DarkTimes - 24Hr Global News Blog

 

By Brij Khindaria

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has shed his army uniform and says he will allow free and fair democratic elections in January 2008 after ending the current martial law in mid-December 2007. Whatever happens will bring little change b ecause the current upheavals in Pakistan are not a bloody choice between democracy and political stability under a military dictator. They are the suffering of people caught between the hammer of a violent force rising in world Islam and the anvil of various secular forces that separate the words of God, whatever that God’s doctrine, from governance through laws enacted by man.

Pakistan is the land that is burning but the power struggle between fundamentalism and secularism is scattered and global. Because of a concourse of circumstances and history, Pakistan has become the focal point of these flames similar to the spot upon which a magnifying glass concentrates the sun’s roaming rays.

Musharraf’s political troubles may have been worsened by his military cooperation with Washington in the war against terrorism and hunt for Osama bin Laden since 9 September 2001. But they stem less from being an American puppet than from the role of Islam in the violence and contradictions that characterise Pakistan’s domestic politics.
These contradictions cannot be effaced without a life-changing decision. Do the Urdu-speaking South Asian people of Pakistan want to belong to the melting pot of today’s subcontinent or live in a purist theocracy admired by a few Arabs and others?

Its people have two choices. Either they review their country’s birth theology to break the link between the State and specific religious doctrine. Or they become true children of Islam by submitting their country to the particular texts they believe contain the ultimate words of God.

This second alternative sends fear around the world since these children of Islam would control nuclear weapons. The fear is multiplied because those who blindly believe in purist religious doctrine often distrust “godless” reasoning in the modern terminology of tolerance, logic and science. Negotiating with them becomes perilous and unpredictable.

The current hope around the world is that martial law in Pakistan is the final death throes of military dictatorships, which has dominated the country for more than half its life. Numerous analysts, including many people in Pakistan, hope that an orange revolution might happen there because of popular uprising.

This view neglects the significant differences between Pakistan and the conditions that allowed peaceful uprisings to bring down the Berlin Wall, defeat the Soviet Kremlin and snatch freedom for Hungarians, Czechs, Georgians, Ukranians and others. In those countries, people were fighting for freedom from the Soviet system which was using local regimes to control and oppress citizens in favor of Soviet interests. In the final stretch, there was no dissension among the people about the need to throw out the foreign puppet masters and their local puppets.

Pakistan is a completely different story. No foreign power has enslaved it directly or indirectly. It chose the path of Islam in a neighbourhood that its founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, thought would be hostile to that religion because it had ruled Indian Hindus for centuries. From the day of its birth on 14 August 1947, Pakistanis have vascillated over whether their country should be a defender of the faith or a modern nation working to bring the best to its citizens. Jinnah died in September 1948 before he could set a course for them.

Field Marshall Ayub Khan started the long tradition of military dictatorships by seizing power in 1958 to “save the country” after 10 years of instability under civilians, including a war with India over Kashmir. Several military dictatorships later, Musharraf is using the same argument.

Ayub Khan modelled himself on Turkey’s Ataturk but did not succeed in breaking Islam’s links with the state, as did the Turkish army. Musharraf has a better record as an economic reformer but his dependence on Islamic politicians is much greater and control over territory is equally precarious.

Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), which make up half of Pakistan, are still wild tribal lands. Both are in the hands of local governments heavily influenced by Islam. Retrograde Taliban theology is popular in the northern areas bordering Afghanistan and is kept in place by local warlords who also have formidable military skills.
Musharraf was forced to retreat in defeat from the northern border areas in 2006 despite sending over 80,000 regular soldiers armed by the world’s most lethal military, the Americans. Over $10 billion in US military and development aid since 2002 has failed to stop traditional Islamists from gaining the upper hand. For Washington, this is a nightmare.

Despite these failures, many in the West see Musharraf as a stabilzing force especially if he enters democracy alongside civilian politicians. They are forgetting that any Pakistani government, whether dictatorship or democratic, may have to work in coalition with the Islamic parties if it is weak and will have to pander to them if it is strong.

Hopes of stabilization are like skating on thin ice. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party is secular in name but Islamic piety runs through all its levels. Bhutto wears the Islamic scarf. Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz group) was and still is overtly based on religious identity and his earlier electoral victories owed greatly to support from more radical Islamists.

Both Bhutto and Sharif also have serious corruption charges against them. Their record offers little hope of clean government if either returns to power, whether separately or together in a political alliance. That means Pakistan’s lawyers and Supreme Court, which were brave enough to confront Musharraf, will have to shelve those corruption charges in order not to weaken a civilian government.

Both civilians and dictators have awful records of governance in Pakistan. Musharraf deposed Sharif in 1999 because of the army did not trust Sharif after humiliation in the Kargil War with India earlier that year. Sharif had ordered the war for the foolish reason of building upon the popular euphoria that followed Pakistan’s acquisition under his watch of nuclear weapons capability in 1998.

General Muhammed Zia ul Haq, the dictator before Musharraf and earlier short spells of civilian rule, was openly Islamist and filled both the army and the feared intelligence service with Islamists and their sympathizers. Ayub Khan was moderate but he led Pakistan into the disastrous 1965 war with India to “liberate” the Muslims of Indian Kashmir. His successer Yahya Khan caused the break up of Pakistan by losing a major war with India in 1971 when East Pakistan became the independent country of Bangladesh.

The war followed democratic elections in 1970 when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto led the Pakistan People’s Party to victory in the West but refused to reach a power sharing arrangement with Mujibur Rahman, whose Awami League had won twice as many votes in the East. The humiliated West Pakistan army blamed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s arrogance for Bangladesh’s creation and General Zia ul Haq later hanged him on charges of corruption. Bhutto’s daughter Benazir and her political rival Sharif each became Prime Minister two times during the 1980s and 1990s but both were deposed and exiled by the army for corruption and incompetence.

This is how Pakistan has reached the brink of implosion today. Whether democracy or dictatorship, Pakistan will continue to be a creation of Islam until its people decide to use religion as a personal path to God separate from their existence as a nation. Till then, modern liberal democracy will have little meaning for them.

There are no true democrats among Pakistan’s top politicians. There are only dictators in camouflage or venal civilians masking their craze for power with democratic jargon learned during their exile and education in the West. All are loyal to political Islam in one way or another.