Which way now?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, — we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. — A Tale of Two Cities

WHAT is going to happen? That is the question everybody has been asking one another. Until some weeks ago, only a few could venture an answer, and plausible answers seemed to be even fewer. A series of recent developments has reduced the confusion and it is now possible to see the crossroads at which Pakistan finds itself.

The regime’s rush to disaster was known. What is new is the birth of the hope that the people may yet again pull the country back from the brink. This new consciousness began with the common citizen’s realisation that the weakening of the writ of the state across the country, and especially in the tribal battle zones, has not been so much due to the faults and failings of junior state functionaries as to the top commander’s loosening grip over matters. When the judiciary showed on July 20 the limits of the regime’s power, or the borders of its helplessness, all those who had despaired of change experienced an exhilarating feeling of rejuvenation.

The signal was correctly read by pretenders to the throne in exile. Nawaz Sharif immediately went on the offensive. Fortunately for him, he had the means to broaden his support by successfully organising a grand assembly in London. A petition in the Supreme Court for a declaration in favour of his return followed. The law was always on his side.

The decisive factor was the timing of the move so as to benefit him from a perceptible decline in the regime’s capacity to carry out its whims and caprices and a corresponding rise in the people’s confidence in their ability to bring about a change. Finally, instead of waiting to be called to battle with the regime, Nawaz Sharif himself gave the call to arms by scheduling his return to Islamabad on Sept 10, again timing the event before the general’s re-election process. Now Gen Musharraf faces a far more formidable Nawaz Sharif than the flabby premier he had felled eight years ago.

Benazir Bhutto also experienced a fair measure of the slump manoeuvred by Gen Musharraf but she did not care to heed the rapidly changing public mood and continued negotiations with him. However, she did up the price for rescuing the regime. Unfortunately, she did not realise that the general had become more dependent on Nawaz Sharif’s former stable-mates whom he had brought over to his side in as remarkable a feat of horse-trading as the transformation of Muslim Leaguers into Republicans half a century ago. (The time for a repeat performance may not be far away).

The snag in the Benazir-Musharraf talks all along was each side’s objective inability to offer the minimum satisfaction the other party needed. The signs of Gen Musharraf’s weakening that had encouraged Benazir Bhutto to drive a harder bargain also emboldened the group around him to sabotage the dialogue and thereby damage both parties to it. This turn of events may do Benazir Bhutto good if she wishes to regain some of the ground she has quite unnecessarily lost.

This group’s ascendancy runs parallel to Gen Musharraf’s slide. The over-confident general faltered on four critical occasions: first, when he missed the opportunity of withdrawing the reference against the Chief Justice; second, when he allowed himself to be led by the nose into botching the Lal Masjid affair; third, when he allowed his associates to persuade him into considering the imposition of an emergency, though the impossibility of doing so should have occurred to him earlier than was suggested by outsiders; and, finally, when he yielded to the pressure exerted by PML-Q wheeler-dealers to stall a compromise with Benazir Bhutto.

The latter’s blunders in seeking an understanding with the regime have become irrelevant. What is relevant now is the possibility that Musharraf’s newly empowered advisors may push the country into utterly disastrous turmoil in the 16 weeks or so between Sept 10, the date Nawaz Sharif has chosen for his arrival in Islamabad, and Jan 15, 2008, by which date the next general election must be held (unless despair totally supersedes reason).

The general’s inflated advisors are trying to convince him that they can get him elected as president in uniform before Nawaz Sharif raises his street power to a critical point. At the same time, they are determined to win the general election for themselves. They seem to have placed themselves in a no-loss position because they are already speaking of a close relationship between PML-Q and PML-N. That makes the ensuing power play infinitely more dangerous but more predictable than before.

The key player over the next few weeks will be the much-maligned Pakistan mob. The revived PML-N can collect a large crowd to greet Nawaz Sharif. The MMA, fired by the prospect of reviving the IJI of 1988, possibly egged on by the alliance’s original godfathers, should also wish to mobilise a good number of people. If the regime loses nerve at the sight of this mob, a costly confrontation may push matters out of everybody’s hands.

If the regime can keep its cool at the time of Nawaz Sharif’s return, the people’s real test will come if and when Gen Musharraf can somehow avoid being tripped by the judiciary and get himself re-elected as president by the existing assemblies. Those in the political nobility who are wavering might not then wish to be on the wrong side of a president installed for five long years.A lot will need to be done by pro-democracy forces to mobilise the masses for a final showdown for which the only arena may be the streets. The kind of passive crowd that gathered in Karachi to see the bridge collapse will not deliver anything. The general election will, in any case, become meaningless.

That will also be General Musharraf’s toughest test so far. He will have no support from his political buddies, for their expertise is limited to horse-trading or the fair weather use of money or bureaucratic levers; they have no first-hand experience of dealing with a really angry mob that has not been seen for 30 years. And if he makes the mistake of calling on the troops to contain the movement against him he will have lost the moment, and the damage to the defence forces will be incalculable.

It is now for Gen Musharraf to determine whether we are “all going direct to heaven” or “going direct the other way”. It is not easy for a person who has long enjoyed Lady Luck’s favours to realise that times change. Perhaps there is something to be learnt from the fall of Ayub Khan.

In 1965-67 he wrote that he had swallowed accusations, abuse, vilification and slander because he wanted to save the system (read the work of eight years in the present context) and declared: “I will not allow it (his system) to be demolished.” By early 1969, not even Ayub’s decision against seeking another term in office could save him or his system. One can only hope that Gen Musharraf will not succumb to the advice Ayub could not resist.

But if one could be allowed a bit of wishful thinking, there is still time for a painless way out — the general may set up an all-party government, shed his uniform, allow a fair election, and then face a test by the new assemblies if he so wishes. Too good to be true?

Igniting a controversy

IDEALLY speaking, any decision on the controversial British-era border, the Durand Line, should be at the discretion of the people living on both sides of the troubled frontier.

As President Hamid Karzai has already stated in unambiguous terms, the governments in Kabul and Islamabad should have little say in sorting out the complex problem touching the lives of millions of tribespeople, who have not yet reconciled to the frontier dividing Pashtun families.

But a pro-Taliban Pakistani politico, infamous for doing one U-turn after another, urged Kabul recently to recognise the frontier — named after British diplomat Sir Mortimer Durand who arbitrarily drew his pencil along a map in 1893, dividing Afghan and British Indian territory inhabited by fiercely independent Pashtuns — as an international border that has since been the subject of dispute.

Addressing members of the Balochistan Bar Association in Quetta on August 23, opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman reasoned that such a move by Kabul would help defuse tension between the Muslim neighbours. Going by the opposition leader’s weird logic, the proposed step would go a long way in containing India’s “extraordinary activities” on Afghanistan’s soil — posing a grave security threat to Pakistan.

Obviously, Afghanistan is increasingly tilting towards India because of its massive contribution to the reconstruction effort, instead of relying on its immediate neighbours, chided for exporting extremism to the war-wracked country.

The Afghans are well within their rights in asking Maulana Fazlur Rehman how Indian consulates in Nangarhar and Kandahar are impinging on Pakistan’s security. If these diplomatic missions in Afghanistan are really fomenting trouble in Pakistan, why has the Indian High Commission been allowed to operate in Islamabad?

To begin with, the MMA secretary-general has taken upon himself an onerous job that the two governments have deliberately eschewed in an attempt to prevent their relations being further vitiated. While going beyond the call of duty in arousing this volcanic controversy, the JUI-F polemicist has given his detractors a big stick to beat him with.

Before speaking on the matter, he must bear in mind that the Durand Line treaty — signed with Amir Abdur Rehman — was to stay in force for a century. At that time, historians with even a minimal sense of objectivity, recall that areas stretching from Khyber Agency to the Chitral valley were not demarcated and the disputed land was to be returned to Afghanistan in 1993 when the treaty expired.

Much to Islamabad’s frustration, however, Afghan rulers including the Taliban and warlords of all stripes spurned suggestions for the renewal of the pact, which has got as much to do with Afghanistan’s sovereignty as with Pakistan’s strategic depth.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s demand amounts to stirring up a hornet’s nest. A political stalwart of his stature is also expected to denounce categorically the phenomena of terrorism, suicide attacks, extremism, a raging Taliban insurgency, the presence of Al Qaeda and the ever-growing drug commerce that have become the bane of our lives.

By sincerely discharging this moral responsibility, he will do a great service to the two countries. Will he? Contrarily, he tends to lend his weight to forces that have brought untold suffering to the benighted region — buffeted by brainless violence, illiteracy, unemployment and backwardness.

For obvious reasons, his nostrum has evoked a thoroughly hostile reaction from Afghan intellectuals and commentators. Political analyst Muhammad Hasan Wolesmal thinks that the formal recognition of the Durand Line by the Afghan government has been a long cherished desire of the Inter-Services Intelligence, which could not achieve the goal even by propping up the Taliban regime for six years. “Even Presidents Karzai, Musharraf and Bush can’t decide unilaterally on the retractable dispute. Raking up the knotty issue in a capricious fashion is bound to spark a fire that may devour a part of the world already faced with a host of challenges.”

Likewise, the director of the Regional Studies Centre, Abdul Ghafoor Lewal, opines peoples — not governments — are authorised to settle the conundrum. The JUI-F boss is not supposed to raise the emotive question, he says, but the Pakistan government has a history of using the clergy to push its geo-strategic agenda. “In promoting core national interests, our religious scholars should take their cue from Rehman — so loyal to the Pakistan government.”

The Durand Line being an international spat could not be tackled by the MMA firebrand, Musharraf or Karzai, believes Shukria Barakzai, a suave female lawmaker, who blasts the rightist for parroting Islamabad’s views on issues of no direct relevance to him. The wrangle should be left to the best judgment of the masses affected by it, she maintains, while underlining the need for moderates on both sides to mount pressure on hawkish elements.

In his speech to the lawyers, the “royal” opposition leader also rejected the joint Pakistan-Afghanistan Regional Peace Jirga as a failure in that representatives from a key party (the Taliban) to the conflict were not invited to it — an opinion faulted by many. All parties were invited to the grand gathering, but some of them boycotted it at the behest of “their masters” who projected the jirga as a damp squib.

Fazlur Rehman, too, was among the invitees but he and his MMA colleagues chose to stay away from the deliberations aimed at building bridges between the neighbours and putting up a joint front against the terrorists. Belying bleak predictions of the doomsayers, the jirga turned out to be a good first step towards fostering Pakistan-Afghanistan amity and promoting confidence-building measures (CBMs).

In a crisis of credibility on his home turf, Maulana Fazlur Rehman should not be under any delusion that he will ever be able to strike a chord with the Afghans.

Now that he has thrust his unwelcome proposal on Kabul, will the MMA leader summon the courage to jaw-bone the Pakistan government into giving up its historically untenable claim on Afghan territories included in the erstwhile British India? As a devout Muslim, he should be perceptibly even-handed in seeking to mediate between “the two brotherly Muslim countries.”

The writer is a journalist based in Kabul.

Future belongs to the masses

IT SEEMS that Pakistan was born under the unluckiest of stars. India gained independence a day after Pakistan and is well on its way to becoming a regional superpower on the strength of a robust economy and stable democratic system.

Malaysia became independent 10 years after Pakistan but is generally considered to be one of the most developed, prosperous and advanced countries in Asia at par with many European countries.

Far from advancing and developing, Pakistan has regressed in real terms, especially in the last three decades. Our economy lies in tatters. If it were not for the foreign remittances and the aid we receive from our foreign masters in return for unquestioningly toeing their line, regardless of the price we have to pay at home, the situation would be desperate.

All our leaders, civilian, military and others, habitually regard themselves above the law and treat the Constitution as if it is there to serve only their needs. They abrogate, suspend, amend and generally run amok over the Basic Law with reckless abandon. We hang our elected prime ministers while others are reduced to pleading for general amnesty for their misconduct.

Important institutions of state and society were never allowed to take root and mature in Pakistan. Whereas Jawaharlal Nehru became India’s first prime minister, the Quaid-i-Azam chose to assume the post of governor-general of Pakistan. His early death prevented him from making the intended transition to democracy. Then followed a series of short-lived civilian governments and the military juntas of Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan, who had little or no nexus with the masses.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the first charismatic and dynamic leader to succeed in firing the people’s passions and capturing their imagination. But after the first two years of an exemplary administration, which still stands as a lesson to all would-be leaders, he succumbed to the trappings of power and steadily distanced himself from the people. He came to be surrounded by the likes of Masood Mehmood and Waqar Ahmed, who caused his downfall and led him to the gallows.

After 11 dark years of General Ziaul Haq’s martial law, the nation dared to vest its hopes in Benazir Bhutto, expecting the young Harvard- and Oxford-educated daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to fight for the common man and set the derailed democratic process back on track. The euphoria was short-lived when, instead, all they got was unprecedented maladministration, corruption and misuse of power for which both her governments had to be dismissed.

The nation felt there was some cause for optimism when General Pervez Musharraf took over in October 1999, since he seemed to make all the right noises and his seven-point agenda seemed to contain the right formula to make amends for a ruinous past. But that too turned out to be a cruel mirage. Expediency became the hallmark of the Musharraf administration, as it became obvious quite early on that the president would dance with the devil if that would sustain and prolong his hold on power.

He collected around himself the most disreputable lotas, some of whom had been imprisoned under various corruption and criminal cases during the early days of his administration, while others absconded. But when the need arose, they were once again rehabilitated and restored to power and their cases swept under the rug.

In this melee of self-serving opportunism and lust for power, the plight of the masses has been overlooked as they have been forced to endure one painful betrayal after another. The current frenzy on the part of some wily politicians to get a share in power by striking a dubious deal with a politically crippled president is perhaps the most shameful of all the let-downs thus far. They insult our intelligence by claiming that they are pursuing the deal to restore democracy.

Someone should remind them that democracy is not something that can be granted by a military ruler as a display of his largesse. It is something the people must seize for themselves. Why supposedly popular leaders of the people and self-proclaimed champions of democracy would prefer to indulge in a shady deal with a military ruler instead of relying on the strength of the people to achieve the professed objective of restoring democracy defies understanding. Perhaps they want to bypass any meaningful democratic accountability at the ballot box and present the masses with a fait accompli. What sort of democracy is this?

Overwhelming temptations to take short cuts to power notwithstanding, at some point in time it becomes necessary to take a stand on principles, if honesty and sincerity mean anything. But these bleeding-heart democracy lovers seem to have arrived at the ill-conceived, convoluted conclusion that power acquired through the ballot box or by taking a stand on principles is shaky at best, whereas power received with the blessings of a man in uniform is far more conveniently acquired and is comparatively stable. That is why everyone is so eager to become the next Shaukat Aziz.

Now that the Musharraf-Benazir deal seems to have hit a pothole along the way, Maulana Fazlur Rehman has reportedly jumped into the fray, having already played a pivotal role in giving President Musharraf a new lease of life with his support in passing the Seventeenth Amendment. As long as President Musharraf keeps dangling the deal like a carrot before the power-hungry politicians, there will be no shortage of takers. In any case, does Musharraf have the ethical and legal authority to forgive corruption and criminal conduct or grant any concessions in order to secure political support? Is this not blatant rigging?

For the first time in Pakistan’s history, the judiciary is fearlessly upholding the rule of law and supremacy of the Constitution. Arguably, it stands as the greatest obstacle before the designs and intentions of the Musharraf administration. It just goes to show how much an independent judiciary can influence the evolution of a progressive state while acting as the guardian of democratic social and state institutions and individual freedoms.

One can only wonder where this country would be today had the courts fulfilled this obligation in the same manner during the past 60 years. Could we have been spared the agony, uncertainty and turmoil that have brought us to this state of ruin at the hands of tin pot dictators and corrupt, self-serving politicians who treat the state as their private jagir? We will never know.

In any case, the matter of the deal, the re-election of the president with or without uniform and a plethora of other issues have already been placed before the Supreme Court. The nation expects the honourable judges to do what the politicians have not the fortitude to do, that is, infuse a modicum of honesty and principles into politics and uphold the Constitution.

But there is just so much that the Supreme Court can reasonably be expected to do. The fate of the nation rests ultimately in the hands of the people. The time has come for the people to be the masters of their own fate. The problem, however, is that they seem to have forgotten just how powerful they really are.

When the people unite, even superpowers and much dreaded armies get out of the way. Our leaders lack the backbone to take a stand on principles because that entails hardship, struggle and sacrifice and it would be foolish to expect any good from them. The future belongs to the masses and they must realise that they need not be bound by the vestiges of a failed past.

Extreme climate, extreme politics

“HOW are our children going to survive in a land that is dead?” asked a survivor of the wildfires that seared much of southern Greece during the last week of August.

Six thousand homes and four million olive trees burned, half the forests of Greece gone, and sixty-four people dead is a huge loss, and in the carbonised landscapes of the Peleponnese it is hard to imagine that people will ever live there again. But what nobody saw coming was the political fall-out: this may be the first time that a government falls because of climate change.

When the centre-right government of Costas Karamanlis called an early election last month after only three years in office, it had a comfortable lead in the opinion polls and was cruising towards a certain victory. The fires changed all that, shaking people’s trust in the competence not just of the government but of the established parties in general. In the last published opinion polls (Greek law bans polls in the last two weeks before the September 16 election), neither Karamanlis’s New Dermocracy nor the centre-left opposition party, PASOK, had even forty per cent of the vote.

The beneficiaries were the extreme right Laos party, a normally marginal group preaching nationalism, hatred of immigrants and Orthodox Christianity (its posters urge all Greeks to unite as “one fist”), and the equally fringe party of the hard left called Syriza. Neither party is represented in the present parliament, since they could not clear the legal threshold of three per cent of the popular vote.

They are both very likely to be in the next parliament -- and if the two major parties end up more or less tied, as seems probable, extremists of one sort or another will be able to extort a high political price in return for agreeing to support a coalition government.

Obviously, we can’t just extrapolate from this single example and say that climate disasters lead to a polarisation and radicalisation of politics, but this is a phenomenon that warrants attention. After a week like the Greeks had, there was bound to be a political reaction, but does it mean anything for other places?

First of all, were these fires really caused by climate change? After all, there were fires of a similar scale in Greece about a century ago, and of course the land did turn green again after a few years. But uncontrollable “megafires” are ceasing to be once-in-a-century events. Another one burned about a quarter of the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands this summer.

There have been comparable megafires in the past few years in France, Portugal, Canada, Russia, Indonesia, South Africa and Brazil. In the United States, where a forest fire that burned more than 5,000 acres (2,000 hectares) was relatively rare twenty years ago, in the past decade there have been more than 200 megafires that burned at least ten times that area. Six of the past ten years have seen the previous US record for the amount of land devastated by forest fires broken.

There is a prima facie case for seeing this as a manifestation of climate change -- so what about the political reaction in Greece? It has been ugly on every side.

Karamanlis’s government, having made few preparations for coping with massive fires despite the speed with which the problem has grown in recent years, was slow to respond to the crisis, and then tried to shift the blame for its failures by claiming that the fires were set by arsonists, saboteurs and terrorists.––Copyright