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September 29, 2002
Is the solution the problem?
Owen Bennett Jones highlights the paradoxes of military rule in Pakistan
There are some reasons for believing that Musharraf can buck the trend. In the first place, he does at least have an agenda. Throughout the I990s Pakistan was led by politicians who never had a comprehensive reform programme. Neither Nawaz Sharif nor Benazir Bhutto even tried to dismantle Zia’s legacy. Musharraf, by contrast, does have a vision of where Pakistan should be going. He wants a modernist, liberal Pakistan in which there is religious tolerance and respect for the law.
There is another significant difference between Musharraf and his immediate predecessors. Since September 11, Musharraf has had the luxury of considerable international support. The most obvious benefit of his decision to join the US-led coalition against Afghanistan was the flow of funds from the multilateral financial institutions to Pakistan. Partly because of their profligacy, but also because of the economic sanctions imposed on Pakistan as a result of its nuclear programme, the civilian governments of the I990s were distracted by repeated financial crises. In 1998, during Nawaz Sharif’s second administration, the situation had become so acute that Pakistan was on the verge of bankruptcy and almost unable to meet its foreign debt repayments. Shortly after September 11, 2001 Musharraf could boast that he had five billion US dollars in the reserves.
Musharraf has another great advantage that the civilian leaders did not enjoy: he does not have the army breathing down his neck. Civilian governments have failed in Pakistan for a number of reasons. The civilian leaders have been corrupt. The civil service has proved incompetent. But the army’s willingness to intervene in policy decisions and remove elected politicians from power has also been a significant factor. Musharraf does not have to worry about such interference. While the possibility of an internal army putsch can never be ruled out, the history of the Pakistan army suggests that its discipline is strong enough to withstand a challenge from within. Barring assassination, Musharraf will govern Pakistan for as long as he likes.
Furthermore, Musharraf’s military status allows him to do things that no civilian leader would ever risk attempting. Take, for example, his policy towards India. In July 2001 Musharraf went to the Indian city of Agra to meet the Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee. On the first day of his trip, Musharraf visited the Mahatma Gandhi memorial in Delhi. Gandhi has long been reviled in Pakistan as a man who tried to prevent the country’s creation and, before Musharraf, no Pakistani leader had seriously considered going to the site. Any prime minister who might have gone there would, without doubt, have been accused of a sell-out. But when Musharraf paid his respects to Gandhi’s memory, the Pakistani people accepted the move as a gesture that might help pave the way for better relations between India and Pakistan.
Neither Benazir Bhutto nor Nawaz Sharif was allowed to formulate her or his own policies regarding India. During her first administration Benazir Bhutto had wanted to go to India to meet Rajiv Gandhi but the military establishment was so strongly opposed to the idea that she abandoned the trip. It was much the same story ten years later when, in February 1999, Nawaz Sharif invited Vajpayee to Lahore.
In doing so, he faced opposition not only from the Islamic radicals but also from the army. Jamaat-i-Islami displayed its displeasure by organising thousands of activists to rampage through the streets of Lahore during Vajpayee’s visit. The protest turned into a riot. One policeman was killed, hundreds of protesters were injured and, as the security forces tried to clear the streets, clouds of tear gas floated over the historic Lahore Fort where the two prime ministers were trying to eat their dinner.
General Musharraf (who at the time was chief of army staff) was not much more helpful than the Jamaat. In a pointed gesture of ill-will, he and his senior colleagues undermined Sharif’s diplomatic effort by refusing to go to the Wagah border point to welcome Vajpayee to Pakistan. They maintained that it would have been unacceptable for Pakistan’s military leaders to be seen shaking the hand of the prime minister of an enemy state.
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the military stand a much better chance of delivering radical change in Pakistan than the civilians. That is true in part because the Pakistani people are more likely to accept change coming from the military. But it is also the case because successive military leaderships have treated civilian governments with distrust and have limited their freedom of action. It is difficult, for example, to imagine any civilian government being able to strike a deal with India over Kashmir.
The Pakistani people, and the army, would surely denounce any such settlement as a betrayal. According to conventional wisdom even a military leader could not expect to survive if he made a significant compromise on Kashmir. The army, it is argued, has invested so much in the Kashmir dispute that it would simply remove any army chief who was seen as giving in to India. That analysis may be correct — and we will never know for sure until someone, may be Musharraf, tries it. But it is also worth considering the possibility that, if he did want to make a compromise on Kashmir, Musharraf might just get away with it.
The conventional wisdom, after all, used to hold that it would also be impossible for any Pakistani leader to survive a showdown with the Islamic radicals. Although the radicals are by no means a spent force, Musharraf has gone some way towards dispelling that myth. Certainly, his January 2002 speech, in which he announced a whole series of measures designed to control the activities of the radicals, produced barely a whisper of protest. This was especially notable given that his speech did have an important bearing on the Kashmir dispute.
When Musharraf banned Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammed, he dealt a severe blow to the Kashmir insurgency. Even so, there was little reaction to his move. Although many in the army and the ISI are reluctant to admit it, outside of Punjab there is little interest in the Kashmir dispute. Admittedly, the army is Punjabi-dominated and that may prove decisive.
But after a decade in which the insurgency has contributed to Pakistan’s underdevelopment, and brought so much suffering in Kashmir itself, many Pakistanis want a settlement. Should Musharraf ever persuade India to accept a face-saving formula, such as autonomy with joint sovereignty for the Kashmir Valley, he might find that most Pakistanis are ready to support him.
General Musharraf’s anti-corruption drive has... failed. Straight after his coup, Musharraf stated that the elimination of corruption was one of his top priorities, but even at the outset there were indications that he would compromise on this commitment if it were politically expedient to do so. The judiciary managed to secure an undertaking that, in return for its retrospective validation of Musharraf’s coup, judges would not be investigated for corruption. Mindful of the need for positive press coverage, the military also let it be known that journalists would not be investigated. And by 2002 the regime’s commitment to anti-corruption had disappeared without trace as was amply demonstrated by the case of Mansurul Haq.
Admiral Mansurul Haq was chief of the navy between 1994 and 1997. Shortly after he took up his post there were rumours that he was taking kickbacks on defence contracts. The civilian government of the time, (probably wishing to conceal its own involvement in the scandal), accepted the view of the other service chiefs that formally charging the admiral would undermine the prestige of the armed forces. After Musharraf’s coup the authorities said they were determined to pursue the case and, by May 2001, had gathered sufficient evidence to secure Mansurul Haq’s extradition from the United States so that he could face charges in the Pakistani courts. But by the end of the year, the military’s commitment to the anti-corruption drive had weakened. The National Accountability Bureau struck a deal with Mansurul Haq in which he secured his freedom by promising to pay back US$7.5 million to the state.
No one in authority even attempted to explain why, if he admitted misappropriating the money, the admiral did not remain in jail. As one Pakistani journalist pointed out, the amount Mansurul Haq promised to return was the equivalent of 1,270 years of an admiral’s salary or twice the annual salary bill for the navy’s entire personnel.
The admiral’s case was part of a pattern. By the start of 2002 several politicians also found that their corruption cases had been dropped. The military attempted to excuse itself on the ground that finding solid evidence of white-collar crime is extremely difficult and time-consuming but the real reason for the softened approach was that the army saw corruption cases as useful levers with which they could control politicians.
If politicians transgress the line of ‘acceptable’ criticism of the military they can expect to have their corruption cases revived. Equally, if politicians accommodate themselves with the military regime they can expect to have their cases dropped. For short-term political gains Musharraf had abandoned one of the strategic objectives of his regime.
It is not only the elite who benefit from the state’s failure to apply the law. An astonishing 60 per cent of Pakistani electricity is stolen. Yet, if anyone is found to have tampered with his or her electricity meter, or to have set up an illegal supply line, the only punishment he or she will receive is a request to pay some of the money owed. If General Musharraf is serious about reforming Pakistani society he will have to overturn the culture of impunity. He shows little sign of doing so.
Other Musharraf initiatives have also run into the sand. His plans to deweaponize Pakistani society have inevitably encountered the problem that no one wants to give up serviceable weapons. Unwilling to face the genuine difficulties of implementing the policy, army officers instead resorted to buying useless old firearms so that the newspapers could publish pictures hailing the success of the government’s programme. The army has never acknowledged its military shortcomings and it is equally unwilling to admit to its political failures.
It remains to be seen whether Musharraf’s attempt to reverse the Zia legacy will bear any fruit. After September 11, General Musharraf found the courage to say that the Islamic radicals did not represent mainstream Pakistani opinion. Many Pakistanis welcomed his remarks with enthusiasm. Yet Musharraf’s decision to speak out against the radicals did not mean that they had disappeared.
And some of the measures which were intended to tackle radical Islam were doomed from the outset. Musharraf’s plan, for example, to get the madressahs to broaden their syllabi to include English and science was never realistic. Since the military regime (like its predecessors) was unable to recruit enough teachers to work in Pakistan’s mainstream schools, it was hardly likely that they would be able to find teachers to fill new posts in the madressahs.
General Musharraf’s regime has another problem. It faces a fundamental contradiction. A man who assumed power illegally, and whose legitimacy depends on military force, has argued that he alone can restore democracy to the country. Musharraf’s tolerance of press criticism and his modernist ideas have given him credibility. In many ways Musharraf is set on a cause diametrically opposed to that of General Zia. Yet there is also a striking similarity between the two men. Neither was prepared to give up the primacy of the army.
What the generals find more difficult to accept is that Pakistan’s military governments have been just as incompetent as their civilian counterparts. If General Musharraf is to transform his vision of Pakistani society into a reality he will need great reserves of political will, and a more effective bureaucracy. He has neither. And while he still believes that the Pakistan army is the solution to the country’s problems, he shows no sign of accepting that, in fact, it is part of the problem.
Excerpted with permission from
Pakistan: eye of the storm
By Owen Bennett Jones
Yale University Press, London
Website: www.yaleup.co.uk and Vanguard Books, 45 The Mall, Lahore
Tel: 042-7243783
Email: vbl@brain.net.pk
ISBN 0-300-09760-3
328pp. 18.95
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