Herald exclusive: Who said the past always looks rosy?
As Pakistanis enter a new decade there are a lot of people, phrases and places from their recent past – blood-soaked images of a people buffeted by unrelenting terrorism, multiple disasters and extreme insecurity – that they would rather forget. But that should not mean we let the past go without digging into even its most horrifying recesses to see how it continues to impact our present and our future.
Pakistan entered the last decade under a dictator, and as the country makes its way into the next decade there are once again doubts about the future of democracy. Our last dictator left us bleeding, fragmented, unsure of ourselves and uncomfortable about our place in the world. Will the next one be any different? To realise what could be in store for us if the powers-that-be decide to usher in another era of dictatorship, it might be instructive to look at how the previous non-democratic dispensation fared. Similarly, Pakistan could have done better in ensuring its internal security if policy-makers in the 1980s and 1990s had understood the implications of sending radical Islamists to fight in Kashmir and Afghanistan. That our bumbling security apparatus is now confronted by its own militant protégés is a result of that failure. Painful or otherwise, going over the past helps plan for the future.
In the pages that follow the Herald offers an overview – although not an exhaustive one – of landmark developments in Pakistan’s history over the last decade. Following, in alphabetical order, are some of the people, phrases and places that had a defining impact on our lives in the last 10 years. — Muhammad Badar Alam
People of the decade
The Unlikely MartyrBy Rashed RahmanIt is ironic that Bugti never took up arms against the government for Balochistan’s independence.Continue reading ...
The baby of the tube By Asha’ar RehmanI was born in 2002 in a private ward run by a famous news philanthropist in possession of the magic formula.Continue reading ...
Extended RoleBy Amir MateenGeneral Ashfaq Parvez Kayani is the only one among Pakistan’s top players who connects the dots of all the important events of the last decade.Continue reading ...
Exit the SurvivorBy Amir MateenBenazir Bhutto and Aung San Suu Kyi always had a lot in common. The two inherited the politics of their fathers and both suffered a great deal as a result.Continue reading ...
The Unlikely MartyrBy Rashed Rahman
Nawab Akbar Bugti, a colourful character in the mould of a typical Baloch chieftain, showed little signs throughout his life and career that he would end up a martyr for the Baloch nationalist cause. But his assassination in 2006 raised his stature to arguably the most potent symbol of the struggle, transformed a relatively narrow and sputtering insurgency into a province-wide conflict and, for most nationalists, became the last straw in a relationship between the province and the centre that had been troubled since Pakistan came into being. Though considered by some a nationalist from day one, Bugti’s political orientation remained pro-centre. He served as a federal minister as well as the governor and chief minister of Balochistan. In the 1970s he had fallen out with nationalists over, it is alleged, his failure to get the post of governor. In true affronted Baloch tribal chief style, Bugti collaborated with then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and condoned the military operations the federal government had launched in Balochistan to crush a rebellion by the Marri tribe. He got his prized governorship in return, but resigned within a year over the manner in which the military went about suppressing the Baloch. The resignation notwithstanding, his attempts in subsequent years to regain acceptance from the nationalist camp met with only limited success. It is ironic that Bugti never took up arms against the government for Balochistan’s independence. In fact, he invited General (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s wrath for displaying traditional Baloch gallantry in defence of a wronged woman. Dr Shazia Khalid’s rape in Sui, allegedly at the hands of an army officer, triggered a revolt by the Bugtis and other tribes surrounding the Sui gas fields. Clashes with the military and security forces escalated to the point where the Nawab had to abandon his ancestral home in the face of heavy artillery and aerial bombardment and take refuge with the neighbouring Marri tribe’s insurgents, grouped under the banner of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). This was a historic first, since the Marris and the Bugtis – two of the three largest and most powerful tribes that dot the parched Balochistan landscape – had often been at loggerheads in the past. A 2006 rocket attack on Musharraf’s helicopter while he was visiting Kohlu, the Marri area’s headquarters, amidst an uneasy ceasefire in the Bugti area triggered the general’s revenge. It is likely that the rockets were fired by the elusive BLA guerrillas, but Musharraf directed his fury towards the relatively easier but high profile target that the octogenarian Bugti was. The consequence of Musharraf’s rash and vengeful action was that a section of the Bugti tribe joined the Baloch insurgency for the first time since Pakistan was created. Bugti’s death washed away his past taints of collaborating with the centre against the nationalists and his grandson Brahmdagh took up the banner of revolt in the aftermath of the still unexplained assassination of his grandfather in the cave in which he was hiding. Bugti’s assassination also arguably changed the trajectory of the Baloch cause towards separatism. As the centre continues its oppressive policies in Balochistan, its actions (including disappearances of activists and the discovery of tortured bodies of missing people almost every other day throughout the province) have become the greatest recruiters for the nationalist cause. — Rashed Rahman is the editor of Lahore-based Enlish newspaper Daily Times The baby of the tube By Asha’ar Rehman I was born in 2002 in a private ward run by a famous news philanthropist in possession of the magic formula. He had his admixture ready: politics, psychological problems, the hakeem sahib, the doctor sahib, the maulvi sahib, women with now sorry, now sensuous tales, wedding photos, a slice of sport and a few spicy bites of showbiz to top it all. All he needed was a heavy anchor as he loaded his ware onto this flagship venture. He found me. My arrival was a trailblazing event covered live by television to popular cheers but to the chagrin of outdated pen-pushers whose agitation I quite enjoyed. They protested that the guy I worked for had taken on a new wife: the Urdu paper had been his first wife and his second marriage had been to the once state-of-the-art daily that conversed in English. The television was, in their book, the man’s third wife, and they fearfully warned that, like the last time, he would soon forget his past loves as he cajoled and pampered and romanced his latest fetish. I said, “why not” — to yet more cheers and chagrin. I knew they were fearful of losing out to me. These hacks were beside themselves with rage as they called me names such as ‘angerman’. Little did these critics know that I heralded the spawning of a new breed of babies of the tube. Some eight years later I am happily lost in the crowd of my clones. I have survived the nascent period and above all the envious brigade of obsolete hacks condemned to a life in-camera away from the glitzy world of electronic media. They have hurled all kinds of invectives at me, faking their diatribe as popular sentiment or, failing that, a cry for professionalism. They say I am too emotional, headstrong and lacking in the etiquette the profession has prided itself on for generations. Some of them denounce me as a bad copy of my distant cousins in the West, whose antics are usually too mundane for the fires of youth that I carry in my belly. My viewers are my real asset, even though I must acknowledge that by the grace of the Almighty and a bit of hopping around I have become entitled to material returns as well. This is the reincarnation I had been promised as, during my last life, I slogged away at a typewriter in a smoke-filled dungeon the left-behind journos still pompously call a reporting room. These thankless souls have no word of appreciation for the revolution I have brought about in their lives; but for it they would still be languishing at the bottom half of the salary ledger with no other option but to vainly claim that they consider their work a mission. Okay comrade, yours was a mission, but as you wrote and rewrote your standard words you sure knew that the zeal had gone missing. I came and changed all that, promoting causes which would have died if left to conventional care. I threw out a dictator and restored the judges. I kept the debates going, generously sharing my increasingly famous guests with fellow hosts to ensure an equal distribution of information among the needy. Frankly, brothers, it was you who had reduced the mission to the level of a listless business. It has now been resurrected. I am too modest to tell you who did it. — Asha'ar Rehman is resident editor Dawn Lahore Extended RoleBy Amir Mateen General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani is the only one among Pakistan’s top players who connects the dots of all the important events of the last decade. He has witnessed everything from close quarters as director-general military operations in 2000, commander of 10 Corps in Rawalpindi in 2003 and chief of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) until his appointment as Chief of Army Staff in 2007. And he continues to oversee Pakistan’s entry into this decade while most others have perished, physically or politically. As army chief Kayani has had a mixed record in his first three years. He cut down the role of intelligence agencies in politics as proven in the 2008 election. Politics in Pakistan would not have been what it is today had Kayani not resisted General (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s political agenda of ousting the elected government and keeping himself in power. He is known to be a quiet man and has generally avoided overt confrontation with civilian institutions, so his resistance to the Kerry-Lugar aid bill and his refusal to let the Inter-Services Intelligence come under civilian control are seen as exceptions to the rule. But WikiLeaks leaves no doubt that he played an active role in pushing President Asif Zardari to restore the judiciary by, it seems, almost threatening to topple his regime. That the threat was conveyed through the American ambassador in Islamabad makes the act even more questionable. It is also clear that he has the potential to push for his political notions of good and bad; whether he uses this to keep the political process on track or schemes to assert his direct role in politics is the million dollar question. One clear indication of the strength of his position is that Kayani is the only army chief whose tenure was extended, ostensibly willingly, by a civilian government. Ayub Khan, who served an extended tenure from 1951 to 1958 as the first native army chief, had virtually coerced the civilian government to allow it. Since then, military commanders who have become dictators have given themselves extensions to perpetuate their rule rather than because of their ability to lead and perform. Kayani has the rare opportunity to correct that historical wrong. He has had sufficient time to settle down. Now is the time to test his vision and his will to reform what an Indian general tauntingly called “the army of bakers and property managers”. On the military side he can either trudge along the traditional way of guarding his turf by getting the maximum military perks or he can attempt drastic measures to ensure that we have more security with less money. On the civilian side he can either help the political process and institutions to recover from successive martial laws or wait for his chance to impose yet another military rule. Kayani may not have many role models. Dictators Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Ziaul Haq and Musharraf stand firmly in the national hall of shame. Gul Hassan was a weakling who could be ‘motored-off’ without a farewell, Tikka Khan was a crony, Aslam Beg was a pseudo-democrat who did not become a dictator because he could not and Jahangir Karamat was confused. Waheed Kakar is the only general who refused an extension, but he is not seen as a model in an army that idealises a macho man like Asif Nawaz Janjua. Kayani has to carve his own niche. His choice is either to please the barracks or the nation. — Amir Mateen is a senior journalist associated with The News Exit the SurvivorBy Amir Mateen Benazir Bhutto and Aung San Suu Kyi always had a lot in common. The two Daughters of the East inherited the politics of their fathers after losing them to their respective militaries’ machinations, and both suffered a great deal as a result. But Bhutto then chose a pragmatic route, negotiating her way into power with the same people that wanted to keep her out. Suu Kyi continues to chart a rather idealistic course, disallowing her party from participating in the recent elections that her country’s junta claimed to win. Myanmar still has faith in Suu Kyi. Bhutto, on the other hand, had at one point lost almost all her political capital. As Pakistan entered the new millennium she was definitely down, if not out. Her party was decimated in the 1997 election and after Pervez Musharraf removed Nawaz Sharif from power he made it known that he wanted to keep her out of politics. Facing numerous corruption cases, she lived in exile while her husband Asif Zardari was jailed in Pakistan. But then she patiently worked her way back into eminence and in a few years’ time positioned herself – once again – at the centre of popular hopes for a democratic Pakistan. As a first step she did not join the Musharraf regime even after her party won the highest number of National Assembly seats in the 2002 general election. Instead she continued working under the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD), which included both her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PMLN), to wage a joint struggle against Musharraf’s rule. This alliance proved to be the precursor of the Charter of Democracy, a text that the two leaders signed in 2006 and that in subsequent years became the seminal reference point for the future of politics in Pakistan. Sharif, who was initially allergic to even talking to her, started respecting her opinion so much that he changed his decision to boycott the 2008 election after she convinced him otherwise. Her support for the restoration of the judiciary that Musharraf had sacked in the wake of his November 2007 emergency was another manifestation of her politics of reconciliation with those individuals and institutions that had given her a tough time in the 1990s and even later. By the time she was killed by an unknown assassin in Rawalpindi, she had reestablished herself as the only Pakistani leader capable of understanding our national and international predicaments. Some may say she has become bigger in death than she would have been alive. Because she carried so much baggage from her past her third term might just have been a repeat of her two earlier tenures, goes their argument. Whether this has merit or not, she was determined about three things this time around. One, she had decided to keep Zardari out of politics. Two, she was convinced that the politics of reconciliation was the way to thwart the establishment’s designs against democracy. Three, she had recognised terrorism as the biggest threat to the country. True, she was playing ball with the Americans on this last one, but the fact that she paid the ultimate price for her convictions is an indubitable measure of the strength of her belief that Islamic militancy would eat away at the very foundations of Pakistan if it was not controlled. She might have survived if she had adopted the Suu Kyi route. Her pragmatism certainly did not serve her well, nor has it benefited her country. — Amir Mateen is a senior journalist associated with The News