WHEN he meets President Bush today (Friday) in Washington, President Musharraf is not likely to spend much time seeking more of US President’s moral, material and political support for his regime. He has had aplenty of it and more is expected to come. Nor is he likely to waste much of his breath on the done deal of F-16s or the non-doable nuclear power deal. What, however, he is likely to focus most on is getting the US president to accept his hybrid system of government based on Military-MMA partnership as a legitimate democratic dispensation. This US presidential endorsement is crucial for Musharraf to get through the 2007 elections with both his system and his uniform remaining intact.
Despite all kinds of generous support extended to the Musharraf regime since 9/11, Washington has persistently declined to accept his system of governance as democratic or his person as anything other than a military ruler. The influential section of US media, which plays a significant role in shaping America’s foreign policy and articulates from time to time for desired results the diplomatically unpalatable sides of this policy for the benefit of countries on the receiving end, has regularly criticized Islamabad’s dictatorial dispensation to throw into bold relief this Islamabad specific two-track policy of Washington.
During the US president’s visit to Pakistan earlier this year, this duality in US policy towards Pakistan was brought to the fore more forcefully by the way President Bush programmed his overnight stay here and the remarks that he made about the 2007 elections. To make this policy even plainer to Musharraf, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Richard Boucher who followed his President in April, told a press conference in Islamabad that the US strongly favoured a civilian rule and a civilian control of military in Pakistan. He acknowledged that Gen Musharraf’s holding of dual offices of president and army chief negated the spirit of democracy.
However, before the month was out, President Musharraf was hitting back rather indirectly at both the US President and his Assistant Secretary of State. He told the British Newspaper The Guardian that he was “not a poodle” of George Bush and rejected accusations he was running a military dictatorship.
He insisted that his mission was to democratize Pakistan. “My popularity has gone down…but at this moment my country needs me. I’ve put a strong constitutional democratic system in place. That will throw up a successor. I am a strong believer in democracy.”
On the face of it, neither does his system exude any lasting political strength, nor does it seem capable of throwing up his successor automatically if he calls it a day on his own or if nature intervenes. In either case the man to succeed him under the constitution is the Senate Chairman, Mohammad Mian Soomro, a gentleman, but without a political constituency of any significance. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz falls in the same category. And Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the President of the ruling Muslim League, can at best command only a small part of the Punjab province. In any case all the three, including most of the ruling PML members, would simply disappear once Musharraf fades from the scene. The system would also go the same way without even waiting to see the fate of these individuals.
Then why is this over-confidence in the system as well as in its ability to throw up his successor without any problems? Could it be that Gen Musharraf, planning to lend permanency to a system that allows successive army chiefs of staff to get automatically endorsed by parliament as the presidents, is trying to get the leader of the US to certify it as a ‘genuine’ democratic arrangement suited to the genius of Pakistani people and the country’s circumstances?
One recalls that during his last visit to the US, he told a newspaper panel interview that when President Bush was not worried about his uniform why should it bother others (or words to that effect). One also recalls with even more trepidation his disingenuous formulation of “I want to bring the army in to keep it out”. To make the argument sound even more conclusive he had once used the earthquake disaster to point out that had he not been in the uniform, the Chief of the Army Staff would have taken his own sweet time to respond to the call for assistance from a civilian prime minister. And only on Wednesday he said he could not have dared bring in the Women’s Protection Bill (WPB), had he not been in uniform.
To impress upon his hosts that his system is working successfully, that it is viable and that it has the capability of coping with any situation even in his long-drawn absence from the country, Musharraf told reporters on arrival in New York on Monday that the fact that he was roaming around showed how confident and relaxed he was. “There is no problem in Pakistan. This is my longest trip and it shows my confidence.”
Indeed, if one went by the façade of his system, there is hardly any imminent threat to his rule. In the Military-MMA partnership, while the military and its intelligence services provide the iron-clad settings for his rule, the MMA enjoys the role of the Royal opposition at the centre and that of coalition partner in the rebellious province of Balochistan and exclusively holds the political and administrative reins of the NWFP province which borders both the terror-troubled tribal areas and Taliban-troubled Afghanistan.
The MMA went into partnership with Musharraf following the 2002 elections by voting for the 17th constitutional amendment which transferred most of the powers of the prime minister to the president and also legitimized his presidency in uniform.
The system has seemingly successfully marginalised the mainstream political opposition. And the two, the Military and the MMA, have thrived in the expanded political space and have operated in a symbiotic manner. By not going along with the mainstream opposition on the issue of the killing of Sardar Akbar Khan Bugti’s murder, the MMA has indirectly endorsed the army action in Balochistan. The government on its part by not using its numerical superiority to get the Women’s Rights Bill (drafted by the Islamic Ideology Council and vetted by the select committee of the National Assembly) passed by parliament has ceded to the MMA, in an ad hoc but dangerously crude style, a supra parliamentary place on issues religious. And it was the MMA which bailed Musharraf out in Waziristan where his troops had reached a stalemate. Musharraf also perhaps believes that the Bomb would be safer with Military and MMA ruling in partnership than in a dispensation defined as ‘democratic’ by the Western world.
So, Musharraf seemingly has a case. And he perhaps thinks that this case of his would get a favourable hearing from a domestically beleaguered US president smarting under battle ground reverses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon (through Israel proxy) and political defeats at the hands of Iran which is making faces at him and getting away with it. Musharraf perhaps believes that there is a mutually beneficial trade-off here for him and Mr Bush who is in desperate need for all the support he can get from anywhere.
But then what if he is totally wrong in his assessment of the situation and fails to win the endorsement of Mr Bush for his uniform and his system? Will he then show his ‘teeth’ that he said he has in his interview with The Guardian? Perhaps. Perhaps not. According to him, “Sometimes the teeth do not have to be shown. Pragmatism is required in international relations.” In any case if what one hears over the grapevine in Islamabad is even fractionally true then perhaps compelled by the massive and growing anti-American sentiments in the country and its expected impact on the result of 2007 election he seems to have decided to give up his pragmatism and bare his ‘teeth’ to the fullest in his book ‘In the Line of Fire’ which is scheduled to be launched on September 25.
