Pakistan's
Problems Start At The Top
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
21 November, 2007
LA
Times
Gen.
Pervez Musharraf seized power in Pakistan eight years ago, claiming
that the army had to step in to save the country from corrupt and incompetent
politicians. Since then, he has run both the army and the government
himself, with the connivance of a rubber-stamp Parliament put in place
through rigged elections. His rule has proved to be a dismal failure,
creating more problems than those it set out to solve.
Earlier this month, with
opposition to his regime growing and the courts about to rule that he
could not legally be president, Musharraf chose to suspend the constitution
and impose emergency rule. He dismissed the Supreme Court and arrested
the judges, replacing them with judges who will bend to his will. He
blocked all independent television channels and threatened to punish
the news media if it disparaged him or the army. His police arrested
thousands of lawyers and pro-democracy activists. He ordered that civilians
be tried in closed military courts. This is what is necessary, he said,
to save Pakistan from a rapidly growing Islamist insurgency.
But no one should believe
him.
It is true that over the
last decade Islamist militants -- Pakistani Taliban nurtured in madrasas
along the Afghan border -- have grown stronger and widened their reach.
Each day brings news that the government's security forces have surrendered
to Taliban fighters without firing a shot. Flaunting its strength, the
Taliban has released many of these soldiers -- and even paid their way
home. Other prisoners, especially Shiites, have been beheaded and their
corpses mutilated.
Musharraf's government and
his army have been woefully unsuccessful at handling this insurgency.
They have lost control in many areas bordering Afghanistan and in the
North-West Frontier Province. Earlier this month, the militants took
over a third town in the Swat valley, only half a day's ride from the
capital, Islamabad, while others captured the Pakistan-Austria Training
Institute for Hotel Management in Charbagh.
Across the country, Islamists
have taken over public buildings, forced local government officials
to flee and promised to bring law and order. A widely available Taliban-made
video shows the bodies of criminals dangling from electricity poles
in the town of Miranshah, the administrative headquarters of North Waziristan.
The militants have even made
their first major foray into the capital. From January to July of this
year, the government allowed heavily armed extremists sympathetic to
Al Qaeda and the Taliban to freely function out of Islamabad's Red Mosque.
It is less than two miles from Musharraf's official residence at President
House, from parliament and from the much-vaunted Inter-Services Intelligence
headquarters. But the authorities were nowhere to be seen as armed vice-and-virtue
squads sent out by the Islamists kidnapped prostitutes, burned CDs and
videos, forced women to wear burkas and demanded that city laws be bent
to their will. The government sent in clerics and politicians sympathetic
to the militants as negotiators, and made one concession after another.
Amid growing public and international
demands to act, Musharraf finally sent in special troops. The military
action turned Islamabad into a war zone. When the smoke from rocket-propelled
grenades and heavy machine guns had cleared, more than 117 people (the
official count) were dead, many of them girls from a neighboring seminary.
Mullahs promised revenge, and it began shortly afterward in a wave of
suicide bombings across the country that has claimed hundreds of lives.
Why has Musharraf failed
so dramatically to stop the insurgency? One reason is that most of the
public is hostile to government action against the extremists (and the
rest offer tepid support at best). Most Pakistanis see the militants
as America's enemy, not their own. The Taliban is perceived as the only
group standing up against the unwelcome American presence in the region.
Some forgive the Taliban's excesses because it is cloaked in the garb
of religion. Pakistan, they reason, was created for Islam, and the Taliban
is merely asking for Pakistan to be more Islamic.
Even normally vocal, urban,
educated Pakistanis -- those whose values and lifestyles would make
them eligible for decapitation if the Taliban were to succeed in taking
the cities -- are strangely silent. Why? Because they see Musharraf
and the Pakistan army as unworthy of support, both for blocking the
path to democracy and for secretly supporting the Taliban as a means
of countering Indian influence in Afghanistan.
There is merit to this view.
Army rule for 30 of Pakistan's 60 years as a country has left a terrible
legacy. The army is huge, well-equipped, armed now with nuclear weapons
and ballistic missiles and has perhaps the world's richest generals.
Sitting or retired army officers govern provinces, run government agencies,
administer universities, manage banks and make breakfast cereals.
Military rule has also created
a class of dependent politicians who understand that cutting a deal
with the army is the passage to power. For them, public office is an
opportunity not to govern but to gain privilege and wealth for themselves,
their relatives and their friends. Meanwhile, barely half of Pakistan's
people can read and write, and one-third live below the poverty line.
The ties between the military
and the Islamic militants are also well known. For more than 25 years,
the army has nurtured Islamist radicals as proxy warriors for covert
operations on Pakistan's borders in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Various
army chiefs honed a strategy that juggled their relationship with the
U.S. against the demands of local intelligence chiefs, and of mullahs,
tribal leaders, politicians and fortune seekers who have contacts with
the militants. Radical groups are encouraged. As they grow and start
to slip out of control, these groups are tolerated and appeased to keep
them loyal. When interests inevitably clash, a military crackdown follows.
The innocent are caught in the crossfire.
If Pakistan is to fight and
win the war against the Taliban, it will need to mobilize both its people
and the state. Musharraf's recent declaration of emergency will only
make this much harder.
In the short term, Pakistan's
current political crisis may be managed by having Musharraf resign --
both as president and as head of the army. And before he does so, he
must also restore the judiciary and constitution, lift the curbs on
the media, free all political prisoners and set up a caretaker government.
These are the necessary conditions for holding free and fair elections.
Credibility of elections
requires that former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif
-- whatever one might think of their personal integrity -- both be included
among the contestants. Bhutto loudly announced in Washington that she
will take on Al Qaeda and the Taliban as her first priority, whereas
Sharif is closer to the Islamic parties. But, as their past tenures
suggest, if elected, realpolitik will force both to act similarly.
Only a freely chosen and
representative government can win public support for taking on the Taliban.
But to do this, it will need to begin addressing the larger, long-term
political, social and economic problems facing Pakistan. The country
must seek a more normal relationship with India. Only then can the army
be cut down to size and Pakistan free itself from the massive military
expenditures and the nuclear weapons that burden it. It must address
the grievous regional inequalities that feed resentment against Islamabad.
The government must push to provide basic needs and sustainable livelihoods
to the rural and urban poor. It must offer people hope.
Pervez Hoodbhoy teaches at Quaid-e-Azam University
in Islamabad.
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