Page 1 of 2 The Sharif factor comes into
play By M K Bhadrakumar
The United States is watching with anxiety
Pakistan's painful march towards democracy, and it
does not like the look of it. The return of former
prime minister Nawaz Sharif to Pakistan has
completely altered the political calculus and took
Washington by surprise.
By insisting on
Sharif's return to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia took
matters into its own hands. Washington should have
read the signal that something was stirring in
Riyadh when, a fortnight
earlier, the Saudi ambassador
to Pakistan made an characteristic public display
of intervening with President General Pervez
Musharraf for the release of the former director
general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) ,
Hamid Gul, from detention under the draconian
state of emergency provisions imposed this month.
Gul is no ordinary mortal. He has an
impeccable record - both as a serving corps
commander and as a retired general - of
campaigning for Pakistan's destiny within an arc
of Islamic countries stretching from Afghanistan
to Turkey. He has consistently advocated strategic
defiance of the United States. Twenty years ago,
he co-authored a strategic rethink ("regional
strategic consensus paper") while serving as the
ISI chief under president Zia ul-Haq, preparing
Pakistan for its post-Afghan jihad phase when the
US was set to drop it as an ally.
Gul is a
staunch believer in the "Islamic bomb". Of course,
that was also the time in the late 1980s when
Pakistan was considering the outright "sale" of a
nuclear bomb to Saudi Arabia to rid itself
altogether of the irksome dependence on American
aid, apart from arranging the supply of Chinese
long-range CSS-II nuclear-capable missiles to
Saudi Arabia. Gul is an untiring believer in the
jihad. Some say he once personally took Osama bin
Laden to meet Nawaz Sharif.
Rise of
Islamist nationalism Yet, Washington
didn't take note when Musharraf acceded to the
Saudi request for Gul's freedom. The promptness
with which the Saudi wish was accommodated by the
Pakistani establishment should have alerted the
US.
Unsurprisingly, the specter that is
haunting the George W Bush administration is
whether the baton of the democratic transformation
of Pakistan will pass into the hands of
conservative nationalist Islamic forces instead of
the "moderate liberals" (read Benazir Bhutto)
chosen by Washington. Bush admitted his personal
sense of frustration when he told the Associated
Press: "I don't know him [Sharif] well enough."
Regarding Sharif's links with Islamic parties in
Pakistan, Bush added: "I would be very concerned
if there is any leader in Pakistan that did not
understand the nature of the world in which we
live today."
Sharif, on his part,
point-blank refuses to acknowledge Bush's recent
efforts to bring about Pakistan's democratic
transformation. He would recall his association
with president Bill Clinton and stress he didn't
know Bush. On Wednesday, Sharif touched on Bush's
"war on terror". Referring to the military
crackdown in Pakistan's Swat Valley, Sharif said
Islamabad ought to think before complying with the
demands of foreign powers. He caustically added:
"This is our country, and we know better how to
solve our problems."
Sharif estimated his
remark would find good resonance in Pakistani
opinion. Senior unnamed US officials, in turn,
have leaked to the American mainstream newspapers
- including The New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle - the Bush
administration's disquiet that Sharif might spoil
the "war on terror".
They paint Sharif as
a conservative politician who connived with Abdul
Qadeer Khan's nuclear proliferation and hobnobbed
with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and argue that he
stands in the way of the emancipation of Pakistani
women. They cherry-pick from Sharif's tumultuous
political life and find fault with him for just
about everything that went wrong in Pakistan in
the recent two to three decades. But that is
grossly unfair. There is almost nothing that
Sharif did while in power at which Bhutto didn't
try her hand.
The Bush administration
squirms that its techniques of political
management failed to work with the formidable
Pakistani establishment. The rapidity of the
unfolding of political events in Islamabad has
left Bush with no option but to keep eulogizing
Musharraf's leadership qualities - even as the
general systematically rubbished Bhutto's
political prospects. Maybe an apocalyptic vision
of a Sharif-led Pakistan may help justify the Bush
administration's continued support of Musharraf.
Washington's demands today have virtually
narrowed down to a lifting of the emergency rule
in Pakistan - something that Musharraf is in any
case getting ready to do. In fact, Musharraf has
no more use for the emergency rule now that he has
overcome the judicial challenges that threatened
to prevent him from becoming a civilian president.
He remains obstinate only in his refusal to
restore the pre-November 3 judiciary that he
sacked. But that is understandable. The political
parties themselves are divided about the issue.
Sharif's options Sections of
the Pakistani establishment keenly expect Sharif
to unify the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) factions
to thwart any residual chances of Bhutto's bid for
power. They seek a repetition of the broad
alliance on the pattern of the IJI (Islami
Jamhuriat Itehad, or Islamic Democratic Alliance)
of 1988, which was an alliance of the PML and
Islamic parties with the help of the military and
the ISI. The point is, even though Sharif may have
a bitter feud with Musharraf, that doesn't
diminish his acceptability to the Pakistani
establishment, for whom he still remains a former
ally.
Arguably, Sharif's natural
inclination ought to be to settle for a deal with
the military-intelligence establishment. But these
are early days. Sharif is probing. He is
grandstanding. He is reconnecting with his support
base in Punjab. He is weighing what is there in
the elections for him. Will his candidacy be
accepted since he stands condemned by court
judgement? The constitution debars him from
becoming prime minister for a third time.
Meanwhile, some elements have been
clarified. First, Sharif may not resort to
agitational politics. He could easily be a rabble
rouser, but the Saudis wouldn't want him to do
anything by way of stirring up things that
threatened to destabilize the existing political
order in Islamabad. Saudi interest lies not in
undermining nuclear-armed Pakistan but to be able
to navigate it if the gyre of Shi'ite Iran's
influence continues to widen in the region.
Again, Sharif continues to view Bhutto
with distrust. Sharif is keen on the PML
functioning within a united front under the banner
of the All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM), but
he can't ensure the alliance's cohesion,
especially the Islamic parties. The ISI used to
handle such matters for him previously. He also
rejects an outright merger of his party with the
ruling party PML (Q) but isn't averse to defectors
from the "King's party" joining his ranks. The
APDM on Thursday announced a boycott in principle
of January's parliamentary polls (Bhutto did not),
but that is not necessarily the end of the matter.
Within this code of conduct, it is not
surprising Musharraf has concluded he could learn
to live with Sharif's hot words as long as the
elections go ahead as scheduled. Musharraf
reiterated on Thursday soon after being sworn in
as the civilian president that he is determined to
hold the elections on January 8, "come hell or
high water". The big question is whether the main
political parties will participate. The legitimacy
of the polls would ease pressure on Musharraf from
the international community.
The powerful
head of the PML-Q, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, and
his cousin and Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry
Pervaiz Elahi (who was until recently perceived to
be the next prime minister) have hinted that a
post-election understanding with Sharif cannot be
ruled out. Sheikh Rashid, who is close to
Musharraf, said: "You cannot rule out anything in
Pakistan. If Musharraf can meet Benazir and if
Nawaz Sharif can return to Pakistan before the
elections, then everything is possible."
Musharraf himself hinted at the
horse-trading that lies ahead when he hoped
politicians wouldn't repeat the 1990s' political
culture. He held out a sort of olive branch when
he expressed the hope on Thursday in front of a
distinguished audience in Islamabad that he
"personally" thought that Sharif's return to
Pakistan would "prove good" for the country.
Musharraf vs Kiani Musharraf
also announced on Thursday that Phase 3 of his
program of democratic transition has commenced.
Clearly, the speculation hogging the current
discourses over Pakistan - as regards the
inevitability of a clash of personalities
involving Musharraf and the newly appointed chief
of army staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani -
completely overlooks the obvious reality that
these two protagonists are virtually joined at the
hip in the post-election scenario in Pakistan.
Their core interests are inextricably
intertwined. The Pakistani army can never hope to
get a president anywhere as deeply committed as
Musharraf for safeguarding its corporate
interests. As for Musharraf, who lacks an
independent political base, he would be
intelligent enough to know the limits to his
presidential authority.
At any rate, the
last thing a quintessential soldier like Musharraf
would do would be to bypass the military's
interests in favor of "civilian supremacy".
Historically, the nearest that the military could
manage to reach by way of an entente cordiale with
the presidency within the framework of Pakistan's
ruling troika - comprising president, prime
minister and army chief - was when the bureaucrat
par excellence, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, took over in
the dramatic circumstances following Zia ul-Haq's
death in a plane crash in August 1988. But Khan
still needed to ingratiate himself with then-army
chief General Aslam Beg.
Musharraf and
Kiani go back a long way. That is to say, the
extent to which the military has gone to ensure
that Bhutto doesn't become part of the troika in
Islamabad, as was the case 19 years ago, must be
put in its proper perspective. Musharraf and Kiani
pursued a common agenda after determining what
is
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