Author: Pervez Hoodbhoy
Publication: Los Angeles Times
Date: November 18, 2007
URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-hoodbhoy18nov18,1,2586197.story?coll=la-news-comment&ctrack=1&cset=true
Musharraf's military rule has damaged his
country's ability to fight Islamist insurgents.
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.
