I HAVE been receiving messages that need to be addressed. They come from diverse sources, but they share a common concern with the prospects of democracy in Pakistan. A group within the University of Karachi Alumni Association in the Washington metropolitan area, interested in getting young people to experience the working of democracy and develop leadership skills, is sponsoring an essay contest in Pakistan inviting participants to write on the desirability of restoring student unions on university campuses.

I support their venture. It is my considered view that the universality of politics cannot be avoided, that a politics-free society is an impossibility, and so is a politics-free campus.

University administrators do not have a choice between having and not having student politics on campuses; they have to choose between that which is open and above board for all to see, and possibly to regulate, and that which has been forced to go underground, where it will work covertly, unreceptive to appeals of civility.

An Indian scholar living in Australia, asks me why, unlike the case in his country, the military won’t let democracy strike roots in Pakistan, even though generations of people in both countries, including their founders and leading men, had been exposed to British influence. In responding to him, I had to limit myself to a partial explanation, to wit, that the people in areas composing India had had a much longer encounter with the British — 100 years longer — than those in areas that make Pakistan.

The MPC meeting in London (July 7) vowed to confine the armed forces to the role the Constitution assigns to them. Mr Aziz Narejo’s presidential address at the annual convention of the Sindhi Association of North America (July 1) includes the resolve to “close the door on any future military role in civilian affairs of Pakistan.”

Both the MPC and SANA would also want to disestablish the “empire” the military have built in the country’s apparatus of governance, economy, and other sectors. Even though anxious to find ways of working closely with General Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto and her party are, at the normative and theoretical level, also opposed to military intervention in civilian affairs.

Politicians and organs of civil society have been voicing the same aspiration for decades. But none of them knows how it is to be realised. Mass movements have overthrown unwanted military and civilian regimes, but they have only opened the way for still another military intervention.

They cannot then be taken as the cure for a chronic condition. There are palliatives, possibly even a cure, but to find them we have to look at the circumstances that invite military interventions.

It cannot be said that the military is inherently covetous of ruling authority. That is not the case in many societies where civilian governments are working reasonably well. There are no military regimes as such even in Latin America and the Middle East where they once abounded.

The Turkish military has overthrown civilian governments four times since 1960, but each time it has returned power to politicians after a brief interlude. Pakistan stands apart from most other countries in this respect.

The military in Pakistan has been barging into the presidential mansion on the professed ground that the government it overthrew was incompetent and corrupt, or that it had broken down. This was not a good excuse, considering that its own governance became just as corrupt and incompetent soon enough.

That a government is corrupt and incompetent to some degree has never been a good enough reason for the military to intervene in politics even in Asian democracies such as India, Japan and Malaysia.

I am inclined to think that military interventions in Pakistan take place mainly because civilian governments become internally incoherent. They fall into disarray because the political agencies that bring them into being — political parties and parliament — are themselves in disarray. Their debility creates a vacuum, which other, better organised, forces in society move in to fill. It is an iron law of politics that power abhors a vacuum.

It is amazing how numerous political parties in Pakistan are. Disregarding the ones that stayed back, as many as 37of them reportedly showed up at the MPC meetings in London.

There are parties of which little is known: for instance, Jamiat-i-Ahl-i-Hadith, Green Party, Khaksar Tehrik, Millat Party, Pakistan Progressive Party and Pasban. There are others that may be slightly better known, but they do not win elections and, therefore, do not become newsworthy — such as the Communist Party of Pakistan, Pakistan Mazdoor Kisan Party, Pakistan Democratic Party and Tehrik-i-Istaqlal.

Then there are parties that won no more than one National Assembly seat each in the 2002 election: Balochistan National Party, Jamhoori Watan Party, Pakistan Awami Tehrik, PML (Zia), Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf and Pukhtoon Khwa Milli Awami Party.

Leadership in several of these parties has come to be dynastic, making the party in each case a “one-man show,” without whom the “show” would probably close down. That might well be the case with Pakistan National Party (led by Hasil Bizenjo, son of Ghaus Bakhsh), BNP led by Akhtar Mengal (son of Ataullah), PKMA (led by Mahmood Achakzai, son of Abdul Samad) and Jamiat-Ulema-i-Pakistan (JUP) that was led by Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani and is currently being led by his son.

Jamiat-al-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) was led by Maulana Mufti Mahmood and is now led by his son, Maulana Fazlur Rahman. Awami National Party was led by Abdul Wali Khan, then by his wife, Begum Nasim, until she was eased out by her son, Asfandyar, who now heads it.

Both of these parties have good rapport with segments of the population in the NWFP, and the likelihood is that they will survive the passing away of their current leaders. I doubt that the PPP factions led by Aftab Sherpao and Madam Ghinwa Bhutto can do without them.

But what about the “mainstream” PPP? I have asked several party leaders from time to time what would happen if Benazir Bhutto were to quit politics or if she were to depart for other reasons. They all believe that would be a disaster for the party. This may be an exaggerated expression of their loyalty to her.

There was a time when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was thought to be the heart and soul of the PPP. Yet the party did survive his ouster from power and subsequent execution. It has a fair amount of popular support in parts of the country, a fair number of reasonably competent leaders and committed workers.

There is a good chance that it can keep going even without Ms Bhutto. I can’t say how MQM would fare if Mr Altaf Hussain were to be taken away. There would likely be a destabilising hiatus, but the party might eventually find its feet.

All of this highlights the personalisation of politics in Pakistan, the fact that many of the parties are assemblages of persons who have seen fit to give loyalty to a certain individual without caring to know what his or her principles and policy commitments (if any) might be.

As a result, parties never get the chance to mature as institutions that will outlast this or that individual who happens to be at the helm at a given time.

Some of the above observations do not apply to the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) and the JUI. They are well organised and firmly committed to a goal, which is to Islamise the state and society to the extent possible. They do want power but mainly to be able to implement their design. The nationalist groups in Sindh and Balochistan know what they want now, but I don’t think they know what they will want to do with power if they ever get it.

None of the major parties in the country (PML-Q, PML-N, PPP, MQM) has any ideological commitment to speak of. (That in itself is not necessarily a defect). But more worrisome is the likelihood that none of them even has a set of considered and prioritised responses to the major issues confronting the country: Kashmir dispute and relations with India, participation in the American-sponsored war on terror, extremism and the spread of Talibanisation, ethnic and sectarian violence, ways and means of alleviating poverty and unemployment, levels of military spending, educational planning (emphasis on elementary and secondary versus higher education), expansion of the state’s revenue base, proportion of resources to be allocated to social services, power and water scarcities, provincial autonomy, privatisation, and globalisation, among others.

Ms Benazir Bhutto, Mr Nawaz Sharif and many of the other opposition politicians tell us that they want the restoration of democracy and the 1973 Constitution. But they don’t tell us what they will do with democracy when they have it.

Will they institute it within their own party organisations? Will they stop ruling the country through presidential ordinances and, instead, bring the needed legislation to the National Assembly? Will they be present on the floor every day that the Assembly is in session and participate in its proceedings?

Do they promise not to use public officials to influence the course of elections when they are in power? If they do not intend to practise democracy in particulars such as these, their advocacy is simply deceitful.

If a government is formed by politicians who have to bribe legislators for their support, who want power not to advance the public interest but to secure their own personal gratifications, who don’t even care to know what the ingredients of the public interest are, that government is almost certain to be unstable, internally incoherent, incompetent, and corrupt.

It will create a vacuum of power, a standing invitation to the generals to come in and take over, which they will be happy to do sooner or later.

I am wholly opposed to military rule. But it should be understood that politicians must put their own house in order if the military is to be kept in its barracks. There is no other way. Preaching self-denial to the generals, while forsaking it in one’s own conduct, will accomplish nothing.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US
Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

THE genie of fanaticism, which was reared by the Lal Masjid clerics, among others, with the tacit approval of successive governments, is now out of the bottle and making its deadly presence felt now and again.

The suicide bombings targeting the army, the security personnel and even ordinary people in the aftermath of the Lal Masjid operation in parts of the Frontier, the tribal belt and Balochistan are the obvious manifestations.

Islamabad too got its share of the deadly brew on Friday again when seminary students reoccupied the Lal Masjid after it was opened for prayers. On July 17 also the bombing at the Chief Justice’s rally was ominous.

But even at this critical stage, no condemnation is being voiced of terrorism indulged in by the misguided fanatics, because it is ostensibly based on popular religious sentiments. Nothing can be more suicidal for a society in transition such as ours than its leaders’ failure to distinguish between an act of terrorism and one that furthers the cause of the faith it espouses.

The glorification of Abdul Rashid Ghazi and those young boys and girls he held inside the mosque compound unto death must stop. The Chaudhries of Punjab must also be restrained from announcing large sums of money that will go into looking after the children and the extended family of a cleric who engaged in terrorism against the people in his immediate vicinity and the state at large.

The religious right may be the Chaudhries’ original constituency, given their people-unfriendly politics, but offering the worst rightist elements financial support in an election year and under the circumstances is mind-boggling. Terrorism under whatever pretext must be abhorred, condemned and dismissed as an agent of change.

With the planned ambushes and suicide bombings now being carried out in the northern parts of the country against security personnel and innocent citizens, those in the government must come clean and own up to their failed policy of appeasement of the religious right.

It is time Gen Musharraf realised that many of those awarded ministries and key roles under his tailor-made political dispensation are in effect the religious right’s Trojan horses in his administration. The government should be required to make an about-turn, this time not for furthering the objectives of the US-led global war on terror but to save its own people and the state from falling to medievalism in the garb of religion.

One only need recall the more than wholehearted efforts the clerics of all shades made to get a safe passage for Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his diehard jihadi commandos who took with them many indoctrinated youth to their graves. Safe passage for what? Terrorising law-abiding citizens, gobbling up public land, attacking government offices and buildings and threatening to start a state of their own within the state?

Yet, those who escaped the mosque compound before the crackdown were given gifts, promised stipends and let go by the prime minister; it makes one wonder how many of them will come back to avenge the assault on their madressah.

Friday’s reoccupation by students of Lal Masjid must serve as an eye-opener. Also, as to who might have been the young bomber who blew himself up at a rally in Islamabad on July 17 is anybody’s guess.

It is not only the government but also the army that has the responsibility to clean up its act of setting a jihadi agenda back in Ziaul Haq’s time. Bands of jihadi boys were brainwashed, nurtured and trained at the behest of the Americans, with petro-dollars flowing in from Arabia to carry out lethal missions against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Today they have grown up to be terror machines, churning out young frustrated clones to take on their masters’ mentors.

Who knows how many little bin Ladens and al-Zawahiris they have in their fold, keeping liaisons with the intelligence and security apparatus, even as we speak?

After the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was over, the jihadi boys were put on a mission to secure ‘strategic depth’ for Pakistan in that country, which bore fruit in the form of the Taliban coming to power and holding it for five very long and oppressive years.

The war booty culture of medieval times was reinstated until the Taliban went too far, and they had to be dislodged in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the US. The prodigal sons then returned home to launch sectarian strikes — all in the way of God.

When the government finally refused to put up with that agenda, the jihadi wrath was redirected at Kashmir and India. Then, Islamabad’s decision to put on hold the jihad in Kashmir in the ensuing years left these trained fighters frustrated. Again, there was a need to chart new territories which must be raided; the fight must go on, the war booty collected and distributed among the faithful.

Guided by their spiritual leaders such as the erstwhile Lal Masjid clerics and their close associates, who still walk free, the jihadis have now set their eyes on radicalising society in their home base, with the aim of establishing Taliban-like rule in Pakistan.

The time has come when the armed forces must save this nation from the danger these neo-Taliban pose to it. It is time for the army to ward off the threat to the country’s peace, stability and internal security posed by these misguided jihadis and zealots. The sham democracy Gen Musharraf has put in place has not been able to get the job done; instead, his handpicked ‘democratic’ leaders have exposed themselves as being a part of the problem.

Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, two parties which have a substantial, genuine vote bank in their respective areas of influence and other parties with regional vote banks of their own should not be too eager to rescue Gen Musharraf out of the political predicament of his own creation.

Let the general level the political pitch queered by his predecessors before counting on the people’s real representatives to come and take charge of the situation.

The army should not be offered the ‘strategic retreat’ and allowed to go back to the barracks without first cleaning up the mess it has created. No one wants to see the generals play up the religious right once again from behind the scenes, letting the mullahs loose on an elected government to face the music that the generals themselves have choreographed. Let there be no replay of such a sinister drama all over again.

Democracy has not been able to strike root in the country mainly because of frequent military interventions and also because power-hungry politicians in the past were found only too ready to offer the generals strategic retreats from the political scene every time the latter messed things up.

This time around, let the general stay in his uniform at the helm of affairs and hold fair elections. Let the genuinely elected leaders come to power and put the armed forces to work under the command of their own military chief as president, for the army will not take orders from an elected leader.

The armed forces have their own interest in ridding the country of fanatic religious elements. The military’s non-defence related economic empire cannot flourish under the existing situation created by its own, past and present leadership. If a transition is thus made to democratic rule, with the leaders involved owning up to their mistakes in the past and pledging not to repeat them, there can be hope both for democracy taking root here and the army being sent back to the barracks for good.