by Ali, Tariq
Deprived of a tongue, we sang
Handcuffed, we wrote poetry
With fettered legs, we danced
And the fragrance of flowers pierced our muffled mouths and nostrils.
EPILOGUE: THE ZARDARI INTERREGNUM
1
AS I DESCRIBED EARLIER, GENERAL PERVEZ MUSHARRAF ACTED swiftly and ruthlessly when he seized power to become Pakistan’s fourth military dictator in October 1999 and proclaimed himself chief executive of Pakistan. Now, as I write the final words of this book, he has lost the confidence of two key board members—the United States and the Pakistan army, majority shareholders of Pakistan plc—and he accepted that his time had come. On August 18, 2008, after a rambling, incoherent address to the nation, replete with the most puerile self-justifications, he resigned. Had he done so when his term expired he would have spared the country some pain and me the task of writing an epilogue. But he was too seriously afflicted with the power disease and his mind remained impenetrable to the tormented cries from below.
As the country celebrated its sixty-first birthday on August 14, 2008, it became obvious that its official president had become completely isolated. To his chagrin, Pervez Musharraf was not allowed to take the salute at the official parade marking the event, while state television discussed plans to impeach him. Pakistan’s venal politicians decided to move against him after the army chief, Ashfaq Kayani, let it be known that there would be no military action to defend his former boss.
Washington followed suit. In Kayani they have a professional and loyal military leader who they imagine will do their bidding. Earlier John Negroponte had wanted to retain Musharraf as long as Bush was in office, but they decided to let him go. Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador, and a few British diplomats working under her tried to negotiate a deal on behalf of Musharraf, but the politicians were no longer prepared to play ball. They insisted that he must leave the country. Sanctuaries in Manhattan, Texas, and the Turkish island of Büyükada are being actively considered. Ideally, the general would like a large estate in Pakistan, preferably near a golf course, but security considerations alone would make that unfeasible. There were three attempts on his life when he was in power and protecting him after he goes would require an expensive security presence. Now he is going in disgrace, abandoned by most of his cronies who accumulated land and money during his term and are now moving toward the new powerbrokers. Amid the hullabaloo there was one hugely diverting moment involving pots and kettles: Asif Zardari, the caretaker-leader of the Peoples Party who runs the government and is the second richest man in the country (from funds he accrued when his late wife was prime minister), accused Musharraf of corruption and siphoning U.S. funds to private bank accounts. It is difficult for citizens to forbear inquiring by what black arts did Zardari (from a family bereft of wealth) acquire such an ample fortune. Their suspicions are severe and reasonable.
A SMALL mystery remained. Why did the United States suddenly withdraw support from Musharraf? An answer was provided by Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti in The New York Times on August 26, 2008. The State Department, according to this report, was not in favor of an undignified and hasty departure, but unknown to them a hardcore neo-con faction led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the Security Council, was busy advising Asif Zardari in secret and helping him plan the campaign to oust the quondam general:
Mr. Khalilzad had spoken by telephone with Mr. Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, several times a week for the past month until he was confronted about the unauthorized contacts, a senior United States official said. Other officials said Mr. Khalilzad had planned to meet with Mr. Zardari privately next Tuesday while on vacation in Dubai, in a session that was canceled only after Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, learned from Mr. Zardari himself that the ambassador was providing “advice and help.”
“Can I ask what sort of ‘advice and help’ you are providing?” Mr. Boucher wrote in an angry e-mail message to Mr. Khalilzad. “What sort of channel is this? Governmental, private, personnel?” Copies of the message were sent to others at the highest levels of the State Department; the message was provided to The New York Times by an administration official who had received a copy.
Khalilzad, an inveterate factionalist and a master of intrigue, had implanted Hamid Karzai in Kabul (with dire results as many in Washington now admit) and was livid with Musharraf for refusing to give 100 percent support to his Afghan protégé. He now saw an opportunity to punish Musharraf and simultaneously try to create a Pakistani equivalent of Karzai. Zardari fit the bill perfectly. He is well suited to being a total creature of Washington. The Swiss government helpfully decided to release millions of dollars from Zardari’s bank accounts that had, till now, been frozen. Like his late wife, Zardari, too, is now being laundered, just like the money he made when last in office as Minister for Investment. This weakness will make him a pliant president of Pakistan. Khalilzad, no doubt, argued that a puppet civilian is easier to manipulate than a retired general. But were Zardari to permit U.S. ground troops to enter the Frontier Province on search-and-destroy missions, his career would be short-lived and leave the Pakistan army close to a breaking point.
How would the Sharif brothers deal with the crisis? They made it clear that they would not compromise on restoring the judiciary to its previous status. Zardari and his cronies seem equally convinced by the opposite. They are only too happy to work with Musharraf’s tame judges. Some of the latter are now denouncing the chief justice as not hailing from a proper class. Unlike them, he is the son of a lowly policeman and thus prejudiced against privilege. The widower and the general share an aversion to honest judges.
It is pointless to speculate whether Musharraf would have lasted nine years had it not been for 9/11 and the war on terror. A previous dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq (1977–88), had similarly become a vital cog in the imperial war machine during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The monsters spawned then were the perpetrators of the assault on the Pentagon in 2001. Poor Musharraf and his generals had to unravel the only victory the Pakistan army had ever won: the conquest of Kabul via the Taliban. In a complete about turn, Pakistani military bases were made available to the United States to occupy Afghanistan.
Ever since Zia’s dictatorship, the soldiers had been inoculated with Islamist ideology. After 9/11, Musharraf was telling the same soldiers the target had been changed. They had to kill “terrorists,” i.e., other Muslims. It almost cost him his life (two assassination attempts came close), but he remained loyal to Washington and vice versa. His Western allies saw no contradiction in backing a general when “democracy and human rights” were the virtues preached to the rest of the world. Warring against the jihadis made him unpopular with the soldiery and junior officers, who began to resign in droves.
As described earlier, it was his clash with a turbulent chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had begun to issue judgments favoring victims of state brutality and corruption and the disappearances of citizens in the name of the war on terror. The chief justice was sacked and angry lawyers began a campaign for his reinstatement. Musharraf backed down, only to impose a state of emergency and sack him and other judges again.
Had this happened in a country not favored by NATO (for example, Venezuela), all hell would have broken loose. Not in this case. In January 2008, the chief justice wrote to Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Condoleezza Rice, and the president of the European Parliament.
The letter, which remains unanswered, explained the real reasons for Musharraf’s actions:
At the outset you may be wondering why I have used the words “claiming to be the head of state.” That is quite deliberate. General Musharraf’s constitutional term ended on November 15, 2007. His claim to a further term thereafter is the subject of active controversy before the Supreme Court of Pakistan. It was while this claim was under adjudication before . . . the Supreme Court that the general arrested a majority of those j
udges in addition to me on November 3, 2007. He thus himself subverted the judicial process, which remains frozen at that point. Besides arresting the chief justice and judges (can there have been a greater outrage?) he also purported to suspend the constitution and to purge the entire judiciary of all independent judges. Now only his hand-picked and compliant judges remain willing to “validate” whatever he demands. And all this is also contrary to an express and earlier order passed by the Supreme Court on November 3, 2007.
2
THERE IS NEVER A DULL MOMENT IN THE COUNTRY. AS IT MOVED from a moth-eaten dictatorship to a moth-eaten democracy, the celebrations were muted. Many citizens wondered whether the change represented a forward movement at all.
Since the February 2008 elections the moral climate has deteriorated still further. All the ideals embraced by the hopeful youth and the poor of the country—political morality, legality, civic virtue, food subsidies, freedom, and equality of opportunity—once again lie at their feet, broken and scattered. The merry widower and his men are extremely unpopular. The worm-eaten tongues of chameleon politicians and resurrected civil servants are on daily display. Removing Musharraf has not won Zardari the badly needed popular support that he craves. He indicated his support for U.S. strategy by inviting Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai to attend his inauguration, the only foreign leader to do so. Twinning himself with a discredited satrap in Kabul may have impressed some in Washington, but it only further decreased support for the widower Bhutto in his own country.
Musharraf’s departure highlighted other problems that confront the country, which is in the grip of a food and power crisis that is creating severe problems in every city. Inflation is out of control. The price of gas (used for cooking in many homes) has risen by 30 percent. Wheat, the staple diet of most people, has seen a 20 percent price hike since November 2007 and while the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization admits that the world’s food stocks are at record lows there is an additional problem in Pakistan.
Too much wheat is being smuggled into Afghanistan to serve the needs of the NATO armies. The poor are the worst hit, but middle-class families are also affected and according to a June 2008 survey, 86 percent of Pakistanis find it increasingly difficult to afford flour on a daily basis, for which they blame their own new government.
Other problems persist. The politicians remain divided on the restoration of the judges sacked by Musharraf. The chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, is the most respected person in the country. Zardari is reluctant to see him back at the head of the Supreme Court. A possible compromise might be to offer him the presidency. It would certainly unite the country for a short time. And there is the army. In July 2008, the country’s powerless prime minister, Yousuf Gilani, went on a state visit to the United States. On July 29, he was questioned by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations:
HAASS: Let me ask the question a different way then [laughter], beyond President Musharraf, which is whether you think now in the army there is a broader acceptance of a more limited role for the army. Do you think now the coming generation of army officers accepts the notion that their proper role is in the barracks rather than in politics?
GILANI: Certainly, yes. Because of the February 18 election of this year, we have a mandate to the moderate forces, to the democratic forces in Pakistan. And the moderate forces and the democratic forces, they have formed the government. And therefore the people have voted against dictatorship and for democracy, and therefore, in future even the present of—the chief of the army staff is highly professional and is fully supporting the democracy.
This is gibberish that convinces nobody. Over the past fifty years the United States has worked mainly with the Pakistan army. This has been its preferred instrument, even though it appreciates a civilian counterforce to further pressure the military. The change in Pakistan was considered necessary so that nothing else changed. The question being asked is how long it will be before the military is back. The tragic circle of Pakistani politics shows no signs of being squared.
AFTER THE fall of Musharraf, demands to reinstate the chief justice grew even more vocal. They were resisted by Zardari and his supporters. Finally the new dispensation behaved as it had done in the past and withdrew all support from the chief justice while simultaneously breaking the unity of the judiciary and waning a whole group of judges who had hitherto been disaffected away from the chief justice. There were angry scenes in Islamabad where lawyers tore down posters with Zardari’s image and burned a makeshift effigy.
When I was in Lahore in February 2009, the lawyers were threatening a new set of public demonstrations and planning a long march from Lahore to Islamabad, but my own impression was that a great deal of steam had gone out of the movement. Where Musharraf had failed to tame the judges, his civilian successor appeared to have succeeded. A month later, Aitzaz Ahsan, an important leader of Zardari’s party who had backed the judges and insisted both at home and in Washington that an independent judiciary was vital to the country’s future, had been expelled by the party’s Central Executive Committee.
On the domestic front Zardari and his government demonstrated that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing from their previous stint in office. In other words, the loss of power was the worst of misfortunes only because it meant the loss of money. For the ruling elite—military and civilian—an umbilical cord made of piano wire ties power to the accummulation of wealth. Barely a year in power, Zardari is up to his old tricks again and instances of unrelenting avarice are commonly cited. Alas there are few, if any, respectable members of the National Assembly or senators from the Peoples Party capable of mounting a challenge to the designs of old corruption that dominates the organization. There is no sense of honor in politics anywhere. It would be overoptimistic to expect it to mushroom suddenly in Pakistan. Most parliamentarians, if not awed by the frown of power, can be bought with foreign bank accounts.
Meanwhile the social infrastructure of the state has virtually collapsed: food shortages are combined with those of water and electricity, crime is at an all-time high, and living conditions for the vast majority of Pakistanis have reached exploding point. Karachi, the country’s largest city, is reminiscent of Naples. It is run by a secular party (MQM) in alliance with Zardari’s local cronies. It uses violence to preserve its power and protection rackets on every level to keep itself in funds. The populace, helpless and crushed, alternates betweeen rage and grief. It is not strong enough to impose its own will on the situation. This is the sort of vacuum that creates an opening for religious warlords in the North-West Frontier. All they offer is a life dominated by their particular interpretations of Islamic law. Against this a government that has no plan to improve the lives of its people can offer nothing. It realizes that killing more people is creating dissension inside the army and so it capitulates.
3
MUCH OF THE ATTACK ON THE RELIGIOUS WARLORDS CENTERS on their attitude toward women. If it were only them Pakistan’s problems on gender disparities would not be so great. But the traditional tribal solutions favored by Baitullah Masood and Fazlullah in the Swat/Malakand area of the North-West Frontier Province are simply a variant of what exists elsewhere in the region.
On the face of it, the South Asian subcontinent has a surprisingly good gender-power ratio: More women leaders than any other part of the world and four states personified by strong women. India and Pakistan have had a woman prime minister each—Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto—although both were tragically assassinated by political opponents; Bangladesh has had two—Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wazed—the latter was reelected in January 2009; Sri Lanka has had a woman president as well as a prime minister—Sirimavo Bandaranaike and, later, her daughter Chandrika. But most of these powerful godmothers did little to improve the condition of their sisters. Much of South Asia remains time-warped, the least gender sensitive region in the world with the partial exceptions of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, where there are more literate wo
men than men. In Pakistan, gripped by a severe economic crisis and spillage from the war in Afghanistan, attacks on women have become more frequent.
As far back as the twelfth century, the Spanish Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd—known to the Latin world as Averroes and disliked by fundamentalist clerics of every stripe—bewailed the status of women, arguing against societies that denied half their population equal rights and were, as a result, destined to petrify:
In these (our) states, the ability of women is not known, because they are merely used for procreation. They are therefore placed at the service of their husbands and relegated to the business of procreation, child rearing, and breastfeeding. But this denies them their other activities because women are considered unfit for any of the human virtues.
He knew. From his perch as a qadi (senior judge) in Córdoba and Seville, he observed how privileged women belonging to the nobility could override societal norms, preside over salons, flaunt their lovers in public, and write erotic poetry. It was the fate of the majority of women that concerned him. Times have changed for women, at least in his part of the world, though Spain remains divided: Pedro Almódovar versus the Church. The feminist heaven-stormers of the seventies, who proclaimed the freedom of the heart and the liberation of the body did leave an impact, but unevenly and not everywhere. A thousand years after Ibn Rushd’s complaint, the condition of women in large parts of South Asia continues to deteriorate.
An old Telugu proverb from South India—“bringing up a girl is like watering the plant in your neighbor’s garden”—applies to the entire subcontinent: Class, caste, tribalism, tradition, religion all help to institutionalize elite rule as patriarchy. “Honor” killings are usually family murders reported irregularly in the Pakistani press. A parent or a brother decide to punish a daughter or sister who defies social norms by a refusal to do their bidding and marry a man they have chosen for her, or if, after a violent and bloody marriage, she decides to divorce her husband. Family “honor” is preserved by her. The killer is usually acquitted by a male judiciary incapable of defying tradition. More than a hundred such murders were officially reported in 2008: all 107 victims were women, fifty-four of whom were married.
