On Monday morning, two convoys of luxury four-wheel-drive vehicles will speed from the leafy western suburbs of Islamabad on to the newly widened dual carriageway through the centre of the Pakistani capital.
Barely braking for the police checkpoints, they will converge on the National Assembly. The two most powerful politicians in Pakistan — Nawaz Sharif, the head of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), and Asif Ali Zardari, the husband and successor of assassinated Benazir Bhutto as leader of her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) — will either be burying President Pervez Musharraf or praising him.
If negotiations to secure an ”honourable exit from power” for the military strongman have been successful, it will be the latter: speeches disingenuously praising his contribution over nine years of rule to the Pakistani people. If not, it will be impeachment.
”Musharraf’s days in power are numbered,” Ayaz Amir, a PML-N MP, said on Saturday. Makhtoum Shahabuddin, a former PPP minister and recently re-elected MP, agreed: ”He is batting on a very, very sticky wicket.”
What is certain is that the world will be watching the power struggle in Pakistan very closely indeed. For the apparently imminent political demise of the president of Pakistan, the head of a nuclear-capable Islamic state of 170-million people, will have repercussions well beyond the humid corridors of Islamabad.
Last week violence flared up throughout Pakistan: suicide bombers struck in the east, hundreds died as the army launched new offensives against radical Muslim militants 150km or so to the west, there were riots across the border in Indian Kashmir and bombs, and the customary rockets and battles in Afghanistan.
”It is clear that we are on the brink of a major change that goes well beyond the end of another cycle of civilian-military rule in Pakistan,” said one Islamabad-based Western diplomat.
Each of the main players in the drama — Sharif, Zardari and Musharraf — represents a broader trend in society, and each viscerally detests the other two. Whoever triumphs will set the nation’s course for the future.
Changes
The changes in Pakistan over the past decade are manifest. This weekend tens of millions will be following events on the country’s scores of new local-language television channels — predominantly Urdu, the national tongue, but in minority Sindhi, Punjabi and Pashto, too. None existed a decade ago. The vociferous and hugely popular talk shows have politicised swathes of the population.
”Once we could count on our name to get elected,” said Masroor Ahmed Jatoi, a candidate in the February election, who hails from a major land-owning family in the southern Sindh province. ”But not any longer. People are demanding much more. They are much less deferential.”
For those without televisions, the now ubiquitous ”one rupee a minute” cellphones will act as a secondary conduit of information. In the growing cities — a recent study revealed that more than 50% of Pakistanis now live in towns of more than 5 000 people — the effects of the long economic boom of the Musharraf years has broadened the middle classes.
”The guys who had a bicycle now have a motorbike; those who had a motorbike have a car,” said one Karachi-based journalist. ”They worry about paying the rent, about losing their jobs, but they are better off nonetheless.”
The symbol of these new classes is the tiny hatchback, the 800cc Suzuki Mehran, which pack the congested streets of the southern port city. If Britain’s ”Mondeo Man” determined political fortunes in the early 1990s, Pakistan’s ”Mehran Man” — and, in this still deeply traditional society, the drivers are almost always male — will determine how Pakistan goes forward.
The irony is that Musharraf instigated the changes, such as the liberalisation of the media and the economy, that could lead to his downfall.
The 65-year-old general took power nine years ago in a bloodless coup, ousting prime minister Sharif, a wealthy industrialist from the relatively prosperous eastern province of Punjab, who came to power when Benazir Bhutto’s administration had been dismissed for incompetence and graft less than three years earlier.
The summer of 1999 had seen a series of corruption scandals breaking around Sharif and his family, a short, vicious and disastrous war with India in Kashmir, and an economy in freefall. One by one Sharif and his cronies corrupted, co-opted, imprisoned, exiled or intimidated almost all who could act as constraints on their power: NGOs, the press, the judiciary, the religious establishment, the bureaucracy, Bhutto and her husband, Zardari.
But when Sharif attempted to replace Musharraf, the head of Pakistan’s immensely powerful military, he went too far. As the general circled in a passenger jet above Karachi, forbidden to land and running out of fuel, loyal army commanders moved swiftly to secure the country.
”The Pakistani Army always has updated plans for a war in Kashmir, for an Indian invasion, and for taking control of government,” one retired senior officer said recently. ”We just dusted off the right file and it was over in hours.”
Vengeance
Sharif was arrested, tried for treason and exiled to Saudi Arabia. He made no secret of his desire for vengeance. Eight years later it looks as if he will get it. According to sources close to the negotiations, it is Sharif who is insisting on the harshest conditions for Musharraf’s potential exit this weekend.
But revenge had to wait. The coup had broad domestic support and Musharraf found himself back in international favour after the 9/11 attacks when, after some deliberation, he pledged his support in the ”war on terror”. A flood of diplomatic, military and financial aid followed. And until spring last year, Musharraf, not least thanks to a booming economy, seemed unassailable.
The threat to Musharraf came from two directions. The first was from the Islamic militants. Critics argue that the general is a ”closet Islamist”, but this is unlikely: Musharraf is far from devout. In his first interview as president, he proudly showed Britain’s Observer his pet spaniels — causing fury among religious hard-liners, who see pet dogs as un-Islamic. If he has manipulated militant groups, it is out of Realpolitik, not faith.
Indeed Musharraf is broadly representative of many old-school Pakistani army officers — and of an earlier generation of the Pakistani middle classes heavily influenced by the culture, language and ideas of their British former colonial masters.
The surge of militant violence during Musharraf’s rule was partly a result of the fallout from the war on terror globally, with Pakistan caught in the surge of radicalism that has seized much of the Islamic world, although sheer incompetence also played a large part. Demoralised soldiers or policemen were sent repeatedly against enemies they were ill-equipped to fight, in campaigns with little strategic direction or consistency.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, shortly after her return to Pakistan after an agreement with Musharraf, was merely the most spectacular of hundreds of bombings, shootings and clashes in a struggle that is now becoming a full-scale war. In the past 10 days nearly 500 people have died and 135 000 been displaced by fighting in the anarchic western borderlands.
For Musharraf, the rising tide of violence was a double blow. Overseas, the president appeared incapable of fighting even Pakistani militants, let alone the Taliban or al-Qaeda, which had based itself in the country he supposedly governed. American officials asked themselves if he really was the right man to be receiving billions of dollars of aid.
Domestically, the violence undermined the military’s claim that only they, not a civilian government, could ensure security. Worse, it led to Musharraf being seen by everyone from peasants through to Mehran Men and Pakistan’s intellectual elite as an American stooge who, in the words of one angry army officer, sent ”good Pakistani Muslims to fight Washington’s wars against their own countrymen and co-religionists”.
National identity
Here a second shift in Pakistan in recent years was important: the reassertion of a more confident and aggressive national and religious identity, which translates into a much less deferential attitude to the West. From the clerks or the pharmacists or the small businessmen who are convinced that Israel, India and the US are joining arms against the Muslim world to the wealthy elite who would rather holiday in Dubai, Malaysia or Saudi Arabia than in Europe or America, a new sense of Pakistan’s place in the world, and crucially among Islamic nations, has become clear. Language as well as faith is important, even among the English-speaking educated class. There is a new emphasis on local, not imported Anglophone, culture.
”For the first time, I am ashamed that my Urdu is not better,” said top music producer and former pop star Rohil Hayatt.
The other threat to Musharraf came in the unlikely shape of Pakistan’s white-shirted, black-suited lawyers. Their protest was sparked when the president moved to suspend the flamboyant chief justice last year — a big mistake. Protests spread to the universities as, for the first time, Pakistan’s middle classes turned against the man they had once largely supported. The ringtone ”Go Musharraf Go” became one of the most popular in the country. A manipulated election in October, a state of emergency in November and a continuing crackdown on the media brought reinforcements from journalists and intellectuals. A new ”civil society” movement appeared for the first time for decades.
”The lawyers set things going, but are not a political party, so could not reap the true rewards of their actions,” said Professor Rasul Baksh Rais, constitutional expert at the Lahore University for Management Science. For the moment, the two major Pakistani parties, the PPP and the PML-N, recognise the need for uniting against the common enemy. But, given the changes in Pakistan, it seems likely that Sharif will be the long-term winner.
In the surprisingly free and fair general elections of February, his Muslim League, though split and unprepared, did well. Particularly in the crucial Punjab province, it is the portly parvenu Sharif who best reflects the new and evolving values and aspirations of tens of millions of his compatriots. ”He has his finger on the popular pulse and the common man likes him,” Khawaja Asif, a key aide, said.
On one side, there was the moderate, secular, charming, Westernised Bhutto and now her urbane, slick widower; on the other, there is Sharif, whose English is hesitant, who likes folksy Punjabi cooking and ostentatious foreign watches, who is socially and religiously conservative without being extreme, who has more support in Riyadh than in Washington, who sees Dubai — not London — as a model of economic development, and whose identity fuses religion and a chauvinist nationalism. There seems little doubt who reflects better the changing identity of Pakistan.
”The winner of this crisis will be the democratic process in this country,” said Rais. ”The culture, values and institutions have yet to be defined and refined, but the democratic process will win.”
And in a democracy the government reflects the culture, the attitude and the beliefs of the people. They may not be those the West hoped to see.
The fate of past presidents
Being the President of Pakistan has advantages — the sumptuous free lodgings, the helicopter, the power — and one major disadvantage: the slim chance of a gentle old age spent basking in the gratitude of those you have so selflessly served.
Iskander Mirza
A military coup ended the rule of Pakistan’s first president in 1958, shortly after he himself had declared martial law. He appointed Ayub Khan as the martial law administrator, in the process forfeiting his own political legitimacy. Sent into exile to London, he died a decade later.
Yahya Khan
The chief of the army staff was handed power by Ayub Khan in 1969, but was forced out of office after the disastrous 1971 war that brought defeat by India and the independence of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan).
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto
Benazir’s flamboyant father and leader of the Pakistan People’s Party was in turn handed the reins of power by Yahya Khan. He ruled, latterly as prime minister after changing the Constitution, for six years before being deposed by the army in 1977. He was hanged in Rawalpindi in April 1979, having been found guilty of the murder of a political opponent.
General Zia ul-Haq
After 11 years in power, Zia, who led the coup against Bhutto, himself died in a mysterious air crash — along with several of his generals and the US ambassador, possibly caused by a grenade hidden in a crate of mangoes. For the next decade, presidents came and went, according to the twists and turns of democratic Pakistani politics, becoming the subject of derision and contempt when ousted.
General Pervez Musharraf
In 1999 the current president seized power. He is hoping to spend a quiet retirement on his ranch in the hills behind Islamabad, saying he has no money to quit the country. The fate of his various predecessors cannot be encouraging.
— guardian.co.uk