Pakistan totters

In Pakistan, people tend to have opinions, unsupported, or should one say unhindered, by facts. This astonishing ability to show no interest in facts is even more manifest when it comes to seminal events that have rocked the nation since its birth. Take 1971 for example. This elemental trauma did not lead to introspection or analysis, but to myths and myth-making. And yet if anyone were interested in an explanation of the breakup of Pakistan, all he would need to do is read the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report and Hasan Zaheer’s The Separation of East Pakistan, published in 1995 and, regrettably, read by few. It is an authentic piece of research and none of the facts it records are open to question. As Pakistan totters on the edge of another abyss, can one hope that General Musharraf will not have history repeat itself?

Lawyers against the general

The Economist 2007-11-08

However Pervez Musharraf tries to justify his actions, this is a dark time for his wretched country

Within 48 hours of launching his second coup on November 3rd, General Pervez Musharraf had compared himself to Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte. Like America's president—he told Pakistanis in a televised address, shortly after he had suspended the constitution—he had been forced to intervene to prevent his country falling apart. “I will not let this country commit suicide,” he said.

General Musharraf's identification with the little French corporal seemed more apposite. Pakistan is certainly unstable. In the past month alone, hundreds have been killed in political violence, Islamist insurgency and terrorism, including at least five suicide-bombs. Yet the general, an unpopular and now clearly illegitimate dictator, is one cause of this strife. Unlike Lincoln, he intervened to save not his country but his skin.

On his order, the Supreme Court and provincial high courts have been suspended. Dozens of dissident judges have been purged. The chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, a popular and cussed opponent of the general, is under house arrest. An artful friend of the general, Abdul Hamid Doger, now has his job. Private TV news channels have been taken off the air. Critics of the army or General Musharraf face a new penalty of three years in prison. Political gatherings are banned.

At least 2,000 lawyers, political activists, human-rights workers and journalists have been detained. They include famous opponents of army rule, including Asma Jehangir, a former UN special rapporteur. In an e-mail from house arrest, where she has been placed for 90 days, Ms Jehangir supposed that General Musharraf had “lost his marbles”. The leaders of most opposition parties are also in the clink or in hiding. Speaking from a secret place, Ahsan Iqbal, the mouthpiece of Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League (N) party, claimed that as many as 2,400 of his party workers had been rounded up.

General Musharraf calls this a state of emergency: a constitutional provision that allows for the suspension of some rights. Experts disagree. “The constitution does not provide for its own extinction. This is martial law,” said Salman Raja, one of Pakistan's finest constitutional lawyers, educated at Cambridge and Harvard—and detained in Model Town police station, Lahore.

Perhaps unwittingly, General Musharraf confessed to 80 foreign diplomats in Islamabad on November 5th that his intervention was merely a matter of self-preservation. He was re-elected president last month by his supporters in Parliament, and had been due to be re-sworn for another five-year term on November 15th. A general election was due to follow in January. But his candidacy had been challenged in the Supreme Court on the ground that a serving soldier cannot be a presidential candidate. The judges were rumoured to be preparing to deliver their verdict this week.

It would have been remarkable if they had decided against the general. During a history of on-off military rule—including four uniformed dictators—Pakistani judges have almost invariably bent to the army's bidding. Yet General Musharraf's case might have required an especially painful contortion. Under the constitution, army officers must swear that “I will not engage myself in any political activities whatsoever.” And at the time when Mr Chaudhry had struck a spark of judicial independence on the Supreme Court, the judges might have read this as plain English. That, at least, was General Musharraf's fear.

Bully that he is, the general told the diplomats to thank Mr Chaudhry for his coup. He was then asked by Britain's envoy to confirm that he would nonetheless quit the army and hold an election as promised. General Musharraf said he aimed to do these things. But he could not say when. A stickler for legal process—a curious trait in a two-time coupster—he said he feared that by seizing power he had introduced “legal complications” into his disrobing.

Meanwhile, the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, suggested that the election could be put off for a year. His colleagues in the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q) (PML(Q)) party, a gang of chancers recruited to give a parliamentary stamp of approval to the general's edicts, added to the confusion. The party's leader, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, predicted that the election would be held on time. On November 8th, however, General Musharraf was reported to have promised the election by February 15th. Mr Chaudry's main rival, Mr Sharif, a bitter foe of the general who was exiled to Saudi Arabia in September, has been especially damaged by the coup. The Supreme Court was almost certain to rule that he must be allowed back to contest the election. This is now hard to imagine.

A troublesome judge

In Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Multan this week, crowds of up to 2,000 lawyers have rallied against General Musharraf's coup. Wearing black suits and sleek moustaches and chanting nicely-worded slogans (“Dictatorship? Not acceptable!”), they are the general's main opponents. And so they have been since March, when General Musharraf first sacked Mr Chaudhry. On that occasion, the chief justice was surprisingly reinstated by his fellow judges after tens of thousands of lawyers protested. By taking the extra precaution of demolishing the Supreme Court bench, General Musharraf will now believe he has rid himself of a troublesome judge.

But he has not heard the last of him. On November 6th, in a speech broadcast to lawyers protesting in Islamabad, Mr Chaudhry called for popular resistance to his ouster. Speaking from house arrest, he said: “The constitution has been ripped to shreds. The lawyers should convey my message to the people to rise up and restore the constitution.”

With baton charges, and a whiff of tear-gas, the police are trying to quash the dissent. Hundreds of lawyers have been thrashed in the streets. This strategy, orchestrated by the army's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, seems to be working. Despite wide hostility towards General Musharraf and admiration for Mr Chaudhry, the Pakistani masses have shown no inclination to rise up—so far.

Almost all of those detained belong to the tiny, politically active portion of Pakistani society that tends to be arrested in such times. Monstrous as this is, they can usually find friends to help them wriggle out of trouble—unlike the hapless poor. In a typical scene, in front of the Supreme Court in Islamabad, a small crowd of slogan-chanting lawyers, including several well-groomed women wearing expensive sunglasses, took turns to get bundled into the back of a police van. From there they flashed victory salutes to assembled photographers. It will take more than this to trouble the general and his spies.

On November 6th Benazir Bhutto, leader of the opposition Pakistan People's Party (PPP), added her voice to Mr Chaudhry's: “I appeal to the nation to join the protest and show their power.” If she means it, General Musharraf may be in trouble. The PPP is Pakistan's biggest party, and the only one likely to rally huge crowds. Last month, 200,000 people turned out in Karachi to welcome Miss Bhutto home from self-imposed exile.

Yet it is unclear how seriously Miss Bhutto means to resist the general. She has been negotiating to share power with him, offering her party's support in return for a fair election and other boons. Indeed her homecoming was a sign of a tentative accommodation. It followed General Musharraf's grant to Miss Bhutto of an amnesty against corruption charges relating to her two terms as prime minister. (In a typical Pakistani stitch-up, the amnesty also covered army officers, bureaucrats and heads of public companies, for crimes seen and unseen; it does not apply to Mr Sharif.)

Benazir's dance

Miss Bhutto's rally in Karachi provided a second reason for scepticism about her clarion call. It was interrupted by twin suicide-bomb blasts that killed 150 people. Taliban militants in north-western Pakistan were probably to blame. They had threatened to kill Miss Bhutto, and presumably they still mean to. This gives the government another excuse to ban her meetings. In issuing her call, Miss Bhutto declared that a rally scheduled to welcome her to Rawalpindi on November 9th would become a demonstration against General Musharraf's coup and go ahead in defiance of a government ban.

Given such obstacles, despite her livid words, Miss Bhutto may yet conclude that the path of token resistance remains her safest way to power. Indeed the current hiatus could even work to her advantage. Since returning to Pakistan, her negotiations with General Musharraf have stalled. Besides her amnesty, she wants guarantees that General Musharraf and his spooks will not rig the election against her, as is their wont. These include the suspension of corruptly-elected local officials and a clean-up of the electoral commission, which is stuffed with the general's men. Miss Bhutto also wants the general to lift a ban on third-term prime ministers.

General Musharraf intends to give Miss Bhutto none of these things. And his supporters in the PML(Q), many of whom loathe Miss Bhutto both personally and ideologically, are determined that he should not. Yet they cannot hope to form another government without fresh allies. And there are few eligible candidates for this role. Mr Sharif and General Musharraf are unacceptable to each other. An alliance of Islamists, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which once backed the general, is unacceptable to his Western friends. It is also enraged by a bloody, and so far disastrous, army campaign against Taliban militants in north-western Pakistan, a semi-autonomous Pushtun tribal region. So Miss Bhutto, if she remains willing, it may be. But if so, she will hope that the general is so disgraced by the current mayhem that he will have to accept her terms.

America will be crucial in this. It has backed the general devoutly since 2001, when he withdrew Pakistan's support from Afghanistan's Taliban government. It has blessed his regime with nearly $11 billion in aid, most of it military. And it now fears it may need his martial leadership more than ever. In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, interconnected Taliban insurgencies and jihadist terrorism are flourishing. On November 6th a suicide blast in northern Afghanistan killed around 40 people, including six members of Parliament—the country's worst such atrocity.

Yet these dreadful setbacks have persuaded America that its problems in Afghanistan are more long-term, and regional, than it had previously thought. Neither Afghanistan not Pakistan can be passably stable while Pakistan is so divided. And greater unity will require more legitimate government than it has enjoyed under General Musharraf. America's strong suggestion has therefore been that General Musharraf should indeed join hands with Miss Bhutto, leader of the most liberal political party, and nudge Pakistan towards democracy.

A search for leverage

His coup is therefore a direct affront to his most generous supporter. Only two days before he launched it, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, personally warned General Musharraf not to do so. She has since told him publicly to quit the army and hold the election as promised, or risk a cut in American cash. On November 6th President George Bush added his own unprecedented chastisement of the general, and called him the next day to deliver the message that there should be elections as soon as possible. The president, he said, “should remove his military uniform”.

America is not short of potential leverage over the coupster. Its walloping aid to his regime includes $5.6 billion given in cash transfers to the Pakistani defence ministry from a war-chest known as the Coalition Support Fund (CSF). This money is intended to underwrite the costs of his four-year campaign in the tribal areas, a crucial American concern. Yet it is nonetheless extraordinarily munificent, with no strings or stringent accounting requirements. If America wanted to give the general serious pause, it might add both. But this is unlikely to happen.

To appreciate why, consider another contest over Pakistan's future. On November 4th, as the ISI was rounding up human-rights activists, it released an aspiring suicide-bomber. His name is Sohail Zeb. He is a 22-year-old from Tank, a town adjoining the tribal agency of South Waziristan, and he was sentenced to 24 years in jail last month after being arrested with two suicide belts. Mr Zeb was one of 25 Taliban militants quietly returned to their commander, Baitullah Mehsud. In exchange, Mr Mehsud released over 200 Pakistani soldiers, including officers, who surrendered to his fighters in August.

It is hard to exaggerate what a fiasco this is. Mr Mehsud controls a vast terrain in South Waziristan, a tribal agency bordering Afghanistan. Western and Pakistani intelligence officials say he has sent many fighters, via Pakistan's Baluchistan province, to attack NATO peacekeepers in Afghanistan; he is also believed to shelter foreign and local terrorists. Indeed, it was Mr Mehsud who threatened to kill Miss Bhutto. Yet the army, which has deployed 92,000 troops to the tribal agencies and adjacent areas of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), is not trying to kill Mr Mehsud. It is trying to restore a formal ceasefire agreement that it made with him in 2005.

This is crazy. Even by the standards of his violent and radicalised area, Mr Mehsud is a very bad egg. Yet it reflects a broader confusion about the border region that is not easy to address. In North and South Waziristan, the army's campaign, American-designed and American-funded, has been a disaster. It has delivered prestige (and thus power) to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of local militants schooled on jihad in Afghanistan, against first Soviet and then American invaders. The local administration, always fragile, has been swept away. The army, trained to fight tank battles against Indians on the plains of Punjab, is at a loss. It has tried fighting the militants and it has made deals with them. Either way, it has failed to secure the rugged border or maintain order inside it. And meanwhile the Taliban's appeal is spreading deeper into Pakistan.

Losing to Mullah Radio

In the tourism area of Swat, formerly famous for honeymooners and the site of Pakistan's only ski-lift, 2,500 troops were dispatched last month to sort out an irksome local mullah, Fazalullah. This followed a suicide blast against a police truck in the local town of Mingora, on October 26th, that left 21 dead. Alas, the army seems to have been routed. On November 3rd Fazalullah, who is known as Mullah Radio after his jihad-inspired broadcasts, released 45 soldiers captured in the fight. In interviews with local journalists, some said they would not kill their Pushtun brothers. On November 6th Fazalullah's fighters seized their third Swati town, in the process capturing another 40 soldiers and police. At least four police have meanwhile been found beheaded, along with notes accusing them of being American spies.

At Fazalullah's headquarters, a pretty riverside village called Imam Dheri, is a vast half-built mosque where the mullah is reported to draw congregations of 5,000 people. Outside it, long-haired militants took a pause from battle to rest, pray and feast. Munching on rice, a militant called Muhammad Rahim regretted the beheadings; he blamed them on local villagers in an “emotional frenzy”.

So long as jihadism thrives, on the internet, anywhere, it is hard to imagine such places being tamed. Even a sustained army campaign, which is essential, may fail as long as non-Muslim armies remain in Afghanistan. And though it would help if Pakistan's government were more broad-based and trusted, that is no magic solution. The PPP, for example, has little support in NWFP or the tribal areas.

Blundering, incompetent and compulsively dictatorial as General Musharraf has turned out to be, this is why America is unlikely to withdraw much support from him. It fears his successor might abandon the fight against militancy altogether. The limit of American hopes is to see him hold an election, almost certainly rigged, which may throw up a worthier ally for the autocrat. For Pakistanis, it is hard to know which, hope or fear, is more distressing.