TARIQ, ali - The Duel

by Ali, Tariq

  THE CRISIS IN Baluchistan dented Bhutto’s standing in the country. Through this inability to cope with the real problems of the new Pakistan, the PPP demonstrated its futility. Many felt that the tragic lessons of Bengal had not been learned. It was back to business as usual, but this time under a civilian autocrat. State television projected Bhutto as it had Field Marshal Ayub. The print media was kept under strict surveillance, and internal debates and discussion were being actively discouraged inside the Peoples Party. The word of the leader was sufficient. This led to some resignations and, later, police repression against PPP dissidents. It was a confession of political bankruptcy. Had inner-party democracy prevailed, Bhutto as well as his party and the country would have benefited greatly. Instead the intelligence agencies were strengthened and given free range to spy and report back on the activities of rival political parties.

  Bhutto had derived all his nightmares and fears from his experience as a cabinet minister in Field Marshal Ayub’s government. He was aware of how the intelligence agencies tortured opponents and, on rare occasions, killed political prisoners. He had observed firsthand the ironfisted feudal and backward Nawab of Kalabagh, Ayub’s governor in West Pakistan, treating the province as a fiefdom. In his own villages, Kalabagh did not permit schools lest the peasants get ideas above their station. Bhutto feared but also respected his authoritarian style.

  Instead of making a clean break with this past, Bhutto molded it to serve his own political needs. He did so not out of a conscious desire to mimic Ayub or Kalabagh, but because he feared the rise of a new opposition. Deeply insecure psychologically, he saw imaginary enemies everywhere. Self-defense, self-love, self-preservation, and sycophancy became the overpowering characteristics of his administration. None of this was necessary. Not even his enemies disputed that he was the most gifted political leader that the country had ever produced. Intellectually he was light-years ahead of any general or politician. His grasp of world politics was based on a deep reading of history. He had studied international law under Hans Kelsen at Berkeley, and both in California and at Oxford his precociousness left a mark on his tutors. The tragedy was in his imagining that his intellectual superiority made him infallible, and this made him his own worst enemy. The majority of his supporters were poor. What they wanted, above all, was an equality of opportunity for their children. Even if this craving was difficult to satisfy immediately, a start could have been made and the foundations laid for modernizing the country. There was to be no beginning, and so when the end came, all that people remembered was a courageous individual who had spoken on their behalf against their traditional oppressors. They understood that this was important, but also knew that it was not enough. On one occasion in Larkana, his hometown in Sind, peasant leaders and activists came to speak with him. For a whole hour they poured out their bitterness about promises he had made and not kept and how PPP landlords were not interested in implementing any reforms. Bhutto heard them out and then asked, “Now tell me this and be completely honest. Can you think of any other prime minister who would have met you and sat quietly listening to your complaints?” The peasant leaders laughed and cheered and the meeting came to an end.

  They deserved better. The generation that had propelled Bhutto to power contained enormous reserves: it was rich in political passion, generous, idealistic, and this allowed it to visualize a better future for everyone. Morally exhausted now by the events in Bengal, silencing self-doubts and surfing on the wave of chauvinism promoted from above, the poor still hoped that conditions would change for the better in what was left of their country. They were disappointed. The predicament of Pakistan has never been that of an enlightened leadership marooned in a sea of primitive people. It has usually been the opposite.

  What of the defeated army? It was not uncommon in those days to encounter a street wisdom: if only Bhutto had executed six or seven generals, all would have been well. Even if this had been desirable, how could Bhutto have ordered such an act? He had, after all, supported the military intervention in East Pakistan. Had he agreed to participate in the National Assembly after the 1970 elections and had he accepted Mujib as the prime minister of the country, it would have been difficult for the army to intervene. Had they done so, then West Pakistan too might have risen in arms, and that would have created a completely different situation. Soldiers encouraged to rape Bengali women and shoot Bengali civilians might have been more restrained in the Punjab, from where they had come.

  The majority view in the Punjab was that drunk and incompetent generals combined with an Indian military intervention had lost them Pakistan. As I have argued, this was a simplistic and chauvinist view that ignored the structural exploitation of East Bengal by a predominantly West Pakistan–based elite. Given his own position on the conflict, Bhutto could not have tried the generals for treason and executed them, but he could certainly have transformed the basic structure of the colonial army by drastically reducing its size and instituting a more democratic command structure. There would have been widespread support for any such change in 1972–73.

  Instead, and in keeping with his character, Bhutto tinkered with the army by retiring some senior generals and favoring others. He appointed General Tikka Khan, a “hero” of the war against Bengal, as the new commander in chief, and on his retirement in 1976, he leapfrogged Zia-ul-Haq over the heads of five senior generals and appointed him as army chief. Bhutto regarded him as a loyal simpleton. This was inaccurate, but even if it had been true, it would not have mattered much. To concentrate on the personnel rather than reforming the institution was a fatal error. Bhutto paid for it with his life. The country continues to suffer.

  Far from being a useful idiot, Zia always reminded me of Dickens’s inspired creation Uriah Heep, the hideous clerk in David Copperfield. A hypocrite whose body language stressed his humbleness while masking his ambition. His closest general-in-arms, K. M. Arif, referred to him without irony as “a practicing Muslim, he was a model of humility.” General Saeed Qadir, another close colleague, listed “humbleness” as one of his boss’s positive attributes and “hypocrisy” as one of his weaknesses, failing to link one to the other. Like many of his more senior colleagues, Zia had come of age in the British Indian army. Born in Jullundhur in 1924 and educated in Delhi, he moved to Pakistan after partition and was fond of stressing his “humble origins” in contrast to those who hailed from the gentry. Nor was he ever hesitant in praising the leader who had entrusted him with command of the army.

  After training at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas during the early sixties, Brigadier Zia-ul-Haq was dispatched to Jordan in late 1968 to help train the locals in the art of suppressing popular uprisings. The target in this case were the Palestinians, who comprised a majority of the country’s population and were in a turbulent mood after the sixday Israeli blitzkrieg in June 1967 had destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian armies, occupied large tracts of Palestine and Gaza, and delivered a fatal blow to Arab nationalism, which never recovered. The Palestinians realized they had to fight for themselves and correctly perceived Jordan as a weak link. The monarchy had become extremely unpopular after the Israeli triumph, and its overthrow would have provided the Palestinians with a state. It was not to be. In September 1970, Zia led the Jordanian troops to crush the Palestinian uprising. Between five and seven thousand Palestinians were killed. General Moshe Dayan noted that King Hussein “killed more Palestinians in eleven days than Israel could kill in twenty years.” The month became known as Black September. Zia was awarded the highest Jordanian honor and returned home in triumph. Soon afterward he was promoted and posted as a corp commander in Kharian, a military city in the Punjab. According to friends, the Black September operation was one aspect of his past that he would never discuss, but clearly it was treated as a routine operation even by Bhutto, who publicly defended the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

  The poor may have felt instinctively that Bhutto was on their side (the elite never forgave him for encouraging
this view and for the nationalizations), but few measures were ever enacted to justify their confidence. His style of government was authoritarian; his personal vindictiveness was corrosive. Under his watch the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) set up the notorious “election cell” to help the government “win” elections by threatening opposition candidates and ensuring that local bureaucrats rigged the ballot in favor of the government. This desperate opportunism created the basis for what followed after him. He attempted to fight the religious opposition by stealing their clothes: he banned the sale of alcohol, made Friday a public holiday, and declared the Ahmediyya sect to be non-Muslim (a long-standing demand of the Jamaat-e-Islami that had, till then, been treated by most politicians with contempt). By accepting the battleground determined by his enemies, he was bound to lose. These measures did not help him, but damaged the country by legitimizing confessional politics.

  What a contrast this was to the mood in 1972 when Bhutto had addressed a giant rally in Lahore. He habitually carried a silver flask containing whiskey that he would mix with water and sip at public meetings. On this occasion a well-orchestrated group of Islamist militants strategically placed stood up the minute he mixed his drink and started shouting, “What are you drinking?” Bhutto held up the glass and replied, “Sherbet.” The crowd laughed. The indignant hecklers were enraged. “Look, people,” they said, “your leader is drinking sharab [liquor] not sherbet.” An angry Bhutto roared back, “Fine. I am drinking sharab. Unlike you sisterfuckers I don’t drink the blood of our people.” The people rose to their feet and chanted in Punjabi, “Long may our Bhutto live, long may our Bhutto drink.”

  • • •

  FEW PAKISTANI politicians were as obsessed with world politics as was Bhutto. All his knowledge was put to the test soon after he came to power in a truncated state crippled by defeat. Bhutto successfully concluded an agreement with Mrs. Gandhi in Simla that led to the release of ninety thousand Pakistan soldiers taken prisoner after the 1971 surrender in Dhaka. Soon after, he organized the Islamic Summit in Lahore, whose main function was to make the recognition of Bangladesh palatable to the army, but this was not enough to silence the self-doubt and fill the vacuum left by the loss of East Bengal. Pakistan’s survival as a nation, Bhutto now decided, was dependent on nuclear parity with India.

  “We will eat grass for a thousand years,” he had shouted at a public meeting in Rawalpindi after India announced its first nuclear test, “but we will make the bomb.” He knew perfectly well which section of the population would dine on grass for a millennium, but felt that a new Pakistan required a sense of pride and achievement. Unable to deliver food, clothing, education, health, and shelter, he would work hard at giving the people a bomb. This was to be the cornerstone of a new Pakistani nationalism that had not been possible before the amputation of Bengal. It was a deadly decision.

  The plan to acquire a nuclear device could only be carried out nocturnally, under cover of a total information blackout and with Bhutto as the presiding genius. He saw this as a supreme and redeeming act. It was all meant to be a secret, but an early meeting with the country’s physicists could not have taken place in a more inappropriate location, of the sort that Bhutto usually favored for clandestine trysts. It was on the estate of Nawab Sadiq Hussain Qureshi, a large landlord in Multan. The city was known for the delicacy and sweetness of its mangoes, a burning-hot wind that blew in the summer months, Sufi shrines, and a tradition of exquisite tile-making that went back to the early Mogul period. Qureshi was a recent supporter of Bhutto’s (and a second cousin of mine) and could be relied upon to maintain secrecy.

  The country’s senior scientists, less than half a dozen men, were incredulous when informed as to why they had been summoned. This was empty talk, they said to each other, a hashish-induced fantasy. Dr. I. H. Usmani, chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, was openly skeptical. He knew that India was two decades ahead of Pakistan and that “Pakistan just didn’t have the infrastructure for that kind of programme. I’m not talking about the ability to get 10kg of plutonium. I’m talking of the real infrastructure. Pakistan totally lacked a metallurgy industry. But if you’re playing political poker and have no cards, you have to go on betting.”

  Bhutto was reminded of the low standard of most of the country’s science graduates. It was impossible, he was told, he should forget it. Instead Bhutto ignored them and went over their heads to a younger, eager group of physicists, men such as Munir Ahmed Khan, Samar Mubarakmand, and Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who were hungry for success and state patronage. They were only too happy to be lured into the surrealistic enterprise by a political leader whose mind was possessed by the vision of a mushroom cloud over the Pakistani desert. Soon they would be joined by another Muslim nationalist, A. Q. Khan, a postpartition refugee from India filled with hatred for that country. These were the men who built the Pakistani bomb, and in remote Kahuta, Bhutto’s nuclear state was born. The nuclear facility remains there to this day.

  While the scientists were happily working away, Bhutto’s high-handedness in neighboring Islamabad had united all his opponents under the umbrella of the Pakistan National Alliance. An election was eagerly awaited. Despite all his mistakes Bhutto would probably have won the 1977 elections without state interference, though with a much-reduced majority. This is generally agreed. His more sycophantic adherents in the state bureaucracy and the ISI were not prepared to take any risk. The manipulation was so blatant and crude that the opposition came out on the streets, and neither Bhutto’s sarcasm nor his wit was enough to allay the crisis. Nor was the United States. Washington had always regarded Bhutto as unreliable and untrustworthy and was unimpressed by the pretensions of his flaccid party or the large crowds that came to hear him. Now it became fearful that he would acquire the bomb. It wanted him out and soon.

  In June 1977, on the verge of being toppled by the military, Bhutto told parliament, “I know the bloodhounds are after my blood,” and denounced the U.S. secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, for interfering in the internal affairs of Pakistan. In his death-cell memoir, If I Am Assassinated, he alleged that Henry Kissinger had warned him, during one of his visits to Pakistan in August 1976, that unless he desisted on the nuclear question, “We will make a horrible example out of you.” Both Kissinger and Bhutto could be economical with the truth, but the remark has recently been confirmed. A journalist in the Pakistan financial paper Business Recorder cites a senior Pakistani foreign official (on condition of anonymity) present on the occasion:

  . . . Kissinger waited for a while, and said in a cultured tone, “Basically I have come not to advise, but to warn you. USA has numerous reservations about Pakistan’s atomic programme; therefore you have no way out, except agreeing to what I say.” Bhutto smiled and asked, “Suppose I refuse, then what?” Henry Kissinger became dead serious.

  He locked his eyes on Bhutto’s and spewed out deliberately, “Then we will make a horrible example of you!” Bhutto’s face flushed. He stood up, extended his hand towards Kissinger and said, “Pakistan can live without the US President. Now your people will have to find some other ally in this region.” Bhutto then turned and went out.*

  If this is accurate, then we have to ask, what happened between February and August 1976? On February 26 that year, while Bhutto was in New York attending the United Nations, a meeting was organized with the secretary of state. The declassified memorandum of conversation offers some interesting insights. Bhutto’s attempts to offer ultraloyal advice on how the United States should have dealt with the Cuban intervention in Angola (via a firm military riposte) and related matters clearly irritated Kissinger, who asked if Bhutto had been speaking to Brzezinski. A rambling discussion on world politics and U.S. strategy follows in which the satrap expresses concern that the imperial power is seen as weak by its enemies, which is disorienting for its friends. Détente is viewed by Bhutto as having gone too far when “pipsqueak countries like Cuba” can score wins with ten thousand troops in Ang
ola. “There were twelve thousand Cubans,” corrects Kissinger as he deftly parries each thrust. It’s obvious that for him the main reason for the meeting, apart from humoring Bhutto, is the nuclear issue. As the following extract reveals, each side was aware of the other’s position, but the tone here is friendly (if occasionally servile on Bhutto’s side) and far removed from any threats:

  BHUTTO: Mr. Secretary, I am sure you like the role we played in the Middle East debate.

  THE SECRETARY (KISSINGER): Yes. That was appreciated. If I spoke vehemently on the topic of détente, Angola, and the erosion of central authority, I did so because I believe you were one of the world leaders who understands us.

  BHUTTO: After that remark I don’t want to provoke you by mentioning nuclear reactors.

  THE SECRETARY: . . . What concerns us is how reprocessing facilities are used at a certain point. I told you last year that we appreciated that you were forgoing a nuclear capability. This placed us in a good position and gave us arguments to assist you in other ways.