The Duel (41 page)

Of course, high—even stratospheric—levels of corruption are no bar to longevity, if a military regime has sufficiently intimidated its population and enjoys solid enough support in Washington, as the Suharto regime in Indonesia testifies. Can Musharraf look forward to this sort of reign? The fate of his dictatorship is likely to depend on the interaction of three main forces. First will be the
degree of internal cohesion of the Army itself. Historically, it has never split—vertically or horizontally—and its discipline in following a 180-degree turn in policy towards Afghanistan, whatever the sweeteners that have accompanied it, has so far been impressive. It is not impossible that one day some patriotic officer might deliver the country of its latest tyrant, as Zia was once mysteriously sent on his way to Gehenna; but for the minute, such an ending appears improbable. Having weathered the humiliation of its abandonment of the Taliban, the high command looks capable of brazening out any further acts of obeisance to orders from the Pentagon.

What of parliamentary opposition to military rule? Vexing though the upshot of the October 2002 election, for all its fraud, proved to be for Musharraf, the parties that dominate the political landscape in Pakistan offer little hope of rebellion against him. The cringing opportunism of the Bhutto and Sharif clans knows few limits. The Islamist front ensconced in Peshawar and Quetta is noisier, but not more principled—cash and perquisites quickly stilling most of its protests. Popular discontent remains massive, but lacks any effective channels of national expression. It would be good to think that their performances in office had discredited the PPP and Sharif’s clique forever, but experience suggests that should the regime at any point start to crack, there is little to prevent these phoenixes of sleaze from arising once more, in the absence of any more progressive alternatives.

Finally, there is the American overlord itself. The Musharraf regime cannot aspire to play the same role as regional satrap that Zia once enjoyed. Pakistan has been ousted as imperial instrument in Afghanistan, and checked from compensating with renewed incursions in Kashmir. But if Islamabad has been forced into a more passive posture along its northern borders, its strategic importance for the US has, if anything, increased. For Washington has now made a huge political investment in the creation of a puppet regime in Kabul, to be guarded by US troops “for years to come,” in the words of General Tommy Franks—not to speak of its continuing hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. Pakistan is a vital flank in the pursuit of both objectives, and its top brass can look forward to the
kind of lavish emoluments, public and private, that the Thai military received for their decades of collusion with the American war in Indochina. Still, Washington is pragmatic and knows that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were just as serviceable agents of its designs in Kabul as Zia himself. Should he falter domestically, Musharraf will be ditched without sentiment by the suzerain. The Pax Americana can wage war with any number of proxies. It will take an uprising on the scale of 1969 to shake Pakistan free of them.
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Events have not contradicted this analysis, with one exception. It was impossible to predict the pleasant if unexpected surprise that the country witnessed in the judicial upsurge. Its impact was a renewal of hope, and the effective media coverage of the movement left Musharraf exposed. He now needed a mixture of repression together with a civilian cover and had little option but to accept a U.S.-brokered deal with the late Benazir Bhutto. He was by now largely discredited in the country, and the imposition of the emergency was the last straw for many of his supporters. The assassination of Bhutto increased his unpopularity. Defeat soon followed.

However flawed the February 2008 general elections in Pakistan may have been, they were a blow to Musharraf as well as the Islamist alliance, which lost its stronghold to the secular Awami National Party, the heirs twice removed of old Ghaffar Khan, who had taught the Pashtuns to value nonviolence and to combat imperialism. The Peoples Party emerged as the largest party with 120 out of a total of 342 seats in the National Assembly, closely followed by the Sharif Muslim League with 90 seats and the ANP with 13. The pro-Musharraf Muslim League won 51 seats and the MQM 25. The defeat was decisive. Had there been no ballot rigging, it would have been a complete rout, especially for the MQM in Karachi, where violence and chicanery were on open display. The religious coalition obtained 6 members of parliament, and even if the Jamaat-e-Islami had not boycotted the election, their representation would not have been much higher.

Till the Bhutto assassination, the election campaign had been largely lackluster. The mainstream parties had few differences on ideological or policy grounds, either on the domestic or the international level. The Peoples Party had long abandoned its populism. The key interlinked issues were Musharraf’s presidency and the reinstatement of the chief justice and others sacked during the emergency. The PPP was divided on this issue. One of its Punjabi veterans, Aitzaz Ahsan, was a central figure in the campaign to bring the judges back. Bhutto’s widower, on the other hand, had been sentenced to years in prison by the same judiciary and loathed them. At a meeting of party leaders in April 2008, he made his views clear to Ahsan.

Leaving aside that the ANP, like the PPP, is not unfriendly to Washington, its electoral triumph in the Frontier Province confirms what some of us have consistently argued. The world’s sixth most populous country and a nuclear state is not on the verge of a jihadi takeover. If neocons in the Bush administration or their successor want their prophecies of gloom and doom fulfilled, all they need to do is to occupy parts of Pakistan, destroy its nuclear facility, and impose a puppet regime. The hell that is Iraq would rapidly shift eastward. Definitely not recommended.

The delighted politicians of the PPP and the triumphant Muslim League rapidly agreed to form a coalition and divide the ministerial spoils. True to form, Nawaz Sharif, himself out of parliament, selected tried-and-trusted supporters or relatives for the work that lay ahead. Zardari, empowered by his widow, was able to choose the new prime minister. During her exile, Bhutto had selected an amiable and unquestioning Sindhi landlord as her proxy. He was widely expected to be the PPP choice. Makhdoom Amin Fahim, a pir-cum-landlord, politician and religious divine rolled into one, is hardly a social liberal. Uniquely, even for Pakistan, all his four brothers-in-law are the Koran. Fahim’s family claims descent from the first Muslims to enter the subcontinent, the cohort of Muhammad bin Kasim who took Sind in 711. Women in early Islam owned and inherited property equally with men, a tradition that took root in parts of Sind. Landowners there devised an ingenious solution to prevent women from marrying outside the family, which could lead to the parcelization of the estates. The young heiresses
were literally married off to the Koran—similar to nuns becoming brides of Christ. This preserved the girls’ virginity, which in turn provided them with magic healing powers; but above all it ensured that the property remained under the control of their fathers and brothers. The problem posed by the four wealthy sisters of the PPP leader was thus piously solved.

Zardari decided against Fahim for geopolitical reasons. He felt a Punjabi landlord would be better placed to run the country and selected another divine-plus-politician from the saint-ridden city of Multan. The choice was Yousaf Raza Gillani, a politician well attuned to the spirit of the age and cut from the same cloth as many of his contemporaries. Gillani’s qualities had been recognized by General Zia-ul-Haq, and like Nawaz Sharif, he became an early favorite of the dictator’s, serving loyally on various committees designed to buttress the regime. After Zia’s death, Gillani was a loyal supporter of the Muslim League, but fell out with Nawaz Sharif and joined the Peoples Party. He stayed with them and turned down offers from the Chaudhrys of Gujrat to jump ship and join their Muslim League. His instinct served him well in this case. His loyalty to the PPP when it was out of power has been handsomely rewarded by the party’s godfather.

The immediate impact of the electoral defeat suffered by Musharraf’s political factotums was to dispel the disillusionment and cynicism of the citizenry. The moral climate seemed to improve. But not for long. The fervor and naïveté soon turned to anger. The worm-eaten tongues of some politicians were soon back on display. Two major issues confronted the victors. The first concerned the judiciary. Nawaz Sharif had pledged that, if elected, his party would reverse the midnight actions carried out during the emergency and restore the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the other sacked judges to their former positions. Soon after their election triumph, the widower Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif met in Bhurban and publicly agreed that this would be a major priority and the judges would be brought back within thirty days of the new government taking office. There was general rejoicing in the country. Since November 3, 2007, until just after the election, the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, had been a prisoner
of the regime, detained in his house that was sealed off with barbwire barricades and a complement of riot police permanently on guard. His landlines were cut and his cell phones incapacitated by jamming devices. Colleagues and lawyers defending him were subjected to similar treatment. One of them, Aitzaz Ahsan, railed against the Bush regime in an op-ed in the
New York Times
on December 23, 2007:

People in the United States wonder why extremist militants in Pakistan are winning. What they should ask is why does President Musharraf have so little respect for civil society—and why does he essentially have the backing of American officials?

The White House and State Department briefings on Pakistan ignore the removal of the justices and all these detentions. Meanwhile, lawyers, bar associations and institutes of law around the world have taken note of this brave movement for due process and constitutionalism. They have displayed their solidarity for the lawyers of Pakistan. These include, in the United States alone, the American Bar Association, state and local bars stretching from New York and New Jersey to Louisiana, Ohio and California, and citadels of legal education like Harvard and Yale Law Schools.

The detained chief justice continues to receive enormous recognition and acknowledgment. Harvard Law School has conferred on him its highest award, placing him on the same pedestal as Nelson Mandela and the legal team that argued Brown v. Board of Education. The National Law Journal has anointed him its lawyer of the year. The New York City Bar Association has admitted him as a rare honorary member. Despite all this, the Musharraf regime shows no sign of relenting.

The new government ordered the immediate release of the dismissed judges and the removal of all restrictions. This was widely seen as a prelude to their reinstatement. Musharraf and his backers in Washington panicked. If the chief justice and his colleagues resumed office, John Negroponte informed the new government (via Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher), Musharraf might be legally removed and that was unacceptable. He had to stay on, at least as long as Bush
remained in the White House. His departure would be regarded as a setback in the war on terror.

This accelerated the political process and brought out into the open the differences on this issue between the PPP leadership and the Sharif brothers. At a subsequent meeting with U.S. officials in Dubai, in the presence of Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto’s fixers, the latter were asked to confirm the exact nature of the deal agreed by the late Benazir with the Americans prior to her return to Pakistan. Her husband had been sidelined during that period and appeared to be unaware of all the details.

Asif Zardari had his own worries. The National Reconciliation Ordinance that pardoned corrupt politicians had been part of the deal between Bhutto and Musharraf. It was a much-hated ordinance and the Supreme Court was due to hear an appeal questioning its legality. Zardari, only too aware that this and the possibility that cases against him in European courts might be resurrected, capitulated. Simultaneously, U.S. officials in Pakistan offered inducements to the chief justice in the form of a senior position on the International Court of Justice with all the perks of the post or even an academic post in the United States. The chief justice told them that he was not interested.

Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif met in London in April 2008 to iron out their differences. Each was accompanied by trusted aides. Two elected Muslim League parliamentarians flanked Nawaz Sharif. Two unelected political fixers, Rehman Malik and Husain Haqqani (the first a submissive courtier, the second a crucial link to Washington), sat with Zardari. No consensus could be reached on the restoration of the judiciary and this inevitably produced cracks in the alliance. After consulting senior colleagues, Nawaz Sharif withdrew Muslim League ministers from the central government, citing disagreement on this issue. It is extremely rare in Pakistan for any politician to relinquish office on an issue of principle. Nawaz Sharif’s popularity in the country soared. Zardari’s action provoked the deepest indignation among the supporters of the judiciary and a number of senior figures in the PPP were clearly unhappy at the public embrace of Musharraf. But having accepted Zardari as their temporary leader they had rendered themselves powerless. As the party’s guardian, the Bhutto family had deprived their
ward of any intrinsic political identity and no group inside it was capable of formulating an independent political program. PPP politicians had grown so accustomed to the Bhutto harness that they could take no step without it. This is a pity. As I have argued earlier, the Bhutto family has long exhausted its historical function. Were the PPP to rid itself of this incubus, democracy could only be enhanced, even if it took a few years for its leaders and members to overcome their political numbness and become articulate again. In the meantime, the initiative lies entirely with Zardari and his close advisers. They make the key decisions, utilizing Prime Minister Gillani and the PPP cohort in parliament as a rubber stamp. For the moment this suits both Musharraf and Bush. What happens after their departure remains an open question.