Manipal, India — After Pervez Musharraf
himself, the individual who will be most nervous at the resignation of Pakistan’s
president is the Pakistan People’s Party co-chairman, Asif Ali Zardari. For it
was Musharraf – admittedly with repeated prodding from Condoleezza Rice – who
offered Benazir Bhutto's widower amnesty from the numerous corruption cases
against him in exchange for his party’s support to his presidency.
Zardari, for reasons unknown, declined to
take over as prime minister of Pakistan, putting forward a presumed yes-man,
Yousaf Raza Gillani, in March.
The new prime minister, a Shiite and a
Saraiki-Punjabi, lost less than a week in establishing direct links with the
real power center in Pakistan, the army. He made the unusual gesture of
personally calling on the chiefs of both the Inter-Services Intelligence and
the army. Today it is to Gillani, rather than to Zardari, that military chief
Ashfaq Kiyani turns on the infrequent occasions when he wishes to consult the
civilian authority. As for the ISI, that instrument of jihad continues to
function under army headquarters.
Although he owes his job to Zardari, it is
unlikely that Prime Minister Gillani will do more than offer a token resistance
to the reinstatement of those judges sacked by Musharraf last year, including
the Zardari-phobic former chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhury.
The ambitious Gillani is aware that a fresh
spell of imprisonment – or enforced exile – would significantly weaken the
Zardari family's hold over the PPP, thus making him Pakistan's version of India’s
Narasimha Rao, the only individual to have succeeded, albeit temporarily, in
displacing the Nehru-Maino family from their grip over the Congress Party.
The son of Zardari and Benazir Bhutto,
Bilawal Bhutto, sans his street-smart parent, would be easy pickings for the
savvy and telegenic Fatima Bhutto, niece of the fallen leader and a possible
substitute for her within the PPP. The other Ms. Bhutto has demonstrated both
tenacity and a commitment to liberal values that could prove useful in the
context of a radicalizing Pakistan.
Unfortunately for her many backers in the
United States and Europe, the late Benazir Bhutto never shook off her fear of
the mullahs, always giving them access and privileges during her stints as
prime minister. Not that such an approach won them over. From the start, the
Pakistan religious establishment has been opposed to a mere woman coming in as
prime minister, especially one with such close links to the West.
Aware that Iftikhar Chaudhury would waste
little time in reopening the numerous and very well-documented corruption cases
against his main rival, Asif Zardari, the leader of the Pakistani Muslim League
(Nawaz), Nawaz Sharif, has been relentless in demanding the reinstatement of
judges, a considerable change from the suspicion and contempt with which he
treated the judiciary during his stints in national power.
Sharif has forged a hidden alliance with
fellow Punjabi Ashfaq Kiyani, chief of army staff, and the two together have
steadily re-secured the dominance of this ethnic group, which had been diluted
by Pervez Musharraf since he secured U.S. backing in 2001. A reinstated Chief
Justice Chaudhury would form the third leg of this Punjabi troika and could be
expected to ensure a fresh general election in which Sharif would emerge the
winner.
Until that time, they can be expected to
continue to place concealed traps for the present PPP-led administration. The
only escape for the "Sindhi" party would be to team up with the
now-leaderless followers of Musharraf in the National Assembly, although such
support may result in a withdrawal of backing from the moderates in the
North-West Frontier Province.
This emerging Sindhi-Punjabi rivalry is at
the root of much of the present political flux in Pakistan. Aware that he was a
target of this lobby, Musharraf had been making efforts to limit the dominance
of Punjabis in the higher echelons of the armed forces, promoting officers with
a Baloch, Pashtun or Mohajir background over the heads of their Punjabi rivals.
The Punjab lobby challenged Musharraf through the then chief justice, who would
never have acted in such a "courageous" manner without the tacit backing
of Ashfaq Kiyani and other Punjabi corps commanders.
If the script they have written works out,
there will be a speedy reinstatement of the judges sacked by Musharraf,
followed by the reinstatement of the cases against Zardari. Aware of this
danger, the chances are high that the cornered PPP leader may seek to install
himself as president, giving him direct access to at least a few of the levers
of power. Gillani, Sharif and Kiyani would want the job to go to someone far
less knowledgeable about the political game than the astute Zardari, and
preferably from the secessionist province of Balochistan.
In all the brouhaha, what about the
"War on Terror"? The short answer is: who cares? For the Pakistan
army, and more so the ISI, the so-called "war" has merely been a means
to wring out more funds from U.S. taxpayers. In exchange for an average of
around US$12 billion each year since 2001, the army makes a few well-publicized
sweeps of the frontier regions and gets into some firefights. However, the
financial and logistics help given by the army to the newly expanded Taliban
continues, albeit through cutouts such as tribal elders and NGOs. Had Pakistan
truly cut off such assistance, NATO would by now have secured Afghanistan,
rather than be fighting what has become a losing battle against the Taliban.
By 2003, mainly because of the support
given by George W. Bush and Tony Blair – backing as uncritical as that
demonstrated by the pair when shown concocted evidence of the links between
Saddam Hussein and Islamic extremists – the Pakistan army had gotten NATO to
sideline almost all the key anti-Taliban commanders, replacing them with
substitutes who were either incapable of responding to this fanatic force or in
recessed sympathy with them.
From the end of that year, after the neutering
of the anti-Taliban native fighters, NATO has been on the losing side in
Afghanistan. Given their backing to the concept of Afghanistan as a
"secure rear area" for Pakistan and the exclusive (to Pakistan) link
to Central Asia, neither Kiyani nor Sharif are likely to pose the challenge to
the mujahideen that Musharraf did for the final two years of his nine years in
office. Nor will Prime Minister Gillani, who has displaced his nominal boss
Zardari as the PPP's link to the army and the ISI.
NATO is following in the path of the Soviet
military, which ignored the safe haven given to the jihadis by Pakistan,
forgetting that the epicenter of the jihad is in Lahore and Peshawar rather
than in Khost or Kandahar. Until the Pakistan army feels genuine pain for its
policy of private support for the Taliban, that force will spread across most
of Afghanistan by 2012, given present rates of success.
Already, throughout the country, there has
been a return within hundreds of thousands of families to the hard-line
practices of the religious extremists. Only carrying the war into Taliban
sanctuaries in Pakistan, and returning to Donald Rumsfeld's policies of
empowering all the Taliban foes without looking too closely at their table
manners, can stop the present slide toward a NATO retreat from Afghanistan
within two years.
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is
vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and
professor of geopolitics at Manipal University. ©Copyright M.D. Nalapat.)
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