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COMMENTARY
The Taliban revisited in
Pakistan
By Ajai Sahni
Nine
months ago, President General Pervez Musharraf's
government in Pakistan rigged an election to scuttle the
prospects of established political parties - including
the exiled Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party
(PPP) and the exiled Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim
League (PML-N) - to give the Islamist extremist
Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) an overwhelming majority
in North West Frontier Province (NWFP), largest single
party status in Balochistan province, and an
unprecedented one-fifth of the seats (53 out of 272) in
the National Assembly.
The elections were widely
criticized by civil-society and democratic elements
within Pakistan, as well as by a range of independent
international observers - including the European Union's
Group of Observers - as being unfair and stage-managed
by the military regime. A rare and crucial exception to
this assessment, however, was the United States, which
accepted the manipulated Pakistani mandate as valid, in
part because it felt - and continues to feel - obligated
to the Musharraf dictatorship for its apparent
assistance in tracking down al-Qaeda and Taliban
survivors, and partly because of an entirely flawed
assessment that this "democracy" could eventually create
the basis of a transition to real democracy in Pakistan.
Democracy, however, is a culture that evolves
through practice, not a system that can be imposed on a
people by a dictator and his puppets - with or without
external support. The "electoral success" of the MMA has
not only placed a crucial border province entirely at
the disposal of Islamist extremists directly linked to
the Afghani Taliban, it has also given them a central
role and exaggerated presence in the national political
order - elements that the fundamentalists have exploited
to the hilt. Concomitantly, the skewed National Assembly
has resulted in the progressive marginalization -
indeed, virtual neutralization - of legitimate
democratic forces, leaving the entire arena to the
Islamist extremists or to featureless puppets of the
Musharraf dictatorship. In all, prospects - indeed, the
very possibility - of a functioning democracy
re-emerging in Pakistan have been destroyed by the
outcome of the rigged elections of last October.
The consequences are the more disastrous in the
NWFP, where the MMA government on June 2 passed a bill
enshrining sharia (Islamic law) as the supreme authority
in the province. It is significant that the bill was
passed "unanimously", without any criticism or
resistance from the opposition parties - including the
"liberal" PPP - in the NWFP assembly. The brand of
sharia that is to be imposed is already visible in the
creation of a "Department of Vice and Virtue" on the
pattern of the Taliban's notorious former ministry for
the promotion of virtue and discouragement of vice in
Afghanistan, as well as in the fact that the MMA
leadership comprises many of the primary patrons and
associates of the erstwhile Taliban regime in that
country. If any doubt remained, it was cleared up by MMA
member of parliament Hamid-ul-Haq, who declared, "MMA
had been given the mandate to implement sharia ... The
blood of [the Afghan] Taliban has borne fruit and sharia
has been implemented in NWFP."
Soon after its
introduction in the provincial assembly - and well
before the bill had been passed - the MMA had
demonstrated its intent and power in the streets when
party thugs went on a rampage through Peshawar (the
provincial capital) defacing or destroying hoardings
that showed women, smashing satellite cable TV equipment
and attacking commercial establishments linked with
foreign multinational companies. Musicians and dancers
have been driven out of the province and all females
over the age of 12 are being forced into purdah
(complete social segregation and head-to-toe veiling in
public places). The chief minister of the NWFP, Akram
Khan Durrani, has backed action with ominous rhetoric:
"We are a force now. Nobody can ignore us. We have
nothing to lose."
The enormity of these
developments cannot correctly be assessed simply by
focusing on the NWFP, and the MMA's visible
constituency. The fact is, no political entity in
Pakistan - and this includes the Musharraf dictatorship
and the army - can effectively resist calls for
Islamization and imposition of Sharia in the country, or
any part of it. Indeed, the language of the MMA's sharia
bill is only a reflection of existing national
legislation. Article 2 of the Pakistani constitution
declares Islam to be the "state religion", and articles
227 and 228 mandate that no law in contravention of the
sharia can be enforced in the country. Article 227
requires that all existing laws be brought into
conformity with the "injunctions of Islam", and that no
law shall be enacted which is repugnant to such
injunctions.
Crucially, moreover, whenever laws
in the name of Islam have impinged on political, social
and cultural freedoms - as they first began to do so in
the Zia ul-Haq era - no government has ever been able to
reverse the consequent trends. It is in the nature of
the political discourse in Pakistan - with oppressive
blasphemy laws, enormous and armed street power in the
hands of the Islamist extremists, overwhelming
illiteracy, a vast network of social and "educational"
institutions controlled by Islamist fundamentalists, and
an entirely emasculated democratic political
constituency - that no effective opposition can be
mounted, or even voiced, to anything, however irrational
or unfounded, that is claimed to be in the "interests of
Islam".
It is, moreover, not entirely clear
that, even if this were possible, there is any will or
intent to create such an opposition among those who
currently control Pakistan's destiny. Pakistani sources
confirm that segments of the army and the Inter Services
Intelligence (ISI) continue to support the MMA's
political consolidation and have, as the Friday Times
notes, "worked overtime to pave their forceful entry
into the corridors of power". The Islamist parties have,
certainly since Zia's time, been seen as the "natural
allies" of the army, as against the democratic forces in
the country, and this is an alliance that is yet to be
questioned under the Musharraf regime.
The
political scenario in Pakistan, consequently, remains
extraordinarily murky. While the military regime
proclaims its support for the US "war against
terrorism", and helps "hunt" al-Qaeda and Taliban
survivors with US forces, it is widely believed to
continue to shield the top leadership of these entities,
many of whom are known to be in Pakistan; the ISI and
elements in the army, moreover, continue to give
clandestine support to Taliban elements still operating
in Afghanistan's border regions, and to terrorism in the
India, particularly in the province of Jammu and
Kashmir; within the country, while limited initiatives
to contain sectarian strife have borne some fruit, the
gradual consolidation of Islamist extremist forces in
national politics has been continuous.
There is
some speculation that the MMA's increasing belligerence
receives tacit encouragement from the Musharraf regime -
on the presumption that, at a stage when the Islamists
cross the line of international tolerance, this will
give the army an excuse to dissolve parliament and the
state assemblies, and regain absolute control of the
political space. Such a projection would be consistent
with the Pakistani military leadership's past record, to
the extent that the threat of a collapse into
fundamentalist anarchy has constantly been held out to
the world as justification for the continuation of
authoritarian rule by the military.
This is,
however, a double-edged weapon, and the gradual
consolidation of the Islamist extremist constituency,
not only in the country's political firmament, but
within the military rank and file as well, creates the
danger that those who seek to play with this fire may,
eventually, be consumed by it.
Ajai
Sahni is editor of the South Asia Intelligence
Review and executive director of the Institute for
Conflict Management, a non-profit society set up in 1997
in New Delhi committed to the evaluation and resolution
of problems of internal security in South Asia.
(Published with permission from the South Asia
Intelligence Review of the South Asia
Terrorism Portal.)
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