What Musharraf could not abide

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What Musharraf could not abide

By H.D.S. Greenway

November 13, 2007

FOR THE United States - and especially for President Bush, who holds such romantic ideas about the transformative powers of democracy - the sight of an ally in the war on terror beating up prodemocracy demonstrators in the streets of Pakistan, arresting lawyers and rival politicians, and dismissing supreme court justices holds a special disappointment. For the world desperately needs a secular Pakistan in the field against Islamic extremism. But when its leader turns on the very institutions that underpin a secular democratic society, then it is the extremists who are most likely to benefit.

When Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf declared his unconstitutional state of emergency, he seemed to be appealing directly to the United States, begging for patience from those who had had a couple of centuries to build their democratic institutions. He said his state of emergency was a temporary and necessary step in the struggle against extremists.

Musharraf has a point when he says that Pakistan's democracy has not yet formed a more perfect union. Its army has long had too much power, and is far too involved with civic, political, and economic life. Feudal landlords, too, control too many votes.

He is right that Islamic extremism is a rising danger, not just in its cross-border operations against the vulnerable American-backed government of Afghanistan, but against Pakistan itself. Suicide bombings and takeovers of mosques and government buildings are a growing problem.

The Pakistani army has taken considerable casualties fighting tribal forces and religious extremists, but alarmingly, many units have surrendered without firing a shot, saying that this is not their fight. Much more of the same could prove fatal to the army's morale. And Musharraf himself has had close calls from would-be assassins since he threw his lot in with the Americans.

There is a low-level but worrisome nationalist insurrection in Baluchistan, which has never been very happy with Islamabad's rule. In Pakistan's northwest, the Taliban are increasingly becoming the militia of the Pashtun people who, thanks to British colonial cartography, straddle both sides of the border and make up some 40 percent of the Afghan population. Not everybody in Pakistan's security services is reconciled to Musharraf's turn against the Taliban, and the Afghan government blames Pakistan for letting insurgents freely cross the border. But then much of the border is so wild as to be uncontrollable, and the Kabul government has not been entirely successful in making the Pashtun feel included in the new Afghanistan.

It is true, too, that Osama bin Laden is most likely somewhere on the Pakistan side of the frontier. But then the Americans couldn't catch him when he was in Afghanistan, and the Pakistanis have helped arrest several high-level Al Qaeda lieutenants.

Civilian politicians and parties have regularly let the Pakistani people down. Both Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf's immediate predecessor, Nawaz Sharif, left Pakistan mired in corruption and decline, which Musharraf helped reverse.

Musharraf bettered relations with India, and his American-trained prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, has turned around a failing economy into one of the economic success stories of the developing world.

It is also true, as Harvard terrorism expert Jessica Stern has pointed out, that democracy is not always the best tool for fighting terrorists, and that too many countries fall into a sort of halfway place that neither fulfills the demands of fighting extremism nor expresses the will of the people. And hanging over all this is the nightmare of Pakistan's nuclear technology falling into the wrong hands, as it did before Musharraf put a stop to it.

But for all of that, Musharraf did not suspend Pakistan's constitution because of Islamic extremism, but because of his obsession with Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Musharraf most certainly feared that the court would not confirm his election as president while he remained in army uniform, but his grievance with the justice was broader than that. The court under Chaudhry, a stubborn Baluchi, showed an independence of mind that Musharraf couldn't abide. His previous attempt to rid himself of this turbulent jurist ended in the embarrassment of having Chaudhry reinstated, and Musharraf lost lots and lots of face.

As of this writing, Musharraf seems willing to compromise on the date of upcoming elections, but not on the supreme court. The justices are gone, he says, and with them he may be planting the seeds of his own fall. History is full of leaders who once did much good, but whose ambitions took them too far on the road to perfidy.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

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