| August 27, 2008 | Wednesday | Sha'aban 24, 1429 |
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Curtains for another dictator
WHEN Pervez Musharraf ensconced himself as Pakistan’s chief executive nearly nine years ago, one of his redeeming features was more or less immediately evident: he seemingly did not fit the military dictatorship template established by Gen Ziaul Haq.
The Zia years could be considered an extended demonstration of the banality of evil: for 11 years, precious few rays of light penetrated the oppressive pall that hung over the nation. And throughout that period there were no grounds for supposing that any good could conceivably flow from any of the regime’s predilections or policies.
Small wonder, then, that when the monthly Newsline, in a survey last year, asked people from various walks of life to pick a particularly treasured moment in Pakistan’s history, a substantial proportion of them chose Aug 17, 1988.
However, notwithstanding the bleakness of the Zia experience, the advent of Musharraf 11 years later was broadly greeted with equanimity, even a sense of relief. Feelings of this nature even pervaded liberal circles that could normally have been expected to champion democratic forms of governance: a testimony, in large part, to the depths plumbed by the second Nawaz Sharif administration. Buoyed by an unprecedented parliamentary majority based on a pathetically low electoral turnout, the government, among various other follies, was toying with the idea of elevating Sharia to a position of legal primacy.
The fact that Musharraf’s coup put an end to that helped to reinforce his image as a possible antidote to Zia, and too many people accepted at face value his pledge to introduce “true democracy”. That vow ought to have set off alarm bells, given that it’s hardly an innovative justification for military takeovers, and that it is invariably honoured in the breach. Furthermore, it stands to reason that chances of democracy flowing smoothly from dictatorship are minuscule, given that the two forms of governance are intrinsically antithetical to one another.
It could certainly be argued, particularly in Pakistan’s context, that regular electoral contests are in themselves no guarantee of democracy: civilian leaderships based ostensibly on popular mandates have regularly exhibited authoritarian tendencies, and that trend seems set to continue. But periodic negations of the democratic process hardly stand out as a practical or responsible — let alone an ideal — means of remedying this distasteful phenomenon. This is a realisation that ought to have weighed more heavily on those who were all too eager, back in 1999, to lend credence to Gen Musharraf’s self-image as a saviour in camouflage.
In the years since then, the impression of him as a sort of anti-Zia has been superseded by intriguing parallels and a host of ironies. Zia successfully sought legitimacy in the international arena after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan turned that benighted country into a Cold War battleground and jihad became a US foreign policy objective.
Musharraf’s task — and he had little choice but to accept it — was to take up arms against the more or less inevitable consequences of that jihad. And to do so at the behest of the same superpower that had contributed so generously towards creating the unholy mess in the first place, with American largesse matched dollar for dollar by aid for the Mujahideen from Washington’s second best friend in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia.
Its best friend, Israel, also contributed covertly to the war effort during the 1980s, and was all too happy to chip in again at the turn of the century, after it became painfully obvious that US sponsorship of Islamist terrorism had proved all too successful.
Pakistan was once more the conduit for effecting a transformation in Afghanistan. For Musharraf, this entailed convincing the armed forces, and particularly the military intelligence agency ISI, to assist in rolling back their only notable success outside Pakistan’s borders: the triumph of the Taliban. The extent to which he succeeded in this endeavour remains disputable. What’s clearer is that he was never quite able to convince the nation that combating the forces of violent obscurantism was a legitimate national priority, rather than something that had to be feigned in order to keep the Bush administration in good humour.
It is not particularly surprising that the American military and intelligence role in Pakistan since 9/11 has remained surreptitious, or that Pakistan’s connivance in the rendition and torture of terrorism suspects (which isn’t necessarily the same thing as suspected terrorists) has occasioned more comment in London than in Islamabad.
As borne out by the ruthless suicide bombings in the wake of Musharraf’s departure, jihadi terrorism needs to be eliminated because of the threat it poses to Pakistan rather than to Manhattan. But it seems obvious that the manner in which it has been tackled over the past seven years has all too often proved counterproductive, and it is far from clear whether the appropriate lessons have been learned.
Last year’s Lal Masjid fiasco, meanwhile, demonstrated that apparent dissonances between the Zia and Musharraf regimes were complemented by a degree of continuity, personified in particular by the latter’s religious affairs minister, Ejazul Haq. Musharraf’s enlightened moderation is said to have been on display in the sphere of women’s rights. His mentality on this front isn’t medieval, but its limitations were demonstrated when he bizarrely accused some women of volunteering for rape as a means of obtaining foreign visas.
And it’s amazing how the myth of his regime’s purported economic achievements — based chiefly on growth rates that never translated into relief for those who needed it most — continues to be regurgitated in political obituaries even as the nation teeters on the brink of insolvency. Perhaps it’s worth recalling how celebrations of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s much ballyhooed ‘decade of development’ coincided with a popular revolt that precipitated his downfall.
February’s reasonably fair and free elections — a creditable achievement on a par with Gen Yahya Khan’s effort in 1970 — sounded the death knell for Musharraf’s avowed political agenda. His relevance rapidly diminished thereafter, and his predictably self-serving abdication speech last week suggested that the detachment from reality which accounted in part for last year’s turmoil remains intact: the figures he cited in terms of popular support appear to have been plucked out of nowhere.
It would have benefited Musharraf to pay greater heed to the fruits of his one genuine accomplishment: an unprecedented degree of media freedom that survived his own misguided attempt to undercut it last year.
The dictator’s belated exit under a US-UK-Saudi-brokered deal has prompted calls for a trial. That may be a principled demand, but it is hard to see how it would serve a constructive — or deterrent — purpose in the given circumstances, with a dysfunctional successor regime desperate for distractions.
The writer is a journalist based in Sydney.
mahir.worldview@gmail.com
