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William Dalrymple | A New Deal in Pakistan •
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Bhutto's Party Picks a Consensus-Builder to be Pakistan's Next Premier
By Saeed Shah
McClatchy Newspapers
Saturday 22 March 2008
Islamabad - Pakistan's dominant opposition party on Saturday announced
that Yousuf Raza Gilani, a soft-spoken consensus-builder, will be the next prime
minister.
Pakistan's People's Party, formerly led by Benazir Bhutto, who was slain in
December, chose Gilani after an agonizing internal struggle. The party won the
biggest bloc of seats in parliament in Feb. 18 elections, but not enough to
form a government. It is organizing a coalition government with the party of
former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, which came in second.
Parliament is to vote Monday on the new prime minister, who will take over
command of the government from U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf. Under
Pakistan's constitution, the prime minister, not the president, runs the government.
Washington, which had been used to working with Musharraf, who's run the country
since 1999, must get used to dealing also with Gilani and Zardari.
Gilani was chosen by party chairman Asif Zardari, Bhutto's widower. It is expected
that Zardari will be the real power behind the throne, and many suspect he will
become prime minister himself in time, though first he must win a seat in parliament.
Gilani was sent to prison in 2001 by Musharraf on allegations of corruption,
which were never proven. His arrest was widely regarded as a crude attempt by
the regime to force him to quit his party and join the Musharraf government.
He was in and out of jail for the next five years. It was alleged that, when
he served as speaker of parliament in the mid-90s, he distributed jobs as favors.
He won enormous credit in the People's Party for not "breaking" under
the pressure.
"The distance between jail and prime minister's house is short,"
Gilani said in a recent television interview. "[But] I have no lust for
power."
"He's made sacrifices for the party," said Karachi-based political
analyst Ikram Seghal. "Yousuf Raza Gilani has got no particular ideology
and he's not a very charismatic figure, but he's a safe choice."
Shafqat Mahmood, a former aide to Bhutto, said: "He [Gilani] is a good
choice. He's been a minister, he was speaker. He's a consensus-builder, he's
an acceptable personality."
Gilani kept a low-profile during the contest for prime minister and will now
lead a government hostile to Musharraf. Since the Feb. 18 elections, he's often
given the impression that he was barely in the race. "Being prime minister
is not a bed of roses," he said repeatedly.
Gilani comes from a family of hereditary religious figures, which should draw
support from conservatives. Yet, he is a modern cosmopolitan man who, it is
believed, will also be able to bring more sophisticated urban voters to the
party.
The party may have chosen him in part also to balance its geographical weaknesses.
Gilani is from Punjab province, which dominates Pakistan politically and economically,
but the People's Party has never been strong there. Its past leaders have all
come from the less developed southern province of Sindh.
Since Bhutto's assassination, Zardari has established an iron grip on the party,
leading to feverish speculation that he will become prime ministers himself,
perhaps within months. Zardari, previously controversial because of alleged
corruption, has emerged as a mature politician who managed to forge a coalition
with Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N, the People's Party's traditional rival.
The choice of Gilani was not entirely risk-free. In picking him, Zardari passed
over the party deputy, Amin Fahim, who enjoys a strong following. It's possible
that Fahim, who has voiced bitter disappointment since it became clear that
he was out of the running, will now lead a break-away faction of the party.
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A New Deal in Pakistan
By William Dalrymple
The New York Review of Books
03 April 2008 Issue
The province of Sindh in southern Pakistan is a rural region of dusty mudbrick
villages, of white-domed blue-tiled Sufi shrines, and of salty desert scrublands
broken, quite suddenly, by floodplains of wonderful fecundity. These thin, fertile
belts of green - cotton fields, rice paddies, cane breaks, and miles of
checkerboard mango orchards - snake along the banks of the Indus River as
it meanders its sluggish, silted, café-au-lait way through the plains
of Pakistan down to the shores of the Arabian Sea.
In many ways the landscape here with its harsh juxtaposition of dry horizons
of sand and narrow strips of intensely fertile cultivation more closely resembles
upper Egypt than the well-irrigated Punjab to its north. But it is poorer than
either - in fact, it is one of the most backward areas in all of Asia. Whatever
index of development you choose to dwell on - literacy, health care provision,
daily income, or numbers living below the poverty line - rural Sindh comes
bumping along close to the bottom. Here landlords still rule with guns and private
armies over vast tracts of country; bonded labor - a form of debt slavery - leaves
tens of thousands shackled to their places of work. It is also, in parts, lawless
and dangerous to move around in, especially at night.
I first learned about the dacoits - or highwaymen - when I attempted
to leave the provincial market town of Sukkur after dark a week before the recent
elections.(1) It was a tense time everywhere, and violence was widely expected.
But in Sindh the tension had resolved itself into an outbreak of rural brigandage.
We left Sukkur asking for directions to Larkana, the home village of the Bhutto
family, only to be warned by people huddled in tea stalls shrouded under thick
shawls that we should not try to continue until first light the following morning.
They said there had been ten or fifteen robberies on the road in the last fortnight
alone.
If it is dangerous to travel here at night, it is much more dangerous to declare
openly for the candidates you support in the elections. The big landlords here - the
zamindars - expect electoral loyalty from their tenants. As the Pakistani
writer Ahmed Rashid put it, "In some constituencies if the feudals put
up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with ninety-nine per
cent of the vote." Such loyalty can be enforced. In the more remote and
lawless areas the zamindars and their thugs often bribe or threaten the polling
agents, then simply stuff the ballot boxes with thousands of votes for themselves.
This is sufficiently common for the practice to have its own descriptive term:
"booth capturing."
Democracy has never thrived in Pakistan in part because landowning has traditionally
been the social base from which most politicians emerge, especially in rural
areas. Here Pakistan is quite different from India, where the urban middle class
quickly gained control in 1947. That class has been largely excluded from Pakistan's
political process, as, even more so, has the rural peasantry. There are no Pakistani
equivalents of Indian peasant leaders such as Laloo Prasad Yadav, the village
cowherd turned (former) chief minister of Bihar, or Mayawati, the dalit (untouchable)
leader and current chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
You can see the results of a system dominated by landowners in a town like
Khairpur, a shor distance from Sukkur in the northern part of Sindh. As you
drive along, the turban-cla head of the local feudal lord, Sadruddin Shah, with
a curling black mustache, sneers down fro billboards placed every fifty yards
along the road. Shah, who was standing, as usual, for no les than three different
seats, is often held up in the liberal Pakistani press as the epitome of all
tha is worst about Pakistani electoral feudalism. After all, this is a man who
goes electioneering no with leaflets setting out his program, but with five
pickup trucks full of his men armed wit pump-action shotguns and Kalashnikovs
For generations the area has been dominated by Sadruddin's family, the head
of whom - currently Sadruddin's father - is known as the Pir Pagara,
"the Holy Man with the Turban." The Pir Pagaras are not only the largest
and most powerful of the local feudal landowners, but they are also the descendants
of the local Sufi saint. Normally Sufism is a force for peace and brotherhood - Islam
at its most pluralistic and tolerant. At the other end of Sindh I have attended
the annual 'urs - or shrine festival - of the Sufi saint Shah Abdul
Latif, where there is ecstatic Sufi music, the singing of love poetry, and men
and women dancing together - something that would horrify the orthodox 'ulema.
But Khairpur has a very different and more militant Sufi tradition. The Pir
Pagaras have always had their own Hur militia, which once acted as a guerrilla
force against the British and now acts as Sadruddin's private electoral army.
The week I was in the district the local papers were full of stories of Sadruddin's
gunmen shooting at crowds of little boys shouting slogans supporting the recently
assassinated Benazir Bhutto, and burning down the houses of those of his tenants
who had flown opposition flags.
The leaders of this feudal army were standing for election under the banner
of their own pro-Musharraf faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (known as PML-F,
in the alphabet soup of acronyms that characterizes Pakistani elections). Against
them were ranged the forces of Benazir Bhutto's party, the Pakistan People's
Party (PPP). Contrary to its socialist-sounding name, the PPP has traditionally
also been very much a feudal party that has consistently failed to bring about
any serious land reform that would break the power of the landowners. Benazir
Bhutto herself was from a landowning feudal family in Sindh; so is Asif Ali
Zardari, her widower and the current co-chairman of the PPP, which she left
to him and their son Bilawal in her will as if it were a personal possession;
so also is Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the most likely candidate for prime minister
of the new PPP-dominated coalition.
But things are at last beginning to change in Pakistani politics, and here
in Khairpur at least, the PPP candidates were largely middle-class - a new
development in the region. Nafisa Shah, who was one of the candidates standing
against Sadruddin, is the impeccably middle-class daughter of a local lawyer,
who is currently at Oxford University writing a Ph.D. dissertation on honor
killings.
Nafisa's campaign was hugely assisted by a wave of sympathy for Benazir: the
day she was assassinated, Khairpur was consumed by riots, and for four days
full-scale warfare broke out between Benazir supporters and the local administration,
during which the election headquarters of the pro-Musharraf parties and several
offices of the local government were burned down.
Partly because of this simmering discontent, outbreaks of violence were predicted
on polling day, and everyone was anticipating widespread rigging by Musharraf
and his intelligence agency cronies, something to which the Musharraf-appointed
election commission was expected to turn a blind eye. This, it was predicted,
would be followed by more riots organized by the discontented opposition parties
who had been cheated of their votes.
In fact, however, serious violence did not materialize, either in Khairpur
or elsewhere, and to general astonishment, Nafisa and her fellow PPP candidates
had a remarkably strong victory, monitored and filmed by Pakistan's increasingly
fearless and independent press and television. The PML-F was almost wiped out
and Sadruddin Shah won only his own home seat - and that with the narrowest
of margins.
What happened in Khairpur was a small revolution - a middle-class victory
over the forces of reactionary feudal landlordism. More astonishingly, it was
a revolution that was reproduced across the country. To widespread surprise,
the elections in Pakistan were free and fair; and Pakistanis voted heavily in
favor of liberal centrist parties opposed to both the mullahs and the army.
Here, in a country normally held up in the more Islamophobic right-wing press
of Western countries as the epitome of "what went wrong" in the Islamic
world, a popular election resulted in an unequivocal vote for moderate, secular
democracy.
For Pakistani liberals, 2007 was one of the worst years in their country's
history. In earl March, Musharraf suspended Pakistan's chief justice, Iftikhar
Chaudhry, accusing him o using his position for personal gain. This was clearly
not the case. Chaudhry had a reputatio for both integrity and independence,
and most assumed that Musharraf simply wanted t replace him with a more pliant
judge who would not block his reelection as president
Some were encouraged by the popular protests mounted by Pakistan's lawyers
in response to Chaudhry's suspension - in city after city across the country
lawyers took to the streets in their court robes, marching in orderly ranks,
three abreast, like emperor penguins in a nature film. But any optimism was
quickly dimmed by the heavy-handed response of Musharraf's riot police and the
simultaneous growth of Islamist radicalism in the heart of the capital, Islamabad.
This took the form of the heavily veiled, black-clad "chicks with sticks"
who, in April 2007, emerged in large numbers armed with bamboo canes from a
mosque and madrasa complex in the city center, not far from the headquarters
of Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI). The young women then proceeded to ransack suspected brothels and smash
video and music stores in the capital while the police watched, apparently helpless.
The bloody storming by the army of their base, the Red Mosque, in early July
was followed by an unprecedented wave of suicide bombings and Islamist revenge
attacks against the army. In all there were sixty suicide bombings in Pakistan
last year, leaving 770 people dead and nearly 1,600 injured.
By autumn the situation had become even worse, with a series of crushing military
defeats inflicted on the Paki-stani army by the Taliban in Waziristan, the "extraordinary
rendition" by Musharraf's officials of the former prime minister and opposition
leader Nawaz Sharif back to Saudi Arabia after his return from exile, and the
subsequent declaration of an emergency by President Musharraf, who put a number
of dissenting lawyers, political opponents, and human rights activists under
house arrest. The disasters reached a horrific climax in December with the assassination
of Benazir Bhutto. This led many to predict that Pakistan was looking like a
failed state stumbling toward collapse and civil war. The cruel contrast with
India, then widely being celebrated as a future democratic superpower on its
sixtieth birthday, was unmistakable.
Yet the widespread publicity given to the crisis obscured the important changes
that had quietly taken place in Pakistani society during Musharraf's eight years
in power. Pakistan's economy is currently in difficulty, with fast-rising inflation
and shortages of electricity and flour; but between 2002 and 2006 it had grown
almost as strongly as India's. Until the beginning of 2007, Pakistan had a construction
and consumer boom, with growth approaching 8 percent; for several years its
stock market was the fastest-rising in Asia.
As you travel around Pakistan today you can see the effects of the boom everywhere:
in vas new shopping malls and smart roadside filling stations, in the cranes
of the building site and the smokestacks of factories, in the expensive new
cars jamming the roads and in th ubiquitous cell-phone stores. In 2003 the country
had fewer than three million cell phones today apparently there are 50 million,
while car ownership has been increasing at roughly 4 percent a year since 2001.
At the same time foreign direct investment has risen from $32 million in 2002
to $3.5 billion in 2006
Pakistan's cities, in particular, are fast changing beyond recognition. As
in India, there is a burgeoning Pakistani fashion scene full of ambitious gay
designers and amazingly beautiful models. There are also remarkable developments
in publishing. In nonfiction, Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban became the essential
primer on Afghanistan after 2001. Ayesha Siddiqa's Military Inc. and Zahid Hussain's
Frontline Pakistan are two of the most penetrating recent studies of the country
and essential for understanding the politics of Pakistan. Siddiqa is especially
good on the economic and political power of the army, while Hussain's book is
the best existing guide to Pakistan's jihadis. There have also been particularly
impressive new works of fiction by Pakistani writers, among them Kamila Shamsie's
Kartography and Broken Verses, Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers, and Moni
Mohsin's End of Innocence. One of Daniyal Mueenuddin's short stories, his wonderfully
witty "Nawabdin Electrician," was published in The New Yorker of August
27, 2007.
Recently Mohsin Hamid, author of the best-seller The Reluctant Fundamentalist,(2)
wrote about this change in culture. Having lived as a banker in New York and
London, he returned home to Lahore to find the country unrecognizable. He was
particularly struck by
the incredible new world of media that had sprung up..., a world of music videos,
fashion programmes, independent news networks, cross-dressing talk-show hosts,
religious debates, stock-market analysis.... Not just television, but also private
radio stations and newspapers have flourished.... The result is an unprecedented
openness.... Young people are speaking and dressing differently.... The Vagina
Monologues was recently performed on stage in Pakistan to standing ovations.(3)
Such reports are rare in the Western press, which prefers its stereotypes simple:
India, successful and forward-looking; Pakistan, a typical Islamic failure.
The reality is of course much less clear, and far more complex.
It was this newly enriched and empowered urban middle class that showed its
political muscle for the first time with the organization of a lawyers' movement,
whose protests against the dismissal of the chief justice soon swelled into
a full-scale pro-democracy campaign, despite Musharraf's harassment and arrest
of many lawyers. The movement represented a huge shift in Pakistani civil society's
participation in politics. The middle class were at last moving from their living
rooms onto the streets, from dinner parties into political parties.
February's elections dramatically confirmed this shift. The biggest electoral
surprise of all was the success of Nawaz Sharif's conservative faction of the
Muslim League, the PML-N. This is a solidly urban party, popular among exactly
the sort of middle-class voters in the Punjab who have benefited most from the
economic success of the last decade, and who have since found that status threatened
by the recent economic slowdown and the sudden steep rises in the prices of
food, fuel, and electricity.
The same is true of the success of the MQM, the Karachi-based party representing
the Mohajirs, the emigrants who left India to come to Pakistan at the founding
of the country in 1947. Like Nawaz Sharif's PML-N, it is an urban-based regional
party attractive to middle-class voters. Almost 50 percent of Pakistan's population
now lives in urban areas, and the center of gravity is shifting from the countryside
to the large cities. The parties that appealed most successfully to this new
demographic trend won the most convincing victories in the polls.
The rise of the middle class was most clear in the number of winning candidates
who, for the first time, came from such a background. In Jhang district of the
rural Punjab, for example, as many as ten out of eleven of those elected are
the sons of revenue officers, senior policemen, functionaries in the civil bureaucracy,
and so on, rather than usual feudal zamindars. This would have been unthinkable
ten years ago.
Even the most benign feudal lords suffered astonishing electoral reverses.
Mian Najibuddin Owaisi was not just the popular feudal lord of the village of
Khanqah Sharif in the southern Punjab, he was also the sajjada nasheen, the
descendant of the local Sufi saint, and so, like Sadruddin Shah, regarded as
something of a holy man as well as the local landowner. But recently Najibuddin
made the ill-timed switch from supporting Nawaz Sharif's PML-N to the pro-Musharraf
Q-League. When I talked to people in the village bazaar, they all said that
they did not like Musharraf, but they would still vote for their landlord.
"Prices are rising," said Hajji Sadiq, a cloth merchant, sitting
amid bolts of textiles. "There is less and less electricity and gas."
"And what was done to Benazir was quite wrong," his friend Salman
agreed.
"But Najib sahib is our protector," said Hajji. "Whatever party
he chooses, we will vote for him. Even the Q-League."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because with him in power we have someone we can call if we are in trouble
with the police, or need someone to speak to the administration."
"When we really need him he looks after us."
"We vote according to local issues only. Who cares about parties?"
Because of Najibuddin's personal popularity, his vote stood up better than
many other pro-Musharraf feudal lords - and he polled 46,000 votes. But
he still lost, to an independent candidate from a nonfeudal middle-class background
named Amir Varan, who received 57,000 votes and ousted the Owaisi family from
control of the constituency for the first time since they entered politics in
the elections of 1975.
As well as a middle-class victory over a feudal past, in the west of the country
the electio was also an important vote for secularism over the Islamist religious
parties
In the last election of October 2002, thanks partly to their closeness to the
ruling military government, and partly to their sympathy with al-Qaeda, the
Islamist Muttehida Majlis Amal (MMA) alliance nearly tripled its representation
in the national assembly from 4 to 11.6 percent, and swept the polls in the
two key provinces bordering Afghanistan - Baluchistan and the North-West
Frontier Province - where they went on to form Islamist provincial governments.
This time, however, religious parties sunk from fifty-six out of 272 seats
in the national assembly to just five. In the North-West Frontier Province,
the MMA has been comprehensively defeated by the overtly secular Awami National
Party (ANP). This is a remnant of what was once a mighty force: the nonviolent
and secular Red Shirts movement, which, before the creation of Pakistan, was
originally led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, an important ally of Mahatma Gandhi
from the North-West Frontier Province. Ghaffar Khan was locked up by one Pakistani
general after another for much of the time between Partition and his death in
1988, but his political movement has survived both the generals and a succession
of bomb blasts aimed at its party, and has now - after nearly fifty years
in opposition - made a dramatic comeback under the leadership of Ghaffar
Khan's grandson, Asfandyar Wali Khan.
"Before the Taliban," the North-West Frontier Province "used
to be a very liberal area," he told me in Islamabad.
No one can force us to give up that culture - even the suicide bombers.
There is a very clear polarization taking place...on one side those striving
for peace, nonviolence, and a future of cooperation with the international community,
and on the other those who stand for confrontation and hatred. They are men
of violence, but we refuse to be cowed. We may lose, but we will make a stand.
In the election, Asfandyar's ANP routed the Islamists, demonstrating that contrary
to their image as bearded bastions of Islamist orthodoxy, Pashtun tribesmen
are as wary as anyone else of violence, extremism, and instability. Now the
ANP is talking of extending the Pakistani political parties into the troubled
northern tribal areas that are federally administered and act as the buffer
zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan: "If I am prepared to take on the
Maulvis in the tribal areas, why should the government stop me?" asked
Asfandyar. "At the moment the tribal areas are just left to fester. We
have to end that isolation and bring them forward."
The issues that mattered to voters in the frontier were those of incompetent
governance by the MMA, increased insecurity, and especially the fear of constant
suicide bombings. Like democratically elected parties anywhere else in the world,
the electorate judged the MMA on its record, and threw it out for failing to
deliver. There is a clear lesson for US policymakers here. The parties of political
Islam are like any other democratic parties: they will succeed or fail on what
they deliver. The best way of dealing with democratic Islamists, if Pakistan's
experience is anything to go by, is to let them be voted into power and then
reveal their own incompetence - mullah-fatigue will no doubt quickly set
in. Besieging Islamist parties that have come to power through a democratic
vote, as the US has done with Hamas, or allowing local proxies to rig the vote
so as to deprive them of power, as happened in Egypt, only strengthens their
hand and increases their popularity.
There is an additional reason for modest optimism about Pakistan's future at
the moment In recent years, the biggest threat to the country's stability has
come from the jihadi group created and nourished by the army and the ISI for
selective deployment in Afghanistan an Kashmir, but which soon followed their
own violent agendas within Pakistan itself. For the las decade, that threat
has been exacerbated by the ambiguous attitude toward the jihadi maintained
by the Pakistani army and its intelligence services. Some elements have bee
alarmed by the militants' violence and the effects that supporting these groups
would have o the alliance with the US. Others saw them as useful irregulars
that could still be drawn on t fight low-cost proxy wars for the army. That
era of division and ambiguity now seems to b coming to a close.
On November 24, 2007, a suicide bomber detonated himself beside a bus at the
entrance of Camp Hamza, the ISI's Islamabad headquarters. Around twenty people
died in what is the first known attack by an Islamist cell against the Pakistani
intelligence services. Many of the dead were ISI staffers. This event, coming
as it did after three assassination attempts on General Musharraf, several other
bomb attacks on army barracks, and the murder of many captured army personnel
in Waziristan, is credited with persuading even the most stubbornly pro-Islamist
elements in the Pakistani army that the monster they have created now has to
be dispatched, and as quickly as possible.
Shuja Nawaz is a Washington-based specialist on the Pakistani army who comes
from a prominent and well-connected military family and who is about to publish
Crossed Swords, an important new book on the army.(4) According to Nawaz,
The direct attacks on the army have shaken up the military at all levels. One
of Musharraf's senior colleagues said he was changing his cars daily to avoid
being identified when he hits the roads of Rawalpindi. The army brass has been
told not to go out in uniforms. Soon, they may stop using their staff cars with
flags and star plates.
This is obviously a radically new situation, and one that changes all previous
calculations on the part of the military. The Pakistan expert Stephen P. Cohen
of the Brookings Institution agrees with this assessment. He recently told me:
The senior leadership of the army under Musharraf now regards the threat from
Islamic radicals as being far greater than the threat posed by India. That conviction
has been hugely increased since the suicide bomb attacks on army staff and the
intelligence agencies this past December.(5)
This week the news came that the army had rounded up in Lahore an important
cell of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi Islamist militants; many more such arrests are expected
soon.
Over the last few years there has been something of an existential crisis in
Pakistan, at th heart of which lay the question: What sort of country did Pakistanis
want? Did they want Western-style liberal democracy, as envisaged by the poet
Iqbal, who first dreamed up the ide of Pakistan, and by the country's eventual
founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah? An Islamic republi like Mullah Omar's Afghanistan?
Or a military-ruled junta of the sort created by Generals Ayyu Khan, Zia, and
Musharraf, who, among them, have ruled Pakistan for thirty-four of its sixt
years of existence
Though turnout in the election was fairly low, partly owing to fear of suicide
bombings, it is clear that Pakistanis have overwhelmingly rejected the military
and Islamist options and chosen instead to back secular democracy. And if many
stayed at home, no fewer than 36 million Pakistanis braved the threatened bombs
to vote in an election which by South Asian standards was remarkably free of
violence, corruption, ballot-stuffing, or "booth capturing."
A new coalition government now looks likely to come to power peacefully, bringing
together Zadari's People's Party and Sharif's Muslim League, and will do so
unopposed by the army. These developments should now lead commentators to reassess
the country that many have long written off and caricatured as a terror-breeding
swamp of Islamist iniquity.
The country I saw in February on a long road trip from Lahore in the Punjab
down through rural Sindh to Karachi was not a failed state, or anything even
approaching "the most dangerous country in the world...almost beyond repair"
as the London Spectator recently suggested, joined in its view by The New York
Times and The Washington Post among many others. On the contrary, the countryside
I passed through was no less peaceful and prosperous than that on the other
side of the Indian border; indeed its road networks are far more developed.
It was certainly a far cry from the violent instability of post-occupation Iraq
or Afghanistan.
On my travels I found a surprisingly widespread consensus that the mullahs
should keep to their mosques, and the increasingly unpopular military should
return to its barracks. The new army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, who took
over when Musharraf stepped down from his military role last year, seems to
recognize this. He has repeatedly talked of pulling the army back from civilian
life, and ordering his soldiers to stay out of politics. He has also ordered
that no army officer may meet with President Musharraf without his personal
approval. He also seems committed to maintaining tight security to protect Pakistan's
nuclear arsenal.
Pakistan will not change overnight. Much violence and unrest no doubt lie ahead,
as shown by the recent assassination by a suicide bomber in Rawal-pindi of General
Mushtaq Baig, the head of the Pakistan Army Medical Corps, and continuing bomb
blasts in the troubled Swat Valley, once the country's most popular tourist
destination. The country still has a vast problem with rural and urban poverty,
and a collapsing education system. It also has serious unresolved questions
about its political future. As Ahmed Rashid said in a recent interview:
The new coalition government will have to face continuing behind the scenes
efforts by President Pervez Musharraf and the intelligence agencies to undermine
them even before they are allowed to govern. Musharraf's agents backed by a
section of the Washington establishment had been secretly trying to persuade
Zardari to go into alliance with the former ruling party - the Pakistan
Muslim League-Q group. The Q group has been decimated in the elections - 23
ministers lost their seats and today it is leaderless, visionless and without
an agenda - except it remains a pawn in the hands of Musharraf.(6)
For many Pakistanis, there continues to be confusion and disillusion. Most of
the country's impoverished citizens still live precarious and uncertain lives.
A growing insurgency is spilling out of the tribal areas on the Afghan border.
But Pakistan is not about to fall apart, or implode, or break out into civil
war, or become a Taliban state with truckfuls of mullahs pouring down on Islamabad
from the Khyber Pass. It is not at all clear whether the members of Pakistan's
flawed and corrupt political elite have the ability to govern the country and
seize the democratic opportunity offered by this election, rather than simply
use it as an opportunity for personal enrichment. But they are unlikely ever
again to have such a good opportunity to redefine this crucial strategic country
as a stable and moderate Islamic democracy that can work out its own version
of India's remarkable economic and political success.
- Lahore, March 3, 2008
-------
Notes
(1) I briefly draw here and elsewhere on my dispatch to The New Statesman,
February 21, 2008.
(2) Harcourt, 2007; reviewed in these pages by Sarah Kerr, October 11, 2007.
(3) Mohsin Hamid, "General Pervez Musharraf: Pakistan's Big Beast Unleashed,"
The Independent (London), February 11, 2007.
(4) Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within, to be published
by Oxford University Press in June.
(5) Stephen P. Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan (Oxford University Press, 2005)
is one of the most sophisticated and penetrating analyses of the country in
print.
(6) Scott Horton, "Six Questions for Ahmed Rashid on the Elections in
Pakistan and US Foreign Policy," February 28, 2008, available at www.harpers.org.
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