The declaration of a state of emergency in Pakistan on November 3, 2007, by the country’s dual-roled military dictator, General and President Pervez Musharraf, was followed by widespread political turmoil and repression. The US and the international community were confronted with the sleeper issue of our time: To what degree is Pakistan a reliable partner in the fight against terrorism? This question has been long avoided since Musharraf’s post-9/11 pledge—made in response to direct threats from Washington—to stop aiding the Taliban and join in America’s “War on Terror.” It was then further buried by the subsequent focus on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the question reemerged with a vengeance as growing civil unrest initially ignited by Musharraf’s removal of Pakistan’s Supreme Court Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudry, escalated into a countrywide pro-democracy movement that Musharraf ultimately responded to with bludgeoning force. As events unfolded, televised scenes of security forces beating, teargassing, and arresting lawyers were followed by opposition leader Benazir Bhutto’s confinement to her home, surrounded by rings of barbed wire and policemen. Thousands of political activists, human-rights workers, and lawyers were arrested. Starkly dispersing the aura of “enlightened moderation” the self-appointed president had been endowed by his Pakistani and Western supporters, and placing the stability of the nuclear-armed nation in doubt, Musharraf justified his actions by bombastically saying, “I will not allow Pakistan to commit suicide.”
Musharraf’s actions amounted to a de facto imposition of martial law: He suspended the Constitution, leveled antiterrorism charges against lawyers who had committed no acts of violence, installed a provision which allowed civilians to be tried by military tribunals, and put curbs on the news media that included a ban against saying anything “prejudicial to the Pakistan ideology.” More importantly, he sacked the 10-justice Supreme Court of its more independent-minded judges—who were expected to rule against him on legal challenges to his continuing as president—only to handpick allies as replacements.
“Seventy percent of the judges were sent home, highly controversial appointments have been made in their place, and pliable judges have been kept,” said Osama Siddique, associate professor of law and policy at Pakistan’s elite Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), while speaking to an audience at Columbia University’s Law School in early December. “Given the unfavorable bent of the judiciary to tail his personal agenda, combined with serious inflation, the privatization of Pakistan Steel Mills, the Red Mosque incident, the stock market debacle, the Supreme Court’s notice of contempt to the government for illegal deportation of the former disposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and the US pressure on Musharraf to strike a deal with the recently returned former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, put Musharraf between a rock and a hard place and put his legitimacy and longevity in office in jeopardy.”
Musharraf’s crackdown was the culmination of eight months of unrest and maneuvering following his summary dismissal of the country’s dissident Chief Justice Chaudhry, in early March. Exhausted by eight years of direct military rule, which dated to Musharraf’s overthrow of Sharif in a bloodless coup in October 1999, a loose coalition of pro-democracy activists led by members of the judiciary and the legal profession seized on this event to mount public agitation for the restoration of civilian government. This legal rebellion is unprecedented in Pakistani history. Previously, the judiciary had always acted as a rubber stamp to the will of the military, most notoriously in 1979 when it was complicit in the execution of Benazir Bhutto’s father, deposed Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, on questionable charges of murder.
The Internet and an emerging student activist movement has helped spur the growing pro-democracy movement. “Technology has played a critical role in mobilizing resistance and building international pressure, especially among tech-savvy students,” wrote Amber Vora, an independent journalist and researcher, currently in Lahore. In her blog, Vora credits student attending LUMS as the “first to organize protests, breaking a decades-long drought on student activism in the country.” According to Vora, in 1999 the Internet was accessible by only one percent of Pakistanis. Today, in light of telecommunication deregulation in 2003, millions have access to the Internet, which “has become a primary source of information during martial law.” Also, according to Vora, the proliferation of mobile phones, with over 70 million subscribers in 2007, is making it easier for Pakistanis to organize, share information, and mobilize.
PERVERSIONS OF LAW
“There was great exasperation with the perversions of the law carried out by the military since 1999,” said Pakistani journalist and author of the international bestseller Taliban, Ahmed Rashid. Rashid believes this uprising resulted from a combination of fatigue and important new developments in Pakistani society. “The constant having to validate Musharraf’s various maneuverings to extend his rule, the holding of suspects without charges and in secret places, the arbitrary decrees. Lawyers and judges wished to work in a freer environment, and at the same time came under pressure from civil society and human rights groups to be more accountable. Then there was also the example of Indian judicial activism. All of these elements came together to force a decisive break with the past.”
Seriously confronted for the first time with widespread popular dissent, the president tried to ride out the storm by offering such concessions as restoring Chaudhry to the court, promising to hold new parliamentary elections, and vowing to resign his post as head of the army while continuing to rule as a civilian. Yet once it became evident that an emboldened Supreme Court was going to rule that his re-election to the presidency in October by way of a dubious parliament election in 2002 was illegal, Musharraf launched what some are calling his second coup.
Amidst all the uncertainty, a central question has emerged: Is Pakistan under Musharraf indeed a “key ally” against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, as the Bush administration has portrayed it over the last six years? Or is Pakistan arguably the most dangerous country on earth, as Newsweek reported in October stating, “It has everything Osama bin Laden could ask for: political instability, a trusted network of radical Islamists, an abundance of angry young anti-Western recruits, secluded training areas, access to state-of-the-art electronic technology, regular air service to the West and security services that don’t always do what they’re supposed to do.” Not to mention Pakistan’s growing and secretive nuclear program, to which the US has given $100 million in known aid to specifically help secure.
Conventional wisdom says Pakistan is both, and therefore the United States has no choice but to heavily support the Pakistani military—10 billion dollars in known aid since 9/11—so it can combat Pakistan’s rising tide of Islamic radicalism. Yet others point to the ideology of the Pakistani military itself.
In America, the themes that dominated reactions to the crisis in news reports, op-eds, blogs, and presidential debates centered on such questions as how the instability would affect the Pakistani military’s ability to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the safety of the Pakistan’s arsenal of 60 operational nuclear weapons, and whether the United States’ chief concern in Pakistan should be promoting democracy or safeguarding its own national security, the last issue often posed in an either/or manner.
Yet amidst all this nervous speculation, there was little sense that the underlying dynamics of the conflicts that are tearing at Pakistan were understood. Few have stated them with more clarity than the Pakistani writer Hamza Alavi, who stressed that the military’s traditional emphasis on an ideology of Islamic unity as a counter to socioeconomic dissent has only proved divisive. “Paradoxically, instead of binding the nation more firmly together, the emphasis upon ideology appears to have convinced disgruntled regional groups that by that means their demands and needs were being ruled out of court. Ironically, therefore, the stress upon Islamic unity and the ideological basis of Pakistan’s existence strengthened centrifugal forces rather than cemented bonds.”
In the light of this insight, it is an interesting coincidence that one of the most infamous controversies involving Pakistan during the last few years was the proliferation of nuclear materials to various countries by its top physicist and father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, A. Q. Khan, which included selling nuclear centrifuges to Iran. A centrifuge of any type is a machine that separates substances that have different densities by centrifugal force, and as Alavi implied, this process can serve as a useful metaphor when trying to understand the country’s perennial dysfunction. Pakistan’s current turmoil stems from the continuity of its historical patterns, the most persistent of which is that of the military taking whatever action it deems necessary to uphold the “Pakistan ideology,” and the centrifugal resistance this has provoked.
EVOLUTION OF A COUNTRY
Pakistan is a country of approximately 150 million people whose geographical position as the northwest doorstep of the Indian subcontinent has always made its possession key to controlling the South-Central Asian region, as well as a perennial launching point for invasions of India itself. A series of such attacks by Arab and Turkic conquerors from the 8th to 16th centuries accounts for the country’s overwhelmingly Muslim character, for it was there that Islam first penetrated the subcontinent and where it put down the deepest roots. Islam is the prime reason that Pakistan exists as an independent state, and is the common denominator of its diverse peoples. Ironically, the determination of what is the appropriate form Islam should take in society is the prime divisive issue among them.
The country’s ethnicities include the Punjabis and Sindhis who live in the agriculturally rich and feudally organized provinces of Punjab and Sindh along the Indus River in the east and south of the country. These two regions account for most of Pakistan’s population and are the chief centers of power. The sparsely populated and arid wastes of Baluchistan—a province rich in natural gas—lies to the west. Pakistan’s rugged North-West Frontier Province is the only one not named after its dominant ethnic group, the Pashtun, whose population spreads across the border into southeastern Afghanistan and whose grievances are at the heart of much of the violence plaguing both countries. Last are the Mohajirs, descended from Muslim refugees who fled India when Pakistan was created by being violently torn from British India in 1947. Although concentrated in the city of Karachi in Sindh, they live throughout Pakistan. President Musharraf is Mohajir, a fact that along with his being a military man, binds him to the “Pakistan Ideology.”
An old but not inaccurate cliché holds that Pakistan may be understood by examining the “Three ‘A’s” that have shaped its destiny: Allah, the Army, and America. Yet there is a fourth “A” that has arisen from the interaction of the others: Alienation, a psychological phenomenon with many dimensions that has placed Pakistanis violently at odds with the peoples of neighboring countries, the West, and with each other.
The modern state of Pakistan—which means “land of the pure” in Persian and Urdu—came into existence as a result of a split in the Indian independence movement during the final years of British rule. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of India’s Muslims, raised the specter of Hindu domination once the country gained its freedom, a prospect he claimed placed “Islam in danger.” Though Jinnah was himself a secularist, this cry has been raised by such diverse actors as Pakistan’s religious parties, mainstream military officers, and jihadi terrorists, resounding through the history of the South-Central Asian region with devastating effect. Only by establishing a separate homeland for Muslims in the areas where they were a majority, Jinnah and his party the Muslim League argued, could they be protected from discrimination and much worse.
There was, however, a socioeconomic subtext to this agitation, one that was to define Pakistan as an independent country and plays a substantial role in the current crisis. Jinnah represented affluent Muslim professionals and feudal landowners who felt that their interests and privileges—such as power over their serfs—were threatened by the democratic pluralism and economic populism espoused by India’s founders, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawharal Nehru. By appealing to Islamic identity and instigating fear that Islam was under attack, the Muslim League hoped to maintain an authoritarian exclusivity, and block social and economic reform. Emphasizing that this dynamic was carried over from the independence struggle into the politics of the new country, Pakistani writer Khurshid Hyder wrote, “Lacking economic and social programs, politicians adopted obscurantist tactics and religious sentiments for the furtherance of their respective political aims.” Whenever more secular-minded Pakistanis have raised issues such as democracy, the rule of law, regional autonomy, poverty, women’s rights, illiteracy, and the persistence of feudalism, the military has suppressed demands for change under the guise of defending an endangered Islam.
PROTECTOR OF ISLAM OR MILITARY INDUSTRIAL CORPORATION?
The “Pakistan Ideology” holds that the country is not an ordinary state with defined borders and the normal obligations to provide for security, rule of law, and development within that territory. Pakistan’s dictator of the early 1970s, General Yahya Khan, often spoke of “defending ideological frontiers.” Similar to Turkey’s post-Ottoman designation of its military as protector of “Secularism,” in Pakistan, the military is the designated protector of Islam, which in their view translates into military rule. “Pakistan” is as much an ideological concept as it is a place from which Islam is championed wherever it is challenged—a regional and even world mission. There have been four direct military coups in Pakistan’s history—1958, 1969, 1977, and Musharraf’s in 1999—and a military head of state has ruled during almost half Pakistan’s existence.
Even in times of civilian rule, the army has held great influence over foreign policy, and most notably under Musharraf has taken over wide swaths of the economy. Indeed, it has been said that the military’s role is so dominating that Rawalpindi, the city near Islamabad where the military-security services complex is based, is the country’s real capital. Support for Pakistan’s major fundamentalist parties, the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Jamaat Ulema-i- Islami, has for half a century been a means used by the army to shore up the “Pakistan Ideology” by fostering a religious and even jihadi tone in national life. This is despite the fact, according to Osama Siddique, “that only five to seven percent of the aggregate vote was ever won by religion.”
A series of cataclysmic events following the creation of Pakistan, many of the military’s own making, allowed it to maintain its self-appointed role as “Defender of the Faith,” and have been used to justify its preeminent role. The independence and partition of British India that followed the granting of Jinnah’s demands for a Muslim state was accompanied by massacres that killed a million people, mass exoduses of refugees between the two new countries, and severe economic dislocation. At the same time, a dispute arose over whether the Muslim majority province of Kashmir should be included within India or Pakistan, a conflict which has led to three direct wars between the countries—in 1947, 1965, and 1999—and decades of Pakistani-sponsored Islamic militancy in the territory controlled by India. Jinnah’s insistence that all Muslim majority areas be included in Pakistan initially led to half of Bengal state in eastern India being included as a noncontiguous province a thousand miles apart from the rest of the country. When in 1971 the more-liberal Bengalis proved restive under Islamic nationalist rule and managed to elect a secular social democrat from their province, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as prime minister of Pakistan, the army responded by unleashing a genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of people. This ended when India intervened to stop the killing, forced the surrender of the 92,000 Pakistani soldiers, and created the independent country of Bangladesh.
Islamic nationalists continually flag these past traumas as proof of the accuracy of their ideological narrative.
Pakistan’s comparatively undeveloped economy has never been sufficient to sustain its 500,000-man military armed with modern weaponry, and in order to pursue policies justified under this “Pakistan ideology,” Rawalpindi has traditionally turned to America. Unable to enlist neutral India into the Cold War and confronted by an Asia loomed over by communist Russia and China, Washington solicited conservative Islamic Pakistan as an anticommunist ally. Since then, it has periodically provided Pakistan with massive infusions of military aid, most notably during the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when Pakistan was the staging ground of the Afghan mujahideen.
THE 9/11 CONNECTION
This policy appeared to end in triumphant justification when the American-Pakistani-Mujahideen alliance forced the Soviets to withdraw in 1989, but the hard-line jihadi cast that Rawalpindi gave to that conflict had severe repercussions. Focused on driving India out of Kashmir, the Pakistani military adopted a “gaining strategic depth” doctrine: dominate Afghanistan by means of a friendly government. Since secular Afghan governments had long made territorial claims to the North-West Frontier Province due to its being inhabited by the same Pashtun who are the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan, support was given—similarly in Pakistan and Kashmir—to political groups whose focus was religion, not ethnicity. In the early 1990’s, Pakistan’s top national security agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), backed the Islamist Pashtun warlord Gulbaddin Hekmatyar’s drive to capture Kabul. When he failed, ISI switched its support to the Taliban, whose harboring of Osama bin Laden eventually helped to foster the events 9/11. It was then Washington gave its ultimatum to Musharraf, and his acceptance opened the way to another era of heavy United States backing of the Pakistani military.
Given Rawalpindi’s record and its set of core beliefs, the question of whether this is an alliance of conviction or convenience has been raised. “The Bush administration’s failures in understanding both Musharraf and Pakistan are plentiful,” said Stephen Philip Cohen, the author of The Idea of Pakistan and the leading American authority on the country. “They really have no Pakistan expertise, and went with Musharraf the same way Bush went with Putin.”
Nowhere are these failings and lack of expertise more evident than in the administration’s silence over the tacit alliance between Musharraf and the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), a six-member coalition of the country’s main religious parties. The MMA has strong links to the Taliban, is violently anti-Western, and is sarcastically referred to as the “Mullah Military Alliance.” Its cooperation with Musharraf is in line with a longstanding strategy of the upholders of the “Pakistan ideology”: supporting extremist Islamic groups in order to advance the strategic goals of the military. Yet the implications of such alliances and sympathies on the part of a “key ally” in the “War on Terror” seem to be overlooked in Washington.
“These parties are not the ‘moderates’ that the US would like Musharraf to support, because they formed a substantial part of the government for the first time in Pakistan’s history after 9/11, riding on the wave of anti-US sentiment in Pakistan,” said Bilal Tanweer, a former Pakistani journalist and teacher. “Interestingly, this party has been one of Musharraf’s unwavering supporters and they have ratified every unconstitutional measure taken by the government. At no point, they have stood for anything substantively anti-Musharraf, except in rhetoric. Why does this unholy alliance survive? Reciprocity. The army and the intelligence agencies assist them to come into power, get them the ministries, and they reciprocate by helping to stabilize Musharraf and his regime. Contrast this with the ‘moderate’ sections of society, who are behind bars for terrorism charges.”
BIPOLAR WORLD BROADENED
Although the current crisis began with the innovation of the judicial/civil society forces taking the role of protagonists, its center of gravity soon shifted as veteran political actors moved in to take advantage of Musharraf’s difficulties. As the lawyers protested, the rival prime ministers of the civilian governments of the 1990’s, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, started maneuvering to end their years-long exiles and return to the political fray.
Focus centered on Bhutto first, owing to the intervention of the United States. Disappointed with Musharraf’s desultory campaigns against Islamic militants and concerned about his seemingly weak position amidst the unrest, America sought to broker a political compromise between the general and Ms. Bhutto that would bolster his position, give his regime a democratic veneer, and add a strongly secular force into Pakistan’s politics to aid in the fight against terrorism. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) was founded by her father in 1967 and has long been the leading left-of-center political force, despite her own social background as a feudal landowner in her home province of Sindh. Pakistani-American financier and media commentator on terrorism, Ijaz Mansoor, wrote in a November 30 Los Angeles Times op-ed, “During two terms in office, Bhutto, the Harvard-educated progressive, looted the treasury, sparked conflict with India in Kashmir to cover her financial misdeeds and ignored the fundamental needs—jobs, education, basic healthcare—of her people.”
Since midsummer, a series of long negotiations occurred between Musharraf and Bhutto. They including a face-to-face session in Dubai aimed at her recognizing his legitimacy in return for being allowed to return to Pakistan and contest the promised parliamentary elections, as well as having old legal charges of corruption against her thrown out. America’s hope was that with Musharraf as president and Bhutto as prime minister, a moderate coalition against extremism could be formed. This initiative culminated with Bhutto’s dramatic return to Pakistan on October 18, when a welcoming procession in Karachi was attacked by suicide bombers, killing140. Although the mutual recriminations that followed between the government and the PPP seem to have poisoned the atmosphere conducive to the US-brokered deal, there are those who say it never had a chance in the first place, precisely because America was ignoring Pakistan’s underlying dynamics.
“The military never wanted a Musharraf-Bhutto deal, but just played the Americans along to please them,” says Ahmed Rashid. “They had no intentions to work with her and still don’t.” Besides the longstanding bad blood between the military and the PPP—which has as much to do with the secular character of the party as it does the traumatic memory of the overthrow and execution of its founder, her father—there were personal and political reasons that made any deal impossible.
“It was naïve to imagine that these two strong personalities could ever have worked together,” said the noted British journalist and Bhutto biographer Christina Lamb. “There are many doubts that Musharraf was ever serious about it. His political allies clearly saw the deal as a way to divide the opposition and discredit her, in one fell swoop.”
To a great extent, they were successful. The public saw the traditionally anti-military PPP as tainted by the negotiations, and Sharif, who fell in Musharraf’s first coup, moved to take advantage of the disillusionment with Bhutto. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League is a deeply conservative organization known for its championing of business interests and strong connections with Pakistan’s Islamist movement, which have their own ties to the military. Mansoor was no less kind to Pakistan’s Islamists, writing, “They believe in a in a ‘one man [no women need apply], one vote, one time’ concept of democracy—in which there’s an election but the winner becomes ruler for life.” As Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mansoor continued, Sharif proclaimed Sharia as the law of the land, reportedly met with Osama Bin Laden, took control of much of the country’s resources and industry, placed friends in places of power, and rewarded cronies to the detriment of Pakistan’s economy.
In late September, Sharif attempted to return to Pakistan, was arrested at Islamabad airport, and deported within 24 hours. However, the incident boosted his credentials as an opponent of the military and strengthened his hand when he finally was allowed to return a few weeks after the state of emergency was declared.
What makes the present situation different from Pakistani crises of the past is the addition of the civil-society movement as a third element in the equation, broadening the traditional military versus political parties tug-of-war. Yet for all the history of coups and military interference in civilian governments, this bipolar world has not been a totally hostile one. For all the military’s desire to retain essential power, there is room for cooperation if both the military and the political old timers feel that their interests are threatened by the intrusion of this newcomer, the civil-society movement.
“The sad thing about the current situation is none of the old players are talking about policies or how they will deal with the problems of Pakistan,” says Christina Lamb. “It’s all about power.” Junaid Ahmad, the president of the US-based National Muslim Law Students Association, says that desire can lead to flexibility. “We must remember that the relationship between the party politicians and the military is not always an antagonistic one, and can be a friendly, cooperative one, as the situation requires.”
Yet for all the dynamism shown by the civil-society movement, critics say it will likely be a long time before it can have a real impact on Pakistani society, given the overlapping, if unequal, monopolies on power enjoyed by the military and the established political parties.
“People are generally jaded with the major political parties, which many see as corrupt cults of personality,” said Amber Vora. “But given their stranglehold on the current political process, its difficult to envision how viable alternatives will evolve in the near future. However, some do have hope that those politicized during the last month will work in the years to come to effect change both within and outside the system.” Osama Siddique is one of the hopeful. “There is a lot of debate—as never seen before—about the role of the Pakistan military. People are craving leadership and there is room for new politics.”
The question is, however: Is there enough momentum to make true change?
A FAIR ELECTION?
In early December, Musharraf, under heavy American pressure, finally made good on his pledge to leave the military to rule as a civilian president. General Ashfaq Kayani, a former ISI chief, assumed the post of army chief of staff. As president, Musharraf lifted the state of emergency on December 15 and pledged to hold elections by January 8. But with the judiciary devastated by dismissals and arrests, the short campaign season, and the fact that polling officials would be Musharraf loyalists, large questions remained about the fairness of a vote held under such conditions. “And as long as the army remains as powerful as it [is], there will be no meaningful democracy,” said Junaid Ahmad.
Speaking before a US Congressional hearing on December 13, prominent Pakistani attorney and UN special envoy for human rights defenders, Hina Jilani reportedly said, “There is no point in monitoring the elections or watching the poll—the rigging has already happened.” According to Jilani, Musharraf had already destroyed institutions such as the press and judiciary, which oversees the elections. “Under these conditions, the election that is going to take place on January 8 has very little credibility.”
Given the political triumvirate of Musharraf, Bhutto, and Sharif, and the legacy of mistrust they have propagated from nefarious actions, present and past, it can be said that none of these leaders can truly satisfy the public’s demand and desire for democracy. “The truth is,” wrote Mansoor, “all three of these ‘leaders’ have had their chances to rule and spent them destroying the very fabric of what could provide Pakistan with a chance at greatness: a functioning civil society built on the vitality and industriousness of its people.”
The Bush administration, in its support of Musharraf and Bhutto, has been virtually ignoring the grassroots pro-democracy movement whose members see this as an incomprehensible betrayal. “We wonder how Americans can be on the side of democracy and not be on the side of a free judiciary,” lawyer Jamila Aslan reportedly told the Los Angeles Times in November. Critics claim this is also a reckless act vis-à-vis the US war on terror. As stated in the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States, “If democratic reform efforts in Muslim minority nations progress over the next five years, political participation would probably drive a wedge between intransient extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives. Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.”
It can be safely assumed that January’s elections, on the surface, will do little to improve the structure of civil society. However, if the growing pro-democracy lawyer’s movement can continue to gain momentum and gain the support of the US—two very large and questionable factors—it can be said that there is certainly room and an opening for a new third tier “middle class” politics to emerge, as well as some very interesting leaders from among the people participating in Pakistan’s pro democracy movement. As Hussein Haqqani wrote in his seminal book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, “Pakistan was created in a hurry and without giving detailed thought to various aspects of nation and state building. Perhaps it is time to rectify that mistake and take the long-term view. Both Pakistan’s elite and their US benefactors would have to participate in transforming Pakistan into a functional, rather than ideological, state.”
This article appears in January 2008.
