Pakistan at Knife's Edge

Preface

This is not a treatise or a work of research; it is just a glance at troubled Pakistan as it is today and how it is likely to develop, identifying the forces at work in transforming it.

An effort, however, has been made to look at the issues in perspective. I, as a writer, do not live in an ivory tower; I am a human rights activist and a fervent supporter of the liberal democratic dispensation. Therefore, my prejudices and prepossessions can easily be noted by readers.

I do hope that my readers will take meaningful interest in problems that the people of Pakistan face. Our democratic struggle will be reinforced by their support.

One-Man Rule: Compulsions

Although one or even a few individuals cannot radically change the fortunes of a whole people, in Pakistan’s case, one is forced to be individual-centric in describing history or writing scenarios for its near future. The question here is: what is to be expected in Pakistan? After a brief historical outline has been sketched out, the reality is that, in the place of a political class and organized governance, what Pakistan now has is one-man rule despite the resignation of General Pervez Musharraf. In all essentials, only General Musharraf, the chief of army staff, who also wore the additional hat of the president of the Islamic Republic, mattered until August 2008; and now, the new president, Asif Ali Zardari, also co-chairman of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), is who counts. Everyone, from the prime minister down to the bureaucracy as well as intelligence services and subordinate departments, take their cue from the policy decisions the president takes. Nobody else matters. There is supposed to be a Parliament with all the usual appurtenances, but what counts is the will of this man at the top.

True, the president has advisers. But who are they? Apart from the advice of international financial institutions – WTO, World Bank, IMF, Paris Club, Asian Development Bank, American Treasury et al – on economic matters, the prime minister and coterie of advisers seem to take decisions more or less autonomously. Even here broad outlines of business as usual goes on. What the boss desires is the ideal. It is really a coterie of a few ministers and officials who manage both finance and development. This coterie runs the economy, insofar as it is possible, in accordance with the economic paradigm of globalization. Pakistan started acting on the IMF’s Structural Adjustments Programme way back in the 1970s and 1980s; globalization being an amplification of those adjustments. As for politics, Musharraf’s real advisers constituted a sort of Parliament of top generals who assembled every month to review the political and security situation. They took the policy decisions; although the generals gave their input, Musharraf was a primus inter pares. Execution was the business of the civil bureaucracy and even the government as such was an obedient tool; true, a few bureaucrats did become second-rank advisers. For dealing with the Parliament and other parties, President Musharraf consulted primarily two individuals: Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the president of the governing Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam) [PML (Q)] and his cousin, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, the chief minister of Punjab, the key province of Pakistan. The president had identified himself with the Q League and was already in election mode, campaigning primarily for the party in preparation for the elections that were due late in 2007. Other allied parties continued to support him in the hope of sharing office, even if power eluded them – largely because they had no alternative course – while the Opposition claimed that Parliament is nothing more than a rubber stamp since no major decision was taken in it and no substantive legislation was passed by its members. The will of one man prevailed and that was the supreme law, in practice.

After the resignation of General Musharraf on 18 August 2008, Asif Ali Zardari was elected virtually unanimously. He, at first, appeared to have considerable moral authority due to an unusual amount of support from Parliament. But it soon became evident that Zardari’s priority was to consolidate his own power rather than implementing the programme of basic legislation of amending from the Constitution all the obnoxious changes that various dictators had forced different Parliaments to put in. Zardari chose to lose the support of the second largest party in the new Parliament, Pakistan Muslim Leaque (Nawaz) [PML (N)], that was elected on 18 February 2008, and which supports all the reform measures to make Pakistan a normal democracy of the parliamentary type and with which PPP’s original leader, charismatic Benazir Bhutto and Zardari himself were signatories to various documents: Charter of Democracy, Bhurban Declaration and a later two written agreements between the PPP and PML (N). Zardari has remained adamant not to implement those agreements and other urgent demands of opposition parties through dilatory tactics and, indeed, chicanery. Specifically about the matter regarding undoing of the mischief Musharraf made on 3 November 2007, where he virtually sacked all the High and Supreme courts judges who refused to take a fresh oath on the Musharraf-amended Constitution in pursuit of his struggle and held the stand taken by the chief justice of Pakistan, Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry throughout. The long and epic struggle the latter waged against the former began on 9 March and ended in sixty-two superior court judges being sent home as a result of Musharraf’s infamous Emergency of 3 November 2007. It is still a cause celebre in which all democrats want a clear and quick reversal of that declaration which was quickly adjudicated as invalid in law by the old Supreme Courts before most of its members were locked up in their homes.

When an individual reigns, such as in the absolutist monarchy of King Gyanendra of Nepal, sovereignty and the source of all legislation is the will of that person. An individual, however, is always vulnerable to political pressures, as evidenced by the uncertain fate of King Gyanendra, showing that one-man rule is much more vulnerable and weaker than a democratic government. This also applies to Pakistan. Examples are galore: the way Musharraf took an about turn on his Afghanistan policy in 2001: a mere phone call from an American general was all it took for him to reverse Pakistan’s fifty-year-old policy on Afghanistan of acquiring suzerainty-like influence over it, when he rounded on Pakistan’s erstwhile protégés, the Taliban, who were ruling Kabul at the time. Such a sudden change is only possible when one man alone wields power – who is not backed by his nation. The political troubles of recent years seem worsened for the same reason. They are largely the result of one-man rule.

At a Knife’s Edge

Pakistan still presents a picture of strange lack of harmony between the government and its people despite an elected Parliament, governments and also an elected president. The polity’s basic problems are discussed later in this book, but here, a few symptoms that are still apparent to most Pakistanis, are being identified. Much of it was written before Pervez Musharraf was forced to resign on 8 August 2008. Since no material changes have taken place; one leaves it untouched.

CIVIL SOCIETY VERSUS MILITARY GOVERNMENT

A dictatorship is still in full control in Pakistan and the people are disgruntled; feeling amongst a growing number of people is that they are at war with the non-democratic regime; it has been growing. Since General Pervez Musharraf made his putsch in 1999 and he had resigned in 2008; but that feeling has not gone away even when a PPP-led elected government is being run by President Asif Ali Zardari. Lawyers throughout the country had agitated against Musharraf’s and Zardari’s governments over the sacking of Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, sitting chief justice of the Supreme Court, by General Pervez Musharraf. The general was the chief of the army staff, but had also proclaimed himself president ten years ago, without the qualification of being elected under the Constitution. What he could have done as president in this case was to send a reference to the Supreme Judicial Council against the chief justice, which he did, although he lacked the legitimacy of a properly-elected president. But he also went on to do something else: he had him arrested on 9 March 2007 after Justice Chaudhry refused to resign as demanded by the general-president, and kept him confined in the Army House for six hours. Musharraf had summoned the chief justice to confront him with a charge sheet alleging ‘misuse of office’. The chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, refused to resign, saying that he would fight the Reference in open hearings. He was prevented from returning to his chambers by men in police uniform, whom the public mistook to be law-enforcing personnel, and was manhandled and ‘escorted’ to his house, which was quickly surrounded and barricaded. The chief justice was not only detained and kept incommunicado between 9 and 13 March; he was prevented from reading newspapers and using the telephone and television, supposedly by law-enforcing agents. Even his children were not allowed to go to school or meet friends in the house. The panel of lawyers defending him could not meet him until the first hearing by the Supreme Judicial Council (which hears complaints against senior judiciary on References by the president, upon the recommendation of the chief justice concerned) on 13 March. The legal fraternity soon began demanding the withdrawal of the Reference, that the proceedings be openly held – not in camera as the government wanted – while the case goes on. All the political parties in the Opposition, human rights organizations and journalists demanded that the chief justice be reinstated and given maximum facilities to defend himself.

The lawyers’ agitation that began in March 2007 and continued till 16 March 2009 has changed Pakistan’s politics in great many ways. The support for the lawyers comes from the middle class across parties. In fact, there was an upsurge of popular support for the lawyers that forced many parties – PPP, PML (N), MMA, particularly Jamaat-e-Islami, and of course, various small parties of the country – to join the lawyers’ movement in varying degrees. One of the tactics adopted by the lawyers’ leaders – Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan, Munir A. Malik, Hamid Khan and Ali Ahmed Kurd – was to make the suspended chief justice of Pakistan address various bar associations, particularly in Hyderabad, Peshawar, Lahore and many smaller places. While the general-president had begun by confining the CJP to his house and keeping him incommunicado, he had to allow him to go to the Supreme Court for the hearing of the Reference he had filed. The kind of uproar that took place in the country over this case was of a kind that he was forced to relax the confinement of the CJP to some extent. It was quickly announced that he was not under arrest, though the CJP was first called ‘non-functional’, then ‘suspended’ and finally ‘on forced leave’ – all odd and illegal in the case of the chief justice of Pakistan. The journey that he undertook from Islamabad to Lahore by road in May 2007 lasted, instead of the usual 3-4 hours, 27 long hours and the entire route was dotted by clusters of thousands of Pakistani villagers who just wanted to see their chief justice, touch his car or him – a brave man who could defy the all powerful dictator and say ‘no’ to his suggestion. The chief justice made no political speeches whatsoever after his order. The CJP has been talking, of course, of rule of law, what the Constitution says, or the importance of Constitution, independence of judiciary and separation of powers. Only these and no politics was included in his speeches-cum-lectures.

It is true most political parties have skeletons in their cupboards on the issue of the judiciary’s independence. PPP, when last in office, had had legal fracas, though much less severe, with chief justice of its days. The PML (N) had a similar spat with the same chief justice, and indeed had organized a physical attack by goons on the Supreme Court, which the ministers led. Among the ministers, Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who later became the eminent rouges of Musharraf’s government and is now secretary general of the PML (Q), is known to have been the leader. Their Lordships had to save themselves by leaving their courts and hiding in their chambers. No leadership of any party, it appears, was wholeheartedly supporting the cause of the lawyers, perhaps, none of them really wanted a truly independent judiciary. While in power each party tends to want to do things that it does not like the Supreme Court to look too closely into. This is an unfortunate situation that characterizes most political parties of the country, except the smaller nationalist parties, none of which ever came to power or was tested in office.

And yet, every section of the civil society came out in support of the lawyers. While the masses were not being mobilized simply because after the 3 November counter attack by the Musharraf regime, the country was virtually under martial law – in the name of Emergency. Dissent and agitation of all kinds were being suppressed brutally. But events were moving fast because a US-brokered secret deal between President Musharraf and PPP’s Life-Chairperson Benazir Bhutto was announced. The PPP was won over to support. Musharraf’s design for staying on as president for another five-year-term, in lieu of taking off general’s uniform, holding a free election and most importantly dropping various corruption cases against Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, otherwise known as Mr Ten Per Cent. Both sides delivered on their promises. The atmosphere changed rapidly after Benazir returned on 18 October 2007 to campaign for the coming election, and the momentum of freer political activity could not be dampened even by the tragic murder of Benazir in December 2007. That remains a mystery. PPP tried to cash in on it electorally and emerged the largest party in the National Assembly and went on to form a coalition government in March with Mian Nawaz Sharif’s PML (N) that broke down two months later in May 2008 though a mostly verbal coalition survives because of two factors: First, PML (N) seems to be under some unacknowledged pressure or a secret deal through the Saudi royal family and the US diplomacy. The other, and more prosaic, factor may be that although PML (N) withdrew from the federal government, it wanted to retain this coalition in the Punjab Assembly. Interestingly, PML (N) could manage a comfortable simple majority and felt no need for allies to keep the government intact. This suggests a mastermind that wants the larger parties to remain in a multicoloured coalition. People have instinctively seen it as a US design: let Musharraf remain president and lead a rainbow coalition government in the War on (Islamic) Terror.

The civil society nevertheless was evolving new tactics during the lawyers’ movement. NGOs, professional groups and many others started assembling at unannounced places, demonstrate briefly and disperse before the police could muster themselves to break the crowd or make arrests. Journalists joined the fray and they have been protesting against the counter measures of 3 November 2007 by General Musharraf, in which electronic media and press were also put under new restrictions. The journalists’ agitation continued in tandem with lawyers’. However, the fact must be noted that the main political parties mostly paid lip service to these two agitations, without getting themselves involved too deeply or too actively. Moreover, as said before, most party leaderships are as wary of journalists, as of the lawyers or superior judiciary, that is truly independent. Independent professionals cannot be influenced easily. Both agitations are continuing after a fashion and the parties dutifully support both campaigns without much conviction. And yet, they dare not say anything specific against these movements, except perhaps PML (N) that has opted to support the lawyers’ and judges’ causes for strategic purposes of its own – and has even achieved it cheaply. That unfortunate circumstance is also a fact of life.

A certain pattern has emerged: people’s response, particularly in Punjab, for both agitations is far more strident and clear-cut than in the other provinces, including Sindh, otherwise a hotbed of dissent and restiveness. This is due to a profound change in Punjab. Time was when Punjab was always with the Pakistan Army and the explanation was simple: 65 per cent or more of the army always comprised Punjabis. Whenever the military took over, Punjabis had the least trouble in finding a way of approaching a soldier, NCO or officer to redress some of their grievances. That was not true of other provinces, namely, Sindh and Balochistan; although the Pushtoons and other NWFP residents had the same opportunity as Punjabis, to a lesser extent however, because they also had a notable representation in the army. But the general climate of opinion in NWFP was never pro-Army.

However, Punjab was different; it identified with the army – which could take Punjab’s support for granted. Punjab now seems to have changed greatly. Partly, there is the growth of civil society organizations and people are now becoming conscious of the taunts they used to hear – that Punjabis are not wholehearted in their opposition to military dictatorship. Some even claim that military today is being far more stridently opposed in Punjab than elsewhere. All this is not without an element of truth. One explanation for this is the relatively greater spread of education in Punjab than elsewhere. Punjab has done much better economically as compared to other provinces. A Marxist thinker, Abdul Khaliq Junejo, wrote in the daily newspaper Dawn that the explanation lies in the fact that Punjab is now more industrialized than any other province of Pakistan, and it has thrown up a middle class comprising commercial, technological, professional and business people who are economically better off. Like all true middle classes it also needs freer conditions, more opportunities for self-expression and needs the removal of the dead weight of an unthinking feudal-minded, inefficient, military or military-favoured regime. Whatever the explanation, Punjab was in the forefront of opposition to Musharraf and hopefully will remain so against future dictators as well, if any.

MUSHARRAF’S LEGITIMACY

This is but one aspect of the many-sided struggles that are going on. The real demand of the lawyers, opposition parties and the rest of the civil society was that, the then forthcoming election in the autumn of 2007 (that had to be postponed to February 2008) be transparent, free and fair, and meddling by the intelligence agencies, both civil and military, be prevented. There should, in fact, be a truly neutral caretaker government under whose auspices the election should be held, as indeed a practice has grown since 1988. But appointing neutral caretakers was unlikely. Who will appoint the caretakers? The same president who is calling the shots and formulating all the policies. In the end, it was General Musharraf who appointed caretaker governments both at the Centre and in the provinces in November 2007. One look at those caretakers and the country found them to be Musharraf’s friends and not at all neutral – as required to carry conviction that they would hold fair elections. The government apparatus, especially the intelligence agencies, was still taking orders not so much from the Government of Pakistan as from General Musharraf, the army chief, who was also occupying the office of the president. He formally did retire from the army, but only in November 2007, handing over the reign of the army to a long-time friend and confidante who was running the dreaded outfit, ISI. People think that whatever happens in Pakistan does so because the army chief wills it. Since Musharraf had the backing of the army he could declare himself the president without having been elected in proper constitutional way.

Most people found his description of being an elected president until October 2007 convoluted. He was only the serving army chief and remained so until nearly the end of 2007. He had not stood in any presidential election, but had simply sent a constitutionally-elected president home, and occupied the President House himself. Subsequently, he held a laughable Referendum in April 2002 that ‘elected’ him the president. Later in 2002, general elections were held under his auspices after he had promulgated a Provisional Constitution Order (PCO), now supposedly a part of the Constitution, without possessing any constitutional power to do so and the elections were held under his thumb. Earlier, soon after the October 1999 military coup, he formed a government after ‘manufacturing’ a wholly new party called the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam), that comprises almost all turncoats, mainly of the opposition party, PML (N) of Mian Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister, and some from the Pakistan Peoples Party, presided over by Benazir Bhutto, another former prime minister.

The most interesting part is that the third nominal opposition party, an alliance of six religious parties called Muttaheda Majlis Amal (MMA), voted for the PCO to be incorporated into the Constitution. Later, the 2002 National Assembly passed an Act expressing confidence in Musharraf. This is how the president acquired whatever legitimacy he has been claiming from the 2002 assemblies that were held under his supervision – in which, by common consent, the intelligence agencies are believed to have queered the pitch against the larger parties, the PPP and PML (N). The legitimacy of these assemblies has been questioned by almost the entire civil society and the opposition parties. Musharraf’s legitimacy has never been accepted by any major party except his own, the PML (Q). It has not been accepted even after the presidential election held in October 2007.

He did go through all the motions of polling – the Electoral College, for instance – prescribed by the Constitution, but this made no significant addition to his legitimacy. Many reasons are cited. First, the assemblies elected in 2002 themselves lacked legitimacy: they were tainted by the main winning party, the PML (Q) which was formed just a few months before the election by none other than Musharraf and ISI, and which comprised mostly of turncoats and defectors from PML (N) and PPP. Then, he was challenged by a retired Supreme Court judge, Wajeehuddin Ahmad in the apex Court, for being ineligible to run for any elective office because he was a serving government servant drawing a salary. No further argument was necessary: the Constitution barred all government servants from all elective offices, unless they have spent two years after leaving that service. Supreme Court took time to decide but before it could pronounce Musharraf struck his promised ‘last punch’: he imposed an Emergency by virtue of being army chief in November 2007, along with a Provisional Constitution Order under which he sacked over sixty-two judges of the High and Supreme courts, by the simple device of not inviting them to take a fresh oath by the PCO-amended Constitution.

STRUGGLES

The overall picture is one of a splintered polity, marked by several ongoing battles or struggles over various issues. The regime first began fighting ‘foreign’ Islamic militants in Pakistan, as an ally of the US and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ (the countries that supported the US in its 2003 invasion of Iraq mostly) that it had assembled. Those who are described as foreign Islamic militants have been living in Pakistan for over two decades in the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA) of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). They are a leftover of 1980s’ jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan because they simply could not return to their homes for fear of being killed. The ‘militants’ are by no means the only ‘foreigners’; it soon became clear that most of them were local residents in affected areas in FATA. Earlier the war was fitful (that is, until about 2004); whenever criticism of President Musharraf became too strong in the American and Western media, a fight was arranged, usually in FATA, in which many people, including Pakistani soldiers and Islamic militants, usually died. This happened many times.

The Islamic militants are now fighting the Musharraf regime in their own way: after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, they, under ISI tutelage, trained their guns on Indian-controlled Kashmir in order to please the Pakistan Army – so as not to be prevented from stabilizing their local influence in FATA. The militants and the army got what they were after. This was after 1989, when a spontaneous political agitation that had begun in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the movement was originally spontaneous, secular, democratic, and was conducted mainly by the Kashmiris themselves, quite non-violently against the rigging of 1987 elections in Kashmir. Pakistan’s military wanted to convert this protest movement into a jihad against India’s infidel Army and the militants obliged. But first a word about a certain circumstance towards the end of 1980s.

That was the time when Pakistan had sparked a global suspicion of having become a nuclear power. There certainly was overconfidence among the Pakistani generals; their chief, General Mirza Aslam Beg, was under the impression that Pakistan’s defences have already become unassailable by this putative deterrent. The generals in Pakistan arrogantly thought they could now do anything with impunity and decided on a war of a thousand cuts against India, with the help of these militants. These jihadis in their zeal attacked Indian soldiers, and along the way managed to convert the non-violent, secular democratic movement of the Kashmiris into a jihad against infidels, changing the secular characteristics of the indigenous movement. The basic understanding was that the proxy war against India was refutable at the diplomatic level and that, anyway, it was not a proper war under ordinary definition of war. The Indians suffered many casualties; 7,000 or 8,000 soldiers are said to have been killed. But most of the casualties were borne by the Kashmiris who became the main targets of the Indian Army. The Indian Army concedes over 40,000 dead among the Kashmiris, in addition to an unknown number of extra-judicial killings, preceded by the disappearance of suspects. The Kashmiri leadership, represented in All Parties Hurriyat Conference, claims 80,000 or more.

The Indians could have been tempted to go to war against Pakistan, but stayed deterred by the much discussed ‘bomb’ that Pakistan had secretly acquired. The Indian military was again tempted to go to war in 1999 as a result of the Kargil semi-war, and later in 2002, when India threatened a grand ground invasion of Pakistan because it was encouraging terrorist attacks on the Indian mainland as well as Kashmir. At the height of the 2002 crisis, President Musharraf gave certain assurances that Pakistan would not assist the jihadis to fight in Kashmir. Apparently the assurances, as well as the diplomatic action by the go-betweens, mainly the United States, satisfied the Indian government that called off the intended invasion by sending the army back from the ten-month long sojourn on Pakistan’s borders.

Reasons of Indian restraint or what deterred them are not relevant here. The subsequent behaviour of the jihadis, however, is of far more interest. After the Pakistan-inspired Kashmir jihad ended, the Taliban turned their guns on the Musharraf regime after his ‘betrayal’ of the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. The Taliban story actually began in 1994 when the Pakistani military brought its ‘secret’ weapon, the Taliban, into action. This group of young Islamic fundamentalists went on to conquer much of Afghanistan when the country was marked by chaos and civil wars – when the state had disappeared a few brief years after the killing of the last Soviet-backed president of Afghanistan, Dr Mohammad Najibullah, and a brief period of rule by the seven religious parties that had carried on the 1980s jihad against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan.

At most times, Afghanistan used to reap rich harvests of opium and reportedly, during the jihad years of 1980s, the CIA had helped organize a roaring drug trade under American and Pakistani tutelage. This partly financed the jihad and later enriched Taliban and Pakistani generals. Later still, the Taliban regime’s mainstay for resources was cannabis and heroin. Many laboratories had originally been set up to process opium into heroin that was exported through Pakistan. Later, this trade developed further and became far more sophisticated. Much of the opium is now exported either through Central Asia or India, although the Pakistan route is still in occasional use. Pakistan had come to acquire a suzerain-like power vis-à-vis Afghanistan after the induction of post-Najibullah governments. But these very governments had begun resenting Pakistan’s overlordship and had also stumbled into a civil war of all against all, that was their undoing and yielded place to so many warlords. It was at this time that Pakistan introduced its new weapon, the Taliban. They were devout madrassa (religious school) students, mostly Afghan refugees, some of whom were