict, the international community led by Washington may be expected to support India as a victim…the fact that India’s robust and independent economy will also be able to better withstand the rigours and ravages of war…than Pakistan’s dependent and crippled economy lends weight to this line of thinking”.
The dye was cast last October when the jehadis of the Jaish i Mohammad (JM) led by Maulana Masood Azhar in Pakistan killed 40 people outside the state parliament building in Srinagar, prompting the American ambassador in New Delhi to finally say that the militants in Kashmir were terrorists and not “freedom fighters”. A more aggressive response from India and the international community should therefore have been anticipated following the December 13 jehadi attack on the parliament house in New Delhi. As India has mobilized for war, Washington has stepped in to outlaw the JM and the Lashkar e Taiba (LeT) and warned Pakistan to clamp down on them.
Unfortunately, Pakistan’s argument that India should provide “evidence” against the JM and LeT before action can be taken against them doesn’t cut ice with the international community which scarcely bothered with such niceties itself when it came to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. But like their ill-fated counterparts in Afghanistan, the jehadis in Pakistan and Kashmir have proven to be their own worst propagandists, having proudly owned up to acts of militancy in Kashmir as well as publicly threatened to carry the jehad to the heart of India in Delhi. Therefore Pakistan’s condemnation of such acts as “terrorism” evokes the same contemptuous dismissal as its lack of adequate “leverage” over the Taliban before 9/11.
But this, too, hasn’t come as a surprise to us. In the same TFT editorial in April last year we warned that “the strengthening of the diverse jehadi parties and groups based in Pakistan for the purposes of the proposed liberation of Kashmir is bound to undermine Pakistan’s internal cohesion and political stability. Indeed, granting center-stage to the Kashmir struggle by the mujahideen could signal a strengthening of the forces of Talibanisation in Pakistan just as similar succour to similar forces for similar purposes in Afghanistan has had a socially destabilizing impact on Pakistan. Equally, since such groups lack a calibrated world view with regard to diplomatic gains or losses, their military successes in Kashmir would be proportionate to a decrease in the political leverage of Pakistan over them, as in Afghanistan. Indeed, in time to come, Kashmir could come to resemble Afghanistan with all that that description entails.”
If Pakistan’s past errors have caught up on it, is there any hope of a realistic adjustment in its Kashmir policy? Islamabad has certainly gone through the motions of complying with the international requirements of freezing the assets of some jehadi groups and detaining their leading lights. But this may not be sufficient to stave off further pressure if the jehadis continue to mount suicide attacks in Kashmir and India, thereby jeopardizing the political and economic “gains” of Islamabad’s revamped Afghan policy after 9/11.
However, if Pakistan desperately needs a more realistic Kashmir and India policy, it is equally true that “India remains bereft of a Kashmir policy and a Pakistan policy and its brinkmanship policy is unimaginative”, as American scholar Stephen Cohen has noted. “This policy cannot consist only of Pakistan-bashing. India must also reassess its entire strategy for dealing with the Kashmiri separatist movement and with Pakistan under its present leadership,” argues Mr Cohen. “India fantasizes that the Pakistan army will suddenly yield power to a pro-Indian civilian government that will turn Pakistan into a pliable and accommodating neighbour but this is wishful thinking. New Delhi cannot afford a truly radicalized and a fragmenting but angry and nuclear-armed Pakistan…Ignoring the root causes of the anger of some of its own citizens and the very existence of its neighbour do not seem to be steps in the right direction”.
Truer words have not been spoken. India should talk to Pakistan and the Kashmiris and resolve their disputes with it instead of fighting with them.
(March 02-08, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 1 – Editorial)
Trussed up like a president?
The biggest non-secret of the year is out of the bag; General Pervez Musharraf is readying to don the mantle of the President of Pakistan. He said as much in a recent closed-door meeting in Islamabad with the top dogs of business and industry. Should this happen, he would have traversed a much trodden path in Pakistan’s sad history during which the Presidency has housed all sorts of conspirators (Iskander Mirza, Ghulam Ishaq Khan), usurpers (Generals Ayub, Yahya, Zia), stooges (Chaudhry Fazal Elahi, Rafiq Tarar), misfits (Farooq Leghari) and witnessed or sanctioned all manner of political instability or perversion. How will General Musharraf get there? And if he does, how will he fare?
The simplest way would be for him to follow in the footsteps of Caesar, Napoleon or Ataturk — having seized the crown, he could simply put it on his head, change his tunic and announce: “l’etat, c’est moi!” Alas, times have changed. The international community won’t stand for it. And since the international community is calling all the financial shots, therefore, someone – preferably the public but any mothball parliament, old or new, will do nicely, thank you – has to confer the presidency on him because neither the writ of the supreme court nor the will of the corps commanders will suffice.
But the public cannot be trusted in the Land of the Pure. It is fickle, if not downright treacherous, having reposed faith in demagogues like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, dilettantes like Benazir Bhutto and the intellectually challenged Nawaz Sharif. Indeed, the public is being unpardonably sinful by insisting that, given half a chance, it is likely to vote for one or both of these rascals yet again. So that leaves only parliament to fiddle with.
The defunct parliament could be revived (rubbish, said he not so long ago; it’s one option, he muses today), sooner or later, for better or for worse, to hand him his crown, create the dubious conditions for reinventing itself and call it a day. But that is easier said than done. Shorn of dozens of leading luminaries who are languishing in the clutches of NAB, the old parliament could go into divisive fits of hysteria when it reassembles without its old leaders. In the event, neither its raucous continuation nor a second sacking is likely to do the general’s cause much good.
The other route is to risk fresh general elections, order the ISI and NAB to rig them to his heart’s content by disqualifying every notable in sight, hold a gun to the head of the new parliament, much as General Zia ul Haq did in 1985, and order it to do the needful or else. Or else, what? The new parliament will be conscious of its indispensability as no parliament before it. It will not allow the generals to mess around with it for too long. And since every politician worth his salt is at least another potential Mohammad Khan Junejo, there are bound to be more than ugly hiccups ahead. Thus General Musharraf could find himself up the creek without a paddle like Zia did in 1988. The alternative would be a game of musical chairs as in the 1950s, with prime ministers getting the boot whenever they raised their heads. Neither route would serve to restore confidence in the country and revive the economy.
Yet General Musharraf seems to have opted for a more difficult transition than even General Zia. He has determined to be pitted against two political leaders instead of one. The circumstances of his era are also not as propitious as they were during Zia’s day. For one, the economy was galloping along then. It is barely crawling today under the shadow of default. Two, the international community was ready to turn a blind eye to the dictator’s political machinations then but is downright impatient with the generals today. Thus, all other things being equal, General Musharraf’s burgeoning confidence might not only be misplaced for his own personal political health, it could spell trouble for the country too.
We acknowledge the fact that General Pervez Musharraf didn’t choose to jump into the dirty political arena. He was pushed into it. But from this it should have logically followed that he would have been keen to get out as soon as possible. Instead, he has been trying to dig in his heels for a long innings. A clique of ambitious supergenerals around him, backed by an anti-corruption moral rearmament brigade comprising middle-class intellectuals seeking perfect solutions in an imperfect world, seems to have convinced him that the time is nigh for a final solution worthy of his person and rank. However, just as he is warming to this theme, the homeless intellectuals have deserted him and the economy has begun to exact a nasty toll of his credibility.
General Musharraf is a good, sincere and well-meaning soldier. But he might rue the day he allowed himself to be trussed up like one of our presidents of yore.
(March 23-29, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 4 – Editorial)
Too little, too late?
The run-up to Moharram is always predictable. There are official vows to “crush sectarian terrorism” and ulema of all stripes are loud in denouncing firqawariat. But this year, the main sectarian organizations are conspicuous by their deadly silence. In fact, the fear is that the Sunni sectarian terrorists may rampage during Moharram in protest against the recent hanging of their hero, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, and the incarceration of their firebrand leader, Maulana Azam Tariq.
Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, it may be recalled, assassinated the Iranian Consul, Sadiq Ganji, in 1990 but could not be sentenced because at least a dozen judges of the Lahore High Court were afraid or reluctant to convict him. Last year, however, the supreme court was nudged to do the needful by the military regime following an Iranian outcry at his acquittal by the Lahore High Court. But the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a banned offshoot of the Sipah-i-Sahaba, avenged the hanging of its leader by killing dozens of Shias in Sheikhupura two weeks ago. A week ago, the Shias went on a killing spree by targeting SS activists and sympathizers in Nishat Colony, Lahore. Meanwhile, Riaz Basra, a companion of Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, is still at large, having inexplicably “escaped” from police custody many years ago to subsequently sow terror in the heart of various civil administrations by successfully targeting top Shia civil servants and police officers in the Punjab.
Now General Pervez Musharraf has expressed his determination to tackle the scourge of sectarian violence in this country. His words ring truer than those of the politicians he has deposed because he is not obliged to horsetrade. In fact, he is averse to sectarian violence because it hurts his government’s drive to portray itself as a “no-nonsense” regime keen on stability and reform. So we may expect the current ban on weapons-display to be followed by a ban on certain avowedly sectarian organizations, followed by the formal tasking of the military’s intelligence agencies to bring the worst offenders to book. But are such administrative measures, however welcome, a case of too little, too late?
To answer this question, we need to remind ourselves that sporadic sectarian disagreement was institutionalized into continuing sectarian violence in this country during the time of General Zia ul Haq when the constitution was formally stripped of its informal secular garb, and sectarian ideas and leaders were allowed entry into the organs of state and government. From then onwards, it has been downhill all the way. Today, at least three Shia-majority cities — Parachinar, Gilgit and Jhang — are in a permanent state of siege while even Karachi, once a sparkling cosmopolitan city, is acutely vulnerable to the sectarian menace.
Some people say that there is not much that the state can do about a religious disagreement that is embedded in Islam’s early history. True. But when a state in a country overwhelmingly dominated by one sect makes it its business to promote so-called Islamic ideas, beliefs and practices, why should one expect the state to remain neutral in passionate schismatic disagreements between the two sects, however well-intentioned any particular organs of the state may be? Surely, isn’t it inevitable under the circumstances that the weight of the ideas and beliefs of the majority sect will be far greater than that of the minority sect and lead to a potentially discriminatory and divisive situation in the country? Indeed, one reason why the state has not been able to curb sectarian warfare in this country is that powerful sections of the state either secretly agree with some of the prejudices of the dominant sectarian ideology as espoused by its violent practitioners or condone it for opportunist strategic external policies.
The state’s reluctance to uproot the aggressive sectarianism of the majority sect is also related to its administrative weakness. The police, for instance, is far less motivated than its adversaries, not merely because of insufficient material incentives and resources but also because of its majoritarian-sect beliefs which find an echo in those of its leading foe. Certainly, it is not as well armed.
The proliferation of small arms since the Afghan campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s has led to the use of weapons for offence rather than defence, to fuel civil war at home and insurgency abroad. But it is no consolation to say that jehad is being waged outside one’s territory because the mind-set nurtured by a proliferating arms culture is consolidated at home and not abroad. The problem becomes even more intractable if external wars are not fought by professional soldiers but by jehadis from the majority sect who periodically return to the home country as heroes in civil society. Thus, open borders facilitate the inflow of all sorts of sophisticated weapons from all over the world. Indeed, Afghanistan alone has sufficient Afghan-war leftovers to arm the majority-sect warriors for another twenty years.
If it is futile to try and resolve old religious differences, it is downright dangerous in a predominantly two-sect nation to de-neutralize or de-secularise the state by allowing majority-sect versions of Islam to dominate its civil and security discourse. Until we stop doing that, we are fated to bite the bullet and be savaged by the warriors of “true faith”.
(March 30-April 05, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 5 – Editorial)
History Man
The government may have successfully bust the ARD’s proposed rally at Mochi Gate in Lahore on March 23. But its decision and modus operandi have been variously diagnosed as “reactionary”, “precipitous”, “needless”, etc. The argument is that if the rally had not been disallowed it would have pitched the ARD in rather poor light because the politicians would not have been able to muster a respectable and animated crowd. As it is, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, Qasim Zia and Javed Hashmi cannot bring themselves to wipe out the grins from their faces. Certainly, the regime has got a bad press at home and abroad.
But the supergenerals seem to have figured it out. “We don’t want to be distracted from our main concerns”, they rebut, suggesting that political activity is bad for the economy and noting the virtues of a “non-discriminatory” approach. Mr Farooq Leghari had planned to march from Peshawar to Attock to demand an international debt reprieve, hardly a provocative act. But he wasn’t allowed to do so. Similarly, Mr Rasul Bux Palejo’s long march in Sindh to focus on the issue of water-sharing and shortage was broken up even though it posed no discernable threat to the regime. All this is true enough. But it is actually the proverbial fig leaf for a less than democratic road map for the future. Consider the sequence of events and the logic of a veritable anti-democratic entry strategy that is cunningly portrayed as a “true democracy” exit strategy.
The local elections have been staggered over a seven month period and split unevenly across the provinces ostensibly because voter lists are not ready but actually because it is easier to control and channel passions in the desired direction over a longer time span and wider canvass compared to an unpredictable, one-shot, operation across the length and breadth of the country. In the absence of political parties, this is the best way to corral voters into polling stations without worrying about the results in the heat and dust of battle. Hence the 45% voter turnout last January was comfortably upped to over 50% on March 21. That was just two days before the proposed ARD rally. If the signal hadn’t gone out to the voters on the eve of the rally that party politicians were strictly no-no, the results of the second round of local elections might not have been so welcome to the regime as they were in the event.
Mian Azhar’s election as president of the PML on March 25 was also scheduled in the shadow of the ARD rally. After the ISI had painstakingly herded the recalcitrant PML MNAs into the dissident camp by promising all sorts of sweet nothings, how could it risk allowing the ARD to dilute or sabotage its message on March 25? The iron fist had to be smashed on the party-political street opposition as represented by the ARD so that the non-party independents at the local level and the King’s party hopefuls behind Mian Azhar in Islamabad could be massaged with a veiled glove. And never mind, as one keen observer has pointed out, that the Margalla Cricket Ground where a red carpet was laid out for the 5000 strong anti-Nawaz PML dissidents so that they could jostle and crowd each other out was bigger and better than the barbed-wire Mochi Gate venue denied to the ARD.
Therefore General Pervez Musharraf’s March 25 announcement to seek an indefinite extension in his tenure as army chief fits nicely into the jigsaw puzzle. When the time is ripe, he means to become the president of Pakistan. When and how will that happen?
General Musharraf is half way there already. Half the local elections are in the bag. And half the political opposition (ie, PML) is in his pocket. Come August, the curtain will fall on the local elections and it will be time to start thinking of provincial elections and what to do about Benazir Bhutto and the PPP. Come to think of it, what is to stop him from decreeing that no one may be elected prime minister if he or she has already been PM twice? Once his nemeses are out of the way for good, he could stagger the provincial elections across time and space much like the local elections and try and engineer “positive results”. That would leave him just one step short of the coveted presidency atop a planned national security council or some such thing. The coup de grace would come with the national elections, which would seek to legitimise and institutionalise the role of the supergeneral regime and accord primacy to General Pervez Musharraf. The question of the restoration of the assemblies is peripheral to the main thrust of future developments. It is merely one route among many to the same end.
If General Pervez Musharraf has his way there will be no politics on the streets of Pakistan. And Pakistanis will not be free to choose the politicians and political system of their choice. But if the road to hell is often paved with the best of intentions, history might still have its way and the best-laid plans could go astray.
(May 25-31, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 13 – Editorial)
Mixing religion and politics
The federal minister for religious affairs, Mr Mehmud Ghazi, is a veritable busybody. He is constantly conjuring up apparently pious religious edicts, exhorting misplaced cannons to thunder against the avowed evils of riba (interest), and hatching plots to drive the unwashed unbelievers into paradise at the point of General Pervez Musharraf’s bayonet. Reportedly, Mr Ghazi’s latest construction is a draft for legislation aimed at “Islamising” every aspect of our wretched lives. It is said to be titled Iqamat-i-Salah (saying prayers regularly), Amr bil Maruf (furtherance of good), Nahy anil Munkar (purging evil).
There is something rather menacing about this proposed law. It is quite akin to Nawaz Sharif’s proposed 15th constitutional amendment to become a dictator. But there are two crucial differences between them. Mr Sharif didn’t spell out how he meant to promote “good” and expunge “evil” from society. But Mr Ghazi has no such compunctions — his draft is over 1000 words long. Also, Mr Sharif was attempting to strengthen his own hands as prime minister. But Mr Ghazi is singing the president’s tune. Consider.
Hisbah (Censorship) authorities will be appointed at every administrative level to frame rules and ensure compliance. All executive powers shall act in aid of Hisbah authorities. Complaints by citizens (as in the blasphemy law) or public functionaries will be grist for the mills. Such authorities will “discourage anti-Islamic social habits” (not defined). Penalties will range from fines and stripes to “corporal or other punishments”. Accused persons must defend themselves without lawyers. The head of the Federal Hisbah Authority and two ulema members will be appointed by the president while the federal government (read prime minister) will have two reps, thus giving the president a decisive edge in furthering his particular agenda. The same powers will accrue to the president’s nominee (Governor) at the provincial level who will “reorder the individual and collective life of Pakistanis on the cultural pattern and moral values of Islam”.
Why is such a law necessary, when all the so-called “Islamic” laws decreed by that evil dictator Zia ul Haq and that rascal Nawaz Sharif didn’t succeed in purging “evil” from our hearts and making “good Muslims” out of us? Indeed, isn’t this another devious scheme to strip us of our civil and fundamental constitutional rights and hound us into submission to those scoundrels who masquerade as the “chosen” few? The fact is that our bruised and battered constitution already mocks the notion of an Islamic state by calling Pakistan an “Islamic Republic” (in an Islamic state, Allah is sovereign; in a Republic, the people are sovereign). Why do we want to muddy the waters further by such a decree? If anything, we should be moving in the opposite direction by ensuring that the purity of religion, faith or belief is not blotted by the dirt and filth of political engineering.
Mixing religion with politics has spawned unprecedented degrees of violence and terror in this country and progressively uprooted chunks of the citizenry. The Qadianis were banned by a “socialist” government-dominated state in 1974 and hounded to flee from the country. Women were alienated by the Hadood laws in the 1980s when rape was equated with adultery and the Qisas and Diyat ordinances degenerated into elements of the class struggle. The blasphemy net was then cast far and wide to include the hapless Christians as well. Meanwhile the Ushr and Zakat committees were established to empower and enrich the ulema,and madrassas were officially funded and propped up in the entire belt bordering Afghanistan in quest of jihadi lashkars for the war in Afghanistan. And so on.
Thus the Talibanised vigilantes who scour the hills of the NWFP and Balochistan, breaking TV sets, burning video films, banning music and flouting the writ of the state, are characterised more by tribalism and illiteracy than by any organic rooting in Islamic law, history or tradition. The Sunni and Shia sectarian militants who heap abuse and murder upon each other in pursuit of an imagined practise of faith harm revealed truth rather than purify or unify their herd. The intra-sect fratricide in the dominant religious stream of the Sunnis is more about the spoils of power and space than it is of religious zeal. The local jihadis who are bent upon waging war against the injustice of the infidels not just in the region but in the four corners of the world are playing with the fortunes of the sovereign nation-state of Pakistan rather than enhancing the cause of Islam. And the advocates of abolishing all forms of interest in an economic system wedded to and integrated with the global system of capitalism are undermining the growth prospects of the economy and the confidence of our saving and investing classes rather than enhancing the cause of our impoverished masses.
Therefore do-gooders like Dr Ghazi who are bent upon making good Muslims out of us by decree are more likely to strengthen the impulse for dictatorship and disruption rather than support the quest for democracy and stability. Perhaps some enlightened general might have a quiet word or two with the gentleman and set him on the right path?
(May 11-17, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 11 – Editorial)
The world according to PM
If it’s lonely at the top, as General Pervez Musharraf claims, it’s certainly not evident in his demeanour. The general is bristling with overconfidence. The politicians have no credibility, he thunders, hence they have no right to hold public meetings. The IMF and World Bank are on board, he asserts, hence everything’s chummy with the donor community. Traders and businessmen have forked over an additional Rs 50 billion in taxes this year, he argues, hence everything is going to be hunky dory with the economy. The local elections are whistling through, he chuckles, hence it’s time to start thinking of ascending the presidency. The supreme court is in a cooperative mood, he grins, hence any number of constitutional amendments can be made. The dictatorial regimes in Burma and Egypt which recently laid out the red carpet for him are alive and kicking, he shrugs, hence his own longevity is assured. The foreign minister has been invited to meet the top dogs of the Bush administration in Washington, he clarifies, hence sanctions are on their way out. The Taliban are giving Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Masood a good thrashing, he notes, hence the European Union which invited Masood to Brussels recently can go jump in a lake. The jihadis are making India pay through its nose in Kashmir, he boasts, hence the national security strategy is clicking. Finally, praise be to Allah who moves in mysterious and unexpected ways, Washington and Beijing are trading threats, he submits, hence Pakistan may receive some Chinese windfalls in the bargain.
But before General Musharraf clicks his heels and dances a jig of joy, he might pause to consider the flip side of the coin. The politicians may be down but they are not out, which is why the regime is scared of allowing them to kick up a dust storm. The IMF and World Bank are fickle mistresses, now you see them, now you don’t, depending on their master’s voice in Washington. America has decided to cosy up to India, thus if push comes to shove, it could start brandishing the stick to Pakistan all over again. Traders and businessmen are mad as hell, so instead of investing in the country they would rather take their money and run. The economy is growing, to be sure, but it’s far below target. The local nazims are lining up to elect a president, but the self-same philosophy may induce them to leave a sinking ship like rats. The Taliban’s military victories provide illusory strategic depth to Islamabad, but one false move by Osama Bin Laden could provoke the wrath of the big boy in the White House and make Afghanistan a millstone around our necks. The Indians may not know whether they’re coming or going, but when they tire of Pakistani pricking they might just become desperate enough to pick up the gauntlet and hurl it in our face.
Finally, there is not much comfort to be drawn from the experience of the military dictators in Burma or from the autocratic president of Egypt. Burma is not teetering on the brink of financial default and is not dependent on international goodwill for economic survival. Nor is it at odds with either Washington on the issue of nuclear proliferation and Islamic terrorism or any powerful neighbour over a hotly disputed slice of history. Likewise, General Musharraf isn’t a patch on President Hosni Mubarak. Where the latter is the most virile, anti-fundo American ally in the Middle-East, the former is wont to flirt with the fundos and is not averse to blackmailing the West ( Apres moi, le deluge!).
In other words, General Musharraf is safe and sound until he trips up or someone throws a spanner in his works. That is not a matter of if but when, since there are so many angry people and disgruntled states around and the general is seeking nothing less than a total transformation of political life according to his own worldview. When that happens, all his wistful dreams will become recurring nightmares and it will get terribly lonely at the bottom of the well.
There is, of course, one way in which PM can ward off the odds stacked against him. That is by stripping the state of its misplaced concept of national security. In the modern age, national security is not built around notions of extracting pounds of flesh by war or jihad. It is constructed around historical compromises with neighbours east and west so that the peace dividend is used to enhance the welfare of all the citizens of a state. Security doesn’t flow from squeezing growth in order to reduce the fiscal deficit or from pushing human talent and capital out of the country. It springs from a high savings and investment rate in the country. It cannot be protected by controlling dissent because it is critically dependent on a democratic consensus based on free association and will. It cannot be achieved by institutionalising passionate faith because it is primarily predicated on the innocuous self-interest of people. Anyone who thinks or believes otherwise is deceiving himself.
(May 18-24, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 12 – Editorial)
Learning from China
The recent visit by Chinese premier Zhu Rongji to Pakistan has aroused many hopes in this country. Indeed, some of us are inclined to view it in the perspective of a deteriorating US-China relationship following the spy-plane incident coupled with the determination of the US to rearm Taiwan, and a warming US-India relationship following India’s opportunist turnabout on President George W. Bush’s controversial National Missile Defence program to which China is opposed. This strategic perspective suggests that China may now be more inclined to assist Pakistan in confronting India and the United States than in the past. In fact, a number of opinion-writers who think Pakistan’s unbending foreign policy is the only way to go are glad to note that a “strategic opening” has been provided to offset Pakistan’s growing international isolation.
But Pakistanis are not alone in thinking in such military terms. In India, too, there are people who see profit in the developing Sino-American contradiction provoked by a Republican Party made rabidly right-wing by its bitter confrontation with ex-President Bill Clinton. In fact, since both India and Pakistan are rather backward in international trade, they are secretly keen to stoke a revival of the Cold War so that they can sort each other out militarily. India supports President Bush’s NMD programme when no one even in the European Union has shown any enthusiasm for it, while Pakistan thinks it can carry on its self-isolating jehadi policies now that China has been provoked by the US to bankroll Pakistan.
That is where the mistake lies. Pakistan must look closely at China and try to understand the real compulsions of its friendly neighbour. This is necessary because Pakistan hardly has any non-official contacts with China, and Beijing is traditionally not given to mouthing reckless foreign policy statements. China is not a warrior state but a trading nation deeply committed to a policy of modernisation and trade surpluses to maintain its astounding growth rate of over 10%. In fact, its status in global trade reinforces the pragmatism that has marked its traditional style of state behaviour. Thus, in its handling of the confrontation with the inexperienced new US president, it is likely to behave as a mature and calculating entity rather than as a state with human attributes that is maddened by a perceived insult.
This means that those Indian and Pakistani ‘experts’ who smell in this “confrontation” the seeds of yet another Cold War and a consequent free military ride should think again. In fact, the Indians may be in for a rude awakening if they think that Washington will build India up militarily as a factor to balance China, given Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent and its nervous rulers. On the other hand, Pakistanis who think that China will lean in favour of Pakistan to offset what is perceived as an India-Israel-US axis should ponder the real meaning of Chinese self-interest.
China’s future lies in retaining its fast growth rate and becoming the biggest economy in the world in the next twenty years. Thus, while it pursues its Asia policy, it is more than likely to take great care in remaining inside a regional consensus and not becoming isolated – a value on which Pakistanis place no premium. It is in this context that China has been pursuing detente with Russia and India whereby it has removed its fundamental disputes with Russia and put its border disputes with India on the backburner. It has achieved a remarkable identity of views with Iran. Indeed, it has even initiated a slight ‘thaw’ in its relationship with the Taliban without going so far as to recognise it as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. But we should remember that all these are countries, excluding the Taliban, with whom Pakistan has bad relations because we believe that there is no alternative to the policies that have led to bad relations with these states. But that is not how China thinks. In fact, Pakistanis should worry about the fact that while India as America’s budding partner is regionally and globally more integrated than ever before, Pakistan can only relate to Burma to break its greater-than-ever solitude. The fear is that Pakistan could become a Chinese liability if it continues to pursue its moribund self-isolating policies.
That leads to a realistic consideration of the promising turn in Pak-China economic cooperation heralded by premier Zhu Rongji’s visit. This is where the silver lining actually exists if Islamabad can demonstrate the capacity of using Chinese help without crumbling under the weight of its old inertia.
We must not let this opening lead us back toward the path of isolationist thinking. Those who suggest that Pakistan should hitch its wagon to China and forget about integrating with the South Asian trading bloc under SAARC are advised to consider whether China would approve of such policies (it won’t!). Finally, we should carefully re-read the import of Chinese advice in the light of its own policies and experience regarding the “unfinished business of history” (our Kashmir cause) on how to settle border and territorial disputes with neighbours.
(May 04-10, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 10 – Editorial)
India: conduct unbecoming
Despite peace-mongering, India remains the bully on the block. Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal have been variously alienated. Now, four years after the Gugral peace initiative settled the water dispute with Bangladesh, its eastern neighbour has been given a dose of New Delhi’s aggressive intent.
Last week, 16 Indian soldiers were killed by the Bangladesh army when they violated the international border in the Sylhet-Meghalaya sector. Understandably, Indians were angry to learn that the dead bodies had been mutilated. Inexplicably, however, the Indian government didn’t shed any light on what had happened, despite a string of nagging questions by the Bangladesh media. Nor has India registered the message of the protesting people of Bangladesh. Instead, the BJP’s allies want aggressive action. Accordingly, New Delhi has reinforced its forces on the border and registered a case of “war crimes” against Bangladesh in an Indian court.
India needs to look at what is happening inside Bangladesh in order to understand why its army has encountered such fierce resistance from the Bangladesh army. Mrs Hasina Wajed’s Awami League government is friendly with the Hindu-nationalist BJP government (it was friendlier still with the Gujral government earlier). But India and BD share a potentially troublesome 4000 km long border guarded by 700 ‘border outposts’ because both countries have enclaves penetrating far into each other’s territory. This is the legacy of the 1947 Radcliffe Award. It should have been straightened out but wasn’t when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan. However, an agreement to do so was signed in 1974. But this wasn’t subsequently ratified by India because it perceived ‘unfriendly political trends’ in Dhaka that led to the political eclipse of the pro-India Awami League of Sheikh Mujiburrehman. Meanwhile, India has continued to suffer from a steady ‘leakage’ of Bangladeshis into India which could have been better prevented if the treaty had been ratified.
Most Indian security experts insist that India should adopt a “forward policy” and teach Bangladesh a lesson. They accuse Bangladesh of culpability on other counts too: that a senior BD army officer paid a visit to Pakistan recently; that Khaleda Zia, the opposition leader, visited China; that the ISI had set up office in a certain quarter of Dhaka and was behind it all; that the Bangladeshi army was pro-Pakistan and that General Musharraf’s current visit to Myanmar could be part of a grand design against India. But no one cared to note that the Bangladeshi media was unanimous in criticising India for provoking the conflict.
Indian security minds are unwilling to see Bangladesh as a small state next door that should be sympathetically treated. They also tend to encourage the Indian public to think of India as an innocent and righteous state constantly destabilised by its’ wicked’ small neighbours. Indeed, the Indian state is so disabled by passions of misplaced nationalism that it cannot fathom why a small and poor state like Bangladesh should choose to kill and maim its troops in such a manner. This, despite the eventual great cost to India when a Sri Lankan soldier hit prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1990 with his rifle butt during a ceremonial parade long before he was assassinated as a direct consequence of the Indian role in the civil war in Sri Lanka. The fact that the Indian ‘free’ media has also failed to present the other side of the story — how the BSF has gradually encroached on Bangladeshi enclaves – reinforces the negative aspect of Indian nationalism.
The hostile Indian reaction does not auger well for the future of Indo-BD relations. Prime minister Hasina Wajed’s popularity will plunge if she isn’t sufficiently defiant. Right wing politicians might also try to deepen the wedge that already exists between her and a suspicious BD army. Therefore Bangladesh might be destabilised unless India shows understanding, ratifies the treaty and gets out of the enclaves it has seized.
If India wants to be recognised as a global player it must first be accepted as a generous regional power trusted by its smaller neighbours. But this is highly unlikely in view of the prevailing circumstances. Now that elections are on in some Indian states hosting Bangladeshi refugees, local politics is bound to turn on communal issues, with leaders putting on the war paint in states like Assam, Bihar and West Bengal, and souring the regional atmosphere further. Let us not forget that there are over one million Bangladeshi refugees in India and the Bangladeshi economy is overwhelmed by goods smuggled across the unprotected border from India.
India’s quarrel with Pakistan is out in the open but Nepal and Bangladesh have tended to downplay their simmering squabbles with their big neighbour. However, when governments sweep big issues under the carpet, their people tend to form their own views about what India is doing to their country. Thus India’s villainy tends to be exaggerated and harms its bilateral relationships. Therefore, as the big country, India should understand this better than the small countries in its neighbourhood. But it doesn’t seem to give a damn. That is classic small-power behaviour in a nation that bids to become a global player and sit inside the UN Security Council.
(June 15-21, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 16 – Editorial)
Action wanted
Audacious or blunt, opportunistic or pragmatic, General Pervez Musharraf seems a remarkable person. He appears neither as rigid as his old uniform might warrant nor as diplomatic as his new position might demand. His arguments are invariably tempered by realism rather than rhetoric. Indeed, his plain-talking and flexibility may have won him more friends at home and abroad than his critics might wish to concede.
General Musharraf’s exceptional performance at the National Seerat Conference in Islamabad on June 6th merits comment. Until now, no political or military leader in the history of Pakistan has had the courage or integrity to call a spade a spade in front of the aggressive, self-appointed “guardians of Islam” and self-righteous “defenders of the identity” of Pakistan. Indeed, if the orthodoxy was confirmed in its suspicions that General Musharraf is unlikely to do its bidding blindly, the liberals were left wondering whether the general might somehow fit their own bill rather smugly. In all honesty, though, who can disagree with the gist of what General Musharraf said that day?
What is so “Islamic” about our country when Sunnis and Shias, and now Deobandis and Brelvis, are killing each other so wantonly, when we are so devoid of a sense of brotherhood and tolerance, when there is no justice for the poor and destitute, when our women are relegated to second-class citizenship? Who can blame the international community for calling us an “irresponsible” or “failed” or “terrorist” state when our religious leaders are quick to hurl outlandish threats? Who will invest in our country if it is constantly rocked by senseless religious strife and violence? Since no nation is an island, how can Pakistan survive in hostility to the global community? The root cause of our instability lies in mixing religion, which is pure, with politics, which is dirty. Could General Musharraf have said half as much last year?
With hindsight, we think probably not. A case in point is the proposal to amend the procedure of filing a case under the blasphemy law. The idea was sound enough since the law is exploited by all manner of vested interests. In fact, a representative government had drafted the necessary changes already. But General Musharraf was ready to backtrack when his intelligence agencies revealed how the religious parties intended to stir up trouble for the government if the proposed changes were implemented. (In one scenario, a religious party would stage an angry demonstration in which a copy of the Holy Quran would accidentally fall to the ground and be trampled upon, thereby enraging the mobs and provoking widespread arson). Why, he was advised, should the military government stir a hornets’ nest, when the politicians and businessmen were already up in arms against the military government, India was fomenting trouble, the economy was down in the dumps and the international community wasn’t being terribly helpful? One step forward might have become two steps back.
Clearly, General Musharraf is not on such a weak wicket any longer. He has rung changes in the army’s high command so that all critical slots are manned by hand-picked generals loyal to him. He has neutralised India and the international community by initiating the regional peace process and buckling down to IMF conditions. He has assuaged the prickly domestic business community by nudging NAB to focus on the public sector while restraining the ubiquitous CBR from fishing in troubled waters. And he has successfully unleashed the process of local elections, thereby isolating the traditional political parties in the run-up to the general elections next year. If ever there was a budding Bonaparte in Pakistan, it is General Pervez Musharraf.
That should not be misconstrued as a compliment. While modern-day Bonapartism could conceivably act as an anti-status quo force favouring modernity and assimilation rather than backwardness and isolation, as in 18th century absolutist Europe, it has no lasting place in a budding 21st century third world democracy like Pakistan. The task for General Musharraf is to initiate the process of growth, globalisation and modernity in a progressively democratic environment without unleashing any of the turmoil and instability associated with rapid change in a largely static society, and then exiting from the scene in a voluntary and organised manner. Anything less than that would be unacceptable to civil society. And anything more than that could be personally perilous for General Musharraf. Is the road clear?
No, it’s not. There is a contradiction between continuing to sponsor jehad as state policy and buttoning up the religious activists in the interest of domestic stability. There is a contradiction between squeezing the public for greater revenues and channelling them into unproductive defence expenditures. There is a contradiction between remaining uneducated and attempting to retool our labour force for IT purposes. There is a contradiction between plans for devolution of power and the state’s preferred mode of centralism. There is a contradiction between constantly stockpiling and upgrading nuclear and missile materials while asking the international community to write off or reschedule our staggering foreign debt. And so on. The sooner General Pervez Musharraf removes these contradictions from Pakistan’s reckoning, the better. Words alone will not suffice. We need action.
(June 08-14, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 15 – Editorial)
Lies and damned lies
A report by the State Bank of Pakistan on the health of the Pakistani economy at the end of the third quarter (March) of the current financial year 2000-2001 paints an interesting picture. Among its summary conclusions may be listed the following: 1. Large-scale manufacturing is up by 8.8%, as against 3.5% last year and 3.6% a year earlier, partly because sugar production and petroleum refining are buoyant. (This is a good sign.)
- Exports are also up 8.4%, as against 8.9% last year and a decline of 11.7% a year earlier. (This is a good sign.)
- Home remittances are up by 16.8%, as against a fall of about 9% last year and a fall of 31.5% a year earlier. (This is a good sign.)
- Tax revenues are also up by about 15%, as against 18% last year and a mere 2% in the earlier year. (This is a good sign.)
- The consumer price index, which is a measure of the rate of inflation, is up by 4.8%, as against 3.4% last year and 6.3% a year earlier. (This is not a bad sign.)
- The fiscal deficit is down to 5.3%, as against 6.5% last year and 6.1% a year earlier. (This is a good sign.)
- The trade deficit is up by only 1.7%, as against 2.3% last year and 3.6% a year earlier. (This is a good sign)
- The cotton crop has largely escaped the ravages of the drought, partly because of its early sowing season and partly because it is less water-intensive than other crops. (This is a good sign.)
- The IMF targets have been generally met and the country’s “good standing” with the IMF has “enhanced its credibility with the international community”. (This is a good sign.)
- BUT GDP growth will be less than 3% this year, as opposed to under 3% last year. Therefore GDP per capita will be stagnant, since population growth is still estimated at about 3% per year. (This is a bad sign)
- Responsibility for the low GDP has been laid at the door of water shortage and drought, “which have taken a heavy toll of agricultural production”. Last year, the major crops averaged over 9% growth. This year, there may be an actual decline of over 5%.
In other words, implies the SBP, the managers of the economy have notched many pluses. Unfortunately, however, nature has thwarted their designs and stopped the economy from taking off into self-sustaining growth. Is this true?
No, it’s not. Agricultural production accounts for less than 25% of GDP. A small decline in the output of some agricultural crops, excluding cotton which accounts for nearly 65% of our exports, should not have such an adverse impact on GDP growth rates. After all, last year agricultural production of the major crops averaged growth of over 9.6% as admitted by the SBP, yet GDP growth was less than 3%!
A glance at the SBP’s summary reveals that critical statistics and explanations which tell the real story behind the economic slump are missing from its analysis. For starters, there is no mention of what has happened to savings and investment (they have actually fallen to about 11% of the GDP, the lowest for a long time) and no attempt has been made to outline and explain the decline of foreign investment in the country (a decline of 70% over last year’s level, bringing it to under US$150 million so far this year). Nor has the SBP told us how much money, which might have been used for investment at home in the right conditions, has fled to foreign shores in search of safety and certainty (unofficially estimated to be about US$1 billion this year). Indeed, the SBP has not explained why anyone in this country should save in rupees when interest rates are down to under 10%, the lowest in a decade, and the government proposes to levy an unprecedented income tax on saving schemes, while the rupee is being devalued by about 15% every year and dollar deposits can earn at least 5% abroad. (In other words, rupee savings yield less than 10% while dollar deposits yield at least 20% in rupee terms.) We might also point out that the home remittance figure is up not because Pakistani expatriates actually sent more money home this year than last year but because there was a one-time windfall handout from the Kuwait government to Pakistani workers in Kuwait as compensation for losses suffered during the Gulf war in 1991. Finally, the fact that the fiscal deficit is down to 5.3% of GDP is relevant only for IMF purposes. The more relevant fact is that this cut in the deficit has entailed cuts in development expenditures and poverty alleviation programmes, and this fact has not been highlighted by the SBP. Similarly, there isn’t much point in crowing about the revival of Pakistan’s standing in the international community by virtue of access to debt-rescheduling programmes when we are being forced to run faster and faster merely in order to stay at the same spot.
The fact is that the economy is down because Pakistani savers and investors are not inclined to save and invest at home because the government’s domestic and foreign policies are not designed to instill certainty and confidence. Until these are realigned, all statistics will prove to be lies and more damned lies.
(June 01-07, 2001, Vol – XIII, No. 14 – Editorial)
Hopes and fears
After adopting a holier-than-thou attitude for 18 months, India has now more than just agreed to talk to Pakistan — its prime minister has actually invited Pakistan’s military leader for talks in India “on all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir”. On his part, too, General Pervez Musharraf doesn’t seem rigid any more. He began by rubbishing the Lahore Peace Summit of 1999 in which Kashmir didn’t figure as the “core issue” between the two sides. Later, however, he shifted ground, sought domestic support for a “moderate and flexible” approach to the Kashmir issue, and called for unconditional talks “anytime, anywhere”. Does this mean that the situation is ripe for the Hindu hardliners in India and the military hawks in Pakistan to arrive at a historic compromise and bury the hatchet?
We think not. For starters, the weight of history is pitted against such a quick fix. In the last decade, there were at least four false starts in 1989 (Bhutto & Gandhi), 1994 (Bhutto & Rao), 1997 (Sharif & Gujral) and 1999 (Sharif & Vajpayee). But there are more concrete reasons why one should not build high hopes into the latest diplomatic flurries. Consider.
General Musharraf was fairly gung-ho when he arrived on the scene in November 1999 and spurned the idea of pursuing the Lahore Peace process. But within months, he realised that even an accidental conflict with India, let alone one provoked by Pakistan, would derail his reform process (especially on the economic front which was critically dependent upon American goodwill) and undermine the stability and longevity of his regime. So the hardliner quickly switched from a policy of “fight-fight” (via the jihadis in Kashmir) to one of “talk-talk, fight-fight” when the Hizbul Mujahideen offered a conditional ceasefire in July 2000.
India, in the meanwhile, wasn’t sitting idle either. After five decades, it had finally succeeded in charming America to tilt in its favour. Now it certainly wasn’t going to allow Pakistan to chip away at its newfound friendship with the sole superpower. So the fraudulent Hizb ceasefire sponsored by Islamabad was followed by a row of fraudulent ceasefires by the Indian army in Kashmir. In due course, each side tried to outdo the other with its “peace overtures” in a bid to woo the international community — restraint along the border and partial withdrawal of troops by Pakistan, and an offer to talk to the Kashmiris by India, etc ? even as the war in Kashmir continued to rage furiously.
India’s latest, rather dramatic offer should therefore be viewed in its proper context. It follows two significant overtures, one by New Delhi (support for President’s Bush’s national missile development program) and another by Washington (a high profile visit to DC by Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and high profile visits to New Delhi by the US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, and the new head of Centcom, General B J Shelton). But if India is keen to scratch America’s back, it is keener still to demonstrate its toughness to Pakistan in more ways than one. The invitation to General Musharraf was preceded by threatening war games along the border with Pakistan, buttressed by aggressive attempts to fence the border in Kashmir and followed up by an abrupt end to the ceasefire in Kashmir. Clearly, it is going to be talk-talk, fight-fight all the way for India as well.
If India has made a clear and decisive move to win international sympathy without alienating its hardliners, Pakistan’s response has been somewhat confused. The invitation was “positively” accepted, to be sure, but the Foreign Office mandarins have been clumsy. They initially supported the context in which the Indians proposed the talks — the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Summit in which both sides agreed to seek a bilateral solution to all outstanding issues, including Kashmir, without assigning primacy to any one at any time. But then the blundering Pakistani High Commissioner to New Delhi, Ashraf Qazi, succumbed to the foot and mouth disease by unnecessarily suggesting that the third option of independence for Kashmir could be considered if the Kashmiris so desired, after an agreement by India and Pakistan to seek an amendment to the UN resolutions, and the Kashmiri freedom-fighters could be persuaded to “alter the pattern of their behaviour” in the event of progress on the peaceful-solution front. This has prompted our Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar to back-pedal furiously by bringing Kashmir back into the “core-issue framework” and insisting that the talks will take place in the context of all previous agreements with India, including the UN resolutions for a plebiscite to determine Kashmir’s future in India “or” Pakistan. And this has led India’s Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh to retaliate that while Kashmir can be discussed, it cannot be negotiated away since it is an “internal” matter of India.
Alas. We have been down this slope many times in the past. The opening moves by both sides were so full of hope and promise. But after each summit, there has been a long and bitter estrangement because neither side had the courage or sincerity to seek a historic compromise. We hope it will be different this time. But we fear it won’t.
(April 02-08, 2004, , XVI, No. 6 – Editorial)
Cricket diplomacy and the peace process
Despite the naysayers who wanted the Indo-Pak cricket series to be postponed or cancelled because of fears of terrorism or unsporting rowdiness in the stands, so far so good. The only injury has been to the Indian captain Sourav Ganguly who tumbled after a ball and sprained his back. Indeed the only hammering that anyone has got so far has been metaphorical, with the Indian batsmen slamming the Pakistani bowlers all over the place and setting new records.
To be sure, there is the usual crop of conspiracy theories about match-fixing and team selection without which no Indo-Pak series can ever be complete. The most bizarre theory has been peddled by a reactionary anti-Musharraf Urdu columnist. Apparently he had predicted that India would win both the One Day Internationals and Test matches because the Pakistani establishment had ordered the Pakistani players to lose to India so that the “sell-out” on Kashmir and “roll-back” on jihad could be cemented!
The reactions of lay Indian visitors to Karachi and Lahore during the series have been no less intriguing. All have gone back gushing about Pakistani hospitality, warmth and friendship. This is a far cry from the hostile Hindu-hating fundamentalist Muslims they had been warned to expect by their Muslim-baiting Hindu fundamentalist compatriots back home. This is what happens when people meet, stereotypes snap and prejudices perish. The balance of misinformation has been partially redressed.
Pakistanis know a bit about India’s Anglicised middle class composite culture from Bollywood. But if the video revolution wasn’t sufficient to give us a glimpse of India, the satellite channels have transported India to millions of Pakistani homes. But there has been no comparable traffic the other way because Lollywood is down market and Pakistani satellite channels have only now reached across India. So Indians were fed by their ideologues with all sorts of propaganda about Pakistan – about bombs and jihadis and Pakistani women shrouded in purdah. When one TV camera focused on a group of trendily clad Pakistani women clamouring for a “sixer” from Inzamam, the Indian commentator was thrilled by such “normal” behaviour. Cricket has served to uproot some of the big lies about Pakistan.
West Punjab in general and Lahore in particular are poised to be the greatest beneficiaries of this peace process. At the time of partition, the Sikhs who migrated from West to East Punjab were predominantly landowning zamindars. So, as the famed Indian author Khushwant Singh has described in his autobiography, they will seek opportunities to return to their homeland in search of their ancient roots rather than their lost properties. In the event, Lahore could become a bit of a boomtown. It was the capital of the first and last Sikh state of Ranjit Singh in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and as such a Sikh “holy land” of sorts. Open the borders and the Sikhs from East Punjab will flood the city. But that would be for starters. Much of the urban property of the city was owned by Hindu shopkeepers and businessmen who migrated to New Delhi at the time of partition. Surely, they will all want to return to the sights and sounds of their city and drink its water and smell its soil. The cry of “Lahore Lahore ay” will echo everywhere and the city may yet regain its composite secular culture of yore.
The credit for all this goes to General Pervez Musharraf and Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee. A handful of die-hard reactionaries have accused General Musharraf of misplaced concreteness vis-à-vis India. No matter. A vast majority support him for focusing on peace rather than war with the neighbours. But Mr Vajpayee has taken a greater risk on the eve of the Indian elections, especially since he seems to have stood the BJP’s anti-Pakistan, anti-Muslim ideology on its head. Indeed, the real test of the peace process will come in the months ahead when both sides are obliged to demonstrate progress towards finding a mutually acceptable “solution” to the core issue of Kashmir.
But it would be a mistake to hinge peace on any acceptable quick fix “solution” to Kashmir. India and the rest of the world will concede nothing more than the status quo. Third party mediation, especially by the United States, will reinforce the status quo after allowing for marginal adjustments between the Muslim Kashmiris and New Delhi. Indeed, the US may exercise its greater leverage with Pakistan towards exactly such an end in the region, and insist on making the peace process an end in itself rather than the means to an end. So what’s wrong with this approach?
Absolutely nothing. In fact, it’s time we concentrated on bread and butter issues rather than on guns and steel. The single most suffocating drag on the Pakistani economy is the “rumour-of-war” syndrome in a nuclearised neighbourhood. India is already growing at 9 per cent a year. But if we languish at 5 per cent we shall be overwhelmed by poverty and unemployment and alienation and civil unrest, all of which have the potential to overwhelm us more comprehensively than the military might of India.
(April 09-15, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 7 – Editorial)
Troubled or troubling states?
Last month, the US deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, reportedly made some critical remarks about Pakistan’s unwillingness or inability to flush out Al-Qaeda and Taliban elements from its tribal borderlands in aid of American objectives in the region. Predictably, Islamabad reacted with a howl of protest. Our foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, thundered that the Pakistan government was already doing more than what could legitimately be expected of it and claimed that several prominent American and world leaders had lauded Pakistan’s crucial support in the matter under trying domestic conditions. Mr Kasuri also reminded critics that specific American weapons promised to Pakistan for use in anti-Taliban/al-Qaeda operations, like helicopters, night-vision equipment, etc, had not yet materialised, making such operations very costly for Pakistan’s security forces. In the event, Mr Wolfowitz was compelled to backpedal a bit, saying that while he greatly appreciated Pakistan’s help, he nevertheless thought that Islamabad could “do more” to assist the American military in blasting the Taliban/Al-Qaeda out of their hiding places.
Now we have the American ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, treading in Mr Wolfowitz’s footsteps. Mr Khalizad is reported to have said at the National Press Club in Washington last Monday that US-led forces in Afghanistan would move into Pakistani territory to destroy Taliban and other terrorist groups if Islamabad could not do the job itself. “We have told the Pakistani leadership that either they must solve this problem, or we will have to do it ourselves”, he said. As expected, his statement has provoked a sharp response from Islamabad, compelling him not only to distance himself from his position of a day earlier but also to praise Pakistan for the “sacrifices” it has made in fighting terrorism. But his bottom line even after the retraction remains the same as Mr Wolfowitz’s: Pakistan must “do more” to earn American gratitude.
It is much the same approach on other issues. In public, the US and the international community are all praise for General Pervez Musharraf’s efforts in the war against terrorism. But in private, senior American and EU officials seriously question General Musharraf’s “willingness or ability or sincerity” to do the job to their satisfaction. Similarly, the official international position on General Musharraf’s handling of “L’affaire Dr A Q Khan” is that it is satisfied with Pakistani assurances of full cooperation in uprooting the nuclear underworld network. But the unofficial position is quite different. The US and the international community actually believe that the high command of the Pakistan army is as guilty of proliferation as Dr Khan; that it cannot be trusted to keep its word in the future; and that at a more propitious time the issue will have to be tackled head-on with Pakistan. In other words, Pakistan will have to “do more” to stay off the hook. All this is perfectly understandable: President Bush needs credible and visible victories against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban this year to shore up his report card in the race for the American presidency next November.
In exchange for Pakistani assistance in these matters, Washington has already offered a fair price – help in obtaining soft financial support from donor agencies, US $ 1b in US debt write-off and US $ 3b in economic and military grants over the next five years. Now Pakistan has been granted Major Non-Nato Ally status, bringing it theoretically at par with countries like Israel and Egypt and enabling it to receive American military weapons and spares. But the small print in these contracts should not be missed: the MNNA status and US $ 600m per year grants are conditional on presidential certification every year, which in turn will doubtless depend on how much “more” Pakistan is going to do in the years ahead on these issues on behalf of the American foreign and domestic policy agenda.
Under the circumstances, at the very least we may expect the going for Pakistan and General Musharraf to get decidedly tougher next year. For one, if President Bush is re-elected, the pressure on him to deliver on the al-Qaeda and Afghanistan fronts will be considerably reduced. On the other hand, the pressure on him to take a tough line on nuclear proliferation might be increased. All this might make him less receptive to General Musharraf’s predicaments and diminish his “need” of Pakistan. Two, if Mr George W Bush isn’t re-elected, the next American president will be a Democrat who, like all previous Democratic American presidents, will be disinclined to take as sympathetic or helpful a view of Pakistan as Republican presidents have historically taken.
Pakistani leaders love to hold forth about Pakistan’s “geo-strategic position” which is supposed to make it a long-term American ally in the region. But they conveniently forget that before 9/11 Pakistan was on the radar screen in the West only as a potential rogue and failing state. Therefore it is not inconceivable that if we don’t get our act in order and clean up our house we could be back in dire straits again. That is why the title of the forthcoming book on Pakistan by Steve Cohen of the prestigious Brookings Institution in Washington DC may probably be titled: Pakistan – troubled or troubling state!
(Aug 06-12, 2004, Vol – XVI, No. 24 – Editorial)
Balochistan revisted
For several years we have read stray reports of tensions in Sui between the Bugti tribes led by Nawab Akbar Bugti and the federal government over issues of employment, job security, compensation, etc., relating to work conditions in the gas generating and distribution companies that pump Sui gas to the rest of the country. But that was presumed to be a local affair. The federal governments of Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and General Pervez Musharraf were convinced that Nawab Bugti was extorting money from Islamabad ostensibly on behalf of the Bugti tribesmen who work the gas plants but actually for himself by nudging his fiercely loyal Bugti tribesmen to rocket the pipelines whenever the negotiations get bogged down against his liking. In this political seesaw, Mr Bugti was wont to bandy about terms like ‘gas royalties’, ‘provincial autonomy’, ‘constitutional rights’ etc while portraying himself as the great and patriotic Baloch nationalist fighting for the rights of his province rather than for his tribe. The federal government, on the other hand, seemed falsely obsessed about “the need to open up Balochistan for economic development” and was constantly carping about the “evil and exploitative Sardari system” in the province that kept the tribesmen in chains and acted as a “brake on progress” Unfortunately for the stability and security of Pakistan, the truth is different on both counts. A brief recapitulation may be in order.
When the nominal ruler of Balochistan, the Khan of Kalat, dragged his feet in the early 1950s over signing the Balochistan accession document to Pakistan, the impatient federal government threw diplomacy and negotiation overboard and hastily sent a couple of PAF jets to strafe his palace and make him change his mind. When One Unit was declared by General Ayub Khan in the 1960s, Sher Mohammad Marri, a tribal wadera, protested the usurpation of ‘provincial rights’, fled to the hills with a band of loyal tribesmen and started taking potshots at the ‘occupying Punjabi army’ The seeds of Baloch provincial awakening gave rise to Baloch nationalism in the aftermath of national elections, the eruption of Bengali separatism and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. If Mr Bhutto’s PPP won Sindh and Punjab and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s Awami League swept East Pakistan, the fact also was that the National Awami Party led by “nationalists” Ghaus Bux Bizenjo, Ataullah Mengal, Khair Bux Marri, Akbar Bugti and Khan Wali Khan dominated Balochistan and the NWFP. At the time, even the Jamiat i Ulema i Islam of Maulana Mufti Mahmud (father of Maulana Fazlur Rehman) thought fit to join hands with the nationalists to espouse the provincial cause.
Emboldened by the stand taken by Sheikh Mujib, the Baloch and Pashtun nationalists demanded their ‘provincial rights’ from Mr Bhutto in exchange for approving the 1973 constitution consensually. But while Mr Bhutto conceded the NWFP and Balochistan to a NAP-JUI coalition, he refused to play ball with the provincial governments led by chief minister Ataullah Mengal in Quetta and Mufti Mahmud in Peshawar. Tensions erupted. Within six months, the federal government had sacked the two provincial governments, arrested the two chief ministers, two governors and forty-four MNAs and MPAs, obtained an order from the Supreme Court banning the NAP and charged everyone with high treason to be tried by a specially constituted Hyderabad Tribunal of handpicked judges. In time, a nationalist insurgency erupted and sucked the army into the province, pitting the Baloch tribal middle classes against the Sindhi-Punjabi oligarchy ruling Islamabad.
The 1970s revolt of the Baloch, which manifested itself in the form of an armed struggle against the Pakistan army in Balochistan, was provoked by federal impatience, high handedness and undemocratic constitutional deviation. It was the effect of unjust federal policies and not the cause of them. The irony was that Nawab Akbar Bugti served as an agent of the federal government when he was appointed as governor of Balochistan by Mr Bhutto throughout the time of the insurgency and spoke not a word in favour of Baloch rights or provincial autonomy!The greater irony was that the insurgency came to an end following the army coup of General Zia ul Haq against the civilian government of Mr Bhutto.
Soon thereafter, Gen Zia unfolded plans to desensitise the alienated Baloch and Pashtun leadership by a multi-faceted strategy aimed at co-opting the leaders into office while providing jobs and funds in the federal government to the alienated and insecure tribal middle classes. More significantly, he created maximum political space for the mullah parties in the NWFP and Balochistan so that they could be galvanised in the jihad against the USSR in neighbouring Afghanistan. Divided, fatigued and shorn of ideological moorings or avowed enemies like ZA Bhutto, the Baloch “movement” melted into memory over the next two decades. Nawab Akbar Bugti was consigned to negotiating rights and concessions only for his Bugti tribesmen in Sui. And the various civilian federal governments that came and went were content to accede to his local pecuniary demands. In the event, what has changed under General Pervez Musharraf to compel the Bugti and Marri tribes to join hands? What has transpired in the last five years to lead to a reinvention of the “Baloch middle class nationalist struggle for provincial rights”?
The single most critical macro factor is the social and electoral engineering initiated by the military regime in the last five years. By sidelining the mainstream PPP and PMLN parties and their natural “progressive” allies like the ANP, BNP and others in favour of the mullahs of the Jama’at i Islami and Jamiat i Ulema i Islam, General Musharraf has alienated the old non-religious tribal leadership as well as the new secular urban middle classes of Balochistan who see no economic or political space for themselves in the new military-mullah dispensation. Similarly, by undermining the cause of provincial autonomy at the altar of local and federal government, the military regime has threatened the very roots of the constitutional consensus of 1973 enshrined in the Baloch consciousness. If the federal government had also delivered the great “development” paradigm and provided jobs and office, it might have avoided this sense of deprivation and resentment among the political and economic have-nots of the province. But it hasn’t. Balochistan remains a backwater province, infested by Taliban-type mullahs and corrupt, opportunist politicians, all beholden to the military regime in Islamabad.
We now have an unfortunate situation in which a “Baloch Liberation Army” comprising a few armed bands under tribal and middle class command is conducting military operations against the “agents and outposts of Islamabad” in Balochistan. Gwadar is an obvious target. It is a federal project without provincial approval or participation in which the non-Baloch civil-military elites are grabbing land for a song. The military cantonments planned at Gwadar, Dera Bugti and Kohlu (the capital of the Marri tribal lands) are viewed as outposts of repression and control, not development. The corrupt Frontier Corps is thoroughly hated and despised as a federal instrument of oppression. With the mad mullahs rampaging in much of Balochistan and defying the writ of the government, the rise of incipient armed nationalism poses a grave challenge to the stability and security of Pakistan.
Ten days ago, army helicopters strafed and bombed a strip of land between Turbat and Gwadar in Makran district where Baloch insurgents who had rocketed Gwadar earlier were thought to be holed in. In retaliation, an army truck was ambushed in Khuzdar last week, leaving five soldiers dead. Later the puppet chief minister of the province, Jam Yusuf, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt on his life. Two days ago, the government retaliated by registering cases of murder against 12 people including a former chief minister of the province, Sardar Akhtar Mengal s/o Sardar Ataullah Mengal (also a former chief minister who was sacked and arrested in his time), and the secretary general of his Balochistan Nationalist Party. And now the federal interior minister, Mr Faisal Saleh Hayat, has warned the agitating Baloch tribesmen that the government is poised to launch a ‘crash programme’ against ‘subversive elements’ in the province.
A hastily formed four-party Baloch alliance, led by the Bugti and Mengal groups in Quetta, has condemned the spate of arrests of Baloch nationalists in Turbat, Gwadar, Kalat, Dera Bugti, Kohlu and Nushki. They have been joined by the ‘oppressed nations movement’ (PONM). Together they are accusing Islamabad of having launched an ‘unannounced military operation’ in Balochistan in which over 200 activists of the various nationalist parties have been unjustly detained.
Suddenly, we have a situation in which all the old “grievances” are being trotted out – Sui gas has never benefited the people of Balochistan; Gwadar is in the clutches of a land-grab mafia from Punjab; the federal government earns billions from gas in the province but gives only a fraction of that back to it for development; provincial autonomy promised in the 1973 constitution is non-existent, etc. Are things coming to a head?
The fact is that Balochistan remains a neglected backwater of Pakistan. Its politics has been ideologised and factionalised by federal interference and meddling in pursuit of dubious strategic regional interests. Its drought-stricken pastoral economy cannot even provide for its small population. This state of affairs has lasted fifty-seven years. No federal government has ever thought of bringing development to Balochistan and talk of tribal chiefs obstructing progress is nonsense. Past neglect has now strengthened the ranks of the nationalists and increased their clout.
The danger in Balochistan is two-fold. The nascent but alienated middle class in the few towns of Balochistan is now rallying behind the nationalists and accepts the ‘sardars’ spearheading PONM as ‘genuine leaders’ At the same time, the developmental lag in the province is sufficient to substantiate the anti-centre stance of PONM. That is why any military action in the province will completely lack local support. The other destabilising factor relates to the ongoing battle against the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine. The Pashtuns in Balochistan also have serious problems with the federal government’s policy on the Pak-Afghan frontier. This could be troublesome since Pashtun nationalism has also been responsible for the internationally reported presence of the Taliban in the province.
Therefore there is need to tread very carefully in Balochistan. The national interest demands that patience, negotiation and compromise should be the hallmark of federal policy rather than knee-jerk army operations and detentions. At the same time, the federal government should make serious efforts to clinch the new development conditions of resource sharing with local tribes and regions. The future of the oil and gas pipelines that are being planned across the mountains and deserts and coasts of Balochistan for the prosperity and stability of Pakistan hinges on a sensible and inclusionary approach to Balochistan.
(Jan 07-13, 2005, Vol – XVI, No. 46 – Editorial)
Not by prayer alone
God forbid that something like this should happen: “The president of Pakistan, who was also the army chief, met with a mysterious accident at 3.10 pm on Monday, July 3. Dressed in battle fatigues, he was on his way to address a public rally in Gujrat organized by the ruling Pakistan Muslim League which is canvassing votes for local polls scheduled later in the year.
“Within an hour, the vice chief of army staff, who was inspecting troops near the Indian border in Sindh at the time, was flying back to GHQ to preside over a hurriedly called meeting of his corps commanders, senior staff officers and top intelligence officials. He was confronted with several critical questions. Should he ‘take over’ via a coup d’etat and rule directly? Should he take over but hold fresh elections and hand over power to the elected representatives three months hence? Or should the army sit back and allow parliament to independently elect a new president who would then appoint a new army chief at his discretion? Should the army intelligence agencies be tasked with ‘guiding’ parliament to appoint a GHQ-sponsored president who would appoint the VCOAS as the new army chief? There were many secondary questions. Should the army stay directly involved in politics or should it retreat to string pulling behind the scenes? Was the international environment conducive to a coup d’etat?Should all the domestic and foreign policies of the ancien regime be sustained or was there a need to change course on some and calibrate others anew? With what set of political leaders should the army sit down to determine a future strategy for governing Pakistan?
“In Islamabad, the PML president and provincial leaders rushed to hold meetings attended by the Speaker of the National Assembly and the Chairman of the Senate who had constitutionally become the ‘acting president’ of Pakistan. Several questions were heatedly debated but none was quickly resolved. Should the acting president be ordered to nominate a new army chief or should that wait until a new elected president was in place? Who should be the PML nominee for the new president? Should the PML ally with the MMA to exploit this opportunity to reclaim civilian power from the army by stressing the supremacy of parliament and undoing elements of the 17th constitutional amendment, in exchange for conceding the MMA’s demand to Islamise Pakistan, halt the American-inspired campaign against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and restart the jihad against India? Who should be the new prime minister since the current one had lost his locus standi in the absence of his mentor? How should the PML deal with the opposition parties while firming up its own ranks?
“Meanwhile, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif had promptly announced plans to immediately reach Lahore from Dubai and Jeddah respectively. Instead of a tragic hush, the city was abuzz with excitement at the prospect of welcoming its exiled leaders. Some turncoat politicians were already tripping over themselves issuing statements welcoming them back to the motherland, while others were biting their nails waiting for Islamabad and Rawalpindi to unfurl their response. In brief statements, both leaders confirmed they had jointly charted out their return path and insisted that they would not settle for anything less than fresh general elections under a neutral caretaker administration immediately. In interviews to the world media, various pundits predicted there would be tens of thousands of people to receive the two leaders at Lahore airport. They argued that the political momentum for overthrowing the status quo could not be stopped.
“Worried, the US State Department handed out a brief statement. It lauded the president/army chief as ‘a man of courage and commitment’. It hoped that the political transition in Pakistan would be ‘smooth, democratic and maintain continuity with the enlightened policies of the recent past’. However, in a statement extracted from the Secretary General of the Commonwealth it was said that any return to direct military rule would be unacceptable. A statement by India’s national security advisor said New Delhi would review its options carefully after the fog had cleared but hoped that a ‘democratic’ leadership in Pakistan would continue and institutionalize a constructive composite dialogue with it.
“One well known pundit summed up the situation succinctly. ‘As in 1988 when an army chief/president exited unexpectedly without institutionalizing a consensual system of political succession and transition, the situation is unstable and up for grabs. Nothing can be predicted about the direction that domestic, foreign and economic policies will take in the months to come. But in the short term the stock market will plunge, the dialogue with India will be frozen and the war against terror will be derailed.’”
A country’s well-being and stability, much more than that of individuals or even institutions, should not rest on the international goodwill, personal integrity and sincerity of one man. God forbid that something like this should happen. But nations and states cannot live by prayer alone.
(Jan 14-20, 2005, Vol – XVI, No. 47 – Editorial)
Balochistan’s volcanic eruption
The crisis in Balochistan is enveloped in a curtain of official censorship, public ignorance, tribal honour and military arrogance. There are two aspects to it. First, there is the local conflict in Dera Bugti in which Sui gas installations continue to be rocketed by Bugti tribesmen and officials of the Defense Security Group (DSG) and Frontier Corps are being fatally targeted. Second, there is the “nationalist resistance” to central rule led by the shadowy Baloch Liberation Army in which military targets in Balochistan are under attack. Behind the scenes, negotiations are being conducted between Islamabad and representatives of the small Baloch nationalist parties and groups over the terms and conditions of local employment and compensation contracts by the gas companies as well as over the amount of royalties and federal development outlays and handouts for Balochistan province and their distribution between the provincial and local administrations.
In the first case, Nawab Bugti has constantly complained that Pakistan Petroleum Ltd has reneged on its financial commitments to local Bugti tribesmen at Sui. Various federal governments have tried to bribe or browbeat him but to no avail. Meanwhile, Islamabad has relentlessly propagated the notion that the tribal sardars, including Nawab Bugti, are both greedy and opposed to their area’s development. This has injected personal acrimony into the conflict and stiffened the tribal resolve. In the latest round at Sui, over two dozen troopers have been killed, gas supply to major industrial units in the Punjab and Sindh has been halted, thousands of regular army troops have been rushed to the area and helicopter gunships have been marshaled to put down the Bugtis and Marris. The conflict is cloaked in a web of deception. It is being painted as standard sardari ‘mischief’. But the facts are quite different and alarming.
A young lady doctor was gang-raped at Sui recently. At first, the PPL and DSG tried to destroy the evidence and denied the incident. Then the woman was spirited out to Karachi and told to shut up. At no stage was the local police allowed to meet and interrogate her. But when the police turned up sperm and blood evidence of rape at the scene of the crime, the PPL/DSG reluctantly allowed an FIR against “unknown assailants” However, Nawab Bugti insisted that one of the rapists was Captain Hammad of the DSG. But the military flatly rejected the allegation. Indeed, the local and national media was advised not to print Nawab Bugti’s allegations. Outraged, the Bugtis joined ranks and vowed resistance. The local military commanders now want to “sort them out”. But that may be easier said than done. If the Bugtis are not calmed down and military action is precipitated, the gas compression and precipitation plants at Sui could be attacked and destroyed with disastrous consequences.
The second issue is even less amenable to the military’s ‘standard operating procedures’. It is a throwback to the 1970s insurgency that resulted from Z A Bhutto’s dismissal of Ataullah Mengal’s nationalist government and the detention on conspiracy charges of 55 nationalist politicians and student leaders. That revolt was crushed by a combination of military force, political appeasement and economic largesse by Gen Zia ul Haq. In the 1990s, the Baloch nationalists were quiescent because they were part of the democratic process, sharing power at the centre and in the province with the ruling PPP and PML parties in turns. But that has changed under General Musharraf who has instead shared power and privileges with the mullahs in Balochistan and forced the nationalists to sulk and conspire in the wilderness. A second generation of Baloch students and tribal leaders has readily fallen prey to the call to arms, targeting such multi-billion rupee federal development projects as Gwadar which have largely left the local Baloch middle classes out of the loop of beneficial stake holders. This disgruntlement has been fed with financial donations from working class Baloch communities in Oman and the Gulf and foreign powers interested in fishing in troubled waters. Certainly, the nature of sophisticated weaponry in the hands of the BLA suggests that it will not be easily sorted out by military means alone.
General Pervez Musharraf has warned the Baloch: “They shouldn’t push us. It isn’t the 1970s when you can hit and run and hide in the mountains. This time you won’t even know what hit you”.
Wrong. This is exactly what is happening in South Waziristan where a couple of hundred motivated militants with local sympathies and support continue to pose serious problems despite all the new US supplied helicopter gunships and wonderful new equipment with the Pak army. In fact, General Musharraf should be thinking of speedily extricating himself from Wana rather than jumping into the Baloch quicksand.
To be fair to him, though, General Musharraf has sincerely tried to negotiate Baloch grievances through dedicated civilian interlocutors. But army hardliners in Balochistan want to jump the gun. The situation in Sui is precipitous. It can be diffused by arresting the DSG officer and ordering an inquiry. The longer term nationalist problem can be tackled by co-opting the main tribes and nationalist parties into the political process and isolating those who give succour to the BLA.
(Jan 21-27, 2005, Vol – XVI, No. 48 – Editorial)
FAQs about Balochistan and the state
Why has the situation in Balochistan in general and in Sui in particular suddenly flared up? Why are Bugti tribesmen attacking Sui gas installations and hurting the country’s national assets? What are the demands of the Baloch Liberation Army? Why is the BLA attacking military targets in Balochistan? Who is funding and arming the BLA? What is the role of the big Sardars in the political economy of Balochistan? Are the Sardars for or against development and progress? Why is there popular resentment in Balochistan against a national development project like Gwadar? Why don’t the Baloch want military cantonments in their province when the other provinces are awash with them? Why is there so much anti-army feeling in the province? How can the situation be controlled? How can genuine Baloch grievances be addressed? Consider.
In the ‘settled’ parts of Pakistan, the legitimacy of the state is widely accepted by its citizens even though the legitimacy of any particular government at any time may be in doubt. Crimes against the state are committed when particular laws are violated. But this violation is generally by individuals rather than groups. Resort to violence is therefore low level, particular and local rather than general and spatial. Criminals are hauled up by the police and the writ of the state is enforced. There is not much armed resistance because individual criminals cannot effectively resist the institutional force of the police. Also, having accepted the state as the legitimate and sole defender of their rights, citizens have given up personal arms for self-defence. Therefore a modicum of stability should be the norm rather than the exception.
There are two notable exceptions to these rules. First, there may be armed non-state actor-groups who don’t accept the state as legitimate and wish to overthrow it. Islamist revolutionaries (Al Qaeda-ists, jihadis), separatists and secessionists, even old style Maoist-communists fall into this category. When the local police and paramilitary forces are insufficient to quell their armed challenge to the state, the besieged establishment calls in the army. That is what happened when separatism erupted in East Pakistan in 1971 and that is what is happening in South Waziristan where Al Qaeda-ists are embedded today. Second, there may be armed non-state actor-groups who may accept the legitimacy of the state but don’t accept the legitimacy of the government in office. This happened in Balochistan in the 1970s when a tribal insurgency was provoked by the dismissal of the sub-nationalist government of Chief Minister Sardar Ataullah Mengal by the Z A Bhutto government in Islamabad. It also happened in Karachi from 1990-94 when the armed MQM defied the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif governments in Islamabad by turns and held the urban areas of Sindh to ransom.
What is happening in Balochistan today can be explained by reference to this analytical framework. Unlike the ‘settled’ areas of Pakistan where the state is supreme, Balochistan has been treated like a tribal area even though it is not one legally where the writ of the state is non-existent. These borderland areas are flush with weapons, and traditional forms of group and tribal dynamics dominate the political discourse. Thus modern notions of both government and state are weak or non-existent in certain areas and among certain tribes. Indeed, the tribal Sardar is a personification of the tribal or pre-capitalist local state while the national government or central state remains a manifestation of the external or colonial or occupying power. Thus all manner of resistance, whether to local and competitive sources of power or to this external power, is always violent and always part of group dynamics rather than peaceful or individual-centred. In other words, where established parties like the PPP and PMLN which accept the legitimacy of the state but not that of the government are likely to take recourse to boycotts and peaceful demonstrations and public rallies in opposition, their Baloch tribal counterparts in opposition are likely to provoke armed attacks on the state. Similarly, where trade unions are likely to strike and negotiate to protect and advance their economic interests, their counterparts in the tribal areas are likely to physically attack their federal employers and contractors to redress their grievances.
This is what has been happening at Sui for 15 years where the Bugti tribe is led by its Sardar and is militantly negotiating pecuniary rights with Pakistan Petroleum Ltd, the owner of the Sui gas fields and installations. Indeed, like a tribal and armed trade union, the Bugtis are wont to attack their employer with guns and rockets in order to get a better deal. Normally, this local and periodic conflict can be controlled by paramilitary forces but sometimes when the conflict threatens to damage national assets the army has to be called in to restore order and bring both parties to the negotiating table.
Unfortunately, however, the recent trouble in Sui has acquired extraordinary proportions as well as a national dimension for two reasons. The first is specific. Perennially tense relations
Between the Bugtis and PPL have been rent asunder by the rape of a lady doctor allegedly by the hated paramilitary personnel which has given an excuse to tribal hardliners to exploit the situation. The second is more problematic. The breakdown of negotiations between the Bugtis and PPL comes in the wider context and background of a resurgent sub-nationalism in the province in which the mainstream secular nationalist parties have been edged out of political power by the state-government regime of General Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad and replaced by the mullahs and religious parties in the provincial government.
This is the point at which the Baloch Liberation Army enters the picture and clouds the issues. This is the point at which the Bugti local feud with PPL enters the simmering and underlying conflict between Baloch nationalists and Islamabad over the issue of effective stake-holding status in Balochistan. This is the point at which Sardar Ataullah Mengal and Nawab Khair Bux Marri, their offspring and nationalist middle class students join hands with Nawab Akbar Bugti and the Bugtis at Sui to voice their demands and vow to continue armed struggle till death. This is why anti-Islamabad Baloch leaders are not prepared to take responsibility for the actions of the BLA even as they secretly urge it to wage war against the external ‘occupying’ power.
In the 1970s, the Baloch secular nationalists were ousted from power by Z A Bhutto and they launched an armed struggle to reclaim power in the province. In the 1980s and 1990s, they were part of the democratic political landscape of the province. So they shared power and didn’t make trouble. But in the last five years they have been excluded from power in the province by General Musharraf, so they have launched an armed struggle to re-stake their claims.
But there are several major differences between the old and the new. First, in the 70s the Baloch insurgents were largely drawn from the Marri tribe and there was only a smattering of middle class urban elements among them. Now, there appears to be the formation of a tribal confederacy which includes the big Marri and Bugti tribes.
Second, a new generation of middle class Baloch nationalists has cropped up which is readily inclined to join the armed struggle against Islamabad. Third, there were no visible outposts or symbols of occupation in the 70s unlike today when the new port of Gwadar under federal jurisdiction has excluded locals from the fruits of its development.
Fourth, the insurgents were poorly equipped with arms and financially strapped in the 70s unlike today when they are flush with the latest weapons (bought from the Taliban and Afghans) and spilling over with donations collected from migrant Baloch workers in the Middle East. There is also a real possibility of estranged neighbouring states fishing in troubled Baloch waters.
Fifth, the army action in Balochistan in the 1970s was conducted by a largely popular and elected political leader and had a degree of acceptability in mainstream eyes, not least because the Baloch resistance could easily be dubbed as separatist since the Russians were thought to be coveting the “warm waters” of the Arabian sea. But no such conditions attach to the current situation.
Sixth, the regional environment is internally volatile for domestic reasons – as the unravelling of many countries for domestic compulsions demonstrates – but externally calm because there are no separatist-baiting superpowers in the neighbourhood.
Seventh, Musharraf’s military regime doesn’t enjoy the same legitimacy and popularity at home that Z A Bhutto’s government enjoyed in Pakistan at that time. Indeed, all mainstream and nationalist parties in the country are opposed to General Musharraf and even his erstwhile mullah friends are out to create trouble for him. Therefore if any repressive army action is undertaken in Balochistan, it is likely to face stiff opposition from all quarters, including elements of the governing coalitions that Musharraf has built for political survival.
Finally, it may be noted that the Pakistan army was fully focused on quelling the Baloch insurgency in the 70s while today it has its hands full dealing with the violent blowback from South Waziristan and Kashmir.
We are in the era of “internal upheavals”. The Soviet Union, Central, South and South East Asia, Eastern Europe and even the Middle East have fallen victim to this contemporary dialectic. Our own Pakistan’s current “internal upheaval” is very much the result of so-called “national security” policies followed in the decades since the 80s. The prosecution of jihad in Indian-held Kashmir and west in Afghanistan eroded the Pakistani state’s “monopoly of violence” by enabling private parties to acquire the means and rationale for violence. This has undermined the maintenance of the “internal sovereignty” of the country. Balochistan has especially suffered from this loss of sovereignty. Its internal polity has been shaped by an influx of Pakhtuns and Afghans following the war against the Russians in Afghanistan and lately by the influx of militant jihadis, Taliban and Al Qaeda elements. The 2002 elections conducted by General Musharraf in Pakistan solidified the situation by ousting the Baloch nationalists from the power equation and entrenching an alienated Pakhtun votebank.
There are additional external factors. Iran is no longer the friendly country that it was in the 1970s when the Shah was its ruler. Apart from a bitter conflict of interests with Pakistan over Afghanistan during the Taliban era, the Iran of today is suspicious of the Pakistan-US axis, especially in view of Washington’s hostility to Iran’s mullahs and its budding nuclear programme. Similarly, Kabul is still influenced by an anti-Pakistan, anti-Pakhtun component that the Taliban ousted in 1996. Finally, there is an entire underworld of jihad that has vowed to reverse Pakistan’s post-9/11 policy and has resorted to terrorism all over the country. In Balochistan this element is embedded with the Taliban who have been allowed by Islamabad to live comfortably in Quetta. This is the larger backdrop to the rise of the Balochistan Liberation Army.
For all these reasons we may come to the following conclusions. First, while the situation at Sui can conceivably be defused in the short term by means of a transparent inquiry into the rape of the lady-doctor, followed by swift pecuniary concessions to the Bugtis, the problem of Balochistan’s nationalist stake holders is more difficult. The BLA cannot be scuttled by military action, political promises and economic crumbs. Indeed, nothing less than a full restoration to power of the nationalists will create the conditions for disunity and disarray in the ranks of the BLA, thereby weakening and isolating it. But this solution is not likely to unfold without fresh general elections in which the military establishment is able and willing to wrap up its opportunistic political alliances and bury its political enmities of the past. Second, constitutional amendments will have to be made in the nature of the central state and the relationship of Islamabad to the provinces. Far from imposing a centralised presidential system as advocated by some, the movement has to be in the direction of full-fledged provincial autonomy and devolution. Third, the reform process has to show disdain for religion-inspired political solutions and allies and consolidate the essence of secular, mainstream, liberal democracy. Finally, the military must return to barracks for all times to come and enable civil society to build a peaceful co-existence at home and in the region.
This is a tall order. If Pakistan’s current civil and military leadership is not up to the task, there will be more rather than less domestic conflict and instability.
(Jan 28-Feb 3, 2005, Vol – XVI, No. 49 – Editorial)
A journey of a thousand days
Is the Indo-Pak dialogue stuck in quicksand? Is the expected peace dividend illusory? Will the two countries revert to mutual recrimination and hostility again? Such questions are becoming increasingly frequent. They suggest growing public frustration with the seemingly “fruitless” rounds of meetings between senior officials of both sides. Indeed, few if any, of the promised openings have so far materialized in the last twelve months since the peace process began.
For example, it was earlier thought that “non-core” issues would be easy to solve, thereby paving the way for more intractable issues like Kashmir. The Baghliar water dispute was one such issue. But instead of showing bilateral progress, the issue has been dragged to the World Bank by Pakistan, indicating frustration and pique in Islamabad. Since “water” is potentially an issue of life and death, the danger is that the rhetoric on both sides in Pakistan because it is the lower riparian country and in Indian-held Kashmir because it desperately needs electricity could degenerate into talk of “going to war over issues of life and death”.
The proposed gas pipeline project from Iran to India via Pakistan is another such issue. All sides readily admit that it is a win-win project for them. Originally India had security-related objections but now it is linking its approval to Most-Favoured Nation status and transit rights from Pakistan so that it can capture a market of 150 million people in Pakistan and 300 million in Central Asia. But since the benefits to India far outweigh those to Pakistan by opening up trade and transit, Islamabad has linked the granting of MFN status to India with progress on resolving Kashmir. However Kashmir is a core issue that has been deadlocked for decades. Thus the gas pipeline problem is threatening to become another core issue.
The third issue is opening road links between Indian-held Kashmir and Pakistan-held Kashmir. Both sides believe it could be a win-win situation for them. The free movement of Kashmiris without redrawing borders, reasoned India, would create strong official and public vested interests on both sides of the Line of Control to maintain the status quo and erode the rationale for the insurgency. Equally, thought Pakistan, it would allow Islamabad a new lever with which to influence Kashmiri leaders on the other side. But the project has got bogged down in bureaucratic distrust and detail on both sides. Indeed, the fear is that it could fall victim to the rhetorical blowback from the frustration over Baghliar and the gas pipeline.
Recent incidents of unprovoked shelling across the LoC have muddied the waters. The suspicion is that non-state actors may be involved in trying to break the ceasefire by manufacturing a new crisis. A string of broken or unfulfilled promises by both sides litters the landscape. India had announced a greatly relaxed visa regime, especially for senior citizens and journalists. Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf had pledged much the same. Yet nothing of the sort has so far been implemented. In fact, both countries are still tied to police-reporting visas, home ministry clearances and intelligence checks on travelers. Nor have they done much to improve the quality and quantity of rail transport for goods and people between Attari and Wagah at the Lahore border.
To be sure, this is a depressing litany of hurdles in the path of normalization. But Rome was not built in a day. Before we succumb to cynicism, we might consider the wonderful progress that has been made in the last twelve months. India and Pakistan are playing cricket and hockey with each other again. Cultural contacts have been revived. Farida Khanum and Abida Parveen have sung to ecstatic audiences in India. Sukhbir, Jagjit Singh and the Dagars have elicited an orchestra of wah wahs in Pakistan. The Strings duo from Pakistan has recorded a message of love and peace with South India’s famous singer Hari Haran while the latter has cut an unforgettable CD with Lahori composers and musicians. Madame Noor Jehan’s grand daughter has the starring role in a forthcoming Bollywood blockbuster while India’s Mahesh and Pooja Bhatt are leading lights of the Kara film festival in Pakistan. Pakistan’s Junoon band has returned to Patiala, the land of its forefathers, and starred in many concerts. Business delegations are to-ing and fro-ing, salivating at the prospects of trade. Journalists are crawling all over the two countries. Theatre groups are regaling and entertaining audiences alike. Even the state governments of the two Punjabs are interacting directly, and Punjabi language and culture are getting a long overdue fillip. And this is just the beginning of a journey of a thousand days, in case we miss the point.
Despite the red tape, despite the distrust, despite the inevitable hiccups, the peace dialectic is bound to gather momentum for three powerful reasons. India has a lot to gain from peace and Pakistan has a lot to lose from regional conflict. The new generations in both countries are not prisoners of the past like their partition-obsessed forefathers. And material globalisation is delinking political religion from culture by its extraordinary extra-territoriality. The sooner the establishments in both countries accept this hard new reality, the better it will be for Pakistanis and Indians.
(Feb 04-10, 2005, Vol – XVI, No. 50 – Editorial)
Unintended consequences
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This is another way of posing the law of unintended consequences. For example, the unintended consequences of General Yahya Khan’s 1970 elections were war with India and the breakup of Pakistan. Similarly, the unintended result of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s re-institutionalization of the demoralized Pakistan army was his later execution by a handpicked army chief. More significantly, the unintended consequences of the US-Pakistan sponsored Islamic jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s against the Russians continue to impact the two sponsors and impinge on the fate of regions, cultures and civilizations. Consider.
For both Pakistan and the US, the intended consequence of the Afghan jihad was the ouster of the Russians from Afghanistan. But the un intended consequences for Pakistan were violent sectarianism, drugs and Kalashnikovs. The un intended consequence for America was Osama bin Laden’s transformation from a low level, US backed, anti-Russia maverick-mujahid to the leader of the most consequential anti-America, ‘Islamic’ movement of modern times. Indeed, OBL’s 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington have changed the discourse of cultures and civilizations and are threatening to redraw the social and political map of the Middle East. It is arguable whether or not OBL could have visualized the swift American intervention in Afghanistan and the demise of the Taliban regime as one consequence of 9/11. Similarly, it is arguable whether or not President Bush would have intervened so decisively in Iraq and ousted Saddam Hussain if 9/11 hadn’t provided him the framework of fear in which to fashion and implement his neo-conservative pre-emptive doctrine of strategic domination. Still, the boot could be on the other foot. Consider.
The US intervention in Iraq had two tactical aims. Get rid of Saddam Hussain quickly, and install a stable, long term pro-America regime. The first objective was achieved but the second has proved costly and difficult in terms of American lives lost (over 1400) and money spent (over $300 b). Nonetheless, despite violent resistance from the Sunni minority, the US has succeeded in holding elections in Iraq. The intended consequence is to prop up a pro-US regime while paving the way for an exit strategy for America’s beleaguered troops. In the event, pundits are asking many relevant questions. Will the new democracy be secular or sectarian? Will the Shia majority be able to live and let live with the Sunni minority that has historically lorded it over them or will their divisions sharpen? Will the Al-Qaeda-supported resistance be crushed? Will the new government be sufficiently autonomous of Washington to be credible in the eyes of the Iraqi people? Few, however, are asking what the un intended consequences of American sponsored Shi’ite Iraqi democracy might be in time to come. Consider the implications of the first Arab nation ever to be ruled by the Shias.
Robert Fisk, possibly the most perceptive journalist writing on the Middle East, argues that “a Shia inheritance of Iraq is creating deep fears among the Arab kings and dictators that their Sunni leadership is under threat”. He says Arab leaders are talking of “a new Shia Crescent running through Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon in which the underdogs of the Middle-East, repressed under the Ottomans, the British and then pro-Western dictators, will be a new and potent force”. In Kuwait, the Shi’ite Salafis have just announced the formation of the Ummah, the first ever political party in the kingdom. In Bahrain, the Shia majority that revolted in the 1990s against the ruling Sunni minority is bound to demand democratization, which will become the buzz word for greater Shia participation in government. Saudi Arabia, which has long disregarded its Shia minority and has no love lost for democracy, is worried. “The Arab states outside the Shia Crescent fear Shia political power even more than they are frightened by genuine democracy”, says Fisk. But those may not be all of the unintended consequences of the American intervention in Iraq.
Much of the Arab world’s oil on which the West thrives lies in the Shia belt. The Shias are astride Saudi Arabia’s richest oil reserves along its eastern seaboard. Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil also lies in Shia lands. Along with the oil wealth of Iran, this now accounts for half the world’s oil reserves. That is why Jordan’s king, for instance, is anxious that the new developments in Iraq could “destablise the Gulf and pose a challenge to the US”. If oil should become a weapon in the struggle for internal democracy and external autonomy, the “tectonic plates of the Middle-East” could move “in a new and uncertain direction”, argues Fisk.
One of the unintended short term consequences of 9/11 is the remarkable turnaround of Pakistan from a potentially “failing” or “pariah” state into a “pivotal” and resurgent state which has disavowed extremist political Islam, minimized conflict with its neighbours and rebuilt mutually beneficial relations with the West. Despite the chances of greater conflict and upheaval in the short term, can one hope that the un intended longer term consequences of America’s intervention in Iraq might be the democratization and secularization of the Middle-East and a more equitable sharing of the world’s resources?
(Feb 11-17, 2005, Vol – XVI, No. 51 – Editorial)
Truth and reconciliation
Syed Fakhr Imam, a former Muslim Leaguer who is now out in the cold but was once a prominent politician, has called for a Truth and Reconciliation process to heal the wounds of incessant political conflict in order to cement a stable consensus in the national interest. This is an idea that we first advocated in this column in this paper in 2001 and to which we have returned many times in the last four years. Unfortunately, however, neither General Pervez Musharraf & Co nor Messrs Bhutto & Sharif have publicly warmed to the theme. Talking of the truth would mean confessing to crimes and misdemeanours, which is anathema to anyone, let alone politicians. And talking of reconciliation would imply a readiness to share power, which may be construed as a sign of political weakness by adversaries. It would also explain why those who have nothing to hide and those for whom the national interest comes above personal power brokerage should continue to articulate this demand.
What is the truth? Why is there a need for national reconciliation? What sort of reconciliatory strategy will yield fruit?
The truth is that we are all naked in this hamam. Neither politicians nor political parties practice democracy or have much personal or institutional integrity. Indeed, politics is personality-driven, not issue-oriented, and parties are fiefdoms and legacies. Political governments are more or less corrupt and more or less inefficient. Nor is there an irrevocable civil-military contradiction. Politicians in opposition have routinely nudged generals to destabilize governments and political leaders in government have routinely paid obeisance to generals and done their bidding.
The generals, too, are in the same hamam.Pakistan has fought three wars under three generals with disastrous results. The generals have huge interests in land and real estate, in trade and commerce. In the 1950s they became landlords. In the 60s and 70s they coveted the status of businessmen. In the 1980s and 90s they consolidated their gains and also became contractors and service providers. Now they are into real estate development in a big way. This is corruption by another name because it is done under special laws decreed and interpreted by the generals in an unaccountable and rigged framework. Concomitant with their business energy and commercial acumen are determined attempts to dominate the civil service and emasculate the judiciary. The generals have been in and out of bed with all sorts of politicians. Now they want to formally bring the army in “in order to keep it out”.
If the truth is unsavoury, then the pot shouldn’t call the kettle black. The need for reconciliation between the generals and politicians has arisen because the legacy of the politicians (a bankrupt economy) and the legacy of the generals (a bankrupt national security policy) has progressively laid the country low. When one has ruled, the other has tried to destabilize the polity, hurting the nation more than each other. So what is needed is a grand reconciliation between the two that self-consciously admits of their respective failings and seeks to establish a less self-righteous, less antagonistic, less incompetent, and less corrupt partnership of power and office sharing in which the rules of the game are firmly established as non-exclusive and non-dominant signposts to national consensus and stability.
The current national context is especially propitious for such a reconciliation process. Despite his best efforts, General Musharraf has, like his military predecessors, failed to establish a credible process of popular consensus, institutional succession and policy continuity. For a nuclear armed country awash with radical political Islam that is internationally committed to a comprehensive strategic “about turn”, this is an unacceptable state of affairs. Despite Musharraf’s best efforts, the PPP remains the most popular party in the country and cannot be continuously thwarted by electoral rigging. Meanwhile, his pet project of the military-mullah alliance has backfired. It has succeeded so well in Balochistan that it has ousted the Baloch nationalists from provincial reckoning and provoked them to armed insurgency and terrorism. And it has failed so miserably in the NWFP that by providing succor to the mullahs it has led to safe havens for Al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorism. The paradox is that the more Musharraf seems to entrench himself by virtue of being both army chief and president, the more politically isolated he becomes. This makes it increasingly difficult for him to successfully mediate troubled domestic realities, demanding regional requirements and pressing international concerns. Has this self-evident truth sunk home or not?
Not so far. General Musharraf still seems bent on running a one party political system dominated by him personally and by the military institutionally. He may offer crumbs to the PPP in the next elections in order to downsize the mullahs, but he is not yet aiming for a truthful rapprochement with the largest and most popular party in Pakistan, nor one with the Baloch and Pakhtun provincialists, all of whom share his secular worldview and enlightened-moderation philosophy. In that sense Musharraf is out of step with the real demands of the times.
(Feb 18-24, 2005, Vol – XVI, No. 52 – Editorial)
Khakis & civilians: us versus them?
On a miserably wet and gloomy day recently, the visiting British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, abandoned his helicopter in Lahore and drove to Gujrat on the Grand Trunk Road to be with his long-distance constituents. Mr Straw has 25,000 Muslims in his constituency in the UK, many of whom hail from the Gujrat region in Pakistan. “I wake up every day to the muezzin’s call for prayer”, he joked, “there’s a mosque and a madrassa in my neighbourhood”. So he also took time out to visit a local madrassa in Gujrat. That’s saying something, isn’t it? Compare this with how it works in Pakistan.
Dr Shazia Khalid was raped on the premises of the Sui hospital where she worked. Her civilian colleagues and employer, no less than the military security institution tasked with site-protection, all actively connived to conceal the crime. The media was barred from talking to her. The local police was obstructed from investigation. The main accused, an army officer, was not detained and interrogated. Far from it. He was actually protected by his institution until the situation became untenable. Even now, the official military spokesman is mealy mouthed about the detention and interrogation of the accused.
Why wasn’t a thorough and transparent inquiry ordered swiftly at the highest level to establish guilt or innocence? If a civilian had been charged instead of an army officer, rightly or wrongly, the law would surely have taken its quick toll. But that’s not the way it works in our “democracy”. The military is innocent unless proven guilty and civilians are guilty unless proven innocent. Ask any wretched cop who has as much as dared to challenge a khaki on the road, and he will tell you that he got a black eye and a suspension from service for his efforts, thank you very much.
The issue, of course, is not about culpability or righteousness. It is about accountability. To be sure, the military is deadly serious about accountability and indiscipline within its ranks. But it is not prepared to submit to the rules of accountability by civilians in a democracy. Of all the specific accountability or ehtesaab laws framed in this country by civilian or military-controlled parliaments since 1995, every one explicitly excludes senior military officers from its ambit. The military insists its internal accountability mechanisms are sufficiently daunting for the purpose. This is true. But the same argument could be flogged for civil servants whose service rules are equally uncompromising. Yet the latter are fair game and the former are not for the National Accountability Bureau. And that is not just because NAB is a civilian outfit governed by civilian laws but headed by a military man. It’s because that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
The same sort of attitude is apparent in other areas of governance. When a civilian senator recently rose in the House to ask why the government had only now woken up to a violation of the Indus Waters Treaty by India over the Baglihar Dam when construction on the dam started way back in 2000, another senator, a military general and former DG-ISI to boot, castigated his colleague by accusing civilian governments of negligence while India had been engaged in constructing a couple of other controversial dams in the past. One might have thought that such a matter of national consequence should have been resolved without resorting to finger pointing, but no, Pakistan must be one of the unlucky few countries in the world where the “us versus them” civil-military syndrome is alive and kicking.
It is unfortunate that a national tragedy triggered by the collapsing dams in Balochistan in which hundreds of lives have been lost has not occasioned a ruthless accountability of the construction companies and engineers who built the dams as part of the federal government’s plans to open up the coastline and lay down the infrastructure of Gwadar. Surely it shouldn’t matter whether civilian contractor and military companies designed and built the dams. What matters is that they should be held publicly accountable for willful criminality. But nothing of the sort has been ordered. Instead, the president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, has deemed fit to accuse the media of unnecessarily “playing up” the devastation in Balochistan and feeding its sense of deprivation. Of course, the allegation is totally misplaced. The media has in equal measure front paged the heroic efforts of the jawans and officers of the armed forces in shouldering the relief campaign, no less than the personal anguish and concern of the military president and civilian prime minister of Pakistan.
On another tangent, Maulana Fazal ur Rehman, the military’s blue-bearded but absent civilian on the National Security Council, is rather equivocal about “family planning”. He says that, despite their deterrence value in controlling population growth, condoms should not be sold because they may be used for illicit sex. By the same criterion, then, we should dispense with the military and nuclear weapons because they can be used for warring. This is how we slide from the sublime to the ridiculous when we try and unravel the contours of civil-military relations in Pakistan.
(Feb 25-March 03, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 1 – Editorial)
Culture and its vultures
Meera, the svelte Lahori film actress, is Pakistan’s sole claim to fame in the plastic world of international showbiz. So it is perfectly understandable that she should try to exploit the recent thaw in Indo-Pak relations and elbow her way into Bollywood by way of a film by the famed Indian producer-director Mahesh Bhatt. Alas. Screen morals being lax in India as compared to Pakistan, some zealous officials in our Ministry of Culture have “seriously objected” to Meera’s screen engagements and threatened to “impose a heavy fine on her because her vulgar actions are against Islamic ethics and moral values”. Well, well, well. Just goes to show how far General Pervez Musharraf’s plea for enlightened moderation has gone in this Land of the Pure.
Lahore is the classic city of saints and sinners. Its zinda dilaan citizens are not cowed down by the Ministry of Culture. They have successfully resisted official attempts to shift the ancient red light district from the old city to new suburbs. They have fought tooth and nail to flog the subculture of popular (‘vulgar’) theatre. They have thumbed their noses at holier-than-thou judges who insist on steering them to the straight and narrow. They have braved the chilling vagaries of February to clamber to their rooftops and indulge in an orgy of kite flying and feasting, and they have blown rings in the air when the stalwarts of the Jamaat i Islami have fretted and fumed, refusing to abandon Basant. On the contrary, Basant is bigger and better than ever. It has been adopted by the multinationals and co-opted by the local and provincial government. Now Lahore is girding up its loins to regain its pre-partition glory as the great secular and intellectual gateway to north India.
We may recall that two provinces of British India, situated geographically on its flanks, were hinged to their own cultural epicentres. One was Bengal that boasted of Calcutta and the other was Punjab which bragged about Lahore. Indeed, Lahore’s cultural and geographical hinterland stretched north to Srinagar and east to Delhi. Urdu writers from Lucknow and Delhi would seek out publishers in Lahore. Three religious entities (Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs) lived in Lahore in harmony under the political leadership of the Muslims, made permanent by the device of separate electorates. When the Partition came in 1947, the cultural hub of Bengal (Calcutta) fell to India and the cultural centre of all Punjab (Lahore) fell to Pakistan. But Lahore, unlike Calcutta, was a big intellectual loser. The Hindu middle classes, including teachers, artists, musicians, writers and publishers, moved to Delhi. But there was no similar movement of such professionally endowed Muslims from Delhi to Lahore. So overnight Lahore lost its secular sheen and lay at the mercy of Pakistan’s new religious ideologues. In time, these self-appointed thekedars of the new state of Pakistan became a critical lynchpin of the anti-secular, anti-democratic, civil-military Pakistani establishment and connived to strip Lahore of all its intellectual fervour and secular culture.
The greatest pre-partition political figure who helped create Lahore as the cultural hub of Punjab – and for a time all of India – was Sir Fazle Hussain. During his tenure, Punjab in general and Lahore in particular saw an unprecedented period of cultural and religious tolerance. But it was precisely this post partition loss of the secular cultural resource of Muslim Punjab that hurt Pakistani Punjab’s ‘national’ culture and created hatred against Punjabis in the other provinces. Is that about to change?
The opening of the land routes from Lahore and Muzaffarabad to Amritsar, Jammu and Kashmir is bound to herald a profound change in the economic and cultural landscape of Lahore. Since current day Lahoris have no memories of Delhi or roots in it because they didn’t emigrate from Delhi at the time of the Partition, the traffic is likely to be pretty one sided, that is, from Delhi to Lahore since hoards of Delhi wallahs migrated from Lahore and struck new roots in Delhi. So Lahore is set to become a boom town awash with secular intellect and culture that reflects multiple religious and community identities and lifestyles.
Under the circumstances, what purpose can possibly be served by censuring Meera for getting chummy with an Indian actor on screen? We see “banned” and “un-Islamic” Indian films in Pakistan all the time on illegal and pirated CDs. Therefore the Ministry of Culture is opening a can of worms when it refers to “Islamic ethics and moral values” and wants actors to behave like “Pakistani ambassadors”. Such references are a throwback to a morbid past that will hurt our composite culture in the future because the mullahs are the sole arbiters of what constitutes “Islamic values”. As a consequence, they can always dig up the entire issue of filmmaking in the country which shows actresses flitting from tree to tree without hijab. Won’t the next step lead to attacks on CD-sellers and cable operators who show Indian TV channels in which the actresses show a lot of leg? Where will it stop, as culture gets scraped off all the nooks and crannies where it is hiding now? In the end will the mullah remain the only “Pakistani ambassador” with the right to parade his views in public?
(March 04-10, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 2 – Editorial)
Hypocrisy and moral chaos over karo-kari
Believe it or not, the ruling PMLQ and opposition MMA have embraced each other like long lost lovers to kill a private bill in parliament proposed by Kashmala Tariq, a member of the ruling PMLQ. The bill sought to amend a law passed last year by the PMLQ-majority in connection with ‘honour-killing’ or karo-kari. It wanted to prevent ‘honour killers’ from getting off the hook via the “Islamic” provision of diyat or ‘blood money’ on receipt of muafi (pardon) by the wali (elder) or relatives of the victim.
Karo-kari refers to a custom of killing (mostly) women accused of sexual relations outside marriage. Often mere rumour may provoke a family member to kill his sister or brother. Even legitimate “love marriages” may trigger such an “obligation” to kill. Worse, when a kari is killed her grave is consigned to the wilderness without the last rites of an Islamic burial.
The spectacle in the national assembly last Tuesday is worth recounting. The ruling PML was clearly divided on the issue. So an SOS was sent to the enemy MMA to join ranks against the liberal amendment. The PML law minister, Wasi Zafar, declared that the bill was against Islam. This is the same gent who recently came on TV to say that the NGOs defending human and women’s rights were funded from ‘outside by forces unfriendly to Pakistan’. Meanwhile, the MMA also denounced the bill as anti-Islam, voted with the PMLQ against it and then duly walked out because the PMLQ speaker did not allow MMA leaders to make fiery speeches.
The battlefield is wonderfully confusing. The PMLQ supports karo-kari by allowing “compoundability” through the device of the pardon/diyat. Thus it shares this Islamic agenda with the MMA, its political opponent. In this way, too, the PMLQ keeps its reactionary Sindhi feudals and Baloch sardars happy by legitimising their killer jirgas. Indeed, the PMLQ Sindh chief minister, Arbab Ghulam Rahim, has actually denied that karo kari exists at all in Sindh. In fact, he has declared that if karo-kari were banned the anarchy of “love marriages” would destroy “our culture”. The oppositionist MMA in Sindh is solidly behind the PMLQ. At a Karachi seminar last year Prof Ghafoor Ahmad of the MMA declared that karo-kari was part of “our religion”. When he was challenged to quote chapter and verse, he walked out of the conference in a huff. But the battle was then joined by Mir Naseer Khan Khosa, an adviser to the chief minister on special education, who thundered that it was only when men were ‘provoked’ that they indulged in killing women. Otherwise, he said, everyone loved women and no one wanted to kill them. Not to be outdone in his love for women, Amir Bux Bhutto, the scion of veteran feudal-politician Mumtaz Bhutto, voted against the anti- karo-kari resolution. Interestingly, though, this pro -karo-kari stance of the ruling PMLQ is not in line with its secular minded MQM partner in Karachi.
The Peoples Party’s stance also merits comment. The PPPP did nothing to promote such a bill while it was in power twice. But in 2004, while it was in opposition, PPPP MNA Sherry Rehman proposed the Protection and Empowerment of Women Bill which sought more rights for women and a repeal of the Hudood ordinances in light of the Women’s Commission Report 2004. However, the PPPP finds itself in an awkward position today. On the one hand it owns up to the proposed amendments. On the other hand, it is in bed with the ARD and, along with the PMLN, is seeking to force President Pervez Musharraf to step down and hold election in 2005. But this is the same PMLN which refused in 1993 to support the PPP when it asked it to uphold the findings of the Women’s Commission to render rights to women. And it is General Musharraf, the PPPP’s current nemesis, who later got the Women’s Commission in 2004 to render another report which again came out against the hudood ordinances. (Note: the 1993 report landed in Islamabad when the PMLQ government patronised by General Musharraf today was in power at that time and shelved it.) The PPPP is also embarrassed by its feudal supporters in rural Sindh who approve of the karo-kari custom. This is doubly disturbing because its arch urban rival MQM supports its anti- karo-kari bill.
On the other side, the PMLQ, even in its breakaway faction mode, is still a firmly conservative party, half in love with the MMA which is baying for the blood of its chief patron General Musharraf. Equally, if President Musharraf thinks that the PMLQ will help him realise his project of “enlightened moderation”, he is sadly mistaken. What he has with the PML is a “marriage of inconvenience”. His politician friends are with him because it is politically convenient, not because they believe in his liberal agenda.
The bewildering nexus of ‘principles’ and practise of all the political and military players in the country on the karo-kari issue shows how hypocrisy and moral chaos cast their long shadows over all of Pakistan’s politics.
(March 11-17, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 3 – Editorial)
Forward march, about turn
General Pervez Musharraf has gone hoarse exhorting Pakistanis to be “moderate” and “enlightened”. He has trooped all over the country pleading for a “soft image” of Pakistan. He has posed with Grand Prix racing car drivers, jogged with Marathon runners, mingled with glitterati at fashion shows, sported well cut western suits, chomped Havana cigars in bush shirts, rubbed shoulders with music bands like Junoon, and so on, with one aim in mind: to show the rest of the world that we’re “regular” guys doing all the moderate things that normal people do in this day and age and not the fiery, fanatical, bearded, blood curdling terrorists and jihadis that we are made out to be by the western media. Alas. In the last few months, we can point to at least four cases in which the leaders of the Pakistan Muslim League have consciously obfuscated, abandoned or negated the very principles of enlightened moderation espoused by General Musharraf.
One example of mealy mouthed obfuscation and contradiction in government was demonstrated by the issue of the “religion-column” in the proposed new machine readable passports. The federal interior minister, Aftab Sherpao, and the religious affairs minister, Ijaz ul Haq, remained at loggerheads. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the PML president, was loath to abandon his pro-MMA instincts. The issue required one firm policy statement from the very top but none was forthcoming. Meanwhile, the foreign media went to town and ridiculed Pakistan.
The issue of “honour-killing” continues to provide grist to foreign mills. MNA Sherry Rehman’s reform bill was summarily shot down by the PML last year. Then, amidst much ridiculous chest thumping by PML MNAs about the justification for honour killings, the king’s party passed a feeble law against karo-kari. One phone call from General Musharraf would have saved the country much embarrassment but none was forthcoming in the “national interest”. When Kashmala Tariq, an MNA from the PML, recently floated another bill to plug the loopholes in the law, the PML again flocked to the MMA, hid behind its skirts and scuttled the bill. Where was Shaukat Aziz, our enlightened prime minister obsessed about the symbiotic relationship between the economy and our national image, at that time? Why didn’t General Musharraf order Chaudhry Shujaat to whip his wayward flock into submission? Why does the ruling party constantly mock itself, its leader and the nation over important human rights issues?
The dangerous controversy over the Aga Khan University Examination Board is another such case. The AKUEB was set up by General Musharraf in 2002 and incorporated into the 17th constitutional amendment with the approval of the MMA. This enables private universities and colleges to be affiliated to the AKUEB and conduct their exams under its professional umbrella. It is a sensible arrangement because of the failing international credibility of public sector degree awarding educational institutions. But the mullahs don’t like it precisely because of its a-religious professionalism. So they have been trying to whip up a religious storm against it. Regrettably, some ministers in the Punjab government have lent their shoulder to the mullahs’ mischief even as others have supported the federal law. What’s going on?
Now the High Court has gone by the book and shamed us all. The state prosecutor couldn’t produce one credible witness out of the 150 witnesses to the gang rape of Makhtar Mai. So the court acquitted all except one. Wonderful. This is a great blow for the judiciary, is it? The judges have redeemed their honour and upheld their independence, have they? What happened to them when the first and second and third martial law was imposed upon Pakistan? What happened to them when they were blinded by the chamak of powerful politicians? What happened to our busybody Advocates-General and our learned Attorney General and our able Law Ministers and hard working Law Secretaries when this case was being “argued” by the state before their honourable lordships? The fact is that no one gave a damn. No one picked up the phone to insist and demand that the prosecution should make a water tight case and get the convictions to redeem our collective national honour. But now that the world media is denouncing Pakistan, the federal information minister has hastily informed us that the government intends to appeal the judgment on instructions from “the top”.
Forward march. About turn. Forward march, about turn. That’s the name of the stupid game. There is no real vision. There is no substantive planning. There is no effective enlightened moderation. When it suits us, ground realities become paramount. When it doesn’t, ground realities can go to hell. The National Defence College in Islamabad is holding seminars to imbue parliamentarians with “correct” notions of national security and democracy. Many civil administrative institutions now have generals lording over them. Parliament is guided by a man in uniform. Granted that civilians are useless, anarchic, ill-reputed. But how many lessons, might we ask, have such distinguished khakis given our honourable civilian representatives in human rights, liberal values, religious moderation? None, we fear. And there’s the rub.
(March 18-24, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 4 – Editorial)
The mismatch in Pakistan
General Pervez Musharraf’s domestic policies are more ‘forward’ looking than conservative, while his external policies are pro-US and pro-West. But public sentiment is staunchly conservative and anti-America. Yet, barring the extremists, there’s universal support for his views on “enlightened moderation”. Is there a mismatch between public policy and public opinion that might lead to instability in Pakistan?
The “mismatch” exists to the extent that two factors — anti-American outrage and pro-Islam sentiment – impinge on ground realities. But if we disaggregate or deconstruct each factor into its necessary and sufficient components, the “mismatch” between public policy and public opinion is not dangerously destabilizing.
There are two components of anti-Americanism in Pakistan. The first element is global-general. After the cold war, America was perceived as an unaccountable bully and anyone who said so evoked sympathy. From this flows the view that “America had it coming” on 9/11. This also explains a sneaking sympathy for Al-Qaeda that transcends religious sentiment. It brings together rightists and leftists, the secular and the sacred-minded. The second element is country-specific. Pakistanis were pro-America when America was a valued ally from 1947 to 1990 despite unjust or hegemonic American policies elsewhere. But Pakistanis became anti-America after America objected to Pakistan’s nuclear programme, sanctioned it for crossing the red light, denied it military hardware and sought a new strategic relationship with India. The net impact of America’s anti-Pakistan policies from 1990-2001 was reflected in a failing economy and weakened military establishment in Pakistan which exacerbated the nationalist backlash. Thus there was sustained anti-Americanism in public policy and public opinion during this period. It was also a time of political instability culminating in a coup.
But 9/11 changed the nature of the matrix. While the people’s global-general sentiment against America worsened, the country-specific nationalist sentiment changed in favour of America after Musharraf unfurled a pro-America foreign policy which led to a restoration of American economic and military assistance to Pakistan, a swift revival of the flagging economy and a rehabilitation of Pakistan in the international community. This pragmatic nationalist sentiment is articulated and calibrated by the national security establishment and the industrial, trading and professional classes. And despite opportunistic deviations and protests, it is effectively backed by the mainstream political party (PPP) that represent the other half of the “masses”. This makes it a powerful factor in limiting the negative fallout of any “mismatch” between public policy and public sentiment, guaranteeing political stability and policy sustainability in the longer term.
In this context, General Musharraf’s appeal for “enlightened moderation” fulfills two important requirements of the popular imagination: it enables Pakistanis to retain their religious faith, beliefs and identities in the face of modernity, westernization and capitalist globalisation; and it facilitates a beneficial separation of their apolitical religiousity from the anti-nationalist political extremism of Al-Qaeda and its supporters that hurts the interests of Pakistanis at home and abroad.
At any rate, the potentially destabilizing impact of any “mismatch” between public policy and public opinion should not be overrated in non-democratic cultures and semi-democratic societies in which elections are not the most critical element of public accountability and government policy is not terribly responsive to popular pressure. This is especially true in Pakistan in which civilian governments and public policies are liable to be held accountable to the national security military establishment instead of the public and where elections are manipulated by the military intelligence agencies to reflect their requirement for a change in public policies. This power devolves from “overdeveloped”, strong and self-conscious post-colonial state structures in relation to “underdeveloped” civil society institutions and weak political party processes.
Some people worry about the negative fallout of the situation in Balochistan, Sindh and in relation to the MMA and the PPP. But surely the infighting in Sindh or the anarchy in Balochistan can be moderated as long as it doesn’t undermine Musharraf’s writ. A change of face or Governor’s Rule can be envisaged if matters get out of hand. Thus discord within the ruling oligarchy may not necessarily translate into country instability.
It is understandable why General Musharraf chose to banish the PMLN and PPP, co-opted the PMLQ, allied with the MQM and pitted the MMA against the PPP. But one unintended consequence of this strategy was the burgeoning of the MMA without a sufficient decimation of the PPP by the PMLQ. This wasn’t thought problematic at the time because Musharraf was still gung ho about the Taliban in Afghanistan and the jihad in Kashmir, which necessitated good relations with the MMA. But 9/11 has about-turned those calculations. Now it is widely accepted that radical political Islam is not good for Pakistan’s health. Hence the necessity of the philosophy of enlightened moderation and the opening of a dialogue with the PPP as a future working partner in place of the discredited, wayward MMA.
(March 25-31, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 5 – Editorial)
Good or bad economics?
The State Bank of Pakistan has just published its half yearly report on the health of Pakistan’s economy. It is, generally speaking, a credible and realistic assessment of the strong and weak points of the economy. Here’s a layman’s guide to what it’s all about.
For Good: The economy (GDP) is forecast to grow at nearly 8% this year, which will be a historic record. But this is largely attributed to strong growth (4%) in the agricultural sector which still has a significant weight in the economy. In turn, this agricultural performance is based on a record production of over 14 million bales of cotton and near self-sufficiency in wheat. This is mainly because of improved water availability to this sector.
The large scale manufacturing sector has grown at over 16% on the back of the construction (largely cement), fertilizer, textiles, automobiles and electronics sub-sectors. But this is too narrow an industrial base on which to take off into self-sustained economic growth. It should be noted that the textile manufacturing sector grew by 16% in the last six months, thereby not just contributing to large scale manufacturing sector growth (it accounts for 1/3 of this sector’s production) but also by sustaining general export growth (in which cotton products account for nearly 65% of all value). Note too that construction is buoyant because of external contingent demand for cement in Afghanistan and Iraq while internal demand is contingent on urban asset and property appreciation based on inflows of expatriate capital seeking outlets at home. Significantly, too, fertilizer growth is directly linked to agricultural performance while automobile demand is based on friendly consumer lending/leasing policies of the banking sector.
For Bad: The SBP has noted a number of negative or disquieting tendencies. First, core consumer inflation is rising despite a gradual tightening of monetary policy. Food inflation was up by 10.4% as compared to 7.8% last year. While continuing agricultural growth may freeze food inflation, the core inflation trend will not be easily reversed unless oil prices decline significantly in the international market, which may not happen in the short term.
Second, the external account deficit (US1.2b) is widening because the trade deficit (US$2.3b) has deteriorated, which in turn is owed to a steep climb in the import bill (47.7%), nearly half of it on account of rising oil prices and one-third on account of imports of textile machinery and other non-food, non-oil products. But export growth (14.6%) has been below target largely because of sluggish textile exports in the last three months. This may compel the government to slightly devalue the rupee in order to spur exports, in line with the position of forex reserves held by the SBP which have declined by about US$1b since March 2004 despite major inflows of about US$1.7b from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank as well as US$600m in receipts from Pakistan’s first Islamic sukuk bond.
Third, and incredibly enough, the SBP report is ambiguous about the state of employment. On the one hand it says that the unemployment rate has decreased from 8.3% in 2002 to 7.7% in 2004. But it then goes on to attribute this gain to the rural areas only, and that too basically among women who constitute unpaid helpers in the family! Regrettably, the SBP report does not tell us what is happening to employment in the current fiscal year. Critically, a discussion of poverty alleviation is altogether missing from the report, even as there are ringing allegations from independent economists who insist that the poor have not benefited by the government’s trickle down economics.
Coclusion: The glass certainly looks half-full. But it may in fact still be half-empty. Much of this year’s growth is based on Allah’s bounty (good water supply has led to good fertilizer demand has led to good cotton crop has led to good textile production has led to good export performance). Extraneous factors that have spurred expatriate remittances and facilitated international loans on account of post 9/11 events have fueled a stock market, property and construction boom. But this could be jeopardized if a semblance of domestic economic certainty were to be ruptured by political upheaval. Direct foreign investment (US$446m) remains a pittance because Pakistan is not even remotely listed in respectable finance journals as an “emerging market”. Indeed, the emerging market for oil and gas exploration and development in Balochistan and the NWFP is seriously undermined by continuing instability and bad US-Iran relations. The spurt in domestic private investment in the textile sector in the last three years is also over. The stock market is dependent for its buoyancy on six or seven scripts which are dependent on disinvestment by the government. The banks are flush with money and are fueling consumer demand for automobiles because there isn’t sufficient demand for funds for productive investment purposes from the business sector. And so on.
This is a rather fragile economic and political base on which to build rosy scenarios of well being.
(April 01-07, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 6 – Editorial)
More Faustian bargains
After months of prevarication, General Pervez Musharraf’s government has ‘retreated’ on the issue of the religion column in passports. How is this perceived by people at home and abroad? Who is responsible for ordering this about-turn and why? What is the political implication of this “concession” to the MMA? What is its significance for greater democratization in Pakistan?
Most Pakistanis instinctively know that the issue has nothing to do with any love for “Islam”. No Muslim country in the world insists on religion as an element of identity for passports. Nor has it got anything to do with making life more difficult for the apostatized Ahmedis. No. This issue is exclusively political in nature, just like all issues raked up by the MMA. With every concession extracted from the state in the name of “Islam”, the MMA gets politically stronger because its stakes in the organs of law and state are enhanced. Therefore it fiercely resists state policies that seek to depoliticize Islam, irrespective of their functionality. Thus the MMA wants Friday back as a holiday; it refuses to rationalize the blasphemy laws; it defends “honour-killings” because outlawing them would dilute the Qisas and Diyat laws. The people know all this. Therefore they perceive this ‘retreat’ as yet another sign of conscious propping up of the MMA. Worse, they are reinforced in their belief that “enlightened moderation” is a sham designed only to placate the West. But the fact is that the West too is becoming increasingly cynical of General Musharraf’s “visionary” meanderings.
We are told that both General Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz were opposed to this ‘retreat’ and that a majority of cabinet members felt likewise. So what happened? It appears that Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the PMLQ president, insisted on it because he had given his “word” to Maulana Fazalur Rehman. And what was the quid pro quo? It certainly wasn’t a promise from the MMA to stop attacking General Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz as American puppets. Nor was it an agreement to stop threatening the government and destabilizing the system by million-man marches. Was it the sop of allowing the chief minister of the NWFP to attend meetings of the National Security Council, despite a continuing boycott by Maulana Fazalur Rehman?
But that’s no big deal. The NSC was still-born when the Maulana refused to sit in it as leader of the opposition. Nor is the participation of the NWFP CM going to revive its legitimacy or utility. So there must be much more to the PMLQ-MMA “deal” than meets the eye.
This ‘retreat’ is, in fact, a strong indication of the persistence of the political alliance between the PMLQ and the MMA on the one hand and General Musharraf and the PMLQ on the other. The need to consolidate this three way relationship has increased since General Musharraf started making overtures to the PPP in a bid to quell domestic apprehensions in general and international disquiet in particular of what might happen to Pakistan’s post 9/11 polity in the event that something untoward happened to its architect. Indeed, the slow but sure international interest in a revival of “democracy” in Pakistan has much to do with the demand for the political rehabilitation of the mainstream and liberal PPP which in turn is linked to growing question marks about General Musharraf’s “indispensability”.
In the absence of a popular leader, the PMLQ is desperate to lean on General Musharraf and join hands with the MMA to thwart the PPP in the next local body and general elections. But far from making him averse to this, General Musharraf’s advisors have convinced him of its necessity. The last thing General Musharraf wants is for the PPP to sweep the elections and for Benazir Bhutto to become a far worse headache for him than Nawaz Sharif. So the MMA retains its political utility for him institutionally. But equally, he doesn’t want the MMA to blackmail, threaten and undermine him personally. So the best political arrangement that would suit General Musharraf would be a more “democratic” one in which the PMLQ still rules the roost, but the PPP is brought into the power sharing loop at the slight expense of the MMA. This ‘strategy’ will diminish the MMA’s clout and enable the PMLQ-ISI to juggle General Musharraf’s political opponents and partners at the centre and in the provinces. In other words, the PPP is required to allay the jitters of the international community, while the MMA, like the MQM, is needed to keep the PPP in check at home, and also reinforce General Musharraf’s continuing indispensability for the international community as the sole vehicle for turning back the tide of political Islam.
The real problem is that General Musharraf and his military colleagues still see the PPP as an “anti-establishment” force with which they cannot do business. They still see the mullahs as a “necessary evil” for various political and geo-strategic reasons. This is a wrong assessment on both counts. Unfortunately, it means there will be no significant roll-back of political Islam or liberal rebirth of Pakistan in the short term. Most regrettably, it also implies that the long term political stability and viability of Pakistan is not assured by the great helmsman.
(April 08-14, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 7 – Editorial)
Mullahs vs Musharraf
General Pervez Musharraf has been going around publicly touting the Lahore Marathon held under the patronage of the Punjab government some months ago as a sign of his regime’s “enlightened moderation” policies aimed at impressing the world. Now his erstwhile “strategic” partners in the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal have told him where to get off. Emboldened by their grand “victory” over the religion column issue, the mullahs have tasted blood. Indeed, they spilt a lot of it in Gujranwala the other day in furtherance of their goals. Armed with batons and spikes, and foaming at the mouth about the participation of women in a mini-marathon organized by the district government, they attacked the police and forced a cancellation of the event. Not so long ago, the rabid Taliban in Afghanistan were doing much the same thing. The cowardly administrations of Bahawalpur, Sargodha and Multan have quickly caved in and postponed or cancelled similar events or banned women from participating. The MMA’s fiery spokesmen have warned that they will resort to greater violence to impose their views on society. So much for their democratic credentials.
The Punjab parliament has roared its disapproval, accusing the MMA of terrorism. The Punjab CM, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, has exhorted the district administrations not to buckle down. Fat lot of good this statement will do. Even if the administrators can pluck up the courage to go ahead with their plans, which is extremely doubtful, which self-respecting or concerned family will allow its women to participate in a mini-marathon targeted by violent mullahs? No, the MMA has succeeded once again in sabotaging General Musharraf’s doctrine of enlightened moderation and the state has once again abandoned its citizens.
The MMA comprises the same people with whom General Musharraf’s military establishment did profitable business for decades in pursuit of misplaced notions of strategic depth; these are the same partners who fueled the military’s jihadist policies; these are the same folk who gave succour to the Taliban and Al Qaeda; these are the same forces which the military establishment consciously enabled to storm parliament in the 2002 elections at the expense of the mainstream liberal parties; these are the same parties with which General Musharraf clinched a “constitutional deal” in 2003; these are the same gents from among whom General Musharraf preferred to choose the leader of the opposition to sit with him in the grand National Security Council; these are the same forces whose advice and threats General Musharraf has constantly heeded in relation to the most oppressive laws in Pakistan. Worse, much worse, these are the very people who want to eliminate General Musharraf from the reckoning in Pakistan!
We recently wrote that there is a mismatch between public policy and public opinion but argued that it would not seriously destabilize the government if it dug its heels in and refused to surrender to the religious extremists. Now the MMA has taken up arms at home and the jihadis have launched attacks to derail the Kashmir bus initiative – the attack on the bus station in Srinagar on the eve of the historic first bus is an act of premeditated terrorism. In both instances, the aims of the perpetrators are the same: challenge General Musharraf at home and undermine his foreign policies abroad in order to weaken and get rid of him before transforming Pakistan into the first jihadist, pro-Al-Qaeda nuclear state in the world.
And what, pray, is the good general doing to stave off mounting threats to his person and policies? “The army is not involved in politics and the cabinet takes all decisions”. He said this after he had explained away the retreat on the religion column by referring to the unanimous decision of the five member cabinet committee tasked with deliberating the issue. But we know that a swift policy reversal was ordered by the khakis and the civilians meekly complied.
Before General Musharraf was compelled to seize power and enter the domain of politics, he was a happy-go-lucky soldier interested only in soldiering. Indeed, one of the reasons why former premier Nawaz Sharif chose him as army chief was his avowed reputation for being apolitical. The problem is that even now his analysis is seriously circumscribed by his political isolation. All his close advisors, save one, are military men, cocooned in standard operating procedures, brimming with confidence, susceptible to the calibrated formulations and machinations of intelligence agencies. Who among them will tell him that serious and concerned and powerful people at home and abroad are beginning to ask many awkward questions for the first time since 1999?
Is he still playing games with the international community? Is his grip over domestic politics slipping? Is his dubious system beginning to unravel? Is he putting his personal self-survival interests before the national interest by postponing or fudging important decisions? Here is a man whose sincerity of purpose and courage of action has won plaudits across the world. The same man is now mouthing platitudes and looking increasingly forlorn and vulnerable. The mullahs sense this and are gearing up to enforce change. Whenever they have been given an inch they have demanded a yard. Will General Pervez Musharraf accept their political challenge or go down lamely, yard by yard?
(April 15-21, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 8 – Editorial)
True worth and limitations of Musharraf’s
Kashmir policy
The One Day cricket match between Pakistan and India in Delhi on April 17 promises to be a thrilling clincher. But it isn’t even the pretext any more for General Pervez Musharraf’s forthcoming trip to India. He wants some palpable, perceptible, movement on resolving the Kashmir dispute before doubts of a “sell-out”, especially in the rank and file of the army and among the hardliners of the Pakistani establishment, begin to weigh him down.
Most Pakistanis can live with a “freeze” on the status quo on Kashmir, as they did from 1965 to 1989. But not General Musharraf. He is, after all, the architect of Kargil. He is the coup maker who accused Nawaz Sharif of “selling out” on Kashmir during the Lahore summit with Mr Vajpayee in 1999. He is the general who returned from Agra 2001 in a huff because Mr Vajpayee wouldn’t accept Pakistan’s Kashmir-related pre-condition for a dialogue without posing India’s own cross-border terrorism pre-condition. He is the general under whom the jihadis became audacious enough to attack the parliament in Srinagar and then the parliament in New Delhi. So if you consider the distance he has traveled in the opposite direction since then, you can measure the depth of his courage in seeking a durable, honourable and realistic peace-settlement with India.
Pakistan under General Musharraf in 2005 has closed the jihadi tap and stopped infiltrating militancy into Indian-held Kashmir. That is saying something. Pakistan under Musharraf in 2005 has accepted the notion of “composite dialogue” first advanced by India in 1992 and constantly rejected by the military establishment since then. Indeed, there are no Pakistani pre-conditions to the current dialogue and CBMs between the two countries today. That is saying something. Indeed, Pakistan under Musharraf in 2005 has enabled the road links between the two Kashmirs to be restored after 58 years and made the Line of Control “soft” without any concession by India on the core question of how to settle the Kashmir issue. That is saying something. Pakistan under Musharraf in 2005 has unilaterally stopped harping about the UN resolutions in an effort to reach a compromise on Kashmir. That is saying something. In fact, Pakistan under Musharraf has publicly floated the “various-options” approach to resolving Kashmir. Indeed, by suggesting that both sides should abandon their maximalist positions, Pakistan under Musharraf has all but admitted that Indian-held Kashmir will probably never become part of Pakistan. That is saying something. And Pakistan under Musharraf has confirmed that the Kashmir issue is not a bilateral territorial issue of dispute between India and Pakistan but one that involves the life and blood and aspirations of the Kashmiris. In fact, in pursuance of this, he wants the Kashmiris on the table in a three way dialogue. This is a far cry from stressing the theme of the “unfinished business of partition”. That is saying something, really saying something, about how far Musharraf has traveled in just two years in his search for a peaceful compromise on all issues, including Kashmir, with India.
But this cuts both ways. If it indicates Musharraf’s swift reappraisal of the new ground realities, it also puts his peace initiatives on the spot at home. If the “peace-with-India” lobbies in Pakistan and in the West see his new policies as bold and beautiful, certain hard line vested interests at home see them as nothing short of a duplicitous “sell-out” to the “old enemy”. This makes it imperative that the response from India should be equally “bold and beautiful” so that the anti-India hardliners in Pakistan can be suitably silenced and Musharraf can secure his flanks and move forward with confidence.
It must be admitted that Mr Vajpayee’s decision to reopen negotiations with General Musharraf at Agra after the “distrusting” episode of Kargil was a bold move. His risky decision to send the Indian cricket team to play in Pakistan just months ahead of the Indian elections was truly “bold and beautiful”. The Congress, too, has taken laudable steps in the same direction. But at the end of the day, the fact remains that India has not budged a millimeter from its rigid positions on Kashmir. Indeed, the recent statements of various Indian officials, including prime minister Manmohan Singh, on the inviolability of “borders” only sour the dialogue-environment by posing pre-conditions.
General Musharraf’s New Delhi visit aims to spur the Kashmiris into uniting under one platform, showing flexibility and taking bold decisions. He also wants more flexibility from India on the urgency of a tripartite dialogue and settlement of the Kashmir dispute. If the Kashmiris can stamp their approval on any settlement with India, he can “sell” such a Kashmir solution to Pakistanis instead of being accused of selling out to India. The sooner India recognizes the true worth, and limitations, of General Musharraf and his strategic approach, the better. It would be a great mistake to view his flexibility as a sign of current weakness rather than potential strength.
(April 22-28, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 9 – Editorial)
Is the peace process irreversible?
“The peace process is almost irreversible”, enthused General Pervez Musharraf in Delhi last Sunday. Manmohan Singh, the Indian PM said he found General Musharraf “candid and sincere”. On the record, they agreed to ply more passenger busses and even trucks laden with goods across the LoC in Kashmir, and establish a bus link between Lahore and Amritsar as well as a rail link between Sindh and Rajasthan by early next year. Pakistan was nudged to activate the Joint Economic Commission and convene a Joint Business Council soon. Cooperation was stressed regarding the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline. Consulates in Karachi and Mumbai were approved. The issues of Sir Creek and Siachin were raised. Off the record, it was agreed that the Siachin dispute could be taken up where it was abandoned in 1992 after the de-militarisation near-accord of 1989, and the Baglihar Dam issue could be unofficially reopened for a hard look by India in line with the “letter or spirit” of the Indus Waters Treaty. Indeed, Mr Singh may even succeed in accommodating Islamabad’s passionate interest in Jinnah House in Mumbai. In exchange, Pakistan has all but abandoned the linkage between liberalizing trade and progress on a Kashmir solution that was so rigidly argued by PM Shaukat Aziz in Delhi last November. Who would have thought all this could be achieved on the sidelines of a cricket match?
Pakistan’s subtle and significant policy shifts on critical issues are noteworthy. The summit at Agra in 2001 had foundered on the juxtapositioning of the core conditionality of Kashmir by Pakistan with the core conditionality of cross-border terrorism by India. But in Delhi last week, the words “core” and “conditionality” were conspicuous by their absence, as in the Lahore Summit in 1999. Indeed, the only formal reference to the “issue” (not “dispute”) of Jammu and Kashmir came by way of an understanding by both leaders “to continue their discussions in a forward-looking and purposive manner for a final settlement”. And the only formal reference to “terrorism” came by way of an oblique counter reference to the Joint Statement of January 2004, a joint condemnation of the attempt to disrupt the bus service across the LoC and a joint pledge “not to allow terrorism to impede the peace process”. The icing on the cake was an enigmatic but far reaching statement by Musharraf before the Editors Guild of India. “The LoC cannot be permanent (Pakistan’s position), boundaries cannot be altered (India’s position), and borders must be made irrelevant (soft borderstheir mutual current position). Somewhere in this context lies the final solution to Kashmir”. Note that this is an even more radical and abridged context to the J&K dispute than the “7-options approach” articulated by Musharraf some months ago in Islamabad. Indeed, Delhi 2005 is echoing with Simla 1972. Clause 6 of the Simla Pact notes that both governments are committed “to discuss further the modalities and arrangements for the establishment of durable peace and normalization of relations, including…a final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir and the resumption of diplomatic relations”.
Have we come full circle to the beginning? Are we on the verge of a long period without conflict, as happened after Simla until the outbreak of revolt in Srinagar in 1989? Musharraf admitted that he had had a change of heart. But he explained it by alluding to the fact that “the world has changed radically since Agra”. He didn’t elaborate. But we can briefly tell you how the Pakistani military establishment has been compelled to change some of its policies.
The Al-Qaeda attack on the US provoked a US attack on Afghanistan. The US threatened Pakistan: “With us or against us?” Naturally, we couldn’t afford to be against the mighty US and risk our “national assets”. So we wisely decided to side with the US and rake in financial and military assistance. Consequently, we had to abandon the Taliban and flush out Al-Qaeda terrorists. But this provoked Al-Qaeda and its Islamist jihadis to counter attack Musharraf. When he hit back at them, he discovered the dangerous nexus between Al-Qaeda and the sectarian Sunni organizations and jihadi outfits that were also fueling the militancy in Kashmir. Soon thereafter, he discovered that anti-American sentiment and anti-Musharraf outrage were common to all radical Islamists – Al-Qaeda, jihadis, sectarianists and Jamaatis. So it became impossible for him to support the jihadis in India and the MMA without also undermining the new and profitable alliance with America and jeopardizing his personal security and political longevity. The time had come to liquidate Al-Qaeda, stamp out the sectarianists, rein in the jamaatis and freeze the jihadis. For decades, the tail (foreign policy) had wagged the dog. Now it has to be the other way round.
General Musharraf’s new policy stance is designed to improve Pakistan’s economy, strengthen the army’s corporate interests and prop himself up with the help of liberal parties and the international community. If the world or Pakistan is not compelled to change in unimaginable or unforeseen ways again – as it did after 9/11 – we should take General Musharraf at his word.
(April 29- 05 May, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 10 – Editorial)
PPP’s public tactics and private strategy
Mr Asif Zardari has created a stir within the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy. He has also roused the rank and file of the Peoples Party to an internal debate about how (not) to endear itself to the military establishment. Some hard lessons of history should not be forgotten in a rush to return to power.
General Pervez Musharraf is “talking” to Benazir Bhutto via secret intermediaries in London, Dubai and Lahore. Both sides admit this. Indeed, General Musharraf has said he wants to engage ‘liberal’ elements in the country “like the PPP” in order to enlarge the domestic “consensus” on his broadly pro-West, peace-with-India, anti-extremist-Islam policies. But there’s a catch. His self-serving logic is that the opening of “democratic space” to the PPP should not lead to a reduction in the political space of the PMLQ that he has personally cobbled together with the help of the Chaudhrys of Gujrat. Instead, it should diminish the clout of the mullahs who have not just outlived much of their utility to the military establishment after the about-turns in Kabul and Kashmir but are actually opposed to General Musharraf’s new policies and are conspiring to get rid of him. So the PPP has to be brought in from the cold but kept on a tight leash because it cannot be trusted.
So Mr Zardari was released from prison, allowed to go to Dubai for consultations with Ms Bhutto and then return to Pakistan. But the Chaudhrys of the Punjab were given a free hand to knock him about and put him in his place. Tens of thousands of PPP supporters were stopped from entering the city to lay out the red carpet for their great leader, thousands were locked up and hundreds were roughed up. Many harmless PPP ‘leaders’ were slapped with terrorism charges even as scores of violent MMA activists were set free unconditionally. Mr Zardari was even barred from organizing a significant welcoming committee when he insisted on going to the Data Gunj Baksh shrine in some style. Here, in a nutshell, was a carrot and stick policy for the PPP. And how did Mr Zardari react?
He allowed himself to be lamely led away to a police car at Lahore airport on April 16 and driven to Zardari House. When the journalists accompanying him were maltreated, he didn’t even have a word or two to comfort them. Nor did he breathe fire and venom in condemning the harsh treatment meted out to his supporters by the Punjab government. In fact, he was all sugar and honey as far as the military establishment was concerned, and went so far as to say that the military was the most powerful force in the country and the PPP was ready to do business with it. This was like admitting that if you’re about to be raped, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
Not unsurprisingly, there was a chorus of hurt and confused PPP voices in response. The rank and file of the PPP remains stoutly anti-establishment. Indeed, that is the sole source of the PPP’s lingering vote bank among the people, in stark contrast to the PMLQ which is an avowedly pro-establishment party that constantly needs to lean on the establishment for ‘positive’ results. When Mr Zardari mouthed a pro-establishment, realist opinion so soon after his Punjab ordeal, it was bound to go down badly among his bruised supporters. It was, in fact, a tactical mistake. The PPP has always flourished when its public rhetoric has been stridently anti-establishment while its secret diplomacy has been solidly pro-establishment. That was Z A Bhutto’s successful strategy in 1971 until he mixed up tactics and strategy in 1977 and paid the price for it. And that was Benazir Bhutto’s successful strategy in 1993 when she returned to power. But in the current context, matters seemed to be going the other way round. Mr Zardari was openly kowtowing to the establishment in Pakistan while Ms Bhutto was secretly holding the line in Dubai.
Mr Zardari’s statement also sent tremors in the ARD. It negated Ms Bhutto’s agreement with Nawaz Sharif to oust General Musharraf and reclaim power from the military establishment. Thus Mr Zardari publicly jeopardized an element of the PPP’s perceived strength (as part of the combined opposition) without first secretly clinching a good power-sharing deal with the military establishment. Consequently, the PPP has emerged weaker rather than stronger in recent days.
In the run up to the general elections in 2007, General Musharraf’s strategy will be geared to the following ends: a PMLQ government in Islamabad and Punjab, with or without PPP support; a PPP-MQM government in Sindh; a PMLQ-MMA government in the NWFP, and a PMLQ-Nationalist government in Balochistan. If Ms Bhutto doesn’t play her cards well, there will be no room in this arrangement for her personally or for her party in Islamabad or Punjab. But if she does, General Musharraf will have to relent. For that to happen, however, the PPP leaders must learn from the establishment and not confuse public tactics with private strategy.
(May 06-12, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 11 – Editorial)
A Magna Carta that isn’t
The parliamentary committee on Balochistan headed by Shujaat Hussain and Mushahid Hussain has made sweeping recommendations on how to give the troubled province a fair deal. This is no mean achievement. The committee faced many obstacles, not least from hardliners in the military establishment who are not enamoured of Messrs Bugti, Marri and Mengal.
The list of ‘recommendations’ is very impressive. Apparently it constitutes a great blow for provincial autonomy. It envisages the transfer of 29 subjects or items from the concurrent list in the constitution to the provincial list before the year is out and the abolition of another 17 items in the next five years, leaving only defence, transport, communications, finance, currency and ‘national integrity’ in charge of the federal government.
Meanwhile, it proposes some concrete and immediate steps to calm down the striking Baloch nationalists in general and Nawab Akbar Bugti in particular. The federal government, it suggests, should: reassess the amount owed in gas royalties to the province and cough up by June 30th (a figure of Rs 6 billion has been bandied about); upgrade the gas royalty and development surcharge to be paid to the province in the future; oblige the gas development and exploration companies to spend at least 5% of their investment outlays in the exploration area for the benefit of the locals; shift the head office of the Gwadar Development Authority from Karachi to Gwadar and enable ‘maximum’ representation of the Baloch on its governing directorial body; ensure that all public sector appointments in Grades 1-16 in the provincial administration are reserved exclusively for the Baloch; hand out a special federal grant of Rs 2 billion for the uplift of Gwadar and its citizens, especially students; accept “level of development and degree of backwardness” as a major criterion to finalise the NFC award; retain the Levy Forces “to maintain law and order in Balochistan” and transfer the Frontier Constabulary (FC) from the districts to the border; direct the Civil Aviation Authority to ensure night landing facilities at Quetta airport; review the cases of political workers arrested in Balochistan and release all those implicated in minor offences; refer the issue of the privatisation of Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) to the Council of Common Interest for deliberation; and maintain parity of the Baloch-Pashtun in all spheres of life.
Some of these recommendations are certainly do-able, like the upgrading of Quetta airport or a change in the public service rules for recruitment, or even a beefing up of the GDA office in Gwadar with greater Baloch representation. But the military establishment is not likely to enable a majority representation for the Baloch in it, given the “strategic” concerns linked to the port. Similarly, a Rs 2 billion grant for the uplift of Gwadar can be announced tomorrow. But questions of how and through whom the grant is to be disbursed will take forever and remain controversial. Similarly, who will monitor and ensure that foreign companies actually invest x% of their outlays in any area? Likewise, it is easier said than done to move the FC to the border in the current environment, especially since the Baloch negotiators (who are they?) claim they don’t know anything about the Baloch Liberation Army (which is setting off bombs all over the place), let alone have any control over it.
Even greater difficulties lie ahead in changing the criteria for the NFC award – there have been as many unacceptable formulations as there have been failed meetings presided over by no less than the president of Pakistan and various prime ministers and finance ministers since 1990. The subject of gas royalties, too, is vexatious. Whatever concessions are set in the case of Balochistan will become precedents for the claims of other provinces. And finally, the question of current vs concurrent lists is not Baloch-centric. It goes to the very heart of the federal system. Under the 1973 constitution, the concurrent list should have disappeared by now. At the very least, there ought to have been a transfer of subjects from it to the provincial list. But nothing of the sort has happened. Every government has shied away from implementing it, fearful that greater provincial autonomy might lead to the unraveling of the state of Pakistan rather than strengthening it as envisaged by the signatories of the constitution.Indeed, it has been an unspoken axiom of the civil-military establishment since 1947 that Pakistan cannot survive without a strong centre to glue it together. That is why a separate sub-committee headed by Wasim Sajjad is still awaiting instructions from the brass on how to effectively block it or ensnare it in hollow promises and vague statements.
The Shujaat-Mushahid recommendations amount to no less than a Magna Carta for Pakistan. Unfortunately, however, they are misplaced in the current context. General Pervez Musharraf aims to insitutionalise the political role of the military at the highest levels rather than enable civilians to rule not just autonomously in Islamabad but also in the provinces. Under the circumstances, these recommendations will amount to pious statements of intent at best and time-buying deception tactics at worst.
(May 13-19, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 12 – Editorial)
Rotters and plotters in PMLQ
All hell has suddenly, though not inexplicably, broken loose in the PML.
Zafarullah Jamali and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain are at each other’s throats, despite the fact that Mr Jamali was handpicked by Chaudhry Shujaat to be prime minister of Pakistan and Chaudhry Shujaat was nominated by Zafraullah Jamali to be the interim prime minister eighteen months later. Differences cropped up in 2004 when Mr Jamali cosied up to Pir Pagaro hoping to strengthen his position as prime minister by combining it with that of party president. But his ambitious maneuverings proved disastrous for him. When Chaudhry Shujaat complained to General Pervez Musharraf about Mr Jamali’s attempt to poach his job, the “boss” was inclined to sympathise with him. The minor Baloch sardar with the lumbering laid back style had failed to come up to his boss’ expectations. So he had to go. Mr Jamali has since had the knife out for Chaudhry Shujaat.
Mr Humayun Akhtar Rehman has also decided this is a good time to kick the Chaudhries in the shin. He has laid the blame for the PMLQ’s “abysmal performance” at confronting a resurgent PPP at their door. Barely a month ago, Mr Rehman had boldly bypassed the Chaudhries, invited General Musharraf to his house in Lahore and made a direct pitch to him about his younger brother’s credentials for the post of Lahore nazim in the forthcoming local elections. Why is Humayun Akhtar trying to outflank the Chaudhries?
When General Musharraf decided to get rid of Mr Jamali, he thought the time had come to inject dynamism in both government and party. He wanted two younger and modern men running his ship of state. The names of Humayun Akhtar as prime minister and Mushahid Hussain as secretary-general of the PML were mooted. Chaudhry Shujaat accepted Mushahid Hussain because, as a latecomer to the party, Mr Hussain still had a lot of learning to do and would therefore be unable to challenge his mentorship. But Mr Akhtar was a different kettle of fish. He was filthy rich, quietly ruthless and overly ambitious. He was a Punjabi with the right “military” background. He had never strayed from the straight and narrow path prescribed by the military’s intelligence agencies. He had always won his Lahore seat by dint of hard work and financial largesse. He was modern without being liberal, and highly “presentable”, to boot. Chaudhry Shujaat must have reasoned that if Mr Akhtar became prime minister, he would not only be hard to dislodge in Islamabad in favour of Chaudhry Pervez Elahi one day but he might even begin to encroach on their Punjab fiefdom. In other words, far from strengthening their pre-eminent position in General Musharraf’s dispensation, the appointment of Mr Akhtar as prime minister could have spelt doom rather than just gloom for the Chaudhries. In the event, by leaning in favour of a political non-entity like Shaukat Aziz, Chaudhry Shujaat has incurred the hostility of Humayun Akhtar Rehman. It’s payback time now for the gent who claims the capacity to “fill the vacuum left over by the Sharifs in Lahore”.
The other disgruntled Muslim Leaguers in the fray these days – Saleem Saifullah, Manzoor Wattoo, Hamid Nasir Chattha, etc – are the usual rotters and plotters that one may expect to find in any King’s Party. They have a lot of nuisance value and little to contribute to General Musharraf’s kitty except trouble. But Pir Pagaro is in a league of his own. He remains a compulsive string puller in Sindh. Since his plan to hoist Jamali was foiled by Chaudhry Shujaat, the Sindh-Baloch grid is out to get the Punjabi Jats. Matters have worsened following the nasty spat between the Sindh CM, Arbab Rahim (Pagaro’s man) and Imtiaz Sheikh (Chaudries’ man).
All this is understandable. But what is inexplicable is the demand by Pir Pagaro for “packing up the assemblies”, the forecast by Saleem Saifullah that the deed is as good as done, and the warning by Kabir Wasti (who’s happily hooked into the intelligence agencies) that the worst may come true if all the politicians don’t get their act together and help General Musharraf put Pakistan in order. Surely, the Muslim League (and along with it all the rotters and plotters) would be the biggest loser in the event of a new election right now because the PPP would romp to power on the basis of the anti-establishment, anti-incumbent vote and the MMA would be able to clutch at anti-American sentiment in the tribal areas to retain its clout.
General Musharraf’s statement – “I’m talking to the PPP” in the midst of this PMLQ melee may give us a clue about what is afoot. It seems he has discerned the limitations of the PMLQ and its motley band of “leaders” and is casting about for new political actors to anchor his reformist agenda and create a truly national consensus for it. Under the circumstances, we may yet come to see a “national government” in Islamabad one day that retains all the current players but includes some from the PPP as a prelude to the re-election of Pervez Musharraf as President of Pakistan for a second term!
(May 20-26, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 13 – Editorial)
We are tired …
We are tired of endless talk of “enlightened moderation”. There isn’t a single member of General Pervez Musharraf’s cabal who is prepared to practice what the Boss preaches. There is no attempt at serious madrassa reform, with the ministry of religious affairs under Ejaz ul Haq at odds with the ministry of education under Gen (retd) Javed Ashraf Qazi. There is no reform of Hadood laws, with the PML allying with the MMA to stifle protest not just from the PPP but also from within the ruling party. There is no embarrassment at the demeaning of the “marathon” by the leaders of the PMLQ despite the fact that no so long ago General Musharraf was lauding the first international marathon (mixed) held in Lahore as a symbol of Pakistan’s return to normalcy. The rights of the minorities and women are under attack by the mullahs. And no one from the ruling party or government has stood up to defend these groups.
We are tired of the endless drone about the bright prospects of foreign investment in Pakistan and how we have irrevocably embarked on the path to nirvana. Pakistan is not even on the list of emerging markets published every week by The Economist. Indeed, our Foreign Office and Ministry of Interior are constantly urging foreign diplomats to keep a low public profile and restrict travel within Pakistan because of security concerns, even as our finance and commerce ministries are irked by the negative “travel advisories” recommended by the same diplomats to their fellow citizens and businessmen.
We are tired of hearing how the oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia and Iran will start gushing prosperity in Pakistan before long. The theme of “Pakistan as the gateway to Central Asia’s 300 million market” was unfurled by former PM Nawaz Sharif when he embarked on the Lahore-Islamabad motorway project in 1992. Three years later, after Pakistan’s obsessive meddling in Afghanistan had paved the way for the wretched Taliban, the oil and gas projects were reduced to classic pipedreams. Afghanistan is far from settled or stable and the Turkmenistan-Pakistan gas project is nowhere on the horizon. Now we hear that Gwadar is the shimmering gateway to Central Asia. But the Baloch, who should own it, are up in arms and not even the existing gas pipelines at Sui are safe anymore. Indeed, Chinese engineers have been killed or kidnapped, new exploration for oil and gas has halted and some foreign companies are thinking of pulling out from Balochistan.
We are tired of pious lectures on democracy and constitutionalism. There is no democracy in political parties and there is no constitutionalism in parliament. Irrespective of who is in power and who in opposition, every government claims to be democratic and every opposition condemns dictatorship. Every parliament trumpets its sovereignty and supremacy and every parliament pays obeisance to every elected autocrat and every coup-making dictator. The present system is particularly tiresome: neither the prime minister nor the leader of the opposition is from the party (PPP) that won the most votes in the last general elections; the chief proponent of the 17th constitutional amendment (MMA) is not prepared to sit in its chief institutional innovation (NSC); and the one-party system is creaking under the weight of its contradictions, with the ruling party squabbling over the spoils of the system on the eve of another round of controlled elections.
We are tired of self-righteous handouts from the NAB. We are tired of allegations of corruption against anti-government politicians and proclamations of virtue from pro-government ones. We are tired of VVIP movements. We are tired of asking why housing societies are allowed to skin unsuspecting citizens; why stock market scams continue to rock the markets; why car makers are able to influence government policy and get away with exorbitant premiums; why we can import cheap goods from far away China that hurt our local industry but not from next door India; why we still need more tanks and missiles and jets and ships when we have made the ultimate nuclear deterrent against war; why with 7-8% growth rates, billions of dollars in debt rescheduling and foreign aid, and unprecedented increases in tax revenues, we are still unable to dent the 30% poverty line and the 70% illiteracy rate; why we have a system of apartheid in education in which the vast majority has been denied access to English as a second language in the name of Islamic ideology and Pakistani nationalism and is rotting at the bottom of the social and economic heap while a small English-educated, Westernized elite hogs all the space; why the green passport is a sure shot recipe for suspicion and hostility abroad instead of being a welcome calling card, and so on, ad nauseam.
We are tired of self-serving reformers and faith healers. We are tired of democrats who act like dictators and dictators who pretend to be democrats. We are tired of tribal sardars, ethnic warlords, and feudals. And we at The Friday Times are VERY tired of offering the solutions over and over again!
(May 27- June 02, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 14 – Editorial)
Channel the truth, not block it
Several questions have arisen following Newsweek’s allegation and retraction regarding willful desecration of the Quran by American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. Did this happen? Was it reported earlier? Was action taken to stop it? Why were such interrogation tactics used? Why aren’t Westerners aware of Muslim sensitivities? Why is the Muslim world up in arms against it now? Why didn’t it protest as vehemently earlier?
In March 2003, The Washington Post noted allegations of Guantanamo detainees that “American soldiers insulted Islam by sitting on the Quran or dumping their sacred text into a toilet to taunt them”. There was no protest in the Muslim world. In 2004, a Newsmax report quoted a former Delta camp prisoner as saying that “late at night, drunken female soldiers used to come and trample on the Quran”. There was no Muslim protest. In March 2004, the UK’s Daily Mirror recounted how over 400 Camp X-Ray detainees went on hunger strike protesting about “a guard who kicked a copy of the Quran”. There was no Muslim protest. In August 2004, The Independent, London, quoted ex-Guantanamo Bay detainees as saying that “guards threw prisoners’ Qurans in toilets”. The same month, the Daily News, New York, repeated the charges. There was no Muslim protest. On June 28, 2004, the Financial Times, London, quoted a prisoner’s mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay: “They tore the Quran into pieces, then threw it into the toilet”. There was no Muslim protest. In January 2005, Associated Press reported lawyers for a Muslim detainee as saying “they made him watch as a Quran was flushed down the toilet”. There was no Muslim protest. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also highlighted similar situations but there has been no Muslim protest until now. Equally, since ex-Guantanamo prisoners started returning to Pakistan two years ago, the Urdu media has known of the willful desecration of the Quran during interrogation. But it didn’t provoke any public outrage. Why not?
One reason may have to do with the Muslim world’s “defensive” or “guilty” mindset following the vicious attacks of 9/11 which killed thousands of innocent people and provoked an angry Western backlash against the extremist preachers and practitioners of Islam. Indeed, governments in Muslim countries, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan, were so anxious to distance themselves from “Islamic terrorism” that they swooped down on suspected Islamic militants and handed them over to the Americans without regard to due process of law in their own countries, the legality of the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay and its interrogation methods being the least of their immediate concerns.
But in due course, this Muslim mindset was transformed into an aggressive and defiant psyche. This resulted from the indiscriminate American bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq, sweeping occupation, and thousands of dead civilians in “collateral damage”. The scandal of Abu Ghraib rubbed salt into Muslim wounds. When Americans started buying up copies of the Quran making it a bestseller, their intent seemed geared to one question only: why did Quran sanction violent “jihad and terrorism”? (After all, Muslims over the world didn’t pour over copies of the Bible or Torah when the Christian or Jewish colonists invaded and occupied their lands.) Here was further proof that for Muslims, America’s declaration of “war against terror” was just another way of sanctioning and unleashing a “war against Islam” and confirming Samuel Huntingdon’s dreaded “clash-of-civilizations” thesis. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, this general resentment was fueled by the MMA and the Taliban respectively – the former has become increasingly hostile towards General Musharraf while the latter is making a last ditch effort to destabilize Hamid Karzai.
It is true that Westerners are not terribly sensitive to Islamic culture in which both the letter and body of the Quran is revered. The reason for this is the secularization of culture and lost sensitivity to the sacred following two centuries of rapid democratic-materialist expansion in the First World. That is why, for example, when the Quran is desecrated in the midst of Third World Muslims, it provokes violent passions. As a corollary, the same incident is inclined to evoke images of “medievalism” in the modern Western mind whose historical memory is cluttered with Witch Hunts and Inquisitions.
But this explanation cannot condone the Guantanamo Bay interrogators. On the contrary, it explains the facility with which they consciously desecrated the Quran as a cold-blooded tactic to break the spirit of the detainees. Far from being ignorant or unaware, the interrogators were acutely seized of the religious sensitivities of their prisoners and they sought to exploit these for mundane reasons. That is why their premeditated crimes are all the more unforgivable.
Newsweek’s “retraction” proves that the American media is vulnerable to state pressure, not that the allegations were misplaced. President Bush should stop being in denial. Guantanamo Bay should be closed down, due process of law must apply to all prisoners and the offenders must be punished. An urgent cleansing program for many officers of the US government is needed. And public diplomacy should be used to channel the truth, not block it.
(June 3-9, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 15 – Editorial)
Signposts to hope
The continuing sectarian killings, brutalization of women and suppression of enlightened opinion are grim reminders of the havoc that the politicization of religion has wrought in Pakistan since General Zia ul Haq’s enforced Islamisation of the 1980s. Unfortunately, no civilian government since has had the guts to repeal or amend the Hudood, blasphemy, qisas, diyat and other suffocating edicts that masquerade as Islamic injunctions, despite the fact that only a simple parliamentary majority is needed to bury them. In fact, it was Nawaz Sharif who, as prime minister, authored the controversial Shariah bill in 1991 and tried in 1999 to ram through the 15th constitutional amendment bill that would have made him Amirul Momineen with omnipotent powers to decree right and wrong, vice and virtue. But today we discern significant signposts of hope on the horizon.
In a PMLQ meeting last month of women parliamentarians led by Ms Nelofar Bakhtiar, the head of the Women’s Welfare Ministry, the party president Shujaat Hussain was pressed to repeal the Hudood laws. Last week, President Musharraf openly called for “critical thinking” to review prevailing “Islamic” laws. And now the chairman of the Islamic Ideology Council, Dr Khalid Masud, has publicly noted that the Hudood Ordinances are man made laws and not scripture. He argued that the Hudood laws can and should be changed for the better because there are many aspects in them which conflict with Islamic laws, in particular those that relate to the difference between rape and adultery, crime and martyrdom.
The reconstituted Federal Shariat Court under Musharraf has recommended a critical review of the Hudood laws. The Women’s Welfare Ministry under Ms Bakhtiar has said that these laws must be undone and the pre-1979 Pakistan Penal Code be restored. The first Women’s Commission set up in 1985 by General Zia himself and headed by Begum Zari Sarfraz supported a review of these laws in 1985. Benazir Bhutto’s commission under Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid published its report in 1997, recommending a repeal of those Hudood laws that went against women’s rights. In 2000, Musharraf established a third Women’s Commission under Justice (retd) Majida Rizvi to examine such issues. This commission’s 2003 report asked the government to do away with the Hudood laws completely. Among the chorus of voices against these laws were: Justice (retd) M Shaiq Usmani; Syed Afzal Haider, a CII member; Chaudhry Naeem Shakir, the representative of the non-Muslims, Justice (retd) Nasir Aslam Zahid; and so on.
Chaudhry Shujaat, the PMLQ president, has often been accused of dragging his feet on repealing the Hudood Ordinances. But President Musharraf, we learn, has now confronted him with “the perception among foreign diplomats and PMLQ parliamentarians that the only hindrance in the repeal of the Hudood Ordinances happens to be the PLM leadership”. Chaudhry Shujaat has also been reminded that when he was briefly PM in 2004 he referred the Justice Rizvi report to the CII for comment and advice. In response, Chaudhry Shujaat has explained that the CII was brought into the equation following the emergence of three points of view: those in favour of a full repeal, those supporting the status quo, and those for a selective amendment. But following the CII’s open criticism of these laws, he has now proposed a two step course of action for Musharraf’s approval and PM Shaukat Aziz’s implementation. In a secret note to the President on May 20, 2005, in response to allegations of obfuscating the issue, Chaudhry Shujaat wrote: “ First, the law ministry may be asked to draft a bill on a consensus between the two perspectives: namely repeal and review, since both viewpoints agree that some replacement of the existing laws is necessary through amendments. Second, the Prime Minister should convene a meeting to decide how and when to table this bill… This meeting should include Justice Rizvi, Ms Bakhtiar, Dr Khalid Masud, Ejaz ul Haq, Mushahid Hussain, PMLQ President (Chaudhry Shujaat himself) and the leaders of the parties allied to the PMLQ.” The note ended with the observation that “hopefully, this process should be completed within 30 days ”.
The deadline expires in two weeks but a committee is nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, the budget will likely occupy us for all of June. We now hear that Chaudhry Shujaat is planning to take long leave abroad for health reasons. Does this mean that the issue is going to be shelved again? Has Musharraf been dealt another “hand” by his advisors, supporters and allies who don’t want to repeal the Hudood laws and lose the support of the mullahs in their coming electoral battles with the mainstream parties?
If the Hudood Ordinances are struck down, it will be a momentous occasion for the moderate and enlightened Pakistan that Musharraf dreams of building. There is greater symbolic value in ridding ourselves of these repressive and divisive laws in terms of turning back the tide of extremist political religion than even in the pragmatic about-turn of 9/11 that has breathed life into Pakistan’s economy.
(June 10-16, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 16 – Editorial)
Good, but challenges ahead
Pakistan has posted a GDP growth rate of 8.4% in 2004-05. This is an unprecedented and remarkable feat. Only China in the entire South and South East Asian region can boast of anything like this. Even India at its shining best touched 6.9% only. The notable part of this achievement is that the peak is contoured along progressively higher growth rates in the earlier years of the Musharraf regime – 1.8% in 2000-01, 3.1% in 2002-02, 5.1% in 2002-03 and 6.4% in 2003-04. The best part is that the economic turnaround has followed a belt-tightening and economic restructuring programme in which fiscal deficits have been brought down from 5.4% in 1999-00, 4.3% in 2000-01, 4.3% in 2001-02, 3.7% in 2002-03 and 3.3% in 2003-04. Full marks to PM Shaukat Aziz for successfully directing an economic recovery programme despite some distressing consequences for the social sector, employment and income distribution. The next step is to effectively manage and sustain high growth while addressing concerns of income distribution, inflation, investment, poverty alleviation and social sector uplift. How will Mr Aziz fare?
The high growth is a direct result of specific factors. First, there is an unprecedented high growth rate of 7.5% in agriculture largely due to favourable weather and water conditions. The agricultural growth rate was -2.2% (minus) in 2000-01, 0.1% in 2001-02, 4.1% in 2002-03 and 2.6% in 2003-04, which partly explains the low GDP growth rates of those years. This sector contributes about 25% to GDP. Since it grew by a measly 2.6% in 2003-04 and a gigantic 7.5% this year, this year’s high growth has contributed at least 2.5% points directly to the GDP growth rate of 8.4%. This year’s cotton crop of 15 million bales alone accounted for an additional 2.5% points of GDP growth. Also, this was a freak good year – only twice in the last 45 years has the agricultural growth rate exceeded 7.5%, the first time in 1984-85 (10.9%) when GDP growth recorded 8.7% growth and the last time in 1991-92 (9.5%) when GDP growth stood at 7.7%. So, if agricultural growth falls significantly next year, it will bring GDP growth down.
Second, with fixed investment/GDP (capital formation) ratios stagnant – 16% in 1999-00, 15.8% in 2000-01, 15.5% in 2001-02, 14.8% in 2002-03, 16.4% in 2003-04 and only 15.3% this year – it is clear that much of this year’s growth has been pump primed by consciously manipulating monetary and interest rate policy and relying on capacity utilization in the manufacturing sector rather than an overly significant rise in fixed investment to feed demand. The growth rate in the manufacturing sector – which accounts for over 18% of GDP – was 12.5% this year compared to 14.1% in 2003-04, 6.9% in 2002-03 and 4.5% in 2001-02. Within this sector, large-scale manufacturing grew by a whopping 18.2% this year, compared to 10.5% in 2001-02, 10.7% in 2002-03 and 11.8% in 2003-04. Thus this year’s growth was largely attributed to high growth in the textiles, cement, automobile and consumer durables sectors, the first fueled by a good cotton crop, the second by demand from Afghanistan and Iraq and the third and fourth by soft lending-lease bank policies encouraged by the government and State Bank of Pakistan. So, without a substantial increase in the fixed investment/GDP ratio on account of a major increase in manufacturing, further growth in this sector will be fully inflationary and unsustainable .
The government’s budget for 2004-05 shows an understanding of these factors. Allocations for the Public Sector Development Plan are up by 34.7%, aimed at social and economic infrastructure development, including waterways improvement. Import duty reductions are geared to make manufacturing inputs cheaper, encourage output/investment and stimulate demand. Tax/duty incentives are aimed at making textiles more competitive in export markets and spurring investment. A tax collection target of an additional Rs 100 bn, coupled with bank borrowings of only Rs 18 bn more than last year, is expected to lead to a low fiscal deficit of 3.8%. This is aimed at keeping tabs on inflation. The rest of the budget seeks to rationalize the economy by bringing it in line with WTO requirements (import duty reductions) and donor agency conditionalities (low fiscal deficit). Accordingly, the GDP growth target is fixed more modestly at just above 7% and inflation is targeted to fall into a single digit.
The policy shift from pump priming the economy to real, sustainable, high growth with low inflation, that doesn’t rely on extraneous, transient or extraordinary factors, is not going to be easy. The need to give something concrete to the people in terms of employment, security and incomes – that overrides statistical achievements – is going to be even harder. Political instability and institutional incapacity to meet targets, especially on inflation, will be the government’s biggest bugbears. The challenge for Shaukat Aziz, and by association General Musharraf, is to overcome these obstacles swiftly. They could have had a good stab at it by freezing defence expenditures and using the additional billions to alleviate poverty. But defence remains a holy cow beyond anyone’s jurisdiction.
(June 17-23, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 17 – Editorial)
Mukthar Mai’s “strength & resilience not for export”
Mukhtar Mai was publicly gang raped on the orders of a village jirga in Meerwala, Southern Punjab. When Mukhtar refused to be cowed down, Pakistani human rights groups helped propel her cause across the globe so that she became an international icon for battered and bruised women. After Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times wrote about her ordeal, donations of over $100,000 poured in to help set up a school and rehabilitation centre for women like herself. What did the government do?
It was compelled to arrest the alleged rapists and order a trial. But it was so peeved at Mr Kristoff for “hurting Pakistan’s image” that it refused to allow him to return to Pakistan. Nor did it care to seriously prosecute the rapists. Indeed, when the court ordered their release from prison last year, it frowned upon police apathy in marshalling evidence and pursuing conviction. But the judiciary received bitter public censure. When had “lack of evidence” ever stopped it from furthering the dirty political agendas of governments in the past? What did the government do?
It detained the alleged rapists on the pretext of law and order. But it didn’t do anything to expedite their trial in the Supreme Court. Its promise to build a “crisis control” shelter for women in Meerwala remains hollow.
Mukhtar was recently invited by a group of concerned Pakistani-American physicians to tell them how they might help alleviate the plight of oppressed women like herself. This was a noble effort from conscience-stricken, affluent Pakistanis abroad who want to “do something good” for their motherland. What did the government do?
The courts sprang into action in defense of “justice” and ordered the alleged rapists freed. The government curtailed Mai’s freedom on the pretext of “security”. Then it secretly whisked her away to Islamabad and pressured her to call off her trip to America because it would hurt Pakistan’s “image”. Nelofer Bakhtiar, the PM’s “advisor” on women-matters, dragged Mukhtar to a shoddy “show conference” on Tuesday and refused to allow her to utter a free sentence. Mukhtar whispered that she was in “virtual house arrest in Meerwala”, she insisted her name should be removed from the ECL, she said she wanted her freedom. But Bakhtiar aggressively egged her on to say that she had decided not to go to America because her mother had taken ill. Asked about the nature of her mother’s illness, Mukhtar was conspicuously silent. Bakhtiar also announced that Mukhtar’s security cordon which includes six commandoes outfitted in menacing black would not be relaxed. Later, Mukhtar was taken to the US embassy to retract her application for a visa and her passport was seized by her Pakistani handlers. As a propaganda stunt, the interior minister then announced that her name had been taken off the ECL.
Of course, the net effect is exactly the opposite of what the government intended. “Musharraf’s Pakistan” has been catapulted into the eye of an international media storm. Mr Kristoff has written an article in The New York Times headlined: “Mai: raped, kidnapped and silenced”, a devastating indictment of the government’s misplaced concreteness about manufacturing a “soft” image of Pakistan. His angry conclusion: “Musharraf has gone nuts”. Mukhtar’s hosts are dismayed. Every major Pakistani newspaper has criticized the government for mishandling this issue and urged it to let the woman go abroad. Christina Rocca, the US Secretary of State for South Asia, as well as a spokesman of the US embassy in Islamabad, has lamented the restrictions on Mukhtar. And The Independent in London wrote: “When Time magazine nominated Ms Mai as one of Asia’s heroes, it commented: ‘As long as the state refuses to fully challenge the brutality of tribal law, the plight of Pakistani women will continue. Mukhtar Mai is a symbol of their victimhood, but in her resilience she is also a symbol of their strength.’ In the end, it seems, that strength and resilience was not for export.”
And what has the government done? It is in a shambles, scrounging around for scapegoats and clutching at conspiracy theories.
Who is responsible for this sordid state of affairs in which General Musharraf is personally becoming the “fall-guy” for the international media? Bad advice by more-loyal-than-the-king ministers and khakis constantly shows up Musharraf in a bad light despite his avowed good intentions and sincerity. What might Mukhtar have said and done if she had been allowed to go abroad?
She would have shed light on the horrible practice of tribal jirgas and dilated upon the plight of rural women. She might have tried to raise public awareness about the desperate need to set up women’s shelters. What’s new about that? General Musharraf himself never tires of exhorting Pakistanis to abandon vicious tribal and feudal practices and is constantly asking for foreign funds to help alleviate their lot.
The bungling of Mukhtar Mai’s case is a monumental blunder that will cost Musharraf’s government.
(July 1-7, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 19 – Editorial)
Musharraf’s tactics over strategy
The political system and strategy cobbled by General Pervez Musharraf’s advisors in 2002 seems to be unraveling in the run up to the local body elections in 2005. The “revolutionary” grassroots system so beloved of General Tanvir Naqvi has been finally overthrown by the provinces. The Military Mullah Alliance once so dear to the military establishment has become a millstone around its neck. The Muslim League that was usurped from Nawaz Sharif (so that it could be united and groomed as the King’s Party) is riven with dissent. And efforts to woo the PPP of Benazir Bhutto in order to broaden the base of the regime have amounted to zilch. With Washington and the international community keen on greater democracy, stability, continuity and predictability, we are not terribly sanguine about the political outlook.
General Naqvi, the founder of the high-sounding National “Reconstruction” Bureau, has already become a footnote in Pakistani history. The “revolutionary” local body system that was supposed to become an umbilical chord between the military establishment in Islamabad and the grassroots politician below has been spiked by provincial governments. The Punjab PML government has amended the Local Government Act by giving the chief minister full powers over district nazims. In Sindh, the PML government has blithely gerrymandered districts to undermine the PPP’s prospects. Now it has chickened out from holding the elections and ordered the city and district governments not to pass their budgets. But the Jamaat i Islami’s Karachi government has defied the provincial government’s orders. Meanwhile, the government’s current partner (MQM) and former partner (MMA) are sharpening their knives for a full blooded encounter in Karachi if the local polls are held. And everywhere the PML naib-nazims are demanding the accountability of PML nazims across the board while half the members of the PML are insisting that the local polls should be postponed.
The Military Mullah Alliance was manufactured by the establishment and the mullahs were handed more than 60 seats in parliament, two seats in the National Security Council and the slot of the leader of the opposition. They were also catapulted into power in two provinces and Karachi. Now they have become a millstone around General Musharraf’s neck. They refuse to sit in the NSC, they refuse to help the war against terror; they refuse to support the India-Kashmir initiatives, they refuse to allow enlightened amendments to the blasphemy and Hudood laws. Worse, they refuse to prop up General Musharraf as president or army chief.
The Muslim League that was usurped from Nawaz Sharif and strapped to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Mushahid Hussain so that it could become a strong, united and fierce fighting force, is bitterly divided. Its Punjab members are against holding local elections not because they can’t win them but because they don’t want the Chaudhries to claim credit for victory and entrench themselves politically. General Musharraf is constantly involved in negotiating truces between its feuding members who are either former prime ministers or future prime ministerial hopefuls – first between Zafarullah Jamali and Chaudhry Shujaat and recently between Humayun Akhtar Khan and Chaudhry Shujaat. Meanwhile, the former president of Pakistan, Farooq Leghari, the former chief minister of Punjab, Manzur Wattoo, and the former head of the Muslim League (J), Hamid Nasir Chattha, are all conspiring to dethrone the Chaudhries. And what are the Chaudhries doing? They are lining up with the Jamaat i Islami to take aim at friends within and enemies without.
Finally, attempts to woo the PPP and PMLN into the fold without Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have stalled. Mr Asif Zardari’s silence since he was released from prison and allowed to leave the country is as stunning as Mr Shahbaz Sharif’s since he was allowed to exit his gilded cage in Saudi Arabia and ensconce himself in London. Both of them are, as Chaudhry Shujaat famously put it, “zeros without Nawaz and Benazir”. But neither Ms Bhutto will relent to a civilian Musharraf as president of Pakistan without a full withdrawal of the cases against her and free rein in the forthcoming general elections, nor will Mr Sharif settle for anything less than the unequivocal exit of General Musharraf and the army from politics. The only option for General Musharraf is to break both parties afresh and compel the new rumps to join his camp in preparation for 2007.
But that’s where it all began in 1999, didn’t it, imprisonment and exile, the making of cases, the breaking of parties, the system change, the pre-election rigging and the constitutional wheeling and dealing?
From 1999 to 2001, the military regime seemed strong at home but weak abroad. After 9/11, it seemed strong at home and strong abroad. Come 2007, however, after the war against terror has abated, and the honeymoon with the Bush regime has fizzled out, and institutional stability is still missing and a national consensus is lacking on the strategic goals of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf could be faced with the prospect of being shown up as weak at home and weak abroad.
This might happen if he continues to make tactical maneuvers for political survival in the short term while losing sight of the national strategic objectives in the long run.
(June 24-30, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 18 – Editorial)
Who’s afraid of Johnny Walker?
In the time of “do-er” Shahbaz Sharif’s Punjab government, a brutish, uneducated fellow called Saad Rafique was the Muslim League’s prime NGO-basher. He was constantly foaming at the mouth about the “Westernised NGOs and their unholy agendas.” His bile was especially reserved for Non-Government Organisations concerned with the plight of women. In General Pervez Musharraf’s time, that dubious role has gone to Shahzad Waseem, the junior home minister. His recent fit in Mukhtar Mai’s case – calling NGOs “vultures and crows” – was also of epileptic proportions. He accused them of exploiting the issue “for a dinner with John and Johnny Walker”. He thundered about their bank balances and foreign funds. Not to be outdone, Nilofer Bakhtiar, the government’s advisor on, believe it or not, “women’s affairs”, said that the “country’s dirty linen shouldn’t be washed in public by NGOs with foreign-driven agendas.”
These are small fry whose bark is worse than their bite. But it is recurring remarks by General Musharraf against NGOs that are troubling. He says that “Westernised fringe elements” constantly seek to “bad mouth Pakistan”. He believes they are as bad as the religious extremists. His ire is mainly targeted at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. He simply cannot stomach Asma Jehangir, the HRCP’s brave and internationally acknowledged UN rapporteur. Ironically, the mullahs accuse General Musharraf of exactly the same thing. He is, they say, a “Western stooge pursuing an anti-Pakistan agenda”, while lambasting the NGOs and Ms Jehangir in the same vein.
But there is an even greater irony here. Who is the biggest recipient of Western funding in Pakistan? The Government of Pakistan (GoP), of course, which is up to its ears in debt of about US$38b. Who is constantly currying favour with the IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, etc for handouts to develop the social sector ? None other than the GoP. Where do our finance ministers, prime ministers and governors of the State Bank come from? The World Bank and Citibank. Who is the greatest beneficiary of Western aid? The Pakistan Army, whose latest submarines and helicopters and fighter aircraft are all branded “Made in USA”, or “France” etc. Worse, who are Johnny’s best friends and the greatest guzzlers of Johnny Walker if not the Johnnies-come-lately of this “moderately unenlightened” regime from top to bottom? So if Western money and booze is sauce for the goose, why isn’t it sauce for the gander?
The NGO phenomenon is predicated on the failure of the third world state and governments to provide for their citizens, especially in the social sector. If these governments had fulfilled their part of the social contract, there would have been no need for donor agencies to shepherd NGOs into the delivery system. Therefore, the greater the state failure and government corruption, the greater the role of the NGOs in alleviating poverty, empowering women and protecting minorities. Under the circumstances, the more General Musharraf’s rails against the NGOs and belittles their achievements, the greater the ignominy he heaps upon himself in the eyes of the international community.
Who is there in today’s Pakistan, like Abdul Sattar Edhi, whose name and work will live long after our self-serving democrats and self-righteous dictators have turned to dust? The work of the Aga Khan Foundation for social uplift, of Akhtar Hameed Khan in the slums of Karachi, of Aurat Foundation and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan – yes, the HRCP – in defence of women’s and minority rights, will be lauded as noble efforts in the service of Pakistan’s defenseless.
What is it about empowering women and protecting minorities and defending children that so upsets every government in Pakistan? Is it because it exposes a government’s bankruptcy in combating these ills? But that is an argument to rectify a wrong, not put a blanket of deceit over it. Democratic and accountable governments are expected to make such violations of the law test cases in demonstrating sincerity and goodwill, instead of cursing the media for unveiling the truth or condemning the NGOs for demanding justice.
While governments are obsessed with hollow statistics of growth, most NGOs are genuinely concerned with life and death issues, where citizens are not the faceless masses but people with hopes and fears, aspirations and crushing disappointments. If it weren’t for many NGOs and courageous citizens like Mukhtar Mia and their determined efforts to uproot socially brutal practices from state and society, there would be no civil society – and by corollary, no spirit of democracy – in Pakistan. If it weren’t for the NGOs, and if we may say, the independent press, there would be no wave of revulsion against “honour” killings and gang rapes, there would be no incentive to reform the blasphemy and Hudood laws, there would be no interest in the plight of political prisoners etc. Indeed, were it not for the work of some trusted NGOs, our avaricious elites might not have been inclined to share their bounty to provide education and health care to the country’s poor. So let’s stop bashing them for daring to succeed where governments are hopelessly susceptible to failure.
(July 8-14, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 20 – Editorial)
Oppression of women by religion
A bizarre case in India last June, in which a Muslim woman was raped by her father-in-law, has drawn nasty world headlines against Islam rather than India It has raised issues of tribal patriarchal “democracy”, Islamic “justice”, sectarian jurisprudence, political opportunism and the nature of the uneasy co-existence between Muslim personal law and the secular criminal code in India. Worse, it has stirred the Hindutva’s venomous anti-Islam propaganda machine into action. This is what happened.
Imrana Ilahi, wife of Noor Ilahi and mother of five, was raped in early June by her father-in-law, Ali Mohammad, in Muzaffarnagar district of western Uttar Pradesh in India. The village panchayat of Muslim elders swiftly decreed that under “Islamic” law Imrana was henceforth equivalent to her husband’s “mother”, and that her marriage to Noor Ilahi had become invalid and she could not live with him any longer. The panchayat also handed over the rapist Ali Mohammad to the police for trial and punishment under India’s secular criminal law . When the attention of the Darul Uloom mullahs in Deoband who follow the Hanafi fiqh or jurisprudence code like most Sunni Indians was drawn to the case, they issued a fatwa supporting the panchayat’s actions as correct under “Islamic” law. Indeed, a couple of Deobandi members of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board that is supposed to oversee applications of Muslim personal law in India have supported the panchayat.
The critique of the Deobandi fatwa comes from ulema within the various fiqhs of Sunni Islam, especially the Shafai, but is not confined to it. There is a split in the Hanafi ulema too. The Shia fiqh and many Muslim intellectuals and scholars have also criticized the position taken by the Deobandis. Recourse is being taken to the Quran, Hadith, Sunnah and Shariah for or against the proposition that Imrana’s marriage to Noor Ilahi has become invalid because the act of ‘sex’ with her father-in-law has made her equivalent to Noor’s mother. Questions of what constitutes ‘marriage’, ‘sex’ and rape have arisen. Linguistics and history have been marshaled – apparently, the Arabic word for ‘marriage’ at the time of the Prophet (pbuh) is the same as the Arabic word for ‘sex’ today and this is confusing the issue. The debate on shariah law is asking whether fiqh can be reformed or modified in light of the principles of ijtihad . The secular critique has also raised a pertinent question: why should Imrana be subject to controversial Muslim personal law while her rapist Ali Mohammad is to be tried under India’s uniform secular criminal code and not stoned to death as required under Islamic law? Finally, feminists have jumped into the fray, condemning the outrage as an expression of patriarchal tribal customs masquerading as religious laws. Apparently, Muzaffarnagar is reputed to be the crime center of UP. It also has a tradition of caste and religious panchayats – of Jats, Dalits, and other Hindu castes and also of Muslims. These panchayats are notorious for barbaric edicts, resulting in lynching, forced marriages and violent attacks on women, Dalits and poor people. Local governments and politicians haven’t intervened because they have increasingly come to rely on communal and caste mobilization for votes and power.
The debate has revealed some little known facts about the application of personal law in India. There is a Personal Law in India for all communities. For example Hindu Personal Law recognizes the concept of the Hindu Joint Family (Muslim Joint Families are not recognized though the Joint Family is an Indian tradition, not a Hindu one) and enables it to file a common tax return, thereby lowering the tax burden for the head of the family called the Karta .
The media too has come in for some stick. It is asked why there is a tendency in the mainstream Indian media to highlight instances of ‘oppressed’ Muslim women while downplaying or even ignoring similar or worse cases of oppression of Hindu women, including of such heinous crimes as ‘sati’ and girl-child sacrifice that are not practiced by any non-Hindu community, including Muslims.
Finally, the role of the ‘secular’ Indian political parties has attracted perceptive comment. Except for the Marxists, none of the secular parties, including the Congress, has condemned the Deobandi fatwa or called for a review of such laws and practices. No one wants to antagonize the ulema who still control the Muslim vote bank. This political opportunism merely reinforces the hold of the ulema on India’s Muslims.
The fate of Imrana and other women like her, regardless of caste or creed, hangs in the balance among ignorant mullahs, vicious Hindutva ideologues, opportunist secular politicians and parties, unprincipled hacks and tribal patriarchs. But, as interfaith scholars have pointed out, the spirited ijtihad of the fatwa suggests that a new Muslim leadership is in the making in India, sensitive to the real-world concerns of voices like Imrana who refuse to be muted. Here in Pakistan, too, Mukhtar Mai’s resolute courage in the face of a similar ordeal has challenged us to stand up and protest the exploitation of religion by tribal patriarchies as the opiate of the masses. We should not let one half of humanity suffer at the hands of the other half.
(July 15-21, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 21 – Editorial)
9/11 and now 7/7
There are significant similarities and differences between the attackers of civilian targets on 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London. These help explain the nature of the problem of “civilisational terrorism” and its possible outcome.
Both were acts of war by so-called “Islamist” extremists described as “Al-Qaeda”. But in war, as we know, civilian targets have always been legitimate objectives of state terror. Hitler bombed London, Churchill bombed Dresden, the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Al Qaeda bombed New York, Bush bombed Afghanistan, Blair helped bomb Iraq, and Al Qaeda has bombed Madrid and London. More civilians have died in wars than soldiers.
Both were an avowed terror-begets-terror blowback of American/British imperialistic policies of the last two decades, most notably in Muslim-targeted areas of Bosnia, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. Apparently, suicide bombing makes sense to the defenseless when their targets are ‘’hard” and the enemy is wealthy, well armed and highly intelligent. Thus suicide bombing is more a strategy against “occupation and violation” than a measure of “Islamic fundamentalism”. Suicide bombings were common in the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s. But over 70% of the suicide bombers were Christians from predominantly secular groups. Until 2003, there were over 300 such incidents involving more than 450 suicidal attackers, mostly in Sri Lanka, Israel, Chechnya, Iraq and New York, of which less than 50% came from religiously affiliated groups. Thus suicide terrorism was a rational war strategy against occupying forces: the United States left Lebanon; Israel withdrew from Lebanon and now (much of) the West Bank; Sri Lanka gave the Tamils a semi-autonomous state, and Spain recently withdrew its forces from Iraq. In recent times suicide bombing has been especially favoured as a weapon of war because the occupying force and the ‘’occupied” insurgents come from different religious backgrounds. The Tamil ethnic minority in Sri Lanka is mostly Hindu and Christian; the Sinhalese majority are Buddhists, the Bush/Blair/Sharon occupying forces are Christian or Jewish while the suicide bombers are Muslim. In fact, the suicide impulse in the Middle East can be traced back to the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, when thousands of Iranian soldiers marched to certain death against Iraqi tank formations bent on invading and occupying their land. That strain of self-sacrifice then spread into Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq.
Both the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks were carried out by young men who were generally more educated and better off than their countrymen. They were in the mould of Omar Sheikh and not, as Bush and Blair would have us believe, the dregs of the earth jealous of the good fortune of the west.
The differences are equally instructive. The 9/11 bombers were non-Americans of Arab origin. The 7/7 bombers were British citizens of Pakistani origin. The 9/11 bombers were all imported into America for the mission. The 7/7 bombers were second generation homespun British Muslims. This would suggest that as long as Bush and Blair remain in occupation of Muslim lands, future Muslim bombers need not be Islamic fundamentalists in the religious sense and need not belong to any given country of origin. Religion will henceforth only be a political marker of separateness and identity in a pan-nationalistic environment of protest and resistance rather than in the fundamentalist sense of religiosity.
Some interesting facts about the composition of the Pakistani immigrant population of Britain might prove useful in understanding what happened on 7/7 and what to expect in the future. One recent study shows that a majority of the Pakistani-origin immigrants in the UK are Kashmiri who are concentrated in four regions: Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester and Glasgow. But because of their high birthrate, nearly 47 percent are under 16, as compared to 17 percent for their compatriot whites. Their unemployment rate is five times the British average; and the crime rate is higher among them than in any other community. Nearly 2 percent of the prisoners rotting in British jails are Pakistani, the highest for any one community. No wonder the suicide bombers came from among them rather than from among the Muslims of East African or Indian origin.
The tragedy is that many of these UK Muslims have stubbornly resisted integration with British society. The pan-Islamic nationalist feeling of persecution in the Middle East, Kashmir and Chechnya has forced them to recede into defensive isolation. Worse, successive British governments have ignored the takeover of British Muslim mosques by extremist imams and khateebs from Pakistan belonging to the Deobandi fiqh that supplied the Taliban in Afghanistan. In exchange, Britain has exported the Hizbul Tahrir to Pakistan. This is an organisation that facilitates a zone of contact between alienated British Pakistanis and salafi Arab ideologues bent upon overthrowing national democracy and replacing it with pan-Islamic khilafat .
Thomas Friedman is only partly right when he says that this is a Muslim problem and moderate Muslims had better resolve it themselves. This is the “good Muslim-if you’re-with-us and bad Muslim if-you’re-against-us” analysis that ignores the critical role of imperialistic occupation. Similarly, Robert Fisk is only partly right when he says that it is blowback time from Afghanistan and Iraq and Palestine. The truth is more complex and the blameworthy are many, not a few. The governments of Pakistan, UK and USA should take note.
(July 22-28, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 22 – Editorial)
Asking the right questions
President-General Pervez Musharraf generally cannot resist the temptation to blow his own trumpet regarding the “many achievements of his government on the economic and foreign policy front”. In the past few days he has also been speaking about how religious extremism is hurting Pakistan and threatening to erode the hard-won fruits of his reform programme. Every concerned citizen therefore wants to know how he intends to deal with it. We wonder, though, whether he will have the courage, now that he has spoken against it, to call it “religious extremism” rather than simply “extremism” and whether he will not try to “balance” it by referring negatively to the “extremism of the liberals and overly westernized elements” in Pakistan – a red herring, if ever there was one, and a sure sign of pussyfooting on the real issue.
Following 7/7, as news of the inevitable “Pakistan connection” has flooded the media, General Musharraf has ordered the police to “crack down on extremists”, to seize their proscribed “hate literature” and to stop the mullahs from exploiting the public through misplaced sermons on and off the loudspeakers. Dozens of third and fourth grade suspected militants have been detained from amongst sectarian groups. Is this for real?
Not really. How many times have we seen a cynical – “arrest the usual suspects” – approach unfold in response to some passing exigency? We saw it after 9/11 when the American administration outlawed a number of extremist religious organisations based in Pakistan. We saw it when the assassination attempts on President Musharraf took place. We saw it when Pakistan-based extremists on the orders of Maulana Masood Azhar of the Jaish-e Mohammad bombed the Indian parliament in December 2002 and President-General Musharraf made a public commitment in January 2003 that he would not allow the export of terrorism from Pakistan under any circumstances. We saw it when the American journalist Danny Pearl was kidnapped and executed by similarly misguided people. We saw it after the church bombing in Islamabad. We saw it when links were definitely confirmed between Musharraf’s would-be assassins, jihadis, religious parties, sectarian groups, Taliban and foreign Al Qaeda elements hiding in Pakistan’s tribal areas or in her urban jungles. Indeed, if the number of “extremists” arrested in all these swoops is tallied, there should be no “extremists” left in the country. But, of course, they were all released. Was it lack of evidence or was it an inability or unwillingness to stitch the evidence and get convictions? Frankly, it is ridiculous to have the spectacle of the President-General of a country in its 58th year of independence specifically ordering the police to “enforce the law and writ of the state” by cracking down on hate literature and stopping the misuse of mosque loudspeakers by extremists bent on poisoning the minds of citizens when the extremist leaders of the Jaish and Lashkar and dozens of other such groups and madrassahs are regularly denouncing President-General Musharraf in public fora and advocating terrorism.
Can we uproot religious extremism simply by pious “exhortations” from time to time? No, we can’t. What has happened to madrassah reform? Damn all. What is the fate of the textbooks that are littered with jihadi slogans and ideological propaganda by those who opposed the creation of Pakistan? They are alive and kicking. What is the state of the blasphemy and Hudood laws that give Pakistan a bad name because they are patently unfair and unjust? They remain untouched. How does President-General Musharraf react to those who would expose such miscarriage of justice and demand reform? He puts them on the Exit Control List (Mukhtar Mai) and calls them “liberal-terrorists in the pay of foreign masters” (human rights and pro-women NGOs)! What is his relationship with the mainstream political parties who could provide him with the public support and political space to uproot religious extremism from Pakistan? They have been rent asunder and their leaders have been exiled.
Senator Mushahid Hussain says that “Pakistan’s case” was not defended adequately after 7/7 by Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s High Commissioner in London. Mr Munir Akram, Pakistan’s UN representative, has accused Britain of being a beehive of terrorism. Both gentlemen are obsessed with the bad image of Pakistan and are looking for scapegoats to obscure the reality they know only too well. Britain, incredibly enough, is asking all the right questions and is trying to find answers in the right spirit of tolerance and multi-cultural accommodation.
Indeed, it is time to start asking serious questions about President Musharraf’s viability as the right man for the urgent task of turning Pakistan round. If this exercise is left unattended for much longer, the ideology and practices of the terrorist borderlands of Pakistan could invade the rest of the country in the name of “religion” and overwhelm the silent majority’s urge for freedom, moderation and democracy. Under the circumstances, the mullah-military alliance must be buried for all times to come if Pakistan is to survive and consolidate itself as a modern nation-state.
(July 29-Aug 4, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 23 – Editorial)
Al-Qaeda vs The Rest
General Pervez Musharraf is obviously stung by international allegations that Pakistan remains a breeding ground for Islamic extremists with global objectives. The latest affront follows the bombings in London and Egypt. Three of the London bombers, despite their ‘British’ nationality but because of their Pakistani origins, had clear connections with Pakistan-based ‘native’ extremists in some hard line jihadi lashkars , fundamentalist religious parties and notorious seminaries, much like Omar Sayeed Sheikh earlier. Equally, circumstantial evidence of Pakistani nationals in Egypt on or about the scene of the latest Sharm-el-Sheikh bombings cannot be shrugged away. It is also obvious that the British and Egyptian governments would dearly love to shift the blame for their own policy failures to preclude or anticipate, uncover and crush extremism among their own citizens and nationals. But the facts speak for themselves.
Afghanistan was the original breeding ground for Islamic jihad in the 1980s when the ‘international community’ led by the United States, and aided by Saudi Arabia, paid Pakistan’s military establishment to conduct the war against communist USSR and its protégés in Kabul. Osama bin Ladin was then the favoured son of all the key players. He funded the destabilisation of the Benazir Bhutto government in 1989 because it was inimical to the military establishment’s strategic goals in India and Afghanistan. It was also during the time of Gen Javed Nasir as DG-ISI that Egyptian Islamists on the run from President Hosni Mobarak’s security agencies descended in droves on Peshawar and began to organise terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani intelligence agencies wanted to use radical Islamists to fulfil their own strategic objectives in Kabul and India while the Islamists saw this as an opportunity to establish a sovereign base area for jihad on a world scale. Egypt’s blind orator Omar Abdul Rehman of the Gama’a Islamiyya party planned the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York through Ramzi Yusuf of Pakistan while Omar Abdur Rehman’s son organised the murder of Hazara Shias in Quetta on behalf of Osama bin Laden, who in turn was supporting his son’s father-in-law, Mulla Umar of Afghanistan. It was upon Mulla Umar’s seizure of Kabul in 1997 that the dye was cast for the formation of OBL’s coveted base area of radical Islam.
In due course, the Taliban, the Pakistan-sponsored Kashmir jihad and the OBL-sponsored world jihad all gelled into one great pan-Islamic jihad. In 1997, 62 people were killed by terrorists at Luxor in Egypt, after which President Mobarak moved to suppress radical Islamists in his country, with the main Islamist organisation Ikhwan al-Muslimoon publicly abjuring terrorism. The resort attack, it may be recalled, was carried out by three suicide bombers who were quickly owned by an organisation calling itself Al Qaeda, “as response to the global evil powers which are spilling the blood of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Chechnya” In 1998, the US rained dozens of cruise missiles over training camps in Afghanistan in search of OBL but failed to get him. OBL hit back on 9/11 in New York and Washington. When the Taliban refused to hand over OBL to Washington, Afghanistan was bombed, the Taliban were sent packing and OBL disappeared into thin air. Following the American invasion of Iraq, a global Islamic resistance movement was born transcending nationality, ethnicity, class and gender, which has come to be labelled Al-Qaeda.
Radical Islamic Pakistanis, Egyptians, Britons, Indonesians, Malaysians, Algerians, Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks, Afghans, Turks, etc have all joined hands to avenge injustice against Muslim ‘nations’ and ‘peoples’ by non-Muslim nations and their Muslim allies. From the assassination of Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat by Egyptian Islamists in 1981 to the 2002-03 assassination attempts on Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, on the orders of Al-Qaeda, the journey of radical Islam from a national political base in Egypt to an international globalised movement is complete. That is why it is not useful for London and Washington and Cairo and Islamabad to point fingers at each another and try and pass the buck. If Arabs can bomb Washington and Britons can bomb Britain and Egyptians/Pakistanis can attack General Musharraf, it is likely that future Al-Qaeda attacks will be carried out by pan-Islamists who do not recognise national identities or national borders or national headquarters.
General Musharraf is therefore right when he says “it is a misconception that Pakistan is Al Qaeda’s headquarters” He is also right when he says that the causes that sustain it like injustice and oppression have to be removed for it to be uprooted. But he is wrong when he insists that “Osama bin Laden’s network does not exist in Pakistan anymore because its command structure in Pakistan has been destroyed”. The fact is that OBL’s network exists in Pakistan and in every country that allows radical Islamic groups and political parties and jihadi lashkars and sectarians to flourish in one form or another. Al Qaeda cannot be eliminated as long as such non-state actors are allowed to breed and sustain the movement. This will become evident when retreating Islamic radicals all over the world determine to fight their final battles in their original base areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
(August 5-11, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 24 – Editorial)
Facing global realities
Ask a British citizen (with a British passport) of Pakistani origin in Manchester or Leeds about his identity and he is most likely to say: “I am a Muslim; I am a Pakistani; I am British.” Ask the same person on a PIA flight from London to Lahore to fill out the immigration entry form in Urdu and the chances are that he may note his Quamiyat (nationality) as “Islam” rather than “Pakistani” or British. Ask the same question of a British citizen (with a British passport) of Indian origin and Hindu faith and he is most likely to say: “I am British; I am Indian”. Full stop. There is no reference to “religion” in anchoring nationality or identity. Instead the reference is primarily to the sovereign nation-state of current or original origin. Much the same response is likely to come from British citizens of Chinese origin and Confucian faith or British citizens of any other national origin and Christian faith. What does this mean?
It suggests that expatriate Pakistanis, wherever they may be, are increasingly inclined in the new globalizing world to contextualize their identity within an Islamic framework while citizens of other countries and faiths are moving in the opposite direction. In other words, while globalization and freer movement and settlement of people across national boundaries is increasing, the concomitant process of a multiple layering of identities sits uneasily on expatriate Pakistani shoulders even as non-Muslim non-Pakistanis are quite comfortable with it. What does this signify?
The theory of “clash of civilizations” is essentially predicated on the incompatibility of the expansive forces of globalization (the need for multiple identities in a competitive but secular mode) with the pan-Islamic movement for core identity and exclusive representation. Thus its premise is that while both globalization and pan-Islamism seek to transcend territoriality, or both are involved in de-territorialisation, the former seeks to do this in a secular mode while the latter is by definition in religious mode. On the face of it, therefore, expatriate Muslims living and working in Western societies are primed to fit the theory of “clash of civilizations”. Certainly, recent events in Britain bear this out where British Muslim citizens of non-British origin sought to bomb fellow citizens for a pan-Islamic ideological cause.
But there is another and more positive way of looking at the problem. The increasing deterritorialisation of Islam as culture is, in fact, a result of globalization and westernization and has little to do with Islam as religion. It is, in fact, through an increase in migration whereby, according to one estimate, one third of the world’s Muslims now live in non-Muslim societies as minorities. But, as the French scholar Olivier Roy has pointed out, these new minorities are different from the old minorities in one crucial way. The old Muslim minorities like the Tartars, Indian Muslims, China’s Hui etc had slow historical time in which to build their own culture or to share the dominant culture. The new minorities, however, are enveloped in rapid globalization-time in which they have to reinvent their sense of being Muslim by a mere reference to Islam without any common cultural or linguistic heritage. Hence the Muslim ummah is thought of in abstract or imagined rather than real terms.
The net effect of this is not a clash of civilizations through any “Islamic revival” demonstrated by an increase in hijab, veiled women, beards or references to sharia etc but a sign of attempts to “Islamise modernity” by avoiding the religious-tradition vs secular-modernity problematic and by subscribing to the view that Islam is not what the Quran says it is but what we as Muslims say the Quran says. This is embodied in everyday compromises, personal attitudes to material and moral issues, casual reference to different levels and types of identity like Asian, South Asian, African, Arab, etc, ad hoc quotations from the Hadith or the Quran for or against everyday practices, dogmatic or liberal post hoc rationalizations to intellectual challenges from non-Muslim colleagues, etc. In short, demonstration of a very wide and flexible range of attitudes and opinions. That is why there is no serious contradiction between the Muslims’ “hatred of the West” and their long queues in front of Western embassies for visas and immigration rights.
In the case of working class Pakistanis settled in Britain, the process of “Islamising modernity” was disrupted by the British state’s policy of multi-culturalism which degenerated into ghettoism because of the inability of the state to educate, employ and absorb second generation British Muslims into the mainstream. This coincided with a Western-state onslaught against Islamic peoples and lands, creating the sufficient conditions for an outgrowth of “Islamic counter-terror”.
The new realities need to be recognized by all sides. Globalisation, for good or bad, better or worse, is unstoppable. It will inevitably lead to a process of “religousising modernity” all round and cultures will compete and overlap, rather than clash, in the long run. Al Qaeda and jihad will peter out, just as Western occupation of Islamic lands that provokes a desperate reaction will not endure, and non-state militant actors in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran that sustain reaction will be eliminated from the reckoning.
(August 12-18, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 25 – Editorial)
Global terror and US dilemma
The former Dutch prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, says his government knew that Dr A Q Khan was “stealing” nuclear secrets in the early 1970s. But the CIA advised against indicting the scientist because “we were in the middle of the Cold War”. This brief statement explains the relationship between US foreign policy, the Cold War, democracy, dictatorship and the roots of modern Islamic extremism.
Mohammad Mosaddeq is Iranian modern history’s most famous champion of secular democracy and resistance to foreign domination. In 1951 he nationalized the country’s British-controlled oil industry and provoked a confrontation with Britain. Two years later the CIA sponsored a successful coup against him. This initiated a 25 year period of absolute pro-US dictatorship by the Shah, leaving an anti-US legacy and paving the way for Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. Thus the modern confrontation between Iran and the US today is rooted in past US foreign policies.
In 1932 the British helped Abd al Aziz ibn Saud to become absolute monarch of the Arabian peninsula. Subsequently, the Saudis clinched two self-sustaining deals for survival and longevity: an external one with the Americans – cheap oil in exchange for military and political support; and an internal one with the Wahhabis in which they could preach, practice and export radical Islam but not challenge al-Saud’s political supremacy. Thus Osama bin Laden’s exhortation to end the long and unholy alliance between the US and the Saudi monarchy.
In Egypt, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1952 and provoked Britain. His pro-Soviet stance antagonized the US. After Egypt was defeated by Israel, the US protégé in the Middle East, his successor Anwar Sadaat suppressed the liberal, secular, and democratic forces, mollycoddled the Ikhwan al-Muslimin which opposed Nasserite secularism, and Islamised the institutions of the state. But the Islamists perceived Camp David as a great betrayal and assassinated Sadaat. His pro-US successor Hosni Mobarik suppressed the radical Islamists but did not democratize or secularise the state. Therein lay the seeds of the Islamic revolt engineered by Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri which eventually linked up with OBL to become Al-Qaeda.
In Iraq, the US befriended the secular dictator Saddam Hussain and nudged him in 1980 to wage war with Shiite Iran for eight years. But after the USSR vanished, the US decided to bomb Iraq in 1991. When Saddam survived, 9/11 provided the pretext for a full fledged invasion. This has unleashed all the sectarian demons of the region without securing and guaranteeing Iraqi oil for the US.
In Pakistan, the religious parties were long nurtured by Saudi funding while the military became an American surrogate in the war against communism. In the 1980s Gen Zia ul Haq assailed the secular institutions of the state and launched the “Islamic jihad” in Afghanistan jointly with the CIA and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. But after the USSR folded in 1989, the US lost interest in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In this era of neglect, the military’s “Islamic jihad” was retuned with the help of the religious parties and lashkars to “liberate” Kabul from local communists and Kashmir from arch-enemy India. In 1995, the Taliban were launched and Pakistan became a stepping stone to the base area of world jihad in Afghanistan. Fortunately for Pakistan, though, when 9/11 inevitably dawned, General Musharraf chose to ditch the Taliban and mollify Washington.
The US handiwork is cracking in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. If America exits from Iraq without sufficiently democratizing and secularizing the country, it will enshrine a non-viable Shiite, pro-Iran state pitted against a violent Sunni minority and tempt intervention by secular Turkey, Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. But maintaining the status quo means losing more American lives and breeding “globalised Islamic terror”. If America bombs Iran’s nuclear installations, it risks inflaming global Islamic passions. If it doesn’t, Iran will acquire nuclear weapons and “Western civilization” will have to contend with not one but two “Islamic bombs” and live with the fear of proliferation. In Saudi Arabia, if America pushes for greater democratization, the Wahhabi hardliners will seize power. But if it nudges the Al-Saud to crack down on the Wahhabis, it risks a violent terror backlash that could transform Saudi Arabia into another Iraq. The same sort of scenario exists in Egypt where the liberal secular forces have been snuffed out by Mobarik and the thought of what happens after him is deeply disturbing.
Pakistan is less unfortunate. The country is awash with anti-Americanism and Al-Qaedaism. But the military and the Islamists are not yet the only political forces to reckon with and choose from. There remains a strong non-Islamic (not non-religious) democratic sentiment in the country which would trounce its military-mullah detractors in any free and fair election and turn back the tide of radical Islam. Thus, despite their dictatorships, Egypt’s embedded political weakness is Pakistan’s lingering political strength. But for how long can these political forces escape emasculation at the hands of a military armed with nuclear weapons, imbued with Islamic nationalism, wedded to regional ambitions and propped up by the US?
(August 19-25, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 26 – Editorial)
Good prospects for General Musharraf,
bad for Pakistan
The local elections in 2005 under General Pervez Musharraf are generating more heat and dust than those held under military patronage in 1962, 1979, 1983, 1987 and 2001. Why’s that? What is its significance?
There are two main reasons for the military’s obsession with local elections: self-perpetuation and legitimization of dictatorship. Having sacked and condemned ancien regimes ( national and provincial parties and politicians ) military rulers have constantly felt the need to create a new, non-party, local, civilian constituency loyal to them which also provides a fig leaf of legitimacy in the first instance . In the second instance , they have sought to groom local leaders for proposed provincial and national setups. But this ‘devolution’ strategy has failed to provide either longevity or legitimacy to its architects. Consider.
Gen Ayub Khan’s one party “basic democrat system” couldn’t save him when he ran into popular trouble and it was scrapped after his exit. Gen Zia ul Haq’s first two local elections in 1979 and 1983 were damp squibs because the most popular party in the country (PPP) was not eligible to contest, and the political route ahead was misty. Certainly, the prospects for democracy were looking dim after he crushed the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD). But in 1987, the local elections were more inspired because the national polls had been held in 1985, and Mohammad Khan Junejo had allowed Benazir Bhutto to return from exile in 1986 and canvass for her party. Despite the non-party status of national and local polls, despite Gen Zia’s lordship, the political prospects for democracy were looking up at the time. Notwithstanding this, however, Gen Zia’s local government system crashed after he died in 1988 because it wasn’t sufficiently democratic or legitimate for the political forces which succeeded him.
Gen Musharraf’s local system was fashioned in 1999-2000 when he didn’t want to truck with anyone from the ancient PPP or PMLN regime. He wasn’t in pursuit of democracy either. Hence his emphasis on a non-party devolution of power (sic) to a new tier of government independent of any party political provincial or national setup; hence too its umbilical link to General Musharraf himself through hand picked, all powerful provincial governors. But that is precisely why the 2001 local elections were lacklustre. The prospects for democratic participation were dim because the mainstream political parties and leaders were left out. Before the 2002 national elections, it was clear that General Musharraf’s presidential referendum had failed to provide legitimacy to him. After the 2002 elections, it was equally clear that his non-party local system was out of step with the party provincial establishments conjured by him. Hence the subsequent debate and amendments to ‘reform’ the local system so that it is in sync with General Musharraf’s party political objectives of longevity and legitimacy after the next general elections in 2007.
Thus we have the current spectacle of “non-party” local polls in which candidates of the sole ruling party are contesting against opposition or independent candidates without a party name to identify them, a definite edge to the incumbent establishment. Thus General Musharraf and Co are openly canvassing for ruling party candidates. Thus all the signs of pre-election rigging to achieve “suitable results”: 16 districts in Sindh have been gerrymandered; the CEC won’t be confirmed until after these elections; opposition candidates have been arm-twisted to cross the floor; bureaucrats and policemen have been transferred to facilitate “positive results”; polling stations have been relocated; electoral lists have been revised. Etc. This will doubtless be followed by various post-election devices to entrench the ruling party in power so that it can sweep the 2007 party-based general elections. This is why the current local elections are generating so much enthusiasm today and this is why they are significant.
But will these elections stabilize General Musharraf and vitalize democracy in the country? We think not. To be sure, by virtue of his uniform, General Musharraf has fully usurped Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League. He has also been successful in bribing or forcing an increasing number of PPP supporters to switch loyalties, which will seriously undermine Ms Bhutto’s national and provincial prospects in 2007. More than that, the Supreme Court’s “timely” ruling last Tuesday whereby it has attached certain educational conditions for contesting elections (three years after the issue first came up in 2002!) will dilute the religious parties who were the principal beneficiaries of the PPP’s loss in 2002. So this time the PPP and the MMA are both being targeted and the principal beneficiary is the ruling PMLQ only.
That may make Gen Musharraf feel personally more secure. But will it make Pakistan less unstable politically in the longer term? Can the consolidation of one party rule in support of a military general in uniform ever be good for democracy? Can an un-institutionalized system survive its creator? The answers, my friends, have been blowing in the wind since the time of Generals Ayub Khan and Zia ul Haq.
(August 26-1, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 27 – Editorial)
ISI’s twilight zone
Geo TV recently aired a discussion about the role and accountability of the ISI. The participants were two former Directors-General of the ISI and PPP Senator Farhatullah Babar. Mr Babar argued that the ISI has always had a political cell, that it has consistently interfered in domestic politics and that it is not amenable to regulation by, or accountability to, civilian leaders or institutions. He wants a select committee of parliament to oversee the ISI, like other intelligence agencies in democratic countries.
But the truth of the matter is that the ISI sees itself as a military organization governed by military law. Like the army, it is distinctly averse to civilian regulation even though, like the COAS and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee, the DG-ISI is hired and fired by the prime minister, unlike the head of the Military Intelligence who is hired and fired by the army chief. So the DG-ISI straddles two jurisdictions and two bosses, the COAS who employs and promotes him and the PM who appoints and disappoints him.
By way of illustration of the murky legal status of the ISI, Mr Babar referred to the “Najam Sethi case” in 1999. He argued that after Mr Sethi, a civilian, disappeared into the folds of the agencies, a judge of the Lahore High Court flatly rejected the writ filed by Mr Sethi’s wife because “the court had no jurisdiction over a military institution”. Mr Babar also referred to the “Asghar Khan case” whereby the former air force chief has alleged before the supreme court of Pakistan that the ISI had illegally interfered in politics in 1990-91. But the case has been gathering dust for over a decade. Judges who have taken oaths under military governments and sanctioned coups and constitutional orders decreed by army chiefs are hardly likely to frown on political interference by the military.
The “Najam Sethi case” sheds fascinating light on the complex relationship between an elected PM and COAS, the PM and the DG-ISI, and the COAS and the DG-ISI. It also shows the twilight zone in which the law, constitution and courts function in civil-military matters.
In May 1999, Mr Nawaz Sharif ordered his handpicked DG-ISI, General Ziauddin, to arrest and court martial me for “treason” because I had relentlessly exposed Mr Sharif’s corruption and enraged him. Accordingly, a charge of “treason” was drummed up on the basis of a distorted version of a speech that I had given in India. The army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, was “suitably” briefed of the impending ISI action.
I was picked and roughed up by the provincial police under Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif. Senior officials of the Intelligence Bureau (a civilian institution under the federal government and PM) supervised the operation. I was later handed over to the ISI, a military institution, which was tasked with court martialing me. While in custody, Major-General Ghulam Ahmed (“Gen GA”), head of the internal wing of the ISI, investigated the charges against me, found them to be politically trumped up and told the DG-ISI and COAS as much.
Some days later, the case took an unexpected twist. Brigadier Rashid Qureshi, then DG-ISPR, a serving military officer of a military institution, said publicly that “the army had nothing to do with the Najam Sethi case” and that “Najam Sethi was not in the custody of the army”. So the question now arose: if the army had nothing to do with the case and if Mr Sethi wasn’t in its custody, what was he doing in the custody of the ISI, a military institution under the army according to the LHC?
My lawyers agitated this issue before the Supreme Court. The Attorney-General fumbled and fumed. The CJ advised him to drop the case and set me free, implying that if he didn’t he would open a Pandora’s Box of thorny legal, constitutional and military issues. The government complied with the advice but transferred me from ISI custody to police custody and immediately lodged a case against me under the anti-terrorism laws. Fortunately, one of the justices of the SC bench, Justice Mamun Qazi, had added a note to the effect that since the case appeared dubious I was not to be arrested or detained in any other case by the government without the knowledge and permission of the SC. In the event, the government was forced to drop the anti-terrorism case against me and set me free. When the BBC asked me for comment, I explained the irony of the situation: an elected and “democratic” government had sought to crucify me while the military and ISI had bailed me out.
But the essential questions remain. What if the ISPR under Gen Musharraf had not publicly disowned the Najam Sethi case? What if Gen Ghulam Ahmad hadn’t shrugged off political pressure to nail me? What if Justice Qazi, an upright Sindhi judge, had not appended his critical note? What if the ISI had been bent on keeping me in its clutches? And so on.
Mr Farhatullah Babar is right. No true civilian democracy can afford to leave such civil-military questions unresolved.
(September 9-15, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 29 – Editorial)
“De-ideologise” Pakistan
Qazi Husain Ahmad of the Jamaat i Islami recently lambasted the Musharraf regime for opening a dialogue with Israel because “it is against the ideology of Pakistan”. Ideology of Pakistan? One might have drummed up tactical or strategic political reasons for not dialoguing with Israel at this time, but talking of the “ideology of Pakistan” in this context is nonsense. If a dialogue with Israel is taboo because Israel is in occupation of Palestinian lands (Muslim and Christian), then why isn’t the JI demanding that we break diplomatic ties with India which is in occupation of Muslim lands in Kashmir, with Russia which is in occupation of Muslim lands in Chechnya, with the US which is in occupation of Muslim lands in the Middle East, with Europe and Britain which allowed the Serbs to carry out genocide of Muslims in Bosnia, and so on?
Indeed, the logic of his statement would lead to the complete rupture of Pakistan’s relations with all non-Muslim states and even with some non-ideological Muslim states. In short, this formulation would mock the very concept of the nation-state in a comity of nation-states that characterizes the global order. Even at the height of the Cold War – the battle between the ideologies of communism and capitalism – the ideological protagonists never succumbed to such absurd notions of state-craft.
But Liaqat Baloch of the JI has gone one better than his boss. On September 6, Defence of Pakistan Day, he stood up in the national assembly, bemoaned military rule and shed tears for the long lost pristine constitution of 1973. He is a fine one to talk of such matters. The 1973 constitution was overthrown by General Zia ul Haq on the basis of an anti-government movement led by the JI in 1977. The JI then went on to join and strengthen Gen Zia’s regime. Similarly, the JI was a pillar of support to General Pervez Musharraf until 9/11. Indeed, the latest military mangling of the wretched 1973 constitution following the 2002 elections was solely due to the MMA’s “deal” with General Musharraf in 2003 whereby it legitimized him as president of Pakistan with extra-constitutional powers in exchange for two provincial governments and the slot of the leader of the opposition.
Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the JUI-F and Maulana Sami ul Haq of the JUI-S have both been declared persona non grata in Europe. Why are we surprised and why are they indignant? Not a moment goes by when they’re not breathing fire and venom at the “Westernised infidels” and their “unholy values” and exhorting the faithful to rise and strike at the “Satanic powers”. These hypocrites want to exploit democratic freedoms to destroy the very democracies in which they breathe and live. Why should they be allowed to do this? If Maulana Sami ul Haq is still in love with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, if he is still sheltering and supporting them, why should the Taliban-OBL hating West cosy up to him? If Maulana Fazlur Rahman still wants to be leader of the opposition in parliament, why does he refuse to sit in the National Security Council legitimized by an MMA-sponsored constitutional amendment in parliament?
There was a time in the 1950s when the mullahs did not launch a single public demonstration or strike against “American imperialism” not because America was fighting the “Godless communism” of the USSR, but because America was also propping up Saudi Arabia, and both America and Saudi Arabia were funding the military and mullahs respectively in Pakistan. Much the same sort of thing happened in the 1980s when America and Saudi Arabia jointly funded the mullahs and military in Pakistan to organize the Mujahedin resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But when America lost interest in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the funding and jet fighters ran dry after the Cold War ended in 1989, the mullahs began to march on American consulates in Pakistan. Let us not forget that Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie in 1990 followed a JI-inspired outcry against the author in Pakistan, followed by a violent mullah march on the US embassy in Islamabad in which several people were killed.
The recent local elections have revealed the truth about the strengths and weaknesses of the mullahs. Without the Pakistani military backing them and without the Saudis and Libyans funding them – because the world has dramatically and radically changed after 9/11 and 7/7 the mullahs are a spent force. They have been wiped out by the secular MQM in Karachi and they have lost ground to the PML-Q, PPP, ANP and BNP in the NWFP and Balochistan. Even where they have managed to win seats, many of these have been scraped together on the basis of rather “unholy”, but pragmatic, political alliances – the JI with the PPP and the ANP with the JUI – rather than on the basis of religious or Pakistan ideology.
If General Musharraf is sincere about modernizing Pakistan and improving the country’s image as a respectable and respectful member of the comity of sovereign nation-states in the world, he should irrevocably disengage the military from the mullahs and “de-ideologise” Pakistan.
(September 2-8, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 28 – Editorial)
Shaukat Aziz: one year in office, not in power
Mr Shaukat Aziz has been prime minister of Pakistan for one year. If he can survive the vicissitudes of Pakistani politics for another, he might well set some sort of record. But the fortune tellers and astrologers are not taking any bets. Ambitious rivals are nibbling at his coattails. Even the generals who once glibly talked him up are now muttering “what’s he done, except for the economy”, as if that were not achievement enough. But will Mr Aziz confound them all?
There are two images of Shaukat Aziz that are implanted on the public imagination. These tell his past story, explain his current predicament, and outline his future dilemma. One is a solitary picture of the day 15 months ago when he sat apprehensively, hands folded in his lap, amidst a gathering lorded over by Chaudhry Shujaat and Zafarullah Jamali when “they” announced that Mr Jamali was exiting as PM, Chaudhry Shujaat was entering as PM-in-transition and Shaukat Aziz was lining up as PM-in-waiting. The second is a frequent and rather revealing photo: it shows Mr Aziz, in an immaculate suit and tie, impassively sitting beside General President Pervez Musharraf who is in full commando regalia, “jointly presiding” over cabinet meetings. If ever a Pakistani prime minister was a holder of office rather than a practitioner of power , this picture says it all. General Musharraf is Chairman, Chief Executive and Managing Director, while Mr Aziz has the distinction of being promoted from CFO to GM, of Pakistan Inc.
A comparison with Mr Moeen Qureshi, another military-import who served as prime minister for three months in 1994, is instructive. Both gentlemen are suave, urbane, Westernized, with similar “moneyed” interests and antecedents, but without a public constituency in Pakistan. Both have made and kept their fortunes abroad, which reflects on their “commitment” to Pakistan. But it was Mr Qureshi who first articulated the concepts of “good governance” and “accountability”, which have come to dominate the discourse of the last decade even though they have since been irredeemably corrupted. He exuded authority and charisma when he was briefly PM but became a political non-entity after he returned to his “American homeland”. In contrast, Mr Aziz is burdened by the fate of his elected predecessors (including Mr Jamali who, after he was sworn in as PM, was adamant that he would escape that fate because he wouldn’t rub up “the boss” the wrong way), all of whom were shoved out of office by the generals. Mr Aziz also has to abide with the hybrid political system constructed by the same boss in which party political leaders, chief ministers and corps commanders are the true lynchpins.
Nonetheless, Mr Aziz has coped with his inherited handicaps well. A double Ph.D. in PR, his bright, charming, reasoned, unruffled and unpretentious demeanour has served to protect him from pretenders and backstabbers. He is not corrupt or arrogant, which means the press cannot lay its grubby hands on him even when it is mishandled by his minions. The economy under his captaincy has bounced back into life but there is nothing he can do about its embedded political constraints. His globetrotting is aimed at projecting a sober and reasonable image of Pakistan but his persuasiveness is constantly throttled by the reality of our murky past and the lingering fear of an uncertain future under the one-party leadership of the Pakistan military. He knows more about IR and globalization than the advisors thrust upon him but he knows even better that his writ to innovate and outreach is hamstrung by the civil-military establishment’s political contingencies. That is why his statements at home and abroad faithfully echo the entrenched opportunism of his boss rather than illuminate any new path to rediscovery and reform.
Mr Aziz’s future is uncertain in Pakistan. His fate is inextricably linked to that of General Musharraf. If the General were to go for one reason or another through fate or miscalculation, Mr Aziz would follow suit in the blink of an eye (you can’t say that for anyone else in the Muslim League). But even if General Musharraf were to survive and entrench himself, there is no guarantee that Mr Aziz would be lucky enough to share the limelight. He could be felled by a scandal or be shed as excess baggage because of political necessity in the run up to the 2007 elections. After all, there can be only so much goodwill for a competent person without a home constituency or party to call his own. Certainly, the more General Musharraf opens up “democratic” space, the more he will be compelled to share it with the “incompetent representatives of the people” and the less there will be to fork over to brilliant “technocrats”, “outsiders” and PR persons.
Whether he weathers Pakistan or not, one thing is clear: Mr Aziz’s future abroad will be brighter than ever. His Teflon-coated CV will list him as an “elected prime minister of Pakistan” without any ifs and buts. That is no mean achievement in a country that is notorious for rubbishing its prime ministers.
(September 16-22, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 30 – Editorial)
Futile debate over presidential system
Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan is a master orator. “There is a conspiracy to crush us under a presidential system”, he thundered in the National Assembly the other day, referring to the continuing lack of quorum in the House. This, he feared, might be exploited by General Pervez Musharraf to bad-mouth parliament and send it packing. Histrionics aside, are we really headed for a “presidential” system?
A presidential system can take many forms. In the US, for example, the president and parliament are directly elected and there is no prime minister. In France, they are both directly elected but there is also an indirectly ‘elected’ (president’s nominee) prime minister. In Egypt, until recently a directly elected but circumcised parliament had approved Hosni Mobarak as president for five five-year terms – there is no prime minister – followed by rigged referendums to obtain the peoples’ approval. Last week, Mr Mobarak went through a rigged presidential election to demonstrate (in vain) greater “democracy” and legitimacy. In Pakistan, different presidential forms have been tried. General Ayub Khan owed his presidency to an indirectly elected parliament without a prime minister. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was first an unelected president and chief martial law administrator and then an elected prime minister with an elected but cowering parliament. General Zia ul Haq was an unelected president for eight years with a nominated parliament and then contrived an unrepresentative, non-party “elected” parliament which duly “elected” his nominee as prime minister (he sacked him barely three years later). And our own General Musharraf was an unelected president without any parliament for three years before contriving a rigged but elected parliament and sacking his first prime minister last year.
But, despite their varying forms, these presidential systems are similar in their core content. In each it is the President who calls the shots and not the prime minister or parliament (even though parliament may theoretically have the ‘legal’ power to effectively challenge the president, it is a power which it is rarely exercises in practice). And by that criterion, despite the paraphernalia of the prime ministerial system, President General Musharraf is already running a strong and centralized presidential system. He has rigged the political system and ensured a suitably pliant parliament that has meekly accepted his nominee as prime minister. He lords it over both via the National Security Council.
And when he is in a hurry to get cracking he thinks nothing of personally presiding over the yes-sir prime minister’s yes-sir cabinet. But his omnipotent power is derived from his position as army chief and not from any legitimacy freely bestowed upon him by the people, parliament or constitution. That is why he refuses to shed his uniform even as he continuously manipulates the system to ensure his longevity.
It is, of course, conceivable that President General Musharraf may have delusions of popularity and covet greater legitimacy as president than he enjoys at the moment. In the event, he might wish to acquire this not through another discredited referendum or unholy constitutional ‘deal’ with the mullahs as in the past but through an election in the future. This would impact on the legitimacy or acceptability of his exercise of power rather than on the quantum of it at his disposal. In order to achieve that end, he would be obliged to relinquish the power that flows from the barrel of a gun and replace it with the power that flows from the sovereignty of the people. How can that be done?
He could sack the current system, unilaterally amend the constitution, compel the judiciary to provide him cover and go for a direct presidential election. In this he could count on the support of the local councilors that he has recently midwifed and the Pakistan Muslim League that he has usurped. But if the mullahs, mainstream parties and sub-nationalists boycott these elections, he will not get the consensual legitimacy he seeks and his mission would be aborted.
Or he could use the same political resources to try and win a two-thirds majority for his party in the next general elections so that he can be indirectly elected as president by the members of the national and provincial parliaments as envisaged by the current constitution or directly elected by the people through an amended constitution. But if the two/thirds majority or direct presidential victory is obtained by pre-election rigging – including banning popular opposition leaders from contesting and fracturing mainstream parties – then his personal legitimacy would be cast in doubt by the very lack of legitimacy of the parliament or the election that gives it to him. In the event, nothing would have been gained by the whole controversial exercise.
General Musharraf may be one sort of president or another in any devised system but his power will ultimately flow from his uniform. If he clings to it, he can never acquire legitimacy. If he sheds it, no system will be able to protect him for long. It is as simple as that. Therefore the debate over whether or not a presidential system suits him is irrelevant and futile.
(September 23-29, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 31 – Editorial)
Gravitas, Mr President, gravitas
“A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.” Thus spake General Pervez Musharraf in response to a question about the mishandled rape cases of Dr Shazia Khalid and Mukhtar Mai. This insensitive statement has provoked condemnation all round – including from the Canadian prime minister compelling General Musharraf to explain that he was misquoted. But has he had a change of heart about how to deal with such cases? Has his view of women’s NGOs and human rights groups changed? No.
After the Mukhtar Mai fiasco, General Musharraf had bristled with indignation and self-righteousness. “I stopped her from going”, he thumped his chest. When that drew howls of protest, Mr Khurshid Kasuri was quick at damage control. “He was misquoted”, said Mr Kasuri rather lamely, “there can be no doubt about General Musharraf’s sincerity in promoting women’s causes”. Unfortunately, General Musharraf has since reiterated and owned his remark several times. But that’s not all.
General Musharraf is angry that Dr Shazia Khalid is “bad-mouthing Pakistan abroad”. He says he will help her if she returns to Pakistan. But this is a ridiculous offer. From the outset, the government has done exactly the opposite. It spirited Dr Shazia from Sui even before the local police could start the investigation, secreted her from the press in Karachi so that she couldn’t tell her story, quietly put her on a plane for London and told her to forget about her ordeal. The rapist is still at large and investigation has been shelved. Recently, Nelofer Bakhtiar, the government’s testy handler, had the cheek to “invite” Dr Shazia to a PR conference on women. Affronted, Dr Shazia has spilled the beans about how a military official first pressed and then arranged for her to leave the country.
General Musharraf’s ire is actually focused on women’s and human rights NGOs whose job and responsibility it is to highlight crimes against women and bring pressure on government to redress grievances. “Why aren’t India or France or Britain or the USA lambasted internationally for crimes against women, especially rape which is all too frequent in these countries”, he wants to know. “Because our NGOs are unpatriotic and insincere”, is his own readymade answer. But this is preposterous. General Musharraf, like most of his uniformed colleagues, thinks nothing of monopolizing patriotism and the national interest. But he should pause to consider why women’s and human rights activists are constrained to shriek in protest in Pakistan and not so much in other countries. It is not that Pakistan’s record of rapes is worse than that of other countries – which is what angers General Musharraf but that Pakistan’s embedded religious, legal and political culture is decidedly more hostile to women’s emancipation and rights than that in many other countries. And when avowedly ‘moderate’ or relatively ‘liberal’ regimes such as General Musharraf’s fail to act judiciously or expeditiously, the end result is likely to be acute frustration and outrage. Rapists are caught and punished, and women’s rights and honour are vigorously defended by the law, in most modern and moderate countries. But this is not the case in Musharraf’s Pakistan. “Semi-feudal societal customs” may be an important explanatory factor, as General Musharraf points out, but surely apathetic state institutions, governmental indifference and lingering bad laws are more relevant. We expect more action from General Musharraf because that is what he has promised us. However, when he starts railing against the NGOs for doing their job he descends to the same level as that of the illiterate PML-N MNA Saad Rafique who was notorious for hounding them to the wall. General Musharraf’s statement shows him up as part of the prejudiced herd and not as its enlightened leader.
Indeed, General Musharraf’s ire at a young woman who questioned him at a meeting in New York last Saturday shows him up as brash and arrogant. According to a news report, “pandemonium broke out… when an irate President Pervez Musharraf declared that those who opposed his policies were the enemies of Pakistan.” The report says the event degenerated into a bout between General Musharraf and part of the invited audience. “I am a fighter, I will fight you. I do not give up and if you can shout, I can shout louder,” said General Musharraf. “Lady, you are used to people who tell lies. I am not one of them.” When a woman raised her voice to ask a question, the president said: “Are you a Benazir supporter? We have introduced new leaders who don’t tell lies unlike your leaders who did… I am disappointed with people like you. You work with people who looted and plundered the nation. You are against the national interest, you have your own agenda. I know that there are people with vested interests and financial interests who are against Pakistan.”
Is this a playground mud-slinging match or what? Where is the president’s dignity? Increasingly he seems on edge tense, resentful, anxious, brittle. The more he berates the defenseless the more he demeans himself. We need gravitas, Mr President, gravitas.
(September 30 – Oct 06, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 32 – Editorial)
Uprooting religious rage and reaction
In most countries of the world, bombs do not go off in crowded places killing innocent citizens. But even in those few in which civilians or military institutions are targeted, the bombers are either inclined to identify themselves and take responsibility, or the government usually knows who is behind the attacks. For instance, in Israeli-occupied territories, various Palestinian resistance movements publicly take responsibility for the bomb attacks. Similarly, various jihadi organizations are quick to claim “credit” for the bomb attacks in Indian-occupied Kashmir. When the bombs were going off in Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s, the radical underground Islamic groups proudly left their calling cards all over the place. Equally, when Al-Qaeda activists attack Western targets these days they are not only ready to say that they did it and why, but also to warn that more will follow.
But Pakistan must be one of those rare countries in the world in which bombs have been going off routinely in the last twenty years, killing innocent people, while the government of the day either hasn’t quite known whodunit or hasn’t been prepared to take the public into confidence about the blowback consequences of its foreign policies. Indeed, official fingers have often been pointed at more than two or three possible perpetrators, the all time favourite being the “foreign hand” of India through its RAW intelligence agency. But if memory serves us right, the other hot historical foreign contender has been KHAD, the Afghan intelligence agency, which was alleged to be responsible for a spate of bomb attacks in the NWFP, Karachi and Punjab in the 1980s and early 1990s when Pakistani “interference” or “strategic involvement” in Afghanistan was at its height. Indeed, we are reminded of a famous statement by the then information minister Mushahid Hussain in the 1990s when Karachi was laid low by bomb attacks in which he alluded to a mysterious link between “three Ks” – Karachi, Kabul and Kashmir – suggesting that Karachi was paying the price of our military adventures in Kabul and Kashmir.
Of course, many bomb attacks have baffled even our evergreen conspiracy theorists. Who planted the bomb many years ago that destroyed a small culvert on PM Nawaz Sharif’s route to his family farm on Raiwind road near Lahore, and why? Who was responsible for the bomb attacks on Shia or Sunni congregations in Quetta, Karachi, Jhang, Lahore some years ago – was it one sectarian organization or another or was it some foreign hand that wanted to trigger a sectarian war in Pakistan in order to destabilise the country? Similarly, no one has claimed responsibility for the bomb attacks on the American consulate in Karachi or on the bus in which many French naval engineers were killed some years ago. Was it RAW scaring away foreign military experts or was it the local branch of Al-Qaeda attacking a Western ally of America? Worse, the government has rarely caught the bombers or told the public why they carried out the bombings.
The two recent “bicycle bombs” in Lahore defy any readymade explanation. There was no sectarian cause this time like the one behind a similar bicycle bomb that was planted on the premises of the lower courts in Lahore by a religious fanatic in the mid 1990s. India’s RAW is also an unlikely candidate because the two neighbours are moving to mend fences and the level of alleged “Pakistan-inspired” terrorism in Indian held Kashmir has significantly abated in recent months. Nor is this likely to be the handiwork of Al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan – according to General Pervez Musharraf, their organizational structure has been smashed by the Pakistani military and whatever is left is confined to their hideouts in the tribal badlands of Waziristan bordering Afghanistan. So whodunit, why, and will more follow?
To be sure, there are a lot of angry, frustrated, alienated, disgruntled people and groups in Pakistan who might be motivated to express their sentiments in this fashion. The Baloch Liberation Army, for instance, has claimed responsibility for planting bombs to damage gas pipelines and electrical installations in Sindh, Balochistan and Southern Punjab. Equally, there are hundreds of footloose religious fanatics trained in Afghanistan and Kashmir with all sorts of scores to settle with General Musharraf for thwarting their domestic and regional ambitions. Many are outraged by his recent moves to normalize relations with India and Israel and crack down on Al-Qaeda activists at the behest of America. Even the mainstream religious parties like the Jamaat i Islami and Jamiat i Ulema i Islam are bristling at General Musharraf’s attempts to curb their zeal. In fact, these parties now see General Musharraf personally, rather then the Pakistan army, as the key stumbling block to their political ambitions.
Are we then about to enter a period of militant “Islamic” reaction to a pro-West military dictator in Pakistan as happened in Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s? This is a frightening prospect. That is why the government should not trifle with ready-made, “foreign-hand” conspiracy theories for a moment longer. It is time to knuckle down and uproot the causes of religious rage and reaction that threaten Pakistan in myriad ways.
(October 7-13, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 33 – Editorial)
Indo-Pak: grateful for small mercies
An unfortunate perception has gained currency that India-Pakistan relations are not going anywhere in a hurry. Certainly, India has shown no signs of wanting to discuss any of the “options” on Kashmir reiterated by General Pervez Musharraf. In fact, the Indian foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, recently dampened hopes when he claimed that the peace process could be derailed in the event of a major act of terrorism. He also said, quite unnecessarily, that India would not accept any territorial changes in Kashmir.
Pakistan’s equally ambiguous position has reinforced this perception. After General Musharraf mentioned the Kashmir dispute in his speech at the UN last month, the Indians were so irked that the Indian prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, greeted General Musharraf rather frostily on the sidelines of the UN. New Delhi was also provoked once again to raise the issue of “cross border terrorism” and accused Pakistan of retaining training camps for Kashmiri jihadis on its soil. What’s going on?
Clearly, the two sides are grappling with thorny issues that have defied solution for over five decades. There is also the legacy of a serious trust deficit given so many false starts and abrupt endings. So smooth sailing should not be expected, despite their best intentions to bury the hatchet. Indeed, the deeply entrenched institutional mechanism for resolving foreign policy issues in India, given its pluralist democracy, and the lack of it in Pakistan, given the exclusive role of the Pakistan army in strategic decision-making, explains why India wants to move slowly and Pakistan is in a hurry to clinch deals. Nonetheless, the fact is that significant progress has been made in the peace process in one year and there is no reason for pessimism.
The Line of Control in Kashmir is softening by the month. Travel and communication facilities across the border are becoming better. People-to-people contacts are improving. Prisoner-exchanges are being facilitated. Military CBMs are in the offing, including advance information about missile testing. Trade is being liberalized item by item. Buses and trucks and trains and airplanes are plying relatively freely. Old routes are being opened up and new ones considered. Despite objections from the US, the two sides are continuing negotiations over the proposed gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan. The water dispute over the Baghliar Dam has moved from bilateral deadlock to multilateral mode without too much acrimony. Cricket diplomacy has reinforced the popular passion for peace. And the Indian political leadership has finally agreed to bring the All Parties Hurriyat Conference into the negotiation loop after allowing its leaders to visit Pakistan for discussions with the Pakistani leadership. This is no small achievement.
The Joint Economic Commission which recently met for the first time in 16 years in Islamabad went out of its way to reiterate the continuing thaw in relations. Significantly, the talks were led by the foreign ministers of both countries. The joint statement was heartening. Both have decided to restructure and streamline the work of the Joint Economic Commission by starting technical-level working groups on agriculture, health, science and technology, information, education, IT and telecommunications, environment and tourism. More to the point, they will consider options for demarcating the maritime boundary in Sir Creek while trying to resolve the deadlock over whether or not to demarcate current troop positions before demilitarizing Siachin. The two also agreed “to explore possible options for a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute in a sincere, purposeful and forward-looking manner” and stressed the continuing need for a bilateral and composite dialogue framework for the peace process. “The second round of talks achieved better results than the first round,” claimed Mr Natwar Singh, India’s Foreign Minister. His most significant remark pertained to the provocative issue of “cross-border terrorism” that constantly hovers over all dialogues and threatens to derail them. He said both countries had agreed not to permit terrorism to impede the peace process. The fact that the Indian prime minister has accepted an invitation to visit Pakistan was the icing on the cake.
The weight of history suggests the peace process is not irreversible. Certainly, the fact that Pakistan has not completely jettisoned its jihadi leverage while India is still dragging its feet on starting talks about a “solution” to the Kashmir dispute, are disquieting factors. But no one should expect that either will abandon its stance unilaterally or unequivocally. Indeed, this is bound to be a verifiable and incremental approach. More relevant are two other questions: Can the Pakistan Army find its raison d’etre as the most powerful player in Pakistan without “institutional hostility” to India? Can India learn to become a global player without seeking to aggressively establish its economic and political hegemony in the region? The first requires greater democratization and civilianization of Pakistan. The second requires greater maturity and self-confidence amongst India’s burgeoning middle classes. Until there are clear cut and irrevocable signs of such a change in the thinking and practice of the Pakistani army and the Indian bourgeoisie, the people of the two countries must be grateful for small mercies.
(October 14-20, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 34 – Editorial)
For better and for worse
The memory of the earthquake that ravaged Azad Kashmir last week will not be erased for a long time to come. Towns have been flattened, hospitals and schools razed, shops and businesses ruined. Tens of thousands are dead, millions uprooted and homeless. This is the biggest national tragedy in memory. It has brought out the best and worst in us. A British reporter writes: “The contrast with New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina could not be more marked. In the US, when government help did not arrive, armed looters roamed the streets and survivors had to huddle together for safety. In Pakistan, people have arrived from all over the country to help in the relief effort. They have simply abandoned their jobs. Some hitched lifts, clinging dangerously on to the sides of trucks and mini buses as they wound around the hairpin curves over a sickening drop to the valley below. Others simply walked for hours across the hills in the blistering sun, denying themselves even water because it is the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.” There can be no more fitting tribute to the great people of Pakistan than this demonstration of inspiring humanity in acute adversity.
Pakistanis have given generously for relief. The political opposition has stopped protesting and offered to shoulder the burden of relief. Notoriously stingy and grubby political parties have coughed up. Even exiled leaders have accepted the common burden of responsibility instead of exploiting the situation and attacking the government. This is a rare moment of national solidarity.
Foreign governments and organizations have responded surely and swiftly. Indeed, as the scale of the tragedy is revealed, more help will follow in every conceivable way – helicopters, hospitals, doctors, medicines food, clothing, shelter. Equally, Pakistanis have appreciated the help. When a British rescue team dragged out the injured from the rubble of Islamabad’s Margalla Towers, it was lauded with full throated shouts of “Allaho Akbar”.
The media has also done a great job. Its reporters have spread out far and wide, covering the plight of remote areas where there is no government or administration to provide succour. The haunting images of loss and deprivation that have floated back have redoubled relief efforts and spurred financial contributions.
But the downslide is equally profound and notable.
It is shocking that a country that boasts nuclear weapons and missiles, spending hundreds of billions of rupees every year on its military prowess, could only muster one crane on the day of the disaster to try and clear the rubble of the collapsed Margalla Towers in Islamabad under which hundreds of people were buried. It is even more remarkable that the Pakistan army, which is supposed to be spread out in force along the Line of Control in Kashmir, was so thin on the ground at the site of every disaster. Indeed, early pictures show army jawans gingerly picking at the rubble with their bare hands or shoveling away in an uncoordinated and relatively unfocussed manner. It is inexplicable that the full extent of the damage is still not clear to the government despite the potential availability of satellite pictures from international sources. It is astounding that the prime minister has announced a relief budget of a few billion only in view of the scale of devastation in which over 5 million people have been rendered homeless and destitute. And it is scandalous that ruling party MNAs MPAs and Nazims are not prepared to divert their “development funds” to help earthquake victims.
The media, political parties and NGOs have also demonstrated an unwarranted degree of introspective thinking at a time for collective and coordinated practical action. Some of the media has unfortunately succumbed to spiritual and religious offerings in the face of a natural disaster. Fatalistic theories of “sin and the wrath of Allah” are being bandied about instead of knowledge based explanations and consequences of the earthquake. Political parties are mounting separate relief efforts as though guarding and developing their turf during an election. Incredibly, the religious parties have chosen this moment to undermine the government by refusing to sit in a meeting of the National Security Council convened for the purposes of extending and coordinating relief to the injured and bereaved survivors of the disaster. Even the NGOs are going it alone so that they can demonstrate their individual utility to donor agencies. The theme of politics and profit over humanity and community has echoed again and again in this hour of national travail. Most notably, it is captured in the agonizing sentiments of Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, the Kashmiri leader, who bewailed the refusal of the Pakistan government to coordinate relief work with the Indian government across the invisible Line of Control that was not recognized by the quake in the region.
Natural disasters and governmental response in alleviating distress are inclined to be etched on the popular imagination. Remember how a cyclone in East Pakistan irrevocably created a hostile Bengali perspective about West Pakistani rulers? Cleary, accountability will figure as a major theme in days to come. Clearly, too, the Musharraf regime will have to work overtime to escape the negative fallout of this particular calamity.
(October 21-27, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 35 – Editorial)
Natural Vs Unnatural upheavals
Certain facts lead to certain questions and answers.
When the earthquake struck Kashmir, the Pakistan army was dug in along the LoC in full strength. Yet it took days to mobilise and help the hapless people of Azad Kashmir. On the other side, the Indian army did little to bail out the stricken in Kashmir. Under the same circumstances anywhere else in the world, armies would have rolled in aid of civil administration immediately. So what use are the armies of India and Pakistan if they can go to war with each other time and again but not come to the rescue of their own people when they are most urgently needed?
Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf did the right thing to request assistance from all countries of the world, without excluding those with which Pakistan has no formal diplomatic relations like Israel, and those like India with whom Pakistan has the worst relations in the world. General Musharraf also solicited assistance from the American Jewish Congress that represents the richest and most powerful community in the United States. His appeal was based on sound reasoning: the people of Kashmir are in acute distress, Pakistan doesn’t have the resources to help them fully, so the cause of unprecedented human suffering shouldn’t be sacrificed at the altar of national pride or prejudice. But when India offered physical assistance in the form of men and helicopters, the government of Pakistan balked. It was prepared to accept Britishers for emergency relief work but Indians weren’t kosher. It was prepared to accept American helicopters flown by American pilots but Indian helicopters flown by Indian pilots were taboo. Certainly, there can be no military security justification for refusing Indian assistance – every inch of disputed Kashmir is mapped by satellites, including positions of both armies along the LoC. But in similar circumstances, India too would have responded in much the same way to the idea of Pakistani troops on Indian soil. Indeed, India’s arrogance has invariably stood in the way of accepting foreign assistance in times of natural adversity. Thus the thought of Indian soldiers on Pakistani soil and vice versa even in times of civilian distress is still abhorrent to the mindsets of the Pakistani and Indian ruling elites. That is why both governments were quick to spurn the sentiments of Mir Waiz Farooq, the All Parties Hurriet Conference Kashmiri leader, to launch a joint relief operation across the LoC. When, if ever, will this attitude change?
Observers have also noted how “seismic shocks can translate into political upheavals”. The cyclone in East Pakistan in 1970 irrevocably turned the Bengalis against the Punjabi ruling elites of Pakistan and sowed the seeds of the country’s dismemberment one year later. In Algeria, Turkey and Egypt, insensitive handling of quake disasters led to a wave of anger at corrupt, lazy and incompetent governments and created a groundswell of support for Islamic parties. These groups were able to fill the political vacuum because of their superior organisational abilities. In the wake of this quake, and given the historic military-mullah alliance and the political shunning of the mainstream parties by the Musharraf government, is Pakistan fated to go down that path too? We might do well to recall a survey of public pinion conducted by an internationally reputed news organisation recently in which respondents in both India and Pakistan were asked to identify the object of their greatest or least trust among the following four socio-groups: army/bureaucracy, religious leaders, media and politicians. The answers were acutely instructive. In Pakistan, a majority trusted religious leaders the most and the army/bureaucracy the least. In India, it was the other way round: they trusted their army/bureaucracy the most and their religious leaders the least. The media and politicians, surprisingly, came second and third in both countries, despite the fact that one is a functioning democracy and the other is a functioning anarchy.
Of course, it is not inevitable that Pakistan should succumb to the religio-political fate of pariah nation-states. President Musharraf could demonstrate some raw courage and real vision in democratising Pakistan and cementing peace with India. That would entail cutting the umbilical link between the military and mosque, allying with the mainstream parties that want peace with India, sharing power rather than office with them, and building a national consensus for a sustainable and realistic “solution” in Kashmir that takes into account only the wishes and aspirations of the Kashmiris rather than insisting upon any Pakistani locus standi relating to the “unfinished business of partition”. On India’s part, it would demand an equally bold and visionary agenda to concede its blunders, demilitarise the region and grant Kashmir maximum freedom for self-determination short of secession from the India union. International dispute resolution should be about alleviating peoples’ suffering and not about massaging our insufferable elites.
If the quake enables India and Pakistan to forget a bloody past and plan a bright future, we may yet be able to forgive, if not forget, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri in the last fifteen years. If not, then there may be more unnatural upheavals in store for all of us.
(November 11-17, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 38 – Editorial)
Indo-Pak: restraint and wisdom needed
The Indo-Pak peace process has been buffeted by certain recent incidents. But, despite the motivated provocations, General Pervez Musharraf and Dr Manmohan Singh have held firmly to their declared objectives.
The terrorist bombings in the bazaars of New Delhi last month came on the eve of talks in Islamabad aimed at opening up the LoC. The Indian delegation in Islamabad went into a sullen huddle until it was nudged by New Delhi to complete its mission and return home. This ‘soft’ response followed a strong statement from General Musharraf condemning the ‘terrorist’ incident. More significantly, General Musharraf explicitly offered to help India investigate the crime and pin down the terrorists. This stopped India from immediately accusing any particular Pakistan-based jihadi groups of complicity in the bombings or demanding that the Musharraf government take action against them. Much the same sort of nuanced response was forthcoming a couple of weeks later from India following the suicide attempt on the life of the new chief minister of the government of Indian-held Kashmir in which at least five people died.
Both countries are struggling to keep the process on track, often having to juggle with contradictory positions and tackle new situations. This is best exemplified by their mutual stance on opening up the LoC and ‘softening’ the ‘divide’. For instance, when Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, India’s prime minister in 2003, offered to open up the LoC at several points, the unthinking response in Islamabad was not terribly encouraging. Indeed, it was even suspected that the Indian proposal might be geared to making the LoC a de facto ‘border’ with Pakistan. Hence the long drawn out negotiations over which ‘documents’ travelers from both sides would be obliged to carry. Clearly, even at that time, the Indo-Pak dialectic was largely a sum zero game. If one country proposed something, the other was obliged to discern some hidden agenda and reject it. But now we have General Musharraf boldly asking for a complete “demilitarization” of both Kashmirs and free movement for Kashmiris across the LoC. In the old paradigm, the Indians would have looked askance at this proposal, suspecting it of being insidiously linked to Pakistan’s old stance of rejecting the LoC as a “sacrosanct” political and geographical feature. Equally, an acceptance would have implied a contradiction with India’s old position that the LoC was an established “dividing line” between the two countries rather than a controversial one between two communities. Similarly, on the Pakistan side, the UN-only approach has been officially abandoned in favour of exploring a multiple-option agenda. In other words, an acceptable and welcome level of “reinterpretation” is developing on both sides.
The bus service between the two countries is being beefed up with new routes and greater frequency. ‘Moderate’ Kashmiri leaders from India have been allowed to cross the LoC and visit Pakistan – Mr Yasin Malik is here for the second time in three months – while Islamabad hasn’t shed any tears about the isolation of the hardliners in Srinagar. The same leaders have also had meetings with the Indian prime minister, a long outstanding demand. The remarkable thing is that an increasing number of opinion-makers in Pakistan want the opening of a trade route across the LoC and the border at Amritsar. Until recently, Islamabad was insistent on linking progress on trade liberalization – which benefits India more than Pakistan because it will lead to a huge trade surplus for India with palpable movement on the core issue of Kashmir. But now the Pakistani government has unilaterally allowed Indian foodstuffs to be imported in order to combat the inflationary pressures at home – which shows that there are benefits for Pakistan too beyond the cold statistics of the trade equation. More significantly, in pursuit of the same self-serving objective, the Pakistani commerce ministry has quietly decided to allow the import of dozens of consumer, industrial and intermediate goods from India. These developments square with India’s desire to normalize relations and build trust before coming to grips with the Kashmir dispute.
The earthquake has raised the question of transforming a national calamity into an international opportunity to build trust and peace. It is therefore unfortunate that the Indian offer of helicopters for relief was spurned by Pakistan for purely military reasons and equally regrettable that India could not bring itself to allow neutral Russian or Arab pilots to fly them. Pakistanis are also upset about the lack of an appropriate response from civil society in India. Perhaps the terrorist bombings of civilians in Delhi has something to do with it. Now comes the unsettling news that India’s pro-peace foreign minister, Natwar Singh, has been stripped of his portfolio for dubious involvement in the UN oil-for-food program. If he is incapacitated, the peace process would naturally slow down. Equally, if jihadi-inspired terrorist attacks in India continue to rock tactical or strategic assessments, there could be pressure on Islamabad to deliver on the anti-jihadi agenda, something that General Musharraf may not be in a position to do quickly.
The Indo-Pak peace process is moving into unexplored territory. Restraint and wisdom will have to be exercised by both sides to keep it on track.
(November 4-10, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 37 – Editorial)
Still no paradigm shift
General Pervez Musharraf’s recent press conference in Rawalpindi reflected his usual candour, sincerity, determination and optimism to set Pakistan right. That was wonderful. But it also betrayed his continuing blind spots and pet peeves. That was unfortunate. More significantly, there was no indication that he is thinking like a political visionary seeking paradigm change. That was frustrating.
His rescue, relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction strategy seems seamless. His assurance of the will and ability to marshal the financial and human resources for the plan is heartening. His warm appreciation of the efforts of the UN, NATO, the international community (especially the United States), the NGOs and the media was timely. His idea of holding an international donor conference in Islamabad in which UN Sec-Gen Kofi Annan will participate is great. Clearly, he is seized of the moment and will do his all to help the grieving survivors.
But how will General Musharraf deal with the sociological and political imperatives of the situation? One can reconstruct buildings, even colonies, possibly housing societies, but cities are organic constructions anchored in timeless human endevour. When they are fully destroyed – as in Kashmir more than just brick and mortar have to be restored. Their souls have to be breathed into them again, as in the case of Germany and Japan after WW2. And that requires political-paradigm shifts towards sustainable grass roots development, accountability, good governance, democracy and regional peace. In the absence of that, angry displacement and forced migration will take their toll, resulting in ghettoization, criminalization and radicalization in both the sending and receiving community.
General Musharraf’s blind spot is the army, of course, and his pet peeve remains the media. The army is his first and last resort. Like a good politician he will see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil of his constituents. Unfortunately, elements of the cynical media which don’t readily buy into the military’s notions of national security, remain a pain in the neck. Thus it wasn’t surprising to see General Musharraf getting hot under the collar when questions relating to defence expenditures were raised. No, he fumed, there will be no cuts because notions of national security are not aborted in the face of earthquakes. It didn’t remotely occur to him that a majority of Pakistanis might be more concerned about bread and butter issues rather than the army’s meticulously ratcheted notion of a poor country’s national security based on expensive conventional and nuclear weapons. Frankly, it is galling that we should be spending billions of dollars on fighter jets and surveillance systems when we could be using some of that money to generate full literacy and employment and real (rather than the current nominal) economic growth. His argument that defence expenditures are only 17% of the budget is palpably disingenuous, considering how some huge military expenditure items have been shifted into government expenditures and how many military-related receipts never find their way into government revenues (the military will give only 25% of the receipts of the sale of military land at market rates – originally bought from earlier governments at subsidized rates to the current government and use the rest to build the new GHQ whose land has been bought from the current government at subsidized rates). Indeed, if one were to look closely at the source of our domestic and international debt we would find that much of it is due to whopping military expenditures since 1947.
One particular statement by General Musharraf was revealing. “For the first time”, he explained in reference to the quake rehabilitation effort presided over by two serving generals hand picked by him, “the army is under the prime minister”. Hello, come again. For one, the poor prime minister, Shaukat Aziz is nowhere in sight when President Musharraf lords it over all matters great and small. For another, isn’t the army supposed to be always under the prime minister in a prime ministerial democratic system? But gone are the days when a prime minister could sack an army chief and hire another. It is the other way round in the Musharrafian presidential system.
General Musharraf opened his address by condemning the “dastardly terrorist attack in Delhi”. He then went on to offer help to India in tracking down the terrorists. And he expressed the hope, even the assurance, that the peace process would not be derailed by the provocative incident. That was an excellent and hopeful move. But when two hours later the Indian prime minister suggested that the mysterious bombers might have links with militant groups in Pakistan, the Pakistani Foreign Office jumped to protest and deny the charge. A more suitable response might have been to reiterate the earlier offer to investigate the terrorists, considering that it is well known that most Kashmiri militant groups have links with jihadi counterparts in Pakistan. But such a response would have suggested a paradigm shift. And that is still not the case . How can the peace process between India and Pakistan become irrevocable without a final end to jihadi militancy in Kashmir and Pakistan?
That is still the most unfortunate part of General Pervez Musharraf’s politico-strategic philosophy.
(October 28-3, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 36 – Editorial)
Seize the hour, General Musharraf!
The UN’s humanitarian wing was able to collect nearly 80% of its targeted relief fund of approximately US$1 billion within 10 days of the Tsunami disaster. Yet it has managed to collect only 30% of its much smaller US$300 million target in twice as many days in the case of the Pakistani quake. Worse, if much of the required relief assistance isn’t forthcoming in the next three weeks or so before the winter snows and rains set in and make the terrain impassable, it will all be in vain. Why hasn’t the “Pakistani” quake elicited the same humanitarian response from the international community as in other international distress cases? Indeed, why is the “Pakistani” quake being referred to in the advertisements of western charities and relief agencies (as for example, by Oxfam, the leading such charity) as the “South Asia” disaster even though the rest of South Asia has fortunately escaped its wrath without a scratch?
Let’s face it. When you mention “Pakistan” to Westerners, they are inclined to immediately conjure up images of a national backwater bristling with nuclear and conventional weapons and infested with west-hating religious extremists, India-baiting generals and war-mongering jihadis in Kashmir. Until recently, we openly proclaimed that the odious Taliban were our friends. More children were named Osama in Pakistan after 9/11 than anywhere else in the Muslim world. Danny Pearl was beheaded in Karachi. Churches and Western consulates have been attacked, French engineers killed, multi-national food stores bombed. Minorities and women are routinely dehumanized. Islamic fanatics among the Sunni and Shia sects wreak senseless havoc upon one another every day. Western embassies issue advisories against travel in Pakistan and insurance companies charge premiums from those who ignore this advice. On top of it all, we make pathetic excuses about our lack of representative democracy, banish our popular leaders from the country, and even in a moment of acute national environmental crisis refuse to bury the political hatchet and solicit their assistance in galvanizing international humanitarian relief.
As if that were not enough, consider what some stalwarts of the ruling mullah-military establishment have been uttering to the international media these days. Dr Israr Ahmad, Amir of the Tanzeem i Islami who gets prime time on public and private media, warns Pakistanis to “beware of India and Israel” because the former wants to win the sympathies of the Kashmiris and the latter only wants to be “recognized” by Islamabad. He argues that “major calamities were inflicted on nations that defied Islam” while only minor travails have visited “the nation of Islam”. Tell that to the 60,000 Kashmir believers who lie buried in the rubble of the quake or to the 2 million faithful who are without food or shelter. Or examine what Riaz Hussain Pirzada of the ruling Muslim League said in parliament. “Why have we allowed Nato troops and helicopters into Pakistan?” he thundered, “why have foreign NGOs been permitted to lend a helping hand?” he screamed, “why has the LoC been softened?” he foamed at the mouth. “The quake was Allah’s wrath for abandoning the Taliban and assisting the US invasion of Afghanistan,” he insisted. Meanwhile, the august parliament of the NWFP expended much energy recently lambasting the chief military spokesman for “breakfasting on the morning of the quake” instead of fasting like a true Muslim.
In the middle of all this comes the news that Pakistan’s military is ready to cough up US$1.5 billion as the first installment on the purchase of 55 new Lockheed Martin planes plus 25 used aircraft.
If you were a Westerner asked to provide humanitarian financial assistance to a country led by a military government obsessed with the regional “military balance”, what would you think? Here is a wretchedly poor country in desperate straits and here is its military spending money borrowed from Western countries and agencies on conventional weapons that cannot provide economic or political security. And this, despite the fact that the military leadership says Pakistan wants to build enduring peace with India and that the nuclear bomb which Pakistan has manufactured at great cost and sacrifice is the ultimate deterrent to war in the region.
Every problem or difficulty is imbued with an opportunity. 9/11 was one such instance when General Pervez Musharraf seized the opportunity to try and turn Pakistan round. Similarly, he exploited the failed assassination attempts on him by Islamic extremists to launch the war against terror. The jihadi attacks on the Indian parliament persuaded him of the vanishing dividing line between terrorists and freedom-fighters and nudged him to open a realistic peace dialogue with India. In the same way, now more than ever, General Musharraf should seize the hour of the quake to abandon the notion of a conventional arms balance with India. He should announce that much of the money earmarked for military weapons purchases will be spent on the destitute victims of the quake in Kashmir. There can be no better or more visionary statement to make at home and abroad. It would do all Pakistanis proud. And it would enable Westerners to perceive Pakistan and its people and leaders in a better light and convince them that their money will be spent on deserving causes.
(November 18-24, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 39 – Editorial)
Human rights: no sovereign frontiers
Gang rape victim Mukhtar Mai is an inconsequential victim in Pakistan but she was treated like a heroine in the United States recently. Mai was publicly invited by the State Department to meet Ms Christina Rocca, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, as a signal of American support for oppressed women anywhere. To reinforce this point, Mai was accorded a similar welcome by a committee of the US senate. Meanwhile, Amnesty International, Reporters San Frontiers, Glamour magazine, and the Asian American Network Against Abuse of Women, heaped laurels on her, constantly stressing the courage and integrity with which she has braved the social and political odds to highlight the issue of rape in Pakistan. She was also given prize money as “Woman of the Year”. More funds will surely come her way as women all over the world join hands to empower her as a symbol of resistance in male-dominated societies. What better icon for this than a woman who was gang-raped on orders from the elders of her own village, aided and abetted by the local police? In contrast to her triumph, General Pervez Musharraf’s trip to the US was a public relations fiasco, foundering on the very issue of rape and women’s oppression exemplified by his crass remarks to the Washington Post and his rant at a press conference later in New York.
Many Pakistani reactions to the rape victim’s US trip have reflected upon the “ignominy” of admitting that such things happened in Pakistan “while a rape occurs in the US every minute”. For example, an Urdu paper typically wrote: “The Pakistani community in the US hated the spectacle that Mukhtar Mai presented while receiving a prize from an organisation. The Pakistanis there said rapes occurred in the US too, so Mai’s rape was no big deal. Pakistanis also resented the fact that she took the prize from Brook Shields, an actress. Pakistanis thought she was working on the American agenda to defame Pakistan.”
The conventional reaction is that Pakistanis shouldn’t air Pakistan’s dirty linen in public abroad because this is humiliating. In other words, it besmirches the “honour” of Pakistan. This “honour-based world view” is also reflected in the thinking of those bureaucrats and holier-than-thou nationalists who advised General Musharraf to “keep a check” on Mai at home and stop her from going to the US and damaging Pakistan’s image. What is unfortunately missing from their perspective is the fact that those who lauded Mai abroad are part of a generalised global campaign against male domination and women’s oppression and not part of any nation-specific insult campaign. They see Mai as a symbol of hope and inspiration for oppressed women everywhere.
General Musharraf’s campaign for a better image of Pakistan ran up against Mai’s tour of the US because of his mistaken belief that we can change our image without changing ourselves, as though this is simply a marketing campaign to fool the consumer into buying a bad product. The bigger challenge facing us is our own transformation. In this task, it is not only our self- perception that will help but also how the world looks at us through its media. In the realm of human rights, for example, it is counterproductive to adopt a policy of blatant denial. Since all societies have their ills, it is a far better policy to agree and promise self-correction than deny and denounce the truth. That is what we must learn to understand while reacting to the NGOs that work in this field. Instead of clutching at honour-based conspiracy theories and blasting the NGOs as recipients of external funding – which is an absurd xenophobic notion since the main accuser, the government of Pakistan, is the biggest recipient of external funding – we should recognise the fact that this is actually a stubborn refusal to reform our state and society.
Human rights are universal. Thank God Pakistan signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights many decades ago when it was not in such a xenophobic, religious and anti-Western mood. If we were asked to do it today, we might object to it since it sanctifies freedom of religion, including conversion. Indeed, all states react to allegations of human-rights abuse by righteous denials until the media or some NGO blows the whistle on them. This is what happened in the case of the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. When the US government was brought under pressure, American civil society was nonetheless allowed to exercise its right to dissociate itself from these atrocities. In this process, there are no sovereign frontiers. The state, for its own survival, must allow a periodical washing of its dirty linen in public. That is what is called accountability and every state and society needs it not just for survival but for growth.
Noam Chomsky was lauded for washing America’s dirty linen by hoards of Pakistanis who flocked to hear him and salute his ideals when he was in Pakistan some years ago. How can the same people now condemn brave people like Mukhtar Mai and Asma Jehangir for doing the same thing by putting pressure on the government of Pakistan to initiate reform and restore Pakistan’s damaged image?
(November 25 – Dec 01, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 40 – Editorial)
No time to crow
The 75-member donor’s conference in Islamabad has netted a cool US$ 6 billion for earthquake relief. The opposition has scoffed at it, which is not fair. Surely this must be some sort of a record for country-specific international disaster relief. It may be footnoted that the international community is weary of coughing up whenever there is a natural disaster in the Third World. Nor is it always easy for leaders of democratic countries with checks and balances to take snappy decisions and announce grants and donations without reference to their parliaments. It is admirable that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia weighed in with the largest donation of all. But consider how the Bush administration must have worked overtime to nudge the US Congress to make supplementary budgetary allocations of over half a billion dollars for Pakistan. This, despite the fact that opinion polls indicate that most Pakistanis don’t like the Bush administration and think that Osama bin Laden’s war of terror against the West is entirely explicable if not entirely justified.
If General Pervez Musharraf is pleased with the results, it is due in some measure to his moderate and realistic foreign policies which have ended years of diplomatic stagnation and even isolation for Pakistan. Make no mistake about it. The international community has pulled out all the stops because it thinks Musharraf is the man of the hour, warts and all.
But one shouldn’t get carried away. Even though the Pakistani public has turned out its pockets for the victims of the quake, Islamabad should be disquieted by the lack of public trust and faith in the government’s ability to manage relief funds transparently and efficiently. Indeed, most Pakistanis have given freely to NGOs rather than to the government. Such reservations have also been expressed by sections of the international community. This is by no means a reflection of distrust in the Musharraf regime as it is of government per se, given decades of betrayal and abandonment by the state. That is why we were surprised by a statement attributed to the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, in which he is supposed to have brushed aside a remark by a representative of a foreign agency urging transparency and efficiency in the use of donor funds. “We don’t need anyone to tell us how to spend this money”, he is reported to have said rather haughtily. A more reasonable response would have been to extend assurances that the Musharraf regime would set new standards of discretion and accountability as demanded by Pakistanis.
Government-opposition relations during this crisis also leave a lot to be desired. The Musharraf regime has hounded the opposition to the wall and therefore has no right to expect any quarter, let alone cooperation, from it. General Musharraf’s propensity to retain all power in his own hands and to treat parliament in a cavalier manner is not conducive to orderly functioning and stability of society, let alone transparent and efficient use of resources in crisis situations such as the current one. For example, there was no harm in allowing a parliamentary debate on the need for NATO troops to help relief operations. Indeed, most Pakistanis are inclined to welcome whatever help is forthcoming from any quarter. But the government’s stubborn refusal to take parliament into confidence and involve it in any meaningful way has created an environment of bitter resentment. And the belated, rather opportunistic, announcement of a parliamentary committee to oversee relief operations is not likely to fool anyone or improve matters.
One section of the opposition is demanding that defence expenditures should be cut rather than merely postponed, as in the case of the pending purchase of F-16 fighter jets. It is also arguing that the costly GHQ-shift to Islamabad should be abandoned in the public interest. But, for obvious reasons, this is not cutting any ice with the military regime. However, whatever the real defence merits of the case, it is galling to hear senior air force officials mock the public by asking why it should have been so agitated when the US refused to sell F-16s to Pakistan some years ago if it doesn’t now want the air force to have the jets. Elementary. The earlier US decision not to sell us F-16s or return the US$ 650 million advanced was an affront to Pakistanis since it signified a unilateral breach of sovereign contract. But the current situation is vastly different. It implies an organic national assessment of our independent defence requirements without regard to sovereignty issues, especially at a time when there is urgent and compelling need for scarce resources to build a whole new human and economic infrastructure in Azad Kashmir.
One last point. Nearly US$ 2.5 billion has been pledged by international finance institutions on soft terms. This is a loan. It will add to the public debt and put pressure on future budgets. Given the extensive misuse and misappropriation of foreign loans in the past, the public at home and abroad has every right to seek assurances that it will not meet the same fate again. Under the circumstances, General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shuakat Aziz would be advised not to be self-righteous about their recent successful attempt to win international assistance.
(December 3-9, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 41 – Editorial)
Believe it or not
“Believe it or not, Benazir Bhutto has been awarded the “World Tolerance Award” for the year 2005 in Leipzig, Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev presented the award, citing “her vision, personal strength and her passion for creating a better and peaceful world in the 21st Century”. Among past winners of this award count Pope John Paul-II, opera singer Luciano Pavarotti, broadcaster Larry King, former polish president Lech Walesa, entrepreneur Richard Branson, singer Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) and film producer Roman Polanski. This is a motley crew. Barring the Pope, it is unclear how an opera singer, a post-modern film maker or even a soft American TV host could have fulfilled the criteria of the award. But an award is an award. And better Benazir Bhutto, the moaner and groaner about the din of democracy, than Nawaz Sharif, the wannabe Amir ul Momineen who put the media to the sword, though Pervez Musharraf might have best claimed it for his fancy footwork in Afghanistan and Kashmir if only he’d agreed to doff his uniform. At any rate, few should begrudge the long-suffering Ms Bhutto who has tolerated the tiring wiles and misdemeanours of her worst half.
Believe it or not, Mir Waiz Umar Farooq, the leader of the All Parties Hurriet Conference in Kashmir, wants to task NATO with demilitarization of Kashmir on both sides of the LoC: “NATO has a tremendous role in crisis management and conflict resolution. It has successfully contributed to Bosnia and Kosovo.” He is also arguing that after the troop pull-out, the APHC could ask militants to stop fighting and strengthen the peace process. Now this is a non-starter if ever there was one. Everyone and his uncle in Pakistan is demanding that NATO should pull out of relief work in Azad Kashmir and not stay a minute longer, and everyone and his aunt in India and China is freaked out with the presence of only 1000 NATO troops in the Himalayan region, let alone the prospect of a more substantial longer term presence. Indeed, everyone sees NATO as the classic American Trojan horse in West and South Asia, much like everyone believed two decades ago that the Russian bear was dying to take a dip in the warm waters of the Arabian Sea even as it lay on its death bed in Afghanistan! The idea that the “militants” could be persuaded to talk peace after the troop pull-out is another gem. Here they are, trying to derail the peace process by bombing civilians, here is India demanding that the militants should be quashed for good before any demilitarization can be envisaged, and here is Mir Waiz tilting at the windmills like Don Quixote.
Believe it or not, General Pervez Musharraf has promised once again that he will make a decision about the status of his uniform before 2007. Believe it or not, he also claimed that “the future of democracy in Pakistan is bright because, with the advent of a system of checks and balances in the country, the democratic system will never be derailed…My uniform is not an impediment in the development of the democratic process. I strengthened democracy and exalted the parliament by remaining in uniform. There is no restriction on any political party.” He might as well have reiterated in the same breath that by bringing the army in he has kept it out, by refusing to make a presidential address to parliament every year as required by law, he has strengthened parliament, and by baiting and banning Bhutto and Sharif he has truly laid the foundations of two party democracy. Believe it or not also, Sheikh Rashid, His Masters Voice, and Sher Afghan, the PMLQ’s parliamentary watchdog, both imply that General Musharraf is lord of the jungle and can do as he pleases, even as Senator SM Zafar, the PMLQ’s legal eagle, thinks it would be unconstitutional to do so.
Believe it or not, President George W Bush was only “joking” when he suggested to Tony Blair, the British prime minister, after 9/11 that it might be a good idea to bomb the living daylights out of the TV station Al-Jazeera in Doha for opposing US cloak and dagger policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. The targeted bombing of the Al-Jazeera building in Kabul was part of the joke, as was the killing of two Al-Jazeera reporters in Baghdad by American troops. The British Attorney General is now so taken up by the joke that he is threatening to slap the Official Secrets Act on any newspaper that publishes the contents of this original Bush joke.
Believe it or not, 34 “wanted tribal militants” surrendered last week in North Waziristan to the new Peshawar corps commander “after a deal was struck” for the umpteenth time, the miscreants were lauded for their “patriotism” and a lot of money exchanged hands. But there is no let up to hostilities in the region. Indeed, several soldiers have been killed in ambushes since the deal was spurned by Maulana Sadiq Noor, a “key Al Qaeda facilitator”, who was conspicuous by his absence when the peace pipe was smoked.
And, believe it or not, that’s only the fare for this week.
(December 9-15, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 42 – Editorial)
Defaming Musharraf’s Pakistan
It is generally understood that if armed non-state actors like certain extremist religious and ethnic groups don’t like what is written about them in the local Pakistani press, they are inclined to take ‘action’ against the offending journalist or paper. That is why some journalists have been assaulted or even assassinated in Pakistan (like the editor of Taqbeer many years ago) and some papers have been vandalized (like Nawa i Waqt in Karachi and The Frontier Post in Peshawar), most often in Karachi which is plagued with both ethnic and religious violence. But they are not the only ones who can take the law into their hands and wreak vengeance. Mainstream political parties, too, have been known to accuse journalists of “treason” and “terrorism” when their leaders have been faulted for corruption or misdemeanour (as in the case of the editor of this paper by Nawaz Sharif). What is less well known or recorded for obvious reasons are instances of abuse at the hands of the intelligence agencies or the military. Here are some examples from the Musharraf regime (which receives international kudos for a relatively free press).
Some years ago, a senior reporter of an English daily paper in Islamabad wrote some uncomfortable truths about the nepotism and unaccountability of a general who was head of the Pakistan Cricket Board. The next day the poor hack was “picked up” by unidentified men in a jeep, dragged off to a nearby wood and beaten black and blue as a warning never to trifle with men in khaki. A shadow of his former self, he has refused to go public with his ordeal and never written a bad word about a serving or retired soldier since. Another respected journalist wrote about opposition in the army to General Musharraf’s pro-West policies. He “disappeared” for several days but his family was “advised” not to lodge a complaint. After he returned home, he taped his mouth, packed his bags and left the country. Other offending journalists have been luckier. One was persistently argumentative at press moots with General Musharraf. “They” simply pushed his uninsured car out of his driveway and burnt it to ashes in the dead of night. He is on good terms with the big man now. Another got the same “car” treatment when he wrote about the nexus between the Pakistan intelligence agencies and a don wanted by India.
Two new troubling cases have come to light in the last seven days. A journalist in the tribal badlands of Waziristan who challenged the official military account of an Al Qaeda activist’s death has “disappeared”. He is Hayatullah Khan, a reporter for an Urdu-language daily and photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA). He was kidnapped by unidentified gunmen last Tuesday in Mir Ali in the tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan. “Khan’s reporting had cast doubt on the official account of how a senior Al Qaeda militant was killed on December 1 and raised the sensitive issue of the US army’s participation in the fight against terrorism in Pakistan,” says Reporters San Frontiers, an international press watchdog. His disappearance comes a day after a journalist was killed in Darra Adamkhel, in another part of the Tribal Areas. His abduction came just a few days after he contradicted Pakistani army claims that the death of Hamza Rabia, a leading Arab militant in Al Qaeda, and four other people on December 1, was the result of an accidental munitions explosion in the home of a person identified as Mohammad Siddiq, who turned out to be an uncle of Khan. “On the basis of photographs he took at the scene, Khan said Rabia was killed by a US missile. Villagers said the explosion was caused by a missile fired from a plane or a drone,” said RSF. Locals say the Pakistani security forces had it in for him. “He was arrested in an arbitrary fashion by US forces in 2002 when he was trying to cover Al Qaeda and Taliban activity in the border region. The Pakistani military harassed him the following year after he wrote about the misuse of army vehicles in Mir Ali,” wrote RSF.
Another recent incident in Bahawalpur is also noteworthy. The local police has filed a case against nine men under the Maintenance of Public Order 16 for “defaming the armed forces” during the launching ceremony of a book titled “Gernailon Ki Siyasat’ (The Politics of Generals). These include the former Pakistan ambassador to Norway and various party political heavyweights who spoke on the occasion. Earlier, it was revealed, the authorities had tried to prevent the book launch by denying permission to hold it at the Circuit House and Rashidia Auditorium, and leaning on local hotels and marriage halls not to entertain such miscreants.
If General Pervez Musharraf doesn’t formally sanction such selective action it is clear that he condones local military commanders out to “protect their asses”, as the Americans would say. But the fact is that they defame the image of “Musharraf’s Pakistan” and hurt him more than the press. Mr Hayatullah Khan should be released immediately before his case becomes a cause celebre abroad.
(December 16-22, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 43 – Editorial)
How to build the Kalabagh Dam
General Pervez Musharraf is a straight-talking fellow. What you see and hear is what you get. No double talk, no diplomatic niceties. This endears him to the headline-hungry media. But he is also inclined to get carried away by the exuberance of his own verbosity. When that happens he gets into a spot of trouble. A case in point is his misunderstood remark some months ago before a panel of The Washington Post editors about “Pakistani women lining up to get raped so that they can get Canadian nationalities”.
Now we have to contend with the fallout of his shooting from the hip during a briefing to the media in Karachi on the need for building consensus on the Kalabagh Dam. But, consensus or not, the Kalabagh dam will be built, he ended up saying. What if some post-Musharraf government should stop the project mid-way, he was asked. That won’t happen, he confided, because “Punjab would topple any government” that tried to do that! Surely, that’s the last thing he should have said to a Sindhi audience decrying Punjabi dominance and high-handedness over the decades. From this many commentators have concluded that Punjab and the Punjabi ‘Pakistan’ army are on one side and the rest of Pakistan on the other on this issue.
But that is not the case. Benazir Bhutto, a Sindhi, once remarked that if the dam could be renamed it might well be built. This implied that a dam at Kalabagh was technically feasible and economically desirable but politically prickly for reasons of historical provincial distrust. Similarly, Nawaz Sharif, a Punjabi whose regime included sub-nationalists from the NWFP and Balochistan, talked time and again about the need to build the dam without a squeak from his fiery provincial partners. It is also well-known that many Sindhi, Baloch and Pakhtun politicians who are publicly anti-dam are privately dispassionate about the issue.
Is it conceivable that prime ministers and technical experts can lie about the viability of a national project on the basis of their provincialism or ethnicity? Equally, is it inconceivable that marginalized sub-nationalists should whip up passions to advance their agendas and win popular support?
Water is a life and death issue for people. So is politics for politicians. But if “enemy states” like India and Pakistan can settle such matters via bilateral agreements like the Indus Waters Treaty which has withstood war and dismemberment and nuclear rattling, why can’t provinces within states find an acceptable resource-sharing model? This leads to other key questions that have a distinct bearing on the issue: Why haven’t we been able to implement the 1991 water accord between the provinces? Why is the National Finance Commission Award on resource sharing still hanging fire? Why is Balochistan constantly grumbling about gas royalties? Why is the Council of Common Interests dormant? Why is the concurrent constitutional list still alive and kicking despite the constitutional provision for its abolition two decades ago?
If the “unfinished agenda of partition” is the unresolved Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, the “unfinished agenda of independence” is the unfulfilled promise of a truly democratic and federal Pakistan. Fifty eight years down the line, we are further away from democracy and federalism than ever before. Three bouts of military-presidential rule have castrated democracy and federalism because the Punjabi-dominated military is obsessed with notions of national security and budgetary requirements that demand highly centralized decision-making and resource-generating state structures. Is it any wonder, then, that suspicions should abound among the powerless civilians and the hapless provinces about the credibility and intentions of a military president-general who is going through the motions of drumming up a consensus on the Kalabagh dam but who is determined to go ahead with the project even without it?
The Kalabagh dam would be built on solid foundations if it followed rather than preceded the construction of a national consensus on the type of democracy and extent of federalism that Pakistanis want. This would entail abiding by the word and spirit of the 1973 constitution that was the first and last truly consensual covenant between the diverse peoples, ideologies and provincial sentiments of Pakistan. Every constitutional amendment since then, especially those by General Zia ul Haq and Gen Musharraf, has taken us away from that goal. The tragedy is that, notwithstanding the best personal intentions in the world to do good by Pakistan, Gen Musharraf’s institutional compulsions are deepening the fissures in state and society.
There is, of course, no such thing as a complete or unequivocal consensus in any democracy. Indeed, by definition, democracy is decision-making and governance on the basis of the majority sentiment. So it is not the lack of a complete consensus that poses problems for the Kalabagh dam. It is the lack of a popularly and freely elected government mandated to take such a decision. Under the circumstances, General Musharraf would be advised to focus on ensuring a free and fair election in which he, as Mr Musharraf, can join hands with the mainstream majority not just to build the Kalabagh dam but also to resolve the outstanding federal issues of the day.
(December 23-29, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 44 – Editorial)
Bad strategy
A glance at the front page of any respectable newspaper these days is a recipe for depression. Here’s a quick dose.
“Help! The Punjabi army is killing Baloch women and children”, shriek Baloch sub-nationalists. “Rubbish”, retorts the army spokesman, “paramilitary forces are flushing out terrorists and miscreants who have been blasting gas and communication infrastructure and lobbing rockets at the paramilitary forces”. It is pointed out that “the miscreants” also tried to shoot down a helicopter carrying the Inspector-General of the Frontier Corps and aimed rockets at the public gathering addressed by President-General Pervez Musharraf, during his last visit to Kohlu in Marri tribal area in Balochistan. “What did they expect? That we’d shower them with flowers?” he asks in exasperation.
“Help! The Punjabi army is killing Pathan, Uzbek and Chechen Islamic warriors in the tribal areas of Waziristan.” “Rubbish”, retorts the army spokesman, “these are not Islamic warriors. They are common thugs, extortionists, terrorists and miscreants who have been ambushing convoys, kidnapping locals, stirring up cross border trouble, fomenting attacks on Pakistan’s Western allies and launching assassination attempts on President-General Pervez Musharraf”. “What did they expect? That we’d shower flowers on them?”
“Help! The Punjabi army wants to choke us with the Kalabagh Dam”, wail the Sindhis. “Help! The Punjabi army wants to drown us in the Kalabagh Dam”, flail the Pathans. “Rubbish”, retorts the army spokesman, “it’s now or never for the Kalabagh Dam. If we don’t build it, all of us – Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans and Baloch – will be squeezed for water and energy in time to come”.
“Help! The Punjabi army wants to deprive me of my rightful due as prime minister of Pakistan”, bemoans former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in exile. “Rubbish”, retorts the ubiquitous army spokesman, “she has been charged with corruption in Pakistan and in Switzerland. She will be arrested when she returns. What does she expect? That we’d garland her at Lahore airport as the long lost saviour of Pakistan?”
“Help! The Punjabi army has banished me from Pakistan”, cries former prime minister Nawaz Sharif in his gilded cage in Jeddah, “all I ever wanted was to be Amir ul Momineen”. “Rubbish”, retorts the army spokesman, “he tried to kill a planeload of passengers, including President-General Pervez Musharraf; he wanted to set up a personal dictatorship; he was corrupt as hell; he bargained to be exiled. What does he expect? That we’ll welcome him back with open arms and elevate him to the prime ministership again?”
If General Musharraf’s enemies are a troublesome and even treacherous lot, his friends are rotten too. The MMA was once amongst his few chosen business partners. It was facilitated with 60 seats in the national assembly, the slot of the honourable and loyal leader of the opposition, a ringside seat in the National Security Council, the nazimship of the city of Karachi and government in the NWFP. Now it is accusing him of being an “agent of America” and desperate to see his back. The MQM is another such fair weather friend. Once it was at the receiving end of the stick in Karachi from the Punjabi army. Now it is in bed with it. In three quick public manifestations of fickleness, it articulated the sentiment that the KBD should not be built without a national consensus; then it threatened to quit the alliance with Islamabad if the KBD were built without a consensus; now it has somersaulted and helped the Sindh government kill an opposition sponsored resolution in the Sindh provincial assembly against the KBD! The ruling PMLQ is also not without its cussed Forward Blocs and opportunist renegades. Worse, not a single member of its allies in Sindh or the NWFP, including the current Sindhi chief minister and the current Pathan interior minister, are ready to come out openly in support of the KBD. This is compounded by the fact that the provincial and federal government’s great media managers, who have showered unaccounted largesse on Sindhi newspaper owners in the past, have been unable to even convince them to carry pro-KBD ads in their newspapers.
Why must General Musharraf personally, and the Pakistan army institutionally, bear the burden of Pakistan which is a difficult country to govern even at the best of times? Because they have consciously edged out the big players and are clutching at the coattails of the also-rans. Why must General Musharraf open so many bitter fronts in the run up to general elections two years hence? Because he thinks the civilians are no good, they cannot be trusted to share power and manage the country effectively and judiciously, therefore now is as good a time as any for him to get on with it.
This is bad strategy. First it was a lack of democracy, now a deficit of federalism is threatening to undermine General Musharraf’s agenda. This is the wrong time to alienate the key civilian stakeholders. Instead, he should be thinking of giving them a share in the pie so that they can shoulder responsibility for the hard national decisions that lie ahead.
(December 30 – Jan 05, 2005, Vol – XVII, No. 45 – Editorial)
Happy new year?
At the end of 2004 we concluded our review of Musharraf’s Pakistan with a forecast for 2005. This is what we predicted. “ The economy will grow without significantly denting poverty. Relations with India will improve without breakthroughs on Kashmir. Political rapprochement at home will be primarily aimed at divide and rule rather than any genuine power-sharing. The religious parties will huff and puff but won’t be able to bring General Musharraf down. His personal security will remain the chink in his armour. He will not anticipate major problems or find solutions like a statesman or visionary leader… we may expect his policies to remain long on tactical retreats and dubious advances in response to changing situations but short on strategic vision in anticipation of irrevocably changed longer term realities.”
So how has General Musharraf actually fared? What is the outlook for 2006?
The Economy
For Good: GDP growth is targeted at about 6% which reflects continuing confidence in the government’s economic policies. Cotton production, a critical factor, too, is good at 13 million bales. Trade is buoyant, with exports and imports rising 22% and 55% respectively until end-December. The currency is stable, the stock market is flourishing, and forex reserves of US$11.5 billion coupled with home remittances of nearly US$2 billion so far are good signs. Tax collection is up 16%. Total external debt is about US$34 billion, no more than before. The IMF has not returned to throttle us with conditionalities.
For Bad : 9% (official) inflation is pinching people. Pervasive unemployment and underemployment exist. Income equality has not improved. No dent has been made in reducing poverty. The trade deficit so far is about US$5.5 billion, which exceeds the end-June 07 target of US$5 billion, spelling balance of payments. Thanks to the botched-up PTCL privatization, direct foreign investment is only US$800 million so far, which is far short of the US$3.5 billion target for the year and pathetic by emerging market standards. We are also poised to spend more than US$3 billion on arms. Foreign debt will jump 10% to US$38 billion on account of earthquake relief.
The Political Scene
For Good: General Musharraf’s foreign policies are yielding fruit. A thaw in Indo-Pak relations has enabled Indians, Pakistanis and Kashmiris greater access to one another, with trade liberalization yielding benefits to consumers and plugging food inflation. Good relations with the international community, particularly the US, have also yielded $6.3 billion in pledges for quake relief. The print and electronic media is still relatively free.
For Bad: General Musharraf has inexplicably sown the seeds of uncertainty and instability. His inability to settle the dispute with the Bugtis, followed by military action against the Marris, has alienated Balochistan. His decision to build the Kalabagh Dam has agitated Sindh and stirred Pakhtun nationalists. The rise of Talibanism in Waziristan is a bad omen. These policies have brought the army and Punjab into disrepute. New fissures have developed in the ruling Muslim League. His U-turn on the local bodies system shows a lack of confidence in his originally envisaged system. The fact that there is still no succession principle built into his system means that if something were to happen to him every significant appointment, policy and undertaking would be up for grabs. His continuing inability or unwillingness to substitute the military’s traditional partnership with the religious parties with one with the mainstream liberal PPP confirms the weaknesses and contradictions in his system. How can he sustain a liberal and moderate agenda at home and a pragmatic foreign policy abroad without the right partners? Selective repression in the media and mishandling of human rights issues, especially those pertaining to women, has tainted his reputation and harmed the country’s “image”.
Civil Society
For Good: The “cultural” environment under Musharraf is less suffocating than before. The government is not insensitive to crimes against women and minorities. Fundamentalist religious edicts and fatwas are generally ignored. The courts are shedding their neo-conservatism. Al-Qaeda terrorism and jihadi fervour has diminished while pro-West sentiment is rising in view of international earthquake relief.
For Bad : “Enlightened moderation” doesn’t exist in practice. Madrassah reform hasn’t started. Education revamp is mired in bureaucratic wrangling and niggardly resource allocation. Police reform and speedy justice are nowhere in sight.
OUTLOOK for 2006
The uncertainty and agitation triggered by General Musharraf’s anti-province policies will destabilize his regime and undermine confidence in the political system and the economy. The developing rifts and forward blocs in the PMLQ will hurt his prospects. Public frustration with lack of dispute resolution with India will lead to a question mark over his India policy. Lack of political rapprochement with the mainstream PPP will compel it to join hands with the religious parties and sub-nationalists to create difficulties for him. Personal risk will remain high. Dubious advances and tactical retreats will not cover him with glory. The country’s “image’ will continue to take a beating despite expensive media manipulators.
(January 6-12, 2006, Vol – XVII, No. 46 – Editorial)
Holy writ of state
General Pervez Musharaf is once again thundering about restoring the “writ of the state” and “sorting them out”. First it was “terrorists” in Waziristan. Now it is “miscreants” in Balochistan. The Waziristani terrorists were mainly “foreigners” while the Baloch miscreants are aided and abetted by a “foreign hand”. Nearly 50,000 “troops” are conducting a “pacification” programme in Waziristan and another 50,000 are raiding hideouts in the Marri-Bugti area of Balochistan. But there is no “army operation” in these areas. The helicopter gunships belong to the interior ministry. Over 90% of Balochistan is in ‘B’ category (no law and order), but never mind, the writ of the state is firmly established in the country.
Governments are expected to misinform and be niggardly about the facts. But this is ridiculous. In this day and age, the truth will out sooner rather than later. And it is not just in Balochistan and Warizistan that the writ of the state is missing. Rising crime, honour killings, rapes, or mischief with the blasphemy law all reflect a feeble state. Wherever there are armed non-state actors – the jihadis, for example – the writ of the state is under challenge. Wherever there are swathes of territory that are not subject to the laws of the land – the ‘tribal areas’, for example – the writ of the state can be washed and hung out to dry. When was the last time that General Musharraf thundered about restoring the writ of the state regarding crimes against women, police corruption, jihadi threats, tribal vendettas, kidnappings and raids? Indeed, when was the army – sorry, paratroops – sent in to sort out all these trouble makers who make Pakistan look bad? When militant cadres of the Ittehad eTanzeemaat e Madaris e Deenia (ITMD) take to the streets next week to resist attempts by the state to expel foreign students in local madrassahs, will the writ of the state be enforced by scattering the demonstrators to the wind, or will Ejaz ul Haq, the minister for religious affairs, cajole them by obfuscating the matter as he has done on the issue of madrassah registration?
Balochistan is a good example of state selectively. The Marri and Bugti “miscreants” are not being offered any inducements or deals to abandon militancy, unlike their counterparts in Waziristan who are terrorists one day and patriots the next. Indeed, the famed writ of the state is curiously invisible when the terrorists start rampaging all over the place as erstwhile Taliban. In Balochistan, however, the painstaking deal between Nawab Akbar Bugti and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain is unilaterally put into cold storage and the Frontiers Corps is blithely allowed to breach the agreement.
Much the same sort of state self-righteousness is evident in proclamations of “development work” in Balochistan. It is propagated that the “Sardars” don’t want their tribesmen to benefit from the fruits of federal education and infrastructure development plans because that process would unshackle the people from slavery and erode the power and influence of the Sardars. In other words, the conflict is portrayed as one between a do-gooder state and the bad Sardars. But the facts are quite to the contrary. There was no conflict in Balochistan for a span of two decades in the 1980s and 1990s when all the “bad Sardars” were on the side of the “do-gooder state” – the eldest sons of Nawab Khair Buz Marri, who are today the so-called leaders of the Baloch Liberation Army, were provincial ministers at one time or another, and the eldest son of Sardar Ataullah Mengal, who is today championing the cause of insurrection in Balochistan, was the chief minister of the hapless province – and yet there was no notable peoples-oriented development work by the federal government in the province. The only major infrastructure project in Balochistan in the last twenty years is the Gwadar port project and a transport grid to service it. But this is a strategic national security project which has property speculators and developers in glittering Karachi and Lahore and Islamabad and Peshawar salivating rather than in dismal Quetta or Mach or Kohlu or Sui which remain one-horse towns. Nor has it helped to “open up” and upgrade Balochistan by providing the Baloch middle classes with opportunities for upward mobility and security.
To be sure, the Nawabs and Sardars of Balochistan are no angels. Indeed, the Baloch tribal system has lost much of its original democratic functionality without becoming less exploitative or oppressive. But why should some Sardars be treated roughly by the state while others are embraced unabashedly? Why are cruel Sindhi vaderas, extremist tribal mullahs, aggressive Punjabi jihadis and urban ethnic blackmailers kosher as state allies? Why have a couple of Baloch sardars, who were allies not so long ago, suddenly become enemies against whom the holy writ of the state has to be enforced?
The state is selective with the truth. It is self-righteous and opportunistic in the same breath. And its credibility is eroding fast. As the periphery of Pakistan heats up, more and more lay people are worrying whether selective attempts to enforce the “writ of the state” will end up with no state to defend after all.
(January 13-19, 2006, Vol – XVII, No. 47 – Editorial)
Games people play
General Pervez Musharraf has made some significant interventions that cry out for comment. They shed light not just on the state of India-Pakistan relations, the situation in Balochistan and the trouble over Kalabagh but also on the health of the ruling PMLQ-MQM coalition. Equally significantly, they provide a window into the mind of the man who rules Pakistan as a self-anointed Messiah.
General Musharraf has finally and publicly accused India of funding and arming the Baloch insurgency. Until now he had minced his words, referring to a “neighbouring country” that was fomenting trouble in Balochistan. No more. He is not “intrigued”, as the Pakistani Foreign Office spokesperson put it recently, by Indian’s hand. He is angry and objects vociferously. But then he does a somersault and shrugs away the extreme provocation, hoping that the peace process and dialogue will remain on track. For those who see a contradiction in this position, it is nothing compared to what follows next. General Musharraf also said that if the Indian prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, wanted to visit Pakistan for a spot of cricket after Eid, he would be happy to send him an invitation. Then he attached an unexpected conditionality to it: “If the Indian PM’s trip to Pakistan isn’t aimed at moving the dialogue on Kashmir forward, then it is useless and meaningless”, he said, or words to that effect. Not surprisingly, the Indian prime minister has swiftly responded with “thanks but no thanks”. It is unheard of in the annals of diplomacy for such a conditional invitation to be offered by one country head to another in public. What does all this mean?
It means that Pakistan and India are still playing tactical games with each other. Pakistan still hasn’t taken its hand out of Indian Kashmir. So India openly accuses it of continuing to fuel the terrorists and jihadis. But at the same time India is dialoguing peace with Islamabad. Now the boot is on the other foot. India has retaliated by fingering Pakistan in Balochistan. General Musharraf has accused it openly but also insisted at the same time that the dialogue for conflict resolution should continue. Both sides are also quite candid about a secret channel in operation that promises a non-sum-zero game. In other words, the name of the game still is “talk talk, fight fight”. So both sides can be sweet and bitter at the same time. There is therefore no threat of the Indo-Pak peace process breaking down and triggering hostilities.
General Musharraf’s critical partner in Sindh province – the MQM – is also playing tactical games with Islamabad. Two weeks ago, one of its Pakistan based leaders threatened to “quit” the ruling coalition if it announced the Kalabagh Dam. Within hours of the warning, however, the MQM’s media managers were desperately calling the media to offer a tactical retreat: it now said that it would “consider reviewing” its support to the ruling coalition in the event of a green signal to the KBD. Much the same thing happened last Sunday. The MQM said that it would quit the ruling coalition on January 13th (to be precise!) if the “military operation” in Balochistan didn’t stop forthwith and if the government decided to build the KBD. Three hours later, however, the MQM withdrew its threat after no less than the immaculate prime minister of Pakistan, Shaukat Aziz, followed by the mighty President-General Musharraf himself, groveled for an hour each before Altaf (Hussain) Bhai in London, and assured him of everything under the sun, including “non-military action” in Balochistan and the government’s retreat on the KBD. The MQM’s “interest” in both issues is obvious enough: it can’t support the KBD because that would wipe it out in the interior of Sindh; and it has to oppose army action in Balochistan because it too was once classified by the Pakistan army as a terrorist group and had to face its wrath in Karachi amidst ISI-MI allegations that it had received training and funding from India!
It is amazing, isn’t it, that General Musharraf can confidently talk to “arch-enemy” India that is fomenting an armed insurgency in Balochistan but cannot dialogue with two mainstream political leaders who were elected prime ministers twice each? It is amazing, isn’t it, that he can blithely ally with the MQM that was once the top “India-trained terrorist” on its hit list and even grovel before its leaders but cannot bring himself to massage Akbar Bugti’s tribal ego and negotiate his demands?
In an interview to an Indian TV channel, General Musharraf called one Pakistani journalist “unbalanced”. He probably meant that the journalist’s views were unpredictable or unsound. But he actually ended up suggesting that the journalist was “unhinged”. This was unworthy of the President of Pakistan. Similarly, he arrogantly dismissed the possibility of any corps commander disagreeing with his policies. “I’ll throw him out”, he bristled. This was unworthy of the Chief of Army Staff.
President-General Musharraf should demonstrate a degree of gravitas as required by the rules of conduct.
If he can’t, it will only be because he’s truly rattled by a string of policy failures.
(January 20-26, 2006, Vol – XVII, No. 48 – Editorial)
Blowing hot and cold
General Pervez Musharraf came across on national television last Tuesday as a calm, collected, confident man, in control of the destiny of the nation. There was no desk thumping, no scowling, no fretting or fumbling about the issues of the day. He didn’t read from any prepared text. This was meant to suggest that he was speaking the truth from the heart and not fibbing like a poker-faced politician or hemming like a pink-faced diplomat. Indeed, he didn’t issue dire warnings of “sorting out” all those who were sowing despair by spreading “lies” about his beloved army’s tremendous role in earthquake relief and rehabilitation.
Let us also admit that his “retreat” on the Kalabagh Dam in the face of provincial opposition is not a manifestation of defeat but actually a step forward in rebuilding centre-state relations. Righting a wrong is a show of strength and character, not a sign of weakness. This was demonstrated by his announcement that henceforth the centre would part with 45.33% of the resources in the federal divisible pool rather than the current 42.7%, gradually going up to 50% in five years. The issue of horizontal apportionment of these resources on the basis of population was wisely left untouched pending a final resolution in the National Finance Commission in time to come.
Some people think that his “retreat” on the KBD will hurt the prospects of the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) in Punjab. We don’t think so. The fact is that many Punjabis were uneasy at the state of provincial agitation against the KBD and were wondering why on earth General Musharraf had dug his heels in and refused to bend. No one wants a dam that is damned at the outset and raises the spectre of federal disintegration. In fact, the PMLQ and the MQM may turn out to be the biggest winners after all. Both can claim to Pakistanis in general but Sindhis in particular that they heeded the call of the people and compelled General Musharraf to get off his high horse. There may, in fact, be a small conspiracy in the manner in which the issue has been handled by the Musharraf regime and its partners.
As everyone knows, the army is trained not to take a step forward without chalking out its best fallback position should something go wrong with the mission. Therefore the strategy for building dams must have been a simple matter. General Musharraf would advance on KBD with all his force but if serious obstacles were encountered and success was doubtful he would fall back to Bhasha and Munda. The people would be so relieved that they would actually welcome the “retreat”, shutting up criticism from the usual suspects about the feasibility of Bhasha and Munda. And the quest for KBD would be postponed to a more propitious time rather than altogether abandoned.
We now know that General Musharraf took the decision to change tack and put KBD on the backburner on January 2, over two weeks ago. Why did it take him so many days to announce his change of heart?
Clearly, there were powerful voices in the PMLQ and MQM in Sindh that were urging him to abandon KBD. When he finally took their advice, they must have begged him to give them an opportunity to exploit the situation. This would explain the MQM’s rather bewildering behaviour in the last three weeks or so. First, it threatened to quit the ruling coalition if the KBD was announced. Then it backtracked a bit because the government must have ticked it off for going overboard. On the eve of General Musharraf’s speech, it joined the issue of the army action in Balochistan with the American attack in Bajaur (was there some nudging on the latter issue by the “Invisible Soldiers of Islam”, we wonder, because that would help Islamabad in keeping the Americans at bay) and called huge protest rallies in Karachi and the urban areas of Sindh. Based on insider trading, its timing was exquisite. The same night, Altaf ‘Bhai’ told ecstatic MQM gatherings in Karachi and elsewhere that he had achieved a “historic victory” by compelling the Musharraf regime to retreat on KBD. His speech was broadcast from London and heard by rapt audiences who danced to the beat of drums and chanted “ Altaf, Altaf! naatch, naatch ke gao aaj, jhoom ke gao khushi ke geet”. “The MQM has achieved what past rulers and other political parties couldn’t achieve”, claimed a jubilant Altaf Bhai. Accordingly, he has ordered “celebrations” across the country to highlight the critical role played by the MQM in strengthening the federation!
That said, it is revealing that General Musharraf was silent on the American attack in Bajaur and outspoken about the tribal insurrection in Balochistan. On the first issue, the circumstantial evidence points to Islamabad’s complicity in providing the intelligence that triggered the US missile attack on the assumed whereabouts of Ayman Al Zawahiri. Hence silence was golden. On the second, the Baloch sub-nationalists, like the populist Peoples Partyists, are not part of General Musharraf’s strategic loop to win the 2007 elections. Hence thunder was appropriate. It was all, rather predictably, about blowing hot and cold.
(January 27 – Feb 02, 2006, Vol – XVII, No. 49 – Editorial)
Should Bhutto take the next flight home?
The Musharraf regime has suddenly decided to approach INTERPOL (international police) to issue “red warrants” for the arrest and deportation to Pakistan of Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari. This is a weird development. It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Ms Bhutto went into self-imposed exile many years ago. Until now the government had made no attempt to drag her back to Pakistan. Indeed, General Pervez Musharraf has warned many times that she will not be allowed to return to Pakistan to take part in politics. He believes it is better to shunt troublesome politicians into exile than to cope with them at home. That is why he packed off Nawaz Sharif and his entire family to Saudi Arabia and insists they can’t return to Pakistan. That is why he enabled Asif Zardari to be bailed out of prison and nudged him to leave Pakistan. And that is also why he wants Altaf Hussain to stay put in London even though he is a temporary ally in Sindh. So why, when nothing has changed regarding the status of the charges and cases against Ms Bhutto and Mr Zardari in Pakistan, has NAB suddenly got it into its head that they should be nabbed and brought to ‘justice’ in Pakistan?
The answer is transparent. The Musharraf regime doesn’t really want any of them to return to Pakistan. It wants to make sure of this by scaring them into believing that it wants them back in order to rough them up and put them into prison for the rest of their lives. So the story is put out that “red warrants” have been issued for their arrest in the expectation that they will take evasive action and not return to Pakistan. There is another reason: the government wants to use the legal pretext of the red warrants and the lack of compliance by Ms Bhutto and Mr Zardari to pressurise the Pakistani courts to start hearing the charges against them, including the evidence of state witnesses, in their absence so that it can obtain swift kangaroo convictions barring them from contesting any election. Clearly, first the senate and later the general elections are already in General Musharraf’s sights.
Ms Bhutto, too, may be thinking of her political future. For the first time since she went into exile, she probably feels the need to return to Pakistan, zap life into her party and save it from the clutches of General Musharraf. The arguments in favour of returning are very persuasive. General Musharraf has made no bones about wanting to decimate the Peoples Party as he did the Nawaz League so that he can muster a two thirds majority in the next parliament and remain army chief and president for another five years at least. To this end, he bribed and browbeat two dozen senior members of the PPP to desert Ms Bhutto in parliament in 2003. He strategised much the same results in the local elections last year when many Piplias crossed over into his camp. Now he is out to diminish the PPP in the next senate elections – only two out of five displaced PPP senators are tipped to return to the House. Therefore Ms Bhutto must return to Pakistan and, even if it entails personal sacrifice, put some steel in the spine of her party before it crumbles in the face of a relentless and ruthless onslaught by the Mushrraf regime. But there is another weighty reason for her to consider.
For the first time in five years, General Musharraf’s political popularity is taking a beating and questions are being asked about his personal conduct and propriety. He has opened many controversial fronts – Balochistan, Waziristan, Kalabagh – and seems politically besieged. His political reforms have stalled or backfired. His unilateral peace offerings to India have not gone down well with his own constituency. Indeed, even his great ally America is nervously asking why he has been unable or unwilling to enlarge the democratic space for consensus over some of his pro-West policies. Thus a growing sense of unease or disquiet seems to pervade the country. The more discredited General Musharraf becomes in everyone’s eyes, the less discredited his opponents appear. So this is an excellent time for a politician like Ms Bhutto to stage a comeback. In fact, she can credibly aspire to become a senator even if she is hauled off to prison. The PPP could then raise a real ruckus before the courts and in the upper House, a strategy that would elevate Ms Bhutto and the PPP to the front pages and help reinvent her as a political alternative to General Musharraf. Surely, that is the last thing that he wants.
The government’s “red warrants” threat has two objectives: it is aimed at browbeating Ms Bhutto into evading arrest abroad and staying put out of Pakistan; and it wants to convict her in absentia and put her out of business, thereby softening her up for a pro-Musharraf deal later. Should she return home nevertheless to contest the charges, the government would like to create the public perception that she is fleeing to Pakistan from Dubai on account of the red warrants and not because she has deliberately chosen to face the consequences like a courageous leader. Under the circumstances, should Ms Bhutto take the next flight home before the government’s propaganda robs her of her developing new advantage?
(February 3-9, 2006, Vol – XVII, No. 50 – Editorial)
India’s media and business should break
Indo-Pak impasse
Indian entrepreneurs are rushing to grab land along the road between Amritsar and the Wagah border. They are planning hotels, restaurants, shopping malls and warehouses. Clearly they visualize a day in the near future when trade and commerce and tourism will take off between India and Pakistan and Indian juggernauts will trundle all the way to Central Asia with manufactured goods and come back with raw materials. This is not unrealistic. Galloping capitalism’s lust for foreign markets is an all-too-familiar historical fact. And India is already preening itself as the next economic giant of the new century after China. That is why the Indian establishment is demanding that Pakistan must liberalize the trade regime.
Indeed, India’s foreign policy establishment has harnessed the Indian media to advocate the abolition of trade barriers by Pakistan while ignoring Pakistan’s plea to take concrete steps for the resolution of long outstanding political disputes. A case in point relates to General Pervez Musharraf’s recent utterances in Davos where he wondered how the two countries which still perceive and react to each other in “enemy” terms could suddenly start trading uninhibitedly as old friends or trusted business associates. His statement was a candid reflection of the frustrating lack of progress in conflict resolution in the last two years rather than any hawkish reassertion of the traditional “enemy” status of the two sides. Yet the Indian media has distorted the import of General Musharraf’s statement by falsely suggesting that he still perceives India as an “enemy” country. This has thrown the unsuspecting and peace-loving Indian public into despair and confusion and once again raised the bogey of why India should “trust” General Musharraf. The status-quo Indian establishment must be pleased.
Since General Musharraf unilaterally abandoned Pakistan’s traditional position on Kashmir based on the UN resolutions, he has constantly sought to nudge the Indian establishment into reciprocating his gesture. But he has not got a suitable response from India. This has prompted him to formulate a concrete but incremental approach to conflict resolution. Unfortunately, however, the Indian establishment’s response is still disheartening. It has sought to deflect the urgency and substance in General Musharraf’s proposals on self-governance, self-rule, autonomy etc by accusing him of going public on “sensitive” matters rather than mooting them secretly through back channels. The unfortunate thing is that the Indian media has bought this argument, even though the Pakistani side has gone hoarse claiming that the proposals were first mooted secretly between the national security advisors of both countries and only aired publicly when there was no response from the Indian side. A case in point is the recent suggestion by General Musharraf in an interview to an Indian channel that India should demilitarize three areas of Kashmir while he (Gen Musharraf) pulls out all the stops to uproot terrorism in these areas. This eminently sensible proposal was spurned by the Indian establishment on the ground that it was aired publicly, despite the fact stressed by General Musharraf that the proposal was forwarded by Pakistan months earlier in secret negotiations between the two sides. Once again, however, the Indian media has bought the Indian establishment’s charge hook, line and sinker and blacked out the true import of General Musharraf’s initiative.
The net result of all this prevarication and game-playing by the Indian establishment is not doing anyone any good. In fact, it is leading to a serious questioning of General Musharraf’s “flexibility” the hardliner view that Indian intransigence should be countered similarly by Pakistan is beginning to find adherents even among the more liberal sections of society. This does not augur well for the peace process.
India’s prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, must show greater initiative and enterprise. The Indian bureaucracy’s traditional status quo stranglehold over foreign policy must be challenged. The lack of a foreign minister who shares the prime minister’s vision and confidence is also taking its toll. Mr Khurshid Kasuri cannot any longer pick up the phone and have a quiet chat with his counterpart when trouble is brewing or a deadlock is imminent. And it is telling that Dr Singh’s two hand picked advisors on Pakistan policy are stolid bureaucrats, one from the intelligence community and one from the diplomatic service.
Similarly, the Indian media must have the courage to ascertain the true facts of the situation and take issue with the Indian establishment where necessary. Certainly, it must not pander to public pride and prejudice, let alone mislead it at the foreign policy establishment’s behest. Why are India’s renowned journalists and editors so acquiescent? Why is there no debate in the India media about the intrinsic merits of General Musharraf’s pragmatic proposals? Why is the Indian media carping about “infiltration” when it knows damned well that it has shrunk to negligible proportions and that, in any case, no preconditions can be set to the dialogue.
India’s dream of conquering new markets and flexing its economic muscle is threatened by bureaucratic blinkers and political cowardice. Therefore India’s journalists and businessmen must demonstrate vision and show the political way forward. This is a role that independent media and budding business have jointly played in the historic development of powerful nation states.
(February 10-16, 2006, Vol – XVII, No. 51 – Editorial)
Dangerous divides
Outraged Islamic hardliners in Beirut and Damascus have burnt down the embassies of Norway and Denmark in protest against the publication of cartoons of the Prophet of Islam, Mohammad (pbuh), by Western newspapers, first in Denmark, then in Norway, France, Germany, New Zealand, etc. The Islamic protests have spilled over into boycotts of goods and services, and in some cases (Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya etc) to the withdrawal of Muslim ambassadors, from the offending countries. The original Danish paper, Jyllands-Rosten, which sparked the row has since apologised for its indiscretion, ignorance, arrogance, provocation, what you will, in hurting the sentiments of over one billion Muslims. But other newspapers in the West have dug their heels in on the grounds that they are defending “freedom of expression”, one of the pillars of the secular state. Who is right and who is wrong?
After the Salman Rushdie affair over fifteen years ago, Western editors certainly cannot plead ignorance of Islamic law and passion regarding the Prophet Mohammad. If moderate Muslims in secular and democratic India could object to a fictional narrative involving the Prophet of Islam – the Satanic Verses controversy was sparked in Bombay and went on to light a prairie fire in Pakistan, Iran and the rest of the Muslim world – Western newspaper editors acted no less deliberately in publishing the blasphemous cartoons as Western book publishers who have since desisted even from printing a visage of Prophet Mohammad from Islamic miniature art expressions of many centuries ago. So if “freedom of expression” is not an issue with Western book publishers in so far as depiction of the Prophet Mohammad is concerned, why has it become one with some Western newspaper editors? What, we might ask, is the status of the notion of “freedom of expression” when Western journalists are blithely “embedded” with invading imperial armies and truth is the biggest casualty? What about “freedom of expression” when self-censorship is applied to enshrine new notions of “political correctness”, as for example in not describing blacks as “niggers”, or Jews as “Shylocks”? What about “freedom of expression” when the law of defamation is slapped on publications which unfairly taint someone’s reputation? What about “freedom of expression” when entrenched notions of “The Holocaust” are challenged and challengers are accused of anti-Semitism, as would doubtless happen if a rabbi had been shown in the cartoon instead of Prophet Mohammad? How can they say that their “freedom of expression” is curtailed if they are asked to desist from demonizing the Prophet of Islam when it is not curtailed by the defamation of a lay Westerner? Since when and under what law has “freedom of expression” become an absolute and sacred right regardless of responsibility, truth and the fundamental rights of other peoples? Nor do we need to reproduce the offending cartoons to determine whether it is right to print them or not under the guise of “freedom of expression”, as some newspapers have argued, when we can describe the nature of the offence (as we have done here) perfectly adequately in words and leave it at that.
If all this is clear enough, what is the “freedom of expression” fig leaf all about? The answer must lie in what is meant to be conveyed by the cartoons. In brief, the cartoons depict the Prophet of Islam as a “terrorist” (his turban is shaped like a missile), like Osama bin Laden, meaning thereby that the 1.5 billion followers of Prophet Mohammad are also terrorists against whose “religious civilization” an unremitting war must be waged by a “secular civilization”.
It has now been revealed that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the anti-Mohammad cartoons, once refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ. It transpires that in April 2003, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to Jyllands-Posten. Mr Zieler received an email back from the paper’s Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them.” So if this is not about “freedom of expression” and Secular vs Islamic civilization, what does it signify?
The cartoon controversy comes in the wake of an Islamic resurgence in West- supported dictatorships in Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Egypt, Pakistan etc. This is unfortunate and dangerous because it effectively adds “civilisational insult to civilisational injury”. Ultimately, however, if the publication of the cartoons is an act of deliberate insult meant to humiliate and frustrate Muslims all over the world, its defenders would do well to recognize the fact they have also demeaned the West’s lofty ideals and exposed the designs of its new crusaders.
Equally, it must be admitted that the violent reaction of the Muslims all over the world has been unfortunate. It is one thing to protest the word and quite another to burn down embassies and threaten to kill people. Once again the image on television screens feeds into the stereotype of modern day Islamic terrorism and plays into the hands of its agents-provacateur .
(February 17-23, 2006, Vol – XVII, No. 52 – Editorial)
Imperialism, dictatorship and civilisational conflict
The original sinner, a Danish newspaper which first printed the blasphemous cartoons and caricatures of Prophet Mohammad, has apologized. Most mainstream Western commentators have also nailed the provocation to the wall by rejecting the argument of “freedom of expression” advanced by the offending newspapers. Finally, the European Commission has formally distanced itself from the sin of commission by the newspapers. Why then is Muslim anger boiling over into the streets of some Muslim countries almost four months after the event? Has this something to do also with the nature of politics in those Muslim countries where the protest has been the loudest and most violent? Consider.
The embassies of Denmark and Norway were attacked by mobs and burnt down in Damascus and Beirut, the capitals of Syria and Lebanon where anti-Israel, anti-American sentiment constantly spills over into violent resistance. But it is curious, isn’t it, that the site of the original anti-Islam offence was not the US or any American newspaper but Europe and a section of its media. Similarly, the Islamic outrage has been most manifest in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where at least twenty people have been killed so far. The government of Iran and the Iranian people are anti-US for many reasons, so the outrage was both genuine and state managed, and aimed to convey a strong message. The other countries are also swamped by anti-Americanism for different reasons. More significantly, they are ruled by pro-US dictators who have cracked down on militant Islamists and Al-Qaeda terrorists at the behest of Washington. That is why protestors in these countries have burnt effigies of President Bush, President Musharraf, President Mubarak and President Karzai. That is also why agitators have not just focused on Danish or European targets like phone companies and banks but mainly attacked and looted American multinationals like KFC, Pizza Hut, MacDonalds, etc. By and large, too, the protests have not been mass based – demonstrations everywhere have been relatively small in number; while the demonstrators have mainly belonged to organized religious parties and groups with overt national political agendas aimed at overthrowing pro-US secular dictators in these countries.
In other words, organized political Islam across the world, but mainly in countries where anti-Americanism runs high, has clutched at a private provocation in Europe to advance its global agenda of resistance to Western secularism and American imperialism. But the critical word is “America”, not Europe. The Iranian and Syrian governments are anti-America. So they have been happy to sponsor anti-America protests on every possible pretext. The Pakistani, Egyptian and Afghan governments are pro-America. So the religious parties out of power have tried to destabilize them by targeting their sponsor America. Under the circumstances, all these protests are only marginally about any global “clash of civilizations” or any search for a globalised “Islamic identity” by Muslims and more about a national confrontation between competing ideologies, established dictatorships and the impulse for democracy in Muslim states.
Nonetheless, Western governments in general and United States administrations in particular must accept primary responsibility for this state of affairs. The sense of Muslim outrage flows from unjust imperialist policies by Europe and Britain in the inter-war period when the Muslim empire in the Middle East was carved up into nation states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, the UAE, etc with pro-West Muslim autocracies and dictatorships in pursuit of Western strategic or economic objectives watch-dogged by Israel. In the cold-war period, the “West” and the “United States” remained the focus of power. But in the post cold war period, by virtue of its status as the sole superpower, the US became the sole object of resistance when it began to pursue unilateralist doctrines of aggression and domination. The situation worsened when the US put all its eggs in the baskets of unpopular and corrupt dictators in the Muslim world, thereby diminishing the space for efficient democratic pluralism. This constriction of democratic space in Muslim countries combined with imperialist interventions by the US created the impetus and space for radical political Islam to grow and prosper. Disciplined and militant religious parties are now everywhere in the Muslim world trying to edge out passive or secular democratic oppositions to pro-US dictatorships. In this way, global civilisational Islam seeks to exploit weaknesses and provocations in the West to extend its national political agendas.
Unfortunately, however, it pays pro-US Muslim dictators to keep the national spectre of radical political Islam alive and kicking. This strategy serves two purposes: it diminishes the democratic space for mainstream secular oppositions to the dictators while scaring the US into increasing its support for the dictatorships. Is it any wonder then that in Pakistan, where General Pervez Musharraf enjoys the thumping support of the Bush administration, a few hundred activists and supporters of the militant religious parties should have been allowed to ran amuck and create anti-American havoc in Lahore and Islamabad, the two centres of power of the ruling junta, on the pretext of the cartoons?
The issue of the offensive cartoons is no longer one of freedom of expression or religious sensitivity. It has been usurped by the proponents of imperialism, dictatorship and “civilisational conflict” for their own unholy agendas.
(February 24-2, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 1 – Editorial)
Mush & Bush
Lext week, when President George W Bush and President Pervez Musharraf meet in Islamabad, the occasion will be historic. The last time an American president visited Islamabad (Bill Clinton in 2000), there was a debate in Washington about whether or not he should stop over in Pakistan for five hours en route to spending five days in India. In the event, far from bearing gifts, President Clinton set some tough preconditions for his layover: he refused to be photographed shaking hands with a military dictator and he lectured Pakistanis live on TV and Radio. This time round, however, President Bush will brave increased security hazards, embrace General Musharraf in public, toast his “friend’s courageous war against terror” and shower new economic and political rewards on him. The niggling issues will be raised in private while smiles will be exchanged in public.
There are two critical differences between 2000 and 2006 which are bound to overshadow the visit. First, Pakistan is so awash with anti-Westernism in general and anti-Americanism in particular that the resurgent religious parties have consciously strategized to keep the recent anti-Western sentiment triggered by the blasphemous cartoons at a high pitch in order to inject certain meaning into the Mush-Bush meetings. Abetted by the government, there was an ominous dress rehearsal last week in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar which focused on attacking President Bush and America rather than the offensive cartoon-publishers. True to form, the mullahs have now vowed to besiege Islamabad despite the ban on political protests and meetings. Second, General Musharraf was domestically strong in 2000 (in the sense that, despite lacking any political support base, he was sitting pretty because nobody in Pakistan was crying over the departed “corrupt politicians”) and weak internationally (in the sense that Pakistan’s failing economy and derailed polity were regarded as manifestations of a failing state) whereas the situation is dramatically different today. Despite a one-party stranglehold over the political system, Musharraf faces real or imagined resistance from Baluch and Sindhi sub-nationalists, religious parties, jihadi groups, Al-Qaeda terrorists and even refurbished mainstream liberal oppositionists; and, despite backing from the diplomatic enclave, the international media has got its fangs out for him over several issues ranging from Dr A Q Khan’s nuclear proliferation, human rights violations, neglect of women’s issues, and soft-pedaling on religious extremists in the borderlands of Pakistan.
Therefore it is easy to discern the agenda for the talks. President Musharraf will point to his economic achievements and, in the face of the rising tide of radical political Islam, stress the stability and longevity of his moderate and secular political dispensation. But if President Bush were to “buy” this, he would be doing a great disservice to the international community and showing great disrespect to the people of Pakistan. After all, General Musharraf is not only responsible for marginalizing the mainstream pro-West political parties and undermining the democratic and popular impulse in Pakistan, he is also responsible for establishing the political space in which radical political Islam is trying to entrench itself in the country. Until his advent, the religious parties were constantly bickering among themselves and never occupied more than a handful of seats in the national or provincial parliaments; but during the last election conducted by General Musharraf in 2003, they were prodded to band together into the formidable MMA and helped to capture 25% of the seats in the federal parliament as well as a majority in the NWFP assembly. Indeed, General Musharraf went so far as to manipulate the slot of the leader of the opposition for the MMA instead of the PPP which deserved it on merit. The specter of radical Islam provokes fear in Pakistan and abroad and serves the purpose of soliciting valuable economic and political “rent” for Musharraf’s Pakistan from the international community.
Under the circumstances, it is critical that this short term and rather opportunist nurturing and exploitation of the genie of radical political Islam by the Musharraf regime is effectively challenged by President Bush because it is fraught with dangerous and irrevocable longer term implications for the country, region and beyond. Surely, the last thing that the international community should want is to be blackmailed into submitting to dictatorship in Pakistan as it has succumbed to in Egypt, the Middle-East and elsewhere because of short term exigencies. The alternative to military or autocratic rule in Pakistan and the Middle East where the West has established interests or serious concerns should not be radical political Islam but mainstream secular pluralistic democracy as in India.
Equally, however, Pakistan’s national interests lie in diligently refusing to get embroiled in Bush’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran. Indeed, if Islamabad can play a constructive role in defusing regional, global, ideological or civilisational tensions, General Musharraf should put the case forcefully to President Bush. After all, it is unjust and inequitable American foreign policies that have created much of the mess in the world today.
Some straight talking is needed by both leaders in the larger national and global interests of both Pakistan and America.
(March 3-9, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 2 – Editorial)
Lesson of Lahore
February 14 is a dark day in the history of Musharraf’s Pakistan. That is the day when activists of the Sunni Tehrik, Deoband Dawat i Islami, Ahle Hadith, Jamiat i Ulema i Islam, Jamaat i Islami, Lashkar i Taiba, PML(Q), PML(N), PPP, Shiite organizations, madrassah students, and even lumpen criminal elements rampaged on the streets of Lahore and ransacked the city. All this was done on the pretext of protesting the blasphemous European cartoons against the Prophet of Islam. But as General Pervez Musharraf has belatedly realized, the protests were merely a jumping pad for the mullahs to target him and him alone. Several questions arise. Who decided to allow the mullahs to vent their spleen? Why didn’t the police stop the arson and plunder? How has the episode irrevocably hurt Musharraf’s Pakistan? What does it foretell about the objectives of the religious parties in general and about General Musharraf’s political strategy in particular?
When the issue of protesting the cartoons arose, there were three contending points of view in Islamabad. It was argued that since the matter was close to the hearts of Pakistanis the PMLQ should swiftly monopolize and lead the protest in the Punjab. This would serve two purposes: it would ensure that the protests remained peaceful; and it would enable the PMLQ and not the religious parties to receive kudos from the media and public. But the opposing view was equally compelling: if the PMLQ hogged the show, it might send the wrong “message” to the world abroad and damage the good work done by General Musharraf to rehabilitate his government as moderate and enlightened – how could a regime in Pakistan that claimed to be pro-West actually stir up anti-West outrage in the same breath? Thus a middle course of action was adopted, with the government permitting and even facilitating and “blessing” rallies by the mullahs so that the people knew that it shared their anguish over the cartoons. Simultaneously, a “promise” was extracted from the mullahs not to resort to violence or turn the demonstration against the government. In exchange, concessions were readily granted, like permission to protest on The Mall and instructions to the police to keep its hands-off the rally. In the event, however, during the demonstration the mullahs scattered all agreements in the air, hardliners went on an orgy of looting and burning, the wretched police stood by and didn’t raise a lathi even when pictures and effigies of General Musharraf were burnt and attacks were launched on the provincial assembly on The Mall and offices of banks and multinationals, flooding the world with frightening images of Lahore that will not go away for a long time. The government had, once again, chosen to play on the mullahs’ wicket and once again reaped a bitter harvest. Why is the state and administration so sensitive to the demands and threats of the mullahs? Is it scared of them? Or is it in cahoots with them?
The PML has historically clutched at the mullahs for support for two reasons: one, its reactionary views are almost akin to those of the mullahs; two, because the military, with whose help it has propped itself up against the popular PPP, has historically relied on the mullahs as an essential element in its national security strategy of “Islamising Pakistan” against “secular arch-enemy India”. So to that extent the Musharraf-Chaudhry regime is “soft” on the mullahs. Indeed, if it wasn’t, the strength of the mullahs in parliament wouldn’t have risen so dramatically during Musharraf’s time since every device has been used to sideline the PPP and hoist the mullah parties as the loyal opposition. The unruly “mullah” also provides a useful peg on which to display the image of the Musharraf regime as a bulwark against “Islamic terror”, thereby generating valuable “rent” for Islamabad from Washington.
But this strategy is riddled with mounting problems. The stronger the mullahs get the less inclined they are to play second fiddle to the military and PML. Indeed, they seek to exploit every situation to further their autonomous agendas of seizing power in Pakistan. The first step is to get rid of Musharraf; the second is to discredit the mainstream parties as corrupt, incompetent or inefficient and encroach on their votes; the third is to fiercely resist any roll back of “Islamic law” even if it is unjust and discriminatory. Under the circumstances, the more General Musharraf and the PML play on their wicket the more they lose out to them. Nor is there any reason to fear the mullahs’ clout. The Punjab administration has shown time and again that when it comes to the crunch it can stoutly defend Lahore from Long Marches by the PPP as in the 1990s or angry protests by the Jamaat i Islami during the visit of Mr Vajpayee in 1999 or airport sieges by PMLN supporters when Shahbaz Sharif flew into Lahore two years ago.
The future should belong to the two party system led by the PPP and PML, with the MQM and provincial sub-nationalists playing second fiddle while the military remains in the shadows. The mullahs have a place in the world of faith but none in the realm of politics. That is the lesson of Lahore.
(March 10-16, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 3 – Editorial)
Miscalculations, misperceptions and mishaps
Thus spake The New York Times: “The nuclear deal with India threatens to blast a bomb-size loophole through the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty….It embarrassed Pakistan, a key ally in the war against terror…President Bush should have stayed at home”.
Notwithstanding the deal, it remains true that when an American President thinks of visiting New Delhi and not Islamabad, Pakistanis tend to go up the wall. But when he does come to India and Pakistan, they tend to fall off the wall with indignation over something or the other. This happened when President Bill Clinton stopped over in Pakistan in 2000 and again when President George W Bush descended on Islamabad last week. But since US-Pak relations were in a trough in 2000 and at a peak in 2006, we must ask why the Bush trip wasn’t “successful”.
What if President Bush hadn’t signed the nuclear deal in New Delhi but gone on to sign the Bilateral Investment Treaty with Islamabad? The Karachi stock market would have risen instead of falling by 400 points and General Pervez Musharraf would have dined out on his successful diplomacy until the next elections at least. Certainly, this was not such a far-fetched scenario. Most Indian analysts believed it unlikely that President Bush would clinch the deal in India before clearing it with Congress at least. Dr Manmohan Singh’s assurance to the Indian parliament three days after the Bush visit that India will not open up its 14 nuclear installations until 2014 confirms that there is still a long way to go before the ink on the deal is dry. Equally, it is now known that President Bush was keen on signing the BIT with Pakistan during his trip but this didn’t materialise because of nagging Pakistani objections on a couple of legal points despite half a dozen video conferences between the two sides to resolve them before the visit. So Murphy’s Law prevailed and everything that could go wrong actually went wrong for General Musharraf.
For starters, the anti-blasphemous cartoon sentiment in Pakistan was cunningly transformed into an anti-Musharraf, anti-American protest by the mullahs. It seemed to hover like a nuclear cloud over the American president’s visit. It restrained General Musharraf from being too cosy with President Bush in public. Equally, the latest suicide attack in Karachi that killed an American diplomat stiffened President Bush’s resolve to focus on the “war against terror”. Both leaders were suddenly playing to the galleries at home. President Musharraf was advised it might be impudent to be seen happily receiving President Bush at the airport. But this must have stung the leader of the sole superpower in the world. And President Bush was advised to announce his mission statement in terms of asking Pakistan to do more in the war against the terror of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But this must have irked President Musharraf who has staked 70,000 soldiers in the battle for Waziristan. Thus President Bush appeared patronizing rather than friendly, and President Musharraf seemed stiff rather than reserved, at the joint press conference. The net effect was far from what they had intended. Pakistanis in general, and the stock market in particular, were left with the impression that General Musharraf was in a huge sulk because he had “got nothing” from President Bush in contrast to Dr Manmogan Singh who had “got everything”.
Greater foresight by Pakistan about how to profitably manage public perceptions could have saved the day too. The US-India deal has been in the offing for many months. Ms Condi Rice and Mr Nick Burns had continued to stress in private and public that Islamabad could not be treated at par given its “history” of proliferation and lack of urgent “need”. President Bush said as much to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz recently in Washington. Pakistan’s foreign policy establishment was also reasonably sure that President Bush would clinch the deal during his trip to India. Why then did Pakistan make no serious and consistent advance effort to explain to Pakistanis that the deal with India would not adversely impact Pakistan’s deterrence capacity, and that Chinese assistance could always be counted upon to redress the balance, something that President Musharraf has faintly attempted after the visit? Similarly, since the Bush visit was announced some months ago, why didn’t Pakistan pursue the BIT relentlessly and resolve it before the visit instead of desperately clutching at long distance video-conferences at the nth minute?
In his relaxed, confident chat with newspaper editors last Monday, President Musharraf seemed to fumble on two occasions only, once when he was asked why he hadn’t received President Bush at the airport (no one buys that humbug about protocol), and again when he was asked to elaborate his plea that Pakistanis shouldn’t be “India-centric” by looking at micro gains and losses in comparison to India alone. We know the miscalculation behind the first decision that contributed to the mishap. But we would like to remind General Musharraf that if state and society are unnecessarily and unhappily “India-centric” in Pakistan, the historical blame must rest squarely on the shoulders of the all powerful Pakistani military establishment whose raison d’etre has falsely rested on India-centrist threat misperceptions.
(March 17-23, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 4 – Editorial)
Musharraf’s profundity
General Pervez Musharraf has made some profound statements recently. On the face of it they seem opportunistic reactions to criticism over policy setbacks. But they could also signal a potential paradigm shift in the raison d’etre of the military-dominated national security state (NSS). However, whether or not this will actualize under General Musharraf is still unclear.
General Musharraf says that the “war against terror” in Pakistan is our war and in our national interest and not just America’s war in its national interest. It has taken General Musharraf five years since 9/11 to admit this. Until now, the NSS view was couched in purely economic cost-benefit terms – “the cost of handing over Al-Qaeda militants to the US and of posting troops in North Waziristan was zilch compared to the benefits of cooperation with the US.” The assassination attempts on General Musharraf were also seen as “individual-specific” acts of “isolated-group retaliation” rather than as “state-specific” acts of “radical Islamic nationalism”. In fact, certain recent developments have triggered a review in the NSS. The first is, as General Musharraf has admitted, “double-crossing” of the NSS by the Al-Qaida/Taliban elements in FATA. They have routinely taken state money, signed truces and pledged to expel the “foreigners”, only to shelter and join with them to attack the Pakistan army. The second is the impunity with which they have enlarged their FATA base areas for Talibanisation of Pakistani territory, used it to launch attacks in Afghanistan and provoke the Americans to retaliate across the Durand line, thereby embarrassing the NSS and fueling anti-Americanism in Pakistan. The third is the attempt by the MMA to exploit this anti-Americanism to undermine General Musharraf himself and try to overthrow his “moderately enlightened” regime. This is best exemplified by Qazi Hussain Ahmad’s statement that the MMA will boycott the next elections if these are held under General Musharraf’s tutelage. Clearly, from contesting the 2002 elections as General Musharraf’s blue-eyed boys and capturing 25% of the seats in the federal parliament as well as one and a half provincial governments, including the slot of the loyal leader of the opposition, the MMA has now singled out its benefactor as the single most important obstacle in the way to capturing state power in the next elections. The mounting social, political and strategic costs of allying with the mullahs have led the NSS to justify the war against terror as being in Pakistan’s national interest.
General Musharraf says “we shouldn’t be India-centric”. It has taken a military commander 58 years to say this. This is a reaction to domestic criticism of the Musharraf regime for failing to persuade Washington to treat Pakistan at par with India over its nuclear deal. But it also amounts to a stout defense of the NSS decision after 9/11 to “normalize” relations with India even at the cost of abandoning Pakistan’s long-held position demanding an “India or Pakistan” plebiscite on Kashmir. In other words, the NSS under General Musharraf has traveled a long distance since his visit to Agra in July 2001 when Pakistani intransigence and inflexibility, coupled with jihadi aggression, eventually culminated in provoking India to amass troops on the border in 2002 and threaten pre-emptive war. The depth of soul-searching in the NSS can be gauged by adding the “Kashmir-centric” (self-governance, maximum autonomy, etc) turnabout to Pakistan’s new quest for “minimum defensive deterrence” without an “arms race with India”.
General Musharraf says that “the real threat to Pakistan comes from internal and not external enemies”. This too is a remarkable thing for him to say. He never tires of saying that his regime is politically popular, democratic, secure and stable, that the economy is on a self-sustaining high altitude flight, that the next elections will be free and fair and strengthen his political system, that the tribal revolt in Balochistan will be quashed in a month, that the Waziristan operation will flush out and mop up foreign terrorists. Where then is the real internal threat? It is the domestic unraveling of Pakistan’s India-centric NSS which necessitates both his statement about internal threats and his need to retain his uniform into the foreseeable future. It is the blowback effect of the ideology of Islamic nationalism crafted by the NSS for five decades to thwart ethnic sub-nationalism and secular democracy in the country in quest of its India-centric obsession.
General Musharraf’s has also said that “extremism” hurts Pakistan’s image and dampens the prospects of foreign interest and investment that is needed to keep the economy afloat. This follows the realization that, having milked the national economy dry in pursuit of Islamic nationalism-inspired India-centricism for 55 years, the NSS cannot sustain the financial budgets required even for a minimum defense deterrence without large injections of foreign assistance in the form of foreign debt retirement, rescheduling, direct foreign investment, foreign trade concessions, foreign aid and sale of national public assets to foreigners.
Taken together, these statements imply a radical new way of looking at Pakistan. But whether or not they will eventually amount to a paradigm shift in the NSS will depend on General Pervez Musharraf’s willingness and ability to downgrade “Islamic nationalism” and upgrade mainstream, moderate, secular democracy.
(March 24-30, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 5 – Editorial)
Indo-Pak relations: hostage again?
President Pervez Musharraf recently accused India of fomenting trouble in Balochistan and admitted that “the Indo-Pak peace process had stalled”. Not so, says Richard Boucher, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia. “There’s been good progress between India and Pakistan in the composite dialogue, including on aspects of Kashmir,” he insists. Hold on, says MK Narayanan, India’s National Security Advisor. “Pakistan is breeding a new form of terrorism aimed at fanning communal tensions within India” he alleges, citing the Benaras and Bangalore bomb attacks as evidence and implying that the peace process would be adversely impacted. Not so, says Indian prime premier Manmohan Singh. “We will not allow violence by vested interests to derail the process”. Just a minute, advises an Indian parliamentary committee, “New Delhi should ‘go slow’ over normalization with Pakistan.” Meanwhile, the IPI gas pipeline project – originally billed as a significant “mutual dependency” goalpost has visibly halted following the US-India nuclear energy deal. There is no movement on resolving Siachin, Sir Creek and Baghliar, despite the early optimism of finding quick solutions. Indeed, India has now raised objections to the proposed Bhasha dam in Pakistan. And at the fag end of the financial year Pakistan has upped its “India-centric” defence budget by US$ 1 billion and decided to fuel the opposition to the US-India nuclear deal in America by demanding parity, despite different “history and needs”.
Notwithstanding all this, however, Indo-Pak bilateral trade has jumped from US$600 million to US$ 1 billion this year, people to people contacts are growing through new road and rail links, and a debate has started over realistic Kashmir solutions, at least in Pakistan if not equally in India. How can we make sense of these contradictory trends?
The Indo-Pak peace process has been dogged by mistrust, hostility and one-upmanship of vested interests on both sides. The Lahore Summit in 1999 was derailed by the Kargil conflict. The Agra initiative couldn’t be followed up because the jihadis provoked India to amass its armies and threaten Pakistan with pre-emptive action. Then the peace process started again in 2003 but was disrupted by a change of guard in India following general elections, and began to stall following the death of Mani Dixit, the Indian National Security Adviser who was hands-on with Pakistan, and the ouster of Natwar Singh, the Indian foreign minister who had a good “understanding” with Pakistan’s foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri.
Since then, however, one new factor has muddied the waters. This is India’s growing influence in Afghanistan and the eruption of an insurgency in Balochistan that is clearly funded and trained by India from bases in Southern Afghanistan, possibly as a quid pro quo for Pakistan’s inability or unwillingness to disband the jihadi groups that are still attacking India in Kashmir. Indeed, India’s “Afghan connection” has persuaded Pakistan to reinforce its links with the Pakhtun Taliban and Islamicist forces to pressurize the Karzai government in Kabul to ditch pro-India Northern Alliance elements and align with Pakistan’s national security objectives.
In other words, the bilateral peace process has been hijacked in India and Pakistan by their National Security establishments for international, regional and domestic reasons. Internationally, the new source of disquiet in Pakistan is the US-India nuclear deal. Regionally, it is India’s abandonment of the IPI project, and its support to the Baloch rebels. Domestically, it is India’s dogged refusal to respond positively to General Musharraf’s various proposals for moving forward on Kashmir. Indeed, it can be argued that Mr Narayanan’s three-point statement clearly shows India’s intent to end-play Pakistan and find an internal “solution” to Kashmir.
Mr Narayanan says India is thinking of entering into a dialogue with militant Kashmiri commanders, including Syed Salahuddin, the chairman of the United Jihad Council, who have thus far stayed out of a formal dialogue. There can be only one reason for this: India wants a dialogue with the Kashmiri mainstream political actors, including individuals in the APHC, but wants to cover their flanks by engaging the indigenous jihadi forces and foreclosing a violent backlash. Mr Narayanan also says that the Line of Control could become a permanent border if the political will to do so could be found. This is not a new idea. But this is the first time that the Indian National Security establishment has indicated the limits of the dialogue over Kashmir by seemingly dropping its claim to Azad Kashmir. Finally, the accusation against Pakistan of fomenting communal violence shows that a new regional game may be on, one which goes beyond the issue of Kashmir. Mr Narayanan has suggested that rising Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh is spawning militantcy in Dhaka which is carrying out acts of terrorism in India at the behest of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Given General Musharraf’s accusations of the Indian hand in Afghanistan and Balochistan, these moves and counter moves by the two national security establishments over the heads of democratic political forces do not augur well for the peace dialogue between Pakistan and India.
(March 31 – April 06, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 6 – Editorial)
Blustering in the 21st century
Everyday a bomb or two goes off somewhere in Balochistan destroying a bridge, a culvert, a railway track, an electricity tower or a gas pipeline. The insurgents have become so audacious that even the chief minister’s house isn’t safe from mortar attacks anymore. Everyday army convoys and outposts in Waziristan are attacked and the death toll of soldiers and local collaborators is rising. Even the interior minister has conceded that Al-Qaeda/Taliban have spread “trouble” in the neighbouring districts of Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan and Tank. So what is the Musharraf regime doing about this?
Its strategy in Balochistan is simplistic. Since the insurgents don’t have a visible face or front, and since the Balochistan puppet provincial parliament isn’t too pushed about the issues of rights raised by the insurgents, there is no one with whom the federal government can negotiate the problem. Sardar Ataullah Mengal is always ready to denounce the “army action” in Balochistan but refuses to act as a spokesman of the Baloch Liberation Army, or whatever. Nawab Khair Bux Marri is 80+ and still as silent and intransigent as ever. And Nawab Akbar Bugti, the trade unionist from Dera Bugti, is languishing in his “secret” cave hideout and giving interviews to foreigners reclaiming his rights as a Baloch “nationalist” after having spent the last thirty five years slamming Messrs Mengal and Marri. Under the circumstances, the federal government, governor, corps commander and IG-FC have jointly determined to run the show with the advice of Military Intelligence. This is based on trying to “win hearts and minds” with “development projects” and promising employment prospects (30,000 new jobs will come online, says the prime minister) and propping up political and tribal opponents of the three rebellious sardars and nawabs (thousands of Kalpar Bugtis ousted by Akbar Bugti from their homelands years ago have been encouraged to return, dig their heels in and lend a helping hand against the insurgents).
In Waziristan, too, steps are being taken to reclaim the initiative. Along with resolute military action, the government is developing plans to buy off and disarm the rebels. The US has pledged money for suitable “development projects” so that strong pro-government vested interests are created. At the same time, the government intends to call a “grand jirga” in the tribal areas consisting of elders, clerics, local councilors and government officials and entrust it with the job of identifying “anti-state elements” and persuading rebellious tribesmen not to shelter foreign militants.
On the face of it, these steps in Balochistan and Waziristan seem reasonable enough. The insurgency in Balochistan hasn’t captured the unequivocal sympathy of Pakistanis because it seems so obviously foreign-inspired and tribal instead of being indigenous and national. Equally, while Pakistanis do not generally appreciate army action against other Pakistanis, however misplaced or misguided these may be, there is even less sympathy for embedded foreigners who want to perpetuate religious extremism, export violence, destablise Pakistan and give it a bad name. Nonetheless, for various reasons, these government efforts can only be described as short term “holding operations” rather than preferred long term solutions.
The strategic constitutional issue of provincial rights and the nature of the “federation” is hanging fire. Indeed, far from democratically decentralising over time as envisaged in the constitution on issues of resource sharing, every military regime has strengthened the centre and complicated the equations. General Pervez Musharaf’s bid to remain both president and army chief indefinitely, with a puppet prime minister, dependent chief ministers and emasculated opposition parties will make the problem worse, not better, over time. Similarly, the obsession of the military dominated national security state with crunching a singular national identity for Pakistanis based on religion has hurt our transition to modernity and democracy. As Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate argues in his new book Identity and Violence – the illusion of destiny : “Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular (religious) and belligerent identities (by the national security state) on gullible people (Pakistanis), championed by proficient artisans of terror (the religious parties, jihadi groups, Taliban and Al-Qaeda practitioners of the faith)….violence is promoted by the cultivation of a sense of inevitability about some allegedly unique – often belligerent identity – that we are supposed to have (Islamic) and which apparently makes extensive demands on us (sometimes of a most disagreeable kind). The imposition of an allegedly unique identity is often a crucial component of the martial art of fomenting sectarian confrontation.”
On both counts General Pervez Musharraf’s approach is self-serving and flawed. Provincial autonomy isn’t satisfied simply by bringing “development” because that’s an imperialist/ colonialist approach. Devolution has to be genuinely evolved. Similarly, the centre simply preach “enlightened moderation” when all the organs of the singular-identity national security state, including its legal structures, educational policies and media propagation units, are geared to harnessing religious nationalism in the service of the state. The laws, especially relating to Hadood, must be changed. The administration must be re-educated about Islam and modernity. Democracy, pluralism and multiple identities – as Pakistanis, Baloch, Sindhis, Punjabis, Pathans, Moslems and democrats – have to be championed as nation building attributes in the 21st century. We cannot afford to sulk or bluster just because we missed the bus in the 20th.
(April 7-13, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 7 – Editorial)
Harnessing Z A Bhutto’s legacy
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s death anniversary is a yearly occasion for the Peoples Party and Benazir Bhutto to exploit his martyrdom and remain alive in the hearts and minds of people despite their many foibles. Mr Bhutto’s populist legacy had two profound interlinked dimensions: one, he woke up ordinary people to notions of self respect and freedom and they have never since relinquished those rights; two, by seeking to harness “peoples power” in pursuit of autocratic ambitions, he alienated the military-business complex. This, despite the fact that Mr Bhutto had all but abandoned “the people” by 1977 after he had resurrected the India-centric, national security state by resuscitating a defeated and demoralized army, laying the foundations of Pakistan’s defence pacts with China, setting Pakistan on the road to nuclearisation and eventually paying the price for wanting autonomy from the US and the Pakistani military-business complex. The irony is that the beleaguered Peoples Party of 1977 had progressively lost any resemblance to the anti-establishment populist Peoples Party of 1971 that had once captured the imagination of the poor. An ever greater irony is that Benazir Bhutto’s bid after 1993 to sell the “non-Peoples” Peoples Party to the military-business establishment has still not cut ice. Why is that?
Mr Bhutto’s populism had two dimensions. It was nationalistic and it was socialistic. The military-business complex loved his nationalist populism and appointed him chief martial law administrator and president in 1972. But it abhorred his socialist populism and dethroned him in 1977. Indeed, it was the fear of having to contend with Mr Bhutto’s socialist-populist rebirth through another election that persuaded General Zia ul Haq’s junta to indefinitely postpone the promised 90-days general elections and despatch him to the gallows. Furthermore, it was the same dread of socialist-populism that persuaded the military-business complex in the 1980s to hound the Peoples Party, banish Benazir Bhutto into exile and promote the notion of Islamic nationalism as a legitimizing force for General Zia’s regime. The irony was that the whole notion of “Islamic jihad” was specifically manufactured for General Zia’s Pakistan by the American CIA in the run-up to the coup de grace against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan and the “accidental” death of Gen Zia coincided with the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the end of the USSR. It therefore paved the way for Washington’s support of “popular” (as opposed to populist) democracy in Pakistan, which meant, in effect, the accession to power of the popular pro-US Benazir Bhutto as opposed to the anti-US populist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977. Unfortunately, Ms Bhutto’s occasional populism, inexperience, incompetence and pro-peace-with-India gullibility soon played into the hands of the military-business complex which replaced her with Nawaz Sharif, an Islamic-nationalist businessman totally in awe of his establishment masters. Fortunately for Ms Bhutto, though, Mr Sharif was hoist by his own petard in 1993 (he fought with his “own” President) and the international environment wasn’t conducive to another military takeover in Islamabad. So the establishment reluctantly gave the popular Ms Bhutto another chance. The irony is that, despite being more loyal than the establishment the second time round and avoiding any hint of populism she too was now hoist by her own petard in 1996 (she fought with her “own” President), thereby paving the way for the newly-popular Nawaz Sharif to ascend the throne in Islamabad. The greater irony is that it was Mr Sharif’s budding populism that went to his head in 1999 and propelled him into a clash with the military. In other words, it is nationalist-populism that scares, and nationalist-popularity that endears, politicians and parties to the military-business complex in Pakistan because nationalist-populism challenges, while nationalist-popularity supplements the hegemony of the military-business complex.
The distinction between populism and popularity is critical. Populism is resort to, and manipulation of, peoples power for mundane political ends whereas popularity is simply a means to an electoral end. Populism is therefore a dramatic extension of popularity to become autonomous if not independent of other sources of state power like the army and bureaucracy and even parliament. All demagogues and Bonapartists revel in the exploitation of populism to entrench themselves in power at the expense of competing interests. By this definition, and on the basis of past history, it would seem logical for the military-business complex under General Musharraf to ally with the popular Ms Bhutto who abandoned populism in 1993 instead of the popular Nawaz Sharif who donned the mantle of populism in 1999 and is still determinedly sticking to it. But that hasn’t happened.
All that is left of Z A Bhutto’s legacy of populism is Benazir Bhutto’s continuing popularity despite her misdemeanors. It is a measure of the short sightedness of the military-business complex that it still refuses to recognize the true worth of this fact and harness it to create the democratic consensus needed to implement the national paradigm shift advocated by General Pervez Musharraf after 9/11.
(April 14-20, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 8 – Editorial)
“The Iran Plan”
A startling investigative report in The New Yorker titled The Iran Plan by Seymour Hersh claims President Bush is drawing up plans to take out Iran’s nuclear program and effect regime change. This comes on the heels of extremely provocative statements by Iran’s President, Mr Ahmedinejad, in which he claimed that the Holocaust never happened, that Israel should be wiped out, and that his government had succeeded in enriching uranium. Mr Hersh is a well known American investigative reporter with many controversial books and long articles to his credit. He is said to be both loved and hated by the American military-industrial establishment with whom he has close “connections”. Some of his scoops have hurt the establishment while others have served to promote its interests.
Mr Hersh now claims that the Bush administration has determined to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program, that it has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack, that US Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of Iranian targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups, including the Azeris in the north, the Baloch in the southeast, and the Kurds in the northeast, to stir up trouble when required. American military planning is seemingly premised on the belief that a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and provoke the public to rise up and overthrow the Ahmedinejad government. Ominously, Mr Hersh says that “ one of the military’s initial option plans calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.”
But Mr Hersh also tells us that the US military high command is not in favour of nuclear strikes. He quotes experts to the effect that hundreds of sites would have to be targeted and not just known nuclear enrichment plants. He says state department officials fear that even if such a military operation were successful it might actually reinforce the current regime (instead of undermining it as hoped) by unleashing violent anti-Americanism not just in Iran but all over the Muslim world. There might be more bad news for President Bush. The Brits and the Europeans are not likely to support such a pre-emptive American military adventure. There will doubtless be questions marks, too, over how Syria and Lebanon will react vis a vis Israel, and how Russia and China might censure the US in the UN Security Council. But most important of all, if Iran curtails production of its 4 million barrels of oil a day and blockades or mines the Straits of Hormuz, the 34r-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean, the price of oil would sky rocket. Indeed, if Iranian retaliation were to be focused on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, the price of oil would double or even triple in weeks. But it would not end there. Iran might try and light a fire in the southern half of Iraq with Shiite militias. Mr Ahmadinejad would then become the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. And the Americans would be in greater trouble than they are in Iraq right now.
But that’s not all. Violent anti-Americanism would erupt across the Muslim world and autocratic pro-America governments would face a relentless backlash that could lead to their overthrow and replacement by hard-line Islamist forces inimical to Western interests. Certainly, countries like Egypt, Algeria and Turkey would find themselves in the eye of a storm. The Musharraf regime in Pakistan, in particular, would be besieged and dictatorship and repression rather than greater democracy might follow, with adverse consequences for the economy. Inevitably, Muslim communities in the West, especially in America, Europe, Scandinavia and Australia, would then be considered security risks and hounded and persecuted. In effect, a veritable clash of civilizations would be unleashed by an American attack on Iran.
If all this is clear enough, some pertinent questions arise: why has this “plan” been leaked to Mr Hersh, why isn’t there any outrage at this erosion of the “national interest” and why haven’t heads rolled in the Bush administration? Is it possible that Mr Hersh has been “used” for some greater purpose? Is it possible that the idea may well be to lay the ground for an Israeli attack on a couple of Iranian sites, and then to wait for the Iranians to attack American ships and armed forces in the region, thereby justifying a full fledged American counter attack on Iran?
It is also possible that this story has been leaked to offset the tough and uncompromising stand taken by Mr Ahmedinejad, that it is in effect a retaliatory posture aimed at flexing muscle and improving America’s negotiating position. The problem with this approach is that the posturing could precipitate the very crisis it is meant to avert if a third non-state actor like Al-Qaeda with an autonomous mission statement is able to step in and push America over the brink as it did on 9/11.
(April 21-27, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 9 – Editorial)
Problem of Balochistan is problem of
Musharraf’s Pakistan
Last Monday General Pervez Musharraf assured a group of Karachi businessmen that “peace had been restored to Balochistan and the issue had been resolved”. The same day 19 rockets blasted the Pir Koh gas plant, and three “security officials” lost their limbs in a mine explosion in Sangsila. The next day, the gas pipeline near Mastung was blown up, stopping supply to Kalat and Mangochar. Indeed, every day the insurgents notch up bold new strikes. So who’s he kidding?
The federal government’s argument goes like this. (1) There is an “emerging middle-class” in Balochistan that is anti-tribal. (2) The government is supporting this middle-class in displacing the traditional sardars in local state and society because it is pro-development. (3) Therefore the sardars of the biggest tribes – Marri, Mengal and Bugti – have taken up arms against the government’s grand “development” agenda for Balochistan. (4) Hence these sardars, who are in the pay of India’s RAW and Israel’s MOSSAD, cannot be called “Baloch nationalists”.
The government’s proposed solution runs like this. (1) Islamabad will not fall into the trap of an indiscriminate military operation because that would inevitably lead to “collateral damage” which would be exploited by the insurgents’ propaganda machinery. (2) Instead, a strategy of “selective” and “individual-level” repression will be adopted for maximizing military dividends. (3) Nor will the government be provoked into direct criminal action against aging tribal sardars because that too could rebound by fuelling a media backlash. (4) Equally, the government will abandon any “flip-flops” in policy which send mixed signals of dialogue and military action. This means that the Chaudhry Shujaat committee has been wound up and the operation is firmly in the hands of the feds led by the Governor Balochistan, Corps Commander Balochistan, IGP-FC Balochistan and Military Intelligence. (5) Instead, Islamabad will enforce a two-pronged strategy. One, it will make and use laws to enmesh the second-tier political leadership of the insurgents in criminal cases and enfeeble it – the Baloch Liberation Army has been banned as a “terrorist” organization; Gazain Marri, the son of Nawab Khair Bux Marri, is being extradited from Dubai; the Mengal and Marri households in Karachi are under siege; several Baloch activists have mysteriously disappeared (they will soon re-appear in chains before special anti-terrorist courts and be accused of belonging to, or abetting, the banned terrorist organization called BLA, etc; the accounts and properties of alleged members of the BLA and sardars will be seized; and so on.
Two, the government will speed up “development” in the province so that the pro-government (a) tribal elites and (b) anti-Sardar “nationalist” elements like the Abdul Hayee Baloch group, are strengthened with new stakes in the spoils of power. Simultaneously, the Baloch “middle-classes” will be recruited into the police (1700 so far) and even in the armed forces (there are 57 cadets from Balochistan in the military academy in Kakul today) to give them a sense of participation in the organs of state. In time to come, the argument goes, the 100,000-strong Marri-Bugti tribals who give succour to the 3000 insurgents will be isolated and marginalized in a population of over 6 million and the insurgency will be crushed or significantly curtailed to “manageable” proportions which merely reflect the “games that nations play” – a reference to the “Indian hand” in Balochistan in response to the “Pakistani hand” in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
There are serious flaws in this analysis of the Balochistan “problem”. Some pertinent questions arise. Why did the Baloch insurgency erupt in the “non-democratic” 2000s instead of the “democratic” 1990s? Does this have anything to do with the fact that the “bad, secular, nationalist tribals” had a rightful share in provincial power in the 1990s but were ousted in the pre-rigged 2002 elections by state-sponsored, “good, ideological, middle-class mullahs ”? Indeed, isn’t there a remarkably similar blowback-insurgency effect of bad state policies in both the NWFP (Waziristan and FATA) and Balochistan (Marri-Bugti) where secular and nationalist elements like the ANP and PPP in the former and the BNP and Marri-Bugtis in the latter were sidelined at the behest of the Military Mullah Alliance? In the NWFP, the mullahs are now a thorn in the side of GHQ because they support the Waziristani “foreign” rebels; in Balochistan, they are the cause of the political marginalisation of the “nationalists” who have been pushed into the arms of foreign powers. Has the “Baloch middle class” that the government looks upon so favourably as compared to the “tribals” materialized overnight out of nowhere? No, it hasn’t. The “middle-class” that Islamabad wants to support and prop up at the expense of the “tribal sardars” is a mullah-middle class, as opposed to the secular, mainstream nationalist middle class that is able to shut down Quetta and other towns in protest against government policies. Worse, thanks to these misplaced and tactical state policies, the “middle-class” Pakhtun and Baloch mullahs in Balochistan are now grouping to seize the provincial assembly in the 2007 elections, which will exacerbate the “Baloch problem” instead of resolving it as claimed by the government.
The second issue is related to the “foreign hand” in Balochistan. It cannot be shrugged away as a simple consequence of the “games nations play”. One reason why the insurgency in the 1970s (which erupted when the Baloch nationalist NAP government was sacked by Z A Bhutto) could be crushed was that there was no foreign hand of any consequence in it. By contrast, the current one is hugely funded by RAW and trained by MOSSAD, as claimed by the government. That is one reason it can’t be militarily crushed quickly – helicopters borrowed from the Shah’s Iran played a critical role in the counter-insurgency campaign in the 1970s because they couldn’t be shot down by World War II vintage.303 rifles whereas better helicopters cannot be used effectively today because of the enormous and modern firepower with the insurgents.
The third set of questions that springs to mind is also critical. Why is India fingering Pakistan in Balochistan when it is simultaneously seeking normalization of relations and resolution of conflicts with Islamabad in the wake of Pakistan’s recent “flexibility” on Kashmir? Why is MOSSAD stirring trouble in Balochistan when Pakistan and the United States (Israel’s mentor and boss) are presumed to have a special and strategic relationship to stabilize the region, and Pakistan is inching towards recognition of Israel? To claim that this is all part of the business-as-usual “games nations play” is stupid. It is certainly more fruitful to see this situation in the prism of the Military-Mullah Alliance in Pakistan that has destabilized India in Kashmir and the United States in Afghanistan by stoking the fires of Talibanism, and not stamping out Al Qaeda and Jihad. The threat of a “middle-class mullah Iran” armed with nuclear weapons has added to the problem of radical, middle-class, political Islam in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Both the West and India have now come out firmly against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Indeed, reports suggest that the US has set boots on the ground in the Azeri, Kurdish and Baloch areas of Iran in preparation for dealing with Iran. Is it any wonder then that US proxies are active in Pakistani Balochistan, that India has abandoned the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project in exchange for a nuclear deal with the US, that the Baloch insurgents are specifically targeting Pakistan’s oil and gas infrastructure even as General Musharraf is setting his sights on going it alone with the Iran pipeline?
General Musharraf’s tactics and strategy are out of sync. The mullahs are out to get him personally and sabotage his pro-West foreign policy that keeps the economy moving. Yet he is unwilling to put them down. He wants normalization with India so that talk of war doesn’t destabilize the economy and lead to capital flight but is unwilling to put the jihadis down. He wants to get rid of Al Qaeda in Waziristan because it is spreading its tentacles to the rest of FATA and undermining his profitable relationship with the US. But he is unwilling to put down the Taliban and Frontier mullahs who support and prop up Al Qaeda morally and materially. He wants to normalize with Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan and wean it away from India. But he is unwilling to uproot the Taliban in the Pakistani borderlands who are attacking the US-Karzai forces in Kabul. If he sees all this as part of the usual game of “leveraging” that states play, it is a great pity. The net result of this clever-by-half, intelligence-sponsored mindset is actually endangering both General Musharraf personally as well as Pakistan politically.
The “solution” to Balochistan is part of the “solution” to Pakistan. The solution to Pakistan is in the cobbling of a new alliance of democratic and liberal forces in the country. Instead of the Military-Mullah-Alliance (MMA) we need a Military-Liberal Alliance or MLA (and by that we don’t mean Martial Law Administrator!) to see us through a transitional period of better democracy in the run-up to and post-2007 general elections after which the military can start retreating to barracks. The MLA should comprise all the anti-mullah forces in the country that straddle not just the labouring and middle classes but also the business, feudal and tribal elites which support the PPP or the Baloch and Pakhtun nationalists, or the MQM or the many liberal politicians in the Pakistan Muslim League Q and N. Until these “rightful” claimants to power are accommodated as is their due, General Musharraf will remain a prisoner of tactics over strategy and Pakistan’s long-term prospects will continue to look grim.
(April 28-May 4, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 10 – Editorial)
“The good that men do….”
Which party obtained the largest number of votes in Pakistan in the 2002 elections but was denied the slot of the Leader of the House as well as that of the Leader of the Opposition in the House? The PPP. Which party was usurped by General Pervez Musharraf and handed power in the centre and three provinces? The Muslim League. Where are the real leaders of the PPP and the Muslim League? In forced exile. Which party is a core political ally of General Musharraf in Sindh whose leader is in self-exile in London, facing over 50 criminal charges ranging from terrorism to murder etc at home, but who can still compel the Prime Minister of Pakistan to “call” on him? The MQM. Which political group was especially facilitated in the 2002 elections so that it could sport two provincial governments, the slot of the honourable leader of the Opposition in the House and a ringside seat in the National Security Council but has now become a thorn in the side of General Musharraf, Pakistan and the international community? The MMA. Who won the 2002 Presidential “referendum” hands down, whose party has a majority in parliament but who personally doesn’t have the courage to take off his army uniform or step into parliament? President Musharraf. Whose post 9/11 foreign policy is in Pakistan’s national interest, and whose economic performance is good, but whose personal popularity is eroding on account of both success stories? General Musharraf. Whose regime has faced the most virulent form of terrorism, extremism, separatism and sectarianism in the last fifteen years as a blowback effect of its political policies? General Musharraf’s. What is the significance of asking and answering such questions at this time?
The reason is that a recent meeting between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in London has set the country on fire with a host of new questions. Will they return to jointly wage a struggle against General Musharraf? Will he remain army chief and president? Is political instability on the cards? Will the next elections be held on time? Will they be free, fair and legitimate? Will General Musharraf enshrine one main-party rule by unpopular decree and rigging, or will he opt for a more pluralistic and legitimate system with a greater national and international consensus underlying it? Will he join hands with liberal elements and jettison the reactionary ones in the country? How will the international community in general and the United States in particular react to forthcoming developments in Pakistan in terms of securing their own vested interests?
Such questions have arisen following a simple meeting between Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif for some important reasons. First, eight years of any government, however good it may be, is sufficient reason for people to want a change of faces if not policies. That is why, in the best democracies of the world, eight years or two full terms of up to ten years is the prescribed constitutional limit of any elected prime minister or president. So ruler fatigue is setting in and General Musharraf’s democratic time is running out. Second, as Mark Anthony said, “the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones”. Accordingly, General Ayub Khan’s “decade of development” and the BJP’s “India shining” campaign were interred with their metaphorical bones, and General Musharraf’s miraculous “economic turnaround” is likely to be diminished at the altar of a rising cost of living for the vast majority of Pakistanis. The greater irony is that the pro-West political policies of the Musharraf regime responsible for the international largesse fueling the economic turnaround of Pakistan are generating a popular backlash from the “nationalist-middle” and “conservative-religious” classes of the country. Thus the more General Musharraf drums up statistics of economic growth, forex reserves, remittances, etc, the more alienated ordinary folk feel who have been left out of the loop of soaring stock or asset values, or those who must contend with the price of sugar and cement and housing, or those who have benefited in the recent past but are now having a tough time maintaining their new cars and air-conditioners.
Two keen perceptions are also adversely impacting General Musharraf’s support base. First, that the international community and the US have decided not to keep all their eggs in General Musharraf’s basket because he lacks the national consensus to go the whole hog on his foreign policy turnaround; second, that his economic growth strategy is not sustainable on account of the “downside risks” attending a soaring trade deficit, a “casino culture” of overvalued property and stock prices, and a weak banking system that has provided easy money and fueled inflation.
In short, Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif have done nothing remarkable to warrant a potential revival. They have merely successfully exploited the contradictions of General Pervez Musharraf’s system. Therefore, if he doesn’t enlarge the consensus behind it and make it more legitimate and less opportunistic, all the cabinet shuffles in the world will not save him and “the good that he has done…..”.
(May 5-11, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 11 – Editorial)
Pakistan is not a failed state
A prestigious American journal has ranked Pakistan 9th among the top 10 “failed” states in the world in 2006. To add insult to injury, Afghanistan is listed as a lesser failed state than Pakistan. Curiously, Pakistan’s ranking in the “failed states index” was decidedly better at number 34 last year. Notwithstanding questions related to the fairness, adequacy or relevance of the assumed index of failure, two questions arise. One, has the right weight been given to Pakistan’s current strengths and potential weaknesses? Two, what has happened to Pakistan in the last twelve months to trigger such a drastic revision of the country’s perception abroad?
The ratings are based on tens of thousands of articles from global and regional sources from May to December 2005, examined by Western ‘experts’ using ‘special software’. The 12 factors which determined the listing were: mounting demographic pressures (but Pakistan’s rate of population growth has steadily declined in recent years) ; massive movement of refugees and internally displaced peoples (no such problem in Pakistan); legacy of vengeance-seeking group grievance (no such legacy); chronic and sustained human flight (if anything, there is a human and capital inflow into Pakistan); uneven economic development along group lines (in fact, current social sector development plans in Pakistan are aimed at redressing such regional or ethnic grievances); sharp and/or severe economic decline (an average growth rate of over 7 % in the last two years has put Pakistan at the top of the regional league); criminalisation and delegitimisation of the state (there is improvement on this score following the Pakistani state’s attempts to uproot criminalized, non-state actors like Al-Qaeda, downgrade its political alliances with extremist religious organizations and pledge to hold free elections in 2007); progressive deterioration of public services (social sector budgets have risen); widespread violation of human rights (there is a relative decrease in such violations compared to earlier years); security apparatus as ‘state within a state’( the role of the ISI and of non-state jihadi groups is palpably diminishing following normalization of relations with India); rise of factionalised elites (there is no significant change in the role and balance of power within the factionalised elites of Pakistan); and intervention of other states or external actors (there is no direct foreign intervention in Pakistan). Thus clearly, Pakistan has performed better on all counts than credited or debited.
The second question about performance-perception is therefore more relevant. Certain new factors have adversely impacted Pakistan’s performance. There is the insurgency in Balochistan where the damaging exploits of the Balochistan Liberation Army are front page news despite General Musharraf making light of them as “pin pricks”. The regime’s admission of indirect foreign intervention in Balochistan (India, Israel and even the CIA) as well as a targeted crackdown on the area’s factionalised and ethnic Marri-Bugti tribal elites, has pushed Pakistan into the top ten “failed state” category. Two, a marked failure of state policy in FATA and the spread of Talibanism to the settled areas of the NWFP has cast a pall of gloom over Pakistan-watchers. The truth is that the Balochistan-Waziristan cauldron has all the ingredients of state failure. There is no state writ in much of Balochistan and Waziristan which comprise 1/3rd of the Pakistan’s land mass and manifest economic backwardness, ethnic tensions, elite factionalisation, human rights violations, military action, religious extremism and terrorism. Finally, the rising graph of anti-Americanism across the country has made Western “experts” jittery and fed into the “failed state” syndrome.
In 1999 we warned that Pakistan was headed in the direction of becoming a “failed” or “pariah” state. Among the factors creating a failed-state syndrome we listed an increasingly dysfunctional government, an autocratic and rigged “democracy”, a stagnant and indebted economy, rising impoverishment, mass alienation, precipitous nuclear rattling and military conflict with India, alarming Talibanisation in Pakistan’s Afghan backyard, insidious identity crises (are we anchored in South Asia or the Middle-East, do we have a singular identity as Islamists or multiple identities reflecting nation, religion, ethnicity, region, class, etc) and dogged suspicions of nuclear proliferation. But our observations were considered treasonable at the time. However, when General Musharraf seized power in 1999 he was quick to justify his coup precisely on the basis of these state failings. Since then, much has been done to steer Pakistan out of its multiple-crises syndrome.
But if the credit for that goes to General Musharraf in the post-9/11 to 2004 period, the discredit for the fall from grace in 2004-05 must also be laid at his door. Pakistan is not in the same clutch as Sudan, DR Congo, Ivory Coast, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Chad, Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan. On the contrary, it has steadily traveled in the opposite direction for four years. But major policy failure in critical areas, increasing political uncertainty, rising religious nationalism and a personal crisis of de-legitimisation for General Musharraf worries many at home and abroad. The sooner these distortions are corrected behind a popular and stable national consensus, the better for Pakistan and General Musharraf.
(May 12-18, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 12 – Editorial)
Musharraf’s new dilemma
he top American State Department Coordinator on Terrorism, Henry Crumpton, met top Pakistani officials, including the interior minister, Aftab Sherpao, in Islamabad and commended Islamabad for being “a vital security ally”. Shortly afterwards, he was in Kabul where he said that Osama bin Laden, Mulla Umar and other top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders were most probably hiding in Pakistan and Islamabad wasn’t doing enough to flush them out. There is a developing history of such “double-talk” from the Americans and it is worth analyzing.
Last year President Bush warmly embraced General Musharraf in Washington as a “buddy” who had risked all in the “war against terror”. But when he came to Pakistan two months ago, he pointedly admitted that he had come to “check out” whether the Musharraf regime was leveling with him or not, and then diplomatically gave the general a clean bill of health. But before Islamabad could heave a sigh of relief, President Bush weighed in with demands for free and fair elections in 2007 and greater democracy, setting tongues wagging about the extent and nature of US support for General Musharraf’s “guided-democracy” regime. More was to follow.
Last month, Richard Boucher, the new American assistant secretary of state for South Asia, lauded General Musharraf for keeping Pakistan on the right track. However, Mr Boucher set opposition hearts aflutter by demanding “civilian control over the army,” free and fair elections, and the incompatibility of democracy with a uniformed president. The next day, the US National Security Advisor, Stephen Hadley, echoed the same sentiments in Washington to make sure the “message” was not lost. Even more troubling for Islamabad were Mr Boucher’s views regarding the insurgency in Balochistan and the status and role of nuclear-proliferationist Dr AQ Khan. He saw no reason to ban the Balochistan Liberation Army as a “terrorist” organization and he thought that Dr Khan had not come clean about his shenanigans. Earlier, the US Energy Secretary, Samuel Bodman, visited Islamabad and bluntly advised the government that the situation in Balochistan was “an impediment” to investment in Pakistan. He also brushed aside the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project and instead offered a 500 MW electricity grid from Central Asia to Pakistan. The same sort of double-speak has characterized statements about Musharraf’s Pakistan by US Secretary of State, Condi Rice, and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The irony in all this “if-ing and but-ing” by the US is that while most Pakistanis still perceive General Musharraf to be an “American puppet”, the Bush Administration is clearly irritated that he isn’t, and therefore wants him to “do more”.
The US wanted Pakistan to pledge active support to the American position in Iraq. I can’t oblige, said General Musharraf. In fact, he lectured Washington on unjust Western policies as being the root cause of Muslim outrage. The US wanted Dr A Q Khan to be handed over for questioning. We’ll ask the questions, said General Musharraf. The US wants Pakistani cooperation to isolate and pressurize Iran to stop its nuclear programme. But General Musharraf refuses to abandon the Iran pipeline project and resolutely opposes American or Israeli intervention against Iran. President Bush wants his nuclear deal with India to go through without any hitches. But General Musharraf is insisting on similar treatment and indirectly putting a spanner in President Bush’s works. President Bush wants all Al-Qaeda elements flushed out of Waziristan by force. We don’t want to use indiscriminate force against our own people, says General Musharraf, however misguided they may be.
The US is hurting in Afghanistan where Taliban/Al Qaeda hit-and-run attacks are piling up American casualties. President Bush wants “hot-pursuit” rights into Pakistani territory. We’ll take care of that problem ourselves on our own territory, says General Musharraf. More ominously, Pakistan and US national security objectives still differ in terms of how to stabilize Afghanistan. The US wants unequivocal support for the Karzai regime but Islamabad has two problems with that: the Karzai regime is influenced by India and non-Pakhtun elements that are anti-Pakistan; and it is not prepared to accept the Durand Line as an international border, nor is it ready to enlarge its Pakhtun base with pro-Pakistan elements. You have your strategic objectives and we have our strategic objectives, says General Musharraf.
This means that the Bush and Musharraf administrations are allies where their interests merge and competitors or even antagonists where they don’t. From this we may draw one conclusion: the US will cast about for future friends among the relatively liberal political parties in Pakistan who are not in General Musharraf’s loop in order to enhance its agenda and improve its bargaining position vis a vis General Musharraf. This is both a current pressure tactic against him and a future investment to secure its interests. The worst outcome from General Musharraf’s point of view would be one in which he ends up being squeezed from all sides. This could happen if he botches up the political system, fails to obtain the legitimate support of mainstream Pakistanis and also ends up alienating the sole superpower in the world.
(May 19-25, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 13 – Editorial)
The Great Charade
Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have finally broken the ice. The old protagonists, who once vowed to cut each other up and throw the pieces into the Arabian Sea, are now acting like long lost buddies. Apparently seven hard years under General Pervez Musharraf have persuaded them to bury the hatchet and make common cause against him. A Charter of Democracy (CD) was unfurled in London last week amidst much self-righteous fury. It purports to be a mission statement on how to get rid of General Musharraf and make sure that the army is never again able to carry out a coup against the democratically elected leaders of Pakistan.
The two leaders say they will not contest the next elections under General Musharraf’s tutelage. Does this mean they will not contest unless there is a national caretaker government independent of General Musharraf in charge, including a chief election commissioner acceptable to them? Or does this mean that General Musharraf would have to be thrown out of power before such a national government can be constituted to hold free and fair elections? The first scenario requires the emasculation of General Musharraf while the second is contingent upon his very ouster. But in the current situation, each seems like a tall order. It is doubtful that from the comfort of their London flats Mr Sharif and Ms Bhutto can rouse the masses and bring the regime to its knees via a long drawn out popular revolt. So they will have to brave a return to Pakistan and take their chances
Unfortunately, their response to this dilemma isn’t terribly encouraging. Neither is prepared to say when he or she will catch a flight to Lahore en route to Kot Lakhpat jail. All they can say is that they will return some time before the proposed elections. But that is a non-starter. If they are not ready to announce a firm date well ahead of that deadline, how on earth do they propose to organize the masses and beef them up for knocking out General Musharraf, initiating a national caretaker government and reforming an independent election commission? Nor have they addressed the issue of how they intend to achieve their objective if they are fated to cool their heels in the clink. The only way out, it seems, is to wait for some sort of crisis to develop independently of them and then jump in and try to exploit it. But how will such a crisis develop? Who will create it and when? And what if General Musharraf is able to ride out the storm and they end up paying for their miscalculations?
The only explanation for their feigned optimism may be the expectation that the Jamaat i Islami will whip up a storm before the year is out and play into their hands. Certainly, Qazi Hussain Ahmad has rolled up his sleeves and is itching for a showdown with General Musharraf. He means to exploit the anti-American and anti-West sentiment in the country. But three questions arise. One, will he be able to take along the JUI which has many vested interests in the status quo. Two, even if the MMA is able to field tens of thousands of people here and there, will they be able to sustain violent agitation over a prolonged period to make an impact? Three, if the MMA is successful to a point, why should it allow BB and NS to harvest the fruits of its labour? We might recall that the MMA “used” the threat of the PPP and the PMLN to obtain a profitable deal for itself from General Musharraf in the last elections. What is to stop it from following the same strategy again?
The weakest link in the chain proposed is their inability to formulate their own long term relationship. When BB asked NS to denounce the corruption cases he had trumped up against her as prime minister from 1997 to 1999, he flatly refused. In other words, he sees her as no less an obstacle to his return to power than General Musharraf and means to exploit the corruption charges to knock her out as soon as the coast is clear. This isn’t exactly a propitious sign of their determination to restore “democracy” and rule of law rather than resort to victimisation and vindictiveness all over again.
It is also unfortunate that neither had anything concrete or original or inspiring to say about the problems that bedevil Pakistan’s quest for democracy. There is no solution to Waziristan or Balochistan in the CD; there is no sure footed proposal to separate the judiciary from the executive; there is no national security strategy to compete with the one offered by General Musharraf; there is no statement on how to deal with the war on terror, America and India.
The media may have gone overboard projecting the CD as a turning point in the politics of Pakistan. There is no evidence as yet that BB and NS are getting “real” about democracy. If anything, it is more likely that the real game of secret negotiations with General Musharraf will begin in earnest now in the hope that one of them will clinch a deal with him and ditch the other before long.
(May 26- June 1, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 14 – Editorial)
Clutching at straws?
General President Pervez Musharraf has seen fit to personally order a ban on Feroz Khan’s entry into Pakistan. Feroz Khan? Oh yes, that has-been film producer from Bombay who recently visited Pakistan in connection with the showing of the film Taj Mahal and made some stupid drunken remarks at a celeb show about how Indian Muslims have got their act together in India while Pakistan’s Muslims are still floundering in Pakistan. He was hauled over the coals by our media and retreated into an apology-cum-denial mode before hightailing it home. That should have been the end of this eminently forgettable matter – after all, there are some relatively successful Indian Muslims who are constantly vying with Indian Hindus to prove their loyalty to their state just as there are some overly insecure Pakistani Muslims who are constantly outraged over any perceived “insult” to their country. But it wasn’t. General Musharraf has jumped into the fray and made sure than the likes of Feroz Khan will dine out on this story for years to come as yet another example of Pakistani xenophobia, paranoia and insecurity. Whoever advised General Musharraf to make this intervention must really be a small-minded, short sighted person. Or, having admitted that he is losing popularity, is General Musharraf on edge?
The Musharraf government has also deemed fit to get an anti-terrorist court to sentence Nawab Khair Bux Marri in absentia to 20 years imprisonment in connection with some murder that took almost a decade ago and for which no evidence has ever been produced. This is ridiculous. The octogenarian Sardar of the Marri tribe is a recluse in Karachi who has not been seen or heard from for over three decades. He is already under some sort of house arrest. If the government is hoping to put pressure on his sons to abandon their rebellious ways, it has another thing coming. Indeed, if the Balochistan problem is a “mere pin-prick”, as General Musharraf recently claimed, this action is akin to trying to smash a fly with a hammer. Knowing Mr Marri, it is likely that he won’t even bother to challenge his conviction in the High Court or apply for bail. Under the circumstances the government will either have to arrest him or let him be. In either case, it will compound the government’s problems and make the Nawab a martyr. Whoever advised General Musharraf to approve this action either doesn’t have a clue about Balochistan and is bent on proving that the President is increasingly alienated from facts and ground realities and surrounded by small, inexperienced, bureaucratic minds, or is General Musharraf on edge?
Now we hear that Commander Khaleelur Rehman has been given his marching orders barely a year from when he was appointed Governor of the NWFP. This is ominous. It suggests a turnabout of 180 degrees in General Musharraf’s perspective on FATA, the JUI and Talibanism. The irony is that Mr Rehman took a hard line against the insurgents in FATA and against their JUI supporters in the NWFP government on the precise orders of General Musharraf. Now he has been sacked for carrying them out. Indeed, Commander Rehman’s head has been offered as a sop to the very elements who, as General Musharraf recently admitted, had “double-crossed” the army in Waziristan – taken its jirga-recommended money and used it to fuel Talibanism in the region! Unfortunately, this new “flip-flop” on Waziristan policy suggests dangerous trends. One, it seems to be staking Pakistan’s national-security interests at the altar of General Musharraf’s personal political interests. It is aimed at strengthening the JUI and encouraging it to defy the pressures of its Jamaat i Islami ally to heave General Musharraf out by a series of “million-man” marches. Hence the recent statement by Maulana Fazalur Rehman that the JUI would participate in elections and saw no reason to abandon General Musharraf. Two, it is bound to make the US nervous because it will lead to a resurgence of Talibanism in Afghanistan. Indeed, it is almost as if General Musharraf is deliberately thumbing his nose at Hamid Karzai and the international community. Equally, since the move is simultaneously designed to bring the JUI back in power in the next elections, it should be disquieting for those at home and abroad who see the country’s future in terms of a pluralistic, moderate and democratic dispensation based on free and fair elections. Combined with General Musharraf’s “soft tactical spot” for the jihadis, the ambiguities and contradictions in his policies are coming to the surface in the run up to the elections next year.
A chorus of voices from the King’s party is saying that the King’s current parliament should re-elect him before going home next year. If this comes to pass it would amount to cynical rigging of the next presidential election. Is General-President Musharraf clutching at straws to retain his power? Certainly, the scene is getting murkier by the day in a depressingly familiar way.
(June 2-8, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 15 – Editorial)
In no-man’s land?
Last Thursday the sub-committee of the Committee on International Relations on International Terrorism and Non Proliferation in the US House of Representatives held a “hearing” on the subject of: A Q Khan Case Closed? It came to several significant conclusions. One, the information supplied by Pakistan on A Q Khan’s proliferation activity especially regarding Iran was “incomplete”; two, the US government should demand “direct access” to A Q Khan and interrogate him “verbally”; three, “criminal prosecution” should be considered against all such individuals involved in proliferation; four, the Pakistan government is “hiding” information about A Q Khan’s network because it has not prosecuted or punished its members; five, Pakistan had helped deliver to America two of the most threatening security challenges ever, namely Iran and Korea.
This hearing is significant for several reasons. One, it is the most damning American indictment ever of the A Q Khan network and the role of the Musharraf regime “in not fully cooperating” with the US on this issue; two, it wasn’t on the sub-committee’s announced agenda of debates and hearings, which suggests an untoward urgency in sending this message across to Islamabad; three, the sub-committee’s chairman, Edward Royce, is the former co-chair of the India caucus on the Hill. Indeed, 8 out of the 18 members of the sub-committee belong to the India caucus. Congressman Brad Sherman, who participated in the A Q Khan hearings, is a leading member of the India caucus too.
On the face of it, this development is in response to a recent statement by the Pakistan Foreign Office that the A Q Khan case had been “closed”. But two other factors may more realistically lie behind it. One, Pakistan’s increasing demand that it should be treated at par vis a vis the proposed US-India nuclear deal, and increasing opposition in the US to the deal, which may have triggered a response from the India caucus to neutralize these arguments of bracketing “good” India with “bad” Pakistan; and two, the Bush administration must have given the green light for the hearings because it is unhappy with the Musharraf regime for not doing “more” to put down the desperately ferocious Taliban who are taking a heavy toll of ISAF this summer.
This reasoning is strengthened by another development in Washington coincidentally on the same day of the A Q Khan hearing. The US Institute of Peace’s seminar on the insurgency in Balochistan was significant for several reasons. First, one of the two seminar speakers, Selig Harrison, is the author of a 1978 book on Baloch nationalism that is peppered with partisan notions of the subject. Mr Harrison is also reputed to be “pro-India” and “anti-Pakistan” if only because of the consistently critical positions he has taken on developments in Pakistan. His presentation was notable for demanding that the US should sanction Pakistan for using American helicopters against the Baloch insurgents. Second, the other speaker, Frederic Grare, also from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, talked about the resurgence of Baloch nationalism and highlighted the region’s geo-political importance because a “huge part of the US military operations in Afghanistan are launched from Pasni and Dalbandin bases situated on Baluch territory and the Taliban also operate from Baluchistan.” He declared that “if the pressure on Western forces in Afghanistan were to become unbearable, Washington and its allies could conceivably use the Baluch nationalists who fiercely oppose the influence of the mullahs and also oppose the Taliban, to exert diplomatic pressure on Islamabad as well as Teheran”. Interestingly enough, Mr Grare notes pointers of the “Indian hand” in Baluchistan and the role of the US as a “potential troublemaker” in the region but is careful not to give personal credence to these signs. More ominously, he concludes that “unless Pakistan changes its policy towards Baluchistan dramatically , the possibility of Baluchistan eventually gaining its independence cannot be ruled out.” At the least, he argues, “this conflict could be used in Pakistan and elsewhere as a weapon against the Pakistan government. Such a prospect would affect not only Pakistan but possibly all its neighbors. It is ultimately Islamabad that must decide whether Baluchistan will become its Achilles’ heel.”
It should be clear to Islamabad that the A Q Khan case is not closed and the Baluchistan case has been re-opened in Washington in response to Islamabad’s policy of non-cooperation with the Bush administration in helping stabilize Afghanistan. Indeed, the recent change of Pakistani tack in Waziristan by opting for negotiation with the Taliban via their JUI political sponsors in the NWFP and Baluchistan could presage further US-Pakistan tensions if this policy hurts rather than helps American interests in Afghanistan. Should that happen, it is certain that Washington will weigh in with greater and more frequent demands for a return to democratic pluralism via free and fair elections in Pakistan. Certainly, think tank opinion in Washington has turned against the Musharraf regime. The conclusion is inescapable: if General Pervez Musharraf’s domestic policies squeeze him into no man’s land by alienating his chief foreign sponsor because of his continuing alliance with his sponsor’s principal religious detractors in Pakistan, he will have only himself to blame for his misfortune.
(June 9-15, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 16 – Editorial)
Futility of budget-debate
The government claims poverty has been slowly but surely reduced in the last few years. More ambitiously, it suggests that the new “pro-poor” budget will drive a nail in its coffin. The opposition says, not unjustifiably, this is hogwash. Inflation is eating into the nation’s entrails, inequality is increasing, there is no positive change in the low savings and investment ratios, a balance of payments crisis is in the offing, and agricultural growth is Allah-given rather than Aziz-generated. But there is some definite economic progress for which the Musharraf regime can claim credit.
If economic growth is all about incremental gains for marginalized sections of society under capitalism, then it is true that the rate of growth of poverty has probably declined in the last few years, if only because of the trickle down effect of high GDP growth rates. That is to say that while absolute numbers and levels of poverty may still be increasing, they are increasing at a lower rate than earlier. But we shall require growth rates in excess of 8% a year for many years to make any significant dent in absolute levels of poverty. In the same context, however, it must also be admitted that higher GDP growth rates are concomitant with increasing inequality under capitalism unless there is a consciously built up and sustained public or social welfare sector for the have-nots with free or subsidized health, education and unemployment benefits. Regrettably, this was not on top of the mind of the budget-makers who have stuck lamely to the usual incremental-statistical approach to deeply-anguished human issues.
This is what the big deal boils down to: government employees, past and present, will get “dearness” or “conveyance” allowances of less than Rs 100 per month. Public sector teachers, who currently get a pittance, will get Rs 500-Rs 750 more every month. Middle class employees and senior citizens will get some tax relief. The minimum wage is up from Rs 3000 to Rs 4000 per month. And so on. But all this is less than the rate at which inflation is eating into their savings and income! We understand that public sector hospitals will henceforth provide free MRI, angioplasty and dialysis to all patients. This is good news. But have the number of such hospital facilities and staff manning them been quadrupled at least as required by a population of 150 million? No.
The government has done well to rationalize the trade policy a bit. Duties on input items have been reduced; cement price has been fixed; subsidies on certain food items via utility stores have been retained; commercial property transactions will be federally taxed; low rent tax has been fixed; cigarette duties increased, incentives given for the dairy and poultry industry, and so on. But the real tussle is over the development budget versus the defense budget.
The development budget is genuinely unprecedented. It was Rs 272 bn last year and is Rs 435 billion this year. Out of this, Rs 180 bn is for hydropower projects, Rs 50 bn is for earthquake reconstruction and Rs 132 bn for infrastructure. The provinces will get about Rs 50 bn for various jobs. But health and population welfare will get less than Rs 15 bn! Considering that nearly 40% of yearly development funds are not spent because of institutional capacity building constraints, the increase may be largely ceremonial. At the end of the year, these “lapsed” funds are conveniently gobbled up by “unexpected” defense expenditure requirements. This brings us to the most critical element of the budget again this year – defense expenditures.
Generally speaking, there is an average increase of about 10%-15% every year in the budget for defense. But at the end of the fiscal year, this actually comes out to have been closer to 20%. The defense increment is always at the expense of the development budget. The defense budget this year is Rs 250 bn, 12 percent more than the Rs 223.5 billion allocated for 2005-06. But actually the government spent Rs 241.1 billion last year. By that reckoning, it is safe to estimate that the actual defense spending will be about Rs 275-Rs 300 bn this year. No other sector gets such royal treatment. In fact we have been advised to expect much the same pattern for the next 15 years because the brave defenders of the soil are modernizing and upgrading their equipment by buying new war planes, guided missiles, AWACS, frigates, etc. If we add to this an amount of approximately Rs 50 bn that is taken out of civil expenditures for military pensions every year, the true defense burden will be about Rs 350 bn this year, almost the same as the development budget that will actually get spent. Howwzat?
The Pakistan military is the biggest land owner and industrialist in the country. It runs an excellent welfare state within an abysmal non-welfare state in Pakistan. It gobbles up the largest chunk of civilian funds in the budget. On top of that it has monopolized political power in the country Is this fair? We are poor and out of power because the military is rich and in power. Until the situation is overhauled, it is futile to talk of a “poor-man’s budget” or “welfare state”.
(June 16-22, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 17 – Editorial)
Grateful for small mercies
The federal education minister, Lt-Gen (retd) Javed Ashraf Qazi, is a former DG of the ISI who is known for speaking bluntly. He has often fallen foul of the mullahs because of his relatively moderate and enlightened views. But a recent statement from him deserves to be highlighted because of its profound and welcome implications.
Speaking at a two-day conference on Pakistani culture in Islamabad last week, General Qazi talked about how the government’s education policy sought to bring harmony in society as well as face up to the emerging challenge in science and technology. He explained why “Islamic Studies” or religious studies would be taught from class 3 and not from class 1. In so arguing he seemed to fall half way between the ignorant mullahs and the opportunist prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, on the one hand, who wanted the subject taught from class 1, and the respected religious scholar Dr Javed Ghamidi on the other, who thinks that class 5 is a more appropriate starting point.
But more significantly, Gen Qazi said that in the new curriculum the subjects of Geography and History would reflect Pakistani culture. He noted that “Pakistan had a rich culture of an old civilization” and stressed that “our culture did not begin from the creation of Pakistan or with the arrival of Muhammad bin Qasim in the subcontinent; rather that it began from the Indus Valley civilization, going on to Taxila and the Ashoka period.” He was sorry that most students were ignorant about the “real history” of the country. “The Pakistani nation has an ancient history dating back thousands of years BC, such as the Gandhara civilization, Mohenjodaro and Harrapa, of which we are proud”. Gen Qazi added that “every Muslim country had a different culture…Pakistanis are free to practice their own religion… there is no significant difference between the cultures of the Hindus and Muslims because the followers of both the religions belonged to the same region… culture is part of history because it is the creative result of men’s actions. It involves the manners, tools and literary production of society…”
This is the boldest and most lucid statement on the relationship between religion, national identity and culture ever posited by a Pakistan government functionary. Since independence and the fostering of the rigid two-nation theory, generations of Pakistanis have been falsely taught that the idea of Pakistan began with the advent of Islam in the subcontinent through Mohammad bin Qasim, and that Islamic religion remains the sole determinant of Pakistani culture. In this bigoted and suffocating environment we have lost all contact with our ancient history and geography and been reduced to a singular, violent identity in an increasingly multiple-identity, complex world. Now Gen Qazi is saying something profoundly different and contemporary. Why is that?
Gen Qazi pointed out that some text was being deleted from the current crop of religion textbooks because it was not conducive to harmony in society. He stressed that Islam teaches tolerance and brotherhood. “We have to prepare the new generation according to the teachings of Islam and boost Pakistan’s image in the world as a moderate country .” If this is the case, two questions arise. One, is the statement mostly rhetorical, aimed merely at putting a gloss on the image of Pakistan, at re-branding Pakistan as a moderately enlightened state instead of a bigoted and violent Islamic state that it is perceived to be by its international detractors? Two, is it a manifestation of the Musharraf regime’s earnest desire to actually change the ground realities to meet the global challenge of modernity (science and technology) that Gen Qazi alluded to in his speech?
The fact that the Musharraf regime has hired a team of earnest “strategic” thinkers to manage the international media and construct a new brand image for Pakistan suggests that it is mostly about changing foreign perceptions rather than radically altering domestic ground realities. Certainly, the fact that nothing significant has been done inside Pakistan to roll back the political and cultural manifestations of violent political Islam that so hurt Pakistan’s image – like the Hudood laws – attests to the political opportunism of the besieged Musharraf regime in Pakistan. But the consistent personal stance of Generals Musharraf and Qazi to liberalise the cultural environment in the country and reduce intellectual suffocation at the hands of the mullahs testifies to their desire for mainstreaming and modernising Pakistan. Starting with the reform of education policy is the right way to go about de-ideologising the singular identity of Pakistan.
Dr Ghamidi has argued that children need to be taught ethics before they are taught religion in order to instill in them a sense of humanism and civility. His argument is that religious education, without formal education from an early age, tends to produce religious and sectarian extremists. Gen Qazi seems to agree with Dr Ghamidi. But he is only prepared to go only half-way in order to thwart any negative political fallout from the prickly mullahs. Unless he backtracks on his utterances, we should be grateful for small mercies if Gen Qazi’s statement serves to show the way forward.
(June 23-29, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 18 – Editorial)
A tragic indictment
Is there a Gulag Archipelago in Pakistan? Where is our Abu Ghraib prison hidden? Has Musharraf’s Pakistan in the 2000s taken a leaf from Pinochet’s Chile of the 1970s? Or worse, faced with insurgency in Balochistan and Waziristan, are Pakistan’s security agencies following in the blood drenched footsteps of India’s security apparatus in Kashmir where 12,000 have simply “disappeared” without a trace in the last fifteen years?
Until now scores of allegedly Al-Qaeda and Taliban have been scooped up from nooks and crannies in Pakistan and dumped at Guantanamo Bay without due process of extradition. Many of them, it turns out, were not the ugly terrorists they were painted out to be. Now we have incontestable evidence that the intelligence agencies are “picking up” allegedly “anti-national” political activists and even journalists and making them “disappear” without a trace. Human rights organizations and media organizations have agitated the startling facts, the latest being the cold-blooded murder of Hayatullah Khan in Waziristan, but their protests have fallen on deaf ears.
Mr Khan’s case is a disturbing reminder of the volatile situation of the “free” press in Musharraf’s Pakistan. He was kidnapped last December by five gunmen who ran his car off the road in North Waziristan, near the Afghan border, while his younger brother, Haseenullah, looked on helpless. It was common belief that some intelligence agency had grabbed him to teach him a lesson for giving the lie to the government’s claim that the blast that killed the Egyptian Al Qaeda militant Hamza Rabia in Miranshah on December 1 last year was caused by home made explosives rather than a missile fired from an American drone. Indeed, the family says he told them, shortly before his kidnapping, that he was receiving threats from “security” agencies for reporting the facts on the ground. His family says that local government officials told them that Mr Khan would be released if they didn’t stir up any further trouble. In the event, his corpse was dumped last Friday near the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan Agency. His handcuffed body bore signs of a long and painful incarceration. The bullet wound in the back of his head shot from a distance of one foot shows he was executed.
This terrifying new trend of disappearances at the hands of the ‘law enforcement agencies’ (sic) “has added a new dimension to human rights abuses in the country,” says the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). On April 11, a member of the NGO Shehri, Nisar Baloch, disappeared after being summoned to Karachi’s Pak Colony police station. On April 4, Bahrain-based Balochi Television MD Muneer Mengal disappeared from Jinnah Airport and has not been seen since. Dr Naqibullah Durrani, an Afghan national and an employee of the Afghan Dutch Community, came to Pakistan in February to attend a workshop at Sindh Agriculture University, Tando Jam. He disappeared on March 13. Prominent Baloch poet and writer Dr Haneef Shareef has been missing since last November after he was picked up by an intelligence agency in Turbat on November 18. Ali Asghar Bangalzai disappeared in 2001 and Hafiz Saeed Bangalzi in 2003. The families of brothers Ibrahim and Ghulam Saleh, Noor Mohammad Marri, Mir Ahmad Marri and Jamand Khan Marri – all below 18 say their kin were hauled up by the intelligence agencies. Seven BLO activists, including its chairman Dr Imdad Baloch, and President Dr Allah Nazir, were taken from a Karachi flat, interrogated and tortured last year. And so the dismal facts pour in every day; according to some reports over 100 people have disappeared thus far. The police and judiciary say they are helpless and habeas corpus writs are futile in the face of military law.
And not all such unfortunate souls are Baloch. The story of Safdar Sarki, a Sindhi-American who once belonged to the Jeay Sindh movement and returned to Pakistan from America a year ago, is equally disturbing. Last February he disappeared from Karachi. His driver, Munir Sarki, told the press and the Sindh High Court that he saw Safdar blind-folded, handcuffed and beaten up in his apartment in Gulshan-e-Iqbal and then whisked away by “agency men”. Amnesty International, HRCP and other human rights organizations have protested and demanded his release, but in vain.
Until some years ago, the intelligence agencies were given to anonymously calling and abusing troublesome journalists. Then a couple of reporters had their cars inexplicably gutted in front of their homes. A few were roughed up in deserted spots and dumped after dire warnings to behave or else. But now things are getting bloodier. It is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that this policy of illegal detention and torture is not officially sanctioned at the highest level of the very national security establishment in Islamabad that constantly decries the same practice by Delhi’s national security establishment in Kashmir. Since repression, disappearance and torture are the usual handiworks of dictators, autocrats and fascists, are we to conclude that the Musharraf regime is increasingly stripping the façade of democracy and press liberalism that has generated much goodwill for it at home and abroad? If so, it is a tragic indictment of a regime which kicked off with so much goodwill in 1999.
Our international friends must join hands with us in condemning and sanctioning the government of Pakistan.
(June 30 – July 06, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 19 – Editorial)
Sab theek nahin hai
The Musharraf regime is leaking like a sieve. Confronted with damaging press reports every day, departments and ministries are increasingly putting out feeble “denials” to redeem themselves or long-winded “clarifications” to salvage the situation. Here are a few recent examples.
A significant group of disgruntled MNAs from the ruling party has protested to the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, about being sidelined from the budget-making exercise. This is actually a pretext to protest their exclusion from the power-privilege-decision-making loop in Islamabad. Mr Aziz has therefore marshaled the services of the PMLQ president, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, to quell an insipient revolt. The good Chaudhry has pointed the finger at the dashing commerce minister, Humayun Akhtar Khan, suggesting that he may have indirectly instigated a “conspiracy” against Mr Aziz.
Of course, it is no secret that Mr Khan has been positioning for clout since he missed the boat for PM-ship after Mr Zafarullah Jamali was sacked. He was President Pervez Musharraf’s personal preferred choice at the time because of his military antecedents. But the dogged Chaudhries prevailed upon the President to bestow his favours on Mr Aziz for two simple reasons: the suave New York banker didn’t have a political constituency in Pakistan and would hold office at their pleasure; the ambitious Mr Khan was a potential political challenger not just for the leadership of the Punjab but also for the PMLQ. Thus one may reckon that Ms Kashmala Tariq’s recent spat with Ms Sherry Rehman (whose husband has allegedly obtained a banking license courtesy Mr Aziz – a trumped up charge) has less to do with the political war between the PMLQ and PPP or the discreet charm of the two ladies and more to do with undermining Mr Aziz.
Even more interesting is the news that the PMLQ’s Ishaq Khaqwani, who co-authored the first letter along with the irrepressible Mr MP Bhandara, has been nipped in the bud by Chaudhry Shujaat before he could send a letter to Mr Aziz signed by many MNAs recommending that Mr Aziz offer himself as a candidate for the post of the UN secretary-general after Mr Kofi Anan’s departure. Until Mr Khaqwani’s “googly” was delivered, the government of Pakistan was happy to live with drawing room gossip that Mr Aziz might be catapulted to the UN as a foil to India’s Shashi Tharoor. But as soon as Mr Khaqwani presented such an idea – not because he sincerely thinks Mr Aziz is the right man for the job and will enhance Pakistan’s image abroad but because he is among many MNAs who are unhappy with the monopolistic hold of the Chaudhries over the levers of power and patronage and want to see Mr Aziz out of the PM house as a first step in improving their bargaining position vis a vis the Punjab set-up – the “news” was “leaked” (unconfirmed but not denied) that Ms Maleeha Lodhi, our alert High Commissioner in the UK, is Pakistan’s answer to India’s suave Mr Tharoor. Doubtless, this late “news” is meant to deflect attention from Mr Khaqwani’s attempt to despatch Mr Aziz to New York for good. (The government should defend Ms Lodhi’s honour now by formally announcing her candidature for the UN so that her status is raised accordingly).
The government is also besieged by the shenanigans of its ministers and functionaries. For starters, the former chairman of the Federal Public Service Commission, General Jamshed Gulzar Kayani, has petitioned the Supreme Court complaining that President Musharraf uprooted him from his job because he didn’t accept the PM’s “sifarish”. The PM himself is the scornful object of leaks by the former chairman of the SECP, Tariq Hasan, who says he was obstructed in his work by the head of government. Much the same stink emanates from the shunting of the chief economist of Pakistan, Pervez Tahir, for not agreeing with the PM’s optimism on poverty alleviation. Meanwhile, the federal law minister, Wasi Zafar, who is notorious for brawling, is scurrying hither and thither after misusing official funds and unfairly victimizing his secretary, an upright young woman, for exposing his misdemeanours. Then there is the Auditor-General’s voluminous report to the Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly. It is replete with cases of embezzlements, omissions and commissions by government functionaries since 1999. The NA’s record also shows that rules of transparency and tendering have been blithely flouted in awarding billions in government contracts to a clutch of unaccountable army “welfare” institutions. Indeed, despite the fact that the proceedings of only five out of 35 parliamentary committees are open to the media, there is so much anti-government sentiment in the air that the NA Speaker has been nudged by you-know-who to stop the press from reporting these findings. Now we learn that expenditures on various ongoing or proposed “development projects” in Balochistan have soared because of delays and disruptions caused by a deteriorating security environment in the area. This is strange in view of the government’s oft-repeated boast of “sab theek hai”.
In fact, sab theek nahin hai . But the answer doesn’t lie in a clampdown on the media. It lies in a greater sense of merit, accountability and fair play in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
(July 7-13, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 20 – Editorial)
Musharraf holds the cards
The picture on the front page was taken in London some days ago. Nawaz Sharif is resplendent in sky blue. He is smiling benevolently and patting Asifa Zardari, who is in blushing pink, on the cheek, while Mama Benazir Bhutto, in rose red, looks on benignly. Sherry Rehman’s hands are folded demurely in front and Bashir Riaz, Naveed Chaudry and Amin Fahim look smug as smug can be. The great ‘democrats’ have just signed a pact to end the ‘tyrannical’ regime of General Pervez Musharraf back home and live happily ever after. Someone should frame this picture for posterity. There may be occasion to reflect on it in the future when the knives are out once again.
Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have much in common. Ms Bhutto is the daughter of a Sindhi vadera who was plucked out of obscurity by Field Marshal Ayub Khan and made Foreign Minister of Pakistan and who then went on to become prime minister over the political carcasses of Generals Ayub and Yayha. But he fell foul of a third army chief (General Zia ul Haq) when he overarched into Bonapartism. His brave daughter inherited his strengths and weaknesses and has been on the other side of the generals ever since. Mr Sharif is the son of a Punjabi businessman who was nurtured in the backwaters of the old city of Lahore. General Gilani, the Punjab military governor, gifted the old man’s son Nawaz to General Zia ul Haq. But in his quest for Bonapartism, Nawaz stepped on the toes of General Asif Nawaz, sulked in front of General Waheed Kakar and sacked General Jehangir Karamat. He was eventually dispatched by his handpicked army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, on the eve of crowning himself Amir ul Momineen. In other words, both Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif must thank Pakistan Army generals for their good fortune in ruling Pakistan and their bad politics in being exiled from it.
But their self-inflicted tragedy is nothing compared to the love-hate relationship of the Jamaat i Islami and Jamiat I Ulema i Pakistan with the generals of the Pakistan Army. The JI got the rough end of the stick from General Azam Khan in the 1950s and General Ayub Khan in the 1960s. But General Zia ul Haq more than made up for this in the 1980s. Since then, every army chief has mollycoddled the JI and JUI for doing the strategic bidding of GHQ, whether in Afghanistan or in Kashmir. Now the Military-Mullah Alliance is under strain because General Musharraf seems to be running with the hare (MMA) and hunting with the hound (USA). Worse, the JI’s Qazi Hussain Ahmad is fuming against General Musharraf for putting a lid on the jihad in Kashmir while Maulana Fazlur Rehman admires him for protecting the Taliban. The Qazi is out of General Musharraf’s tent fulminating against the dictator’s treachery while the Maulana is in the same tent enjoying the dictator’s largesse (Leader of the Opposition in parliament, coveted membership of the National Security Council and chiefdom the NWFP and Balochistan governments). In short, the former is hoping to win something and the latter is expecting to lose everything from the exit of General Musharraf.
But if this is confusing, consider the state of the King’s Party. There is a Forward Bloc comprising the supporters of Mr Farooq Leghari and an Outside Block comprising turncoats from the People Party. Then there is the power struggle between the Chaudhries of Gujrat and the Khans and Makhdums of Lahore and Rahim Yar Khan respectively. The icing on the cake is provided by the contradictions in General Musharraf’s situation.
He is perceived as an American puppet in a widely anti-American country. But America and the international media are getting increasingly angry with him for not leashing the Taliban and ending US losses in Afghanistan. He is perceived as a peacemaker with India in a widely anti-India country. But India is making him look foolish by not reciprocating his flexibility. He talks of democracy and free and fair multi-party elections next year. But he refuses to doff his uniform, he is afraid of getting legitimacy from a new parliament after elections and he has all but outlawed the two mainstream parties and exiled their moderate and still-popular leaders. He insists that Pakistan is shining because of his economic policies but admits that many people in the urban areas are hurting because of them and he has become unpopular over time. Worse, Pakistan’s tribal periphery is bristling with a quarter of the Pakistan army and a great new game replete with foreign intervention, human assets and technical liabilities is underway with unforeseen consequences.
There is a fork in the road ahead. General Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain can continue on the well trodden path of political confrontation and mutually assured destruction which is bad for Pakistan. Or they can take the road less traveled and try to arrive at a grand national consensus that is good for Pakistan. What will it be? General Musharraf holds the cards.
(July 14-20, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 21 – Editorial)
Let the record speak for itself
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has been buffeted by four financial storms which have left much political debris in their wake. The first was the privatization of PTCL last year in which the foreign Arab buyer refused to cough up and had to be cajoled into a less profitable compromise for Pakistan. The second was the sugar crisis in which Mr Aziz was compelled to rein in NAB and bail out leading members of the ruling PMLQ who are core operators of the sugar cartel that was perceived to be fleecing the public. The third was the stock market crash of last year due to the speculative manipulations of a handful of powerful stock brokers. This is still hanging fire. The last is the privatization of the Pakistan Steel Mills which was reversed by the Supreme Court of Pakistan with adverse remarks against the government. In all these cases, the public has been swamped with perceptions of impropriety at the highest level.
A dispassionate analysis, however, suggests that Mr Aziz and his official teamsters may be guilty of many things, including mismanagement, political naivety and even unwarranted smugness about flogging “Shining Pakistan”, but they are not personally corrupt and they have not wittingly undermined the national interest.
The PTCL privatization was dubiously designed to fetch the most money for Pakistan. But the foreign buyer saw through it and reneged. In the event, President Musharraf had to personally bend the rules and lure the buyer back. If the foreign buyer had done his original homework, he wouldn’t have overbid. Equally, if the Privatisation Commission had been more up-front, it wouldn’t have had to eat humble pie later.
The sugar crisis, too, was triggered by an incompetent buyer (government) and a greedy seller (sugar industrialists). The sugar lords pushed up the price to maximize windfall profits like all true capitalists. But the sluggish government didn’t pre-empt the market by shoring up stocks and regulating supply. High world sugar prices didn’t help matters. The solution was not to enable NAB to nab everyone and his aunt in the sugar industry and become an economic regulator by force, thereby precipitating a greater crisis in politics and business, but to try and diffuse the crisis by supplying sugar to the people at lower prices. The government can be faulted for not anticipating the shortage and subsidizing the public. But the charge of corruption or kickbacks or financial gain laid at the door of Mr Aziz is specious.
The issue of the stock market crash has resurfaced with a bang. Charges are being traded between the former head of the SECP, Dr Tariq Hasan, and the finance advisor, Dr Salman Shah who speaks on behalf of the prime minister. Who is responsible for triggering the crash and benefiting from it? In essence the issue boils down to this: Dr Hasan and his SECP advisors held the top brokers of the country and certain prevailing stock market finance practices responsible for the debacle. He proposed some immediate steps to reform the market and rap the leading brokers. But the finance ministry ordered an inquiry and advised the SECP to go slow on the proposed reforms in order not to alienate the key players and shake up the market further. Its main concern was to make sure that the image of the Pakistan stock market as the “most shining and best stock market in the world” should not be sullied by any targeted inquiry because that would have had an adverse impact on business confidence and capital flows into the country. But if the SECP was unduly preaching a radical solution, the finance ministry succumbed to rank opportunism by insisting on the status quo. Bad judgment, personal ambition, arrogance of power, greed, lack of accountability, can all be laid at the door of one or the other actor. But neither Mr Aziz nor Dr Shah can be accused of financial gain or misappropriation in this matter. Like Dr Hasan, they too believed they were doing the right thing for government and country.
Much the same can be said of the Steel Mills case. Mr Aziz didn’t sanction the sale of the Steel Mills for a song because of any bad intent. The government simply thought it couldn’t get a better deal under the general circumstances of the country and the particular ones of the Steel Mills that has been bleeding the exchequer from Day-One. Nor will the Supreme Court decision necessarily fetch a better deal in the end. But even if it does, the court’s intervention could have a negative impact on the privatization process itself as far as foreign buyers are concerned. The government’s error lies in the hasty and less-than-transparent ways in which it has pursued and propagated the case.
Unfortunately, these “scandals” have marred the credibility and performance of the Aziz government. Islamabad is guilty of protecting infamous political friends and unscrupulous business cronies. It has swept uncomfortable truths under the carpet in its misplaced quest to “re-brand Pakistan”, come hell or high water, instead of running an efficient and accountable team and letting the record speak for itself.
(July 21-27, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 22 – Editorial)
Assets & liabilities
India says that Pakistani jihadis have a hand in the Mumbai bombings. But it hasn’t provided proof. Similarly, the US and Afghanistan say Pakistan is responsible for the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan. But they haven’t provided proof. Pakistan denies these charges but counters that India, Afghanistan and “others” have a role in creating and supporting the Baloch insurgency. But it too hasn’t offered any proof. What’s going on?
After the jihadi attacks on parliament buildings in Srinagar and Delhi in late 2001, India reacted and rushed its army to the LoC to intimidate Pakistan. This compelled General Musharraf to pledge in January 2002 that Pakistan would not be used as a base for exporting terrorism. But the jihadi attacks continued in Kashmir in the expectation that an internationalisation of the Kashmir dispute would pressure India to resolve it. Under the circumstances, however, India’s reaction was two fold: it pulled the army from the border and initiated talks with Pakistan in 2003; but it also opened a counter-front against Pakistan by encouraging the disgruntled Baloch nationalists to launch an insurgency. Its logic was that if Pakistan wanted to talk directly and fight by proxy for maximum leverage, then India would pay in the same coin. India was able to tap the resentful Baloch nationalists because General Musharraf’s rigged pro-mullah 2002 elections had sidelined them in their own home province.
In post 9/11 Afghanistan, the same dialectic was at work. The US-Karzai regime was dominated by the Uzbek-Tajik Northern Alliance (NA) that was partial to India and hostile to Pakistan for historical reasons. General Musharraf urged Mr Karzai to ditch the NA, bring in pro-Pakistan Pakhtun elements and align with Islamabad. But this didn’t happen, partly because of Mr Karzai’s political opportunism and partly because of General Musharraf’s refusal to help Mr Karzai until India had been eliminated from the reckoning. In the event, when India’s footprint in Afghanistan grew large, General Musharraf edged closer to the Taliban. If Mr Karzai claims he didn’t partake of India’s developing secular “assets” in Balochistan, he at least turned a blind eye to them. Similarly, if General Musharraf claims he didn’t nurture the Islamic Taliban in Pakistan’s borderlands, he turned a blind eye to their revival. So there was a full fledged insurgency in Balochistan and a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. None of the players talks of developing these “assets” because each is guilty of the same offence.
The problem, however, is that such “assets” tend to acquire a life of their own which inevitably leads to serious problems for their creators without fulfilling the original aims of the project. In such cases, the weaker and more dependent side is squeezed in the end. In this case, the scales are tilted against General Musharrf’s Pakistan because the sole superpower is on the side of India and Karzai’s Afghanistan. This is because the US is building a long term global-strategic relationship with India against China while merely trying to maintain a short term regional-tactical one with Pakistan. Thus, instead of Pakistan benefiting from an internationalization of the Kashmir dispute through jihadi attacks, it has suffered by being branded universally as a hotbed of terrorism. Similarly, instead of improving its bargaining position vis a vis Kabul owing to the Taliban card, Pakistan and General Musharraf have now got to contend with the dangerous and destabilizing consequences of the birth of Talibanism internally as well as a potential deterioration in its external relationship with the US.
The developing “squeeze” on Pakistan is manifest in other ways. Both the jihadis and Taliban have become so autonomous that they are now obstructing Pakistan’s path of dispute settlement with India and Afghanistan. Domestically, too, they have obliged General Musharraf to ally with the mullahs rather than the liberal parties for political survival.
Fortunately, though, there are signs that General Musharraf is becoming aware of the pitfalls of this strategy and may take steps to extricate himself and Pakistan from this mess. Unprecedentedly, over 200 Taliban were rounded up in Quetta last week. Pakistan has also provided American and British troops logistical support to combat the Taliban in Afghanistan. In exchange, the UK has banned the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and the American ambassador to Islamabad has defended General Musharraf and criticized President Karzai. Significantly, Islamabad has denounced the perpetrators of the Mumbai blasts and urged India to keep the peace process on track. Incredibly, too, General Musharraf is finally moving to amend the Hudood laws and recently said that he wanted to make alliances with “progressive forces” in the country, a possible attempt to develop a broader policy consensus at home. But it should be noted that the UK and UAE have still not extradited the BLA leaders to Pakistan, and Washington is insisting on full democracy and civilian control over the military in Pakistan.
So time is short and options are fleeting. The jihadi and Taliban “assets” have spawned more powerful anti-Pakistan and anti-Musharraf “liabilities” at home and abroad. If these are not dismantled swiftly and decisively, General Musharraf and Pakistan will plunge into the eye of a storm.
(July 28-August 03, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 23 – Editorial)
Stoking the fires of terrorism
Israel has over 10,000 Palestinian prisoners whose freedom is a key Hizbollah-Hamas goal. In the past, as in 2004, it swapped prisoners: one Israeli for over 400 Palestinians. Why then did Israel now decide not to exchange prisoners but to try and decimate Hizbollah, brutalize Lebanon and kill thousands of civilians in retaliation against the kidnapping of three Israelis soldiers by Hizbollah and Hamas?
Condoleeza Rice has provided an answer. The US prohibited the EU, UN Security Council and G8 from affecting an immediate cease-fire so that its pre-planned mission of “redrawing the map of a new Middle-East” could be accomplished by Israel. The US didn’t stop Israel from unleashing death and destruction because it wanted it to hammer a spike in the heart of the Iran-Syria-Hizbollah-Hamas axis. This axis poses the greatest threat to US and Israeli interests because it has successfully cut across sectarian Islam, won the Muslim mosque, galvanized the Arab street and isolated pro-US puppet-dictators in the Muslim world. In the bargain, the Israeli army is also seeking to settle scores with Hizbollah which ended Israel’s 22 year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000 and thereby proved its mettle to Arabs and Palestinians alike. Meanwhile, the neo-con dominated Bush administration is desperate for a “success” story after debilitating failures in Afghanistan and Iraq and a frustrating stand-off with defiant Iran over the nuclear issue. Unfortunately, too, the US and Israel were emboldened by the quiescence of Sunni Arab oil producers like Saudi Arabia and the Sheikhdoms of the Gulf who are afraid of rising Shi’ism under the umbrella of Iran.
But this US-Israeli strategy is bound to fail in the short term and its long-term blowback could fuel greater violence on the world stage.
The US went into Afghanistan ostensibly to smash the Taliban and build a stable nation-state. Instead, it has reaped a drug-infested anarchy, revived Talibanism and dragged NATO into the quagmire. The US went into Iraq to dethrone Saddam Hussain and build secular democracy. Instead, it has so far lost 2,567 American lives, spent US$2,000 billion (US$2 trillion) and unleashed a civil war. The beneficiary of both failures is Al Qaeda which is not a terrorist territorial army but a terrorizing global sentiment. Similarly, this new adventure will surely cost America strategically. Pro-American dictators in the Muslim world are quaking in their shoes at the wave of radical Islamic anti-Americanism that is threatening to swamp them. Israel can also forget about better relations with some of them, like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to win a degree of diplomatic legitimacy for itself.
More critically, despite the ongoing destruction of Lebanon, Israel will not be able to eliminate Hezbollah and Hamas by force just as it has not been able to uproot Al Qaeda by force. Hamas is a democratically-inspired, popular and hardline successor to the PLO because Israel refused to strike a just peace with the PLO and weakened it in the eyes of the Palestinians. Similarly, Hezbollah has now come to represent the popular aspirations of not just the Shias of Lebanon and Iran but also of non-Shia Lebanese for liberating parts of Lebanon from Israeli occupation and of the Sunni Hamas, other non-Muslim Palestinians and all sects of Islamic opinion in the world. It is not just a military or guerilla organisation that can be defeated by a superior military force. It is a complex phenomenon that has taken root in Lebanon’s security, social services and democratic political system nationally and locally. Thanks to Al Jazeera and Al-Manar, this popular springboard is reinforced every day by graphic images of Palestinian and Muslim martyrdom.
On one front President Bush wants to browbeat Shia Iran with Israeli “shock and awe” tactics. On the other front, he wants to pressurize Syria (which is the conduit for Iranian weapons to Lebanon and Hezbollah) through the good offices of Washington’s core-group allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to help install an international force in south Lebanon that will assist the secular Lebanese army to disarm the Shia Hezbollah after Israel has been forced into a cease-fire. In other words, Dr Rice’s task is to get the unpopular pro-American Sunni Arab dictatorships to become a buffer between Shia Hezbollah and the secular Lebanese government, Israel and the US.
The developing scenario reflects two distinct trends. On the one hand, there is a surge of radical political Islamism which is global and which transcends Shia-Sunni sectarianism in the face of neo-con imperialism. This fits into the clash of civilization thesis. On the other hand, the neo-cons will try to deepen divisions in the Arab and Muslim world by supporting unpopular pro-West dictatorships and nurturing sectarianism, a recipe for clashes within the Islamic civilization. The cynical plan for the division of Iraq and Afghanistan along sectarian or ethnic lines followed by an attempt to redraw a new Middle-East is cast in such a mould. It won’t succeed because injustice cannot endure. But it could stoke the fires of anarchy and terrorism if Israel and the US remain arrogant, unjust and unaccountable.
(August 4-10, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 24 – Editorial)
Playing hardball in Sindh
The MQM under Altaf Hussain is a tough nut to crack, as General Pervez Musharraf must have realized these past few days. But he should have known better. The MQM was spawned by the military’s agencies in 1979 to protect General Zia ul Haq’s flanks from the PPP. But like all the other proxies created by the military (Jihadis in the 1980s and Taliban in the 1990s) the MQM has also assumed an autonomous life and exclusive interests of its own. This was made clear when MQM terror laid Karachi low from 1990-92 and compelled Nawaz Sharif to unleash the army against it. Benazir Bhutto faced much the same sort of blackmailing terror in 1994 and was forced to sic General Naseerullah Babar’s Rangers on the MQM. Mr Altaf Hussain slipped out of the country in 1991 and has since been hosted by London, despite the fact that he is charged with over 50 counts of criminality, including murder and terrorism.
General Musharraf’s rank opportunism led him to mollycoddle the MQM once again in 1999 on the basis of the twisted logic that my enemy’s (Nawaz and Benazir) enemy (Altaf) can be my friend. Now, seven years later, after having retaken Karachi from the religious parties and entrenched itself in urban Sindh, the MQM wants a still larger chunk of the action in Sindh and Islamabad, even if it means encroaching into the electoral and administrative domain of General Musharraf’s mainstay PMLQ. It is significant that the MQM’s most recent spat with General Musharraf over the spoils of power comes at a particularly vulnerable time when he is facing the threat of a street movement by the MMA and a vote of no-confidence in parliament by the ARD as a prelude to a noisy election next year. Is this brinksmanship or what?
Mr Hussain’s provocative moves are doubtless based on the following calculations: (1) With Karachi and urban Sindh in its pocket, the MQM must consolidate its position while trying to make gains in the next elections in rural Sindh, Islamabad and possibly also in Punjab. (2) This is the time to extract meaningful concessions from General Musharraf in all these areas because he seems vulnerable for the first time since 1999 on both the domestic and foreign front. (3) This is all the more necessary since current talk of some sort of deal between the PPP and General Musharraf closer to the elections cannot be discounted. Such a ‘deal’, if it happens, would inevitably enable the PPP, which even now has the largest number of seats in the Sindh provincial assembly, to hog the Sindh government and pit it against its old politico-ethnic rival MQM, quite apart from reducing the MQM’s “quota” of federal ministries in the post-2007 election government.
On the other hand, the PMLQ in Sindh led by the chief minister, Arbab Rahim, sees matters differently. Mr Rahim wants to strengthen his party’s roots by buttering up his supporters and spreading the spoils of power to potential turncoats from the PPP in the run-up to the next elections. Should he fail, the PPP could rout the PMLQ in the next elections, especially if General Musharraf is compelled to give it a level playing field in exchange for support in the centre over the issue of his presidency and uniform. So for Mr Rahim and the PMLQ it is a matter of life and death. Any more concession to the MQM would eat into the Sindhi vote bank and push Sindhis into the lap of the PPP. So what will the two erstwhile partners in Sindh do?
The PMLQ would benefit if President Musharraf were to install Governor’s Rule. Although Mr Rahim would lose his job, the PMLQ would still get Islamabad’s patronage to beef itself up for the next elections. The MQM, however, would lose out by having to fend for itself against the MMA, PPP and PMLQ in the next elections, an unsettling prospect especially if it finds itself on the other side of General Musharraf. That’s why Sindhi PMLQ stalwarts have dug their heels in and are refusing to be blackmailed by the MQM any more. The only negative fallout of Governor’s Rule would be that, with nearly 18 months to go until the next elections, it would show up the fragility and lack of sustainability of General Musharraf’s political dispensation and embolden his detractors in the PMLN, MMA and PPP to redouble their efforts to destabilize and weaken him. Therefore it is not logically in the political interest of the MQM or General Musharraf or even Mr Rahim to fall back on the device of Governor’s Rule, except as a measure of angry desperation in the face of mulishness by one or other of the contestants.
Altaf Hussain is known for playing hardball. But General Musharraf is no pushover himself. Fortunately, it is just as well that nagging personal affronts rather than significant political factors seem to have muddied the waters between the MQM and PMLQ. It would be plainly stupid if they didn’t pull back from the brink and quickly get down to business as usual.
(August 11-17, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 25 – Editorial)
Bad omens for Indo-Pak detente
Is the Indo-Pak peace process in trouble? Yes, insists India. No, hopes Pakistan. Notwithstanding who’s right or wrong, the facts are complex and the outlook is depressing.
It’s true that people-to-people contacts have improved. But problems persist. Nearly 100,000 Pakistanis got visas to visit India this year. But only 10,000 Indians were allowed entry into Pakistan. Significantly, India doesn’t impose visa restrictions on Pakistani “artistes”, academics, journalists, businessmen and social activists but Pakistan is reluctant to grant similar rights to such Indians. Why is Pakistan so dogged?
Islamabad’s grouse is that India is unreasonably stalling conflict-resolution of contentious issues and thereby eroding the very spirit of the peace dialogue. India has backed off from a track-two movement to resolve Kashmir; it has put demilitarization of Siachin on hold; it is delaying a neutral-settlement on the Baghliar Dam; even an agreement on Sir Creek has been forestalled by its bureaucracy. Worse, it seems to have lost interest in the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline following its nuclear deal with Washington and military-cooperation with Israel. Why is India being so intransigent?
India’s pat answer is: Mumbai. And the Indian media is dutifully pointing the finger at Pakistan. But the fact is that the conflict-resolution process between the two began to backslide over a year ago. And no evidence of any Pakistani intelligence ‘hand’ in Mumbai has been presented. Instead, there is a chorus of official and media voices in India that is blaming Pakistan for the troubles in India’s periphery, the latest allegation in the Lok Sabha being that “Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) is recruiting disgruntled Muslim youth from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal besides Jammu and Kashmir to subvert India.” This is deadly serious business. Why should Pakistan want to hurt India when General Pervez Musharraf says he wants peaceful resolution of conflicts with India?
Indian arrogance may explain Pakistan’s frustration and even pique. But the recent expulsion of an Indian diplomat by Pakistan suggests a more profound and disturbing reason. Pakistan is angry that India is fanning the Baloch insurgency from its various diplomatic outposts in Afghanistan, Iran, the UAE and London. Pakistan also suspects that the US and UK are secretly condoning India’s hand in Balochistan. If this is correct, we need to ask why this is so and where all the players are headed in this region.
India’s new hand in Balochistan is a response to the old Pakistani hand in Kashmir. If the insurgency in Kashmir hasn’t shut down, India reasons, it is because Pakistan hasn’t disbanded the jihadis in Pakistan or stopped assistance to them in Kashmir. Similarly, the US and UK see a Pakistani hand in the revival of the Taliban who are inflicting casualties on their troops in Afghanistan. If Pakistan is not going to help them stabilize PM Hamid Karzai and Afghanistan, they reason, maybe it ought to be dissuaded from fomenting trouble by compelling it to pay a price for its misguided adventure. If this is clear, why is Pakistan refusing to disband the jihadis and not helping America fight the Taliban?
It’s partly a case of the chicken and the egg. The national security establishment argues that if Pakistan were to unilaterally disband the jihadis and abandon the insurgents in Kashmir before a satisfactory resolution on Kashmir, India would be reprieved from making any concession to Pakistan at all and Pakistan’s “investment” of sixty years will have come to nought. Much the same sort of reasoning prevails over Afghanistan policy. If Pakistan were to help get rid of the Taliban insurgents before it is formally accorded a role as a stakeholder in Kabul like India and the US, Afghanistan would succumb to domination by a non-Pakhtun, pro-India establishment inimical to Islamabad. But that too is strategically unacceptable until India and Pakistan have buried the hatchet over Kashmir and can live in a non-zero-sum environment in the region
The complexity of the issue of terrorism, insurgency and finger-pointing in the region in relation to Kashmir was recently highlighted in New Delhi by Richard Boucher, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia. He refused to join India’s media in holding Pakistan and Kashmir-based groups culpable for terrorism in Mumbai. Indeed, he categorically stated: “I don’t see the issue of Kashmir and the issue of terrorism as linked in any way. We need all to fight terrorism for a variety of reasons. But it is also good to see progress made on Kashmir. I’d like to see that as well.” But will that happen?
The prospects aren’t good at all. As the Indian state surges ahead economically and militarily and becomes increasingly obsessed with its new image as “the most dynamic American partner of the new century”, it may be less and less inclined to ‘compromise’ with Pakistan on any major issue and more insistent on stabilizing the status-quo. Equally, if General Musharraf’s hold over power diminishes and Pakistan’s relations with America become more tenuous over time, he might find it difficult to maintain his relatively soft and flexible position on India. Under the circumstances, it is possible that the hard-liners on both sides may win in the future and the people lose out in as in the past.
(August 18-24, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 26 – Editorial)
So many questions, so few answers
The London plot is thicker than the London fog. It has provoked many questions and provided few answers. The world media is being desperately manipulated by the three governments of Britain, USA and Pakistan to do their respective bidding. Where does truth begin and falsehood end?
The plot has already been captured in world headlines as “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”, as “Britain’s 9-11”, “the most severe threat since the end of the second world war.” And what do the three governments have to show for such elephantine claims?
Well, some two dozen Britons of Pakistani-descent have been rounded up in the UK and six or seven people in Pakistan, only one of whom has been named, a certain Rauf Rashid. The British government claims these terrorists were planning to blow up transatlantic airplanes “soon” with liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks. Considering that the super sleuths of Britain and Pakistan were on the trail of these terrorist masterminds for months, possibly a year, and that an attack was “imminent”, can’t they even give us evidence that any of the alleged terrorists had even bought a ticket or seat for transatlantic travel on any flight in the near future?
The Pakistani government says it played a critical role in apprehending Rashid who is supposed to be the big link between some grand planning ace, an Al Qaeda hot-shot no less than the equivalent of a #3 after Osama and Al Zawahiri, and the various executioners of the plot. We haven’t been told the name of the planner. If he is free, like OBL, what’s the big deal about not naming him and putting a reward on his mug shot? Will Rashid be handed over to the UK? The London Times says the UK will definitely seek his extradition. But the Pakistani Foreign Office spokesperson says there is no extradition treaty between the two countries. The British High Commission says it may happen in due course and a Pakistani intelligence official deflects the question. Has the UK asked Pakistan to investigate the links of the 24 arrested in the UK? No.
Meanwhile, the UK and USA governments are leaking like a sieve to their media. Allegations of Pakistani-jihadi involvement in the plot are flying thick and fast. There is talk of money transfers from the UK to Pakistan ostensibly for quake relief but “probably” to facilitate the plotters, we are told. But no evidence is cited or source named. Instead of Pakistan looking like the good guy it is being rounded up in the columns as the usual terror suspect. And what is Islamabad’s response? Incredulously enough, the line is that it is “Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan” that is the source of the plot. Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? We thought it was the Taleban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda in Waziristran! We live and learn. Apparently, the British wanted the plot to unravel allow the plotters a “dry-run on board aircraft with the liquids in their handbags before swooping down on the plotters. But President Bush weighed in and ordered Blair and Musharraf to seize the moment.
The foreign media wants to know why Hafiz Saeed, the head of the Jamaat ud Dawa, a front for the banned Lashkar i Toeba, was detained a few days before the London plot was announced if he doesn’t have any connections with the plot. A report from India says Islamabad did it to in exchange for a commitment from Delhi for a Manmohan-Musharraf meeting in New York in September and a resumption of secretary-level talks. Not so, we are informed, the decision was taken when Condi Rice visited Islamabad and complained about the Lashkar. But the government waited for some time before ordering his detention because it didn’t want to be seen as kowtowing to Washington. Then the Mumbai blasts in July forestalled the decision because Islamabad didn’t want to be seen as bending before the Indians. But after he was detained last week, American pressure on Britain and Pakistan to announce the plot put paid to Pakistani sensibilities. So what happens now? It seems Mr Saeed will successfully challenge his detention before the Lahore High Court next week and put all conspiracy theories to rest!
A little cynicism is in order. It’s strange that Bush should have leaned on Blair and Musharraf to go public with the mother of all terror plots just when his woes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon were beginning to take a toll of his popularity in the run-up to the Senate elections in a few months. Strange also that Blair should have decided to take a holiday just when Britain was threatened with a fate worse than 9/11. Strange too that the incredible investigative work done by Britain should have yielded the fruit of fear and insecurity precisely when its government is being whipped for supporting US foreign policy in Iraq. And definitely strange that the great moment should have been seized at the height of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon in which over 1000 civilians have died and there is universal belief that Israel lost the war and Hezbollah won it.
So many questions. So few answers.
(August 25-31, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 27 – Editorial)
Rights and wrongs in cricket
Darrel Hair was wrong on all counts, Inzimamul Haq was right in protesting and the ICC was wrong to charge him but should now try to be right for the sake of cricket. Here’s why.
The great British umpire, Dickie Bird, remarked after this incident: “An umpire cannot charge a player with cheating without conclusive proof or evidence”. All foreign commentators have repeated that there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that the Pakistanis tampered with the ball that was in its 57th over. Indeed, not one of the 26 Sky TV cameras or the hundreds of still cameras trained on every player’s smallest movement saw anything remotely like it. Hair did not call Inzimamul Haq for consultation, did not present any evidence to anyone, unilaterally replaced the ball with the sole approval of the England players, and blithely awarded five runs to England as a penalty against Pakistan. He was wrong on every count, especially the final one of awarding the match to England instead of allowing the Pakistanis to resume play.
If Inzimamul Haq had led his team off the field at that time or, as it happened, delayed his return after the tea interval to lodge his protest, the heavens shouldn’t have fallen on him. The game’s history is replete with spats between players and umpires, including walk-offs in protest, without the match being abandoned or the game being “awarded” by the umpire. In 1970-71, Ray Illingworth, the England captain, and Lou Rowan, the Australian umpire, got into a finger-wagging clash in Australia and Illingworth led his team off the field despite a warning from Rowan of forfeiting the match. But cooler heads prevailed, the match wasn’t awarded to Australia and Illingworth led his team back to the field. The same scenario could have been played out last week if it hadn’t been for Hair’s arrogance. In 1973, the British umpire Arthur Fagg and the West Indies captain Rohan Kanhai quarreled on the field. Fagg refused to start the third day’s play and Kanhai refused to apologise. But the match resumed without recriminations or penalties after Alec Bedser, the head honcho of English cricket, persuaded Fagg to return. In 1979-80, the West Indies had problems with umpire Fred Goodall in New Zealand and refused to play after tea. The match wasn’t forfeited and they returned to the field to play. In 1987, Pakistan’s umpire Shakoor Rana and England’s captain Mike Gatting had a flaming row on the field and Gatting angrily led his boys back to the pavilion. But discreet negotiations broke the deadlock and allowed the match to continue because Rana did not precipitate a crisis by awarding the match to Pakistan. In 1998-99, following a heated argument between Ross Emerson, the British umpire, and the Sri Lankan captain, Arjuna Ranatunga, the Lankans walked off the field in protest. But reason prevailed and the match was resumed instead of being hastily “awarded” to the other side. Most significantly, Ross Emerson was sidelined by the ICC after that.
Unlike Hair, some umpires in the eye of a storm have behaved with dignity. Frank Chester, the great British umpire, had issues with the Australians from 1948 onwards. In 1953 matters worsened during the Ashes series in England. The Australians objected to him. So he diplomatically stood down in the 1956 series citing bad health. Much the same course was adopted by Tom Brooks, an Australian umpire, who voluntarily quit on the fourth day at lunch in the Sydney Test in 1978-79 between England and Australia after giving a series of controversial decisions.
Under the circumstances, the ICC and its match referees should have played a positive role last Sunday in cooling tempers and nudging everyone back to the field. Instead, the ICC precipitated the worst crisis in cricket history by donning the garb of the prosecutor and judge after siding with Hair and trying to drag Inzimamul Haq to a “hearing” on Friday. This provoked Pakistan’s captain and coach to warn that if Pakistan were adjudged guilty without evidence and any further punishment applied, the Pakistanis might boycott the ODIs. Hair didn’t do his cause any good when he dug his heels in and told the Australian media that he was “ready for battle”. The stakes were suddenly raised when Pakistan’s President General Musharraf and the chief of the BanglaDesh Cricket Board weighed in publicly on the Pakistani cricket team’s side and the Australian and Pakistani media and players rose to defend their respective compatriots.
But money walks the talk. When the NatWest sponsors of the ODIs, contacted their lawyers on Wednesday to ascertain what damages they could legitimately impose on the ICC in the event of a cancellation of the ODIs, the ICC took the first sensible step in the entire episode. It postponed the Friday hearing on the pretext that one of its members was unwell. The next step is obvious enough: the ICC should do whatever it takes with dignity and diplomacy to keep the ODIs on track. There will be time enough for a full and impartial inquiry later against all the parties. Meanwhile, if Hair insists on being pig-headed, he should be let out to pasture in Australia, or England if he so prefers.
(September 1-7, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 28 – Editorial)
Bugti, the military and the great game
After a lifetime crowded with passion, violence, opportunism, controversy and arrogance, Akbar Bugti’s wish at the ripe old age of 80 to transcend his tribal limitations and personal rivalries and be dubbed a martyr for the cause of Baloch nationalism may well come true. How did this happen? What are its consequences?
Mr Bugti was pro-Pakistan and pro-Jinnah before the Partition. He expected his personal and tribal prospects to flourish in a democratic and federal Pakistan. But General Ayub Khan’s martial law and One-Unit scheme in the 1960s was inimical to such a setup. Resistance, incarceration, alienation and radicalization among the Baloch followed. After the disenfranchisement of the Bengalis led to war and secession, the Baloch papered over tribal rivalries and banded together to demand provincial and local rights in 1972. But Z A Bhutto’s Bonapartism sought to snuff them out. He rewarded Mr Bugti with provincial governorship for splitting with his nationalist Marri-Mengal colleagues. This was a grave error on Mr Bugti’s part. He was isolated and condemned thereafter by fellow Baloch. But he didn’t have the humility or wisdom to rebuild fences with them. So he became a loner, isolated from mainstream Baloch politics, dependent upon Islamabad for his political well being. As chief minister during Benazir Bhutto’s time, he earnestly negotiated the Bugti tribe’s contracts with Pakistan Petroleum Ltd and the federal government like a good trade union leader.
This local role was entrenched over time for two reasons. The Marris and Mengals combined to share power with Pakhtun elements in Balochistan while Mr Bugti sulked on the sidelines throughout the 1990s. Thus, as the province learnt to be flexibile regarding greater autonomy, Mr Bugti was inclined to brawl with governments in Islamabad. When Islamabad tried to cut him down to size him by propping up his local opponents, he became furious and vindictive. But a combination of new political developments in the post 1999 period made Mr Bugti’s isolated and prickly position dangerously untenable. This is what happened.
General Musharraf arrived on the scene with self-serving ideas “to rescue Pakistan from the clutches of corrupt politicians, feudal lords and tribal chieftains”. His agenda’s centre-piece was a local body system in which there was no room for traditional and relatively autonomous power-wielders. In Punjab and Sindh, this meant a scuttling of the landed and commercial support base of politicians like Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto; in the NWFP and Balochistan it meant the replacement of the big and rebellious Sardars and Nawabs by smaller tribal and middle-class elements. This strategy was seemingly clinched via rigging the 2002 elections and ousting Bhutto’s PPP from Sindh, Sharif’s PMLN from Punjab, ANP nationalists from the NWFP and the Marri-Mengal-Bugti triumvirate from Balochistan. The Military-Mullah Alliance was reinvented to strengthen the military’s domination over the country. Inevitably, however, there was resistance from the ousted players.
Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif were dependent on peaceful street protest to make their voice heard. But the masses were cynical and fatigued. However, the Baloch Sardars could recourse to the time-tested path of armed resistance by fiercely loyal tribesmen. Thus as Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif wearily inched toward a feeble Charter of Democracy, the Marris and Mengals set up the Balochistan Liberation Army and tried to nudge Mr Bugti to join forces with them. In the event, India and Afghanistan jointly sensed an opportunity to exact historical revenge from Pakistan’s military establishment by financing and training the BLA.
Mr Bugti was now impaled on the horns of a dilemma. He could swallow pride and join the BLA under the leadership of the Marris or he could fight his own battles with Islamabad. In the event, he opted to flirt with the BLA in order to extract concessions from Islamabad. But he overplayed his hand. Unlike politicians who relish long-drawn negotiations and are prepared to compromise, military commanders seek swift and outright victory on the basis of their might. So Genenal Musharraf wrapped up the Chaudhry Shujaat-Mushahid Hussain committee and closed the door on Mr Bugti. This provoked the BLA to recklessly tempt fate by attacking the IG-FC and lob shells at General Musharraf during a tribal gathering in Marri area in December 2005. The dye was cast for irrevocable military action against the BLA and Mr Bugti.
The final military action was predicated on the calculation that Balach Marri, the son of Khair Bux Marri and commander of the BLA, and Brahamdag Bugti, the heir apparent of Mr Bugti, would also be eliminated in one fell swoop, thereby decapitating all tribal resistance. The cruel irony, however, is that the main targets escaped and the frail old man who couldn’t even walk was felled by a hail of bullets and bombs from the gallant defenders of Pakistan.
History has a cruel way of making heroes and budding nationalisms need martyrs like Akbar Bugti for sustenance. His killing is significant. It should remind us of the crippling results of military dominance in Pakistan – dismemberment, violent sectarianism, Al-Qaeda and Talibanism – and warn us of the disastrous consequences for Pakistan if Balochistan is sucked into a new great game to redraw the map of the region.
(September 8-14, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 29 – Editorial)
State of the nation
“The writ of the state”, thunders General Pervez Musharraf, “shall be enforced at all costs in Balochistan where tribalism stands abolished”. Then he blithely surrenders the same dubious writ of the state to resurgent Talibanism and entrenched tribalism in Waziristan and celebrates the retreat of the state as a “historic breakthrough”.
The truth is that General Musharraf is selling pure opportunism as principled constitutionalism. The “writ” of the state refers to the “constitution” of the state – hence the term “writ petition” in legal parlance for redress of constitutional rights. In turn, the “constitution” enshrines the “socio-political consensus” of a nation by means of which the state is to be organized and run. But if the constitution of a country like Pakistan has been so military-mangled that, far from reflecting the consensus of diverse elements that are supposed to voluntarily constitute a nation, it actually provokes violent resistance by popular national stake-holders, how on earth can the state justify force to establish an un-consensual and undemocratic writ?
General Musharraf never tires of reproaching us with the observation that Indians, for example, seem so “patriotic” in their attitudes to, and defense of, their state compared to Pakistanis who always seem to be wanting on this score. But has he ever paused to reflect this is so because a democratic national consensus is enshrined and upheld in the Indian constitution whereas in Pakistan the military-mangled constitution of today bears no resemblance to the 1973 constitution which was cobbled together on the basis of a national consensus? That is why most Indians could live with the idea of forcefully establishing the “writ of the Indian state” in insurgency-wracked east Punjab in the 1980s, Kashmir in the 1990s and a couple of north-eastern Indian states to date while most Pakistanis are voicing anguished protest over military action against disgruntled elements in Balochistan.
But that isn’t all most Pakistanis think and feel about the way General Musharraf is running the state and enforcing its writ. A May 2006 public opinion survey conducted in Pakistan by the International Republican Institute, a reputable research organization of the US Republican Party of General Musharraf’s best friend, President Bush, revealed that 66% percent of all Pakistanis wanted their exiled leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif back in Pakistan to contest the next general elections. Indeed, 77% thought that Pakistan needed a strong but popular leader – General Musharraf seems ‘strong’ by virtue of his uniform but he has admitted his popularity is waning, most respondents in the survey think he shouldn’t be army chief and president at the same time, and Ms Bhutto (18%) leads the pack for prime ministership. Most interestingly, 60% want a parliamentary system instead of a presidential system, a majority believes that General Musharraf’s regime will not hold free and fair elections, and only 7% will want to vote for the mullahs and religious parties.
On each count, General Musharraf seems opposed to the will of the people. He doesn’t want the exiled leaders to return and participate in the next elections, he refuses to extricate himself from the clutches of the unpopular mullahs and embrace the popular political parties, he insists on strong presidential powers in a weak parliamentary system, he will not allow an independent election commission and caretaker government to conduct the elections, and he seems bent on retaining his uniform and also being president. Under the circumstances, talk of restoring the writ of the state is nonsense. Is that the beginning of the end of the story?
The same survey showed that a majority of Pakistanis generally approved of General Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz personally even though only 28% thought well of the PMLQ’s ability to govern. Similarly, half of all respondents wanted some role for the army in civilian government. But the outbreak of several corruption scandals in June and July after the survey steel mills, stock market, etc – has hurt Mr Aziz’s credibility. Worse, the Balochistan fiasco has damaged the political credentials of General Musharraf and the military considerably while exacerbating political tensions within the ruling alliance and emboldening the opposition to unite against the regime. So where do we go from here in restoring the elusive and diminishing “writ of the state”?
Clearly, the people have shown the way forward via the survey. The state has to sincerely enable the exiled popular political leaders to return and give them a transparent and level playing field in the next elections under a neutral caretaker government. Mr Aziz can cash in his sponsor-chips and stake a respectable claim in the PMLQ. General Musharraf can shed his uniform and become an elected president representing the military in a predominantly prime ministerial and genuinely federal system. Finally, the nation’s “new” ruling establishment will have to devise a strategy of peaceful accommodation with India and Afghanistan instead of conflict in order to secure stability within Pakistan.
If General Musharraf has the wisdom to fathom the nature of the required paradigm shift and the skill to effect it in the writ of the state, we will be well served. But if he continues to “stop-go” and “flip-flop” much longer, we will be doomed to a dead-end.
(September 15-21, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 30 – Editorial)
9/11, democracy and political survival
There hasn’t been a single Al Qaeda “terrorist” attack in the US since 9/11. But the bogeyman of “Islamic terror” is winning the war against America. Under President Bush, Americans are more bitterly divided today than at any time in their history since the civil war. Key Bush allies like Tony Blair, Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf are besieged by popular resentment and there are question marks over their futute.
The global coalition against terror is also plagued with mistrust and deep divisions – “We are all Americans”, headlined the French paper Le Monde on September 12, 2001; not long after, “French” fries and French wine were downed the drain in America. Torture, military prisons, preventive detention and human rights abuse have tarred the very citadels of democracy by dragging dirty symbols like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib into the vocabulary of global civil discourse and the Patriots Act and Homeland Security into the nightmares of international civil society. Indeed, even as President Bush waves the flag of nation-building in Afghanistan and democracy in Iraq, American forces are actually burying these ideals in the rubble of civil war, sectarianism and separatism.
“We will get Osama”, insists President Bush, while hundreds of Osamas are being born in the political minefields of Lebanon, Palestine, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Central Asia, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, giving credence to ageing warriors like Samuel Huntingdon who have been predicting a clash of civilizations since the cold war ended. The world and its people are more divided, insecure and unsafe today than they were on the eve of 9/11 because President Bush has used brute force to reinforce injustice and inequality in the world system instead of diplomacy and dialogue to uproot them.
Pakistan’s military leader, General Pervez Musharraf, has also squandered a great opportunity to decisively turn the country around in the last five years. Forget about Kashmir. India is not even ready to resolve minor disputes. Indeed, relations have so bottomed out that India is putting stiff pre-conditions on a resumption of the peace dialogue, a self-righteous stance once adopted by Pakistan as the more aggrieved party. Relations with Afghanistan are bad because each is convinced the other is making life difficult for it. Now large swathes of Pakistani territory in the tribal areas have physically been handed over to varieties of the Taliban while separatist sentiment has been wittingly provoked in Balochistan. The country is awash with religious fervour and extremism, while sectarianism and ethnicity infect the hearts and minds of Pakistanis. The military is gobbling up billions of dollars while tens of millions of Pakistanis remain below the poverty line. The base of the political system has become so narrow that even the religious parties are threatening to quit while non-state actors aligned with the military are sulking in the shadows. Pakistan’s image has hit rock bottom abroad even as millions of dollars are being wasted on “Branding Pakistan” without changing the product at all.
Under the circumstances, a genuine stock taking should have been in order in which we should have focused at home on how to restructure and stabilize the political system so that the aspirations of the people and provinces could be accommodated democratically and legitimately. Instead, we are witnessing a great farce which would be laughable if it weren’t tragic. While secret emissaries from General Musharraf are trying to rope Benazir Bhutto into their tent, key stalwarts of the King’s party are desperately clutching at the coattails of the mullahs to thwart the King’s concession to popular opinion. This is vividly demonstrated by the shenanigans of the ruling party over the so-called Women’s Protection Bill in which the Hudood Ordinances are being spruced up to impress the West while strengthening the stranglehold of the extremist and religious parties over Pakistan’s civil society. Now the Taliban have been formally given a base area in Waziristan to deepen their movement and extend it into southern NWFP and southern Afghanistan, enabling the JUI to coalesce into a formidable regional force.
Much the same sort of disingenuous dissembling is being undertaken abroad by General Musharraf when he claims that the Taliban are a bigger threat than Al-Qaeda and that the birth and growth of the Taliban and the Mujahidin are owed to America’s cold war policies in Afghanistan in the 1980s rather than to anything that Pakistan’s national security establishment may have done in the last twenty six years to extend its outreach. But the fact is that the Mujahidin were, and remain, purely Pakistani “assets”. They were “rented out” to America in the 1980s and let loose against India and Afghanistan in the 1990s. Now India wants them disbanded but we don’t have the ability or will to do so.
The casualties of 9/11 were counted among the five thousand dead in the twin towers of New York that fateful day. But five years later, over twenty times as many have perished in its aftermath. George W Bush and Tony Blair will not survive, that’s for sure, but Britain and America are bound to emerge stronger and more united because they are democracies. However, the question that haunts us is what kind of wasteland will Pakistan look like by the time our present rulers are done.
(September 22-28, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 31 – Editorial)
Emperor’s new clothes
The Women’s Protection Bill, along with the august national assembly, is in suspended animation. Everyone and his aunt is anxiously awaiting the return of the Moderately Enlightened Emperor from his “longest ever 18 day journey” in foreign climes so that he can take the reins of power again and lead us to salvation. Meanwhile the loudest whisper in the country is: he is playing a game of charades. This month’s evidence is compelling.
We are informed that a big “deal”, a “historic breakthrough”, has been clinched with a pro-Taliban tribal jirga in North Waziristan whereby the pro-Taliban elements will not create trouble in Pakistan or Afghanistan in exchange for tons in compensation, freedom for hundreds and rights for any foreigners from Arabia, Central Asia and Africa to live there. Anyone? Even Osama bin Laden? The army spokesman’s fumbling response has made world headlines. But in Kabul, the Emperor vowed to “crush” the “common Taliban enemy” which, he claimed, was even “more dangerous than Al-Qaeda”. In New York, however, the army spokesman said, “there are no Taliban in Pakistan”. Meanwhile, three ageing tribesmen have been decapitated in Waziristan by pro-Taliban elements for allegedly “spying for America” (read Pakistan army).
Back at home, the wretched Women’s Protection Bill has become a football. It has been kicked about since the Emperor unveiled Enlightened Moderation some years ago. Three National Commissions for Women chaired by high court judges in the last ten years have advocated a repeal of the Hudood Ordinances. The matter has twice been referred to the Islamic Ideology Council by the PMLQ and twice the IIC has favoured the required amendments. It was referred to originally as an anti-Hudood bill. But our God-fearing government got cold feet and rechristened it the WPB. Then someone high up suggested it might be better referred to as the Human Rights Bill, a sure shot conspiracy to send Asma Jehangir, the great HR campaigner, into an epileptic fit. Thankfully, however, by that time a draft WPB had already been approved by the PPP, MQM and ANP. But then the mullahs threatened to quit parliament and the PMLQ neo-cons went into their usual conspiratorial huddle.
Had the government really wanted to free women from the clutches of the Hudood Ordinance without further ado, it could have passed a presidential ordinance when parliament was not in session. In the last seven years, the Emperor has decreed 44 ordinances, only five of which have been approved by parliament and become bills. So what’s the big deal about passing another ordinance and extending it every quarter until a more amenable parliament can make it into a permanent bill?
Increasingly, the perception is taking root that the government is a master “double-crosser” – it has sought to crush the indigenous Baloch who are demanding their rights while befriending the “alien” Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Waziristan at the behest of the MMA. The shabby treatment meted out to Mukhtar Mai and Dr Shazia Khalid is evidence of a medieval mindset. The clinching argument is that the very JUI, whose Deobandi madrassas in the tribal and borderland areas are the original source of the Taliban and which threatened to quit parliament over the WPB last week, has been given charge of Waziristan. Certainly, the WPB fiasco has served to take the simmering tragedy of Balochistan off the front pages and reprieved the government.
The Emperor’s expertise in taking one step forward, two steps back, is now legendary. Remember the anti-blasphemy bill that was hastily shelved soon after he had vowed to repeal it? Recall the anti-honour killing sentiment that was thwarted so tactically? And now new diversions are being conjured up there is talk of a “provincial autonomy bill” to get rid of the concurrent list – to make it easy to dilute the WPB and push it through. The latest twist in the drama is a sudden decision by the Supreme Court of Pakistan to open hearings on a long shelved petition seeking the disqualification of most MMA parliamentarians on the ground that their educational qualifications do not fit the requirements of the electoral law. This is meant to signal that if they don’t play ball they could be out in the cold for a long time to come. It is also “rumoured” that the Emperor’s viziers are “talking” to Benazir Bhutto, which is a signal to all ruling coalition partners that they had better fall in line. So we may yet see some cunning maneuvers by the MMA before the passing of the WPB, though not necessarily in the form in which it can be most effective.
But the Emperor’s “bag of tricks” is emptying rapidly. The PMLQ neo-cons and the MMA mullahs are as thick as bugs in a rug. The problem is that the MMA is against him, against his American friends and against his “vision” of a modern Pakistan. The PPP is pro-America and pro-modernizing Pakistan. It could easily live and let live with him. But the PMLQ has sleepless nights thinking about this and won’t let him do a deal with the PPP. So the Emperor has become a Master Chameleon in order to survive.
(September 29 – Oct 05, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 32 – Editorial)
Why begrudge General Musharraf a couple
of million dollars?
“Pakistanis are happy with me and unhappy with the US”, declared President-General Pervez Musharraf in America last week. He told Fox TV, that he was “so popular back home that he would win elections for President ‘hands down’”. He then weighed in with National Public Radio and claimed that “the massively moderate people of Pakistan are massively in my personal support” and “will never come out on the streets against me.” Then he expanded into international relations and lectured America on its unjust and failed policies in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan which have provoked a Muslim backlash.
Who’s he kidding? Except for his American publisher, many people are pissed off with his utterances in print. In the Line of Fire is a world bestseller already because General Musharraf has taken a nasty dig at anyone who’s anyone at home and abroad and cunningly exploited his official position to beef up sales of his book.
General Musharraf writes that Richard Armitage, who was US deputy secretary of state on 9/11, “rudely” threatened to “bomb Pakistan into the Stone Age” if it didn’t comply with US demands. But Mr Armitage has denied this: “I didn’t have authority to make such a threat”. The former Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has been roused from semi-retirement by General Musharraf’s charge that “someone above the two of us with the power to overrule us” sabotaged the Agra summit in July 2001. “I told him we had both been humiliated. He just sat there, speechless”. Mr Vajpaee has retorted that there was no insult or humiliation and the summit failed because General Musharraf insisted on calling the “terrorists in Kashmir freedom fighters”. The general blithely claims the Pakistan army had the better of the Indians in the Kargil conflict in 1999. To add salt to Indian wounds, he adds the “Indians blinked and quite ignominiously agreed to a mutual withdrawal of forces” from the border in 2003. Later in the book he patronizes Manmohan Singh, the current Indian prime minister, as seeming “sincere” but being “inflexible” in resolving conflict with Pakistan because of the weight of the Indian establishment. This has stirred ultra-patriotic Indian commentators to damn the book as “chest thumping machismo and self-aggrandisement” by an author with a “sick mind”.
At home, the reaction has been even more negative. The mullahs are bristling at his “cowardice” in bending to American threats after 9/11 and admitting to taking CIA money to fund the war against terror in Pakistan. The media is indignant that he used a state-paid visit to the US to flog his book and reveal “state secrets” that could harm Pakistan. The Peoples Party is annoyed because he holds Zulfikar Ali Bhutto responsible for the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971. And Nawaz Sharif has called him a liar and a cheat.
But the general should be more worried about the disquiet on the Pakistani street following his disparaging remarks against Dr A Q Khan, the rogue scientist who remains a “hero” in the Pakistani imagination. “Dr AQ Khan was not the sole scientist in charge of the entire effort; yet he had a great talent for self-promotion and publicity…he was such a self-centered and abrasive man that he could not be a team player…he had a huge ego…he did it all for money”. Only a week ago, Dr Khan hit the news when he underwent cancer surgery in Karachi and was flooded with good wishes from Pakistanis. “He is no fall guy for anyone” writes General Musharraf in a futile effort to deflect the widespread perception that the military establishment has sacrificed Khan to protect its own involvement in the sordid saga of Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation. Last Sunday, Pakistan was swept by a wave of rumours during an unprecedented national power outage that General Musharraf had had a heart attack in America and a coup had been carried out against him. Some Pakistanis distributed “sweets” upon hearing the “news”. But in America, General Musharraf thundered no coup could take place against him because “Pakistan isn’t a banana republic”.
Clearly, General Musharraf’s aim is to woo the US with tall claims and feigned confidence. He explains the rationale for the book in the preface. “What happens to Pakistan in the coming years will not only decide the outcome of the global war against terror, it will also shape what the future will look like for both Islam and the West…I am determined that that future be peaceful and prosperous – not just for Pakistan but for the entire international community. That vision is possible only if the Muslim world and the West, led by the United States, strive together toward resolving the issues before us.” In other words, he is saying that the US needs to stay engaged with Pakistan and Pakistan needs to stay engaged with President-General Musharraf.
The bad news is that there cannot be a more self-serving agenda or book. The good news is that it will not have any good or bad impact on friends or foes alike because he is quite transparent in word and deed. So why begrudge the general a couple of million dollars in book sales?
(October 6-12, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 33 – Editorial)
Don’t hold your breath
You have to give General Pervez Muaharraf his due. When he is truthful, he is revelatory. But when he is fibbing, he is transparent in his self-righteousness. He is also wont to be delusional. Indeed, his recently launched memoir “In the Line of Fire” is threaded with destiny and fate (“which have smiled upon me”). He clearly doesn’t suffer from a surfeit of modesty.
The general believes he was a “born leader” and fate intervened at critical moments to spare him for the sake of Pakistan. He admits to more than the proverbial nine lives. He was about four years old when Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah died in 1948 and recalls that day vividly, “crying along with everyone else”. Unbelievably, a “metamorphosis took place in me in the fist months and years after Partition. An uprooted little boy found earth that was natural to him. He took root in it forever. I would protect the earth with my life.”
He was also a born strategic thinker apparently: when he was playing, “even at that age I was very good at making strategies and planning tactics to ambush and trap other gangs”. About his street fighting days in Nazimabad Karachi, “needless to say, I was one of the tough guys … who became known as a dada geer – a tough guy you don’t mess with”. He was a bodybuilder, an athlete, a gymnast, and winning a place at the military academy at Kakul “was a cinch for an athletic, intelligent boy”.
Much later in life, Pervez Musharraf was “surprised and disappointed” when the then COAS General Jehangir Karamat selected General Ali Kuli Khan, “a mediocre officer”, as his Chief of General Staff because “most army officers felt that I would and should get the job.” He says Karamat’s predecessor General Abdul Waheed Kakar “manipulated” the seniority list to “promote” Ali Kuli Khan. But General Musharraf’s obsession for serving the country remained with him in the form of a prayer since his days as a corps commander at Mangla: “O Allah! The only thing I can promise the Army and my Nation is sincerity, honesty, integrity and unflinching loyalty, You give me the vision to see and perceive the truth from the false, the wisdom …, the courage… the clarity, the chance to serve the Nation”. That said, poor Ali Kuli Khan Khattak gets it in the neck more than anyone else in the book.
General Musharraf says that on October 7th 1998 at around 7.30 pm, then PM Nawaz Sharif’s military secretary rang him and asked him to drive down immediately from Mangla to the PM’s house without explaining anything. He “sensed something abnormal afoot”. Mr Sharif told him, he says, “One of the reasons I have selected you (as COAS) is that you are the only Lt Gen who never approached me, directly or indirectly, for this job.” Was he indeed clueless about what destiny had in store for him? Had he given up on his prayer to Allah to give him a chance to serve the nation? When Ali Kuli Khan resigned after being bypassed, General Musharraf silently advised him to remember that “Man proposes and God disposes”. Of course, it is another matter of fact that several members of Nawaz Sharif’s inner circle, including General (retd) Iftikhar Ali Khan and General (retd) Moinuddin Haider, had “proposed” General Musharraf to Nawaz Sharif instead of General Ali Kuli Khan for many months and their protégé was aware of their efforts. General Iftikhar was defense secretary at the time and is treated sympathetically in the book – he didn’t sign the notification sacking General Musharraf as army chief – while General Haider was rewarded after the coup (he served as interior minister and then governor of Sindh).
The last chapter of the book is titled “Reflections”. “God has always been kind to me”, says General Musharraf, protecting him from certain death time and again, helping him move up the army ladder in preference to “officers born with a silver spoon in their mouth”. “I wonder why”, he asks innocently, while “reinforcing his belief in his destiny” and his sense of “honesty, truthfulness, contentment and humility” (“being humble in greatness raises one’s stature”). A splendid lecture on leadership follows. It is all about character, decisiveness, boldness and cool temperament. Loyalty, honesty and uprightness are essential prerequisites in colleagues. A leader must never suffer paralysis through analysis. He must have the will to change public opinion in the true national interest. General Musharraf is all of these and more because he is used to putting in 15 hours of work a day even though he doesn’t believe in micromanagement.
The most revealing aspect of the book, and one which his idle detractors will find most depressing, is the list of things-to-do on his 7-point agenda for the next decade ahead. “We have to consolidate our democracy and ensure the supremacy of the constitution” is way down the line at number 6 in terms of priority. “But Pakistan has a long way to go”, says the author.
General Musharraf has promised to shed his uniform by the end of his first official term as president next year. But since he expects to be in the driving seat on the nation’s long journey to rediscovery and rebirth, we shouldn’t hold our breath.
(October 13-19, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 34 – Editorial)
Play cricket, don’t wage jihad
Pakistan cricket has plumbed new depths. After a disastrous tour of England where we badly lost the Test series, barely scraped level in the ODIs and brought the game into historical disrepute, we have now lost the chairman, manager, administrator and bowling coach in the space of one week. Worse, the Champions Trophy is primed to bring fresh heartaches for the multitudes and unending headaches for the new management.
The resignation of the chairman, Shaharyar Mohammad Khan, should have been unacceptable. He was the most sincere, dedicated and selfless face of Pakistani cricket. When the unruly saga of the 4th Test was being played out in the Pakistan dressing room at the Oval, the sight of Mr Khan leaning over the balcony in abject despair told the whole sorry story. Inzimamul Haq may be a great batsman but he is a big zero as far as captaincy is concerned. Any captain who has to constantly lean over his shoulder and ask the volatile Shahid Afridi or the rigid Abdul Razzak or the born-again Mohammad Yousaf nee Youhana for advice is not worth his salt as captain.
The fellow didn’t understand a word of the umpires’ discussion about ball tampering because it was in English, but he didn’t have the humility to call in someone to explain the problem to him or the sense to react to it properly. Indeed, he woke up to notions of “honour” only during the tea interval when a couple of hotheads who didn’t know the law provoked him to take it into his own hands. If he had listened to Mr Khan the protest could have been made properly and the match won to boot! His misguided action has provoked a four match ban personally and is threatening a million dollar lawsuit institutionally. What is the Pakistan cricket captain and team all about?
To be sure, the side is overflowing with talent and audacity. In recent decades, we have boasted some of the fastest bowlers and best batsmen in the world. We have even won the World Cup once. We have beaten every team in the business many times. But we have never dented world rankings for any appreciable length of time like the Australians, the British and the West Indies. Indeed, when we think of Pakistani captains we think invariably and only of “Skipper” Hafiz Kardar and “Skipper” Imran Khan. No one ever called Zaheer Abbas or Asif Iqbal or Javed Miandad or Wasim Akram “skipper” because they were barely “first among equals” by virtue of their appointment as “seniors” for captaincy and not by dint of any leadership qualities.
That is the basic problem with the Pakistan “side” – it doesn’t gel as a team because it lacks a captain with leadership qualities who can mould and motivate individual talent into something much greater than the sum of its parts.
The main problem is a lack of basic education and human relation skills that hone a “team spirit” and keep the game in repute. The street is not the same thing as the arena. By definition the street is rough and ready while the stadium is regulated and monitored. One plays selfishly and individually on the street but selflessly for team and country in the arena. But this is one transition that most street-fighting Pakistani cricketers haven’t learnt to make independently or institutionally. That’s why we have had only two good and worthwhile captains – both had talent and could lead from the front because they were educated and conscious of the responsibility and sense of duty and fair play that a good education imparts. That was a combination of talent, education and character that set them apart from the others because it evoked respect and fear and admiration from their “mates”. They had the ability to exploit the individual talent of their players and channel it for the greater collective good. That is why there were no “groupings” in the ranks, no backstabbing, no sulking, no rebellion, no blackmail, no self-righteousness, and no unmerited indulgence of players. Winning and losing were important, to be sure, but the team spirit or esprit de corps was fundamental. Nationalism was important, certainly, as a motivating force and crowd puller but it was visibly frowned upon when it spilled over into the ground and trampled onto the wicket during the match.
It is in this context that Younas Khan’s petulant behaviour in accepting the captaincy, refusing it and again accepting it is not a good omen for the future. According to reports he felt slighted because Mr Khan turned down his sifarish to employ a gardener or made him wait for an appointment. This shows lack of character. It is also not a good sign that feigned religiosity has so stamped itself on the forehead of many of our players that they are spurred into action and reaction by self-righteousness and rage rather than tactics and strategy, competence and professionalism. The national malaise has seeped into the cricket team and undermined it.
We are, after all, required to play cricket with equals, and not wage jihad against infidels. More than any physical training or coaching or talent, what Pakistani street-fighting players need is a continuous educational camp to build character and renew the esprit de corps of the game.
(October 20-26, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 35 – Editorial)
Logic of a deal
President-General Pervez Musharraf and PPP chairperson, Benazir Bhutto, are talking turkey. General Musharraf doesn’t deny it but insists only that Ms Bhutto cannot be prime minister again. Ms Bhutto doesn’t deny it but her minions insist it is all government propaganda to divide and rule. The prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, has said that a “political realignment” of forces is possible by the time of the next elections. Chaudhry Shujaat, the PMLQ president, says that he isn’t averse to the idea of a “national consensus government” following the next elections which could include the opposition parties. Qazi Hussain Ahmad, head of the Jamaat i Islami, is angry that a deal is being negotiated by the establishment to bring the PPP into the loop and weaken the opposition. Only the former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, says he “trusts” Benazir Bhutto and is “optimistic” that she will not do a deal with the devil. What can General Musharraf possibly offer Ms Bhutto, he asks, that would sufficiently compensate for her ten years in exile since she was ousted in 1996? Mr Sharif believes that General Musharraf is so flushed with self-righteous success since he returned from his American trip that he is not likely to climb off his high horse in a hurry. So if a deal is still in the offing despite Mr Sharif’s observations, there must be compelling reasons for General Musharraf to strategize this option.
There is, of course, no better person than General Musharraf himself to explain the new “ground realities” (his favourite phrase). “The next elections will mark a watershed in Pakistan’s history”, he recently argued, “we must reject extremist and obscurantist forces which want to adopt a confrontationist approach in the world and region”. So here it is in a nutshell: General Musharraf’s longevity, the military establishment’s refurbishment and the Pakistani economy’s continued growth depend critically on continuing external support which is opposed to Islamic extremism globally and military confrontation regionally. Thus General Musharraf is obliged to ditch his erstwhile mullah friends in the old Military-Mullah Alliance and replace them by more “liberal” and “progressive” (read pro-West) mainstream forces who can help him better sell the new ground realities to the people of Pakistan. Under the circumstances, even Dr A Q Khan has had to be ditched. The threat of sanctions cannot be countenanced by the military establishment because the “ghost of proliferation” continues to haunt it.
There are compelling domestic reasons too. The PMLQ is burdened by the weight of incumbency. It is marked by personality clashes and power disequilibrium. Its vote bank has shriveled in the face of inflation. Popular anti-Westernism has frowned on its embrace of America. Thus, by default, the PPP is staging a comeback in the popular imagination and cannot be ignored. How do the cards lie?
General Musharraf seems impregnable but is not so in reality. He needs to be legitimately re-elected as a powerful president for another five years. He also wants to cling to his uniform because that is the ultimate wellspring of his power. But the PMLQ isn’t in any position to single-handedly guarantee this two-fold objective. The last time round it clutched at the coattails of the MMA to deliver but this time the MMA is part of the problem and not the solution. Bringing the ANP and other disgruntled and disenfranchised elements into the loop will certainly help but not enough to solve the issue. So the PPP has to be baited to share office and not power.
By the same token, Ms Bhutto seems indispensable but may not be so in reality. She wants to be prime minister again but even at the best of times she won’t be able to command a two thirds vote in any parliament to amend the constitution and fulfill her ambition. She must also contend with the likelihood that if she doesn’t play ball with General Musharraf he would be inclined to arm-twist her party and compel many more defections than the last time round. In any case, the thought of another five years in the wilderness should be quite daunting for her.
There are institutional roadblocks for both too. General Musharraf is obliged to install caretaker governments before the next elections, which means rigging won’t be so easy. He also needs a door rather than a window of opportunity between the time the elections are held and his presidential/army chief’s term is up so that he can maneuver his second term while he is still all powerful. This would imply a relatively early and clean election rather than a late and dirty contest. Similarly Ms Bhutto has to worry about the Swiss cases and incarceration at home if she is implacable.
By our reckoning the logic of a deal in the near future between General Musharraf and Ms Bhutto is strong. Indeed, an early deal would help General Musharraf while a late deal would tip the scale in Ms Bhutto’s favour. But Pakistani politics is unpredictable and there are powerful politicians in General Musharraf’s camp for whom Ms Bhutto is anathema no less than Mr Sharif. So we may have to wait a while before the much-vaunted Musharrafian strategy begins to unfurl in all its glory.
(October 27-Nov 2, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 36 – Editorial)
Two Kashmiris on death row
Two Kashmiris, one each in Pakistan and India, are on death row. Both are victims of lawyer neglect, police brutality, media lies and court opportunism. Both are in the glare of international scrutiny. Both have petitioned their country’s president to spare their lives. Both are palpably innocent and should be reprieved. One is Mirza Tahir in Pakistan and the other is Mohammad Afzal in India.
Eighteen years ago, Mirza Tahir was 18 years old when he stepped off a plane from London to Islamabad and hired a taxi to take him to Mirpur. He says that, en route at night, the taxi driver stopped at a deserted spot, pulled out a gun and tried to sodomize him. A scuffle ensued and the taxi driver was killed. The police said Tahir robbed and killed the fellow. Tahir was convicted and sentenced to death by a lower court but the high court ordered a retrial. The lower court then reduced his sentence to life. But an appeal before the high court yielded a full acquittal. The case was then dragged to the Federal Shariat Court by the heirs of the deceased and the FSC sentenced him to death. The sentence was upheld by the Appellate Shariah bench of the Supreme Court. Afzal has spent 18 years on death row on the basis of a forced and retracted confession and dubious circumstantial bits of “evidence”. The taxi driver’s heirs have demanded blood for blood. Incredibly enough, though, no one has wondered how a foreign lad who stepped off an airliner hours earlier could have acquired a gun for the premeditated robbery (for a few hundred rupees) and murder of an unknown taxi driver?
Indeed, no one has stopped to think that the case refers to a particularly bleak and opportunist period in Pakistan’s political history two decades ago when the Federal Shariat Court and other such “Islamic institutions” bequeathed to us by General Zia ul Haq, including the Appellate Shariah bench of the SC, were inclined to overlook the spirit of justice and letter of law in their rush to reinforce the Qisas and Diyat Ordinances. Clearly, he is a victim of unjust and ideologised “Islamic” laws. Therefore President Musharraf should “pardon” him. That will also send a powerful message that his “enlightened moderation” is very much about closing the suffocating and hypocritical Zia chapter in our legal, political and cultural history.
The case of Afzal is more complex because it is also entwined in geo-political state necessities. He was a Kashmiri “militant” who had surrendered to the Indian authorities and was trying to lead a secluded and monitored life. But he was arrested, along with three other Kashmiris, shortly after the attack by five terrorists on the Indian parliament in Delhi on December 13, 2001. The trial court sentenced the three men to death and the sole woman to five years imprisonment. The high court, however, acquitted the woman and one of the men but upheld the sentences of Afzal and another. Then the Indian Supreme Court stepped in, reduced the other’s death sentence to life but enhanced Afzal’s to three life terms and two death sentences.
In its judgment the apex Indian court admitted that: “As is the case with most conspiracies, there is and could be no direct evidence of the agreement amounting to criminal conspiracy. However, the circumstances cumulatively weighed would unerringly point to the collaboration of the accused Afzal with the slain ‘fidayeen’ terrorists.” More dubiously, however, the court held that “the (parliament attack) incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender. The challenge to the unity, integrity, and sovereignty of India can only be compensated by giving maximum punishment …”.
This statement, as Arundhati Roy has brilliantly argued, “validates ritual murder, which is what the death penalty is, and skates precariously close to valorizing lynch law”. The role of the ultra-nationalistic and “patriotic” Indian media in pointing the finger at Pakistan and flogging the police’s trumped up case was especially objectionable. The climate in which Afzal’s trial took place was characterized by hawkish calls for strikes against Pakistan following America’s new doctrine of preemptive action against Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. Hindu frenzy had already been whipped up by communal riots in Gujarat which had claimed over 2000 Muslim lives and driven over 150,000 Muslims from their homes. Bereft of money and a good lawyer, Afzal was asked to conduct his own personal cross-examination of witnesses.
The blatant contradictions and holes in this case have been superbly documented by social activists in India. Kashmir has erupted with protests. The former Kashmir chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, a Delhi loyalist, has warned that Afzal’s execution could provoke a violent backlash and engulf India in flames. Under the circumstances, the Indian leadership would do well to be guided both by notions of justice and national security rather than the jaundiced Indian media and frenzied Hindu mobs. “The challenge to the unity, integrity, and sovereignty of India can only be compensated” not by giving maximum punishment to Afzal as argued by the SC but by doing exactly the opposite.
(November 3-9, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 37 – Editorial)
General Musharraf’s dilemma
The October 30th air-strike on a madrassah-Taliban training camp in Bajaur in which over 80 persons were killed raises many questions. It also points to the increasingly contradictory and untenable position of General Pervez Musharraf’s policies at home and abroad.
Despite the conflicting and agonized statements of the army spokesman that the operation was conducted entirely by Pakistani forces on the basis of its own intelligence, the truth is different. The Americans monitored the madrassah with their spy planes, provided aerial evidence to the Pakistanis of terrorist training and told them to take out the camp, or they would do it themselves. The Pakistanis were caught on the horns of a dilemma. They were about to sign a peace agreement with tribal bigwigs in the area along the lines of the earlier one in North Waziristan but the tribesmen were clearly double-crossing them as they have done in Waziristan. If the Pakistanis had ignored the American evidence and pressed ahead with a dubious agreement with the Bajaur tribesmen, the Americans would have taken matters into their own hands and bombed the camp anyway. The domestic blowback of that would have been disastrous. It would also have strained the US-Pak relationship and wiped out the “successes” notched up by General Musharraf during his recent trip to the US.
The other way out was to try and coordinate an air strike with the Americans – who have the intelligence and the firepower – but make it look like an exclusive Pakistani army operation that could be defended on the basis of tribal treachery. Unfortunately, however, the Pakistani helicopter gunships arrived on the scene some minutes after the Americans had already bombed out the site and been debited by the tribesmen for it. In the event, the military objective was achieved but the political mission of minimizing the political fallout has been botched.
Tragically, this development was on the cards. The Americans had voiced grave concern about the Waziristan deal which might have protected the Pakistani army from the mischief of pro-Taliban tribesmen but actually enabled them to target NATO forces in Afghanistan with relative impunity. Another such agreement in Bajaur would have greatly annoyed NATO. The course finally adopted by both sides is also not surprising. When General Musharraf was asked at a press conference in Washington last month how he would react in a situation in which the Americans rather than the Pakistanis had the intelligence and the firepower to combat terrorist or Taliban camps in Pakistan’s tribal areas, he could only muster the response that a “joint strategy” would be chalked out but the action on the ground would be conducted exclusively by Pakistani forces. This is exactly what they tried to do last Monday. The problem is that General Musharraf is being crushed between the immovable tribesmen and the irresistible Americans.
Much the same dilemma confronts General Musharraf on the political front. He wants to amend the Hudood laws, the reform is important to him because he is seen by “enlightened moderates” at home and abroad as all bluster and no action. But he has failed to achieve his objective because his own PMLQ party is not on board. The PMLQ fears that if the amendment is enacted as desired, the MMA will resign from the assemblies in protest and cash in on the right-wing religious backlash against General Musharraf &Co. In this situation, the PMLQ would become mince meat for the PPP, PMLN and MMA in the next general elections. This would be contrary to the scenario that brought the PMLQ to power in the 2002 elections and enabled it to rule by sharing power with the MMA and blocking out the PPP.
We reiterate: General Musharraf means well but his political policies are downright opportunistic. He is constantly at sea, juggling one interest against another, because his strategic goal is misplaced and untenable. He wants to survive long enough to institutionalize the role of the army in politics. But that is the problem and not the solution. His goal should be to reverse the army’s past policies and withdraw it from politics. It is the army’s national security policies and obsessions that continue to undermine the development of a democratic, moderate and consensus based Pakistani civil society at peace with itself, with its neighbours and with the rest of the world. Now Pakistan’s militarized polity is crumbling under the weight of radical religious revivalism, rabid anti-Westernism, incipient separatism, regional conflagration, political disenfranchisement and popular disgruntlement.
In the run up to the Pakistani and American general elections next year, President Musharraf and President Bush will certainly reap the whirlwind of what they have sown. But while President Bush and the Republicans will bite the dust, America’s democratic system will bail the American people out. What happens in Pakistan under a military man who refuses to build a national consensus under a democratic and accountable system, however, could be altogether different. A free election would spell the end of General Musharraf and the military’s domination while a rigged one would provoke popular hostility at home and abroad and eventually lead to the same result.
(November 10-16, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 38 – Editorial)
Live and let live
The scarf, chadar , veil, hijab, burqa, niqab are all in fashion, so to speak, in the West. Notions of multiculturalism, assimilation, integration, identity and rights, are being bandied about by prime ministers, bishops, muftis, mullahs, feminists and Islamists. Philosophies of religion, secularism, politics, culture, freedom, fetishism, and commoditization are in the air. Now fears of clash of civilizations, violence and terrorism are all the rage. Enter Sheikh Taj al Din al-Hilali, an Islamic mufti based in Australia, with a remarkable statement about women who are raped. “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it… whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab , no problem would have occurred.” Bloody metaphor apart, he is in effect saying that “immodest” women “are asking for it”.
This is a chauvinistic variation on the theme that somehow it is women and not men who are responsible for rape because it is women who provoke, instigate or encourage men to violate them. In Pakistan this philosophy is formally embodied at the highest level of the state and constitution in the Hudood Laws. Under these laws – universally recognized as being highly discriminatory and unjust – a woman who has been raped but cannot prove it by providing four male witnesses is automatically charged with and punished for adultery on the basis of her own confession that sexual intercourse has taken place.
This is unjust and hypocritical. Sheikh al-Hilali must know that the incidence of rape in Australia, or in any other Western society where women are like “uncovered meat” – is no higher than in “Islamic” societies like Pakistan where most women “cover” themselves in the scarf, chadar , veil, hijab or burqa . Indeed, most women who are raped or gang-raped in the rural or urban areas in Pakistan are not violated because they were “uncovered meat” but despite it. Rape here is less a result of wanton lust as it is of notions of vindictiveness or honour. Nor indeed is it the case that “if she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred”. In most rural rape cases, “covered” women are kidnapped from their chardevaris at gunpoint and brutally raped for a variety of reasons. Similarly, there is no evidence that working uncovered women in the urban areas are more liable to rape than their “covered and secluded” counterparts in the urban or rural areas. In fact there is no evidence that the incident of rape is higher in the “uncovered” and secular West than it is in the “covered” and Islamic “East”. Indeed, there is a striking similarity in the way both societies have sanctioned sex and provided a safety valve for raging hormones. In the West, extra-marital sex is the norm while in the East notions of more wives than one at any given time, mistresses and “temporary” wives are a fact of life.
The issue of the veil for Muslim women in the West is as much a political issue as it is a cultural or religious one. If secular Western culture hasn’t ever had any problems with the pristine religious habit of the Christian nun, there is no reason for it to be agitated or provoked by the Muslim hijab or niqab unless it is threatening in some way. Nor does the secular West frown on a manifestation of separate identities – in fact it flaunts the multiple identities of its citizens – in its midst, unless the separation proclaims an unfriendly and exclusivist political statement. That is why it is only in the current environment of civilisational distrust, anger and hostility, which is rooted in the politico-imperialism of the West and the politico-religious response to it from third-world Islam, that such issues have cropped up. In other words, the recourse to the hijab/niqab by Muslim women in the West is seen as an overt statement of political resistance and defiance rather than as a sign of innocent cultural separateness or group identity. This also explains why dogged practitioners of secular Westernism are inclined to respond with aggressive counter statements (cartoons of the Prophet, pbuh) or state policies (as in France) to reassert their collective national and state identities.
In the final analysis, therefore, while the political and civilisational context is still overpowering, such issues can only be resolved on the basis of the unique consensus within each nation state. If France were to outlaw the veil, for example, Muslims must obey French laws or leave France, just as when Saudi Arabia ordained the veil or hijab for all women, including Westerners, the choice was to obey the law or leave the Kingdom.
Similarly, while Pakistani society accepts a flexible dress code for local and foreign women, it objects to displays of nudity or licentiousness. Therefore foreigners should be advised to acclimatize to local sensitivities. Equally, if most Western societies are able to live with the hijab but not the head-to-toe niqab, Muslims should not shout about an identity crisis or loss of freedom.
(November 17-23, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 39 – Editorial)
Pakistan’s Afghanistan strategy
Pakistan’s foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri has said that NATO cannot beat or subdue the Taliban in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has gone further and advised the Bush administration to consider withdrawing NATO troops from Afghanistan. His suggestion is based on the logic that the war in Afghanistan is not faring any better for the Americans than the war in Iraq.
Both statements are surprising. For one, how can President Pervez Musharraf continue to insist that Pakistan’s lead role in the war against terror and Talibanism will remain undiminished even as his government is asking the Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan in the face of the same threat? Second, while the American public backlash against the war in Iraq is manifest, it doesn’t apply to the war against terrorism in Afghanistan. Indeed, there is a consensus in Congress and the Bush Administration that a greater military presence in Afghanistan is needed to combat the Taliban and Al-Qaeda since that particular combination of forces will remain the dominant threat in the next decade for them.
The Pakistani security establishment’s mindset may be gauged from the enthusiasm shown by President Musharraf for the North Waziristan “deal”. At first it was flogged as an agreement with “repentant” Taliban and Al-Qaeda supporters, including foreigners who had settled in the area. But in essence it amounted to buying peace for the Pakistan army in exchange for permitting the tribesmen to enforce their own writ on Waziristan. However, when the Americans asked whether the ground rules of the agreement applied to bin Laden and his colleagues too, the military spokesman’s response was ambiguous. This provoked outrage in Washington and compelled the Pakistanis to backtrack. Meanwhile, Islamabad tried to persuade the British contingent in southern Afghanistan to strike a similar deal with the Taliban in which territory could be ceded in exchange for an end to fighting. At the same time, President Musharraf floated the idea of a grand jirga of pro and anti-Karzai tribal heads (who are mainly Pashtun Taliban) to give some respite to the beleaguered regime in Kabul. This was another way of flogging the same thought: a deal with the Taliban in which territory and autonomy/power was to be exchanged for peace and cessation of hostilities.
America’s negative response to this proposed strategy has been swift and decisive. Only days before a similar deal was to be signed with “locals” and the Pakistani military in Bajaur, American intelligence insisted that a madrassah of would-be suicide bombers in the area should be “taken out”. In the event, 82 Taliban were killed and a counter-attack left 42 Pakistan Army soldiers dead. This has wrecked the “deal-strategy”, for the time being at least.
At the heart of this strategy and the reasoning behind the apparently remarkable statements from Messrs Aziz and Kasuri lies one enduring Pakistani security concern: Afghanistan must not be allowed to fall into the hands of anti-Pakistan elements, especially India; indeed, any regime in Kabul must be overtly and manifestly pro-Pakistan so that Pakistan’s western flank is not threatened like its eastern one with India. There is one other pressing consideration: since the Durand Line is still unacceptable to Afghanistan as the legitimate border with Pakistan, Islamabad remains concerned about irredentist claims by Kabul on Pakistani territory east of the Durand line which is occupied by Pashtuns who share an ethnic nationalist sentiment with their compatriots in Afghanistan. In recent times, Pakistan’s security concerns have been heightened by reports of an “Indian hand” which is allegedly stoking the separatist insurgency in Balochistan from “bases” (consulates) in Afghanistan, provoking President Musharraf to unveil an iron fist.
So, it is clear why Pakistan seeks an understanding with the Pashtun Taliban in which Pakistani national security interests are safeguarded in exchange for conceding territory and power in Afghanistan. This strategy was followed from 1996 to 2001 and abandoned only when the Taliban refused to de-link themselves from Al-Qaeda after 9/11. Islamabad’s renewed hope is that with the Al-Qaeda threat now visibly diminished in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US and Hamid Karzai should be encouraged to do a power-sharing deal with the Taliban in the same way that Pakistan is urging the Taliban to abandon Al-Qaeda and do a peace deal with Islamabad.
The prospects of this strategy are not bright. First, Pakistan’s religious parties support the Taliban and hate President Musharraf. They want to overthrow him, partly by street agitation and partly by egging on Talibanised Pakistani Pashtuns to resist the military. Two, the Americans are more likely to beef up forces in Afghanistan than to reduce them in the future. Three, the forthcoming elections in Pakistan may throw up unexpected political equations which might derail this strategy. In the longer term, it may be a much better idea for the security establishment to protect Pakistan by building enduring peace with democratic India in the east rather than to concede to the unpredictable, fundamentalist Taliban in the west and risk a fundamentalist encroachment inside Pakistan.
(November 24-30, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 40 – Editorial)
Significance of Women’s Protection Bill
In 1974, Z A Bhutto, a “progressive-socialist-secularist” decreed the Ahmedis “non-Muslim”. In 1977, he outlawed alcohol and nominated Friday as a weekly holiday. He hoped to fend off an “Islamic” threat from the Pakistan National Alliance which sought to overthrow him and install an “Islamic” state. In the event, these opportunistic sops couldn’t save him. More significantly, these “concessions” to political Islam marked a turning point in the political evolution of Pakistan.
General Zia ul Haq capitalized on the prevailing religious sentiment for legitimizing himself and transformed Pakistan into a sham “Islamic state” with hypocritical and unjust laws. This Ziaist state went on to spawn violent sectarianism, ethnicity, Talibanism and jihad, eventually alienating the international community and condemning itself as a pariah and “failing” state. Of the two democrats who followed, Benazir Bhutto was powerless to redress the injustice while Nawaz Sharif actually rode to power on the back of the Islamic Jamhoori Ittehad in 1990, passed shariah laws in 1991 and was on the brink of declaring himself Amir ul Momineen (in the spirit of the contemporary Hisbah Bill of the NWFP) when he was hoist by his own petard in 1999.
Seven years later, after many false starts and opportunistic retreats, another dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, has made bold to try and lead the wretched Pakistani state back into moderation, enlightenment and integration with the modern world. But the remarkable thing is that he has taken the plunge – enacting the Women’s Protection Bill which challenges the Hudood Laws – seemingly at the most inopportune and weakest moment of his seven year rule. The mullahs who helped him amend the constitution in 2003 to remain army chief and President are now baying for his blood because of his allegedly “pro-moderation” policies. His popularity too has hugely dipped in the wave of anti-Americanism sweeping the country. His Muslim League is fearful of losing the next general elections. So the last thing that it wanted was a new law that has led to a split with the mullahs. Thus two questions arise: why has General Musharraf thrown caution to the wind and bulldozed the WPB at this juncture? What is the significance of the Women’s Protection Bill?
To be fair to General Musharraf, he has been personally keen on amending the Hudood laws, including the blasphemy laws, and ending discrimination against women from Day-One. But his tactical alliance with the mullahs against the mainstream Peoples Party has precluded any remedial action. That is why the PMLQ has constantly shunted such proposals from one pious committee to another and sabotaged his plans. It was mortally afraid of losing its conservative vote bank to the mullahs or dividing it and enabling the PPP to trump it in the next elections. That is why it desperately sought to convince General Musharraf to postpone any amendment to the Hudood laws until after the next general elections. So why has General Musharraf defied the pundits, naysayers and oppositionists and rammed the bill through with help from his nemesis, the Peoples Party of Benazir Bhutto?
It is simplistic to say that he did it under American pressure. Of course, they have been urging him to fulfill his pledge. It is also true that his credibility as a reformer has evoked negative comment. But the fact is that if he had postponed the decision, his international benefactors would hardly have scolded him, far less ditched him, under the circumstances. He is, after all, their mainstay in the global war against terror and they believe there is no alternative to him. Nor was his decision based on political pique against the mullahs or personal gratification. He has proved to be a hard-headed, shrewd and pragmatic operator not given to emotional decisions. No, there has to be a strategic explanation. And it is most likely along the following lines.
Pakistan’s national security demands a strong and stable economy aligned with the international community. The economy does not brook religious fundamentalism, extremism or anti-Westernism because these outcroppings create a trust-deficit with Pakistan’s major aid and trading partners and are therefore bad for it. Consequently, the Pakistani state and political system have to be re-crafted to face new global realities. This is where the Peoples Party comes into the equation. Since General Musharraf cannot solely on the basis of the PMLQ or the army create the larger consensus needed to turn the state around, a mainstr eam, national, secular, popular party is needed to help mediate the transition and accomplish the objective. That is also the requirement of the international community which doesn’t want to put all its eggs in one basket. This explains the increasing exhortation by General Musharraf to the public to vote for “progressive” and moderate elements.
It is in that sense that the WPB purports to become the most significant legislative marker in Pakistan’s history since 1974. It is the first serious attempt by the state to redefine its national security framework in the new international environment. Whether General Musharraf will succeed or not will depend, however, on the nature of his new alliances and the extent to which he is prepared to share power with the moderately enlightened civilians.
(December 1-7, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 41 – Editorial)
Politics as usual
The MMA’s leading firebrand, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, claims he’s ready to flaunt the resignations of 67 federal parliamentarians in the face of the NA Speaker any day. Hold on, cautions the MMA’s wily leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, this isn’t the right time to throw the gauntlet for President-General Pervez Musharraf. But I don’t agree with you, insists Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, the Maulana’s second-in-command, and I am ready to create mayhem along with Qazi Saheb. Hold on, that’s unfair, grumble the rank and file of the MMA parliamentarians in Islamabad, why should we pack up while our colleagues continue to enjoy the fruits of power in the NWFP and Balochistan provincial assemblies? If we have to resign and force Islamabad’s hand, they argue, then everyone in the MMA should quit en masse from the national and provincial assemblies. This is the cue for the chief minister of the NWFP to stand up and be counted. We are ready to quit, thunders Akram Durrani, but we are waiting for a nod from the leader of our party. And who’s that? Maulana Fazlur Rehman! So the MMA is huffing and puffing but really isn’t in any position to bring the House down.
The scene in London isn’t too hot either. Like Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Mr Nawaz Sharif would love nothing more than to see the back of General Musharraf asap. He knows that as long as the General is around, in one form or another, there is no scope for him personally and institutionally. As the idiom goes, how can two swords sheath together? Nor is there any scope for him in the next elections, whenever they are held, because General Musharraf has also robbed him of his party and chained him in exile. But Mr Sharif rightly wonders whether this is the proper time to try and topple his foe. For one, Maulana Fazlur Rehman isn’t fully on board. But more significantly, Benazir Bhutto isn’t too keen on a strategy of resignations and street agitation. And without her party’s popular clout, no street agitation in the Punjab is likely to create a dent in the government.
Ms Bhutto, meanwhile, is enjoying all the attention she is finally getting after so many years in the wilderness. General Musharraf is wooing her party because he is worried about the dwindling support base of his pro-US policies which have alienated the public and outraged the mullahs. Obviously he is hoping that the PPP’s moderate, anti-mullah and pro-West brand of populism will provide just the tonic he needs to cling to power and retain the economic, military and political backing of the West. Mr Sharif, too, is ready to embrace his old foe – the same one he once threatened to chop up and throw into the Arabian Sea – on the logic that his enemy’s enemy is his friend. He also realizes that if and when the crunch comes on the streets of the Punjab he will need the PPP by his side to punch beyond his weight. And as far as Maulnana Fazlur Rehman is concerned, his abiding “relationship” with the “daughter of the East” goes back to the time when she made him the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of Parliament and sent him off to gallivant all over the capitals of the world in the perennially elusive quest of the Holy Grail of Kashmir. Under the circumstances, with so many ardent but hypocritical and self-serving suitors fussing over her, why should Ms Bhutto elope with one of them and cut her options so early in the game? Clearly, she is the centre of attraction and means to enjoy her new status as long as possible.
Meanwhile, the government is sanguine that all is proceeding according to plan. The Women’s Protection Bill has been passed and the Heavens haven’t fallen. The opposition is divided because Islamabad is dangling the prospects of power sharing before the PPP and JUI while debunking the threat of the Jamaat i Islami and PMLN. Meanwhile, the MQM and ANP have been assured a berth in the next dispensation, both at the expense of the mullahs in Karachi and Peshawar. General Musharraf says that temporary upheavals and dislocations are all part of the game and nothing to worry about. Indeed, there may well be a move afoot to strengthen the ruling PMLQ by diluting the monopolistic hold of the Chaudhries and including some old disgruntled stalwarts into the leadership. So we shouldn’t be surprised if it is reported that Hamid Nasir Chatha, for instance, has been to-ing and fro-ing to Sindh and Karachi and having chummy chats with Pir Pagara and the Sindh CM with an eye to the presidentship of the PMLQ! Isn’t a genuinely effective Grand National Alliance, with the Chathas, Wattoos, Legharis, etc., all thrown in for comfort, to be preferred to a divided PMLQ?
In this reckoning, the key players to watch out for are General Musharraf and Chaudhry Pervez Elahi on one side and Benazir Bhutto and Fazlur Rehman on the other. If they all get together and share power, Pakistan will sail through the next five years smoothly. But if they are pitted against each other, then instability will follow.
(December 8-14, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 42 – Editorial)
Battle for the soul of Pakistan?
President-General Pervez Musharraf’s pragmatism is often perceived as opportunism. His courage, too, is sometimes billed as bravado. But the facts show his courage and realism in trying to tackle two central and sensitive issues that have greatly damaged Pakistani polity. We refer to the simmering dispute of Kashmir with India and the explosive issue of the Hudood Ordinances.
General Musharraf has overturned an unrealistic policy position on Kashmir that had focused the state on external military conflict rather than domestic economic improvement and autarky. The establishment’s theory of the “unfinished business of Partition” – Kashmir Banega Pakistan – has provoked three wars with India, led to the dismemberment of Pakistan and compelled us to sacrifice our natural democratic impulse at the altar of “national security” and military rule. It has also embroiled us in disastrous sectarian ideologies and violent jihads that have isolated and alienated us from the rest of the world. In fact, the notion of an “Islamic state” cultivated by General Zia Ul Haq in the 1980s only served to ingratiate the praetorian state with the reactionary “Pakistan-ideologues” in the media and bureaucracy who constantly sought to flog the “two nation theory” long after its demise at independence.
The Quaid i Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, it should be recalled, whipped up Muslim communal sentiments in support of his demand for a separate state for the Muslims of India only in order to protect their economic and political interests because he feared discrimination at the hands of an increasingly Hinduised Congress. At no stage of this struggle for Pakistan was Islam, the religion, ever in any danger of being subsumed or overwhelmed by Hinduism, the religion. This is proven also by the fact that the Muslims of India who stayed behind came to face the very discrimination and alienation that Mr Jinnah feared they would in a Hindu-dominated India without in any way losing the bearings of their faith. Therefore the issue was never so much “Islam in danger” as it was “Muslims in danger” – meaning thereby that Mr Jinnah was driven in the ’40s by real apprehensions about the political and economic fate of the Muslim community in an independent, Hindu-dominated India rather than by concerns about how Islam might fare in a sea of infidels. Under the circumstances, the issue of what sort of state would be created in the new Pakistan was never in any doubt in the mind of its creator. Mr Jinnah, the secular democrat, did not want a state run by clerics on religious lines. Thus, while there was room in his worldview for the Islamic notions of social justice, humanity, equality and brotherhood there was none for so-called “Islamic” laws decreed by an ignorant, divisive and authoritarian clergy that had called him an “infidel” for opposing the Khilafat movement and accused him of undermining “pan-Islamism” by proposing a Muslim nation-state.
Under the circumstances, General Musharraf’s policy of abandoning the “plebiscite or independence” option on Kashmir is a welcome new beginning with India. But equally significantly, it also marks a critical rupture with the “two-nation” theorists whose central plank has been the forced “Islamisation” of Pakistan. In this way, and despite the obvious aberration and incongruity of his military uniform, President Musharraf has tried to rectify the “qibla” of Pakistan by de-linking Kashmir from the “two-nation” theory/Islamisation nexus.
It is in this context, too, that we should see the recent amendment to the Hudood Ordinances by the government. By insisting on the Women’s Protection Bill, and thereby contesting the Hudood Ordinances, General Musharraf has risked his personal political future by breaking an alliance with the mullahs that enabled him to be both President and Army Chief for the last five years. Now the mullahs are threatening to resign from parliament and launch street agitation. They are even going from house to house falsely decrying the “sexual permissiveness” allegedly unleashed by the Women’s Protection Bill.
When General Musharraf exhorts Pakistanis to vote for “moderates”, he is not just asking people to shun the mullahs, he is also indirectly undermining the arch conservatives in his own PMLQ and propping up the liberals in the opposition PPP. No wonder the ruling party is unhappy: The mullahs are trying to eat into the PMLQ conservative urban vote-bank and the PPP is indirectly benefiting from General Musharraf’s philosophy of “enlightened moderation”. This requires a lot of guts and great conviction on his part. If he had been a rank opportunist, he could have easily “postponed” this clash of ideas and interests until after the elections, as recommended by the PMLQ, and protected his supporters from the adverse fallout of mullah ire. But he didn’t, preferring to take the bull by the horns now when he is still all powerful rather than risk it when he might be weaker.
Now is the time for India to reciprocate General Musharraf’s unprecedented flexibility and resolve outstanding disputes fairly. Likewise, the liberals and moderates of Pakistan should understand the nature of the principal contradiction in Pakistan about the soul of the state rather than the form of transitional government under General Musharraf, and act accordingly.
(December 15-21, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 43 – Editorial)
Recipe for state failure
Over 80,000 people have been killed in the conflict in Indian-Kashmir since 1989. Most were civilians. But many Pakistanis, too, went there to wage jihad in the misguided service of the state. The direct costs to us include a prohibitive arms race, two wars, dismemberment, and rout in Kargil which paved the way for military rule. If ever there was a litany of abject state foreign policy failure, this is it.
Our score on the western front is not better. Pakistan’s alliance with the US led us to create and nourish the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s, with horrendous consequences: two decades of forced “Islamisation” that eroded civil society, violated democracy and brainwashed two generations in a subterranean culture of hardline Deobandi “Islam”, violent sectarian strife, drugs and guns. It was also, inevitably, a precursor to the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan which have sucked Pakistan into the eye of a global storm. As such, the multilateral conflict on our north-western border threatens a much more ominous blowback in the future than the bilateral Kashmir conflict on our eastern border with India ever did in the past.
Pakistan’s Afghan policy remains deeply flawed. After the demise of the USSR, Islamabad would have done well to broker a deal between the disparate Mujahidin and the orphaned Najibullah regime in which it could have fashioned a key role for itself in stabilizing Afghanistan and winning influence. Instead, Islamabad helped the Mujahideen overthrow the ancien regime and precipitated an ethnic civil war, warlordism and anarchy. Then Islamabad clutched at the Taliban in 1996 as “revolutionary saviors” and installed them in Kabul in 1997. But in 1998 Al Qaeda perceived Talibanised Afghanistan as a revolutionary “base area” for its global operations, moved in and shoved Pakistan aside. Thus, when Al-Qaeda struck on 9/11 and the Taliban refused to banish it despite pressure from Islamabad, Pakistan arrived at the brink of becoming the biggest loser in the great game for Afghanistan.
General Musharraf took the right decision to join the international war against Al-Qaeda. But he failed to grasp the necessity of a complete political and military elimination of the Taliban as a corollary of the war against Al-Qaeda. In the event, even as the military selectively targeted Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, it allowed the Taliban to retrench themselves in the tribal borderlands and politicize these areas. Worse, in a blithely opportunist move against mainstream national parties, General Musharraf made alliances with pro-Taliban and pro-Al-Qaeda religious parties in Pakistan, ensuring that with only 11 per cent of the vote they were able to capture 25% of the federal parliament as well as the provincial governments of the NWFP and Balochistan. Indeed, the JUI – the original source of the Deobandi madrassahs that continue to spawn the Taliban – was so exalted that its leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, was given a ringside seat in the National Security Council. In return, the MMA facilitated General Musharraf as President and Army Chief until 2007.
This grave strategic error led to the creation of a powerful nexus between foreign Al-Qaeda, Afghan Taliban and Pakistani religio-political elements in FATA, NWFP and Balochistan. Therefore when General Musharraf tried to flush out Al-Qaeda from FATA in 2003-04, the army met with such fierce resistance from their local Talibanised “hosts” that it was compelled to sue for “peace deals” which have only served to strengthen foreign and local Taliban. Worse, a legal and political environment in which they can flourish has been provided by the NWFP government after the promulgation of hardline Talibanised laws. That is why there is now overwhelming evidence that Taliban activity in Afghanistan has significantly increased after the recent peace accords were struck with them by Islamabad. In fact, Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have banded with remnants of the former Mujahideen (like Hekmatyar, who is close to the Jamaat i Islami) and Al-Qaeda to launch attacks on the Kabul regime.
The Pakistan military-security complex is playing with fire. It is gravely mistaken if it thinks that by buying “peace” with the Taliban and mullahs at home at the expense of the Karzai-NATO regime in Kabul, it can consolidate its power in Islamabad and steer Pakistan in the direction of a moderately enlightened and stable state. A defeat of the NATO-Karzai regime at the hands of pro-Al-Qaeda Taliban would inevitably lead to the entry into Afghanistan of other players like Iran, Russia and India and open it to the risk of prolonged ethnic warfare and eventual partition. But then a Pakhtun Taliban state in south Afghanistan that is blocked from pursuing its ambitions in the north by powers greater than Pakistan would inevitably look south across the Durand Line and covet areas of Pakistan’s Frontier and Balochistan to consolidate its “nationality-statehood”. And that would be disastrous for Pakistan.
General Musharraf is following an Afghan policy which – whether by military ambivalence or political opportunism or misplaced strategy or a combination of all – is spinning out of control. The concoction of passionate religion, fierce ethnicity and modern firepower in the tribal lands north of Islamabad is a sign of state failure followed by state disintegration.
(December 22-28, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 44 – Editorial)
Make borders irrelevant
India and Pakistan are on the verge of liberalizing travel between the two countries. This is the best news of the new century.
Currently, India is issuing up to 10,000 visas a month and Pakistan about 1000 visas to each other’s citizens. But visa seekers on both sides have to run the gamut of intelligence agencies, queues and delays, which is worse than an obstacle race. Other restrictions apply. Most visitors have to report their movements to the police on arrival and departure like criminals on parole. They can’t enter from one point and exit from another. They can’t go to ‘cantonment’ areas even though such areas are not exclusive military cantonments any more and have become residential suburbs. They can’t get permission to visit more than a couple of cities on any one visit. They can’t change their travel plans once they have landed in the other country. And so on. Often there are travel restrictions on diplomats as well, which is a contradiction in terms and completely absurd.
All this negativism is justified in the name of “national security” by both sides as though real spies queue up for permission to ply their trade. Indeed, the violent destabilizing campaigns so effectively mounted from in the past by both in the other country through proxies are rarely, if ever, dependent on such restrictions. At the end of the day, Pakistan’s establishment has not been in favour of people-to-people contacts and cultural bonhomie because the “threat from India” was a central plank of its “Pakistan’s ideology strategy” to retain primacy for the military in the country’s body politic. As for India, its rigid and arrogant bureaucracy was wedded to the theme of “reciprocity” (do unto Pakistan what Pakistan does unto you) even though it was clearly in India’s interest to unilaterally flog an open travel regime so that Pakistanis could see for themselves that Indian Hindus were not out to gobble up Pakistan.
At last, real change is in the air. Many of the current restrictions will be lifted and people will be able to travel relatively freely in the region. This is on account of a dramatic change of heart in Pakistan rather than in India. Indeed, President-General Pervez Musharraf made a remarkable statement the other day at a conference in Islamabad. He said that tourism between India and Pakistan would benefit the economies of both countries. He might have said that people-to-people contacts would reduce hostility and enable him to build a peaceful neighbourly relationship with India, which is on the top of his agenda. But he shied away from the truth because it would have upset many old-timers in Pakistan whose veins are still flush with the anti-India poison injected over the decades in pursuit of false “national security” objectives.
India has a flourishing tourism industry already which is a great foreign exchange earner and helps build the image of India as a peaceful, romantic and democratic place to visit. No one gawks at foreign women while local women bustle about in saris, shalwar/kameez, jeans and even skirts. Everyone who can afford it can put his hair down and feet up in beautiful resorts all over the country. Booze is not banned. In short, the ingredients of tourism – hospitality, charm, tolerance, infrastructure are aplenty and affordable. Pakistan, on the other hand, needs to improve its level of tolerance and infrastructure. But this is easier said than done. It is lumbered with adverse travel advisories by foreign countries and foreigners fear for their lives from gun toting, wild eyed mullahs rampaging on the streets.
However, the point of tourism between India and Pakistan shouldn’t be underplayed either. Delhi, for instance, is full of old Lahoris who migrated in 1947. Many would flock to Lahore to refresh historical memories of communities and families and associations. Lahore would also become the focal point of transit to Srinager because it is at the centre of the old natural geographic trade routes between Kashmir and the rest of the sub-continent. Similarly, many people in Karachi would swamp the Indian consulates for a chance to revisit their roots in Bihar or Hyderabad or UP or Gujerat. From the other side, Sikh pilgrims would choke the highways of Pakistani Punjab year in and year out. What could be better for business than tourism that doesn’t challenge our culture or affront our religion or outrage our sense of modesty?
Businessmen would profit the most from free association and trade. Some months ago, the Pakistan government added a few hundred items to the list of goods that can be imported from India. This was a radical step to rationalize the domestic economy. Now another few hundred items are on a list on which import duties will be mutually cut by up to 10% as part of an agreement under the South Asian Preferential Trade Agreement. Fears of Indian goods drowning Pakistani industry have evaporated since Chinese goods have come to play that dubious role. Only the fittest, most competitive and cheapest will now survive, which is good from the public’s point of view.
Since borders can’t be changed, they should become irrelevant. There can be no better mission statement than this for both India and Pakistan.
(December 29-4, 2006, Vol – XVIII, No. 45 – Editorial)
Reviewing 2006
2006 has been a good year in many ways for Pakistan under General Pervez Musharraf. The economy has continued to grow at over 6 per cent. The women of Pakistan who constitute half the nation have been greatly relieved by the Women’s Protection Bill. The minorities are freer today than at any time in the last three decades. Pakistan’s standing in the world community has risen. The press is vibrant and thriving. Sectarian violence and terrorism has diminished. The cultural environment is not as suffocating as before. Tensions with India have abated. And the promised general elections for 2007 seem on target.
But lingering problems and shortcomings persist. These could cast a shadow over 2007. Inflation remains a big worry for the urban middle classes. The mullahs are rampaging against the amendment to the Hudood Ordinance. The press has been selectively silenced from reporting on the political, legal and humanitarian crisis in Balochistan. The thaw with India is viewed with suspicion by hard-liners and ideologues who accuse the government of “selling out” on Kashmir. The jihadis are planning ways to sabotage the peace process. The relationship with America is coming under strain because of different perceptions and policies relating to Afghanistan. All these factors could weaken General Musharraf’s hand in 2007 and thereby destabilize the country.
Economy: FOR BETTER – Economic growth of over 6 per cent is based on rising tax revenues, increased aid flows, high foreign remittances, easy money policies, significant privatizations and buoyant trade. Banks, insurance and leasing companies, textiles, cement, automobiles, fertilizer and telecoms are boasting soaring growth rates and profits. Real estate developments are proliferating. Foreign bond floats are generating international confidence and international credit rating companies are notching up Pakistan’s standing in emerging markets. The regulatory environment is improving. The stock index remains impressive. FOR WORSE – Inflation is high. This hurts the urban middle classes and is cause for discontent. Interest rates are rising because the state bank is tightening money supply to control inflation. But this is a disincentive for investment. The trade deficit is threatening a balance of payments crisis because the surge in imports, due in part to the steep climb in the price of oil, is outstripping the growth in exports, which are still solely dependent on the textile sector. Foreign investment is largely confined to the privatization of profitable state owned units which will run out in a couple of years. Similarly, the spurt in the telecom sector which fulfilled a historic slack is bound to flatten out ahead. With flat remittances and reserves under pressure from the trade deficit, a gradual devaluation of the rupee cannot be ruled out, which means more inflationary pressure. A structural crisis between means and ends is looming over the horizon.
Politics: FOR BETTER – The political system is stable despite mounting threats from the opposition. General elections are on target next year. The government hasn’t backtracked from its commitment to conduct them under neutral caretaker governments and an independent election commission. The passing of the Women’s Protection Bill has raised the moral stature of the regime at home and abroad. The revision in the textbooks against notions of violent jihad and demonizing India and Hindus has been universally welcomed. The détente with India is people and business oriented. The decision to build the big dams to cater for energy shortages in the future is good. The federal and provincial governments are relatively competent and transparent and there are no major corruption scandals in the air. FOR WORSE – Despite exhorting the people to vote for the moderates, the government has still not clinched a working deal with the Peoples Party to enlarge the moderate basis of the national consensus required in support of current policies. The centre-provincial relation is on the rocks in Balochistan and the NWFP, with the former in the throes of a nationalist insurgency and the latter in the grip of Talibanism. As the incumbent, the PMLQ’s popularity is at its lowest ebb, raising the spectre of rigged elections, boycotts and instability in 2007. General Musharraf’s dogged refusal to doff his uniform is causing deep rumblings in the political system. Relations with Washington are on the verge of deterioration over America’s mounting troubles in Afghanistan that are ascribed to Pakistan’s reluctance to confront the Taliban in its areas. The social and political trend of increasing anti-Americanism and deepening religiosity in the country bodes ill both for domestic stability and international credibility.
Until now General Musharraf has demonstrated a remarkable ability for pragmatism in the face of rooted ideological beliefs and prejudices among the people and ruling establishment of Pakistan. The decision to about-turn after 9/11 has proved extremely beneficial to Pakistan. The war against Al-Qaeda even at great personal risk has brought rewards. India has been won over to a peace and security dialogue to change the status quo. And now the women of Pakistan have been liberated from the shackles of the Hudood Ordinances at considerable cost to the PMLQ. But the real challenge remains how to extend and institutionalize such beneficial developments in the next few years. If General Musharraf fails to do that next year, he will go down and take the system down with him.
(January 12-18, 2007, Vol – XVIII, No. 47 – Editorial)
New forms of terror?
A number of recent international news reports are worrying for the state of the world in general and the Middle-East and West Asia in particular. One report says that President Bush is contemplating sending another 30,000 US troops to Iraq rather than start pulling them out as demanded by the American people and recommended by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group set up by President Bush himself. Another says that if the Americans were to pull out of Iraq the Saudis would pour in arms and money for the very Sunni minority in Iraq that is infested with Al-Qaeda and is exacting the greatest toll of American lives. A third claims that the US has given the green light to US oil companies to stake their claims on Iraqi oil – which is largely in the Shia or Kurd areas of Iraq – until the country is partitioned and the oil wells run dry. Another report insists that the Israelis have trained and are readied with American backing for a tactical nuclear air strike against Shia Iran’s nuclear installations. The latest news is that the Americans have gone and bombed alleged Al Qaeda elements in the civil war in Somalia between corrupt warlords supported by Western-backed Marxist Ethiopia and oppressive Sunni Islamic revolutionaries infiltrated by Al Qaeda under the banner of the Union of Islamic Courts. Meanwhile, the finger-wagging war between US-backed Pakistan and US-occupied Afghanistan over the resurgence of the anti-Shia Taliban-Al Qaeda nexus shows no sign of abating. Is there a link between these apparently contradictory and conflicting developments? What do they foretell?
It seems that President Bush is on the verge of a last ditch effort to redeem American power by enlarging the theatre of war in the short term. Mr Donald Rumsfeld, the blundering defence secretary, has been replaced by Mr Robert Gates, the coldly efficient CIA man. Gen John Abizaid, head of Centcom, and Gen George Casey, commander of US and all allied forces, have been replaced by Admiral Richard Fallon and General Dave Petreaus respectively. Gen Abizaid was opposed to US troop enhancement in Iraq and advocated a regional solution involving Iran and Syria as also recommended by the Iraq Study Group. Admiral Fallon, however, is better placed to deal with the new agenda because he is an old hand at the use of sea and air power as envisaged in the developing situation against Iran. This explains the context of the Israeli air strike threat against Iran as well as the recent American air strike against Islamic militias in Somalia and suggests the potential role of the American naval fleet in the Gulf and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Mr Zalmay Khalizad, an Iraq and Afghan hand, has been pulled out of Iraq and dispatched to the UN, while Mr Ryan Crocker, an old Middle-East Arabist, is being shunted from Islamabad to Baghdad to defend the new doctrine.
This plan meets with the approval of the hard-line Wahhabi-Sunni government of Saudi Arabia. The rise of anti-America Shia Iran as a contending power in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, along with the continuing resistance of Syria to Israeli and American policy in the region, dominates the current ME agenda. But the rise and revival of the Shia in the Sunni-ruled states neighbouring Iraq (Kuwait, Bahrain, Lebanon and even Saudi Arabia and the Gulf) threatens to upset the balance of national power and American interests in the region. The blowback from this could have far-reaching consequences.
At the moment, the spectre of extremist Wahhabi and Salafi Sunni anti-Shiaism and anti-Americanism is haunting the Muslim world in which Sunni governments are generally dictatorial and pro-America while the Sunni masses are anti-America and pro-radical Islam. Worse, Al Qaeda seems to have made common cause with the Sunni extremists. But the problem is compounded by the support of Shia Iran for the resistance movements against Israel in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria which is undermining the influence of the Sunni governments of the Middle East with these anti-Israel forces. Therefore a hasty and unplanned American withdrawal from Iraq after democratising it by giving effective power to the majority Shia, who would be inclined to lean towards Shia Iran for succour, would have two grave consequences: it would be a signal for foreign Shia and Sunni intervention and further bloodletting between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq; it would also force the Sunni governments of neighbouring states to dig their heels in and resist democratising their countries for fear of empowering the local Shias in their midst. An Israeli attack on Shia Iran would compound the Shia-Sunni national-state divide in the ME. Everywhere in the Muslim world, it would lead to political chaos, state repression, sectarian warfare, Arab de-identification and mass anti-Americanism.
The ripple effects of Sunni militancy in association with Al Qaeda are bound to touch Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Afghanistan and Pakistan and encourage anti-America regime-change across the Muslim world. If extremist Sunnis believe that “a war on America is a war on the Shia, and a war on the Shia is a war on America”, then we might be looking at new forms of terror in the near future.
(January 5-11, 2007, Vol – XVIII, No. 46 – Editorial)
Our crystal ball is murky
An Indian astrologer has predicted that General Pervez Musharraf will not have an easy ride in 2007. But another is silent about his fate. Our own crystal ball is a bit murky with lots of “ifs” and “buts”. However, one thing is clear. General Musharraf means to remain both president and army chief for the indefinite future.
One way of remaining president is to get the present parliament, in which his ruling PMLQ and its allies have a slim majority, to re-elect him president for another five years before his term is up later this year rather than risk a new parliament born on the basis of an uncertain general election upsetting his apple cart. But this course of action is subject to two qualifications: first, it will be seen as a measure of desperation and weakness on his part and therefore fail to provide the popular legitimacy that he seeks; second, it could be challenged in the supreme court as being unconstitutional and there is no way of knowing which way the court will blow under the current chief justice whose penchant for heroics should not be ignored. In any case, a president thus elected amidst bitter controversy won’t be able to garner the 2/3rd parliamentary majority to amend the constitution and remain army chief as well. So even if General Musharraf clutches at this option before the next general elections he will certainly have to get a similar endorsement from the next parliament if he is to bid for his uniform.
Thus everything hinges on the results of the next general elections. But how on earth is he going to get not just a simple majority in the next parliament in order to be president but a 2/3rd majority in order to remain army chief? His chances of accomplishing this fairly and squarely are as bleak as those of a snow ball in hell.
The ruling Muslim League is factionslised and the Forward Block is itching to rear its head. The alliance partners are refusing to merge into one cohesive and organized fighting unit under one centralized and acceptable leadership. Meanwhile, popular sentiment for the Peoples Party is surfacing in Punjab and Sindh while that for the MMA mullahs in the NWFP and Balochistan is not diminishing.
The last time round, the PPP got the largest number of votes but could only muster 25% of the number of seats in the national assembly, thanks to some clever manipulation of the ‘first-past-the-post-system’ by the “agencies”. This was then slashed to 20% by enabling nearly 20 PPP MNAs to cross the floor and then making sure (through a cunning decree) that they couldn’t retract their decision. But this time matters will be different. For one, the PPP is more popular than in 2002 and the PMLQ is less so. Therefore the same tactics will have to be applied, albeit on a bigger scale. But more significantly, it won’t be possible now to nudge anyone to cross the floor after the elections since the law against floor crossing that helped lock up the rebel PPP MNAs in General Musharraf’s stable in 2003 will not allow anyone to get into it either in 2008.
Equally, the last time round the MMA with only 11% of the votes was able to net nearly 20% of the seats in parliament. But after the elections they were able to increase their tally to 25% with the help of FATA and other independents. Eventually, in exchange for a ringside seat in the National Security Council and the slot of the leader of the opposition, the MMA enabled General Musharraf to get a 2/3rd majority to amend the constitution and remain army chief. This time round, however, the MMA wants to get rid of General Musharraf for various reasons – “he is an American puppet, he has amended the Hudood Ordinances, he is revising the textbooks to remove notions of jihad, etc”.
Therefore the only way out for General Musharraf is to charter a course based on four nodes. One, split the MMA so that the JUI stays on his right side while the fiery Jamaat Islami is exiled to the wilderness. Two, split the ARD so that the PPP is persuaded to live and let live with him while PMLN is sidelined along with the JI. Third, crack the whip and get the PMLQ to set its house in order by accommodating the Forward Group. Fourth, activate the ISI, MI, IB and Rangers to safely “deliver” the next general elections after suitable political “deals” with the PPP and JUI have been clinched. In exchange for supporting General Musharraf’s bid for president and army chief, a bunch of carrots can be offered to the PPP and the JUI, including coalition governments in three provinces and possibly even prime ministership to Benazir Bhutto a few years after the elections .
Will the PPP and JUI bite? If they do, we can be assured of stability and continuity. But if they don’t, the compulsion to rig the elections blatantly is bound to provoke a major boycott by the ARD. In the event, we may face the spectre of martial law or political anarchy all over again in 2008.
(January 19-25, 2007, Vol – XVIII, No. 48 – Editorial)
Two options for Pak military
Until recently, US-Pak relations were hunky-dory. But a question mark has just cropped up. President Bush’s “democracy” project in Iraq has crashed. Worse, his “nation-building” project in Afghanistan has stalled at the hands of resurgent Taliban. Consequently, his ratings have plunged and he desperately wants to show some good results. So he is rushing 22000 additional troops to Iraq and considering the same option for Afghanistan. But there’s a difference. In Baghdad, he has only himself to blame for his woes while in Afghanistan he is inclined to blame Islamabad because the Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists are operating from borderland sanctuaries in Pakistan.
The “Taliban problem” in Afghanistan has resurfaced in 2006 with a bang. In 2003-04, the Americans prodded General Pervez Musharraf to use the Pakistan army to crush them in Waziristan. But the army’s high losses, followed by a popular backlash, forced it to opt for dubious “peace deals” to maintain the status quo in 2006. But when the Taliban launched a wave of ferocious attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan, Washington’s patience ran out. Shorn of additional NATO troops and expecting a renewed Taliban offensive later this year, President Bush wants General Musharraf to “do more” to clamp down while he sends more troops to defend Kabul. A “hearts and minds” project is also underway simultaneously – there is more US money for “rehabilitation and development schemes” in Waziristan and “reconstruction” in Afghanistan.
Until now the US has nudged the international media to accuse Pakistan of “hosting” the Taliban. It has also played “good cop” in Islamabad who praises General Musharraf and bad cop in Kabul who clucks sympathetically with President Hamid Karzai when he blasts Pakistan. But that “soft” approach may be changing. Recent statements by top US officials and generals claiming that Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders are holed out in sanctuaries inside Pakistan are meant to signal that if Pakistan doesn’t stop the Taliban then America will conduct pre-emptive strikes against them inside Pakistan.
Islamabad’s ambiguous response lacks credibility. It denies Taliban and Al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan but cracks down on foreign or Pakistani journalists who try to verify its claim. It has signed “peace deals” with Talibanised elements in the tribal areas but is not averse to occasionally rocketing them at American insistence. Last week, two such “strikes” were carried out. This approach is wearing thin. The Americans are not appeased while the local tribal backlash against the Americans, General Musharraf and the Pakistan Army is spilling over into the rest of the country. Why is General Musharraf clinging to this “failing strategy” which is alienating his international friends without diminishing the hatred of extremists for him?
The answer lies in a national security doctrine long nourished by the Pakistan’s military intelligence agencies. It says that (1) Afghanistan must not be allowed to fall into the hands of pro-India elements, like the Northern Alliance Uzbek-Tajik ethnic combine (2) It should therefore be dominated by pro-Pakistan Pakhtuns who have historically straddled both Pakistan and Afghanistan (3) These Pakhtuns should not be secular, or pro-Russia or pro-India like earlier Pakhtun regimes until 1990 and the current Karzai regime (4) The Islamic Pakhtun Taliban should be supported as the least objectionable option. It is this doctrine that has spawned sectarian violence and fundamentalism in Pakistan and enabled Al Qaeda to take root in Afghanistan. In short, it is the Pakistan military’s obsession with India on its eastern border that is at the root of its Afghanistan policies on its western border.
Until now, the price of this doctrine was paid by Pakistanis because the military is all powerful and unaccountable. But the Al-Qaeda-Taliban nexus has sucked the US into the region and pitted the Pakistani military’s regional interests against the American military-industrial complex’s global ambitions. The Pakistani military’s assessment is that the Americans have no long term staying power in the region, as demonstrated by their impending retreat from Iraq, and that Pakistan is sure to rebound as the key player in Afghanistan, hence the need to retain its Taliban assets.
This means that Mush-Bush interests may diverge in 2007-8. Mr Bush wants an outright “victory” over the Taliban while Mr Musharraf means to deny him exactly that. Meanwhile, anti-Americanism is growing in Pakistan and the political opposition is ready to exploit any opportunity to weaken the Musharraf regime. We should therefore expect a chorus of foreign and local calls for “democracy” and taming of the Pak army by Democrats and Republicans alike.
There are two options. The Pakistan military establishment can continue to play devious “power games” at home and abroad, deepen ethnic and religious fissures in the country, demean and weaken the democratic impulse of the people and lead Pakistan into isolation and despair. Or it can bury its obsession with India, allow Afghanistan to acquire an autonomous, moderate, pro-West centre of gravity, focus on rolling back the tide of religious extremism and build a stable and sustainable economy.
(January 26-February 1, 2007, Vol – XVIII, No. 49 – Editorial)
Musharraf’s bold experiment
President General Pervez Musharraf has come along way in mending fences with India and taking a fresh look at how to resolve the Kashmir dispute. He should be supported in his endeavours by all peace loving people in India, Pakistan and Kashmir.
In 1999 General Musharraf actively sabotaged Nawaz Sharif’s peace initiative with India at Kargil. Indeed, even after the coup he was still talking tough about how he wouldn’t even sit with India until it was ready to put the “core issue of Kashmir” squarely on the table and resolve it to Pakistan’s satisfaction. In fact, he walked out of Agra in a huff in June 2001 when India countered his demand for core issue Kashmir discussions by putting its own core issue of “cross-border infiltration” on the agenda. Then, following jihadi attacks on the Indian parliament in December 2001, India moved its army to the border and threatened hot pursuit, preemptive strikes and war.
In 2003 General Musharraf finally about-turned, promised to stop the export of jihad to Kashmir and India, and persuaded the Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, to reopen a dialogue. The even more remarkable thing is that he has managed to keep that initiative on the tracks for over three years despite a change of guard in India and continuing provocations from vested interests in both countries which want to derail it. While credit must be given to two Indian prime ministers for risking a change in the status quo, the fact remains that it is General Musharraf whose bold “out-of-the-box” thinking on Kashmir has fired the imagination of people everywhere – at home, next door in India and in capitals aboard.
There are two types of oppositionists to General Musharraf in India and Pakistan. There are those in India who ask why they should “trust” the “mastermind of Kargil” to smoke the peace pipe. The correct response to these Doubting Thomases is simple. Of course, India shouldn’t “trust” Musharraf’s Pakistan. But equally, why should Pakistan “trust” Congress’ India? The list of each other’s grievances against the other is unending. What’s more, what has “trust” got to do with relations between states? It is conventional wisdom that mundane, hard-nosed interests rather than friendship or some such sentiments govern relations between states. And as far as trust is concerned, isn’t it India’s long held view that a degree of confidence has to be established between the two by resolving “other” non-core issues before Kashmir can be tackled? Isn’t that exactly what General Musharraf is now doing when he exhorts India to put Siachin, Sir Creek and Baghliar behind as quickly as possible?
Others in India are irked by the fact that General Musharraf has gone public with his proposals. But this is misplaced concreteness. These options have been aired ad-nauseam via back-channels for four years now, without a satisfactory response from India. So, in a fit of desperation, General Musharraf has gone public, with wonderful results. There is a growing corpus of informed opinion in both countries that these proposals merit serious consideration. Indeed, for the first time in history, public opinion in India is nudging the Indian establishment to respond positively.
In Pakistan, the opposition comes from die-hard old-timers who refuse to bury the hatchet with India for “strategic” reasons or from those “tacticians” who argue that General Musharraf should not have publicly abandoned old positions (like the UN resolution for a plebiscite) unilaterally. But the “strategists” should be discarded because their strategy has brought only misery to Pakistan and Kashmir without significantly hurting or thwarting India. Equally, the “tacticians” should be ignored because General Musharraf’s strategy has in fact won over public opinion in India and across the world and objectively nudged the Kashmir issue closer to resolution than at any time since the Partition.
The newest move in this direction follows an ongoing visit to Pakistan by the moderate leaders of the All Parties Hurriyet Conference in Indian-held Kashmir. The APHC has wisely endorsed General Musharraf approach without necessarily concurring with its details. But more significantly, in an unprecedented statement, Mir Waiz Umar Farooq, the leader, has called for an abandonment of jihad and violence in Kashmir as a weapon of struggle for the rights of Kashmiris. This has provoked both condemnation and sympathy in Srinagar. The hardliners are outraged by this “unilateralism”, especially since they believe that the gun had a role to play in bringing India round to talking about Kashmir. But this critique, too, is passé. The APHC’s new stance bolsters the peace agenda and puts greater public pressure on the Indian establishment to get out of its old groove and respond positively. It also lays the basis of a larger consensus with the other Kashmiri parties ruling in Srinager who have distanced themselves from New Delhi by agitating for maximum autonomy and self-governance.
The ball is in India’s court. It should build confidence by quickly resolving Siachin, which is most do-able, followed by Baghliar and Sir Creek. It should also encourage all the moderate Kashmiri groups to forge unity and tie them into the India-Pakistan dialogue, thereby isolating and diminishing extremists and cynics on both sides.
(February 2-8, 2007, Vol – XVIII, No. 50 – Editorial)
A scary scenario
A wave of suicide-bombers is threatening to engulf Pakistan. They are attacking Shia personalities and congregations, state security forces and even foreigner-occupied hotels. Last week, there were three such attacks, one in Islamabad against a five star hotel, one in DI Khan against a Shia imambargah and one in Peshawar against a police contingent guarding a Shia procession. More are expected since hundreds of young men in the tribal and rural areas are being readied for such attacks.
There is nothing new about sectarianism in Pakistan. But in recent years, it has spread to Jhang, Quetta, Bannu, Kohat, Gilgit, Karachi, DI Khan, Peshawar and even Multan in south Punjab. The interesting factor is that there are significant clusters of Shia minority communities in all these cities along with aggressive Deobandi seminaries. For instance, DI Khan is the hometown of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the head of the JUI whose Deobandi seminaries filled the ranks of the Taliban in 1996.
That means there is a common thread linking the suicide-bombers to terrorism. They are anti-Musharraf, anti-America and anti-Shia. They are anti-Musharraf and anti-America because President Musharraf and President Bush are jointly conducting the war against Al Qaeda while NATO forces are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. So they must belong, or be linked, to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. They are anti-Shia. So they must belong to hard core Sunni groups and parties like the Lashkar Jhangvi and the Taliban, whose attacks on the Hazaras in Afghanistan and in Quetta prove this point. They have the capacity to strike in both rural and urban areas. So they must comprise tribal, peasant and urbanized cadres and activists. This establishes a link with Sunni jihadi organizations which are both anti-India and anti-America. The Arab connection comes via Al-Qaeda, the Pakhtun connection comes via the Taliban and the Punjab connection comes via the Jihadis. In short, Islamic radicals – Mujahidin, Jihadis, Al-Qaeda, Taliban and Sunni sectarianists – have all joined hands to wage war against America, India and all “infidels” and their puppets in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But there is a significant development underway in the Middle-East which is complicating matters. Sunni extremists who represent a minority in Iraq have joined forces with Al-Qaeda to attack US troops propping up a majority Shia-dominated Iraqi government. But because the Shias of Iraq have a political alliance with the US, the Sunni-Al-Qaeda nexus has begun to attack the Shias too. Thus Iraq is in the throes of a civil war that is sectarian and “nationalist” at the same time.
The entry of Shia Iran into the equation is creating greater difficulties. The US wants to cut Iran down to size for three reasons. First, its anti-US regime has a budding nuclear program that threatens Israel and Sunni states like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain and the Gulf Emirates. In many, there are large oil deposits in the Shia areas. Second, Iran is fueling the resurgence of the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, both of which threaten Israeli interests. Third, Iran is also staking a claim for the longer term loyalties of the Shia of Iraq. We are thus confronted with a string of political paradoxes: The US is anti-Shia Iran but pro-Shia in Iraq. The Iraqi Sunnis are anti-US just as the Middle East Sunnis are anti-US. But Middle East Sunni regimes are pro-US just as the Iraqi-Shia regime is pro-US. In Afghanistan, the majority Sunni-Pakhtuns are anti-US. In Pakistan there is a wave of Sunni-anti-Americanism even as the Musharraf regime is solidly pro-US.
Further complications will arise if there is an American attack on Iran or quick withdrawal from Iraq. An attack against Iran will lead to a worldwide militant Shia backlash against America. It would also pit the Shia of Iraq against America, hasten an American exit and invite hard line Sunni Saudi and Shia Iranian intervention in Iraq. Therefore the Sunnis and Shias will fight each other and America at the same time in the Middle East, Afghanistan and in Pakistan. One direct blowback of this will be a Sunni Islamic resurgence everywhere against pro-America regimes in the Muslim world. Indeed, in Pakistan this could provoke state suppression of majoritarian electoral democracy, repression of militancy and suspension of human and fundamental rights, as in Algeria, Egypt and much of the Arab world.
It is a scary scenario. But Pakistan can reasonably extricate itself from this global mess by taking some important steps. General Musharraf must start by swiftly democratizing the political process and bringing mainstream, moderate and secular sub-nationalist parties into the power loop in order to create a national consensus against extremism and sectarianism. Then he must facilitate this “national power” to roll back extremist political Islam through sustained economic development, poverty alleviation, curricula revision and legal developments. Most critically, he must de-link the militarized Pakistani state from all radical and religious ideologies and forego foreign adventures through Islamic proxies like the jihadis and Taliban. Finally, he must build peace in the region by burying the hatchet with India and Afghanistan so that Pakistan is not dependent on American support for political survival and economic growth.
(February 9-15, 2007, Vol – XVIII, No. 51 – Editorial)
Islamic extremism, law and nation-state
The Capital Development Authority in Islamabad recently woke up to the fact that nearly 80 mosques have encroached on land or been built without the CDA’s permission, and are therefore “illegal”. Consequently, after eviction notices were blithely ignored, the CDA moved to demolish a couple of these encroachments according to the law of the land. In the event, however, it has only managed to stir a hornets’ nest of Islamic militancy.
The fanatical mullahs of Lal Masjid and the students of Jamia Hafza Madrassa for women next to the Masjid are at the core of the protest. The Masjid and the Madrassa are led by two brothers who regularly vent venom at President General Pervez Musharraf for being an “agent of America”. On 22rd January, in protest against the CDA’s demolition of one mosque in Islamabad, the mullahs of the Masjid instigated a group of baton wielding female students of the Madrassa to “seize” and “occupy” a children’s library next to the mosque. When the authorities moved to reoccupy the library, the fiery khatib of the mosque publicly vowed to raise a batch of suicide bombers to resist the state. If the administration’s patience runs out, the situation could get messy.
This episode raises questions of law, state and religion. It suggests that many extremist mullahs do not accept the notion of the “writ of the nation-state” and the laws of the land promulgated by parliaments and constitutions if, in their view, these are in conflict with their notions of Islamic law and life. Indeed, by their very definition and logic, not just Pakistan but the whole world belongs to Allah and they (the mullahs) have a right to build mosques (houses of Allah) wherever they like, regardless of the laws relating to land and property. Indeed, such thinking may extend to the use of force to claim these “above-the-law-rights”. This approach makes nonsense of the idea of modern constitutional law and challenges the notion of the state as the sole repository of authority to enforce the law. In fact, the tactic of suicide bombing is a devastating device against the notion of deterrence or punishment for breaking the law on which the whole edifice of the modern state is constructed.
This situation is complicated by another form of protest by religious extremists against alleged state encroachment on their “democratic” and “human” rights. Those who don’t accept the notion of “peoples democracy” as opposed to “Allah’s democracy” (Islamic state) are ready to clutch at the props of the same peoples democracy (rule of law, due process, judicial accountability and independence, etc) for survival and sustenance that they are committed to overthrowing. In short, the extremist mullahs seek to exploit the freedoms of liberal democracy to overthrow it and replace it by their dictatorship in the name of religion.
There is a complex development underway in Pakistan in which Al-Qaeda, Taliban, jihadi and sunni sectarian elements are all being stirred in a red hot crucible. Notions of national state interest have been sacrificed at the altar of global jihad for the greater glory of Islam.That is why General Musharraf has become the “enemy” because he seeks to put a lid on jihad (against “foreign infidels” in general and “Indian and American infidels” in particular) because it undermines the national interest of the Pakistani nation-state. Indeed, the very philosophy that jihad can only be sanctioned by the state in its national interest has been overtaken by the notion that jihad can be sanctioned by the private sector especially when the state is a non-Islamic one and the objective of jihad is a global revival and resurgence of Islam. The fatwas of various Islamic luminaries from Osama bin Laden to the top khatibs in the “holy land” testify to this innovation.
Much the same may be said of the latest weapon of suicide bombing. It was Yusuf Qardawi, the leading Islamic jurist of our time living in Qatar, who first issued a fatwa legitimizing suicide-bombing in the cause of Islam against injustice. His objective was to condone and even legitimize the suicide-bombing campaign by young Al-Qaedaists in the West against American and British targets despite the fact that innocent fellow Muslims were also killed in the act. The blowback from such ideas has taken its toll in Pakistan too: a former judge of the Appellate (Islamic) Branch of the Supreme Court of Pakistan who has been attacking President Musharraf on private TV networks is influenced by such new and radical ideas, as is the khatib of Lal Masjid who threatened resistance by suicide bombing if his demands were not met.
The Pakistani nation and state is therefore faced with a new and dangerous threat that represents a violent minority which seeks to exploit the values of liberal democracy to undermine majoritarian democracy. This threat cannot be thwarted by military means alone. The nation and the state will have to demonstrate a broad democratic mainstream moderate consensus to tackle their common enemy by political, legal and economic means. This is not just General Musharraf’s war. It is every patriotic Pakistani’s war who wants to protect and defend this nation.
(February 16-22, 2007, Vol – XVIII, No. 52 – Editorial)
Mountains out of molehills
The World Bank’s “neutral expert” has determined that India has a right to build the Baglihar Dam and that its design is, in principle, fine. However, as a concession to Pakistan, he has said that the dam’s spillways need to be lower by about 1.5 metres and the capacity of the reservoir should be about 5 million cubic metres less than that planned by India. This is a remarkably insignificant finding, given that the dispute has simmered for years and provoked much passion on both sides. Equally interesting are claims made by each country’s spin doctors that its stand has been vindicated. Indeed, the “expert” was forbidden from holding a press conference and answering “nationalist” queries because each side wanted to feed its own media a suitably doctored version of its victory. In the event, the media on both sides have obliged their respective states and each has claimed victory for itself. There are two conclusions that we can draw from this episode.
The first conclusion is that, excluding the dispute over Kashmir, India and Pakistan are inclined to make mountains out of the molehills of their “outstanding disputes”. Surely, if both had sincerely wanted to resolve the dispute over Baglihar swiftly instead of dragging the issue and scoring childish bureaucratic points, there would not have been any need for a neutral foreign expert. In fact, in this case, it turns out that Pakistan was being unnecessarily suspicious of India’s “intentions”, despite the fact that India has never tried to squeeze Pakistan’s water lifeline even during time of war and conflict.
Much the same can be said of the dispute over Siachin. Both sides agreed in 1989 to pull back to pre-1984 positions but India has not yet signed on the dotted line. The matter is pending the settlement of the legal status of India’s current troop positions, which is ridiculous if the status of the glacier itself is clear. Indeed, if Pakistan’s intentions are noble, it shouldn’t matter if India’s stance on annotating its troop positions is accepted. Equally, India shouldn’t peg its be-all and end-all on its troop positions if it sincerely wants to mend fences with Pakistan – after all, it was guilty in the first place of changing the status quo unilaterally in 1984. This rigidity on both sides is in sharp contrast to their flexibility in settling border disputes with China.
The problem of attitude demonstrated by the civil-military bureaucracies of both countries is also reflected in the media of both countries which are inclined to trip over themselves in being “patriotic” – the “my country right or wrong” syndrome is still alive and kicking, the biased press commentary on Baglihar being only the latest manifestation of this malaise of “tailism” in foreign policy and “national security” issues. In 1989, the Pakistani media was egged on by the civil-military establishment to hound Benazir Bhutto when she tried to make peace with India. In 1997, the Indian media forced IK Gujral to retreat from opening discussions on Kashmir. In 1998 the Indian media was overjoyed with India’s nuclear tests and challenged Pakistan to follow suit. In 1999, the Indian media pushed Mr Vajpayee’s bus all the way to Wagah but was later quick to embed itself with the Indian army in Kargil and bay for Pakistan’s blood. In 2001, the Pakistani media bucked up General Musharraf when he walked out of Agra in a huff but in 2003 both media “tailed” their governments in advocating cricket diplomacy. Recently, the Indian media played a particularly nasty one-sided role at the behest of the security agencies in the case of Afzal Guru, the former Kashmiri militant who is on death row because of an unfair and rigged trial. And so it goes on.
Under the circumstances, one of the central recommendations of a recent SAARC editors conference in New Delhi merits attention if the peace dialogue is to yield any lasting dividends. “It calls upon journalists and media organizations in the SAARC countries to maintain their independence and keep a healthy and critical professional distance from their foreign policy, security and other official establishments as well as from vested interests of any kind, so that journalism can play an independent, democratic and progressive role in making inputs into or shaping foreign and other vital national policies”. But in order to take the lead in opinion-formation rather than opinion-confirmation, the media in both countries has to be freed from the ban imposed on travel and reporting in the region.
As matters stand, General Pervez Musharraf has twice publicly announced multiple-entry, non-police reporting country-wide visas for senior accredited journalists from the SAARC countries, including India. But Pakistan’s foreign office is still awaiting a nod from its intelligence agencies. On the other side, the Indians never tire of saying that they are ready to push for greater people-to-people contacts “unilaterally”, yet they too are dragging their feet on SAARC visas for senior journalists. Who will take the first step? Why can’t both countries use the next SAARC summit in April to launch a liberal SAARC visa regime for bonafide media persons, businessmen, traders and artists instead of making mountains out of molehills?
(February 23 – March 01, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 1 – Editorial)
General Musharraf must not hog power
As the government of our enlightened and moderate leader President General Pervez Musharraf forks over large sums of money to rebuild Pakistan’s “image” by lauding the culture and warmth of the great Islamic Republic of Pakistan, here is a slice of cold-blooded reality. Last Tuesday, the Punjab Social Welfare Minister, Zille Huma, was shot dead in broad daylight in Gujranwala by a religious extremist who didn’t approve of the lady’s moderate and enlightened views. The same day, the media reported that religious extremists had beheaded yet another fellow Muslim in Waziristan because they thought he was an American spy. A day earlier, a train carrying Muslim travelers back to Pakistan from Delhi, India, was bombed, killing over 70 people, mostly Pakistanis. Apparently, the killers do not want détente between Pakistan and India and are angry that Pakistan under General Musharraf has abandoned the cause of jihad against the infidel. A couple of weeks earlier, a five star hotel and the VIP lounge of an international airport were targeted by religiously motivated suicide bombers whose message is: foreign infidel trash stay out. Around the same time, religious extremists suicide-bombed a police contingent guarding a Shia procession in Peshawar and a courtroom in Quetta, killing dozens.
These are not insignificant stray incidents. The religious extremist who killed Zille Huma has already killed many women because of their alleged moral laxity. Ms Huma was targeted because she was keen on promoting sporting activity – marathon walks – for the girls of Gujranwala. The killer had gone scot-free because the state is isolated in the face of bigots. Those who kill Muslim American “spies” in Waziristan are Taliban who like to smash and burn down TV-video shops. The suicide bombers who attacked the hotel and airport want to turn Pakistan into another Talibanised Afghanistan. The state’s capitulation was especially significant when religious extremists recently held a “children’s library” hostage in Islamabad for over two weeks. The only ones who get the boot in the face are the stupid “liberals” because they espouse peaceful and democratic values of protest.
General Pervez Musharraf claims that he wants to be army chief and president of Pakistan, which two offices are the fount of his ultimate power, because he has to attend to unfinished business relating to National Security (peace process with India, the war against terror, religious extremism in Pakistan) and countering the insurgency in Balochistan and Talibanism in Waziristan. This is a profoundly significant statement full of historical irony. His predecessor General Zia ul Haq was both army chief and president of Pakistan when he unleashed policies in the 1980s that eventually led to the creation and rise of militant Islam in the region, especially in Pakistan, including the birth of the Taliban and the rise of militant jihad as a state weapon in the conflict with India. So if the military establishment under General Musharraf has now seen the error of its ways in the past, it must be lauded for its realism and wisdom. Nonetheless, it is still pertinent to ask whether the prescription for injecting militant Islam into the body politic of Pakistan – being army chief and president at the same time – is the same for expunging it from the nation’s blood stream.
General Musharraf has had seven years to change the direction of Pakistan and ensure that there is no sliding back. But his scorecard is not inspiring. Apart from passing a diluted women’s protection bill and minimal proposals to change hate-filled text books, the issue of militant religious extremism seems to have gone from bad to worse. Indeed, religious violence and intolerance is spiraling out of control and undermining the very notion of a democratic nation-state.
The reason for this is not General Musharraf’s lack to commitment to the project – his sincerity is palpable since he remains the top target of the extremists – but his incapacity to deal with the issue precisely because he is both army chief and president. His presidency rests solely on his military power and does not give him popular legitimacy. And that is where the problem lies.
President General Zia needed military power to make the space for political Islam in Pakistan’s civil society. Subsequently, national security establishments retained the threat of military power to empower Islamists. But now that militant Islamists have established political roots among significant sections of the masses, military power alone without popular political power cannot reverse the process. And as long as General Musharraf insists on a strong centralized presidential system of government in which the aspirations of the popular mainstream and moderate parties are denied or thwarted, his project of moderating and enlightening Pakistan will not succeed. The space which the Islamists wish to retain and enlarge can only be won away from them by political parties that have deeper and more enduring roots among the people of Pakistan than the elitist and clinically isolated institution of the army. That is why General Musharraf must not hog power. He should enable the politicians to play their historic role in a democratic system.
(March 2-8, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 2 – Editorial)
Al-Qaeda’s last laugh?
For many months the American administration, backed by the American media and think tanks, has been demanding that Pakistan should “do more” to eliminate the Taliban-Al Qaeda threat to Kabul. Now the demand is also echoing in the select committees of Congress. Indeed, a bill is afloat in Congress which, if passed, would link further American economic and military assistance to Pakistan to a yearly certification by the American president that Pakistan was actively engaged in helping the US fight the war against the Taliban-Al Qaeda. Potentially, if Pakistan doesn’t play ball, this could have the same negative impact on it as the Pressler amendment did in the 1990s when all American aid was cut off following a refusal by Pakistan to freeze, cap and roll back its nuclear programme. In the last five years since 9/11, as a reward for waging the war against terror, Pakistan has received nearly US$10 billion from the US, and another US$1 billion is earmarked for the current year.
Mr Dick Cheney, the US vice president, was the latest in a line of international bigwigs to descend on Islamabad last week and press the same demand. In the last two months, the CIA chief, Robert Gates, and the US Secretary of State, Condi Rice, came to Islamabad with the same message. As if to confirm America’s worst fears, the Taliban left their latest calling card – a suicide bomber – at the gate of the mighty US air force base at Bagram near Kabul shortly after Mr Cheney arrived. Over 20 people were killed, including an American and two foreigners.
Understandably, President Bush is a deeply worried man. His Iraq strategy is in tatters and Afghanistan is unraveling the same way. Britain and his other NATO partners have got cold feet. And the American people want him to “bring the boys home, asap”. Therefore everyone knows that the Bush administration’s bluster of sending more troops into the two theatres of war is running on empty, that it is only a matter of time. Under the circumstances, all the old and new players are already conscious of making adjustments to protect their national interests. And these include Pakistan. Some critical questions arise.
Why has the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated to such an extent? Who is to blame and in what measure? What can be done by each of the players to salvage it now?
Following the rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan by American forces in 2002, and the courageous steps taken by President Musharraf to uproot Al-Qaeda from the urban areas of Pakistan from 2002-03, the situation was ripe for both players to press the advantage home. But America and its NATO allies shirked from injecting the pledged financial resources for nation-building in Afghanistan. Worse, they made opportunist payoffs to the warlords instead of disarming them and building a multi-ethnic Afghan national army. The straw that broke Pakistan’s back was US dependence for state building in Kabul on Tajik and Uzbek elements of the Northern Alliance (NA) that had been in bed with India throughout the 1990s. Tensions between Kabul and Islamabad exacerbated in 2005 when Islamabad began to suspect that India and Afghan intelligence might be involved in fueling the insurgency in Balochistan. That is the time when Pakistan’s military establishment began to have second thoughts about how to deal with Kabul. That is when the strategy of confronting and eliminating rebellious Pakhtun-Taliban elements in FATA was changed into one of trying to making peace “deals” with them and limiting Pakistani casualties. Unfortunately, this “reprieve” has enabled the Taliban to regroup and stage a comeback, and in the process threaten both Kabul and Islamabad. If Washington and Kabul had been more sensitive to long-held Pakistani geo-strategic concerns relating to India and the Pakhtuns, this situation could have been avoided. So where do we go from here?
First, we need to address the question that if America, Europe and India can be legitimate long distance players in Kabul, why not Pakistan which is directly in the firing line of the blowback from Afghanistan? This will require greater Pakistani input into how to cobble a new Afghan political system and state that is adequately represented ethnically and is friendly to Pakistan without being a Talibanised state. Second, America and NATO will have to expend resources in nation-building and on creating stake holders not just in Afghanistan but also in the tribal areas of Pakistan to woo people away from radicalism and extremism. Third, America and the international community will have to actively support the revival of democracy and mainstream politics in Pakistan urgently so that a greater national consensus can be developed on integrating it with the global economy and stopping it from sliding into widespread anti-Americanism, religious extremism and consequent isolation.
If this democratization isn’t accomplished in Pakistan while the moderate and mainstream parties still have roots in the masses, extremist religious groups will fill the vacuum of opposition politics. Should that happen, Pakistan will degenerate like much of the Muslim world, ruled by military-monarchial oligarchies in which the fundamentalists are constantly trying to break down the gates of the failing state. In the event, Al-Qaeda will have the last laugh.
(March 9-15, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 3 – Editorial)
Place your bets!
Most people believe that some sort of a “deal” is inevitable between Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf. Both sides have admitted that they are in “contact” with each other. Newspapers have reported “secret” meetings between their emissaries. At home, Sheikh Rashid, the bete noire of every PPP regime, is betting that Ms Bhutto will sail smoothly from the “quarter finals to the semi-finals and finals”. Abroad, Newsweek magazine says “Bhutto and Musharraf make the perfect match”. Alarmed, the secretary general of the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI-F), Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, has pronounced that under Islam only a male can be prime minister or president of Pakistan (this is the same JUI which allied with the Bhutto regime in 1993-1996 when its head, Maulana Fazal ur Rehman, was appointed chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the National Assembly and given trunk loads of greenbacks to gallivant the globe in the cause of Kashmir)!
Meanwhile, Ms Bhutto and Mr Musharraf continue to spar in public. He says she can never be prime minister again and that she will be arrested if she returns to Pakistan and tried for corruption. She says he cannot be both army chief and president and that she will definitely return to lead her party to victory in the next polls. To cut her down to size, the government is cajoling members of her party, old and new, to switch loyalties and join the PMLQ. To hold her own, she is flirting with the PMLN and MMA, and remains the pivotal force in the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) which has threatened to protest and boycott the polls if they are not free and fair.
The government has now floated a new balloon. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the PMLQ president, has argued that if the regional security situation deteriorates in the run up to the general elections, the government would consider extending the life of the present assemblies by a year or so, which means it might postpone the elections. Mr Babar Ghauri, an MQM federal minister who pretends to be close to the presidency, agrees that this is a good idea. On the heels of these two “expert” opinions, as if to provide grist to the mills, President Musharraf has chosen to make the rather ominous statement that the security of the entire region, including Pakistan, would be greatly destabilized in the event of an American attack on Iran.
However, lest the ARD be unduly alarmed into precipitating a joint anti-Musharraf strategy at this point, the evergreen federal information minister, Mr Mohammad Ali Durrani, has assured everyone that there is no question of the polls being postponed. But we must take Mr Durrani’s glib utterances with a fistful of salt. We recall how, a couple of months ago, he was the first to reveal that the cabinet had concluded that President Musharraf would get re-elected as president from the current assemblies. When there was a backlash from the opposition, he was swift to clarify that the cabinet had merely deliberated on the matter and not concluded anything at all. Later, the same refrain (“the present assemblies were legally entitled to re-elect Presdient Musharraf”) was echoed by Chaudhry Shujaat, and the matter was finally laid to rest last week when President Musharraf admitted that he intended to get re-elected in the current dispensation. Therefore, on the basis of past balloons, it is more than likely that the government has drawn up Plan C (postpone the elections) in the event that Plan A or Plan B are unfeasible.
Plan A is to cobble a strong ruling alliance with everyone except the PPP, PMLN and MMA and try to sweep the elections with a two thirds majority. The heads of the ISI, MI, IB and Rangers have all been parceled responsibility for ensuring “positive results”. But if this seems problematic and is not failsafe, then Plan B may be risked. This entails a “deal” with Ms Bhutto according to the rules of the game set by President Musharraf. Hence “negotiations” with the PPP are to continue until such time that such a deal is not necessary, or is clinched on the government’s terms (power sharing in Sindh and Islamabad with President Musharraf, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Governor Ishrat ul Abad in their respective chairs). Plan C will come into operation in the event that the “agencies” and the PMLQ jointly fail to deliver on both counts and more time is needed to manipulate the main players.
The main players on the other side are not Qazi Hussian Ahmad and Nawaz Sharif but Ms Bhutto and Maulana Fazal. These two have everything to gain from an accommodation with President Musharraf. Ms Bhutto stands to come in from the cold if she plays her cards right and Maulana Fazal fears banishment to the wilderness if he plays his hand wrong. That is why she is not letting the ARD get ahead of the PPP and that is why he is not letting the MMA get ahead of the JUI.
Will she, won’t he? Faites vos jeux , ladies and gentlemen, place your bets!
(March 16-22, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 4 – Editorial)
No win situation
Everybody knows about the shoddy treatment meted out to the chief justice of Pakistan, Mr Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, by this moderate and enlightened government. He was confronted on March 9 by General Pervez Musharraf at his camp HQ and asked to resign. When he refused, he was detained until an acting chief justice was hurriedly sworn in and a Supreme Judicial Council of five judges assembled to “suspend” him for alleged misconduct and misuse of authority. Then he was escorted by the police to his residence, quarantined and deprived of papers, phones, computers and television. The “agencies” confiscated his papers and files. Earlier, the second senior-most supreme court judge, Mr Rana Bhagwandas, suddenly decided to leave on a foreign trip after a meeting with General Musharraf, fueling speculation that he had refused to participate in the conspiracy to oust Mr Chaudhry. As if to stamp its authority on the judicial proceedings, the government released a picture of General Musharraf in full khaki regalia lording it over the chief justice in judicial black.
In the event, the exercise has backfired. Pakistanis are outraged by that obnoxious picture and the subsequent handling of the chief justice. Mr Chaudhry is riding a wave of hostility to an unaccountable and arrogant military-dominated government rather than being a recipient of great personal sympathy. The SJC is also likely to be measured by the same yardstick of subservience to the military.
Two major questions arise. Why does General Musharraf’s establishment want to get rid of Mr Chaudhry? What will happen if this conspiracy succeeds or fails?
Mr Chaudhry, unlike his not-so-illustrious predecessors, has been stepping on the toes of the establishment for many months now. He shot down the New Murree scheme and Basant so beloved of the Punjab chief minister. He overruled the privatization of the Pakistan Steel Mills so beloved of the prime minister. He dragged senior police officers and bureaucrats to Islamabad and castigated them for spurning the rights of the poor and exploited. He stopped avaricious property sharks and conniving officials from turning public parks into golf courses or commercial centers for the rich. He ticked off factory owners for tearing up the environment laws of the country. He stopped sham educationists from setting up sub-standard medical universities. He took “suo moto” notice of thousands of everyday social and economic injustices against the downtrodden. But his worst crime was his insistence on enforcing the writ of habeas corpus in favour of hundreds of persons who had been abducted by the secret agencies of the military and confined without due process of law. Indeed, under his stewardship, the supreme court veritably became a custodian of human and fundamental rights as enshrined in the constitution. This was anathema to the establishment which has got used to its unaccountable and domineering status. But that is not the only reason why he had to go.
The country is heading into a period of constitutional crisis and political instability in view of General Musharraf’s stated objectives. These are: (1) re-election as president for another five years by the current parliament rather than a new one (2) remaining both army chief and president (3) holding the next general elections (4) winning them by a sufficiently large margin via suitable constitutional and political engineering of interim administrations, election commissions, and electoral rules barring leading opposition politicians. In this situation, a compliant rather than an independent chief justice will be the need of the hour. But Mr Chaudhry, increasingly, was perceived to be slipping out of the role earmarked for him. So he had to go now rather than later when he would be at the centre of a constitutional storm over General Musharraf’s attempt to achieve his objectives.
General Musharraf was advised that Mr Chaudhry was widely disliked by the bar and bench because he was rude and whimsical. It was thought he would crumble and resign when threatened with sacking by a SJC of peers who disliked him for personal reasons. And if he didn’t, the SJC would swiftly put paid to him, thereby clearing the path for a pliant successor. But his advisors failed to reckon with the growing disenchantment of the public with this government and the popular need, given the forced exile of the country’s top political leaders, for credible heroes to resist the military’s arrogant encroachment into the civilian domain. So where does General Musharraf go from here?
Round one has gone to Mr Chaudhry. With the public, bar and media solidly behind him, the SJC’s credibility and independence is going to be tested. If it sacks him, it will be seen as a puppet of the military and lose credibility. In the event, the judiciary will be emasculated and fail to provide succour to General Musharraf when he needs it most to bolster his legitimacy. But if the SJC restores him as CJP, he is likely to become a rigid obstacle in General Musharraf’s path. In both cases, instability and deadlock will ensue, compelling General Musharraf to resort to drastic action to try and prolong his rule. In the long run, it is a no win situation unless the general is prepared to share power and abide by the constitution.
(March 23-29, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 5 – Editorial)
How extraordinary!
Last week was extraordinary, even by Pakistani standards. The chief justice of Pakistan was detained in the army chief’s camp office in Rawalpindi for five hours, an acting chief justice was hurriedly sworn in and a supreme judicial council swiftly suspended the CJP. Then he was “house arrested”. The next day, he was manhandled by the police. How extraordinary! Never before has a CJ of the Supreme Court been treated in this way.
The media received unremitting press “advice” to play down the CJP’s case. When Geo Television didn’t comply, its offices were attacked by the police in broad daylight. How extraordinary! Never before has a media outlet been ransacked in this way by the government.
The protesting lawyers soon got the rough end of the stick too. Clashes were provoked when police rammed an armoured carrier through the gates of the Lahore High Court and fired tear gas shells into the premises. How extraordinary! Never before has the police dared to transgress the courts to attack lawyers in this way.
The leader of the ruling party, foreign minister and railways minister all suggested that the cabinet was not in the loop regarding these developments. Government functionaries slunk away in dejection, despair and shame. How extraordinary! Never before have such high profile ministers distanced themselves from their government’s policy.
General Pervez Musharraf has offered a public “apology” to the media. He has also claimed a “conspiracy” against the government within the government. How extraordinary! Never before has any president ever admitted to a conspiracy within a conspiracy in government.
General Musharraf has tried to defend the indefensible but made a hash of things in an interview. How extraordinary! Never before has General Musharraf seemed so shallow and vulnerable as he did on screen that day.
The Pakistan cricket team lost to Ireland and was knocked out of the World Cup. How extraordinary! Never before has the Pakistan cricket team failed to make it into the super eight round.
Angry cricket fans have protested and burnt effigies of the cricket captain, Inzamamul Haq, and the coach, Bob Woolmer. But Inzi has retired from one day cricket and captaincy of the team. How extraordinary! Never before has a cricketing captain admitted personal failure and atoned for it by resigning.
Mr Woolmer was stricken with a heart attack and has passed away, transforming brickbats into bouquets overnight. How extraordinary! Never before has a foreign coach taken defeat to heart so badly and paid for it with his life. The chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board and his team of selectors have all resigned. How extraordinary! Never before has any chairman of the PCB or the entire selection committee voluntarily accepted responsibility for any debacle and left office.
A judge of the Lahore high court, a deputy attorney general and several civil judges have quit the service in protest at the treatment meted out to the CJP. How extraordinary! Never before has a pang of conscience exacted so many casualties on the bench.
Lawyers are protesting across the party political divide. But the opposition political parties are divided and have failed to light a prairie fire from the sparks of last week. How extraordinary! Never before has the Musharraf government been so weak and never before has the opposition been so lackluster as now.
There are conclusions to be drawn from this chain of extraordinary events. First, the unprecedented resistance of Iftikhar M Chaudhry to state pressure shall stand the judiciary in good stead in time to come. As long as judges are not corrupt, no executive in the future dare trample over them as in the past. Similarly, the bar and bench have shown unprecedented unity in defense of their institutional rights without party-politicising or personalizing the issue. This should put the fear of God in the hearts of wannabe autocrats. All this is good for building and strengthening the justice-pillar of a democratic state.
Second, the media has not buckled under physical executive pressure. This denotes the coming of age of the press which took its first lessons in the art of resistance against the Nawaz Sharif regime in 1999. This is good for building the accountability-pillar of a democratic state.
Third, the defeat of the Pakistan cricket team proves that religion and outward notions of piety like beards cannot substitute for professionalism, training, competence, tactics and strategy. This lesson will be good for fashioning a new team with a new image that does the country proud.
Fourth, the wholesale resignations associated with the events of last week show that notions of responsibility and culpability are finally taking root in civil society. These are a measure of civilized behaviour that should be emulated. Fifth, governments should realize that they are not here forever, that power can slip away without warning, that arrogance and unaccountability cannot endure.
Finally, President General Pervez Musharraf should read the writing on the wall. He cannot have his way over all the people all the time. He should start the process of sharing power and building a national consensus based on constitutional and democratic norms of behaviour.
(March 30-5, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 6 – Editorial)
The more things change …
There’s never a dull moment in Pakistan. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Who killed Bob Woolmer? Why is Pakistani cricket dogged with controversy? How can it be revived after plumbing such depths? Will the CJP, Iftikhar Chaudhry, be “restored” by the Supreme Judicial Council under Justice Rana Bhagwandas? How will a “restoration” or “sacking” of the CJP impact on President General Pervez Musharraf and the judiciary and what will be its consequences for dictatorship and democracy? Will elections be held this year or postponed? Will General Musharraf be both army chief and president next year? Will Benazir Bhutto return to Pakistan and lead her party in the elections?
Cricket is both the love and bane of our life. Our favourite heroes are true villains. Bouquets were reserved for Inzamam-ul-haque. Now he will get brickbats. Many said Bob Woolmer and his mysterious laptop were “useless” fixtures. Now everyone is praying for his ghairatmand soul. The PCB chairman Nasim Ashraf had resigned. Now he’s back in the saddle. The former PCB chairman Tauqir Zia had returned to the pavilion. Now he’s all padded up again. Thank God former manager Zaheer Abbas wasn’t on this tour obsessed with his mobile phone. Now it’s PJ Mir whose fat’s in the fire. Shoaib and Asif rued the day they took some drugs. Now they’re thanking the Almighty they weren’t on this tour. The proliferating beards denoted unity, faith and motivation. Now they’re cause for fingerprinting and DNA testing. All the “oldie goldie” cricketers who were in with the PCB have been shunted out and all who were out are shoving to get in. Will an inquiry be held? Yes. What lessons will be learnt? None. And if Mr Woolmer’s murder should come to be linked to any Pakistani cricketers or their halal meat suppliers or Tableeghi faith inspirers or ever-friendly bookies, then Allah truly have mercy on us. But the Pakistan team had a good time in the Caribbean. The players laid into halal Alu Gosht until midnight and prayed till sunrise.
Meanwhile, the CJP affair is taking a predictable course. The defence lawyers want to bombard the SJC with petitions and prolong the trial so that they can extract dramatic public mileage from it. Curiously enough, the government is also keen to stretch the case, but only in order to defuse the situation on the street. The longer it plays out, the greater the chances that the protesting lawyers will sputter out. Significantly, however, the CJP’s aim is to publicise the trial because popular sentiment is in his favour while the government’s objective is to “judicialize” it because most judges in the apex court have an axe to grind against him. Hence the CJP’s readiness to address Bar associations across the country and General Musharraf’s exhortations not to politicize the case.
If the SJC under Justice Rana Bhagwandas is reconstituted as demanded by the CJP and restores him, the judiciary will have acquitted itself well in the public eye. But this CJP doesn’t have much support or sympathy among fellow judges in the Supreme Court. He would be a lame duck captain whose teammates are likely to gang up and thwart him at every stage at the behest of the executive, as the former CJP Sajjad Ali Shah’s case testifies. So the government’s mission of neutralizing him can be achieved by other means. If the CJP is sacked, however, the government and the judiciary will both lose credibility, thereby casting a deep shadow over the fate of the constitutional writs that are bound to fly as we confront the elections and General Musharraf’s bid to retain both jobs as army chief and president. Needless to say, the government’s short term objectives can all be met by prolonging his suspension and trial and getting his colleagues to swiftly dispose off troublesome petitions in favour of the government. Thus it can be argued that regardless of whether he is sacked or restored, the CJP is already in the throes of becoming history.
The political parties sense this and are making adjustments accordingly. The protest demonstrations so far have been loud on rhetoric but short on passion and numbers. The PPP and ANP are already in the loop with General Musharraf and don’t want to rock his boat unduly. They have been out in the cold for a long time and have much to gain by post-election power-sharing deals with him. The JUI, too, retains a vested interest in him. Its popularity has dwindled in the NWFP and Balochistan and it can return to government only by seat-adjustments and power sharing with the PMLQ. The Jamaat i Islami too will need help from the PMLQ to bag some seats in provincial and federal parliaments. So the opposition parties have decided that if they can’t lick General Musharraf then they had better learn to live with him until at least the elections are over.
Never a dull moment in Pakistan. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
(April 6-12, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 7 – Editorial)
Shadow boxing
The incendiary exploits of two brothers Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Maulana Abdul Aziz who manage the Lal Masjid (LM), the Jamia Faridia (JF) and the Jamia Hafsa Madrassah (JHM) for women in Islamabad – which are guarded by AK-47 toting talibs – have raised the hackles of civil society organizations and the media. They openly support Osama bin Laden, espouse extremist versions of Islam and are ready to wage jihad for the enforcement of shariah in Pakistan. Equally significantly, however, the administration’s kid-gloved response has provoked serious questions about its role in “handling” the matter.
The LM-JHM complex has become the self-avowed epicenter of religious militancy in Islamabad. In August 2004, police discovered a couple of rockets in the trunk of a car belonging to one of the brothers, compelling Islamabad’s Inspector General of Police to order his arrest. But the order was withdrawn and the IGP was transferred after the religious affairs minister, Ejaz ul Haq, dissuaded the government from digging deeper into the matter. In 2005, several Al-Qaeda terrorists with connections to the LM-JHM complex were arrested. But no further investigations were launched into its operations and objectives. Two months ago, head-to-toe niqab clad women students of JHM brandishing batons “seized” a children’s library adjacent to the LM to protest the demolition of some illegally built mosques and madrassahs by the Capital Development Authority (CDA) in Islamabad. Nothing has been done to date to “free” the wretched library. Once again, Ejaz ul Haq has bailed out the brothers by written assurances that the government will reconstruct the demolished mosques and no illegal mosques will be demolished without their approval.
Last week, hooded vigilantes of the “vice and virtue” department of the JHM closed down an alleged brothel in Rawalpindi and kidnapped three women. The administration detained four teachers of the JHM but the “girls” hit back by kidnapping two policemen. Worse, the JHM has threatened to close down video and music shops in the twin cities, echoing similar demands by the Taliban of FATA and NWFP in recent months. But the government is still wringing its hands in feigned despair.
On each occasion, the administration’s response has seemed inexplicable. The LM-JHM complex was not carefully combed for weapons caches and its activities were never seriously monitored. Indeed, when the brothers decided to encroach on land belonging to the ministry of education next to the children’s library in 1999 to build the JHM in 2002, there wasn’t a squeak out of the ministry, CDA or the Deputy Commissioner. In 2004 the interior ministry was brought into the loop. But the minister shrugged off responsibility by arguing that the madrassah had been there for a long time and couldn’t possibly have been built in three years. Each department has passed the buck to the other. Their argument is deceptively simple: the mullahs are a hornets’ nest; it is best not to stir it. But this argument doesn’t wash.
On the one hand, the military under General Pervez Musharraf seems to have come round to the idea of securing a strategic alliance with the USA as well as peace with India so that the economy can be enabled to take off into self-sustained growth boosted by large doses of foreign investment and capital inflows. This necessitates a ditching of the jihad and a rolling back of the extremist anti-Hindu religious sentiment that sustains it in civil society. Hence the need for “enlightened moderation”. On the other hand, General Musharraf is not yet personally ready to share power with mainstream and moderate political parties, let alone hand power to civilians. This means that he cannot fully roll back political Islam because it would mean irrevocably antagonizing the MMA which is a potential partner. Indeed, the JUI still seems to be an element of his domestic and foreign policy requirement to balance against the resurgent PPP while retaining an organic link with the Pakhtun Taliban assets for Afghanistan. For all these reasons, the Musharraf regime is soft on madrassah reform, soft on the JUI and soft on the Taliban. Indeed, some of General Musharraf’s advisors seem happy with regular manifestations of extremism. They think these serve to mould opinion that it is not democracy but religious extremism that is the fundamental issue at stake for which a secular military man like General Musharraf is needed. In the current political situation, the eruption of fanaticism in Islamabad also serves the purpose of diverting attention from the crisis of constitutional legitimacy sparked by the sacking of the chief justice of Pakistan.
But this thinking is wrong for several reasons. First, no one believes that the government is helpless or incapacitated against religious extremists. Time and again, the state has wielded an effective stick when it has been “necessary”. Second, most people have come to accept that it is only by democratizing Pakistan and enlarging the national consensus for enlightened moderation that religious extremism can be tackled. In other words, democracy and mainstreamism are the solutions to extremism, not obstacles in its path. Third, time is running out for General Musharraf. He should stop shadow-boxing and make the right decisions and alliances quickly.
(April 13-19, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 8 – Editorial)
Status quo and insurrection
The outlook is bleak. After four weeks of inspired dithering, the government has succumbed to the Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa jihadis. Chaudhry Shujaat, whose political career rests on alliances with the mullahs, has been tasked to neutralize them. Apparently, the intelligence agencies, various ministries and even some well-meaning columnists are wringing their hands in despair because they are opposed to “sorting them out”. But they are all wrong in their prescriptions because their diagnosis of the problem is wrong.
The official diagnosis/prescription formula goes like this: These are a couple of mad maverick mullahs who have little public support but great nuisance value; therefore, there is no need to use force because that would only give them media headlines and public sympathy in the run-up to elections, with the judicial crisis still simmering and anti-government fronts boiling over in Balochistan and FATA. Instead, the prescription is to engage them in “talks” and make some concessions – land and money to build new mosques and promises to uproot “brothels” and other “un-Islamic ills” from Islamabad and other cities .
But will this concession suffice to appease Islamic revolutionaries wired for suicide bombing? Logically speaking, the government should then prepare to make the same concessions to copycat blackmailing mullahs and madrassahs all over the country. Already, the Islami Jamiat i Tulaba has been emboldened into beating up “un-Islamic” students at the Punjab University in Lahore (where the vice-chancellor is a retired general) and openly proclaiming the “Islamisation” of the campus. In Peshawar, Maulana Qureshi, head of the 17th century Mohabat Khan Mosque and president of the Muttahida Shariat Mahaz (MSM), has warned the government to close down “brothels” or else “the Mahaz will launch a jihad against them”. More mullahs are likely to follow suit if this issue is not “closed” swiftly. Brothels, billboards, veils, music, film, haircuts, dress, schools – there is no end to the “concessions” that will be demanded in the name of jihad and Islam. Indeed, if the threat of provoking militant resistance and suicide bombing by the Jamia Hafsa students has unnerved the government it should step down and hand over power to the FATA mullahs and Taliban who have raised not one but many brigades of suicide bombers to resist the government’s war against terrorism.
One variant of this opportunist approach is to say that, while force is not the answer, a dialogue coupled with the “threat of force” may be the right way to handle the issue. But this is a non-starter. If force as an option is already ruled out then the “threat of force” in any context is meaningless.
In fact, herein lies the answer. In many situations, the threat of the use of force is more effective than the use of force itself. But that strategy requires a credible demonstration of the mental will and physical ability to deploy and use massive force. In this situation, General Musharraf was required to show the iron fist of the police and military, not proffer the velvet glove of Ejaz ul Haq or Chaudhry Shujaat. There were a hundred ways of doing that at the outset. But when the government leaked word that “force was not an option”, the mavericks were emboldened to extend their agenda from seizing a library to forming vigilante groups for the enforcement of virtue in the twin cities and establishing an “Islamic space” in the heart of Islamabad. The situation is so pathetic that this high and mighty government cannot even block the mullahs’ website on the internet. So if the government wants Chaudhry Shujaat to succeed in his negotiations, it should physically and mentally demonstrate its ability to “sort them out” immediately. One way to do that would be to cordon off the area, deploy troops and make ready to smoke them out. Then negotiations might succeed in disarming them.
But, of course, the problem is much deeper than that. The maverick mullahs of Islamabad are just one outcrop of a developing countrywide jihadi resistance to a cynical state establishment that once trained and nurtured them and now wants to put a lid on them. For a variety of well known reasons, this is unfortunately happening in the context of rising anti-Americanism (which is a political sentiment) and anti-Westernisation (which is a cultural sentiment). Both these sentiments are stimulating a return to religious faith as a symbol of measuring and stating identity in an alienating, insecure and globalizing world. The failure of the nation-state and nationalism in Pakistan is increasingly manifest. So what is the way out?
Clearly, we need a fresh restatement and refurbishment of the nation-state so that it truly reflects the aspirations, hopes and dreams of ordinary Pakistanis, a state that is based on democratic institutions that inspire popular confidence and are able to productively channel the energies of the people, a state whose writ is accepted as a measure of the social contract between rulers and the ruled rather than forcibly imposed from above and therefore liable to be resisted. But the rub is that, despite an early promise of radical reform of state and society, General Pervez Musharraf seems to be digging in for the status quo which is actually a recipe for Islamist insurrections.
(April 20-26, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 9 – Editorial)
One deal, no deal, two deals
Has a deal been clinched between Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf? What are their compulsions to do a deal at this juncture? What sort of deal might this be? Why do both sides insist that no deal is in the offing? Is this pre-election deal a confidence-building precursor to a more enduring post-election deal? Can Ms Bhutto and Mr Musharraf live and let live, given their strong personalities and a legacy of mutual distrust?
Both Mr Musharraf and Ms Bhutto “need” each other. For many reasons – the rising cost of living, anti-Americanism, incumbency, a string of broken promises, political retreats and gross mishandling of the CJP and Jamia Hafsa case – Mr Musharraf has lost considerable popularity in the last two years. Unfortunately, this has happened precisely when his liberal reform agenda needs to be buttressed by a greater national consensus than the one he currently enjoys. On top of that, the forthcoming elections pose a serious challenge for him. If they are free and fair, he could lose them with disastrous consequences. If they are rigged, he could win them at the cost of a combined opposition boycott and onslaught against him. Therefore he needs to “manage” the elections so that they give him legitimacy. The only way to do that is to get Ms Bhutto’s PPP on board for the whole exercise unequivocally because she is a “natural” – same broad agenda and current set of values – political partner in every other way. This means conceding a say to her in determining a neutral interim administration as well as allowing her to lead her party at the polls without the hassle of defending the corruption cases against her.
Ms Bhutto “needs” Mr Musharraf too in her bid to rehabilitate herself in the power establishment. She has been out in the cold for eleven years, most of them in self-imposed exile. Her ill-fortune in 1996 had to do with her hand-picked civilian president, Farooq Leghari, rather than any principled or strategic tiff with the army establishment. Indeed, she welcomed the ouster of Nawaz Sharif, her nemesis, in the belief that Mr Musharraf would offer her a raft back to shore. But he didn’t do that. In fact, in his new found anti-politician reformist zeal, he pressed the cases drummed up by Mr Sharif against her and her husband. Her thinking is that if she misses this opportunity to get cosy with the military establishment, she would be reinforcing the trust deficit built into the army-PPP equation which has hurt her cause badly in the past. Indeed, her fear is that if Mr Musharraf were to be ousted from power by any means before she has wormed her way back into the fold of the establishment, the chances are that the military would retreat to the barracks, revert to form and start rebuilding a secret coalition with a unified Muslim League led by Mr Nawaz Sharif as it did from 1981 to 1999. That would condemn her to another long exile from power. This means that she will clutch at any reasonable deal with Mr Musharraf if it enables her to get a toehold in Islamabad.
The pegs of this rationally unavoidable deal look like this. First, for Mr Musharraf, it will not be at the expense of the PMLQ. Indeed, he will try and strengthen his current PMLQ-led grand national alliance by all means so that Ms Bhutto doesn’t sweep the elections and turn the tables on him. Second, the cases against her will neither be pressed nor withdrawn. They would be shelved as an insurance policy lest Ms Bhutto try and get ahead of herself. Third, Ms Bhutto will not derail the elections by joining with the opposition on the issue of the re-election of Mr Musharraf as president by the current assemblies prior to the general elections or in the event of the final sacking of the Chief Justice of Pakistan by the Supreme Judicial Council in the next two months or so. If she can’t vote for Mr Musharraf as president before the elections, she won’t aggressively stand in his way or destablise him either. Fourth, once the general election results are in, she and Mr Musharraf will sit down to hammer out a working power-sharing arrangement much like Mr Musharrf and Maulana Fazlur Rehman did in 2002. So the issue of his uniform and the issue of her prime ministership will be tackled on the basis of the trust and confidence built in the next six months or so between them as in the case of the MMA in 2003.
Meanwhile, both sides will stoutly deny that any “deal” has been clinched. Such a confession would hurt Mr Musharraf because many good pro-establishment potential PMLQ electoral candidates might perceive a sudden surge in the chances of the PPP coming to power and be tempted to switch sides in the Punjab. Equally, such talk would undermine the popular image of the PPP as an anti-establishment party and persuade many voters to rush into the Nawaz Sharif-Jamaat i Islami camp in the Punjab and Sindh.
The deal has been done. It is a precursor to another deal after the elections that will determine Pakistan’s fate in the next five years.
(April 27-3 May, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 10 – Editorial)
Paradox of power
Contrary to the government’s expectations, the lawyers’ support for the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry, isn’t petering off. In fact, the protest rallies seem to be getting more fired up by the week. The CJP is also cashing in his sudden popularity by rallying bar associations across the country. Most ominously for the government, almost all the judges of the Sindh and Peshawar High Courts have weighed in publicly on the CJP’s side. If the same spirit of solidarity is demonstrated by the judges of the Lahore High Court when he visits the city to address the bar next week, it would bring the judges of the Supreme Court presiding over the fate of the Reference under great peer and public pressure.
Consequently, a degree of nervousness is palpable in the Presidency. That is the only explanation for the hasty and ill-advised attempt by PEMRA to try and gag sections of the electronic media from showing public support for the CJP. It also explains another ungainly attempt by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the PMLQ president, to pit pro-Musharraf supporters against pro-CJP protesters in Islamabad the other day. Finally, President Pervez Musharraf’s round of “off-the-record” meetings with media representatives, editors and columnists is focused on acquainting them with the breadth of the allegations of misconduct against the CJP, some of which haven’t even figured in the Reference, and proves that this matter concerns and worries him deeply.
And so it should. If the CJP is restored, he is bound to become a big thorn in the side of the executive in general and President Musharraf in particular. Indeed, it is more than likely that under his publicly revitalized leadership the superior judiciary would swing from its predictable pro-executive policy framework to an anti-executive populist mood overnight. Given the authoritarian and unaccountable predilections of the executive, whether democratically led or not, this is bound to lead to a gridlock in government and even conceivably pose a challenge to parliament, with resultant instability in the country. The threat to President Musharraf’s plans would be more direct and short term in nature. He would not be able to count on the judges to support him sufficiently on four critical issues ahead: his re-election by the current parliament, nomination of caretaker administrations in the provinces and at the centre, selection of the chief election commissioner and his desire to be both army chief and president for another five years. This is a not a prospect he is likely to relish.
Clearly, the government is determined to send Justice Chaudhry home, come hell or high water. The addition of Sharifuddin Pirzada to the president’s battery of lawyers indicates the high stakes. The shifting of the drama from the Supreme Judicial Council to a full bench of the Supreme Court, followed by the withdrawal of one of the judges from the bench that is going to hear the CJP’s petition against the SJC, suggests many twists and turns to come.
President Musharraf’s strategy may be fairly anticipated. He wants this issue out of the way before the four critical questions noted above are posed. In one June/July scenario, the government might envisage a passing of the budget in strength, re-election of the president by the current assemblies, a decision against Justice Chaudhry, the end of the assemblies and an announcement of the next general elections three months hence, in October, thereby giving President Musharraf about ten weeks in office as president and army chief under a new parliament. This would give him an opportunity to lean on the judiciary sans Justice Chaudhry or cut a deal with the PPP in parliament to sanction his pressing needs. Meanwhile, the lawyers’ protest against any anti-Justice Chaudhry decision by the Supreme Court is likely to be lost in the heat and dust of electoral battle.
Is there a Plan B? Irrespective of whether Justice Chaudhry survives or not, the fact is that President General Musharraf’s popularity has significantly ebbed while that of his various opponents has soared. The PMLQ is finding the load of incumbency too heavy for comfort. The judiciary cannot be taken for granted any more. The Military Mullah Alliance that stood him in such good stead in the 2002 elections has evaporated. Instead, the spectre of political Islam is threatening to undo his reform agenda and compelling his American allies to crib about his increasing “incapacity” to do more in the war against terror. And the people are restless and want change. Under the circumstances, he would be advised to abandon any thoughts of going solo.
Pakistan is a land of living paradoxes. Here is one that is staring President General Musharraf in the face. Perhaps the only way he can cling to power is by relinquishing some of it in a timely and democratic manner. He should enlarge the support base of his popular power by agreeing to reduce his executive power. He can do so by sharing the spoils of office instead of hogging power. The best way to do that is to hold free and fair elections that give him and his erstwhile partners and future allies the credibility and legitimacy required for good and stable governance.
(May 4-10, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 11 – Editorial)
Has Musharraf come full circle?
The political system spawned by President General Pervez Musharraf in 2002 is in the throes of breakdown. Too many cracks and fissures have developed over time for comfort in an election year. Consequently, if the breaches are not plugged, the elections could burst the dam of pent-up anti-incumbent sentiment among the people. Worse, they could trigger rebellion among core organs of the state to sweep away this military-run government. What are the symptoms and what is the diagnosis?
General Musharraf’s original edifice was based on five strong pillars: the PMLQ, the MMA, the superior judiciary, the powerful media and the US-led international community. But he can now count on the undiluted loyalty and support of the PMLQ only, the four others being in various states of disgruntlement. This is not a good framework in which to conduct elections.
The MMA sanctioned General Musharraf’s uniform and presidency in 2002. But today it is bidding to oust him from power. The higher judiciary swore allegiance to General Musharraf’s amended constitution not once but twice. But today, after the CJP fiasco, its loyalty is in such grave doubt that one decision could plunge the country into an unprecedented political crisis. The free media was General Musharraf’s great showcase of democracy. But today it is smarting from unwanted and unwarranted government advice, threats and restrictions, on account of which Pakistan is now among the top ten countries in the world where press freedom is seriously endangered. Another bad move to gag the media could compel it to gang up and destablise the government. And, finally, the US was General Musharraf’s sole strategic ally whose support shored up the military and fueled the economy. But today President Bush has second thoughts regarding General Musharraf’s “asset-worthiness”, given his “incapacity” to sort out the Taliban in Afghanistan and roll back radical political Islam in association with new and liberal allies at home.
Fortunately for General Musharraf, the MMA, the media and the US can all be discounted for the moment. They are not inclined, or in any position, to precipitate too much discomfort for him. But this is not true for the judiciary. Indeed, General Musharraf’s fate and that of his government depends very much on how the Supreme Court deals with the CJP issue. And here the omens are disquieting from the government’s point of view. Some judges on the new bench set up to hear the CJP’s petition are inclined to give “good news to the nation” while others are biding their time, waiting to see which way the wind blows. No one in government or opposition is taking any bets.
The government is understandably nervous. It is weighing its options so that it is not immobilized or derailed if the CJP is restored by the SC. One option is take the blow on the chin when it comes and fish for some working “understanding” with the CJP. But in the absence of popular support, General Musharraf won’t be able to handle a judiciary that is flush with its new found independence and power. Under the circumstances, this would be a route to constitutional and executive gridlock. The other option is to petition the SC for a full court hearing on the CJP’s case and hope that a majority of judges will side with the government. But if this too doesn’t work, General Musharraf could consider imposing a state of emergency to rein in some of the disgruntled elements who are rocking his boat. But this option is a meaningless half-way house that cannot cope with a situation in which the judiciary is bent upon restoring the CJP – the same judiciary will likely strike down a state of emergency and deepen the crisis. The last option is to impose a short term martial law, promulgate a provisional constitutional order, line up a revamped judiciary to approve it and move towards general elections on General Musharaff’s new terms, allies and conditions as he did in 2002. The only problem with this route is that there would be a domestic and worldwide backlash and it would signal political weakness on General Musharraf’s part rather than strength as it did in 1999. In the event, he could get away with it only if he were able to offer and devise a more liberal and reformist political order in 2008 than the one he did in 2002. In effect, in order to get the mainstream parties on board, he would have to share more power with them than he is at present prepared to do as well revamp foreign and domestic policy to unequivocally roll back the Taliban and radical political Islam.
But that would bring him full circle to where he stands today. So why recourse to martial law and open up a can of worms when he can take the required domestic and international initiatives today and save the situation from sliding further? In short, why not agree to take off his uniform, restore some independence and credibility to the judiciary and share power with like-minded people in the opposition before it is too late?
(May 11-17, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 12 – Editorial)
Early general elections is the answer
A five member bench of the supreme court has set up a 14 member “full court” to hear all petitions for and against the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. It has also stopped the five-member Supreme Judicial Council of senior judges from continuing to hear the Reference against him. This judgment should please everyone. The government was worried that its fate lay in the hands of five relatively junior judges of the SC while Justice Chaudhry was opposed to the idea of a SJC packed with judges who allegedly have some vested interest or the other against him. CJP Chaudhry is also pleased that the “full court’ excludes the judges of the SJC.
It is interesting that the government had originally opposed a petition by CJP Chaudhry for a full court hearing of his petition. However, when the acting CJP, Justice Rana Bhagwandas, constituted a five member bench of relatively “junior” (independent?) judges, the decision was welcomed by CJP Chaudhry and the government began to have second thoughts. In the event, Mr Sharifuddin Peerzada was roped in to petition for a full court hearing which has been granted.
Understandably, therefore, both sides are crowing “victory”. However, if there is any victor, it is the rule of law and constitution. The decision is so palpably fair and impartial that the real surprise is why it took so long in coming. If the government had not tried to railroad an adverse judgment against the CJP by the manner in which it tried to sideline and quarantine him and hurriedly constituted the SJC, things would not have come to this sorry pass. Indeed, the politicization of the case is entirely due to the government’s cavalier approach to the rule of law and constitution.
The politicization of the issue has many implications. First, it has enabled the CJP to create sufficient pressure on his peers to show spine in countering pressure from the government. Second, and more significantly, it has cemented an unprecedented alliance between the bar, bench and public for the independence of the judiciary. This is a historic gain in the journey of a post-colonial ‘executive’ state towards greater democracy and accountability. The gains of the judiciary will not be easily squandered again. Third, and equally significantly, it has served to create the backdrop of the transition to general elections in which core issues – like neutral interim administrations, General Musharraf’s re-election as president of Pakistan from the current assemblies and his uniform – will be settled and have a bearing on the shape of the political dispensation to come. Fourth, most significantly, the outpouring of public support for the CJP’s cause is not so much a measure of his rising personal worth as it is of the dwindling popularity of General Musharraf and his Pakistan Muslim League. The implication of this is that regardless of Justice Chaudhry’s eventual fate at the hands of his peers, the net loser is General Musharraf and the PMLQ. If Justice Chaudhry is restored, it will be a blow against the government. If he isn’t, the public will cynically assume the worst about the historical nexus between the judiciary and the executive and show its displeasure at the polls.
In other words, despite the political respite promised by the full court from pro-CJP demonstrations against the SJC which may now cease, the government will remain at a definite political disadvantage in the weeks ahead. CJP Chaudhry clearly means to exploit his political “underdog” advantage by continuing to rouse bar associations and people across the country. Karachi is next, followed by Quetta, Multan, Sargodha, Faisalabad, and so on. Will the government petition the full court to restrain him from doing so? How will both sides fare in the legal battles ahead? To what extent will the full court be politicized by pressure from the government and the CJP? What is the government’s strategy to regain the high ground before plunging into the general elections?
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has hinted at the imposition of a state of Emergency if conditions so warrant. But any such step would rebound on the government. Public protests could erupt. The media and political parties won’t take it lying down. The judiciary’s current mindset may not sanction any curtailment of fundamental rights. It is also doubtful whether the SC would allow any extension in the life of parliament. A defeat on this front would compel the government to think of extra-constitutional measures like martial law, a dead-end in which General Musharraf could be the main casualty in time to come.
A better course would be for the prime minister to order, as soon as possible , early rather than late general elections, possibly in September or early October. This announcement would shift the focus away from the CJP’s trial to party politics and local constituent issues. In order to benefit from this tactical diversion, however, the government would need to cement its political strategy with erstwhile partners and potential allies quickly. “Massive” rallies by the PMLQ in Islamabad or by the MQM in Karachi cannot substitute for a revised, open and realistic game plan to garner credibility and support.
(May 18-24, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 13 – Editorial)
Wrong, wrong, wrong
President General Pervez Musharraf has reportedly told his PMLQ supporters that Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, and his lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan are responsible for provoking the violence in Karachi. If this is true, he must take Muslim Leaguers to be utter fools or believe his own propaganda. In either case, he is completely out of touch with reality.
The MQM continues to insist on pain of death that the opposition provoked the carnage. But Pakistanis across the country have seen the evidence with their own eyes and given their verdict by vigorously striking in protest.
Mr Altaf Husain, in alliance with President Pervez Musharraf, conspired to deny Justice Chaudhry another rousing reception in Karachi like the one he got in Lahore. Towards this end, the MQM announced a rally on the same date as the CJP’s address to the Sindh High Court Bar Association. This was aimed as a warning to the CJP not to venture into Karachi. When he spurned the threat, the Sindh and federal governments both “advised” him to cancel his engagement in the interest of his personal security. When he still didn’t listen, a plan was hatched to thwart him after he landed in Karachi: roadblocks were erected by MQM activists and armed MQM gunmen took over Karachi after the police was officially withdrawn from the city precincts. The idea was to cage the CJP at the airport while drumming up an MQM rally elsewhere. The objective was to show that Karachi “belonged” to the MQM and that the MQM would not make the “mistake” made by the Punjab government when it gave CJP Iftikhar Chaudhry a free hand to whip up popular support to bring the judges under pressure and thereby undermine the presidential reference against him. But the plan backfired when the CJP stood his ground and his angry supporters braved the barricades and returned the fire. So who should bear the blame? The CJP who exercised his right to go to Karachi like he did in the NWFP and Punjab or the government which sought to deny him entry and resorted to private violence to achieve its ends?
If Lahore on May 5 was a major marker in the lawyers struggle for an independent judiciary, then Karachi on May 12 was an irrevocable turning point. A wave of revulsion against the MQM and, by association the PMLQ and President Musharraf, has engulfed the country. It cuts across class, ethnic, regional, religious and party-political lines. Critically, for the first time since independence, Punjab has turned its back on the “mohajirs” of the MQM who have proved themselves to be terrorists and fascists. Punjab is also deeply anguished over President Musharraf’s blind alliance with and defence of the MQM. It is now common to hear the comment that General Asif Nawaz under the government of Nawaz Sharif and General Naseerullah Baber under the government of Benazir Bhutto were right after all when they went for the MQM in 1992-1996 and President Musharraf is wrong, wrong, wrong to sacrifice the national interest at the altar of his personal-political interest. The national tragedy is that the ethnic origin of army chiefs has never been the subject of controversy as it is now threatening to become.
So where does President Musharraf and his discredited and diminishing allies go from here?
Qazi Hussain Ahmed has seen the writing on the wall and petitioned the supreme court to forbid President Musharraf from being both army chief and president and canvassing politics forbidden under oath to soldiers of the Pakistan army. Another two petitions are likely to follow which will give sleepless nights to President Musharraf. One will come from the supporters of Nawaz Sharif pleading the supreme court to enable Mr Sharif to exercise his fundamental rights to return, live and contest elections in his country. Another will challenge President Musharraf’s bid to be re-elected as president for five years by the sitting assemblies. If the SC holds in favour of the petitioners in either case it would spell the end of President Musharraf’s plans in much the same way as a resumption of office by the CJP. In the event, one thing would follow another and a combination of judicial independence and political activism would toll the bell for both the prospect of a free and fair general election as well as the political career of President Musharraf.
Meanwhile, the CJP and his supporters are likely to become bolder as public support wells up for them following fresh mistakes by a government that is bent on defending and extending the original political sin of sacking the CJP on March 9. Under the circumstances, President Musharraf may be compelled to move towards greater repression rather than democracy, which was his original goal, signalling utter alienation from the people of Pakistan.
But that isn’t all in store for him. President Musharraf’s utility to the international community rests on his willingness and ability to deliver the war against terror, which effectively means rolling back radical political Islam in Pakistan and eliminating the Taliban. Therefore it may soon be asked what good a beleaguered President Musharraf is to the international community when he has effectively diminished his support base instead of developing and enlarging a national consensus behind his pro-West policies. In other words, what is his net worth if his capacity to wage the war against radical Islam has significantly diminished while that of his religious opponents has increased. After all, it doesn’t require a soothsayer to reveal that President Musharraf’s failure without the success of liberal mainstream elements will only play into the hands of the Islamist extremists. As one think tanker in the US is reported to have remarked, “it is in such situations that Washington requires more than one phone number to call in Pakistan!”
(May 25-31, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 14 – Editorial)
General Musharraf’s best friend and worst enemy
Three updated statements from three vested interests qualify for comment this week. The first is by President General Pervez Musharraf who says (a) that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif will not be allowed to return to Pakistan and directly participate in the general elections; (b) that the presidential election will be held in September and the general elections two or three months later; (c) and that if the situation so warrants he might consider taking some “extra-constitutional” steps. The second is by Nicolas Burns, the US undersecretary of state, who says (a) Washington fully supports General Musharraf (b) but wants him to “do more” to prosecute the war against terror; (c) and promote democracy. The third is by Benazir Bhutto who says (a) that talk of any “deal” between the PPP and General Musharraf is passé now and General Musharraf will have to call an All Parties Conference for a way out; (b) that she is not ready to sit with the MMA and oppose General Musharraf from the platform of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD); (c) that she is readying to return to Pakistan to contest the elections.
General Musharraf’s statement shows only one change in political strategy from the one articulated earlier. This is the veiled threat of “extra-constitutional” steps to save his situation. He knows he can get the current parliaments to elect him president in September but he also knows that, in view of the supreme court’s developing mindset under popular pressure, this may be held to be unconstitutional and rebound on him. In any case, he cannot but fear the prospect of relatively free and fair elections because he is bound to lose them even without the participation of Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif personally. Hence the threat of “extra-constitutional” measures is a sign of nervousness. But this Plan B will pose as many new problems as it might solve old ones. So it cannot be a viable long-term solution.
Mr Burns statement reflects this reasoning. It implies that the US supports General Musharraf for a host of reasons and wants him around for the foreseeable future. But it also suggests that General Musharraf’s strategy to help the US in the war against terror is not working too well and that in order to do “more” for the US he needs to build greater “political capacity” at home by democratizing society and welcoming new and liberal political allies in government. This means that the US is not likely to support any extra-constitutional measures by General Musharraf because such measures would isolate him and deepen the political crisis instead of enhancing his political capacity and stabilizing his polity. Of course, the extent to which General Musharraf can spurn or ignore US “advice” will depend on his ability to “do more”, which may conceivably be enhanced in the short term via repressive measures but cannot be sustained for long and might well be e prelude to a more worrisome political vacuum in Pakistan.
Ms Bhutto’s statement is a slight departure from the past. While she has always said that she intends to return before the next general elections and that she is in touch with the government without having clinched any deal, she is now saying that no deal is possible with her alone and that General Musharraf will have to negotiate his future and that of the political system with the combined opposition. In other words, she is suggesting a national consensus of all political players including Mr Nawaz Sharif and General Musharraf about the transitional way forward so that relatively free and fair elections can be held and President Musharraf can legitimately bid to become a civilian president for the next five years. She is also saying that she is not yet interested in sitting down with the likes of Qazi Hussain Ahmad with a view to overthrowing General Musharraf via a popular militant movement. In other words, Ms Bhutto is keeping her gun sheathed and ammo dry and hoping that the US or the developing popular movement or a combination of both will persuade General Musharraf to accept her outstretched hand rather than go it alone and risk losing everything.
The most critical factor ahead is the extent to which the supreme court will become independent in the next six months. This will depend on the degree and sustainability of popular pressure on the supreme court. That pressure will be, in turn, depend on the ability and willingness of the political parties to fuel the popular anti-Musharraf sentiment in the country. And tat, in turn, will depend significantly on whether or not the political parties in general, and the PPP in particular, get a workable deal from General Musharraf.
It all boils down to General Musharraf. If he tries to crush the popular sentiment by force or extra-constitutional measures, he will create the conditions for his downfall sooner rather than later. But if he opens up genuine political space he may yet get the supreme court to provide him legitimacy and the political system to give him longevity. In other words, General Musharraf is his own best friend and potential worst enemy.
(June 1-7, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 15 – Editorial)
Truth and reconciliation needed
Some people are convinced that the political crisis is deepening and President General Pervez Musharraf is a “goner”. Others think not. But everyone thinks that everything depends on the fate of the presidential reference against the chief justice, Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry. Mr Chaudhry’s restoration will spell the beginning of the end of General Musharraf, it is thought, because an independent supreme court under Mr Chaudhry’s stewardship will not give General Musharraf the constitutional leverage to prolong his rule. But if Mr Chaudhry’s ouster is confirmed by the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC), it is argued, General Musharraf will likely weather the political storm and continue to lord it over Pakistan for the next five years at least.
This is not necessarily the way things might turn out. The CJP could be restored with the provision that he may not adjudge petitions pertaining to the decisions and powers of the president. If that happens, President Musharraf may escape with most of his powers and alliances intact. Alternatively, the presidential reference may be upheld by the SJC but the judiciary as a whole may not be fully amenable to executive pressure as in the past and start to pose problems for President Musharraf. Or the case may be allowed by either or both sides to drag on for months, enabling the government and judiciary to get cosy again.
Similarly, some people passionately believe that a restoration of “undiluted” democracy with full civilian supremacy is the need of the hour. Among these may be counted most opposition parties and their supporters and some human rights groups and journalists. And then there are those who think that despite his many shortcomings General Musharraf has done some commendable things and needs to stay on to complete his unfinished agenda. Among the proponents of this view are members of the business community and professional classes, some NGOs and journalists. However, whatever the intrinsic worth of such views, it is worth examining the lay of the land with and without General Musharraf at the top.
Even if General Musharraf were to weather the storm, the scope of his capacity and ability to fulfill many valid and necessary elements of his agenda – like rolling back extremist Islamists, prosecuting the war on terror, sustaining high economic growth, pursuing the peace process with India – would be radically diminished. He would have managed to survive only by rigging the elections and repressing the forces of popular democracy. Therefore his legitimacy and support base would be thin while the opposition would be stronger and more vociferous. This would lead to a series of continuing crises in economy and society that would create instability and hamper his movement on major fronts. He would be susceptible to opportunist manipulation for survival rather than policy advancement for national good. It would be a no-win situation for the country in which the benefits of autocracy like economic continuity and political stability would be as elusive as the fruits of democracy like consensus and legitimacy. The ultimate winners would be extremist non-state actors seeking the establishment of an Islamic state.
However, if General Musharraf were to be ousted by a popular movement that led to a revival of undiluted democracy, the chances are that the political dispensation to follow would be even more chaotic, unstable and unproductive than the one in the 1990s. Pakistan is far more fractured and divided by class, region, ethnicity and ideology today than it was in earlier decades. Thus coalition governments would be the norm and infighting the rule in the provinces and centre. Widespread corruption would follow in the wake of scratching each others’ backs for survival. The judiciary would be flooded with petitions challenging executive orders and everything would be confined to a state of “stay” or limbo. Executive deadlock would cripple the economy. Worse, major initiatives of the last five years like the peace process with India and the war against terror would be abandoned in the face of fierce resistance from conservative alliance partners in government or oppositionists in and out of parliament. Shorn of all responsibility, the army and its secret agencies would retreat into their old mould of pulling strings from behind the scenes to discredit both politicians and policies. The ultimate winners to emerge from this anarchy would be the forces of extremism, violence and separatism.
Thus what is required is an orderly transition to democracy in which the fruits of the last decade are preserved and allowed to ripen for all Pakistanis while power and benefits are shared more equitably. This can only happen if General Musharraf and the Pakistan army, no less than the politicians in opposition, can be persuaded to sit down in a truth-and-reconciliation mode to determine the nature of a dynamic collective enterprise in the future. Singly, both civilians and soldiers have failed the people of Pakistan time and again. So we should stop blaming each other and start shouldering responsibility collectively. All exiled politicians should be allowed to return and contest the next general elections without fear or favour and President Musharraf must take off his uniform and respect the verdict of the electorate. There is no other way out.
(June 8-14, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 16 – Editorial)
Unraveling of a regime
President Pervez Musharraf has taken three steps in one week which suggest the unraveling of his regime. He has tried to gag the media by a new ordinance so that the truth doesn’t get out, a reversal of a long standing good policy that had earned him high marks. He has roped in his corps commanders to signal that the army stands behind him, a veiled threat that he had consciously chosen not to make earlier because he didn’t want to drag the army into everyday mundane politics. And he has called a meeting of the National Security Council to send the signal that his decisions have the sanction of state security, a device he has rarely clutched at in the past.
The PEMRA ordinance is obnoxious. It imposes pre-censorship, a device reminiscent of martial law eras. It is a sign of political weakness. Governments grab at it when they stumble and totter. But it is counterproductive because moderate truth is replaced by exaggerated rumour, which is far more dangerous and destabilizing. An example is at hand. Print and internet media reports of the chief justice’s foray to Abbotabad last week claim unprecedented crowds and passionate slogans. The strategy is also self-delusional. It suggests that the media is the problem itself when the media is only articulating the problem. So if the government refuses to accept the validity of the problem it is hardly in any position to solve it. In this case, President Musharraf has been erroneously advised that if the media is stopped from showcasing public support for the chief justice of Pakistan, this support will peter off and the crisis will evaporate. In actual fact, however, this support is likely to become more dogged and pervasive and even violent as a form of resistance rather than protest. In the event, the political crisis could deepen if relief is afforded to the media by the judiciary on grounds of fundamental rights and public interest.
President Musharraf’s attempt to rally the military high command behind his moves is also fraught with dangerous repercussions. Indeed, it can cut both ways. When the ISPR says the military will not allow anyone to malign it, it is not only threatening action against those who are allegedly maligning the military, it is also posing a pertinent question for itself: whose or what policies are provoking the public to malign the military and would a change in policy or person halt the slide into disrepute? Institutions are not blind and collective institutional interest always comes before personal interest in crisis situations. When the boiling point arrives, the same outward aggressive threat can materialize into an inward protective defense mechanism.
Much the same can be said of the National Security Council’s “deliberations”. In our case, the NSC is not even remotely a national security institution because it does not have representation from either of the two great pillars of the state like the judiciary and the media. Nor, in the current circumstances, is it in any position to hear the views of the two most popular leaders of mainstream Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. In fact, the “honourable” leader of the opposition, Maulana Fazal ul Rehman, who is supposed to sit in council, has consistently refused to attend its meetings since its formation. The NSC is a farce and resorting to it shows the magnitude of the tragedy upon the nation.
The more repressive General Musharraf becomes the more unrepresentative and shaky his regime will appear to Pakistanis and the world at large. That process has begun. The perception is gaining momentum that he is a “goner”. There is an unrelenting logic to what happens next. The government will have to silence all dissent and win the next elections to disprove this perception. But that will compel it to rig the elections and reinforce the perception that it has lost public support. That will transform perception into reality and push the crisis to boiling point.
General Musharraf’s advisors are pushing him into a corner. He is being isolated and alienated from the public. It is remarkable how one mistake is being heaped upon another. This is not a judicial crisis which has spilled over into a media crisis. It was and remains a political crisis that needs a political situation.
The fact is that General Musharraf has personally become unpopular. The fact is that his king’s party is riven with dissent. The fact is that his MMA “friends” of 2002 have become his enemies in 2007. The fact is that his “enemies” of 2002 are increasingly afraid of becoming his friends of today. The fact is that the international community is no longer infatuated with him and pondering his successor. The fact is that the media at home and abroad which once lionized him is now gunning for him. The fact is that the judiciary which has historically been a handmaiden to the executive is now straining at the leash. The undeniable fact is that the chief justice of Pakistan said no and became a national hero because nations desperately seek heroes in times of “silence, exile and cunning”.
(June 15-21, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 17 – Editorial)
US-Pakistan: share it or lose it
Speculation is rife regarding Mr Richard Boucher’s latest trip to Islamabad in the midst of a simmering political crisis. So this is the right time to examine the evolution of US policy towards Pakistan since the coup in 1999. Interestingly, it is precisely at moments of popular strain that nuanced shifts in US policy are lost on leaders and lay men alike.
For various reasons, especially General Pervez Musharraf’s misadventure in Kargil, Washington was fully behind Nawaz Sharif when the 1999 coup occurred. Thus, General Musharraf became an international pariah until 9/11 compelled President Bush (who didn’t even know the general’s name before he was elected) to renew contacts with Pakistan’s military leadership.
From 2002 to 2005, General Musharraf became the best ally of the international community when he cracked down on Al-Qaeda in the urban areas of Pakistan and in Waziristan. The original American demand for “democracy” in Pakistan was now replaced by gushing appreciation of General Musharraf’s policy of press freedom, enlightened moderation and economic revival. The mainstream American media generally followed this trajectory of comment and assessment.
After 2005, however, Washington began to express public reservations about General Musharraf’s “capacity” to “do more” in the war against terror, although it still insisted it didn’t doubt his “sincerity”. This nuanced shift followed mounting American problems in Afghanistan posed by resurgent Talibanism exported from safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas and was in reaction to a policy reversal by General Musharraf when he halted army action in Waziristan and made “peace deals” with the American enemy. The American media duly echoed its “do more” reservations but continued to hail General Musharraf as the best man for the job, a view which climaxed with the launch of his best-selling memoirs last September in which he boasted before clucking American hosts of his “democratic credentials” and scorned the “corruption” of past prime ministers.
By 2007, however, Washington had begun to publicly criticize General Musharraf’s “inability” to stem the Taliban spring offensive while the US media was now questioning his “willingness” and sincerity. Indeed, when General Musharraf seemed unable to roll back political Islam, as during the Hafsa issue and when Talibanised tribesmen started to bomb video and music shops, the western media was ready to rebuke an increasingly “useless dictator” with a dwindling domestic support base. The proposed solution to his diminishing “capacity” was to consider bolstering him with support from the liberal, pro-West, and popular Peoples Party of Benazir Bhutto. So when Ms Bhutto began to get a hearing in Washington, it was a signal that thoughts of ditching General Musharraf for an uncertain military replacement in an increasingly Islamic and anti-Western Pakistan had been replaced with the idea of a “deal” between Ms Bhutto’s populist forces and General Musharraf’s moderate army to oversee Pakistan for the next five years. In NGO parlance, this is called “capacity building or enhancement”.
But before the “deal” was done, General Musharraf provoked a judicial crisis and transformed it into a political crisis by his blundering tactics. Popular pressure now compelled Ms Bhutto to step back from the deal. This forced Washington to sit up and take note. Its original view was that the judicial crisis could not last long, let alone become a political crisis. But after the Karachi violence, and the relentless chants of “go, Musharraf go”, it began to have second thoughts. The government’s crackdown on the media and its heroic resistance was the proverbial last straw. It indicated that General Musharraf was isolated and slipping fast. So Washington made another nuanced shift in policy. Where it had hemmed and hawed in the past, it now lent its weight to a future power-sharing arrangement between General Musharraf as president without uniform and a democratically elected civilian government on the basis of acceptably free and fair elections.
This revision is based on the understanding that the military on its own, whether under General Musharraf or any other general, cannot uproot radical Islamism or provide economic and political stability to Pakistan. Similarly, the “democratic” politicians on their own, without support from the powerful stake-holding military, cannot do the job. Under the circumstances, it is a good idea if General Musharraf is able to supervise the “transition” to “greater” democracy by sharing power rather than hogging it. Of course, should General Musharraf be hoist by his own petard, Washington would fall in line behind the demand for an immediate return to full civilian “democracy” rather than risk further anti-Americanism by nodding at another general to take over.
The writing on the wall should be clear to General Musharraf. The US is not talking about a return to undiluted democracy immediately. It is talking about a transition to greater democracy. General Musharraf will be totally isolated at home and abroad if he insists on going it alone. If he doesn’t get ready to share power he will lose all power. And the US won’t be able under a Republican administration or willing under the Democrats to bail him out.
(June 22-28, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 18 – Editorial)
Decisive move in the offing
Until recently, President General Pervez Musharraf was adamant that he would seek presidential re-election from the current parliament in late September as required by law, within two months of the expiry of his tenure as president on November 15. This implied that the general elections would be held after the presidential election – that is, between November 2007 and January 2008. General Musharraf also insisted that the uniform was like “second skin” to him. This implied that he would move heaven and earth to remain army chief. But the Supreme Court is expected to decide the CJP case within a week or two. If the CJP is restored, its fallout would be akin to a vote of no-confidence in the government.
So General Musharraf is compelled to seriously ponder a dissolution of parliament soon and early general elections, around September-October. In the event, since he must constitutionally seek presidential re-election between September and November, he will have to get it from the next parliament rather than the current one. How will he achieve that objective?
Free and fair general elections would probably fail to restore the PMLQ to power and upset General Musharraf’s apple cart. But it won’t be easy to rig them to obtain “suitable results” in today’s charged environment in which the judiciary has sprouted wings. Worse, any such attempt would provoke an election boycott by the combined opposition, which would de-legitimize the next parliament and the presidential election.
So the only workable option is to try and put the pending SC judgment on the CJP on hold while firming up an alliance/understanding with the PPP before the general elections which guarantees General Musharraf the presidency in exchange for sharing power with Ms Bhutto after the elections. There is no personal grudge or animosity between the two of them and the PPP broadly supports his reform agenda. It also helps to have the sanction of Washington behind such a proposed liberal platform.
This explains why talk of a “deal” between General Musharraf and Ms Bhutto refuses to die down. On the negotiating table are chips denoting a withdrawal or cold-storage of corruption cases against Ms Bhutto, neutral caretaker administrations, safeguards against electoral rigging, and the scope of the power-sharing arrangement in the centre and provinces after the general elections.
The issue of General Musharraf’s uniform is trickier still. He insists it will be resolved “strictly within the ambit of the constitution”. But given the constitutional necessity of relinquishing charge as army chief before end 2007, he can resolve the uniform issue “constitutionally” only by getting parliament to amend the law that enables him to be both president and army chief at the same time. The constitutional amendment deal with the MMA in 2003 enabled him to occupy both offices only until 2004. After that the law regarding the status of the job of the army chief (whether or not it was a job of profit in the service of Pakistan) was temporarily changed by a simple parliamentary majority so that President Musharraf could hold two offices until 2007. Thus the resolution of this issue after the next presidential and general elections will depend on the respective strength and bargaining position of the PMLQ and PPP in the next parliament. If General Musharraf’s winning alliance is strong he could offer Ms Bhutto a sweetner in exchange for supporting parliamentary moves to retain the uniform. But if Ms Bhutto is stronger, she would settle for nothing less in exchange than a constitutional amendment to restore her to the prime ministership for the third time.
But if all this is problematic, why doesn’t President Musharraf get the current parliament in which he has a majority to elect him president again and also amend the law enabling him to retain his job as army chief?
That, of course, was the original prescription. However, he realized that both moves would be constitutionally challenged. So Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry, an unpredictable and anti-executive maverick chief justice, had to be sidelined before this strategy could be unfurled. But Mr Chaudhry refused to “disappear” and instead became a millstone around General Musharraf’s neck. Any attempt to railroad the current parliament today is likely to fuel anti-government protests outside parliament and compel the opposition parties inside parliament to resign and boycott the general elections. Worse, if Justice Chaudhry is restored, all these plans would go up in a puff of smoke.
Therefore General Musharraf has to pull himself out of the quicksand before the CJP is restored. He also has to hold general elections which are stamped with approval by the mainstream opposition and which yield results that are compatible with his plans. Alternatively, if he can find a way of postponing the general elections until the ground situation is better for him, he could achieve his objectives. But whatever route he takes, it is clear that he can no longer rely on the PMLQ to bail him out. That is why an appropriate deal with Ms Bhutto and a necessary understanding with the Supreme Court is so critical in these times.
One way or the other, we should expect a decisive move from General Musharraf soon.
(June 29 – May 05, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 19 – Editorial)
Murkier and murkier
Benazir Bhutto has petitioned the Supreme Court to locate over 20 million “missing” voters in the new electoral lists furnished by the Election Commission. This is the difference between the number of registered voters in 2002 and 2007.Apparently, these voters have “disappeared” into thin air, much like some unfortunate separatism-minded Baloch or Al-Qaeda-inspired Pakhtuns whose whereabouts are not known.
The election commission says that it has excluded all those who cannot furnish National ID cards issued by NADRA. But NADRA says that the EC hasn’t tallied its data with NADRA’s and if it had done so then the problem wouldn’t have seemed so insurmountable. Why both state-controlled organizations should be so reluctant to share their data, which is public property, is inexplicable and raises many questions about their integrity.
The EC’s explanation is that it has clipped the names of those who had registered in more than one location or whose ID was dubious. But 20 million out of about 70 million is a deadly serious matter. At the very least, it casts a big question mark over the credibility and authenticity of the last general elections which returned pro-Musharraf allies to power without in any way assuring us of the legitimacy of the new lists for the general elections later this year. Indeed, Ms Bhutto fears that the chopping and changing may be unduly marked in districts and constituencies in which the PPP voter is rampant. In fact, the complaint originates from potential or actual PPP candidates, especially in Sindh where the PPP alleges that nearly 4.6 million voters have been crossed out in 23 districts, who feel done in by a significant reduction in their vote bank. Certainly, no pro-Musharraf candidate seems to have expressed similar qualms on this count. On the contrary, the problem appears to be exacerbated where there are strong pro-Muslim League or MQM nazims and overtly pro-regime officials, implying an early unholy nexus between the ruling party and election commission officials to devise a novel form of pre-election rigging at the lowest and most basic level of the registered vote.
Ms Bhutto has threatened to boycott the polls if this issue isn’t resolved to her satisfaction. This has provoked Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the Muslim League big-wig, to pooh-pooh her suspicions and magnanimously offer to waive the NIC condition altogether, much like in old times when some form of reasonable identification apart from the NIC (like an electricity bill, or property document) used to suffice for voting purposes. But before we start to applaud Chaudhry Sahib’s untoward generosity and marvel at his spirit of transparency we might pause to note that this strategy is designed to help the ruling party rather than the opposition because the discretion of EC officials at polling booths across the country is likely to be tipped heavily in favour of the ruling parties. So if the opposition can muster a few extra million voters without a NIC the ruling parties can easily get away with laundering thrice as many.
Thus the first stone has been cast at the next general elections. The opposition is convinced the ruling party will successfully resort to all manner of pre-and post-electoral rigging in the absence of a strong and vigilant election commission. Therefore it should come as no great surprise to anyone if the opposition were to start clamouring for a new and neutral chief election commissioner who satisfies their demand for transparency. But this demand is going to lead to a dead end because the chief election commissioner is a constitutional post and cannot be changed whimsically. So this battle too will end up in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court – a reminder why the prospect of an independent chief justice remains anathema to President General Pervez Musharraf and the Muslim League.
Several questions arise. Can the EC find a solution to the question of the missing voters that satisfies Ms Bhutto in time for her to withdraw her threat to boycott the general elections? If it cannot, will the government offer to postpone the elections until such time that electoral lists acceptable to Ms Bhutto can be manufactured? Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, which route would Ms Bhutto take: an early general election with murky electoral lists or a late general election with transparent lists? What would be her response if the government or EC responded to her petition in the SC by saying that her objections are not valid but if she insists on having her way then the EC would require many more months to do the job to her satisfaction and the SC should sanction a postponement of the general elections until such time?
It is intriguing of course, why Ms Bhutto has waited so late in the day to challenge the electoral lists of the EC when an announcement of general elections is expected sooner than later. But conspiracy theorists who say she may have stitched a deal with President Musharraf to delay the elections on this pretext may have to sharpen their wits. Mr Nawaz Sharif has also jumped into the fray to protest the same issue.
The road to greater democracy is getting murkier and murkier.
(July 6-12, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 20 – Editorial)
Height of cynicism
The Lal Masjid brothers, Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid, had threatened to go with a big bang. But when the black curtain was lifted, Abdul Aziz went with a whimper. This is the same Mr Aziz who had earlier claimed over 300 “sacred dreams” in which the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) came to him and exhorted him to raise the banner of Islam, enforce Shariah and purge society of all ills. Was this the mother of all farces, or what? Certainly, the facts are disquieting.
First, the Ghazi brothers have a history of close connections with Pakistan’s intelligence community. Their father, Abdullah, served the cause of Pakistan’s various “jihads” in the neighbourhood, for which he was amply rewarded. In due course, his “mosque administration” blithely began to encroach on adjoining state land without a squeak from the “agency-fearing” government of the day. Abdullah was assassinated in a sectarian killing in 1998. In 2004, after the erstwhile jihadis and Al-Qaeda had hooked up to try and kill President General Pervez Musharraf for abandoning their cause at America’s behest, Abdul Rashid was arrested when the boot of his car yielded explosives and a rocket launcher. But Ijaz ul Haq, the religious affairs minister, intervened and he was let off the hook by his “minders”. More significantly, despite their pro-Taliban-Al-Qaeda sympathies and support, backed by strident anti-American rhetoric, the brothers did not “disappear” into any intelligence black hole like so many others of their ilk.
Second, it is curious that the Lal Masjid affair has hogged the media precisely when the more substantive national issue of the fate of the chief justice of Pakistan and the independence of the judiciary has been at stake. The Lal Masjid “drama” shifted into high gear in March-April when the CJP started his long marches across the country. The Ghazi brigades diverted the public’s mind by kidnapping women, children and policemen and raiding CD and music shops in broad daylight in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The government pretended to “negotiate” with them even as they set up their own Shariah courts in April and started to threaten thousands of “suicide attacks” across the country. Indeed, following a Lal Masjid fatwa against Nilofer Bakhtiar, the government relieved the tourism minister of her portfolio. The mullahs’ heroics continued in May when they kidnapped four policemen and in late June when they abducted seven Chinese nationals. Significantly, during these last three months, the government made no attempt to besiege the Lal Masjid or even to stop the comings and goings of their cadres. This, despite the alarming statement by General Musharraf recently that the compound was awash with firearms and home to the dreaded Jaish i Mohammad terrorists and suicide bombers of Al-Qaeda. (He did not explain how the terrorists and weapons got into the compound in the first place without the knowledge of the all-powerful and ubiquitous “agencies” which have even bugged the homes of senior judges). Even more significant is the fact that the Lal Masjid mullahs parted with their periodic hostages after monopolizing the media but without getting anything in return from the authorities.
Third, the Lal Masjid brigades have not been able to garner the support of mainstream madrassas and religious parties. This is, to say the least, very strange. One might have imagined that their “successful” Islamic heroics would have provoked copy-cat strikes, kidnappings and religious insurgencies across the settled urban areas of the country and set the nation on fire. Instead, mainstream religious parties and groups have assiduously side-stepped the Lal Masjid, with most mullahs decrying their headline grabbing methods. Indeed, Maulana Fazal ur Rehman, one of Pakistan’s most astute and well-connected politicians, has said time and again that the Ghazi brothers were doing the agencies’ bidding to divert attention from General Musharraf’s domestic woes and to create the impression that radical Islamic fundamentalism was such a real threat that only an enlightened and moderate commando like him could roll it back.
Fourth, it is a mistake to say that the government has finally launched a military “operation” or “attack” against the Lal Masjid mullahs. Contingents of Rangers and policemen surrounded the compound and shut down power and water supplies (how “soft” can you get?) following a public backlash at the kidnapping of the Chinese nationals ten days ago. Certainly, the “conspiracy” would have been nailed if the government hadn’t even done that. But, as is likely to happen in the most carefully laid plans, zealous cadres got carried away in the heat of the moment and forgot the script when they tried to kidnap some Rangers and opened fire when the policemen resisted. The casualties of the last few days reflect the autonomous unfolding of the drama rather than any great attempt on the part of the state to forcefully stamp its writ on Lal Masjid.
The media has been manipulated. The international community has been bamboozled. Radical Islamists have been discredited. The CJP’s trial has been downgraded. It looks like a case of shuttering, a wink here, a nod there, and a final crackdown to exploit the situation. So if President General Pervez Musharraf is seen to be crowing or smirking or growling at the same time when he addresses the nation shortly, who can blame him?
(July 13-19, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 21 – Editorial)
Strategic conclusions of Lal Masjid
The military “operation” against the Lal Masjid extremists is over. But most Pakistanis are worried about its fallout. Indeed, a post-mortem may reveal disturbing fissures in Pakistani state and society with far-reaching consequences.
First, there is a split among those Pakistanis who say “they had it coming”, “the writ of the state must be enforced at all costs”, “religious extremism is a curse”, and those who nevertheless insist that the “militants should have been given safe passage in order to save the lives of women and children”. Naturally, the latter include mullahs and conservatives of all shades. But anti-Musharraf politicians are also trying to exploit the situation. The only divergent voice is that of Benazir Bhutto. She agrees that the “operation” was necessary but has cunningly qualified it by adding that religious extremism is a consequence of army rule and only civilian supremacy in a democracy can counter it effectively.
Second, the mainstream vernacular media, print and electronic, has been more swayed by the Islamists than the government. This is because the sentiments of most middle-class reporters, news editors and television anchors are typically anti-army, anti-Musharraf, anti-West, and anti-America. The objective effect of this is the consolidation of emotional positions in the media by default. Since pro-establishment, commercial-minded owners are unable or unwilling to chastise or educate their staffers in the larger, long-term, rational “national interest”, this independent media-bias could become a destabilizing factor in national polity.
Third, the Musharraf-Military-PML alliance is a net loser in this situation. Many Pakistanis accuse it of scripting the prolonged drama to divert attention from the multiple crises facing it and then losing control of the play when the actors rebelled, compelling it to hastily draw the curtain. Others believe it arrogantly backtracked on a last-ditch solution stitched by PML stalwarts Chaudhry Shujaat/Ijaz ul Haq and Maulana Rashid Ghazi. The net result is mullah outrage and conservative alienation across the country. If this protest becomes widespread and turns violent, the government might be compelled to clamp martial law. At any rate, with “lib-labs”, NGOs and civil-society types opposed to military rule, and others rooting for the PPP, the fortunes of the ruling Muslim League are likely to dim in the run-up to the general elections, thereby significantly thwarting General Musharraf’s political ambitions.
Fourth, the bloody conclusion to the Lal Masjid affair has only served to bring the government’s simmering political troubles into sharper focus rather than make them go away. The Supreme Court’s decision on the fate of the CJP is expected next week. In this anti-government mood of the country, if the judges are inclined to bend with the popular wind instead of standing with the government, a gaping hole could appear in General Musharraf’s plans to be re-elected president by the present assemblies, appoint a pro-PML caretaker government that would facilitate the ruling party in the general elections, and continue to wear his army uniform for the next five years.
Fifth, there may be a long term silver lining in the Lal Masjid showdown if the right conclusions are drawn by the military establishment. The most significant conclusion is that the time has come to disband the Military-Mullah Alliance – which has been the pet project of the establishment since the 1980s – for good. This is a natural consequence of the post-cold war world and Pakistan’s place in it after 9/11. Islamabad now has the bomb on the shelf instead of in the basement. Its armed forces have been modernized and replenished. Its economy is finally on the mend. It needs peace in the region, especially with India, to sustain these developments. Therefore it has no need for jihadis or radical Islamists to further its security agendas. On the contrary, they have now become part of the problem instead of the solution, as demonstrated by their desperate attempts to derail the peace dialogue with India, to assassinate General Musharraf, to Talibanise the frontier regions, provoke American retaliation, and to enforce their narrow self-serving brand of shariah in the federal capital by vigilante action.
Sixth, an equally critical conclusion is that this paradigm shift cannot be fully accomplished by the establishment simply by allying with a failing PML. Indeed, the PML has shown itself to be a drag on General Musharraf’s agenda for enlightened moderation. On every turning point, its leaders have sought alliances with the mullahs instead of spurning them. The built-in contradiction between General Musharraf’s outlook and that of his main political partner needs to be resolved. This suggests the necessity of a transitional alliance of the new military establishment with more progressive and secular elements in the country.
Seven, a final conclusion is that the tide of political and religious extremism cannot be turned back solely by our weak, unstructured, divided and ill-disciplined political parties without the active support of the military. Indeed, “undiluted” civilian democracy without military backing would be a recipe for anarchy just as military supremacy with a weak civilian consensus is leading to political gridlock. Instead, an enlightened and moderate politico-military alliance is required immediately to stem the growth of religious radicalism in the same manner in which a conservative and immoderate politico-military alliance was cobbled to start the process of Islamisation in the 1980s.
(July 20-26, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 22 – Editorial)
US-Pak tragedy
President General Pervez Musharraf has said that the infiltration into Afghanistan of Taliban fighters with sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas “had been reduced” and Al-Qaeda is “on the run” in Waziristan. He added that Nato and CIA agreed with him because the “spring and summer offensives” of the Taliban in Afghanistan had been blunted.
But a US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) just released argues exactly the opposite. It claims that Al-Qaeda has safe havens in Waziristan and been so strengthened that it now poses a direct threat to the US mainland. It criticized General Musharraf’s “peace deals” with the Taliban in Waziristan because the hiatus had provided Al-Qaeda “space” for entrenchment in the area. More significantly, it suggested that if General Musharraf wasn’t up to the job of eliminating the terrorists in his territory the US should consider taking them out with or without the permission of the Pakistan government.
This has prompted Pakistan’s Foreign Office to say that the NIE report isn’t right and that Pakistan has fully cooperated in the war against terror whenever it has been provided with credible intelligence about the movements of the Taliban-Al-Qaeda network. So who’s right and who’s wrong?
There has been a spate of Taliban attacks on Pakistan’s security forces in Waziristan and the northern areas in the last two weeks in which nearly 150 people have been killed, mostly soldiers and local officials. This two-week toll is equal to the loss of lives in the last two years and suggests that General Musharraf’s rosy assessment may be a case of dissembling. The fact that the Taliban and its local supporters have unilaterally broken the truce and the government is running around desperately trying to patch it also implies that the stronger Taliban force has taken the initiative against a weaker opponent. The clinching fact is General Musharraf’s admission that Pakistan’s National Security Council recently decided to beef up troops and equipment in the troubled areas and persuaded the chief minister of the NWFP to back its plans. This was buttressed by news that the US government had sanctioned US$750 million for the Pakistan government’s anti-terrorist operations in FATA over the next five years and Pakistan was raising 15,000 new para-military troopers for deployment by December. Three days ago, there was news that government troops had used heavy artillery to attack suspected Taliban-Al Qaeda hideouts and camps in Waziristan.
But if the Pakistan government has a vested interest in downplaying its failures in combating the Taliban, the US government may now have a high stake in drumming up the threat from the same source. It is significant that the Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, is a major inspiration behind the NIE and is making all the noises about the Al-Qaeda threat to the US rather than NATO which is the chief player on the ground. The Bush administration has, time and again, relied on the “fear factor” to shore up its plunging ratings with the American people. Its failure in Iraq has been compounded by its failure in Afghanistan. But for obvious reasons, it is convenient to blame Pakistan rather than admit its own strategic and tactical shortcomings in Afghanistan. Hence the NIE’s forecast that another Al-Qaeda attack on US soil is imminent and that it is Pakistan’s tribal areas which are “key elements” in the regeneration of Al-Qaeda’s “homeland attack ability”. Mr Chertoff also triggers the “fear factor” when says he would like the US Congress to modify visa free travel rules for visitors to the US as well as tighten screening of all air passengers with new technology.
The US strategy has produced immediate results. The Washington Post has editorialized that “if Pakistani forces cannot or will not eliminate the (Al-Qaeda) sanctuary, President Bush must order targeted strikes or covert actions by American forces, as he has done several times in recent years”. The WP takes the 9/11 Commission to task for saying that direct attacks on Al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas would be disproportionate to the threat. “The US must not repeat that tragic misjudgment” it concludes. Indeed, Lee Hamilton, vice chair of the 9/11 Commission and member of President Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, says America should bomb Waziristan even at the risk of destabilizing General Musharraf.
The fact is that both the US and Pakistan governments are responsible for the revival of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Americans haven’t put in enough money in the last six years to wins hearts and minds in Afghanistan. They have made short term tactical alliances with warlords which have weakened their long-term strategic allies in Kabul. Hamid Karzai has been a weak and confused puppet whose inability to make the right tribal, ethnic and political alliances is marked. Their European allies in NATO remain squeamish about taking casualties or putting more money into the anti-terror kitty. Meanwhile, Pakistan has been unwilling to knock out the Taliban because it sees the Pakhtun Islamic force as a long term antidote or “balancing factor” to the pro-India Northern Alliance of Uzbeks and Tajiks that dominates Kabul.
The net result of both countries’ domestic and foreign policies is a lasting tragedy for both Americans and Pakistanis.
(July 27-August 2, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 23 – Editorial)
More uncertainty ahead
The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, has been restored to his erstwhile pristine glory by a unanimous decision of the 13 member supreme court of Pakistan. Whatever they may say, the fact is that neither the government, nor the lawyers and supporters of the CJP, expected such a resounding verdict. Indeed, the government’s intelligence agencies had told it to expect 8-5 in favour while the friends of the CJP thought he would be restored only with some restraining conditions. In the event, the Supreme Court kept its pledge and delivered a truly historic blow for the independence of the judiciary. So where does everyone go from here?
Take the CJP. The truth is that in his previous incarnation, Mr Chaudhry’s histrionics did not endear him to the federal and provincial executives or to senior lawyers and judge-colleagues. But now the perception is that he may be eternally indebted to the bar and bench and irrevocably hostile to the executive. This is unfortunate. If he actually turns out to be partial towards those who stood by him or opposed him, it would be a travesty of justice at the highest level because justice is supposed to be blind. But this “blindness” is not going to come easily. Already, a leading pro-CJP lawyer has thundered that justice cannot be blind and that Justice Chaudhry must help the “go-Musharraf-go” movement get rid of President General Pervez Musharraf. Indeed, political emotions ran so high during the campaign that another leading lawyer threatened to burn the Supreme Court down if it didn’t give a favourable judgment. Therefore Justice Chaudhry will have to tread carefully so that he is not tainted by the brush of favouritism or bias. Equally, if he is inclined to consider himself as an all powerful and unaccountable “chief” rather than a “first among equals”, the judges who stood up for him might become resentful and foment a revolt at the behest of the executive, much like the judges who threw out Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah in 1998.
As for General Musharraf, the judgment has weakened him morally and politically. But no heads have rolled to appease the pro-judiciary movement and call it quits. This is unfortunate. The government’s feeble “we accept it” response suggests that it has gone into a desperate huddle and is working out suitable counter-moves to protect its diminishing fortunes. Indeed, the perception in the president’s camp is that, whatever the legal pros and cons of any case, no pro-government decision should be expected from this revamped Supreme Court in its current mood. In other words, apart from having to contend with various anti-executive positions on a number of current public issues, President Musharraf should not expect this Supreme Court to validate his quest for re-election from the current assemblies, or give blanket approval to his proposed caretaker set-ups, or allow him to wear the two top hats of president and army chief at the same time.
Under the circumstances, if General Musharraf doesn’t want to face the prospect of defeat at the altar of the Supreme Court led by Justice Chaudhry on any of these three great issues of the day, his options may be simply stated. He can hold genuinely free and fair elections, hand over power to the elected representatives of the people, forget about being president or army chief, and leave as honourably as possible. Or he can swing the other way and impose a stiff martial law, pack off the assemblies, postpone the elections, suspend the Supreme Court, and face the domestic and international consequences of his action. Is there a third option whereby he can achieve part if not all of his agenda without stepping on the toes of the Supreme Court?
The only way out is via a transparent constitutional route which cannot be challenged effectively in the Court. General Musharraf can make a power-sharing deal with both Maulana Fazal Rehman and Benazir Bhutto – the former is estranged from his Jamaat-e-Islami colleagues just as mush as the latter is distant from the PMLN – whereby they can help amend the constitution so that he can be president and/or army chief for another five years in return for Ms Bhutto being prime minister for a third term and Maulana Fazal reigning supreme in NWFP and Balochistan. Such a deal can be done before the general elections so that a constitutional amendment that cannot be challenged in the Supreme Court can give General Musharraf a degree of reprieve or comfort. Or it can be done after the elections when all the parties know their true worth and can get the best deal for themselves. The problem with the “before elections” deal is that it would partially give General Musharraf what he wants without guaranteeing the other two anything because the elections might return an unexpected verdict. The problem with the “after-elections” deal is that it could founder on the rock of intransigence if one or more parties want more than their share of power warranted by the election results. Therefore General Musharraf would probably favour the “before-elections” constitutional deal while the other two would want to do it after the elections.
Clearly, more uncertainty lies ahead.
(August 3-9, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 24 – Editorial)
Transition to functional democracy
By all accounts, the “Mother of All Deals” has been concluded. We were not among the Doubting Thomases who said that General Pervez Musharraf and the rightist military establishment could never sup with the liberal and moderate Ms Bhutto. We were not among the liberals who insisted that Maulana Fazal ur Rehman would inevitably camp with Nawaz Sharif and Qazi Hussain Ahmad. We were not among those who predicted one month ago that “Musharraf is a goner”. In fact, we have constantly chastised General Musharraf for his mistakes and highlighted his increasing problems. But we have always pointed out new opportunities for advancing the national interest.
So what is the deal? Based on some concrete information and some relentless logic, we can lay down the salient points of the agenda of the next six months.
One, General Musharraf will be seeking the approval of Ms Bhutto and Maulana Fazal in August about the contours of the interim governments at the centre and in the provinces which will oversee the next general elections. The candidates for interim prime minister and Sindh/Punjab Chief Minister will have to seek a nod from Ms Bhutto while ensuring that there is no strong opposition to them in Punjab from the PMLQ and in Sindh from the MQM. Candidates for NWFP-CM will have to pay homage to Maulana Fazal. President Musharraf will have a relatively free hand in Balochistan.
Two, he will seek presidential re-election in uniform from the current assemblies in September, with the implicit support of Ms Bhutto and Maulana Fazal who will not vote for him but will not try to derail him either. In fact, if the supreme court is envisaged as a hurdle in this regard, they will positively help him overcome it by means of a constitutional amendment.
Third, such a constitutional amendment will be passed by the current assemblies with the support of Ms Bhutto and Maulana Fazal which will (a) exempt any government servant (read General Musharraf) from the two year restraint on standing for election to the presidency. (b) remove the bar on twice-elected prime ministers (read Ms Bhutto) from becoming prime minister for a third time (c) compel General Musharraf to remove his uniform sooner rather than later. Ms Bhutto would like him to take it off by December 2007 or June 2008 at the latest, but General Musharraf is still insisting on end-2009, which means a compromise is possible. (d) remove the graduation condition on members of parliament (so that the controversy pending resolution in the supreme court over whether a madrassa degree is equivalent to a BA degree for election purposes is buried).
This deal makes a lot of sense. In fact it makes much better sense from the point of view of Pakistan’s national interest in moving towards greater democracy and moderation than the deal that General Musharraf did with the MMA in 2002. The old deal gave him five years as army chief and president. The new deal allows him to retain the presidency but compels him to doff his uniform quickly. The old deal sandwiched him between two conservative allies – the Muslim League and the MMA – and stopped him from practicing his enlightened moderation agenda. The new deal relegates the PML and JUI to junior partners, splits the JUI from the hardline Jamaat I Islami, and elevates the secular and moderate PPP as a senior player, thereby enabling the state to enlarge the national consensus against religious extremism and terror. The old deal put primacy on military power and supremacy. The new deal will send the military back to barracks when General Musharraf doffs his uniform and also stop it from pulling strings from behind the scenes to destabilize civilian government because President Musharraf will retain greater control over it than any other purely civilian president in history.
Finally, the old deal was at odds with the post-9/11 international and regional community. The US was fighting the war against the Taleban and Al-Qaeda even as its ally in Pakistan was bent on protecting its Pashtun assets in the battle for Afghanistan. Equally, India was deeply apprehensive about the prospects of peace with Pakistan as long as the Military Mullah Alliance in Islamabad was bent on fomenting jihad in Kashmir. But the new deal will help bury those ghosts and promote a settlement with Afghanistan and India in time to come. That is why it has evoked support from both the US and India – the former has played a significant role in nudging all parties in this direction while the latter’s national security advisor has announced that “the worst is over for Musharraf”.
To be sure, “there’s many a slip between the cup and lip”. But why should we accept the proposition that the situation one or two years hence will be worse than if the “deal” hadn’t taken place today? Most people forget that, in their second stints, Ms Bhutto had a better working arrangement with the military than Mr Sharif. On their own, neither the military generals nor the politicians have served Pakistan well. This deal should be supported because it represents a realistic last ditch compromise to establish a stable transition to a more functional liberal democracy.
(August 10-16, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 25 – Editorial)
Don’t do it, General Musharraf!
President General Pervez Musharraf has said on countless occasions: “I will never impose an Emergency or martial law in the country”. Why, then, is he thinking of taking an about-turn?
A state of Emergency enables the national assembly to extend its life term by up to a year. It allows the federal executive to suspend many fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution. It also enables federal directives to override certain provincial prerogatives. Are there radically new internal and external conditions that warrant such a drastic step to “protect” the federation?
The national assembly has been in session for a few days. Interestingly, treasury members of the pro-US Musharraf regime have joined hands with the religious oppositionists sympathetic to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to condemn the United States for threatening to bomb Al-Qaeda and Taliban “safe havens” in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The assembly has erupted with thundering calls to defend Pakistan’s “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity”, despite assurances from the American administration that no hot pursuit, let alone any invasion, is on the cards.
Simultaneously, the idea of a joint Afghan jirga mooted last year by President Bush and Hamid Karzai with President Musharraf has been scuttled. The “tribal elders” from Pakistan representing Waziristan have refused to go to Kabul. They say they fear reprisals from their Taliban compatriots, a thought that didn’t occur to them earlier when they were readying for the jirga. Finally, President Musharraf has pulled out of the Kabul moot at the last minute himself and sent Mr Shaukat Aziz, the prime minister, to hobnob with Mr Karzai, stamping failure on the joint jirga even before it has been convened.
The giveaway has been provided by Major (retired) Tanvir Shah, a parliamentary secretary with “connections”. Incredibly, he stood up in parliament the other day to denounce the American CIA for killing Chinese nationals in Pakistan. All that remains for the “external threat” to materialize is for the ubiquitous “Indian hand” to show up now. This is the traditional handiwork of Pakistan’s manipulative intelligence agencies.
The “internal” threat is more implicit than explicit. Clearly, President Musharraf has been in a spin since the Chief Justice of Pakistan was unanimously restored to power and lost little time in asserting the court’s independence. If the SC could reverse an earlier decision and free the PMLN’s Javed Hashmi, there is nothing to stop it from reversing another earlier decision and granting the Sharif brothers their fundamental right to return to Pakistan. Their fundamental rights petition has been strengthened by the addition of a new point: the Sharifs are required in the “public interest” to lead their party in the forthcoming general elections. But the return of the Sharifs would create a plethora of problems for the Musharraf regime and pit it into another confrontation with the courts, thereby undermining its credibility and electoral prospects further. By contrast, a suspension of fundamental rights under an Emergency would presumably deprive the courts of rubbing up the government the wrong way on this and many such issues in the offing.
Finally, the ruling League would like nothing better then to have its life extended for another year and general elections delayed accordingly. It is in great disquiet and disarray. Its electoral prospects are dimming by the day. It is mortally scared of a deal between General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto in which their main benefactor is stripped of his uniform (whence he drives his power of beneficence) and compelled to play footsy with their arch enemy.
So if the signs ominously favour an Emergency, what could derail General Musharraf’s plans?
First, the SC might not be a pushover. It could clutch at its power of “judicial review” and strike the Emergency down. All hell would then break loose, leading to constitutional gridlock. Second, if civil society, lawyers and opposition political parties jump into the fray behind the judges, as they most certainly will, the constitutional breakdown would lead to violent agitation. In the event, the government could back down and lose its remaining credibility, or it could go a step further, impose martial law and send the judiciary and parliament packing. But this won’t work either. In the heated aftermath of repression, there are not likely to be too many new or old judges ready to take a new oath to legitimize martial law. Indeed, the probability is that most senior judges in the country would resign in a show of solidarity with their peers and the country would be adrift without any law or order. Thus General Musharraf’s problems would increase manifold, his remaining legitimacy would evaporate, terrorism would increase, uncertainty would damage the economy and he would end up riding a tiger, which would surely gobble him up sooner than later like his three predecessors who took such a route.
General Musharraf was once advised that if he wanted to impose an Emergency he should not constantly deny it, and if he didn’t want to impose it he should hold out an oblique threat constantly. We don’t know what he made of that advice. But, for what it’s worth, here’s our advice: “Don’t do it, General Musharraf. The economy will be the first casualty and you will be the next”.
(August 17-23, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 26 – Editorial)
Nation, state and religious identity
The “nation-state” evolved over 200 years ago, so Pakistan is relatively immature at 60. It is beset with problems of insecurity, identity and governance. Its insecurity is derived from the bloody pangs of a Caesarian birth and its identity crisis reflects an attempt to cut the umbilical chord with secular South Asia and seek its destiny in the Islamic Middle-East.
Pakistan’s crisis of governance flows from its inheritance – a relatively developed colonial state apparatus representing the army and bureaucracy before the consolidation of a Pakistani nationhood. This led to the creation of a state-nation standing above the people rather than the other way round in the historical formation of nation-states in which the people formed a nation, then hammered out a consensual or constitutional state.
This Pakistani state-nation has sought to legitimize and entrench itself on the basis of religious ideology. It has tried to stamp a singular identity on the people with the objective of swamping their historically created and enduring multiple sub-identities of ethnicity, language, class, region and sect. By contrast, the historical nation-state, as in India, is predicated on the principles of pluralism and secular democracy in which unity is an acknowledgement, rather than a denial, of religious, linguistic, ethnic and class diversity among the people.
A state-nation built on a singular, solitary, centralizing religious identity, which is by definition exclusivist, polarizing and intolerant because it sets up categories of “us” and “them”, is more prone to bouts of internal and external violence than a nation-state based on pluralist multiple-identity secular democracy. In Pakistan, the state-nation/nation-state problem is compounded by one powerful contradiction based on its singular religious identity: Islam is a brotherhood that transcends the nation-state by demanding loyalty to a Khilafat which undermines the notion of loyalty to a national state bounded by geography with limited political sovereignty. Thus Pakistan’s attempt to forge an “Islamic nationalist” identity is a violent contradiction in terms of the state-nation/nation-state paradigm.
In 60 years, this ruling singular ideology has led to the establishment of a political culture of authoritarianism, violent dismemberment, debilitating regional wars, internal insurgencies, sectarian strife and a prohibitive arms race that has effectively blocked the trickle down effects of economic development to the vast majority of Pakistanis. All these elements signify progressive state-nation failure. What is the way forward?
First, we need less state religious ideology, not more, to make our multi-national state more temporal, peaceable and viable. This is not incompatible with increasing personal religiosity. To do this, however, we must rewrite history, revise the core education curricula, educate the media and cleanse the constitution of all manifestations of any singular religious destiny. We must also insist that the army and bureaucracy serve the cause of a civilianised nation rather than lord over it for reasons of misplaced religious (national) security. Therefore we must encourage civil society pluralism and autonomy in opposition to the centralism of the religious state. We must also support the peoples’ movement for greater democracy and liberal constitutionalism and insist on the irrevocable retreat of the military and clerics from the dominating heights of the state. Finally, our state’s relations with our neighbours should be based on peaceful co-existence and trade rather than territorial or religious ambitions. How does this translate practically?
General Pervez Musharraf must be compelled to shed his uniform and take the army back to barracks. Free and fair elections should return political parties to power which are at least united on a one point national agenda: to establish a political order that is democratic, that recognizes the pluralistic nature of our society and revises the Objectives Resolution in the constitution to engage with multiple impulses, including those of the judiciary and civil society groups, and disentangles the state and constitution from any singular religious identity.
The debate in Pakistan should not only be about choosing religious moderation over extremism or about civilian control over the military. It should be, above all, about the nature of the relationship between our pluralistic nation and our singular state. If this state -nation remains mired in singular religious ideology and identity, it can never be peaceable or democratic, regardless of whom among civilians, clerics and military men rule. But if a national consensus between the civilians and the military can be cobbled on this fundamental issue, the other contentious issues can be tackled. Is this possible?
Unfortunately, in the current religious mood of the people – in which anti-Western passions and clash of civilizations figure more prominently than notions of democracy, civil society or even economy – this seems unlikely. Hence a power-sharing deal between General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto, whatever its transitional legitimacy, will not be able to redesign the state as required. For that to happen, the unequivocal support of Nawaz Sharif in a government of national consensus will be needed. Since that is not on the horizon, Pakistan may be fated to suffer many more trials and tribulations.
(August 24-30, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 27 – Editorial)
General Musharraf’s fading options
President General Pervez Musharraf’s “strategy” to get re-elected president for the next five years and, if possible, to remain army chief for as long as possible is failing. The Chief Justice of Pakistan has got stuck in General Musharraf’s throat and refuses to be coughed up. Consequently, the regime is desperately flapping for a way out. Nothing has come of Mr Zafarullah Jamali’s attempts to neutralize the CJP and rumours of General (retd) Hamid Javed’s meeting with the CJP have been hotly denied by CJP sources. Meanwhile, the good judge is going full throttle. He has forced the government to release “alleged terrorists and insurgents” held incommunicado without trial for years by military intelligence. He has opened hearings on a Jamaat-e-Islami petition challenging General Musharraf’s bid to be re-elected president in uniform from the current assemblies. He is in a hurry to decide Nawaz Sharif’s petition to be allowed to return to Pakistan. And he is leaning on the Election Commission to create a level playing field for the next general elections. Any anti-government decision would cut the ground from under General Musharraf’s feet. Already, the ruling PMLQ is reeling with loss of faith and urging all manner of emergency responses to save its skin.
General Musharraf has been wooing the PPP and JUI, partly to divide and rule the opposition and partly to shore up his regime with some additional junior partners. But this is easier said than done. Indeed, the secret “deals” with both parties are beginning to unravel because General Musharraf and the PMLQ don’t see eye-to-eye on strategy. General Musharraf and his American benefactors want a deal with the moderate PPP in 2007 but the PMLQ wants one with the radical MMA as in 2002. The irony is that an exclusive deal with the PPP would weaken the PMLQ, which is General Musharraf’s current base, while one with the MMA would castrate General Musharraf’s enlightened moderation agenda, polarize the country and alienate the international community. The failure to resolve this question of strategic and tactical power-sharing allies for the future has led the Musharraf regime to consider an imposition of Emergency to prolong the life of the current parliament and government and also clip the wings of the Supreme Court. In the hazy background dangles the sword of martial law if all else fails.
The next thirty days will shake Pakistan. Either the SC will unite to maul General Musharraf or General Musharraf will try to sow dissension within its ranks and nudge parliament to defang it. But there are two problems with pitting parliament against the SC. First, parliament’s supremacy and exclusive sovereignty to make laws, including those aimed at clipping the SC’s powers, is open to judicial review by the SC. So the SC could strike down new legislation if it doesn’t measure up to the “spirit” or “conscience” of the constitution as interpreted by the SC. That would open up an irrevocable breach between a sovereign parliament that represents the will of the people and a SC that is bucked up by the same people against their very own elected parliament. This deadlock would lead to martial law or General Musharraf’s ouster. Second, only a constitutional amendment with 2/3rd parliamentary majority would carry sufficient weight to hold the SC off or sow dissension in its ranks. But such a constitutional amendment is not possible without the support of the PPP. So it’s back to the core contradiction in the strategic choice of the best bedfellows for General Musharraf and the PMLQ.
Unfortunately, the time for postponing this decision has run out for General Musharraf. The PPP risks being significantly weakened by open association with him no less than the JUI. Each wants a chunk of the cake in the next round with him but both are worried about being out of the loop completely if he is not around at all. Meanwhile, Mr Nawaz Sharif is exclusively reaping the fruit of dissension, fear and blundering among General Musharraf, PMLQ, PPP and JUI. In anticipation of bad days ahead, the stock market is hunkering down and the bookies have shuffled the odds against General Musharraf.
Would martial law resolve anything? No, it won’t. In the past, martial law was imposed when the civilians had run aground, so it had a measure of public support. But this time it is General Musharraf and the military that is threatened with shipwreck. So logically speaking it is the opposite of martial law – greater democracy and civilian supremacy that is required in the current situation. Thus martial law would pit civilians against the military and exacerbate the issues. Since the situation would quickly become untenable at home and abroad, it would have to reverse itself by overthrowing its chief architect. Meanwhile, the loss to Pakistan’s economy would be irredeemable and society would be more polarized than ever before.
General Musharraf should allow all leaders to return to Pakistan and contest free elections. He should then seek re-election as president from the next parliament. If he wins, he should appoint the next army chief. If he loses, he should go home and let the next civilian president appoint the next army chief.
(August 31- September 6, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 28 – Editorial)
Deal or no deal, the crisis will deepen
Time has run out for General Pervez Musharraf. He must take some sweeping decisions in the next few days. A dozen PMLQ MNAs won’t vote for him in the presidential elections. Two dozen others may conceivably jump ship. The Supreme Court has welcomed three petitions to dethrone him. If there is even one more anti-SC judgment against him, the PMLQ could stampede and throw him to the wolves. Therefore he has no constitutional option but to clutch at the lifeline thrown by Benazir Bhutto. If he falls back to martial law, he could be swallowed up in its aftermath.
General Musharraf wants a constitutional amendment with Ms Bhutto’s help to ensure that the Supreme Court doesn’t derail him when he tries to become president in uniform via the current assemblies. In exchange for a concession package, Ms Bhutto says she will support such an amendment but may not vote for him as president because she doesn’t want to be seen as supporting a military man for president of Pakistan. But that doesn’t bother him.
General Musharraf has agreed to take off his uniform before December 31, 2007 but refuses to give a firm date right now. If he did, he believes he would become a lame duck and jeopardize his presidential election. This is a small sticking point for Ms Bhutto who wants Pakistanis to cheer her for stripping him of his uniform. But he won’t be dictated to on this point. So Ms Bhutto will have to settle for a general commitment from him to quit as army chief before year’s end.
Ms Bhutto wants all cases of misconduct, criminality or corruption dropped against her and all other politicians. Originally, she had demanded that this general amnesty should cover the period from 1988 to 2007, thereby including the charges against Nawaz Sharif, so that she could say she had negotiated a national rather than a personal reconciliation. But General Musharraf refuses to give any relief to Nawaz Sharif. The deterrent is critical for General Musharraf since Mr Sharif is his chief opponent, not just personally but also politically since the PMLQ has been carved out of the PMLN and is threatened by desertions to the Nawaz camp. Hence the new proposal to drop all such charges against everyone only from 1988 to 1999 will probably carry and Mr Sharif will not benefit from it.
Ms Bhutto wants the law banning a third term for anyone as prime minister changed so that she can be prime minister again. She wants people convicted in absentia to be able to contest elections from home or abroad. She also wants an interim government to oversee the general elections and she wants the local bodies system, in which PMLQ nazims have a central role, suspended until after the general elections. General Musharraf doesn’t seem to have too many problems with these demands. She has also recommended a nominee for the caretaker prime minister. This one or that, there will be someone acceptable to both in the end.
Ms Bhutto doesn’t object to the president’s power to appoint the service chiefs in his discretion but insists he shouldn’t have the right to appoint provincial governors or dismiss elected governments. She argues that a power-troika of president, army chief and prime minister is inherently unstable as experience shows. But he has dug his heels in and won’t budge. He says that, as currently constituted, this power is already subject to judicial review by the Supreme Court within 30 days of the sacking of any government by the president and that, given an independent judiciary, it is the indirectly elected president rather than any elected government which should fear the Supreme Court. At any rate, he says, if the opposition in the next assembly can pass a constitutional amendment to get rid of these presidential powers, they’re welcome to do so. So we may see a compromise solution prevail in which the power to dismiss the government, subject to the approval of the Supreme Court, remains with the president but the power to nominate the governors goes to the prime minister, or something like that in which the civilians will then outnumber the khakis in the national security council to be presided over by the president.
The alternative to a deal between Ms Bhutto and General Musharraf or martial law is to enable a re-invigorated PMLN to emerge, which would be anathema to both. But even if the deal goes through, there is no certainty that General Musharraf will be able to survive. The young lawyers, the resurgent judiciary and the rising opposition led by Nawaz Sharif, Imran Khan and the MMA are bound to give him a run for his money.
As soon as the deal is signed, however, all eyes will be on Nawaz Sharif. Will he return to rapturous crowds and risk deportation or arrest? Or will he back down at the last minute? General Musharraf isn’t mincing his words. If Mr Sharif does return, he will precipitate another crisis in the country which will pit the courts and the PMLN against the government. So deal or no deal, the political crisis is bound to deepen in the short term.
(September 7-13, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 29 – Editorial)
Reaping the whirlwind
There are three deadlines in the offing. President Pervez Musharraf has to stitch a deal with Benazir Bhutto and launch his bid for presidential re-election from the current parliament by the 15th of September. The opposition has to get the Supreme Court of Pakistan to fast-track the legal process of derailing him before he achieves his objective. And Mr Nawaz Sharif has to return to Pakistan by September 10 as promised so that he can deliver a coup de grace to General Muharraf. The next ten days will shake Pakistan.
The Supreme Court has clubbed two petitions against General Musharraf and seemingly wants to decide their fate in a hurry. Most people take this to mean that the court is hostile to General Musharraf and its judgment is foretold. The besieged government’s perception is much the same. So we may expect sparks to fly in the court. Should the chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Mohammad Chauudhry, preside over these two petitions, against the “principle of propriety” which lays down that a judge may not hear a case in which he is presumed to have a vested interest for or against the petitioner and/or respondent? After the disgusting manner in which he was humiliated and sacked, and the heroic manner in which he was restored, Justice Chaudhry is rightly perceived to have an elephantine grudge against General Musharraf and an obsessive desire to vindicate himself by ousting his nemesis. If a constitutional amendment cannot stop the honourable judge from asserting himself and pitting the supreme court against parliament, will we head into a martial law or some such naked exercise of executive power to neutralize the court? We should know soon enough.
Meanwhile, Mr Sharif’s deadline to fly home to Pakistan is catching up with him. He seems determined even though some embarrassing questions have cropped up. First it was announced that he was booked on a direct flight from London to Islamabad on September 10. Now his minions are claiming that he is booked on three different flights out of London but a final decision will be taken on September 8. The confusion has been compounded by an extraordinary announcement from the Saudi Arabian government that he should abide by his agreement to stay away from Pakistan and not take part in politics for ten years. This lends credibility to the perception that the government is pulling out all the stops to make him change his mind. With the supreme court breathing down his neck, the last thing General Musharraf wants is Nawaz Sharif rampaging down the GT road in an unending bus caravan and giving the PMLQ leaders a heart attack. So if Mr Sharif takes the plunge, as he insists he will, the government may risk another confrontation with the judiciary by arresting him or even deporting him to Saudi Arabia. Will Mr Sharif stick to his wise decision to return to Pakistan and court popularity, or lose his nerve and clutch at some excuse to postpone the day of reckoning? We should know soon enough.
The deal between General Musharraf and Ms Bhutto has been in the making for months. But General Musharraf has delayed clinching it for tactical reasons. He wanted to assess the nature and immediacy of the threat from the SC and Nawaz Sharif before making any significant concessions to Ms Bhutto. Since crunch week is upon him, we should know soon enough which way the wind is blowing. If these two protagonists can be held at bay, then no deal may be required with Ms Bhutto to amend the constitution to get re-elected as president. But if the confrontation with the SC threatens to blow up in the government’s face, then the PMLQ’s objections to an alliance with Ms Bhutto will vanish in the blinking of an eye.
Of course, if all else fails, General Musharraf has a fall back position. He can get the prime minister to order fresh general elections to the national assembly in the next two months, retain the provincial governments in Sindh and Punjab until these are over, remain in command as both president and army chief so that he can manipulate them in order to facilitate his presidential election from the new parliament, and then take off his uniform if necessary. Should this plan too fail for some reason, he could conceivably resort to extra-constitutional measures for a short time to set his house in order. Everybody says that martial law is not possible because the people of Pakistan and the international community will not accept it. But if push comes to shove the commando in him may go for it anyway in the belief that it is better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at all.
Do we need the “unadulterated civilian democracy” of the PMLN and MMA or a “transition to democracy” via General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto’s PPP? Should the new supreme court become supreme over the old parliament? Is the battle against religious extremism our war or America’s? After passion and outrage subside in the next few months, we shall have to reap the answers to these questions.
(September 14-20, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 30 – Editorial)
Ten Days that will shake Pakistan?
Mr Nawaz Sharif has come from London and gone to Jeddah as we predicted. He really had no choice in the matter after filing a successful petition in the Supreme Court. If he hadn’t returned he would have been branded a coward and “loser” in our honour-stricken society. So he took the right decision. Unfortunately for him, however, the Musharraf regime managed to rub the gloss off his “heroic return” by persuading the Saudi authorities to expose him as being economical with the truth regarding the deal when he went into exile in 2000. Indeed, he looked quite lost when he later realized that the Saudis had actually conspired with the Pakistani government to belittle him and then whisk him away to Jeddah and shut him up. To add salt to his wounds, the All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM) that he created in London without Benazir Bhutto put up a dismal performance on the day of his arrival. Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Imran Khan, Asfandyar Wali, and the worthies of the Pakistan Oppressed Nationalities Movement (PONAM) couldn’t whip up the crowds to protest and rescue him. Meanwhile, Ms Bhutto, with whom he had signed the Charter of Democracy, sat smarting in the wings over his bid to don the mantle of her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Indeed, in a perverse way, the components of the APDM may be happy to have him out of the way. They expect to garner a slice of his support base in the forthcoming elections that may not want to “waste” its vote on a politician whose future cannot be bleaker as long as General Musharraf is around.
The government is smug. Operation “Deport-NS” went off without a hitch. It also sent a strong signal to would-be deserters in the ranks of the PMLQ: stay tight, or else. A flush of confidence in Islamabad could spell the end of the so-called “deal-dialogue” with Ms Bhutto. The government might prefer to go it alone into the presidential election with General Musharraf in uniform rather than dilute the shot in the arm for the PMLQ with the deportation of Nawaz Sharif by openly allying with the PPP. Ms Bhutto, too, might not now want to risk getting too close publicly to General Musharraf after his latest show of arrogance and authoritarianism. Certainly, she has already lost some public sympathy by wanting to do a deal which bails him out of his mounting difficulties. So rather than an overt constitutional amendment deal there may be a “memorandum of understanding” between them, a sort of “non-deal”, which ensures that if Ms Bhutto cannot help him directly in getting re-elected as president in uniform she shouldn’t destabilize him by siding with the opposition. In exchange, she could hope for a fair playing field in the next elections with the prospect of sharing power with him later.
But before General Musharraf can ride off into the sunset, he has still got to conquer the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Two battles lie ahead. The SC will definitely find the government guilty of disobeying its orders by deporting Nawaz Sharif to Jeddah and will want some heads to roll. But the government can live with such a rap across its knuckles. However, if the SC should order the government to bring Mr Sharif back to Pakistan, then the government is likely to refuse to comply. Therefore bitter conflict will arise. More ominously, if the SC decides that General Musharraf cannot stand for election in uniform or out of it, he will have no option but to obey the court and shed his uniform unceremoniously, or simply exit from the scene, both of which he won’t like doing. Or he could clutch at a deal with Ms Bhutto to amend the constitution accordingly. But the PMLQ will try and sabotage it; Ms Bhutto may demand an exorbitant price; and the court may still find all this unconstitutional. Or he could override the court by martial law. Therefore the battle lines have been drawn between the executive and the judiciary. If the judiciary tries to stop General Musharraf in his tracks, he will impose martial law and sack the supreme court. Will he get away with it?
General Musharraf will find the going tough. The official international community will denounce him in public but might wink at him in private if the martial law is short, if it facilitates free general elections in three months or so, and if it leaves General Musharraf in command. In turn, the elections will go ahead if Benazir Bhutto’s PPP participates in them and accords a degree of legitimacy to General Musharraf regardless of how the PMLN and smaller opposition parties react. But there could be big trouble for General Musharraf if civil society organizations and political parties successfully pressurize the judiciary not to take a new oath to validate the new Provisional Constitutional Order and if the opposition parties, including the PPP, decide to mount a protest and boycott the polls. This is all very iffy . All the players must think long and hard of the diminishing choice between confrontation and transition.
The next week or so will chronicle the fate of Pakistan under Musharraf.
(September 21-27, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 31 – Editorial)
All eyes on Supreme Court
Sheikh Rashid Ahmad is His Master’s Voice. His statements on the fate of the deal with the PPP and now on the “extreme steps” that President General Pervez Musharraf might take if the opposition and/or the supreme court steps on his toes, have the nod of the president’s chief of staff, Lt Gen (retd) Hamid Javed. Dissembling or not, these statements are almost always at variance with what Chaudhry Shujaat, the president of the PMLQ, has to say on the subject. For instance, Sheikh Rashid has always said that a deal with the PPP makes political sense. Chaudhry Shujaat, on the other hand, has always pooh-poohed the idea of a deal with Ms Benazir Bhutto and insisted that the PMLQ should go it alone with General Musharraf. This reveals a struggle of ideas and strategy in the corridors of power, with Sheikh Rashid echoing the sentiments of one group and Chaudhry Shujaat those of another.
All this is relevant because both gentlemen are once again at variance on a critical issue. Sheikh Rashid has hinted at martial law if the supreme court refuses to allow General Musharraf to contest the presidential election in uniform from the current assemblies. But Chaudhry Shujaat has clarified that the government will obey the court’s verdict and there will be no martial law. What’s going on?
The idea that General Musharraf should be elected president in uniform from the current assemblies was originally mooted by the Chaudhries. Their logic was simple. They wanted him to confirm his legitimacy (as president) and authority (as army chief) before the general elections so that he could not only fix them in the PMLQ’s favour but also lord it over the next parliament and make sure that the PMLQ remained in the driving seat. Once that was accomplished, they argued, he could take off his uniform. In this scenario, any “deal” with Ms Bhutto before the presidential and general elections would have undermined the PMLQ’s chances. But the newly independent supreme court has created a hole in this strategy. The court may say maximally that General Musharraf cannot be elected president in or out of uniform or minimally that General Musharraf can contest the presidential election only after taking off his uniform. How will the regime react to either of these decisions?
If General Musharraf is not allowed to be elected president in or out of uniform by the supreme court, he can impose martial law, bend the law in a new Provisional Constitutional Order to suit his ambitions, and hope to sell his formula to the opposition parties, especially the PPP. But martial law would pose many problems. The international community is opposed to it. If there are few credible judges ready to be sworn in under the PCO, if the lawyers and opposition parties can mount prolonged agitation against him and if the PPP decides to join hands with the opposition rather than with him, then it won’t get too far. Or General Musharraf can accept the maximal decision, ask the prime minister to dissolve the assemblies, order general elections in November, set up an interim government, fix a pro-PMLQ tilt in the elections, maybe even opt for seat adjustments with the PPP, and confront his destiny in the new parliament (a deal with the PPP via a constitutional amendment much like the one in 2003 with the MMA) before he is obliged to take off his uniform by 31 December. But what will he do if the court minimally allows him to contest the presidential election out of uniform?
It’s a toss up. The advantage with taking off his uniform and getting elected from the current assemblies is that he doesn’t have to worry about his fate in the hands of a new assembly after an unpredictable general election which will be monitored far and wide for its transparency and fairness. The disadvantage is that such a presidential election is likely to be boycotted by the opposition parties and conjure unpleasant memories of the presidential referendum which failed to deliver legitimacy. The advantage of seeking presidential election from the next assemblies is that it will reflect genuine and acceptable legitimacy. The disadvantage is that the opposition political parties might gang up against General Musharraf and elect their own joint candidate. But how realistic is this prospect?
Not very. Unless the PMLN and MMA can together field a majority in the national assembly as well as in all the four provinces – which is highly unlikely – they won’t be able to elect their own presidential candidate. The chances of the PPP allying with them are equally remote, given their opposite outlook on most matters. Therefore the likelihood is that the PPP and PMLQ will have to tie the knot in Islamabad like the PPP and MQM in Sindh. If the PMLQ tries to get into bed with the MMA as it did in 2002, it will have to be based on abandoning the war against religious extremism and ushering in an Islamic state. In the event, the international community will abandon General Musharraf and the Pakistan military, and the economy will crash.
Of course, if the supreme court rejects all the petitions against General Musharraf, he will have a smooth ride.
(September 28-4 October, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 32 – Editorial)
Real crisis of Pakistan
Whatever the judgment of the Supreme Court of Pakistan in the various petitions against President General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan may be entering its most dangerous decade since independence. There is a short term problem which should worry Pakistanis and there is a longer term issue which makes the international community quite anxious. Consider.
The short term problem relates to the fate of Pakistan with or without President General Musharraf. If he is not allowed to contest and become a civilian president,, he can either pack his bags and quit or roll up his sleeves and fight. If he quits, the road is open for three major forces – PPP, PML and MMA – and several minor ones – MQM, ANP, PONAM, etc – to slug it out for “democratic” supremacy. The end-mosaic will likely reflect a highly fissured Pakistan veering to a conservative right alliance between the PML and MMA as under every PML central government in the past. The problem with this scenario is that it will lead to cultural and religious roadblocks in society that will make the economy dysfunctional as well as alienate the international community by abandoning the war against religious extremism. On the other hand, if General Musharraf refuses to throw in the towel and share power with the left-liberal PPP, he will be confronted by the combined opposition of the left and right forces which will make the country ungovernable, as we have seen over the last six months.
The longer term problem of Pakistan derives not from its state of dysfunctionality with or without greater “democracy” which it shares with several other underdeveloped countries but from its volatile and unique mix of popular religious nationalism, anti-Westernism and state nuclear-ism. Consider the central contradiction in Pakistan’s polity. The predominant sentiment in the country is anti-American. It cuts across class, religion, ethnic and political lines. Yet the US is Pakistan’s major aid giver and trading partner by far. Pakistan’s economy has done well only in periods when the US-Pak state partnership has been strong, as in the 1960s, 1980s and since 9/11. Yet those periods are marked by social divisions (as in the 1960s), religious revivalism (as in the 1980s), and political turmoil and anxiety (as in the 2000s) engendered by military rule. Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons and a documented history of nuclear proliferation raises a unique and persistent worry abroad: what if anti-America Pakistan were to go “Islamic” and start rattling its nuclear arsenal?
The latest research study by the Vienna-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, co-chaired by media mogul Ted Turner and former US senator Sam Nunn, claims that Pakistan is one of the two highest threats of nuclear terrorism and theft in the world. While Pakistan’s nuclear stockpiles are relatively small, it asserts, serving military officers in Pakistan cooperated with al-Qaeda in two plots to assassinate President Musharraf, “raising questions about the reliability of the military officers who guard the country’s nuclear stockpile”. Thus it is Al-Qaeda’s quest for establishing Waziristan as a base area for operations aimed principally against the US but generally against the West, coupled with the rise of politico-religious nationalism, that makes Pakistan of central concern to the international community. In consequence, American media reports these days are obsessed about the “reluctance” of the Pakistan army to face the Al-Qaeda threat in Waziristan and the Northern areas, prompting western strategic-policy hardliners to suggest direct and pre-emptive US strikes in the area. This is also the backdrop to the approval of the Western powers for an alliance of the Pakistani military with the pro-west but secular Peoples Party of Benazir Bhutto. Indeed, it is in this context that Ms Bhutto recently said that if returned to power she would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to question Dr A Q Khan directly about the scope of his nuclear proliferation. Ms Bhutto has risked popular nationalist ire at home only to assure the international community that there is no smoking gun in Dr Khan’s arsenal, that Pakistan’s nuclear leadership is responsible and its nuclear safeguards are secure.
In the longer term, therefore, it seems that “control”, “religious neutrality” and “accountability” of the nuclear state of Pakistan may be of far greater importance than the mere revival of “democracy” and the return of discredited political leaders. But there is a realization that in the absence of mainstream civilian participation in, and control of, the state, the writ of the state has rapidly eroded in large parts of Pakistan. The madrassah phenomena manifested itself under General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s and sustained the Taliban in 1996. The number of madrassah students has doubled during General Musharraf’s watch, from half a million in 2001 to one million in 2007. More ominously, Al Qaeda has joined hands with the Taliban and militant Sunni sectarianists to secure the periphery of Pakistan as a base area for local and global terrorism.
Ideally, the short term battles in the supreme court of Pakistan for civilian supremacy and democratic revival should yield a stable transition to longer-term state functionality and accountability. Unfortunately, however, there is no sign that the protagonists, or the outraged and passionate public, are even aware of the real crisis of Pakistan.
(October 5-11, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 33 – Editorial)
Necessity is the mother of politics
President General Pervez Musharraf’s fate hangs in the balance between the Supreme Court and Benazir Bhutto. The court can knock him out but Ms Bhutto can breathe life into him. Or the court can reprieve him but Ms Bhutto can strip him of his remaining legitimacy. Of course, his best hope is that the court will let him pass and Ms Bhutto will prop him up. But is that going to happen?
The SC can decide by Friday October 5th to allow or stop the presidential election on October 6. If it stops him, General Musharraf can impose martial law or opt for a lifesaving constitutional amendment “deal” with Ms Bhutto to override the court. But if the court allows him, he can proceed with or without Ms Bhutto’s support. In the event, if she does a “deal” with him and doesn’t resign from parliament, his presidential election will have a degree of legitimacy. But if there isn’t any “deal” and she is forced to resign, parliament will look forlorn and the presidential election will resemble the two farcical referendums of the past that were denuded of legitimacy.
Serious problems would arise for General Musharraf if the court simply “stayed” the presidential election. This would upset the election schedule, create a surge in uncertainty and leave little time between the presidential election and the November 15 deadline by which General Musharraf has to take off his uniform. Postponement of the judgment until after the presidential elections on the understanding that its validity would be subject to the court’s decision in the days following the election would be worse from General Musharraf’s point of view. It would be tantamount to holding a sword over his head and construed as unacceptable “blackmail” by the presidency. Certainly, if the president were compelled to take off his uniform as promised after the presidential elections but before the judgment is delivered, he would be an emperor without his clothes who is liable to be chucked out without further ado.
In other words, and regardless of what the court decides, the only way General Musharraf can move ahead with any degree of legitimacy and certainty now is by clinching a “deal” with Ms Bhutto. So what is stopping him?
The presidency says that the PMLQ is the main hurdle because it sees such a “deal” as cutting into its electoral prospects. That may be exaggerated since the PMLQ’s main threat comes from the PMLN in the urban areas of central and northern Punjab and not the PPP in the rural areas to the south. But even if it is conceded, what’s the president’s choice? To lose his all in a bid to cling to the PMLQ or salvage the presidency by sharing power with Ms Bhutto?
This issue of a “deal” between President Musharraf and Ms Bhutto upsets other people too, including many PPP supporters and sympathizers. It doesn’t seem “right” to them that a popular democratic party should shake hands under the table with a general. But such people should not let emotion run away with their political judgment. The PPP stands a far better chance of capturing office after a “deal” with President Musharraf than going it alone as in 2002 and enabling the PMLQ to clutch at the coattails of the MMA after the elections. In terms of the “national interest”, too, a Bhutto-Musharraf power-sharing arrangement over the next five years is to be preferred to one between the PMLQ and MMA that has brought a bad name to the country as “the epicenter of terrorism” in the world.
At any rate, all this opposition and allied flak for a deal between Ms Bhutto and President Musharraf smacks of hypocrisy. Didn’t the MQM do a deal with President Musharraf which gave it the governorship of Sindh and a decisive stake in the provincial government? Didn’t the MMA do a deal with President Musharraf when it handed him the 17th constitutional amendment in exchange for the Balochistan government and the slot of the honourable leader of the opposition to Maulana Fazal ur Rehman despite the fact that the PPP was the largest opposition party in parliament? Didn’t Nawaz Sharif do a deal with President Musharraf by opting for exile in place of imprisonment? The only party that didn’t do a deal with him was the PPP which has been out in the cold since 1996.
If President Musharraf doesn’t do a deal with Ms Bhutto, he won’t last long. Indeed, if he pushes her into the APDM camp, he should get ready to face the prospect of a massive presidential and general election boycott or an impeachment in the next parliament because it is inconceivable that the PMLQ will win a majority to form a government. Can General Musharraf and Ms Bhutto live and let live? If the establishment which cracked down on the MQM from 1990 to 1996 can live with it and if the same establishment which created Nawaz Sharif and the MMA now can’t live with them, there’s no reason why the PPP and PMLQ can’t live and let live for a few years. After all, if politics is the art of the possible, necessity is the mother of all politics.
(October 19-25, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 35 – Editorial)
More convulsions in Pakistan
Benazir Bhutto’s second homecoming in 2007 is significantly different from her first in 1986. Twenty one years ago, she was a defiant, anti-establishment heroine who radiated revolt and resistance. Today she is a tired and tainted politician seeking rapprochement with the establishment. The crowds who surged to welcome her then were spontaneous, hopeful and idealistic. Those of today have been whipped up by savvy party loyalists. Then she came to topple an entrenched and ruthless military dictator. Today she has pledged to prop up a wannabe democrat. Given the popular urge for democracy, those were revolutionary times for politics. But given the extremist backlash, this could be a counter-revolutionary turning point for Pakistan. Hence the paradox: there was no threat to her life then whereas she is a prime target today. Equally significantly, if she was young and foolish for taking on the establishment and being chucked out of office twice at that time, is she wise and worldly now, will she succeed in capturing power for the third time and leading Pakistan to a moderate and democratic future?
Whatever the moralistic brigade may say, Ms Bhutto’s sense of real-politik is sound. There is a serious crack in the establishment and she means to get a toehold. Drumming up a massive welcome by the flock is good politics. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry showed how the media could be manipulated to transform thousands of “black coats” into hundreds of thousands of “people” for effect, just as the Aziz brothers conjured up the resistance of hundreds of extremists to signify the opposition of millions to the state’s attack on the Lal Masjid terrorists. Equally, Nawaz Sharif’s inability to generate surging crowds when he tried to return to Pakistan last month hurt his cause and contributed to his recent oblivion in the media. Therefore the demonstration effect of Ms Bhutto’s tumultuous welcome is likely to lead to a surge in her ratings and make her a major player in the general elections. By that yardstick alone, she has scored high on the comeback-trail.
Some people say that the PMLQ is not about to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of being sidelined in the affections of General Pervez Musharraf or the public. So the Sindh and Punjab Chief Ministers should be expected to muddy the waters. But there is another side to this obstacle which makes it a win-win situation for Ms Bhutto. Repression will only make her seem more “heroic”. It will rub off the pro-establishment label and make the media more sympathetic to her. Much the same goodwill will accrue to her if she is physically attacked by religious extremists and acquires the halo of a living martyr.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court could disown the NRO, thereby reinforcing the public sentiment against her alleged corruption. But in the current charged environment this too could be transformed into an opportunity to flog her innocence. With the government committed to withdrawing the charges, Ms Bhutto could welcome the axing of the Ordinance “in deference to her respect for the Supreme Court” and self-righteously claim that she is prepared to face the charges and seek acquittal. With the administration looking the other way and the prosecution pussyfooting in court, can you imagine the PPP mobs outside any court that tries to haul her up for a trial? In the event, every court hearing would become another public show of strength by Ms Bhutto and her supporters, a continuous media-trial in her favour. At this rate, Ms Bhutto would soon be tipped to win the general elections and, if necessary, to sweep out the wannabe-democrat general-president along the way as well.
But these are not the only reasons why President Musharraf and the ruling party didn’t want her to return to Pakistan in the first place and why the establishment may still lean on her to return to Dubai as soon as possible. Their fear is that the SC may soon hold the government in contempt for packing off Nawaz Sharif to Jeddah while the Saudi Arabian government insists that if Ms Bhutto has been allowed to play the field then so should Mr Sharif. In the event, Mr Sharif would announce his return, his supporters would try to outdo Ms Bhutto’s welcome and the game would slip out of General Musharraf’s hands. Repression would make Mr Sharif look heroic; acquiescence would lead to a stampede from the ruling party into the ranks of the PMLN and denude it of its electoral prospects.
Of course, the curtain could come down on Ms Bhutto, Mr Sharif and the Supreme Court if General Musharraf were compelled to wrap up this noisy “transition to democracy”. Originally, it was thought that this option might be exercised if the SC refused to enable General Musharraf to become President Musharraf. But the more credible threat to General Musharraf now stems from the rising prospects of both Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif in the forthcoming elections. The only way General Musharraf can “manage” the situation is by keeping Mr Sharif out and the SC at bay. But that, as things stand right now, seems like a tall order. The thunderous arrival of Ms Bhutto on the scene has set the stage for more convulsions in Pakistan.
(October 26, November 01, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 36 – Editorial)
The Network
Two days before Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan, she wrote to General Pervez Musharraf alleging that certain administration officials along with some “remnants” of the Zia ul Haq era were out to get her. Their names were not publicised because she was negotiating with the same administration. It is only after the October 18 attack on her life that she publicly said she suspected the hand of three persons. But no one has been named in the FIR. Since then the media has gone mad trying to join the dots.
It now transpires that there are more than three people allegedly haunting Ms Bhutto. These are the chief minister of Sindh, Arbab Rahim, whose political career will end if Ms Bhutto returns to power. He has treated the PPP roughly and may expect the same treatment from them when he is down and out. Then there is General (retd) Hamid Gul, formerly DG-ISI, an avowed radical Islamist-jihadi who approves of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He has long harboured political animosity against Ms Bhutto and the PPP and recently against General Musharraf for thwarting an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. But he is without a party and has no formal links with any terrorist organization. On their heels is Brig (retd) Imtiaz Billa Ahmad, of “midnight jackal” fame in the ISI under Gen Hamid Gul in 1989 and the then DG-IB under Nawaz Sharif. His whereabouts since 1999 are not known when he was briefly detained by the Musharraf regime. Then there’s Waseem Afzal, ex-NAB right hand of Saifur Rehman, the notorious Nawaz Sharif henchman, who investigated the corruption charges against Ms Bhutto and Mr Asif Zardari well into the Musharraf era and was only recently decommissioned from NAB on the urging of Ms Bhutto and shunted to a low key job as secretary to the Punjab Governor. He is the hunter who fears becoming the hunted. Brig (retd) Ijaz Shah, currently DG-IB, also served as station head of the ISI in Lahore in 1999. But he is hardly likely to foment terrorism under the nose of his boss and friend against a potential political ally. A senior police officer in Sindh, Manzur Mughal, currently DIG Ops, who once abused Mr Zardari when he was in prison, has also figured in the revelations.
On the face of it, all of them have a strong anti-BB/Zardari motive. But it is inconceivable that any of them might be involved in a terrorist conspiracy to kill Ms Bhutto. So Ms Bhutto has tried to make political capital by pointing the finger at the administration. For simple-minded people, this makes sense because the sitting government is always presumed to stalk the opposition. In the PPP’s case, it also helps to brush aside the charge of its leader being pro-establishment among the anti-establishment rank and file, thereby evoking sympathy and empathy for Ms Bhutto.
Whodunnit? The footprints of the Al-Qaeda-Taliban Network are all over the place. The Network includes elements of the old jihadi sectarian organizations like the Jaishe-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi whose businesses were shut down by General Musharraf after the peace initiative with India in 2003. This Network has a definite and powerful motive: Ms Bhutto, like General Musharraf, is aggressively pro-America; and worse, she is now trying to prop up General Musharraf, against whom the Network has already made three assassination attempts, apart from one each against Aftab Sherpao, the home minister, and Shaukat Aziz, the prime minister. It is fighting the army in the tribal areas and elsewhere in the north. It benefits from chaos and instability in Pakistan so that it can seize control of large swathes of land and create safe havens for itself. This Network also has the technical and human capability to do the job. Its spokesmen, from Ayman Al-Zawahiri to Baitullah Mahsud and others have openly called for war against General Musharraf, Ms Bhutto and other “American agents” and it boasts scores of motivated suicide bombers for its purpose across the country.
The problem is that most Pakistanis are reluctant to point at The Network because they are personally religious and politically harbour The Network’s virulent anti-Americanism in their own hearts. How can a religious group which is rightly resisting America’s crusade against Muslims, they reason, be against anti-establishment Muslim leaders like Ms Bhutto whom they revere or support? In fact, the anti-Bhutto, anti-Musharraf opposition, whether religious or mainstream or nationalist-secular or regional ethnic, is in a state of opportunist denial about the aims and objectives of The Network in Pakistan. This makes the task of identifying and combating it impossible. Indeed, following the October 18 attack, misplaced supporters and sympathizers of The Network among Pakistanis, including some prominent media persons, have actually gone so far as to deny that it could have had a hand in the attack on a popular woman because it would have led to a peoples’ backlash against The Network.
It is time to call a spade a spade. This is true for Ms Bhutto and General Musharraf as much as it for the opposition parties, media and lay Pakistanis. While they are at each other’s throats, The Network is slowly penetrating the body politic of Pakistan and poisoning it.
(November 2-8, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 37 – Editorial)
No winners
The Supreme Court’s judgment on the fate of General Pervez Musharraf will have a profound impact on Pakistan’s future.
If the judges should decide to accord legitimacy to President Musharraf, he will take off his uniform (which is what everyone wants him to do), hold relatively free elections (which is what everyone wants him to do) and enable a merited successor to take over as army chief (which is what everyone wants him to do). This will provide a degree of continuity and stability.
But significant chunks of the media, opposition and civil society would be unhappy. They don’t want continuity of General Musharraf’s key domestic and foreign policies. Indeed, they believe that these policies are domestically divisive “because they are seemingly driven by US agendas in the region” and they are undemocratic because they exclude the PMLN. Hence, the argument goes, the extension of the Musharraf regime in any form is not conducive to stability or democracy. Therefore a pro-Musharraf decision would diminish the SC in their eyes, heighten cynicism, and provoke outrage and possibly protest. In time to come, the SC would come under renewed pressure to awaken, “cleanse” itself of its “sins” and “take on” the executive. Suo motu anti-executive writs would fly all over the place. Instead of a delicate balance of power in a troika, we would have a quartet of countervailing power that would lead to a systemic breakdown of the system.
But if the judges decide to sway with the wind and try to knock out General Musharraf, he will impose martial law, scuttle the court, and reverse the transition to democracy. Pakistan would plunge into an abyss of fear and uncertainty. The domestic political process would be derailed and the international community would become anxious. There would be protests and repression. Elections will have to be rigged or postponed. The judiciary’s new found independence would be replaced with subservience and compliance and civil society would retreat to lick its wounds. But Pakistan is not Myanmar. Sooner rather than later, martial law would have to be removed. That is when General Musharraf and Pakistan would arrive at the beginning and struggle to invent the wheel all over again. Meanwhile, the forces of extremism would rush to fill the vacuum created by the absence of the mainstream moderate forces and the specter of radical Islam would come to haunt the trigger happy international community.
There are no easy solutions. We have been there, done that.
Every civilian period is marked with a crisis of governance and every military era is dogged by lack of legitimacy. When the civilians are ousted by the military, we rejoice because they were corrupt and vile and incompetent and autocratic and nepotistic. We applaud every dictator’s “revolutionary agenda” but tire and turn on him because of our yearning for democracy and freedom. The problem arises because military dictators don’t know when and how to call it quits and we remain infatuated by transformations and intolerant of transitions.
Last year General Musharraf was the most popular man in Pakistan. Today he is the most undesirable element in the country. For ten years, Ms Bhutto was maligned but safe. Now she is reborn and insecure. Last month Nawaz Sharif was courageous for defying General Musharraf. This month he is a loser for being evicted to Saudi Arabia. The SC which took oath under the provisional constitutional order of General Musharraf was a kangaroo court. But the same court has now become a savior of the people. We all loved the US as Pakistan’s greatest benefactor because it wrote off our loans and refurbished our military as a bulwark against hegemonic India. But now we hate it with a passion because it is a crusader against Islam. When Shia-Sunni Islamists bomb each other in our cities or Islamic vigilantes take the law into their own hands, we don’t exhort the government to root out sectarianism or establish the writ of the state. But when Islamic radicals cut the throats of our soldiers in Waziristan or Swat, we curse the state for taking them on and killing “fellow Muslims”.
Our current wish list is remarkable for its naivety and opportunism. We want the Supreme Court rather than the political parties and parliament to determine the fate of our system. Thus we seek to replace the opportunism of our sovereign representatives with the unaccountability of nominated judges. We want an end to violent extremism but we will not allow the state to retain its monopoly over the instruments of violence. We abhor Talibanism but are quick to condone it in large parts of Pakistan. And so on, ad nauseam.
Pakistan’s simmering crisis of democracy, law and constitution will not be resolved by piety, popular outrage, media moralism, judicial activism or political engineering alone. We need collective wisdom, patience and tolerance in charting the way forward. Unfortunately, all these qualities are in short supply. Under the circumstances, if the Supreme Court under CJP Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and the military under General Pervez Musharraf clash, there will be no winners.
(November 9-15, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 38 – Editorial)
Do you want to be a pariah again, General Musharraf?
General Musharraf was a pariah when he made his coup in 1999. But he soon became popular because of some sensible decisions. Unfortunately, thanks to a combination of arrogance, tunnel vision and bad advice, he is universally disliked today. The media which was once tickled by his straight talk is bursting with indignation. The business community which once prayed for his longevity is cursing him for his stupidity. The international community which once lionized him is warning him to shape up or ship out. Having done some good half-heartedly over the years, he has now gone and done the worst thing imaginable ham-handedly. The PCO and Emergency are reprehensible. The repression of fundamental rights is condemnable. Any delay in the election schedule is unacceptable. Pakistanis want a free election. They want a transfer of power from the military to civilians. And they seek a stable democracy with a functional government that sustains economic growth, uproots extremism and alleviates poverty. How did General Musharraf fall from grace? What is the way forward?
Until March this year, General Musharraf was sitting pretty, all set to share some power via a relatively free general election later in the year. This envisaged a process of taking off his uniform, nominating a new army chief and consolidating himself as a relatively powerful elected president via a vote from the current assemblies rather than one from the next. The plan critically required him to remain army chief until becoming president as a guarantee against any judicial misadventure. And it is this factor that has precipitated today’s crisis, thanks to CJP Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.
The CJP’s unexpected penchant for pomp, popularity and power became a potential hurdle in General Musharraf’s carefully laid out plans. So, rather than risk Justice Chaudhry’s activism at a critical juncture in the game-plan, General Musharraf decided to get rid of him in March. And the rest, as they say, is history. Backed by the media, a heady CJP rallied his peer judges to lay the executive low. He extracted the “disappeared” from the bowels of the state, sided with the Lal Masjid extremists, (the khateeb appointed by the court later gave a fatwa against the army saying that the soldiers killed in the Swat and Waziristan operation were “infidels”) ordered criminal cases to be registered against the military commanders who stormed the mosque, enabled General Musharraf’s nemesis Nawaz Sharif to return to Pakistan and embraced a spate of petitions against General Musharraf’s bid for re-election as president. Soon it was clear that the judges were determined to oust General Musharraf not so much on the basis of the law or constitution but politics and preference.
At this point, General Musharraf had two options. He could either allow the court to kick him out of office and uniform or drum up a constitutional amendment with the help of the PPP to protect his presidency. But far from letting go, he refused to countenance the idea of sharing power. So he chose to kick the headstrong judges out of office via the PCO. Upon this first wrong was heaped another – the promulgation of a state of emergency and “zero-tolerance” clampdown on all protest. Instead, if he had chosen to let the media remain free and announced a quick general election under a broadly consensual government with a renewed pledge to doff his uniform after taking oath as president from the next parliament, he would have been able to absorb the protests rather then risk the dire straits of today. The tragedy is that at every stage General Musharraf took the wrong option because of his self-righteous obsession with power, demonstrated so vividly in his speech on PCO day. So how do we get back on track?
Confrontation between heroic but weak and disparate civil society groups and General Musharraf’s repressive and unpopular civil-military government may not yield acceptable solutions. The mainstream PPP and JUI have to jump into the loop. But a successful popular revolt to get rid of General Musharraf is precluded because the public is cynical about both parties and probably won’t respond to calls for sacrifice. Instead sporadic civil strife will lead to a postponement of elections, economic gloom and a probable surge in religious extremism to take advantage of the situation. A better option might be to compel General Musharraf, via a combination of street protest, international pressure and political negotiation, to withdraw the emergency and revert to the old plan of holding early elections and shedding his uniform in exchange for the presidency. Who knows how long President Musharraf will last once he has taken off his uniform and is sandwiched between a relatively independent parliament and a new army chief who is bound to become his own man over time.
The ruling PMLQ now realizes that an early election might suit it because it is bound to get more unpopular over time. The PPP and JUI are also keen to take their electoral chances now. The international community led by the United States determinedly supports this course of action. If General Musharraf drags his feet, then there’s no option but for everyone to band together and make a pariah out of him all over again.
(November 16-22, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 39 – Editorial)
Bringing them in to keep them out?
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.
(November 23-29, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 40 – Editorial)
Opposition must contest elections
An advertisement in a leading Pakistani newspaper proclaims that “Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf has decided to allot National and Provincial Assembly tickets to the civil society and lawyers to contest elections from PTI platform”. The same paper carries another statement by Imran Khan denouncing elections under General Musharraf and calling for a boycott. Much the same confusion prevails among sections of the lawyers’ movement and civil society advocates. Justice (r) Wajihuddin Ahmed has withdrawn his petition against the usurpation of the presidency by General Musharraf but is exhorting his supporters to flood the election commission and file their nomination papers so that a tough fight can be given to General Musharraf.
Mr Nawaz Sharif is traveling in the same boat. In a statement from Jeddah following General Musharraf’s recent visit there, he says he is readying to return to Pakistan “in time to file his nomination papers in the Election Commission before the cut-off date of November 25”. This runs parallel to another in which he says that elections under General Musharraf are not acceptable and should be boycotted.
Qazi Hussain Ahmad has also been calling for a boycott. But his senior partner in the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), Maulana Fazal ur Rehman, says his Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) will definitely participate in elections. However, Qazi Sahib is not ready to quit the MMA in pursuit of his stand against elections under General Musharraf.
Everyone and his aunt, meanwhile, are exhorting Ms Benazir Bhutto to boycott elections. Yet no one is prepared to sit with her and forge a common front – with or without elections – against General Musharraf. Mr Imran Khan says he will parley with her only under the umbrella of the Pakistan Bar Council or some such body. Mr Nawaz Sharif refuses to accept the legitimacy of any All Parties Conference (APC) called by her or the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD). Instead, he insists she must submit to the All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM) cobbled by him in London to negate the ARD. But the validity of the APDM is suspect. Maulana Fazal is a member of the APDM; yet he has already decided not to be governed by its joint charter or discipline.
Ms Bhutto is in a quandary. The PPP’s boycott lobby argues that the election will be rigged; so far from leveraging a constitutional amendment to enable Ms Bhutto to become prime minister for the third time, it may not even yield a government-forming majority in parliament. Instead, the argument goes, a full-fledged boycott in which the PPP is joined by all oppositionists will deny legitimacy to the general election as it did General Musharraf’s referendum some years ago and plunge him into a greater crisis.
But to what effect, asks the pro-election faction? With Maulana Fazal out of the opposition’s loop, General Musharraf’s PMLQ led Grand Alliance will cobble a working relationship with the JUI and hobble along. In the event, the oppositionists will have no future platform for opposition except the street. And the street, unfortunately, hasn’t been too accommodating so far. Indeed, with the Pakistani bazaar and Karachi consistently refusing to shut down against General Musharraf, no popular movement can take off against him. On the other hand, even a rigged election in which all opposition parties take part is bound to return a strong anti-Musharraf force in the next parliament. Indeed, if the objective of the opposition parties is a return to full democracy for the country rather than party political interests only, they should be able to manage an effective seat adjustment arrangement everywhere and deny the PMLQ the simple majority it covets from the election. At the very least they can deny General Musharraf the two-thirds majority he requires to indemnify his unconstitutional moves since November 3 from the next parliament.
Therefore a preferred course of action for the opposition should be to band together and agitate for a fair and free election, preceded by General Musharraf’s exit as army chief, a withdrawal of the Emergency, suspension of Local Bodies, restoration of fundamental rights, the return of Nawaz Sharif and freedom for all political prisoners. This would require Ms Bhutto to adjust her sights for the next round. She should get ready to play the role of an opposition leader in parliament rather than accept a junior partnership in General Musharraf’s PMLQ-dominated dispensation.
If the elections are massively rigged, the opposition can always refuse to accept its results and boycott parliament, which would amount to the same thing as having boycotted the polls in the first place, with much the same critical consequences. But if the results are satisfactory, they can take on General Musharraf in the court of the people when he applies for indemnity from the next parliament. If they can muster a two-thirds majority among themselves, they could impeach him. If they can’t, they could extract a free judiciary and a free press at the very least in exchange for indemnity. In that way, they could live to fight another day in the most democratic and popular of all ways. We can’t afford to allow cold blooded logic to be drowned out by passionate outrage.
(November 30-6, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 41 – Editorial)
What next after the second coming of Musharraf?
US President George W Bush for once got it right on November 20 when he predicted that General Pervez Musharraf would quit as army chief before the month was out as he had pledged because “he was a man of his word”. Some of us too had argued as much, not because we thought he was a man of his word (he’s an opportunist) but because the nature of circumstances was such that he had no choice in the matter. There were, of course, many Doubting Thomases who still insisted he would clutch at one rhyme or reason to hang on to his uniform. But who can blame them? Most dictators tend to die with their boots on rather than fade away when the time is nigh. It is also futile to debate what would have happened if the judges under Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry had tactically drawn the line between reasonable independence and undue activism and not tried to overthrow General Musharraf before he had shed his uniform and the powers that went with it, the same powers that he used to sack the court and renew himself as a civilian president. So it’s time to move on.
Mr Musharraf has got to ensure that the dubious legitimacy acquired unconstitutionally is indemnified by a sovereign parliament. The first step in that direction will be to get everyone who matters on board the general elections. The return of Ms Benazir Bhutto and Mr Nawaz Sharif is a good sign, even though it has not been happily accepted by Mr Musharraf in good faith. For this to happen, everyone must get a level playing field. This entails an end to the state of Emergency, unshackling the media, suspension of the pro-Musharraf local bodies and neutralization of the election commission. These demands are realistic and Mr Musharraf will likely concede most, if only because a rigged election will lack credibility and trigger resistance and instability which could provoke a boycott of the political process at any stage of the game. But the demand for the restoration of the sacked judges, however justified in the interest of democracy and accountability, is unrealistic. It amounts to asking Mr Musharraf to commit political suicide right now. So we may persist with it in principle but without making everything conditional on it. Nor should we worry too much on that score. The victories of civil society and the sacrifices of the lawyers will not go in vain because they are big steps in Pakistan’s march towards a functional democracy. Given the relentless pressure of these groups, the new judges are bound to spread their wings after a transfer of power from the presidency to parliament and the political parties next year.
The second step is to activate a united front among the opposition parties with the realistic and minimal common objective of thwarting election rigging. Everyone will benefit from such an accord. Most of the electronic media is back in the game already, albeit with marginal adjustments. But we shouldn’t be too pessimistic. Even these self-imposed restrictions are likely to be aborted once everyone is back in action and the electoral game heats up. The media and the opposition are likely to make common cause, given their rough treatment at the hands of Mr Musharraf recently.
The third step is to get federal and provincial parliaments into action. Then, too, a minimal unity among the opposition will be needed to extract the most critical concessions from Mr Musharraf. That will not be easy given the conflicting pull and push of party politics and personal egos. Therefore the time to negotiate the powers of the president and his indemnification will be a litmus test for the representatives of the people and a springboard for the future of democracy in Pakistan. Equally, the politicians will be under the microscope for sharing power and making coalition governments work. If they fail, the whole process of civilianization will get discredited for the nth time and Mr Musharraf will start looking good again.
The passing of the baton is undeniably a good step, however belated and whatever the circumstances in which it has finally materialized. One can also empathize with General Musharraf’s farewell speech in which he explained his emotions on shedding his “second skin” of nearly half a decade. But it is a long leap from that backward glance to his blazing shot upon ascending the steps of the presidency when he said that he, as president, and General Ashfaq Kayani, as the new army chief, would jointly lead Pakistan to stability and prosperity. If this is his vision for the next five years, his version of bringing the army in so that it can be kept out, of putting the military’s need for stability and continuity above civil society’s demand for freedom and change, then he has another thought coming. Such contempt for all things civilian bodes ill for the proposed second coming of Mr Pervez Musharraf as a civilian president. It should strengthen the civilians’ resolve to think calmly and collectively, rather than emotionally and irrationally, about how to snatch their rights and protect them in time to come.
(October 12-18, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 34 – Editorial)
Some home truths
Ever Eid we should pause to reflect on the contradictions and hypocrisy in some analyses about issues that afflict Pakistan. Here are some examples to chew on.
- “Benazir Bhutto has buried the ghost of her popular democratic father by doing a deal with an unpopular military dictator. She has thus fallen into Musharraf’s trap.”
Nonsense. Mr Bhutto was an anti-state-establishment populist until he got into power. Then he became the most favoured son of the state-establishment. He ditched all principled populist elements from his party, crushed the workers movement, created the Federal Security Force to intimidate opponents, rebuilt the army and used it to scuttle provincial autonomy, and invoked Islamic Unity in state ideology in competition with the secular Non Aligned Movement. After his execution, however, Benazir Bhutto successfully revived the PPP by flogging its populist and anti-establishment origins. But this became a millstone around her neck when she became prime minister in 1988. The state-establishment led by Ghulam Ishaq Khan, General Aslam Beg and Nawaz Sharif rallied to conspire and overthrow her. But she learnt her lesson well. When an opportunity arose in 1993-94, she used the state-establishment – Ghulam Ishaq Khan, General Asif Nawaz, etc – to advance her claims to power. After becoming prime minister in 1994, she dutifully did the state-establishment’s bidding by allowing the army to fuel jihad in Kashmir, internationalise the Kashmir issue and acquire rocket technology from North Korea for nuclear purposes. She charmed America into relaxing the Pressler amendment which had hurt the military and she helped launch the Taliban in pursuit of the army’s strategic goals. So Ms Bhutto is not anti-establishment. Unfortunately, she lost out in 1996 because she fought with her own handpicked president and embarrassed the establishment by hugely misusing her authority for personal gratification. This “corruption” factor, rather than any perceived anti-state-establishment leanings, discouraged General Musharraf from aligning with her when he seized power. And it is this same factor that he has had to eat as humble pie today in a bid to get her support when he is desperately short of political allies. Therefore she has not fallen into Musharraf’s trap. On the contrary she has played her cards well (like she did in 1994) by seizing the opportunity to try and get back into power. Despite remaining the single most popular mainstream party since 1970, owing to a combination of internal incompetence, corruption and external conspiracies, the PPP’s three spells in power amount to less than 10 years in 37 years. No popular party can expect to remain organic if it stays, or is kept, out of power for such a long time.
- “The ‘deal’ between Ms Bhutto and President Musharraf is outrageous, the NRO is immoral.”
Of course, the deal is outrageous. But it isn’t any worse than the deals made by politicians with generals in the past. Z A Bhutto made a deal with Generals Yahya Khan and Gul Hasan that brought him to power as chief martial law administrator in 1972. The Jamaat i Islami made a deal with General Zia ul Haq to execute Z A Bhutto and share power in 1979. Nawaz Sharif and Altaf Hussain made deals with Gen Zia in the 1980s and later with Gen Aslam Beg from 1988-91. The MQM, PML and MMA made deals with General Musharraf on the 17th constitutional amendment. Nawaz Sharif made a deal with general Musharraf to exchange life imprisonment in Pakistan for exile in Saudi Arabia. There is no end to sordid political deals in Pakistan’s history.
Of course, the NRO is immoral. By so was the spectacular corruption of the Majlis e Shoora of Gen Zia. And it was immoral of Nawaz Sharif to absolve himself of corruption cases in 1997 and launch the Ehtesab Bureau of Saifur Rehman to witch-hunt Ms Bhutto in 1997. Similarly, General Musharraf’s immorality was on display when he withdrew or shelved criminal cases against Dr Ishratul Ebad and made him Governor Sindh, and unleashed NAB to hound Ms Bhutto into exile. Why, then, are the immoralists of yesterday baying for the blood of the immoralists of today?
- “Restoration of “full-fledged” civilian democracy and judicial activism will lead to transparency, efficiency, stability and equity.”
Wrong. Civilian democrats and judges no less than military dictators have been part of the problem of Pakistan rather than the solution. Pakistan has become a deeply divided and violent society. The state lacks legitimacy, hence its writ is thinning among peoples and regions. No political party is singly able to inspire a majority of Pakistanis. Coalition governments representing different ethnic, religious, regional or social interests will be the norm in the future. It is not the responsibility of the SC to “save” Pakistan by usurping the role of the executive or seizing sovereignty from parliament. Judges should not judge on the basis of their “conscience”. The tyranny of the judiciary which leads to anarchy is no better than the authoritarianism of the executive in pursuit of stability.
Instead of confrontation and hypocrisy, this is a time for truth and transition to greater cooperation, tolerance and democracy in which bridges are built between the military and civil society as much as between mainstream political parties and sub-nationalist or religious alliances.
(December 7-13, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 42 – Editorial)
Rigging, not boycott, core issue
As Benazir Bhutto and Mr Nawaz Sharif have joined hands to frame a Charter of Demands which Pervez Musharraf must concede if he wishes to preclude a massive all parties boycott of the forthcoming general elections and consequent loss of credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of the world. This is a much better political strategy than the one earlier adopted by Mr Sharif in which he had called for a “principled” boycott and the one by Ms Bhutto in which she had prepared to go it alone “under protest”.
If Mr Sharif’s APDM (without Maulana Fazal ur Rehman) had boycotted the elections while the ARD took part, life would have moved on (as it did in the 1885 elections in which Mr Sharif took part but which Ms Bhutto boycotted) and Mr Sharif, Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Imran Khan would have been consigned to oblivion for another five years. This would have hurt Mr Sharif much more than the other two (who at best may be worth a dozen national seats between them) because the PMLN is bidding to reclaim its status as one of the two mainstream parties of the country at a time when the ruling PMLQ is flaky owing to the great unpopularity of its military benefactor. If the PMLN stays out of the next election, the PMLQ under Chaudhry Pervez Elahi will capitalize on its last eight years in power and strike deeper roots in state and society in the next five, diminishing the PMLN’s chances of regrouping and living to fight another day.
For Ms Bhutto’s ARD, too, this is a good move. It will add weight to her demands that conditions must be propitious for a free and fair campaign so that the best wo(man) wins. It also ensures that she may get the better of a level playing field in a three-way fight between the PPP, PMLN and PMLQ in which the anti-Bhutto vote bank may be split between the two PML factions and give Ms Bhutto an edge in our first-past-the post system with a smaller percentage of the national vote yielding a greater percentage of parliamentary seats in her favour.
Of course, in the ultimate analysis, even if no party wins an outright majority in the general elections, Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif can join hands in parliament to field a strong opposition that can thwart President Musharraf at every stage. Indeed, in the event that President Musharraf must seek indemnification for his PCO and Emergency from the next parliament, the combined opposition can extract more than its pound of flesh on behalf of the struggle for greater democracy and accountability. And if worse comes to worst, the opposition can always band together and resign from parliament, thereby achieving much the same end result as they would if they joined together to boycott elections today. In other words, the boycott is a good or bad weapon depending on its timing and on the consensus or lack thereof behind it. The ARD-APDM charter of demands suggests that this is not a good time to use it.
The charter of demands will doubtless contain a reference to the end of the PCO and Emergency, the restoration of the pre-PCO judiciary and media, a neutral and independent election commission, suspension of the local bodies, release of all political prisoners, freedom to lead and hold rallies, provision of security by the state, and so on. Doubtless, too, it is unlikely that all these demands will be met by the Musharraf regime. But if most of the demands are met and the opposition is persuaded that it has a fighting chance of negating any significant rigging – because that is the core issue – by the Musharraf regime, then the APDM-ARD should step into the fray and sock it to him. Meanwhile, the opposition should keep the weapon of a boycott handy at all times during the election campaign and voting day so that if its smells any rigging it can walk out of the whole exercise and create a legitimacy crisis.
President Musharraf, too, should be wary of more-loyal-than-the-King types. In the 2002 elections, certain middle level state-intelligence functionaries vetted the PMLQ candidates whilst their seniors interviewed and approved them. One khaki gentleman in particular took open credit for creating the PPP Patriots. The loudest whisper these days is that the dynamic duo of a retired Brigadier and a retired Major-General may be roped in again to do the needful, especially in the Punjab.
But President Musharraf would be committing an irrevocable blunder if he clutched at this sort of “state-solution”. As in 1977 when some over-zealous bureaucrats rigged a dozen seats to please Mr Z A Bhutto and unwittingly created a wave of resistance and boycott in the form of the PNA, the situation today is ripe for a bigger wave of agitation to engulf the incumbent if he resorts to rigging. Certainly, the opposition and the media will be watching out for tell tale signs – like fishing out certain recently retired khakis and contracting them into state institutions – to signal a wholesome boycott of the elections and the start of a mass movement to overthrow the regime.
(December 14-20, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 43 – Editorial)
Cat o’ nine lives?
It is famously said that President Pervez Musharraf is like the proverbial “cat o’ nine lives”. Indeed, he seems to believe in his luck so much that he has referred to several narrow escapes in time of war and peace, including two assassination attempts. Certainly, since March of this year he seems to have been foolishly expending his political lives much too rapidly even for his own comfort.
Blunder One: Sacking the CJP. Blunder Two: Not withdrawing the Reference against CJP and saving face. Blunders Three and Four: Karachi and Lal Masjid bloodbaths, provoking media and civil society backlash. Blunder Five: Not joining hands with PPP for constitutional amendment to forestall SC judgment against his presidential nomination. Blunder Six: PCO and Emergency, with consequent domestic and international isolation. Blunder Seven: Media crackdown.
This stint in Blunderland has prompted some wits to claim that he has only two more “lives” left and cannot afford to slip up any more. What new “blunders” can he conceivably make?
President Musharraf is lucky that the political parties have put party political interests above everything else and decided not to boycott elections. But for this he must partly thank the Americans and the Saudis for their unremitting efforts to persuade Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif to play ball. Of course, the two political leaders see intrinsic merit in contesting the polls. Ms Bhutto knows that if President Musharraf were to vanish in a puff of smoke, the main beneficiary would be Mr Sharif because the old Punjabi military-bureaucratic-business “establishment” would reassert itself and close ranks around him, thereby consigning her to the blackmail of the MQM in Sindh as in 1990. So she would prefer to haggle with a weakened Mr Musharraf over the spoils of post-election office rather than join hands with Mr Sharif et al to get rid of him before the elections. Equally, Mr Sharif reckons that if he boycotts the polls he will leave the field to the PPP and PMLQ and he will be isolated in the future much like what happened to the PPP in 1985 when he came to rule in association with General Zia ul Haq.
Pressure from their constituents to contest the elections has also helped them weigh their options carefully. The PPP has ruled for only 10 years in the 36 years since 1971. Any more in the cold would have taken a serious toll of the party. Mr Sharif is better placed, with 14 years in office out of 26 since 1981, but another five in the wilderness would have enabled Chaudhry Pervez Elahi to capture the Punjabi establishment’s affection. Far better, they both surmise, for them to be in parliament chipping away at Mr Musharraf’s shaky edifice than to be biding their time waiting for the apathetic masses to rise up in revolt.
But their participation in the elections is going to be a mixed blessing for Mr Musharraf. To be sure, it will provide him a degree of sorely needed legitimacy. But it would prove to be his death-knell if it sweeps either or both Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif into parliament with a thumping vote. To forestall that, he would have to rig the elections – clearly the PMLQ is not in a position to grab a majority of votes – and risk a joint boycott after the results are out. Or get ready to play second fiddle to an elected and popular political party, with the possibility of being thrown out of the presidency if he is overbearing.
Mr Musharraf claims he won’t be a “trouble-maker” next year. But that is easier said than done in view of his track record in courting trouble. If he insists on having his way always, he won’t last long. Any political squabbling that creates an unpopular deadlock in the Musharrafian system will compel the military to distance itself from him. The international community, which is already wondering whether he is an asset or a liability, will react similarly. Also, the option of cementing an alliance between the PMLQ and the JUI and going it a la 2002 is not realistic. The politico-religious lobby is part of the domestic and international problem today, not part of the regional solution that it was in 2002 for the Pakistani military. It has to be contained and rolled back – the political and geographic spaces it has occupied in the last six years have to be seized back – instead of being molly-coddled and pampered.
The birth of the lawyers’ movement for a strong judiciary and the upsurge in civil society’s demand for an end to military dominance, however “fledgling”, coupled with the return into action of the two most popular politicians of the country, however “corrupt and incompetent”, and the establishment of a brave and pervasive new media, however “irresponsible”, are three recent milestones in Pakistan’s journey to democratic nation-hood. But if a new and democratic parliament isn’t born because of rigging or terrorist violence, or if it is born but doesn’t survive the vicissitudes of a troika, then Mr Musharraf will be blame-worthy and his cat-luck will run out. In that event, another political vacuum will arise and the mullahs will be the biggest gainers.
(December 21-27, 2007, Vol – XIX, No. 44 – Editorial)
Leash police & un-gag media, Mr President!
A picture of a leering posse of policemen raining blows on a young woman in Islamabad during a protest demonstration by a hundred odd human rightists adorns the front page of the Daily Times of December 18. There are similarly disgusting snapshots in other papers. Is this the image of Pakistan that President Pervez Musharraf wants to project to the world about the state of his gilded democracy? Are occasional sprinklings of protest by students, homemakers, professionals and university teachers such a grave threat to the integrity, solidarity and ideology of President Musharraf’s Pakistan that the demonstrators should be thrashed and dragged off to police stations? Not so long ago, the same Islamabad police distinguished itself when it opened up the skulls of journalists on Constitution Avenue (sic) when they were simply covering a march by a lawyers contingent on the election commission of Pakistan.
President Musharraf’s mishandling of the media in recent times also defies the logic of self-preservation even if it is the cause of it. There was a time not so long ago when the media sang his praises, lauding him for licensing electronic channels and allowing cross-media ownership. Indeed, hardly any new channel was launched without an invitation to General Musharraf to preside over the ceremonies. This was in sharp contrast to the shoddy treatment meted out to the media during the time of the autocratic democrats in the 1990s. Wherever he went, General Musharraf proudly showcased a free media as one of his biggest achievements. Indeed, when the police waded into the offices of Geo TV in Islamabad and wantonly smashed it up last summer, General Musharraf was quick to publicly apologize for the mishap.
But all this changed on that fateful day in Karachi on May 12 when General Musharraf’s allies mowed down dozens of pro-Chief Justice supporters and targeted Aaj TV as well. The dye was cast for the media to take a sharp look at the policies of the man who claimed to be ushering in freedom and democracy but was in fact undermining them.
The Lal Masjid stand-off did not do much credit to General Musharraf or the media. For months the regime prevaricated about how to deal with the extremists until they became outrageously bold and pro-active. Suspicions began to abound about the true motives of Islamabad. One persistent and plausible theory was that the regime was soft on the Lal Masjid extremists because it wanted to distract attention from the CJP affair. By the time the military attacked the Lal Masjid, many in the media had already become sympathetic to the terrorists by default. Unfortunately, when certain reputed anchorpersons in the electronic media went overboard and a couple of print reporters lost all sense of balance or propriety and started lionizing the extremists, the besieged government rushed to the judgment that the media as a whole was bent upon destabilizing and even overthrowing it. A common refrain in the corridors of power at the time was that if the media hadn’t been so biased and powerful the judicial and Lal Masjid crises would have passed without tremors. That is when the government decided to rap the electronic media by means of some stern advice. And when this didn’t yield too many dividends, it decided to shut it down following the promulgation of the Emergency.
All except one of the offending channels (and their anchors) have since been restored. They signed on the dotted line and live to fight another day. But Geo and its offshoots are still serving a stiff prison term. The company has lost over Rs 100 crore in revenues to date. Its application for a license for another channel is pending. Scores of its journalists are camped outside its offices across the country, protesting their fate. The owners have bravely resisted the government’s stern pre-conditions so far but would now like to sue for a dignified truce. They realize that it takes two hands to clap and confrontation is counterproductive. Why then is the regime being so bloody-minded? Why is President Musharraf so personally affronted? Doesn’t he realise that he will need the media to stand by him when confrontations arise between the presidency and parliament in time to come? Doesn’t he understand that the same media which once cheered him is now bound to boo the politicians and should therefore be wooed and strengthened instead of being punished and alienated? Isn’t that the sort of tactical retreat in search of a strategic advance that he loves to beat from time to time?
The Supreme Court has decided not to hear Geo’s petition until January 1. This is most unfortunate because the ban cannot patently be sustained in law even by PCO judges, and justice delayed is justice denied. But this is just the moment for President Musharraf to rise above prejudice and bad advice and restore Geo. That would be a most welcome decision after a long time. And while he is being good, he should also order the police to desist from beating up democracy’s colourful, fragile and wonderful protestors.
(Dec 28, Jan 3, 2008, Vol – XIX, No. 45 – Editorial)
Don’t rig the elections
President Pervez Musharraf insists that the polls will be free and fair. But the facts belie his assertion. The election commissioner isn’t approved by the opposition. The judiciary is crippled. Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif are barred from contesting. The former chief ministers of Punjab and Sindh continue to pull strings. The nazims haven’t been suspended. Certain important officials have been posted, transferred or hired to facilitate suitable results. For example, just before he quit office, the former CM Punjab bent the rules and hired 28 former police officers for special duties. The EC has reportedly forbidden local and foreign observers from conducting exit polls. And so on.
Expert opinion posits four stages of election rigging in Pakistan. First, there is system-rigging. This refers to the incumbent’s need to create a macro political framework to favour some parties and discriminate against others. It includes specific rules and laws, including the selection of caretakers and gerrymandering of districts. Then there is pre-poll rigging. This refers to myriad “interventions” by the administration to make life easy for the favoured party and difficult for the opposition. The third is polling-day rigging, which includes facilitating favoured candidates in pulling out voters and creating hurdles for the opposition. Ballot box stuffing or fake voting is part of this exercise. The last stage is post-poll rigging, which starts after polling is over and ends with the announcement of the result.
This post-poll rigging is of critical significance in the face of droves of non-government institutional election watchdogs and international observers. It is conducted in a highly secret and selective manner by a handful of handpicked officials in the hours between the counting of votes at given polling station and the announcement of the cumulative result of the constituency by the election commission some hours hence. In essence this is how it works.
First, there is a careful screening of “marginal” constituencies (about 20%) by the “agencies” where favoured candidates need help in scraping through. Then about 20 % select polling stations are identified in each such constituency and manned with handpicked presiding officers supervised by screened government officials. After the polling is over, the polling agents of the parties at these polling stations are browbeaten, cajoled or bribed by earmarked local police contingents to quietly disappear. The results from these polling stations are conveyed to the key administrative or police official in charge of the constituency who determines how many fake votes are to be added to the kitty in each such polling station. The presiding officer then does the needful stuffing or switching of ballot boxes behind closed doors and passes the “new result” on to the returning officer who duly conveys it to the EC. In this way, a couple of dozen national assembly seats, along with the corresponding number of provincial seats, amounting to less than 500,000 votes, may be easily “stolen” in a big province like Punjab without any overt evidence of rigging, and thereby change the entire complexion of the election.
It is in this context that Benazir Bhutto has cried herself hoarse alleging that hundreds of thousands of ballot papers have been doled out in the Punjab and Sindh to handpicked officials in cahoots with chosen presiding officers to “fix” the result in all marginal constituencies in favour of the PMLQ. The interesting thing is that even Mr Wasi Zafar, the former fumbling law minister denied a ticket by his old party, is now alleging the existence of an election cell in the residence of the former CM Punjab for this purpose.
The confidence borne of this carefully pruned strategy to be exercised by a select posse of mercenaries is reflected in the unofficial assertion that the PMLQ will get 115 NA seats followed by PPP (90), MMA (45), PML-N (40), MQM (20), ANP (12) and Others (20) in a national parliament of 342. In this scenario, the PMLQ is clearly going to try and “steal” the maximum number of seats from the PMLN. This formula is devised to ensure “suitable” governments in Islamabad and Punjab with the help of the PPP or MMA, depending on who is more amenable while ensuring that neither can join hands in parliament with the PMLN to create numerical difficulties for President Musharraf.
Every election since 1988 has been rigged to a greater or lesser extent. That is one reason why most elected governments have lacked credibility and failed to complete their terms. The 2002 election was also rigged, not least by keeping Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif out of the country. But President Musharraf was popular then and could make an alliance with the MMA without ruffling feathers at home and abroad. Even then he has barely managed to survive 2007 by the skin of his teeth. Now it’s going to be different. He is visibly unpopular and the PMLQ has lost its development sheen, as evidenced by the jettisoning of its architect Shaukat Aziz. So President Musharraf would be foolish to rig the elections and risk jeopardizing his fig-leaf legitimacy in this volatile and hostile environment. He must let the people speak and accept their verdict gracefully in the national interest.
(January 4-10, 2008, Vol – XIX, No. 46 – Editorial)
After Benazir Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto has become larger than life in her death. Her assassination pushed oil and gold prices up in international markets. It widened Pakistan’s credit debt swaps and unprecedentedly sent the Pakistani stock exchange plummeting over 700 points. Clearly, this is an irreparable loss not just for Pakistan but also for the world because nuclear-armed Pakistan’s stability and longevity matters to the world and the world perceived her as a core facilitating element in it. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property and assets were destroyed in Sindh province by angry protestors. This signaled the alienation of Sindhis from the loss of a staunch and lonely symbol of the federation that has seen dismemberment once before – the PPP is the only national party left following the split in the PML. Many questions need answers.
Who killed her? She had pointed the finger at rogue remnants in the Musharraf regime from the days of the Zia regime. But the government says Baitullah Mehsud ordered it because he is avowedly behind many other terrorist attacks on the army and pro-Musharraf or pro-America leaders. The truth is probably in between. If there were rogue elements in the administration out to get her they must have been in league with the likes of the Al-Qaeda-Taliban network that has the capacity to launch meticulous suicide attacks and comprises some sectarian and Kashmiri-jihad organizations who have become rogues since the intelligence agencies tried to put a lid on them following the launch of the peace process with India.
Unfortunately for the government, most Pakistanis believe it is culpable at some level or the other. Its fumbling and contradictory handling of the investigation, including literally washing away the evidence, is partly responsible for this suspicion. The main beneficiary of this perception is the PPP and the main loser is President Musharraf and the PMLQ. Even the belated announcement that Scotland Yard will be asked to assist the Pakistan government will not allay concerns and misgivings at this late stage.
How will Asif Zardari lead the party? Mr Zardari has acted wisely in nominating Bilawal as the formal chairman of the party but retaining command of it. Bloodlines are important in Pakistani culture and society; that is why dynasties flourish. The sons (and sometimes grandsons) of Gen Ayub Khan, Gen Ziaul Haq, Nawaz Sharif, Shahbaz Sharif, Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi, Gen Akhtar Rehman, Farooq Leghari, and others are in politics. But it will be a tough act to follow in Ms Bhutto’s footsteps. She could count on the blind loyalty of people and party but Mr Zardari will have to work very hard to keep the party united in the face of internal and external pressures. In fact that is the biggest challenge he faces.
Mr Zardari has decided to opt for participation in the delayed elections rather than go for agitation to remove President Musharraf. This is a measure of his pragmatism, of which we may expect to see a lot, as much as it is of his rawness to the job. In a similar situation, Ms Bhutto might have extracted more from President Musharraf and conceded less, but then Mr Zardari cannot afford to take such risks so early in the game. Of course, there are sound political reasons for his decision. The PPP is expected to benefit from the sympathy wave for Ms Bhutto, even though it may wane somewhat in the next six weeks. Nonetheless, if the elections aren’t rigged, the PPP should win a majority with the PMLN and PMLQ running second and third respectively. But that is not the way things will probably turn out.
President Musharraf hasn’t come so far so autocratically and so unaccountably to let free elections decide his fate and that of Pakistan. So even if the PPP is allowed to be the biggest winner it seems inconceivable that it can be allowed to win a majority to form a government on its own. Indeed, the prospect of a parliamentary alliance between the PMLN and PPP must haunt President Musharraf. So we may expect the “angels” to do their bit. The problem is that if rigging is overdone, it could precipitate a party-political backlash that negates the election. And if it is underdone, it could threaten the post-election scenario. In both instances, the loser will be President Musharraf and the resultant instability and anarchy will reinforce the dysfunctional nature of the Pakistani state and set alarm bells ringing in world capitals.
An elegant and worthy solution would be for President Pervez Musharraf to hold free elections and go home after swearing in a new prime minister. That would alleviate some of the widespread loathing for him and open the way for a genuine national reconciliation government to oversee Pakistan in the next five years. It would also be a fitting epitaph to Benazir Bhutto’s long struggle for democracy and moderation. Her great legacy is that her death has opened up the soul of Pakistan for civil society and political parties to oppose the role of the military and its secret agencies in spawning a brand of cynical, opportunist and violent brand of politics that is antithetical to the very idea of an enlightened, democratic and federal Pakistan.
(January 11-17, 2008, Vol – XIX, No. 47 – Editorial)
Don’t tempt the gods
The elections will be held on 8th January, come hell or high water”, insisted President General Pervez Musharraf last November. But his pledge was broken. The election commission clutched at the sporadic destruction of some property in Sindh following the murder of Benazir Bhutto on December 27 to postpone the polls until February 18, despite the fact that the PPP, PMLN and JUI all wanted the polls on January 8 as scheduled. This has triggered a now universally held view that the ruling PMLQ is running away from the elections because it is afraid of being drowned in the tidal wave of sympathy for the PPP. But if the fortunes of the PMLQ don’t improve significantly in the next month or so, what will be the fate of the elections? Will some other leaders be killed, will there be fresh disturbances, to compel a further postponement?
Originally, it was a matter of faith with the opposition parties that the January 8 polls would be rigged to ensure that the PPP and PMLN combined did not get a majority in parliament and create problems for President Musharraf. Indeed, this was Ms Bhutto’s major fear and she never tired of stressing it. On the eve of her assassination, she was scheduled to release a detailed report on how this rigging was going to be done and had threatened a post election boycott and even civil war if the elections were rigged. Now President Musharraf has admitted that he tried to pressurize Ms Bhutto not to return to Pakistan in October and he was angry when she defied him with American backing. He had hoped to conduct the 2007 elections with the same degree of leverage as in 2002 when he kept both Ms Bhutto and Mr Nawaz Sharif out of the country and contrived “suitable results” with the help of the MMA.
Under the circumstances, everyone believes that the Musharraf regime will definitely rig the February 18 polls to thwart the rising might of the PPP and PMLN. From this it follows logically that the regime will start by trying to undermine the PPP and Asif Zardari. This campaign will be conducted along several fronts. Mr Zardari will be painted as the villain of the piece. The NRO will be challenged by high powered lawyers so that criminal and corruption cases against him can be trotted out and aired even if a conviction is impossible. The Swiss case will be dusted off the shelf. Stories of Mr Zardari’s “infidelity” to the martyred Ms Bhutto or “moral turpitude” may even be concocted. His “political immaturity” will be drummed up. The ethnic Punjab vs Sindh card may be played to scare away PPP voters in the Punjab. Stories of “splits” in the PPP and “insults” to Makhdum Amin Fahim will doubtless be planted in the media. And, if all this fails to yield the desired results, the regime may sound out the Supreme Court on a further postponement of the polls.
That would be a blunder. Every attempt to rig a resolution to the crisis of President Musharraf’s personal legitimacy and power will eventually pit the parties and the people they lead against the army that President Musharraf avowedly represents. This will hurt the national interest. But there is a more compelling practical reason to have a popular and legitimate civilian government in the country as soon as possible.
By all accounts, the Bush administration is soon going to turn on the heat in the war against Al-Qaeda and Taliban by a forceful and more direct intervention in Waziristan. This is necessitated by the compulsions of US domestic policies in the year of the presidential election. President Bush’s attack on Afghanistan after 9/11 to root out Al-Qaeda was distracted by the war in Iraq. Now the situation is precipitous. Every US presidential candidate is trying to outdo the other in focusing on “Musharraf’s Pakistan” as being part of the problem of Al-Qaeda-Taliban rather than the solution as preached by President Bush. In fact, Pakistan’s growing instability under President Musharraf and his inability or unwillingness to uproot the extremists and terrorists has raked up the specter of “Pakistani nukes falling into the wrong hands”. The climactic reaction has come from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief, Mohamed El Baradei, who recently said: “I fear that chaos… or an extremist regime could take root in that country which has 30 to 40 warheads”. In order to keep the difficult relationship with the US on an even keel and without provoking a popular backlash, Pakistan needs a fairly elected and legitimate civilian government in Islamabad.
In an earlier editorial we had argued that President Musharraf had lived out seven of his nine lives. The assassination of Ms Bhutto and the mass finger pointing at Islamabad has now deprived him of his penultimate political life. If he still insists on rigging the elections or postponing them, he will surely go down by provoking a popular resistance and may take Pakistan with him by triggering a foreign intervention. Already the foreign media is writing of General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani as the “new hope for Pakistan rising in Musharraf’s shadow”. Musharraf should not tempt the gods.
(January 18-24, 2008, Vol – XIX, No. 48 – Editorial)
No national government
In the good old days, the media used to love President Pervez Musharraf’s candid, up close and personal utterances. But these are strictly no-no in the current environment of suspicion, hostility and loathing. Unfortunately, however, he hasn’t been deterred in the least, despite his avowed insistence on always recognizing “ground realities”. A case in point is his recent statement that Benazir Bhutto was “unpopular” with the “army”. There cannot be a more damning admission on his part, considering that Ms Bhutto was the charismatic and “popular” leader of the biggest political party in the country and has now been endowed with the halo of martyrdom not just by the PPP or the Sindhis, as in the case of her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but by Pakistanis across the divide of class, ethnicity, and region. Indeed, even President Musharraf is now forced to refer to her as “shaheed Benazir”. In fact, his admission has compelled us to recall how the military and its agencies, under General Zia ul Haq, General Aslam Beg, General Hameed Gul and now General Musharraf, have routinely thwarted the PPP’s popular quest for democratic representation and civilian supremacy. It is as if the military has a political problem with popular parties and a personal problem with their charismatic leaders. Certainly, the treatment meted out to Nawaz Sharif (after he too became a populist) by the military under General Musharraf confirms this prognosis.
Therefore the idea of a “national” government under the tutelage of President Musharraf is a non-starter. Mr Sharif has consistently said as much and there is no reason why he should budge now. Given their acrimonious history, Mr Sharif’s political fortunes will not take off until Mr Musharraf is out of the way. And given Ms Bhutto’s last will and testament about the alleged “role” of the Musharraf establishment in her assassination, Mr Zardari can hardly “welcome” Mr Musharraf to Naudero for condolences, let alone become a junior partner in government with him. So who is spawning all this talk of a national government and what is its significance?
Clearly, President Musharraf is on the horns of a dilemma. He knows that the electoral prospects of the PMLQ have dwindled to such an extent that the PPP and PMLN together will probably get two thirds of the seats in the next parliament after a free and fair election, thereby setting the stage for his ouster through a vote of impeachment. This fear has prompted another “candid” remark from him to the effect that he would prefer to resign rather than face a vote of no-confidence in the next parliament. Under the circumstances, his options are limited: he can rig the elections and face the consequences of his illegitimate act at home and abroad, or he can try and postpone the elections along with his day of reckoning. The idea of a “national government” under him before the elections therefore serves two purposes: if the elections are held under such a national government no one among its participants will be able to claim that the elections were rigged under its own administration even though the rigging would be done by our ubiquitous but unaccountable angels in ghost polling stations; and if such a national government could be persuaded to postpone the elections because of “national security” considerations following “deep briefings” by the brass, then the supreme court could be nudged to stamp its approval, and the PMLQ would get time to regroup while the agencies would find fresh space in which to undermine the PPP and PMLN and sow discord among and between them.
It is this context that Maulana Fazal ur Rehman’s native wisdom seems profound. He wonders how an opposition that has failed to put up a united front in boycotting or participating in the elections can conceivably form a “national” government, and that too under President Musharraf who is universally distrusted. Mr Sharif”s statement is also indicative of his mood. He says he would welcome such a prospect in the interest of free and fair elections only if President Musharraf were to call it quits before it is constituted. And Mr Zardari’s, who says he can’t rule it out only after a round of free and fair elections which gives the PPP a majority in parliament “the two implications being that if the PPP doesn’t get a majority the election results won’t be accepted, and if it does then it may be inclined to join hands with the PMLN and get rid of President Musharraf as a precondition to packing the military off to barracks.
Since President Musharraf is in no mood to call it a day, we are lumped with the prospect of a rigged or delayed election “come hell or high water”. Unfortunately, the air is thick with dark revelations of terrorist “hit lists” and forebodings of bloody assassinations. Therefore most politicians are not venturing too far out and there is no “election campaign” out there. Speculation about a “national government” before the elections sows even more confusion in the mind of the candidates and their voters and dampens the enthusiasm of the crowds. Worse, a big assassination or a spate of bombings could scatter the marchers for democracy.
(January 25-31, 2008, Vol – XIX, No. 49 – Editorial)
Who is to blame?
President Pervez Musharraf’s advisors constantly tell him that “Pakistan’s image” abroad is painted bad by the foreign media only because Pakistan’s own homespun media is its country’s worst “enemy”. They say the foreign media picks up the yarn from the Pakistani media and weaves it unflatteringly for the international market. Therefore everything would be hunky dory and rivers of foreign investment would flow into the country, blessing high and low alike, if only the Pakistani media could be persuaded to restrain its criticism of government. For good measure, the “national interest” is also bandied about in such advisories on the dubious assumption that it is equal to the “government’s interest”.
This is a warped view of how the media works. Surely, as one of the famed “pillars of the democratic state”, it is the job of the press to force the state to wash its dirty linen and cleanse itself continuously. Nor is any regime or government the sole repository of the state or indeed the exclusive arbitrator of the “national interest”. Certainly, a non-democratic or unrepresentative government is least qualified to monopolize definitions of the “national interest”. The solution, therefore, is not to gag or lecture the media but to provide credible answers to issues raised by the media. Here are some particularly relevant and timely questions and answers.
President Musharraf wonders why everyone is convinced that the forthcoming elections won’t be free and fair. Surely, he says, his regime has done everything transparently and his own record of sticking to pledges isn’t bad. But that’s not true at all. For starters, it is common knowledge (of mythological proportions) that except for the 1970 elections every election to date has been rigged more or less by incumbents or by the perennial establishment. The record also shows a string of arbitrary and authoritarian decrees, including two farcical referendums (one by General Musharraf himself), and significant intelligence agency involvement in the politics of the country (one major case against the ISI is pending in the Supreme Court). But more specifically, people ask why, if he really wanted free and fair elections, didn’t he appoint an election commission with the approval of the opposition parties, why doesn’t he suspend the local governments that favour his alliance partners, why doesn’t he sanction a neutral national caretaker government to oversee the elections? His personal record is also tainted. He said he would quit as army chief in 2004 but didn’t. He said the elections would be held on January 8 but now it’s February 18. He said he would “never” impose an Emergency but he decreed a mini-martial law and an Emergency last November. He said he’d never chain the media. Yet he has inflicted some of the most suffocating gags on the media and it has taken three months for all the channels to be back on air after signing various humiliating undertakings and even now some anchorpersons are banned.
President Musharraf is also irked that the blame for the wheat and flour crisis is being laid at his door. He says the problem of flour shortage was created because large quantities of Pakistani wheat were smuggled to India, Afghanistan and Central Asia where prices were up to 50% higher, and that profiteers and hoarders reaped the benefits of artificial shortages. That may be true. But whose job is it, if it isn’t that of the government of the day, to stop the smuggling of precious national resources and punish profiteers and hoarders? Surely, we are talking of the smuggling of truckloads of wheat across metal roads through border security checkpoints and not mule-packs of heroin across dry riverbeds and barren mountains. Also, better handling of stocks and exports, coupled with some elementary pre-emptive action by the Shaukat Aziz government, might have staved off this crisis. Instead, President Musharraf has ridden to the defense of Mr Aziz like Don Quixote tilting at the windmills.
President Musharraf is also worried that post-election Pakistan is fated for unstable coalition governments because no party will get an absolute majority in the elections. Why is he so sure of what the voters are going to say? Some pollsters think the PPP will get a majority. And why should tomorrow’s coalition governments be any worse than the ones under President Musharraf’s tutelage yesterday, as in Sindh between the MQM and PMLQ and in Islamabad and Balochistan between the PMLQ and assorted groups and parties? Indeed, most analysts think his fear stems not from the probability of unstable coalition governments but from the fear that a stable ruling coalition between the PPP and PMLN might actually oust him from the presidency.
The fact is that the media was warm towards President Musharraf for many years because he did some good things in the national interest but has lately cooled because of his blundering approach to law, justice, elections, media and democracy. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the rise of religious extremism on his watch have also alienated most Pakistanis from him. So they see him as part of the problem rather than the solution. But he perceives himself in quite the opposite light. So who is to blame?
(Fabuary 1-7, 2008, Vol – XIX, No. 50 – Editorial)
Democracy, Talibanisation and Pakistan
Lt Gen (retired) Jan Mohammad Orakzai, the governor of the NWFP who recently got his marching orders, is the fourth in a row of provincial governors who have failed to devise an effective anti-Taliban policy. The “peace deal” signed by him in 2005 with Mr Baitullah Mehsud, which was doggedly billed by President Pervez Musharraf as a “tactical necessity”, has turned out to be a strategic disaster, as predicted earlier by independent experts and analysts on the subject, including this paper.
Mr Mehsud has just been nominated head of a 40-member Islamic Taliban Movement of Pakistan. He has cunningly exploited the two year lull to boast an army of 35000 Taliban, including hundreds of suicide bombers. South Waziristan has become the core base of the Taliban. Now Swat and large areas of the settled districts of the NWFP are threatened by Talibanisation. Indeed, fierce battles have been raging for control of territory a mere 20 miles from Peshawar in the vicinity of Dara Adam Khel and further along the way to Kohat etc.
More significantly, Mr Mehsud has enabled elements of Al-Qaeda to get a strong foothold in South Waziristan. In a TV interview Mr Mehsud admitted meeting Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader who died in Iraq fighting the Americans. But it is known that Mr Mehsud has received direct funding from Al Qaeda and indirect revenue from Afghan and Pakistani businessmen in the UAE. He has been successfully raiding convoys carrying war material from Pakistan to Afghanistan for the use of the 42,000 strong NATO forces. Around 40 percent of the military supplies to NATO forces go through Pakistan, and if these continue to be threatened then it is only a matter of time before the US military decides to get into the act to protect its supply routes.
The former interior minister, Mr Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, has now admitted that Talibanisation poses a real threat to Pakistan. He says the only way to confront it is through “swift and decisive action”. But he worries that “the police are scared; they don’t want to get involved” and the paramilitary Frontier Corps is “too stressed” to meet the challenge. He is dismayed by the fact that the Pakistan Army was reluctant in the past to take on the Taliban despite all the accumulating evidence of the threat they posed. Mr Sherpao’s most frightening admission is that the Taliban are supported by elements determined to derail the electoral process in the country. He fears “total Talibanisation” and has warned that unless political parties, civil society, and religious leaders unite to act against it, it is bound to overwhelm Pakistan. His views were echoed by the Afghanistan President, Mr Hamid Karzai, who claims that his country along with Pakistan faces “gloom and doom” from Taliban insurgents, and he has called for the world to “join hands” to defeat the “Islamist” rebels.
The latest response of the Musharraf regime to the threat of Talibanisation has been two fold. On the one hand, military force is being applied to clear out the areas captured by the Taliban. This is a defensive policy. It merely acts as a post-facto stop gap measure because it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. On the other hand, the government is reported to be planning a politico-religious initiative to win hearts and minds in the Talibanised areas. One such “Shariatisation” move is aimed at enforcing a special judiciary of Qazis in the provincially controlled areas of Swat, Dir and Chitral. But the extremist verdicts to be handed down by such courts in the interests of “swift justice” are more likely to promote Talibanisation instead of combating it. In this context, the reaction of Mr Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, a member of the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), is noteworthy. He says that Islam has not laid down any edict in favour of “Qazi courts”. So this would clearly amount to a parallel system that the Taliban would support. Indeed, the area has already been primed for a parallel extremist system by the Taliban’s illegal FM radio stations and in the federally administered Khyber Agency punishments like stoning to death are already being doled out.
The US has offered to widen its role in the Tribal Areas. But President Musharraf has spurned this offer because of its potential for backlash. That brings us full circle to the core issue of a lack of political consensus in the country under President Musharraf on how to deal with religious extremism in general and Talibanisation in particular. The dispossessed politicians are not ready to back the army on the difficult job of fighting an internal insurgency. Even some of our retired generals are concentrating their minds on the political aspects of the state and not on the survival of the state when they imply that the army should not take on the Taliban. That is why the only way forward is to hold free and fair elections which bring the peoples representatives back to political power so that they can strengthen and stabilize civilian democracy and support military action against the anarchists and extremists who want to make Pakistan a failed state.
(February 8-14, 2008, Vol – XIX, No. 51 – Editorial)
PPP must avoid controversy
Mr Asif Zardari told the media in Naudero, Larkana, 40 days ago that Bilawal Bhutto would be chairman of the Peoples Party, that he (Mr Zardari) would be co-chair (de facto regent) and that Mr Amin Fahim would be the PPP’s nominee for prime minister. Minutes later, in the same press conference, Mr Zardari wisely amended his statement by adding that Mr Fahim’s nomination would be subject to the approval of the Central Executive Committee of the party. And that is how matters rested until Mr Babar Awan, a PPP stalwart who seemingly wants to endear himself to the co-chair, recently announced that Mr Zardari would be a candidate for the prime ministership after winning a seat in the bye-elections after the general elections. Mr Awan’s intervention provoked comment but debate was suppressed when an official party statement reverted to the old position that this issue would be settled by the CEC at the appropriate time. However, Mr Zardari’s interview to Newsweek magazine three days ago has renewed the controversy.
Mr Zardari is quoted as arguing for his candidacy for prime ministership. He is the one who has suffered the most in the party and offered the greatest sacrifice, he says. He has more name recognition than anyone else. He is the designated heir apparent in Benazir Bhutto’s will. And so on. But the adverse reaction to his interview has compelled Mr Zardari to make a retraction. “I was misunderstood”, he says in defence, “the position is unchanged. The CEC will decide the matter at the right time”.
If Mr Babar Awan took an unwise initiative, then he should be zipped up and the matter can be allowed to rest. However, if Mr Zardari was testing the waters, first by eliciting a statement from Mr Awan and then by saying much the same thing to Newsweek, then he must be a wiser man after the event.
The PPP has unnecessarily muddied the waters by raking up the issue of who will be prime minister if it wins the general elections. This has given grist to the mills of the enemies of the party in general and Mr Asif Zardari in particular. It is politically distracting for a party that is bereaved and hoping to ride the sympathy wave for its departed leader Benazir Bhutto to start a debate at this stage on who should and should not be prime minister, suggesting that there is no consensus on a core issue. Certainly, this is not the way to go about building confidence among voters who will be looking to the PPP to demonstrate wisdom, unity and discipline in the face of the odds facing the party and the nation.
Fortunately, however, Mr Zardari has been making all the right moves and noises on other fronts. He has done the proper thing by releasing the contents of Ms Bhutto’s “will and testament” relating to his right to lead the party “in the interim”. The timing – on the eve of the Ms Bhutto’s chehlum – is spot-on. The tens of thousands who go to Naudero should have no doubt about the legitimacy of the party’s leadership as bequeathed by Ms Bhutto.
Mr Zardari’s repeated offer to make a “national government” after winning the general elections is also to be appreciated. It shows that he is acutely aware of the fissures that beset the nation and intends to apply a much needed healing touch. The qualification that such a “national” government will exclude the PMLQ is obviously meant for popular consumption since Ms Bhutto and now Mr Zardari have accused it of complicity in her assassination. At this stage, no one quite knows what the configuration of the coalition governments in the provinces and the centre will look like one month hence. After all, politics is the art of the possible, and President Pervez Musharraf is not about to reveal his hand.
Significantly, Mr Zardari has criticized the US administration for being soft on President Musharraf’s bid to rig the general elections. He rightly says that the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute have both catalogued the steps taken by President Musharraf to rig the elections, “but Washington remains painfully silent”. He has criticized those in the US administration who say that an election under such dreadful conditions can be “good if not perfect” and argued that this “functionally gives President Musharraf and his cronies the green light to rig the elections as long as they don’t get caught red-handed.” Indeed, there can be only one explanation why the IRI and NDI are pulling out of the election-monitoring process. If the elections are rigged, as is widely believed, they will have to say as much, thereby embarrassing the US administration and calling into question its support for President Musharraf. So it is better to stay clear and let the US administration calibrate its policy position without worrying about what American pollsters have to say on the subject.
The PPP and its leadership should stay clear of any controversy at this critical juncture. They should ride the wave and land safely on shore. That is what Benazir Bhutto would have wanted.
(February 15-21, 2008, Vol – XIX, No. 52 – Editorial)
Chronicle of a result foretold
On the eve of the general elections, two interesting developments are worthy of comment. The first are the results of polls by the Terror Free Tomorrow (TFT) organization and the International Republican Institute (IRI) and their blowback. The second is a meeting between Mr Asif Zardari and Mr Nawaz Sharif in Lahore in which the possibility of a coalition government was explored.
The TFT poll (Jan 19-29) concludes that (1) 62 percent of respondents support the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), while only 12 percent are in favour of the PML-Q). (2) 70 per cent want President Musharraf to quit office. The IRI survey concluded that (1) 79 per cent said if the PMLQ wins that would mean the elections were rigged. (2) 58 per cent said they would protest if the elections were rigged (3) 72% supported the PPP (50%) and PMLN (22%).
The collective results are a severe indictment of President Musharraf and by association foretell the dismal fate of the PMLQ. Unfortunately, the government has tried to discredit the pollsters by dubious means. This is quite pathetic. It may be recalled that during President Musharraf’s address to the Pakistani Community in USA in Washington on 24 Sep, 2006, the President said, “I know the people are with me. Even the opinion polls by foreign organizations prove that.” Indeed, in December 2006, the Musharraf regime proudly released the findings of an IRI poll which showed that General Musharraf was more popular in Pakistan than Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Then on December 8, 2007, the government’s media mandarins released the findings of a poll by “US-based International Public Opinion Polls (IPOP),” showing a boost in President Musharraf’s popularity after he took off the uniform. But the Daily Times exposed the poll as a fraud because the IPOP did not exist. Now the government is questioning the very rationale of opinion polling that it once extolled and lauded.
But that is not all. The IRI has quit Pakistan recently because of the hostile attitude of the government. The IRI was forbidden from conducting “exit polls” which would have interviewed voters after they came out of the polling stations and shown how they had actually voted. If the elections hadn’t been rigged, the exit-poll results would have reflected the election results but if the elections had been rigged they would have diverged. So the conclusion is inescapable: the government has much to fear and hide. Indeed, it is this prickly issue that has kept the National Democratic Institute in the US and many senior human rights and EU observer groups away from these elections.
The second issue of a possible coalition of interests between the PPP and PMLN is related to the election results. Both popular parties agree that if the elections are rigged they will join hands with the APDM parties and lawyers and civil society activists to protest and boycott the results. If that happens, the credibility and legitimacy of the elections would be destroyed and President Musharraf would be stripped of local or international support, compelling him to quit.
The issue of forming governments is more complex. The PPP will surely be the single largest party in Islamabad followed by PMLN. If PPP wins an absolute majority, it will probably form its own federal government. If not, then it would have to choose a coalition partner from the PMLN and PMLQ. But it is doubtful if Mr Sharif will come on board as long as President Musharraf is still on the Hill and the pre-PCO judges aren’t restored. If Mr Zardari is unable or unwilling to oblige Mr Sharif on these two counts – in fact if the judges were restored they would quickly band together to throw President Musharraf out on one pretext or another – then he will have to make a coalition with the PMLQ. But he can extract a heavy price for sharing power with President Musharraf. If the president is inclined to hog the show or throw his weight about, Mr Zardari could always exercise the option of joining with Mr Sharif and stripping President Musharraf of his powers to appoint the army chief and dismiss governments and parliament or, if worse comes to worst, throwing him out.
Much the same sort of considerations would come into play in Punjab. But since no single party might win an absolute majority in the province, a coalition government would have to be cobbled here that would complement rather than confront the government in Islamabad. So if the PPP forms a government in Islamabad alone or with the PMLQ, it would have to form one in the Punjab with the PMLQ if it wants to work with President Musharraf. But if it wants to overthrow him its natural ally will be PMLN in Punjab. In Sindh, its options would be to go it alone or make a coalition with the pro-Musharraf MQM. Of course, a serious political crisis would erupt if the PPP and PMLN were to try to overthrow President Musharraf. In the event, the President would likely try to use the “agencies” to stiffen the resolve of the PMLQ, JUI and MQM to thwart the challenge.
(February 22-28, 2008, Vol – XX, No. 01 – Editorial)
Beginning, not end, of transition to democracy
This has been a great election. It vindicates those who, like Benazir Bhutto, argued for a peaceful transition to democracy instead of a confrontation aimed at transformation. It supports the pollsters who said the country was awash with anti-Musharraf sentiment and the PPP was the most popular party in the country followed by the PMLN. The best part of the election is that the forces of religious extremism have been routed and the true worth of moderate, mainstream and even secular parties has been duly upheld. To give the devil his due, President Musharraf has shed his uniform and held credible elections like he promised. But it is not lost on anyone that he was shoved and pushed in that direction by a persistent civil society and a concerned international community. What more could Pakistanis ask for?
Plenty. With the tail-wind behind them, Mr Asif Zardari and Mr Nawaz Sharif are demanding President Pervez Musharraf should quit. They say that the people have cast a vote of no-confidence in him and he should respect their verdict. But Pakistan is not an established democracy and he is not a legitimately elected president. So he has refused to oblige. Where do we go from here?
One option is to get back into confrontation mode, unite the anti-Musharraf forces in parliament and try to impeach him or strip him of his extraordinary powers. But that is easier said than done. Even a two-thirds majority in the national assembly for a constitutional amendment won’t do the job since the Senate is still controlled by the PMLQ. The other option is to boycott parliament and take to the streets, provoking the army to step in at some ugly stage and “save democracy”, a contradiction in terms that is fraught with problems.
The other option is for the pro-democracy forces to forget about overthrowing President Musharraf for the time being and unite to make the system functional and more democratic step by step. This means coalition building everywhere. The PPP can form a provincial government in Sindh but may be advised to get the MQM on board in the interests of stability. In the NWFP, too, the ANP and PPP can form a coalition that is secular and moderate. In Balochistan, thanks to the boycott by the nationalists, the PMLQ is in the driving seat. The real issue is what to do in Islamabad and Punjab.
In Islamabad, the PPP is the largest party and should be asked by President Musharraf to form a government. It can do so with the PMLQ, ANP, MQM and everyone else except the PMLN. This PPP-PMLQ formula would work in the Punjab too because the provincial independents would naturally gravitate towards a dispensation that supplements the one in Islamabad. But the problem with this approach is that Mr Zardari would have to establish a working relationship with the unpopular President Musharraf and risk the ire of many idealistic PPP voters and supporters, including the angry civil society protestors who want Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry restored as CJP, which is not possible with President Musharraf around.
The other option is for Mr Zardari to try and include Mr Sharif’s PMLN in coalitions in Islamabad and Punjab and exclude the PMLQ. This would mean two things. First it would be an anti-Musharraf dispensation that is likely to end up in confrontation mode sooner than later and jeopardize the transition to greater democracy. At any rate, any strategy that leads to the overthrow of President Musharraf will automatically lead to the re-unification of the PML under Mr Sharif and swell its ranks to overwhelm the PPP once again. Second, Mr Zardari would have to fork over Punjab to Mr Sharif if he wants to keep Islamabad to himself. But after Mr Sharif gets Punjab with Mr Zardari’s support, he will be able to corral the independents into his camp. Then Mr Zardari would be at his mercy in Punjab and therefore in Islamabad. In the event, Mr Sharif could chose the moment of confrontation with President Musharraf and precipitate a crisis leading to a fresh election in which he would be the biggest beneficiary. Given the longer term divergence of party political interests of the two competitor parties, Mr Zardari must therefore scrutinize this option before succumbing to its emotional “national reconciliation” rhetoric and pull.
At the end of the day, the unpopular but pragmatic dialectic which propelled the PPP to choose the electoral route of transiting to democracy in the presence of President Musharraf instead of a boycott and confrontation preferred by Mr Sharif will have to be realistically weighed by Mr Zardari. There will be a time when President Musharraf will definitely be hoist by his own petard but whether the time has come is not certain from the point of view of party political interests. He would certainly hasten it if he continues to throw his weight about, if he manipulates politics via the agencies, and if he doesn’t zip up about people and personalities. Indeed, if the transition to democracy is to succeed in the longer term, Mr Musharraf will have to retreat to the shadows and eventually bow out to redeem himself and the nation.
(February 29 – March 06, 2008, Vol – XX, No. 02 – Editorial)
Politics is the art of the possible
Well meaning and concerned Pakistanis are sincerely excited about the prospects of principled alliances between and among the newly elected democratic forces of the country which lead to the creation of national reconciliation governments in Islamabad and the provinces. The major consequences of such democratic unity would presumably be the ouster of the unpopular President Pervez Musharraf, the disappearance of the rump PMLQ, the restoration of the independent pre-PCO judges, including the brave former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, the granting of full provincial rights to the NWFP and Balochistan, the rupture of the Mush-Bush partnership that has spawned Talibanism and terrorism in the tribal areas, and various other good initiatives in the popular imagination.
Certainly, all the principal actors are making the right noises and moves publicly. They have demonstrated their ability to rustle up 171 MNAs in Islamabad, which is a signal to the man on the hill that time is running out for him. We also learn that Ms Nilofar Bakhtiar and five disgruntled members of the PMLQ in the Senate have created a “forward bloc” to lend credibility to this move. Then there are the 22 independent MPAs-elect in the Punjab assembly who dutifully lined up for photographs at the Model Town Lahore residence of Mr Sharif the other day.
But to the cynics, this rosy scenario should raise a few hard-nosed questions. Why has Mr Sharif been in such a hurry to capture the provincial independents and stake an exclusive claim to a solely PMLN government in Lahore when Mr Zardari is still insisting on a national unity government which includes the PMLN in Islamabad? Indeed, why is Chaudhry Nisar of the PMLN saying that his party will support Mr Zardari’s government in Islamabad “from the outside” but not accept any cabinet posts in it? Why is Mr Zardari reluctant to commit his party to the restoration of the former chief justice and the impeachment of President Musharraf when Mr Sharif is pressing him to do exactly that? Why has Mr Mushahid Hussain suddenly extolled the cause of the prime ministerial system by announcing that the PMLQ would happily work with the new parliament to get rid of the president’s 58 2B power to sack prime ministers and parliaments? Indeed, what has prompted Ms Nilofer Bakhtiar and others among the PMLQ to create a forward bloc in the Senate to support the anti-establishment struggle for democracy? Why is the Bush administration still insisting on a role for President Musharraf and why has Democrat Senator Joe Biden, who heads the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, sought to explain the meaning of his original remark that “President Musharraf will go quietly in to the night” as suggesting that he may take a back seat rather than exit from the scene in a hurry? And finally, what is the meaning and significance of the four or five meetings in the last few days between the Chaudhries and President Musharraf?
Let us accept some solid party political realities. First, while Mr Sharif and Mr Zardari may share some short term tactical objectives like wanting to weaken the military’s domination of the political system and the removal of 58-2B, their longer term strategic goals differ completely. Mr Sharif would like to see another election soon so that he try to capture Islamabad and become prime minister again. But Mr Zardari would like to rule uninterruptedly in Islamabad and elsewhere in the provinces for a full five years. Second, while Mr Sharif wants to recapture the Q rump of the PML and restore the League as a truly national party, Mr Zardari would like to keep the PML vote-bank divided and hog the status of the only significant national party in the country. This means that the two will play ball as long as their party political interests converge but part ways when these interests differ. So what is going on?
One scenario mooted behind the scenes goes like this. In exchange for allowing Mr Musharraf to remain president as per the US agenda, while enabling Mr Zardari to strike a blow for democracy, a constitutional amendment may be floated to get rid of those provisions of 58 2 B which relate to the sacking of prime ministers and parliaments and enable most pre-PCO judges, minus the ex-CJP and a couple of others, to be restored. Mr Sharif would be asked to join this initiative with the prospect of sharing power in Islamabad and Punjab as part of a national reconciliation effort. If he doesn’t come on board, the PPP and PMLQ would go ahead without him and deprive him of Punjab (the independents MPAs would flock to a PMLQ-PPP government). As a sop to public opinion, the PMLQ would designate a new leadership which seemingly shunts the Chaudhries asides and removes red rags like Farooq Leghari and Ejaz ul Haq from the PPP’s sight. This would explain Nilofer Bakhtiar’s forward bloc in the Senate and Mushahid Hussain’s offer to get rid of 58-2B.
Politics is the art of the possible. We should know soon enough which way the wind will finally blow.
(March 7-13, 2008, Vol – XX, No. 3 – Editorial)
Zardari is right on Kashmir
A coterie of vested interests is up in arms against Asif Zardari for his policy statement on Pakistan-India relations and Kashmir given to an Indian channel. The chorus of protest springs from diminishing militant groups in Kashmir and Pakistan who have tried to resolve the Kashmir dispute by force and failed to do so for sixty years, in the process militarising Pakistan as a failing National Security State, losing half the country, and suing embarrassingly for peace in Tashkent in 1965 and Kargil in 1999. Even some high profile Jihadi-Taliban supporters in the media, like the provocative host of a talk-show in the capitol who once edited a fiercely pro-jihad newspaper, have jumped the gun and tried to haul Mr Zardari over the coals. So what did Mr Zardari say that has provoked them to accuse him of “a great betrayal”?
Mr Zardari said that if his party came to power good relations with India would not be held hostage to the Kashmir issue and the two countries would wait for future generations to resolve the issue in an atmosphere of trust. He did not agree with the notion that the Kashmir issue could best be sorted out while the army was in power in Pakistan. He insisted that people-to-people contacts and inter-dependence in trade could help negate the “fear factor” in both countries and lead them on the path of conflict resolution.
Actually, this is a realistic summing up of the situation. It reflects the spirit of accumulated wisdom in the wake of a failed foreign policy via a vis India for sixty years. Significantly, however, it is not a unique or unprecedented position taken by a national political leader in Pakistan.
Ms Benazir Bhutto came to this conclusion in 1989 when she parleyed with the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in Islamabad. But remnants of the Zia-ist military establishment accused her of being a “national security risk” and she was ousted from power by the “midnight jackals”, some of whom are among the great spokesmen of the democracy movement today. Later, the jihad in Kashmir was intensified by the military establishment.
The force of the argument and the failure of the jihadi policy to wrest Kashmir from India by force, however, compelled Nawaz Sharif to adopt the same pragmatic position in 1999 when he invited the Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, to a prime ministerial summit in Lahore. Three formal communiqués were issued. However, not one mentioned Kashmir as the “core dispute” or the UN Resolutions. But Mr Sharif’s peace initiative with India was sabotaged by General Pervez Musharraf’s military misadventure in Kargil in May. Following the debacle, differences cropped up between the two and Mr Sharif was ousted in a coup in October 1999. In interviews shortly after he became chief executive, General Musharraf castigated Mr Sharif for “abandoning the cause of Kashmir” and pledged to maintain hostilities with India until the “core dispute of Kashmir” was resolved to the satisfaction of Pakistan as per the UN Resolutions. So in 2001 General Musharraf went to Agra to discuss the core dispute of Kashmir with India. But when India countered with its version of the core dispute with Pakistan – export of terrorism from Pakistan to Indian-held Kashmir – he left in a huff, with a coterie of hawkish Pakistani journalists in tow.
However, power brings responsibility with it. In 2002, after the militants attacked the parliament in Srinagar and then the one in New Delhi, compelling India to move its army to the border with Pakistan and threaten hot pursuit and even war, General Musharraf formally pledged not to allow Pakistani territory to be used for the export of terrorism. By 2003, he was ready to extend the olive branch to Mr Vajpayee in pursuit of “building trust”; by 2004 he was ready to put the lid on the militants in Pakistan; by 2005 he had closed down their training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and by 2006 he was reiterating the most flexible and creative “out-of-the-box-solutions” to a resolution of the Kashmir dispute which had nothing to do with the “outdated” UN Resolutions. Indeed, the more popular he became among ordinary people in Indian-held Kashmir for his realistic peace policies enabling them to rebuild their shattered lives, the more unpopular he became with the militant organizations and their sympathizers and supporters in the Pakistani media. The terrorist attacks on General Musharraf from 2003 onwards, as well as the ones on Benazir Bhutto and her PPP, all have the footprints of the military’s erstwhile friends and allies.
Like Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and General Musharraf on the issue of relations with India, the wisdom of the age has fortunately dawned on Mr Zardari as he prepares to don the mantle of power. More than anything else, we Pakistanis need to quickly heal the wounds within and without and rebuild our lives and our polity. Creating relations of peaceful co-existence, trust and trade unconditionally with our neighbours is no less critical than cobbling coalition governments with former foes at home in the national interest. Mr Asif Zardari should be applauded for his pragmatism instead of being castigated for it.
(March 14-20, 2008, Vol – XX, No. 4 – Editorial)
Transiting to democracy and stability
The Murree Accord is a remarkable development. Despite the assassinations and suicide bombings, and despite the daily protests of lawyers and civil society activists, the accord seeks to sustain the transition to a democratic tomorrow that was sparked by the tumultuous return of Benazir Bhutto and the holding of relatively free and fair general elections. It tries to defy cynics like us who argued that a meeting of minds between the PPP and PMLN, given their past history, future prospects and competing interests, was difficult to imagine, let alone coalition governments and ministry sharing in Islamabad and Punjab where neither party needs the other to reinvent itself. And it spurns the sincere but misplaced advice of those who have been exhorting the two parties to jointly confront and oust President Pervez Musharraf and forcibly restore the pre-3rd November judiciary to its pristine glory.
In some ways, the greater maturity has been shown by Mr Nawaz Sharif while the greater courage has been shown by Mr Asif Zardari. Mr Sharif did not succumb to the confrontationist demand to boycott the elections and was vindicated when his party trumped the PMLQ and seized Punjab. Now he has forsaken similar exhortations to propel parliament into a head-on clash with the presidency and the post-3rd November judiciary by accepting the need for a parliamentary resolution as a statement of sincere intent aimed at devising a medium term strategy to obtain an independent judiciary. Meanwhile, Mr Zardari has demonstrated courage by persevering with the political strategy of transiting to democracy articulated by Ms Bhutto, despite the life-price that she paid for it eventually. In short, a good start after months of uncertainty and instability.
We wish, though, that we could be as sanguine about President Musharraf’s intentions. True, he shed his uniform as he’d promised. But it wasn’t without shedding buckets of tears. True, too, that he held relatively free and fair elections. But it wasn’t without bipartisan Americans and the EU breathing down his neck and the political parties brandishing credible threats of a boycott and strikes. One might have imagined that after his PMLQ was trounced at the polls largely because of the sentiment against him personally, he might have announced a relatively decent exit – as we had advised him in an earlier editorial – and let democracy find its own level of gravity. But he is given to posturing and lecturing and strutting about as though he is still commando-in-chief. This reckless and arrogant attitude has to change. He must learn to zip up and take a back seat, otherwise he is bound to step on the people’s mandate and bruise the egos of the new parliamentarians, thereby precipitating another confrontation. At any rate, the PMLN and PPP will obtain a two thirds majority in the senate elections next year and parliament will become strong enough to uncontroversially strip him of his extraordinary powers or send him packing if he remains obstreperous. The time will be right too because a Democratic administration in Washington may not be as enamoured of him as the Bush regime is today.
For the moment, however, everyone must focus on the myriad problems of nation and state. The economy is crying out for better management of food and power shortages in the short and medium terms. The trade deficit is soaring and putting pressure on the rupee, which is fueling inflation. The hefty subsidies to wheat and oil are enlarging the fiscal deficit. Forex reserves are depleting, interest rates are rising and development budgets are facing cuts. Poverty and unemployment are increasing again. It is hardship time.
Then there is the war against Taliban-Al Qaeda terrorism. It has to be tackled as our war and not as America’s war. It is the Pakistani flag and not the American that is trashed when the Taliban banner is hoisted in Swat and Waziristan. Simplistic notions that all such terrorism will come to an end after Mr Musharraf is gone are foolish and dangerous. The Taliban-Al Qaeda network is in search of a base area to inspire a world uprising. It had hoped Afghanistan would be one but the Americans put paid to that. We should not have allowed this network to find shelter in Pakistan and extend its tentacles. But we did and are paying the price for our opportunism. Now the Americans are poised to shift focus from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan is squarely in the eye of the approaching storm. A coordinated joint effort of the international community, the Pakistan military and the Pakistan mainstream political parties is needed to uproot terrorism and win hearts and minds in the disaffected areas and populations. This is a most opportune moment for such a move. The terrorists have alienated Pakistanis by their indiscriminate bombings, one consequence of which is the rout of the religious parties in the elections for protecting and nourishing them.
We owe it to Benazir Bhutto for sacrificing her life for the sake of a transition to democracy via the electoral process. She made it possible for Mr Sharif and Mr Zardari to occupy centre stage today. Now these two leaders have to keep the faith and steer the ship of state into calmer waters. And we, the people, have to give them the political space to do just that.
(March 21-27, 2008, Vol – XX, No. 5 – Editorial)
“Honesty, truthfulness and humility”
President Pervez Musharraf said on Wednesday that the new government should meet the challenges of terrorism, energy shortage, and rising fuel and food prices through good governance and by keeping “Pakistan first”. “Politicking has to give way to good governance,” he advised. The president said the country had been through “turmoil” in the past few months and the new government must sustain economic growth to meet the difficulties it faced. He said Pakistan’s macro-economic indicators were strong and the recent shortage of energy was caused by rapid industrial growth. He said growth in the energy sector should match the growth in economy.
Well, well, well. It didn’t occur to the president that his advice might have been better received if he had admitted his regime’s failings and offered a mea culpa.
We are faced with terrorism because the state under his military predecessors nurtured the very groups which are committed to terrorism today. Indeed, he was in the saddle for eight long years and made a hash of anti-terrorism policy, often running with the hare and hunting with the hound. A string of corps commanders and governors of the NWFP couldn’t deliver. In fact, the MMA government which his anti-PPP/PMLN policies had foisted upon the hapless province actually facilitated the militant groups.
We are faced with energy shortages, he says, because of rapid industrial growth under his regime. So whose responsibility was it to ensure that energy supply should have risen in step with growth? For eight years the president has been talking about a gas pipeline from Iran to India. And nothing has come of it. At first, he insisted that Pakistan was only in it for the transit fees because it had a surplus of energy while India was faced with a growing deficit. So he linked the pipeline deal with India to a resolution of the Kashmir dispute. But when that failed to impress India and Pakistan’s energy shortages begun to weigh on him, he de-linked it from Kashmir but not from opening up trade with India. So India continued to balk. Now we have a situation in which India is stitching up a nuclear deal with the US which will preclude any gas deal with Iran. A great opportunity has thus been lost by lack of vision on how the region is shaping up and Pakistan’s place in it. Much the same sort of muddle headed thinking was in evidence on the private power policy. For the first few years, NAB was ordered to tighten the screws on the private power producers and sovereign guarantees given to them by the PPP regime from 1993-96 were flouted with impunity. All new projects were banned. Now we are told that a “fast track” policy to set up new power plants in the next two years has been launched. As for the big dams that could provide the most efficient way out of the energy crunch, the less said the better. President Musharraf spent the first few years of his tenure insisting that Kalabagh would be built and the last few denying it was on the cards.
To be sure, the crisis generated by the steep climb in food and fuel prices is exogenous. But his government can be faulted for mismanaging it. About a million tonnes of wheat was exported in the last twelve months to prop up exports so that ex-PM Shaukat Aziz could meet his targets. A similar amount was blithely allowed to be smuggled to Afghanistan for political reasons. Fuel prices should have been raised progressively, in tune with the rising international price of oil, in order to reduce sudden shocks, but this was not done for political reasons too because 2007 was election year. So now the new government has been burdened with the sins of Shaukat Aziz and has to contend with the self-righteous lectures of the president.
The last chapter of President Musharraf’s bestselling autobiography, now remaindered at throw away prices, is titled “Reflections”. “God has always been kind to me”, writes Mr Musharraf. “I wonder why”, he asks innocently, while “reinforcing his belief in his destiny” and his sense of “honesty, truthfulness, contentment and humility” (“being humble in greatness raises one’s stature”). A splendid lecture on leadership follows. It is all about character, decisiveness, boldness and cool temperament. But these are the very qualities that have been in short supply for the last year or so. Significantly, the most revealing aspect of the book, and one which many Pakistanis found most depressing, was the list of things-to-do on his 7-point agenda for the next decade. “We have to consolidate our democracy and ensure the supremacy of the constitution” is way down the line at number 6 in terms of priority.
Significantly, the new parliament and the new coalition government have put this item on the top of their agenda. Therefore President Musharraf would be advised to change his priorities quickly. This is the moment to display “honesty, truthfulness, contentment and humility”. He should bow before the will of the people and let their representatives find a sensible way out of the economic and political crisis that we face today.
(March 28 – April 03, 2008, Vol – XX, No. 6 – Editorial)
Hard times
Mr Asif Zardari has played his cards well so far. A coalition alliance with Mr Nawaz Sharif has taken the sting out of a potentially formidable opposition. It has also spread the burden of all difficult decisions to be taken in the weeks to come on everyone’s shoulders instead of just the PPP.
His decisions to nominate Dr Fahmida Mirza and Yousaf Raza Gilani as Speaker of the National Assembly and Prime Minister respectively are no less significant. Dr Mirza’s appointment sends a strong signal of the PPP’s liberal credentials. She won her NA seat fairly and squarely through the heat and dust of electoral battle. But she also paved the way for the nomination of a prime minister from Punjab rather than from Sindh. If too many of the top slots had gone to Sindh at the outset there might have been an adverse reaction from the rank and file in the Punjab.
Mr Zardari did not want a prime minister from Sindh for obvious reasons. It would have created a rival source of power in his home province and served to undermine the Bhutto constituency that he means to nurture and monopolize. His fears were confirmed after Mr Amin Fahim sulked and even assumed a threatening posture in public at the prospect of being bypassed. If he had been made prime minister there is no knowing how long he would have played second fiddle to Mr Zardari, nor whether he would have stepped down lamely when Mr Zardari was ready to don the mantle himself. Mr Fahim’s “friendliness” with the Musharraf establishment would have also remained a source of continuing disquiet not just for Mr Zardari but also for the other coalition partners, in particular the PMLN. This was demonstrated by the PMLN’s Khawaja Asif when he publicly chided Mr Fahim for being too close to the establishment for comfort.
By contrast, Mr Gilani played a low key role when several names were being bandied about for the prestigious slot. Certainly, if Mr Zardari was watching to see which candidate would trip himself up by hogging the media even before he had been crowned PM, he must have been reassured by Mr Gilani’s modest behaviour. At any rate, a landlord from southern Punjab where the PPP won most of its Punjab seats suits Mr Zardari well. Why it wasn’t the more educated and articulate Mr Clean, Shah Mahmood Qureshi instead, is unclear – he has been loyal and steadfast no less than Mr Gilani – unless there is a more appropriate slot reserved for him in the cabinet which couldn’t have been handed to anyone else with equanimity.
But Mr Zardari’s coup de grace was reserved for the last. The inclusion of the MQM into the coalition is very significant. By bringing it into the tent even though he had the numbers to form his own government in Sindh, Mr Zardari has achieved two significant objectives. First, he has neutralized the threat of instability in Sindh which the MQM is equipped to create at any given time; second, he has reduced his dependence on the PMLN and created more political space for himself in the coalition. The fact that the MQM is a supporter of President Pervez Musharraf cuts both ways. It keeps lines of communication open to the presidency without becoming subservient to it as might have happened if the PMLQ had been brought into the tent instead of the PMLN. And it prepares for the day when the PPP will need all partners on deck when the PMLN chooses to part ways and sit on the opposite side of the fence because its longer term party political interests have begun to diverge. Mr Sharif’s annoyance is therefore perfectly explicable.
Two swift developments will challenge Mr Zardari’s mettle immediately. The first is the challenge by the lawyers movement to restore Mr Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and all his colleagues immediately by means of an executive order that pits the new government into a head on confrontation with the presidency and sitting supreme court. The second is the embarrassing American pressure to play ball with the Musharraf establishment and “own” the war on terror. Both will put the fledgling coalition under strain, as evidenced by anti-American statements from Mr Sharif and Mr Aitzaz Ahsan against continuing American support for Mr Musharraf. Mr Gilani’s first executive order freeing the detained judges may not dampen the enthusiasm of the lawyers movement for an immediate and full restoration of the judges. Indeed, with the deposed judges in their midst, it might actually spur them to take on the new government and put parliament on the mat.
In the midst of this, the question of who and how many will sit in the cabinet will not be resolved without rancour. Pakistanis will want a lean and efficient government. But the nature of the grand coalition suggests that we are going to see one of the most bloated cabinets in history, even it is accomplished in stages. So we may expect the media’s romance with democracy to be over pretty soon. There are hard times ahead that will make the game so far look like child’s play.
(April 4-10, 2008, Vol – XX, No. 7 – Editorial)
Economic outlook not bad
The economic challenge faced by the new PPP-PMLN coalition government is admittedly daunting. It faces an economic and political backlash from a steep rise in the oil and food bill – Pakistan used to pay US$ one billion per year in oil imports in the 1990s and this has soared to US$ 6 billion a year currently – and acute shortages of power that entail hours of load shedding across the country. A strategy to offset these is bound to strain government expenditures on development, increase the fiscal deficit from the projected 4 percent to 6 percent, fuel inflation and entail economic hardships for ordinary people. But is all the doom and gloom associated with this challenge fully justified?
The State Bank of Pakistan says that economic growth will fall from the projected 7.2 per cent to about 6 percent this year. But that’s not bad at all, considering the political turbulence of the last eighteen months. Certainly, it is a far cry from the 3 per cent average rate of growth in the economy during the decade of civilian democracy in the 1990s and in the first few years of the Musharraf regime from 1999 to 2002. But how many people remember those belt tightening years? All is surely not lost.
In 2007, the most turbulent year since 1999, the Karachi Stock Exchange grew by over 40 %, the average yield on its stock being about 6 %. One leading international financial group (BMA Capital) is still projecting earnings growth in Pakistan’s publicly listed companies at about 12.2 % this year and 18.9 % next year. In 2007, too, the Pakistan Opportunity Fund generated 28.5 % in the midst of PCOs, emergencies, bomb blasts and assassinations. There are other good indicators too. The telecom sector is not exhausted by any means. The mobile population is only 43 %. So prospects are bright. Huge opportunities still exist in broadband and the internet. The banking sector is also looking up. The country witnessed an extraordinary growth of financial sector assets to US$180 billion or 125% of GDP in 2007, as noted by the State Bank of Pakistan. The fact that this is fueled by the dynamic private sector which holds about 90 % of all banking assets now compared to under a quarter not so long ago suggests continuing dynamism ahead. To clinch the argument, take a look at the World Bank Report on Doing Business rankings of 178 countries. Pakistan is projected in 2008 at No: 76, better than emerging markets like China at No: 83 and India at No: 120. With investment opportunities opening up in the energy and power sector, refinery, gas distribution, fertilizer, autos, banks, cement, telecoms and textiles, the “horizon for prosperity and growth seems lustrous for Pakistan”, claims BMA Capital. For investors, then, the fundamentals of the economy are still sound, despite the headlines in the Pakistani media.
To be sure, the coming wheat crop will be adversely affected by lack of water. So the government has to plan for potential flour shortages. We will also have to keep the price of flour lower than the international price. This means that we must make sure that flour is not smuggled into neighbouring countries like last year. Now the wheat price has been fixed at Rs 620 per 40 kg, which is better for the farmer and not so bad for the consumer because its price in India is higher. The same sort of scenario will present itself in rice and edible oil. But all these are manageable issues if one plans ahead on how to tackle them effectively.
The real challenge is to build on these rather than succumbing to economic opportunism by postponing the short term belt tightening that is in order. Indeed, the earlier the hardship measures are imposed the better. Good politics suggests that all hard decisions should be taken immediately after a general election and belt loosening decisions just before a general election. So the government must resist the temptation to court cheap popularity by dishing out huge subsidies and depleting the exchequer. Of course, this is not to say that the poor should be targeted unjustly. In fact, wherever possible the impact of direct or indirect taxation should be distributed much more on the rich and very rich.
This is also the time to redress the civil-military equation that impinges on economic development and income redistribution. The peace process with India should be speeded up so that there is a peace dividend in the form of a reduced growth of defense expenditures and increasing benefits from trade. The civilian government should also take ownership of the war against terror and channel all US funds meant for it directly into its coffers. God knows how much over-billing was done by the military and where that money went in the past. According to one reliable estimate, the total amount of US money to Pakistan on one count or another since 9/11 is about US$17 billion if all un-audited and secret funds transfers are also taken into account. Surely, there are many billions of dollars of savings for the common good to be made here when all this is transferred to the control of the civilians in the future.