Pakistanization Of Pakistan And
The Night Of The GeneralsBy Taj Hashmi
07 November, 2007
Countercurrents.orgThere should not be any reservation about the expression “Pakistanization” for the obvious reason: what happens in this unique country created in the name of a religion (Islam) hardly happens anywhere in the world. While even coup-prone nations are gradually treading the democratic or at least constitutional path, Pakistan has remained unique for being run by a serving general as its “elected” president and without a constitution. The country’s constitution has been suspended, modified and even replaced with draconian acts several times since 1958, in the name of defending Islam and sovereignty of the country.
So there is nothing new about the latest scrapping of the constitution on November 3, by General Pervez Musharraf. The serving general-cum-elected president of the country declared the state of emergency, suspended the constitution, dismissed the Chief Justice, arrested lawyers and curtailed whatever had been left of human rights in the country. The raison deter for these extreme measures, as always under martial law, was “to save the country from the brink”.
Sadly for Musharraf, hardly anyone in the world is buying his phony logic. It is absolutely clear that his declaration of emergency as the Chief of Staff of the Army, not as the President, virtually amounts to the re-imposition of martial law in Pakistan, which is practically under military rule since 1999. And Musharraf did this apprehending Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s judgment nullifying his recent “election” as the president of Pakistan. Pakistan is the first and only country in the world having a serving general as its “elected” president. Consequently, Musharraf has become more of a power-hungry despot than an ally in the American War on Terror. His recent deals with Islamist extremists in northwestern Pakistan have tarnished his image as an upholder of “moderate Islam” as well.
Not only Condoleezza Rice has considered Musharraf’s latest act “highly regrettable”, registering America’s aversion to this anti-democratic move, but Britain, Canada and Australia among others, have also condemned this re-imposition of martial law.
The Supreme Court is unwilling to endorse this unconstitutional move despite Musharraf’s installing a corruption-tainted Justice Hamid Dogar as the Chief Justice. Cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has demanded death penalty for Musharraf’s “treason”. Interestingly, Benazir Bhutto, seemingly in alliance with Musharraf, rushed back to Pakistan soon after the declaration of the emergency, urging the US to apply the “regime change” policy towards Pakistan. One is not sure how Musharraf is going to react to her open invitation to the US to topple his regime and if the General remains as obdurate as before. The least likely scenario is a mass upsurge to overthrow the regime.
Without endorsing the sweeping assertions by some analysts that the US embassy in Islamabad had “green-lighted” the coup to prevent the “pro-Taliban” Justice Chaudhry from de-legitimizing Musharraf as the elected president, we may speculate no direct US intervention to reverse the process. We may agree with Teresita Schaffer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies that despite “a lot of visible wringing of hand” Washington is not going to abandon Musharraf notwithstanding his causing so much embarrassment for the US administration. And as before, Musharraf is likely to take full advantage of American dependency on him as its most dependable ally in its War on Terror. In a country, and especially in the turbulent northwestern region, where Bin Laden is more popular than Bush, and where anti-American sentiment is escalating for various reasons including the perceived US endorsement of Musharraf’s dictatorship, the US simply cannot afford to dump the dictator without ensuring the support of a viable alternative ally in Islamabad.
Meanwhile Senator Joseph R. Biden, chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wants the US taking away F-16 fighter jets and other military equipment from Pakistan if the Musharraf regime does not withdraw the emergency rule. He wants Musharraf to understand “that our [US] patience wasn’t unlimited” with him. It is, however, too early to foretell if Democratic Senator Biden will have his way.
Pakistan being the third largest recipient of US aid after Israel and Egypt and its armed forces being the biggest beneficiaries of US aid ($10 billion since the Nine-Eleven), there is no reason to expect that the military will ever stop exploiting the ongoing Islamist insurgency in the country and adjoining Afghanistan to undermine its “indispensability” as the defender of freedom. One has every reason to believe that as part of the Taliban-al-Qaeda insurgencies and terror is a reality, part of it is a creation of the Pakistani military to justify its superordinate position as rulers of the country. The military is running billions of dollars worth business conglomerates in the country, where generals are worth millions of dollars each, as documented by Ayesha Siddiqa in Military Inc. Consequently, the military’s handing over power to any civil government is far fetched. It would need more than international condemnation and Pakistani civil society’s feeble verbal or written denunciations to unseat the military.
In sum, we may single out the “Pakistan Syndrome”, which stands for the supremacy of the military-civil bureaucracy with the ever-growing influence of the mullah, for the prevalent chaos in the country. The Pakistani experience could be a good lesson for other Muslim majority countries that the promotion of mullahs, Shariah, Islamism or Political Islam, even out of political expediency, could be disastrous for a liberal democracy. General Zia ul-Haq’s assiduous cultivation of the mullah-military nexus to legitimize his rule while the US desperately needed Pakistan to contain the Soviet Union in Afghanistan may be cited here. And the rest is history. Ironically Musharraf is exploiting the US portraying himself as its best ally in its War on Terror. Apparently, he seems to be fortunate enough to be surrounded by thousands of Islamist terrorists who turned him into their “common enemy” along with George Bush. One may, however, surmise that as Musharraf’s cry wolf has so far brought rich dividends for him, it could also spell disaster for his regime and eventually for Pakistan. If the table is turned, some Islamist generals take over the country (some estimate as high as thirty percent Pakistani troops as pro-al Qaeda), one is not sure who would be eventually controlling the turbulent country and its nuclear arsenal. Can the world afford to be in the wait-and-see mode for an indefinite period?
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