Pakistan - News and Discussion 6

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>After Musharraf is gone…</b>
  Fridaytimes
Khaled Ahmed’s : A n a l y s i s 
No one really knows if President Musharraf will put aside his military post of the chief of the army staff in 2007; and if he does, will he contest the post of the president in accordance with the Constitution? <b>The ruling PML leadership seems to be saying that he will stay on as COAS-cum-President well into the next decade. (The year 2016 is at times given, coextensive with the completion of the dams, including the Kalabagh Dam.)</b> But all of the PML doesn’t say it. In a recent TV debate, federal minister Dr Sher Afgan thought there was no constitutional bar on him if he wanted to go on holding the two posts beyond 2007.

PML senator Mr SM Zafar seemed certain that he couldn’t do that after 2007. In his view, after the next election, Musharraf will have to seek the presidency as a civilian in the normal constitutional course. Then in May 2006, the view earlier expressed by PML president Chaudhry Shujaat seemed to prevail: President Musharraf will be re-elected by the 2002 parliament for another five years before it is dissolved for the 2007 general election.

<b>The hate-Musharraf community:</b> The secular-clerical ‘combined’ opposition in parliament loathes Musharraf, so do also the chattering classes, liberals and conservatives all put together. Those engaged in the economic function – and those subscribing to the pragmatic school of thought – should like him but they don’t speak out in his favour, except perhaps when they meet him in person, which could only mislead him. He himself began by saying he will go. Many ‘democrats’ have sat on the fence, taking his word on trust. Then he began to say he might not go. In the eyes of some, he should have gone at the end of 2004. Then he refused, after a nitpicking interpretation of the 17th Amendment, with the Supreme Court seeming to nod its head in assent. Meanwhile his graph with the chattering classes kept going down. Now we are in 2006 and he has still not announced that he would go. The cabinet in Islamabad has been asked not to comment.

Opposing him, the politicians have eaten into the narrow patch of ‘self-correction’ they would need after they replace him. They have taken firm positions on issues that are actually not merely the causes of opportunism espoused personally by Musharraf but are also related to some permanent flaws of the state. They have become flaws of the state through a steady postponement of their resolution because the governments were not empowered enough politically to tackle them. These problems have become flaws also because their permanent irresolution is being described by some outsiders as the cracks in the state structure on which it might finally end its life.

<b>Rhetoric that may not die: </b>No matter who comes to power he will have to face the following issues: the relationship with the United States which the opposition has dubbed slavery, thus tending to scare off the international opinion willing to accept Pakistan’s return to full-dress democracy; the process of ‘normalisation’ with India which the opposition has dubbed ‘capitulation without a quid pro quo’; the winding up of the Kashmir jihad which the mainstream parties have joined the clergy in condemning as harmful to the Kashmir Cause (The Charter of Democracy has significantly gone back to UN Resolutions on Kashmir.); the ‘de-buffering’ of Balochistan and the Tribal Areas where the writ of the state doesn’t run; the resolution of the crisis of water reservoirs for irrigation and power generation; and the problem of the de-Islamisation of society to root out seminarian rejectionism and violence, etc.

After a two-hour long meeting in London on 25 April 2006, (repeated on 14 May after signing the Charter) Pakistan’s two exiled prime ministers Ms Benazir Bhutto and Mr Nawaz Sharif issued a statement calling for the removal of President Pervez Musharraf - before the next general election in Pakistan is held under a “national government” under a revamped Election Commission. They demanded that the government release the PMLN and PPP leaders incarcerated at present while at the same time vowing not to enter into any deal with the government. They have since prepared and signed an agreed ‘charter for democracy’ together with a ‘code of conduct’ which they will place before the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) summit on 2 July 2006.

<b>Rejectionism without street power:</b> There is an assumption in the above policy statement that the government is under pressure and would be relieved to let the PMLN and the PPP be a part of the ‘national government’ to hold the 2007 election. How have the two achieved this ‘deterrence’? Do the mainstream parties have ‘street power’? Judging from the ease with which the government was able to brush off party-cadre agitation in the occasion of the arrival in Lahore of Mr Asif Zardari and Mr Shehbaz Sharif, the two have vote-banks but no street power, which, on the other hand, is possessed by Jamaat Islami and which empowers its leader Qazi Hussain Ahmad above the other clerical components of the MMA. Knowing this fact, Qazi Sahib is already threatening a till-Musharraf-is-ousted dharna in Islamabad, daring the combined opposition to do what he can do.

Ms Benazir Bhutto has been carefully prefiguring the course the PPP will follow if the party performs well in the 2007 election and gets a chance to run the country. She has already ruled out any electoral arrangement with Jamaat Islami and the MMA, thus rescuing her party from the pro-clerical slant given by her second echelon leaders in Pakistan who thought it good policy to align the party with the radical policy of the MMA, condemning brahminism (sic!) in the neighbourhood and hegemonism (sic!) at the global level. (The media manager of the party who coined the terms has since been changed.) But the ‘politics of return’ will be tough to negotiate by both Ms Bhutto and Mr Nawaz Sharif. This means that the parties will have to fight the 2007 election under the 17th Amendment which the ARD and the MMA have vowed to throw out.

<b>A hypothetical post-Musharraf coalition:</b> Let us imagine that Musharraf has left the scene in 2007 and the mainstream parties have won the next election against PMLQ. In 2002, the PPP was supposed to have got the highest number of votes. The PMLN and PPP politicians in Pakistan have announced that the two parties will go into the 2007 election after making ‘seat-adjustments’. This aims at mobilising the vote-bank with the purpose of gaining more seats. This time the PPP might not get the highest number of votes but it may win more seats in the assemblies. The PMLN might face a much bigger challenge because of the much larger split that happened in its ranks in 2002. Also it will be faced not so much with ‘rigging’ as with defeating well-entrenched feudal vote-getters that joined the PMLQ. It is almost certain that if the PPP wins, it will not be able to form a government on its own.

Let us assume that the PPP-PMLN form a coalition. Ideological differences will hound the coalition - despite the ‘code of conduct’ - given the nature of politics in Pakistan. Vote-getting politicians in parliament will demand to be made ministers, which will swell the federal and provincial cabinets and make formulation of policy difficult. On a daily basis, the ruling coalition will be hounded by politicians threatening to resign on national issues they would know to be intensely disputed at the public level. The PPP, for instance, will feel pressure from Sindh on its position on the dams, in particular, the Kalabagh and Diamer-Basha dams. Chances are that the two dams may never get started.

<b>The Balochistan quagmire:</b> The issue of Balochistan will become more complicated after the PPP-PMLN coalition decides to go back to ‘political negotiations’, which mostly means letting the troika of sardars rule as before with ‘persuasion’ added in the shape of massive bribes. This time however the situation on the ground will be more difficult than the mainstream parties realise: the two have already agreed in the Parliamentary Committee’s Report of 2005 that there would be no Frontier Constabulary guarding the borders against smuggling, no police force facilitating the registration and investigation of crime in the province, and no new military cantonments guarding the international gas pipelines crossing Balochistan. Even under these agreed conditions, the negotiation of peace with the sardars in Balochistan may have some added dimensions, as follows:

The sardars have already made it known that their ownership of natural gas in Balochistan was no longer open to discussion. Gas in Balochistan would be extracted by Balochistan which will then decide at what price to sell it to the international market, including Pakistan. Needless to say, the prevalent international price – with gas approaching the price levels of oil – would be preferred by Quetta. Islamabad will have to accept the new conditions or suffer the consequences of not pacifying the province after the exit of Musharraf from the scene. The coalition will also have to surrender the port of Gwadar to Balochistan even if that means amending the Constitution and thus opening the door to the ‘provincialisation’ of the Karachi port as well, as demanded by many ruling politicians in Sindh. The breakout of an inter-ethnic conflict in Balochistan might not be easily controlled by Islamabad after the country’s return to ‘full democracy’.

<b>The Waziristan quagmire:</b> On the question of ‘foreigners’ in Waziristan, the two mainstream parties have already given their verdict and it has been pretty close to the stance of the MMA without being overtly pro-Taliban and pro-Al Qaeda. (‘Musharraf is doing it on orders from America’, has been the line.) The top leaders of both parties have courted public support by de-linking the trouble in the Tribal Areas from the trespass of foreign terrorist elements. When they come to power, the real problem there will confront them. Their predictable inaction will not lead to pacification in FATA but a further surge in extra-territorial control, which might lead to further empowerment of the rejectionist clergy. The PMLN side of the coalition will lean to the MMA clergy and weaken the government in its resolve to come to grips with the problem.

The next government in Islamabad sans Musharraf will have to accept the validity of his anti-isolationist foreign policy and will need to be very careful about reversing his domestic policies related to the ‘flaws of the state’. The top military leadership may provide a smooth transition after Musharraf but it will be averse to coming to the help of the civilian government after it worsens the crises now seen as ‘misdeeds’ of Musharraf. The army will also resist the ‘insertion’ of Islamist officers in the top echelons through promotions recommended by the civilian government. A rapid erosion of the credibility of the mainstream parties may happen while enhancing the public profile of the clerical parties.

Musharraf has to go and he knows it. But his policies were actually aimed at the self-correction of a state gone wrong. This going wrong was on many counts, but most dangerously, it had lost sight of the distinctions that most states are compelled to make between public passion and foreign policy pragmatism. Musharraf’s going will increase pressure on the politicians in power in Pakistan to ‘correct’ this ‘self-correction’ by plunging into another period of isolationism. The PPP and the PMLN both know this despite their rhetoric to the contrary, but <b>they will never be empowered enough by democracy to save the country from going down the road of isolationism, which is another name for defeat and dispersal.</b> <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->