TARIQ, ali - The Duel

by Ali, Tariq

  But Musharraf had underestimated the capacity of Pakistani journalists, especially a newer and younger generation untouched by the sleaze of the past, to pursue the truth. Historical crises such as the breakup of the country were, for the first time, openly discussed in the media, and the generals were confronted with hard questions. Inevitably a clamp-down followed the early loosening of censorship. The independent media’s coverage of the lawyers’ revolt was one of the primary targets of the declaration of a state of emergency in 2007. Geo, the largest network, went off the air for many months. The government introduced regulatory procedures that seriously restricted news broadcasting. Musharraf insisted that to remain on air TV news stations had to sign a code of conduct whereby journalists who ridiculed him and other government officials would be subjected to fines and prison sentences. “The media should not agitate,” Musharraf said. “It should join us in the war on terror.” He was wistfully thinking of CNN and BBC World.

  The newly elected government’s minister for information announced in April 2008 that legislation was about to be introduced to restore complete media freedom.

  The interrelationship between domestic and foreign policy in Pakistan has never been hidden. Instead of a foreign policy dependent on big powers, there should be a regional concentration on South Asia and the working out of a common approach to international relations. A rapprochement with India and the creation of a South Asian Union, a better and more coherent version of the EU, is in the long-term interests of the whole region. At a time when the United States is actively breaking up states and encouraging client nationalisms in such places as Kosovo, Croatia, and Kurdistan, regional cohesion offers a nonconfrontational solution to the Kashmir and Tamil disputes, a reduction in military expenditures, and an improvement in social standards in all countries in the area. It would also lead to a political strengthening of the region as a whole, allowing for healthier relationships with the United States and China. South Asia should not act as a buffer between these two great powers, but as a strong and independent region in its own right. Pakistan’s relations with China are an important factor in this equation. In recent years they have been symbolized by a massive Chinese investment transforming Gwadar, a small fishing port on the Makran coast in Baluchistan, into a major port. China’s vice premier, Wu Bangguo, was flown in to lay the foundation stone of the new development on March 22, 2002, four months after the U.S. occupation of Kabul. When completed later this year, Gwadar will be the largest deep-sea port in the region, providing the Chinese with an oil terminal close to the Persian Gulf, which supplies two-thirds of its energy. Some U.S. intelligence analysts are worried that Gwadar could become a Chinese naval base providing rapid access to the Indian Ocean. Such anxieties are reciprocal. With U.S. bases and armies now on China’s borders in Afghanistan, Beijing is beginning to feel the tension. This was one of the reasons that the Chinese prime minister visited Pakistan in April 2005 to sign a set of twenty-two accords that were designed to boost bilateral relations. A year later Musharraf visited Beijing. The official agenda centered on trade and counterterrorism, but Afghanistan and Pakistan’s desire for civil nuclear cooperation will have been discussed in great detail. China is regarded by many in the Pakistani military leadership as an “all-weather friend,” a more reliable strategic and noninterfering partner than Washington, which has periodically embargoed the supply of military hardware; the final restrictions were only removed after 9/11.

  The West’s current obsession with Islam is related only partially to 9/11; the larger cause is oil, the bulk of which lies underneath lands inhabited by Muslims. In considering the meanings of Islam, Western analysts would do well to recognize it for what it is: a world religion that is in no sense monolithic. Both as a religion and a culture it encompasses numerous local traditions as different from each other as those in Senegal and Indonesia, South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, the Maghreb and China. It contains all the colors of the rainbow and its culture has remained vibrant to this day. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Indonesia produced three of the finest novelists of the twentieth century, Abdelrahman Munif, Naguib Mahfouz, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. South Asia has produced poets of matchless quality, including Ghalib, Iqbal, and Faiz. Senegal and Iran have given us an auteur cinema that compares to the best once produced in Europe and often superior to Hollywood. That this has to be spelled out in the twenty-first century points to the provincialism of the West, incapable of looking beyond its own interests and unaware of the world it traduces.

  The political realm is murkier, but here also there are causes and consequences. Indonesia, the largest Muslim state in the world, once had the world’s largest Communist Party, with a million members and sympathizers. They were wiped out by General Suharto with the blessings of today’s Islamophobes.* Who crushed the Iraqi Communists with a leadership that included Sunni, Shia, Jew, and Christian? A U.S.-backed Saddam Hussein. Repression, the implosion of the Communist system, and the new economic orthodoxy produced a vacuum in many parts of the Islamic world. As a result, many turned to religion. A series of articles on Egypt in the New York Times in February 2008 highlighted middle-class unemployment as a major factor driving young people to the mosques. The same is true to a lesser extent in Pakistan. For some, religiosity eases the pain.

  As for political Islam, it too comes in different shapes and colors. NATO’s Islamists in Turkey, neoliberal to the core, are popular in the West. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt would be equally happy to work with the United States, but might disagree on Palestine, since Gaza is a neighbor. Elsewhere new forces and faces are emerging that have something in common. Muqtada, Haniya, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad: each has risen by organizing the urban poor in their localities— Baghdad and Basra, Gaza and Jenin, Beirut and Sidon, Tehran and Shiraz. It is in the slums that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sadr brigades, and the Basij have their roots. The contrast with the Hariris, Chalabis, Karzais, Allawis, on whom the West relies—overseas millionaires, crooked bankers, CIA bagmen—could not be starker. A radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth, surrounded by the fabulous wealth of petroleum. The limits of this radicalism, so long as it remains captured by the Koran, are clear enough. The impulses of charity and solidarity are infinitely better than those of imperial greed and comprador submission, but so long as what they offer is social alleviation rather than reconstruction, they are sooner or later liable to recuperation by the existing order. Leaders with a vision capable of transcending national or communal divisions, with a sense of unity and the self-confidence to broadcast it, have yet to emerge.

  There is, of course, Al Qaeda, but its importance in the general scheme of things is greatly overstated by the West. It unleashes sporadic terror attacks and kills innocents, but it does not pose any serious threat to U.S. power. It is not even remotely comparable to the anticolonial national liberation movements that tormented Britain, France, and the United States in Africa or Indochina during the last century. The current turmoil is still confined to those areas of the Middle East where for twenty years or more American power never significantly penetrated: the West Bank, Baathist Iraq, Khomeinist Iran. The real U.S. anchorage in the region lies elsewhere—in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Jordan. There, despite being Muslims, America’s traditional clients have held the line and are usually on hand to help out with regional problems. That Pakistan has been part of this group has been at its own cost.

  It is foolish to speak, as many Western commentators do, of “global Islam” being “Waziristan writ large,” when what is really meant is that the U.S./NATO war in Afghanistan is posing serious problems and that neo-Taliban groups are crossing the border and winning support in Pakistan. Referring to this phenomenon as an aspect of “global Islam” is about as accurate as referring to the judeocide of the Second World War as an aspect of “global Christianity.”

  An argument often used by Bernard Lewis is that the United States has become a scapegoat for the Mus
lim world to explain its own decline and problems. To put forward this argument at a time when the Western military or economic occupation of the Arab world, barring Syria and partially Lebanon, is virtually complete is somewhat disingenuous. The founders of Al Qaeda were incubated in Saudi Arabia and Egypt before being dispatched to wage jihad in Afghanistan by Zbigniew Brzezinski, now an adviser to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign. Pakistan’s relations with Saudi Arabia have always been close, with the cash nexus, rather than religion, playing the bigger part. But the Saudi kingdom is also close to Washington. Surely Bernard Lewis is aware that King Faisal sincerely believed that the only way to defeat Nasser and the godless Communists was by making religion the central pillar of the Saudi social order and using it ruthlessly against the enemy. Islam was under threat and had to be defended on all fronts. This pleased his allies in Washington, who were tolerant even of his decision to impose an oil embargo against the West after the 1973 war, something that has never been attempted since.

  Even after Saudi oil was fully nationalized in 1980, Washington’s politico-military elite maintained their pledge to defend the existing Saudi regime and its state whatever the cost. Why, some people asked, could the Saudi state not defend itself? The answer was because the Saud clan, living in permanent fear, was haunted by the specter of the radical nationalists who had seized power in Egypt in 1952 and in Iraq six years later. The Sauds kept the size of the national army and air force to the barest minimum to minimize the risk of a coup d’état. Many of the armaments they have purchased to please the West lie rusting peacefully in desert warehouses.

  For a decade and a half in the late 1970s and ’80s, the Pakistan army, paid for by the Saudi treasury, sent in large contingents to protect the Saudi royal family in case of internal upheavals. Then, after the first Gulf War, the American military arrived. It is still there. U.S. air bases in Saudi Arabia and Qatar were used to launch the war against Iraq. All pretense of independence had gone. The only thing the Saudi princes could do was to plead with the United States not to make public what was hardly a state secret. There was practically no TV coverage of planes taking off from Saudi Arabia bound for Iraq.

  Linked to the “scapegoating” argument is a “new” idea that is also promoted by Muslims anxious to please, mainly in the U.S. academy. The struggle, they argue, is not between Islam and the United States but within Islam itself. All this means is that with the United States strongly backing and protecting its friends in the Muslim world, those who oppose client status are fighting back. As the nationalists and the left both have been virtually eliminated, this task has now fallen to Islamist groups of differing stripes. Al Qaeda is one such group, but is a tiny minority within the House of Islam. Nor is this new. Islam has never been united.* That is one reason why it lost Sicily and Spain in the medieval period. The only time it managed to unite its armies was under the Kurdish sultan Salah ad-Din to take back Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the twelfth century and return it to its former status as a city for all three peoples of the Book.

  It is simply foolish to expect “Islam” to speak with one voice any more than Christianity or Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism. The rise of recent Islamist movements with their extremist factions is a modern phenomenon, a product of the last fifty years of world history. It’s a phase that will wither away, including in South Waziristan, if the military occupations of Muslim lands are ended. There are bigger problems in the world. To make Islam the scapegoat for U.S. foreign policy disasters is as destructive as the utilization of religion during the Cold War, when the United States itself for the first time stressed its own loyalty to religion. The reason was obvious. Religion was being used to mobilize support in the third world against the godless Communist enemy. President Truman used religion as a weapon against the Soviet Union. In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted a higher authority than itself when it ruled, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” The word religious rather than Christian was used precisely to make a common block with Muslims. President Eisenhower repeated all this in 1954: “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.”* In Pakistan and other Muslim states such as Egypt and Indonesia, the USIS openly supported the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e-Islami and their student wings. As we have seen, this process reached its climax during the first Afghan war as General Zia, backed by Washington, created, armed, and trained specialist jihadi groups to wage the war against the godless in Afghanistan. Waziristan, in those years, was global anticommunism writ large. The United States could, or so it imagined, wash its hands and retire. The Pakistani state was lumbered with this unsavory legacy. Then came the 9/11 blow-back, which, contrary to the views expressed by George W. Bush at the time, was not an attack on pure innocence by irrational evil, but the outcome of what had transpired in another epoch.

  In 2003, after a lengthy trip to Pakistan, I wrote:

  The Army is now the only ruling institution; its domination of the country is complete. How long can this be sustained? . . . The officer corps is no longer the exclusive domain of the landed gentry— a majority of officers come from urban backgrounds and are subject to the same influences and pressures as their civilian peers. Privileges have kept them loyal, but the processes that destroy politicians are already at work. Whereas in the recent past it was Nawaz Sharif and his brother, or Benazir Bhutto and her husband, who demanded kickbacks before making deals, it is now General Musharraf’s office that sanctions key projects.

  Of course, high—even stratospheric—levels of corruption are no bar to longevity, if a military regime has sufficiently intimidated its population and enjoys solid enough support in Washington, as the Suharto regime in Indonesia testifies. Can Musharraf look forward to this sort of reign? The fate of his dictatorship is likely to depend on the interaction of three main forces. First will be the degree of internal cohesion of the Army itself. Historically, it has never split—vertically or horizontally—and its discipline in following a 180-degree turn in policy towards Afghanistan, whatever the sweeteners that have accompanied it, has so far been impressive. It is not impossible that one day some patriotic officer might deliver the country of its latest tyrant, as Zia was once mysteriously sent on his way to Gehenna; but for the minute, such an ending appears improbable. Having weathered the humiliation of its abandonment of the Taliban, the high command looks capable of brazening out any further acts of obeisance to orders from the Pentagon.

  What of parliamentary opposition to military rule? Vexing though the upshot of the October 2002 election, for all its fraud, proved to be for Musharraf, the parties that dominate the political landscape in Pakistan offer little hope of rebellion against him. The cringing opportunism of the Bhutto and Sharif clans knows few limits. The Islamist front ensconced in Peshawar and Quetta is noisier, but not more principled—cash and perquisites quickly stilling most of its protests. Popular discontent remains massive, but lacks any effective channels of national expression. It would be good to think that their performances in office had discredited the PPP and Sharif’s clique forever, but experience suggests that should the regime at any point start to crack, there is little to prevent these phoenixes of sleaze from arising once more, in the absence of any more progressive alternatives.

  Finally, there is the American overlord itself. The Musharraf regime cannot aspire to play the same role as regional satrap that Zia once enjoyed. Pakistan has been ousted as imperial instrument in Afghanistan, and checked from compensating with renewed incursions in Kashmir. But if Islamabad has been forced into a more passive posture along its northern borders, its strategic importance for the US has, if anything, increased. For Washington has now made a huge political investment in the creation of a puppet regime in Kabul, to be guarded by US troops “for years to come,” in the words of General Tommy Franks—not to speak of its continuing hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. Pakistan is a vital flank in th
e pursuit of both objectives, and its top brass can look forward to the kind of lavish emoluments, public and private, that the Thai military received for their decades of collusion with the American war in Indochina. Still, Washington is pragmatic and knows that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were just as serviceable agents of its designs in Kabul as Zia himself. Should he falter domestically, Musharraf will be ditched without sentiment by the suzerain. The Pax Americana can wage war with any number of proxies. It will take an uprising on the scale of 1969 to shake Pakistan free of them.*

  Events have not contradicted this analysis, with one exception. It was impossible to predict the pleasant if unexpected surprise that the country witnessed in the judicial upsurge. Its impact was a renewal of hope, and the effective media coverage of the movement left Musharraf exposed. He now needed a mixture of repression together with a civilian cover and had little option but to accept a U.S.-brokered deal with the late Benazir Bhutto. He was by now largely discredited in the country, and the imposition of the emergency was the last straw for many of his supporters. The assassination of Bhutto increased his unpopularity. Defeat soon followed.

  However flawed the February 2008 general elections in Pakistan may have been, they were a blow to Musharraf as well as the Islamist alliance, which lost its stronghold to the secular Awami National Party, the heirs twice removed of old Ghaffar Khan, who had taught the Pashtuns to value nonviolence and to combat imperialism. The Peoples Party emerged as the largest party with 120 out of a total of 342 seats in the National Assembly, closely followed by the Sharif Muslim League with 90 seats and the ANP with 13. The pro-Musharraf Muslim League won 51 seats and the MQM 25. The defeat was decisive. Had there been no ballot rigging, it would have been a complete rout, especially for the MQM in Karachi, where violence and chicanery were on open display. The religious coalition obtained 6 members of parliament, and even if the Jamaat-e-Islami had not boycotted the election, their representation would not have been much higher.