Mediaeval way to power

TODAY Pakistan is in the grip of a war of succession between the army and the politicians. Why does the country have to pass through turmoil every time the government changes? It is instructive to see how political successions, generally controversial, have been managed in different societies. Historically, such successions often ended in bloodshed and civil wars.

Rivals traditionally invested massive resources to further their own cause and to recruit soldiers to fight wars to help them acquire power and wealth. These conflicts consumed huge resources, and many lives were in fact lost. When the succession issue was resolved one way or the other, it was the victor and his cronies who actually benefited from the conflict and were appointed to important posts and were allocated properties as a reward.

After experiencing internecine wars and bloody conflicts on the issue of political succession, European feudal society evolved a system for a peaceful transfer of power by implementing the law of primogeniture that recognised only the eldest son as the legitimate inheritor of the throne or the property.

The other children normally joined the army or the church in order to acquire status in society. It was their heirs who participated in the wars to conquer overseas colonies for their countries to further their ambitions for fame and glory.

The law internally pre-empted the claims of other sons to the throne or property. But this did not pre-empt other rivals from challenging the authority of the ruling monarch for various reasons.

As a result, the question could never be resolved permanently.

The Ottoman royal dynasty devised a novel method to prevent a civil war. Sultan Muhammad Fatih (1444-1451) introduced a law following which whoever gained power and ascended the throne was required to kill all the other claimants who aspired for kingship.

The practice continued for some time but then it was realised that shedding blood of so many innocent princes was not a good beginning for a new sultan. So, instead of killing them, the new sultan imprisoned all his brothers in palaces which were known as qafas (cages).

They were provided all the facilities but were not allowed to have contact with the outside world. It was life imprisonment for the unfortunate princes.

The practice proved disastrous to the empire because if a reigning sultan died accidentally without naming his heir apparent, a new sultan was released from the qafas and handed over all powers.

As a result, he remained a puppet in the hands of a strengthened bureaucracy. When he became weak and failed to participate actively in decision-making, institutions declined.

That was the beginning of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

In Mughal India, succession became controversial and bloody during the rule of Shah Jehan (1628-1657) who, after acquiring power, ordered all potential claimants to the throne to be murdered. Succession from then on was never peaceful and was inevitably subject to intrigues or civil wars. The vicious circle of civil wars ended when the East India Company seized political power and the Mughal king became its puppet.

At the time of succession, intrigues and conspiracies characterised the power struggle and attempts were made to win over the British resident by bribery to get him to favour one candidate or another. Every successive king was ready to give more concessions to the Company for his survival. Bahadur Shah Zafar’s heir apparent Mirza Fakhru agreed to leave the Red Fort and abandon the title of king if he managed to enlist the Company’s support for his succession.

However, he died before 1857, and the revolt ended the Mughal dynasty, and the rule of the British crown was established.

There is a need to understand the process of political succession in the brief history of Pakistan in this historical perspective. In the early period, when there was no constitution, the question was resolved by intrigues within the ruling class. Ghulam Muhammad and Iskander Mirza assumed political power as a result.

Ayub Khan’s martial law in 1958 brought a new element in the process and the military became a decisive player in the game of selecting the successor.

As democratic institutions were weak and political parties not well-organised, people could not be mobilised against the military which started dominating politics, and Ayub Khan ruled for a full decade.

At the end of this period, the people were fed up of military rule and came out on the streets against Ayub Khan. When he came under pressure, Ayub Khan handed over power to General Yahya Khan instead of transferring it to the speaker of the assembly as provided for in the constitution of 1962. Yahya immediately declared martial law and abrogated the constitution.

After the 1970 elections, the issue of succession was politicised and instead of the leader of the winning party, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, heading the government, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was given preference by the army as the new successor to Yahya Khan.

The process of unconstitutional succession was kept going by Ziaul Haq in 1977 and by Pervez Musharraf in 1999.

Throughout this process, two constitutions were abrogated and the third distorted by a number of amendments which allowed successive dictators to remain in power. The question of political succession was never resolved and the issue continued to be disastrous for the country.

Just estimate the cost of all the agitations and protests that the people undertook against dictatorships and corrupt governments: hundreds died as a result of police or military firings or torture. Damage to public and state property created instability and insecurity subsequently followed by chaos, anarchy and lawlessness.

The most tragic outcome of this struggle for power was the Bangladesh crisis. Not only did Pakistan lose part of its territory, it also had to bear the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Bengalis as a blot on its conscience. This tragedy befell the country because the process of political succession was not resolved legally and constitutionally.

The reasons of the failure of the system are easy to understand. The politicians quite simply treat their political parties as their jagirs and their workers as their tenants. There are no elections within the parties and no process of succession. Parties have become family corporations and nobody but family descendants are allowed to claim their leadership. Political succession is basically a question of wealth and family heritage.

Sadly, in the absence of democratic traditions and institutions, people have no role to play in decision-making. Instead of succession with the approval of the people, the transfer of power is also basically a question of compromise with those who are already in power. When somebody succeeds to power, the question of illegitimacy bothers no one and we accept the theory of al-Mawardi, a thinker of the mediaeval period, who in his book Al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyah advises Muslims to recognise those who usurp power with the help of arms as legitimate rulers. We haven’t moved too far away from this mediaeval thinking, have we?

Going back to the NWFP

THE journey from Lahore to Peshawar in April 2007 was, as ever, replete with childhood memories. As the fields grew greener on approaching Attock, and the Indus and the Kabul rivers met, the heart lifted in anticipation of the inimitable characteristics of the Frontier.

It has retained its natural beauty and its people, the Pashtuns, their unique blend of egalitarianism, pride, generosity, sincerity and warmth coupled with wit and intelligence.

As in other major Pakistani cities, modern cafes and stores have sprouted in Peshawar over the last few years and are frequented by the youth. Roads have been built across the province, there are new schools, public parks and hospitals and environmental projects. Primary and secondary education is free. That’s the good news.

The whole world knows about the bad news.

Zia’s Islamisation drive in the seventies and the negative social fallout of Pakistan’s involvement in the Afghan war against the Soviets introduced radicalisation in a normally easygoing, traditional society. This slide towards obscurantist fanaticism is something Peshawar, and indeed the whole Frontier, has never recovered from. It has, instead, grown stronger in spurts, and was fully unleashed with the ill-conceived American plan to oust the Taliban in 2001 and take control of Afghanistan.

As a result, where one formerly worried about being verbally or otherwise attacked as a female if not covered from head to toe in public, now one risks being blown to bits by a bomb — a quantum leap in the dangers of living in Peshawar, where since last year a number of bombs have exploded, aimed usually at government officials. They kill many others as well. There are security stops all over the city.

These are the conditions in which ordinary people, who don’t want to leave their homeland, have to live in. Here they have to cope with a new madness that tells its victims to kill themselves and as many others as possible because people are rightly against the latest foreign occupation of Afghanistan and the government’s and the coalition forces’ actions in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Another striking phenomenon were the billboards in Peshawar: new, shiny ones featuring young men in reclining positions holding cans of cooking oil. Odd, but very modern, one thought unbelievingly, surmising wildly that women’s emancipation had finally struck Peshawar.

For surely men advertising domestic products was a sign of gender equality. Alas, this thought was nipped in the bud at the sight of older, faded posters showing women whose faces had been either blackened or scratched out.

One learnt that this was the work of vigilante groups with links to the MMA government that also performed the task of forcing women not to vote in local and provincial elections, and stopped them from working in PCOs in Hazara District, known to be generally less conservative.

Coming to power on a wave of anti-US sentiment in 2002 and as a result of flawed elections heavily weighted in its favour, the MMA has been unable to uphold the momentum of its victory in the NWFP, in large part because it is perceived as having given the federal government a free hand in the tribal areas.

The army action in Waziristan, the first of its kind in Pakistan’s history, was extremely ill-advised and has alienated the tribal areas. This has undermined the mediating function of Fazlur Rehman’s JUI, which has brokered the deals between the federal government and the tribals in North Waziristan.

In addition, development has been restricted to some districts only, corruption is rampant and its economic and administrative performance has been poor. The pro-poor agenda on which it came to power has become heavily diluted. All this has led to the MMA adopting a hard-line profile to appeal to the electorate on the basis of its ‘Islamic’ credentials.

Hard on the heels of a federal government crackdown on pro-jihad imams, madressahs and militants followed the Hasba Act of July 2005, aimed at convincing the poor and religious population of the province of the government’s pro-Islam agenda. But had it been implemented it would have shown the MMA as the enemy of Islam. Luckily, it was blocked by the Supreme Court. For even though experts have stated it to have been not much more draconian than some of Nawaz Sharif’s Islamisation measures, the present mood of the province would have ensured its execution in its most extreme form.

The rift between the JI and JUI resulted in a bad performance for the MMA in the 2005 local elections, when the votes for Islamist candidates fell from 46 per cent to 23 per cent.

There continues to be bad news from the NWFP: there are bans on male doctors treating women, forced segregation in government colleges, children being prevented from getting polio vaccination, barbers being forced not to shave beards, music shops being destroyed and, most lately, girls’ schools being bombed and, chillingly, women being beheaded in Bannu.

Idyllic and friendly places like Swat have been transformed into frightening outposts of extremism, forbiddingly populated by aggressive men. Women are hardly to be seen any more. An ancient statue of the Buddha has been bombed in the valley, like those at Bamiyan in Afghanistan in the past.

The creeping spread of violence and extremism that threatens to engulf and paralyse not only the NWFP but the entire nation can only be checked by a) the withdrawal of all foreign forces from neighbouring Afghanistan on the one hand, and b) the replacement by political parties of the defunct and corrupt political agent and malik system in the tribal areas, now effectively under Taliban control.

Allowing both national and local political parties to contest elections in the tribal areas as a counterweight to the Taliban is the only road back to sanity.

The recent surrender of 300 Pakistani soldiers in South Waziristan amply demonstrates the bankruptcy of the current strategy and must be read as a signal for change.

The writer is a Cambridge-educated analyst based in Germany

email: p_v_hassell@t-online.de

Pakistan: America’s choice

AMERICA faces a stark choice in Pakistan this fall: do we support democracy and the rule of law or do we support a failing military dictator? President Bush seems to have made his call and chosen to back the dictator, Pervez Musharraf. This is a mistake that will damage our interests in South Asia and in the Muslim world.

Musharraf took power in a military coup in 1999. When we travelled with President Clinton to South Asia in 2000, we made a four-hour stop in Islamabad where Clinton insisted on speaking to the Pakistani people. He made a strong appeal for a return to democracy, less than half a year after Musharraf had deposed Pakistan’s elected — if not entirely effective — Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Seven years later, the people of Pakistan, which is increasingly on the edge of chaos, deserve no less.

The stakes are critical. Pakistan is the epicentre of the most dangerous corner of the world, where terrorism, nuclear weapons, war, narcotics and dictators come together. We have looked to Musharraf since 9/11 to be the edge of our spear against Al Qaeda, and handsomely rewarded him with over $10bn in aid, but Al Qaeda is stronger than ever.

In the last six months, he has alienated the majority of Pakistanis by trying to pack the Supreme Court and by his temporising in handling the challenge of Islamic extremism in the capital.

Recent polls show his approval rate has dropped precipitously. Now he has refused to let Sharif return to the country despite a Supreme Court ruling that said Nawaz should be allowed home.

The administration has been notably quiet about all this. It has demurred from demanding the rule of law be respected and, instead, put its arm around the dictator.

It has preferred back room deals to free and fair elections, even colluding with the Saudis to again exile Sharif. This despite the fact that Pakistan has become a safe haven for our Taliban enemy in Afghanistan who are killing Nato soldiers every week.

A recent study shows 80 per cent of the suicide bombers who attack Nato come from training camps in Pakistan. Five years ago, there were two suicide attacks in the country, this year there have been over 100, a 70 per cent increase from last year. And in those Taliban camps lurk bin Laden and his gang.

Thanks to ignoring the Afghan war and to the internal crisis in Pakistan, bin Laden’s space to operate in South Asia is growing today, not narrowing. His freedom to operate in the badlands was underscored in his message last month urging a jihad to overthrow Musharraf.

He is not cowering “impotently” in a cave; rather he clearly has access to a sophisticated media apparatus that has tripled its output of messages in the last year, and, we can be sure, to an even more sophisticated operational apparatus.

All too often America has forsaken its long-term interests and, worse, its values in Pakistan and chosen the short-term convenience of backing military dictators. Each time they have failed to develop the country’s freedoms and undermined its democratic institutions. Consequently today only 15 per cent of Pakistanis have a favourable opinion of America and over 70 per cent fear an American military attack.

Some say Musharraf is all that keeps Pakistan from an Islamic takeover. Musharraf used that line with Clinton in 2000 but he didn’t buy it then and we should not buy it now.

Pakistan’s democratic institutions and politicians are far from perfect. Whose are? But they should be given the opportunity to address their country’s problems. Sharif and Benazir Bhutto should be allowed to compete at home, and face trial if accused of crimes, not deported.

Free and fair elections with international monitors will produce a secular government that would have the legitimacy to tackle extremism. Every election in Pakistan’s history shows the Islamists are a small minority and the more secular parties are the majority.

Democracies are always more troublesome partners because they listen to their own people. A secular government in Pakistan will have its own self-interest in fighting extremism and bin Laden but they will do so for their interests, not ours.

It is time for the Pakistani army to go back to its barracks for good and for us to have confidence in the 170 million people of Pakistan.

Sandy Berger was National Security Adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001. Bruce Riedel was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Near East and South Asia Affairs then and is now Senior Fellow at the Saban Centre in the Brookings Institution, Washington DC.