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  #21  
Old Saturday, September 22, 2007
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Reprieve for ‘tinpotism’




By Ayaz Amir
Friday, Sep 14,2007

THE events of Sept 10, leading to Nawaz Sharif’s deportation to Saudi Arabia, have handed Pervez Musharraf his first success, or something he can savour, since March 9. The general was down and out. Now he is back on his feet, or so appearances would suggest.

The PML-N is shell-shocked, still trying to come to terms with the yawning gap between its rhetoric and ground realities. The Q League, still finding it hard to believe its luck, is back in business, the growing murmurs of disquiet in its ranks abruptly halting. Rule out any more crossing of party lines. The road to Musharraf’s ‘re-election’ as president from these assemblies — still his safest bet — thus looks clearer than for a long time.

The Pakistani media has come of age and the higher judiciary has asserted its independence but political parties are in a bad way, incapable of homework or doing things in an organised manner. On their own PML-N workers had slipped into Rawalpindi by Sept 10, the day of Nawaz Sharif’s homecoming. But there was no one to lead them or show them the way.

No need to come down hard on them. Our political parties are ‘election’ parties, not instruments of struggle or agitation. And their leaders are ‘press conference’, now also TV talk show, experts, fiery of speech but slow of action.

The Jamaat-i-Islami is an organised political party but it has a narrow political base. The MQM is an organised party with a mass base among its ethnic constituency. But it is organised on lines that don’t much distinguish it from the party of Adolf Hitler. Neither of the two would be the preferred cup of tea of the ordinary, moderate, mainstream-swimming Pakistani.

The last political movement in Pakistan took place in 1977, 30 years ago. The political class talks of mass movements as if these can be started by turning on a switch. This is more like nostalgia for a misty past bathed in the colours of drama and romance. The PPP and the PML-N can win elections, as they have proved more than once. But expect them not to be good at erecting barricades or lobbing Molotov cocktails.

On the road to Lahore, or from a prison cell, Sharif would have posed a serious threat to Musharraf. But putting him on a plane to Jeddah amounted to wrong-footing him and his supporters. The script had changed for which they were wholly unprepared.The lawyers’ movement went on for so long precisely because the lawyers’ community is organised differently from our political parties. The lawyers have a nation-wide organisation grounded in an act of parliament. They hold regular elections and the decisions of their national leadership are collective in nature. Our political parties for the most part are family affairs with the cult of personality strong in them and leaders more despotically-inclined than a chief of the army staff (who when it comes to major decisions has to take his colleagues with him).

Still, it was but natural that Sharif’s expulsion should have triggered a storm of moral indignation: of how the law, the Constitution, the decision of the Supreme Court allowing the Sharifs to return to the country, had been trampled upon. All this is true but then we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that while we have a semblance of the law in Pakistan, the most powerful factor in national life is not the tenets of the Constitution but the dynamics of military rule.

Musharraf is not in power because of the Constitution. He is there in spite of it, his grip on power ensured and even sanctified by his military position. In expelling Sharif he consulted not the Constitution or even the verdict of the Supreme Court but the demands of his survival.

Allowing Sharif to stay in Pakistan would have undermined his rule, further weakened his grip on power and encouraged his own supporters in the Q League to jump from what looked dangerously like a sinking ship. So he consulted his survival and had Sharif packed off to Jeddah.

Undoubtedly, this is a deplorable state of affairs but fully in tune with much of our history. No strangers to the logic of authoritarian rule we have seen worse things happening: a succession of first-rate disasters as rulers, wars driven by criminal folly, the breakup of Pakistan, the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Zia’s tyranny, Islam put in the service of hypocrisy. The list is long and growing.

Moral indignation while a worthy sentiment is no substitute for proper action. Dictatorship and authoritarianism can be denounced as much as we like but unless a real challenge is thrown to them, as the lawyers challenged the Musharraf order after March 9, our conditions will not change.

Lawyers did not just address press conferences or appear on TV talk shows (the new opiate of the Pakistani political class) although these too were necessary. They braved the heat and tramped the roads and took beatings from the police when these were unavoidable. But they still kept coming. The law was on their side but it was their tenacity which prevailed.

If instead of Nawaz Sharif it was Chief Justice Chaudhry returning from London, and if instead of the PML-N it was the legal community in the field, I have no doubt that battalions of young lawyers would have somehow come to the airport, skirting police barricades or even storming them should that have become necessary.

Anyhow, the battle lines are now more clearly drawn. The political parties are no threat to Musharraf. Indeed, to look at the Daughter of the East and the Sir John Falstaff of Pakistani politics, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, collaboration appears to be the flavour of the season. If he faces any resistance it will be from the Supreme Court, where petitions relating to his eligibility as presidential candidate await hearing, from the lawyers’ community which is promising to protest the filing of his nomination papers, and from freelance political and social activists who lent their support to the lawyers’ movement.

The focus thus returns to the rainbow coalition which drove Musharraf into a corner from March 9 onwards. Is this rainbow coalition strong enough for the next phase of the struggle? We shall have to wait and see although my hunch is that the forces of reaction (for want of a better word) are regrouping and, after Sept 10, will have regained some of their lost confidence.

Efforts are already afoot to undermine the unity of the legal community, Attorney General Qayyum the active Trojan horse in this connection. Lawyers must preserve their unity at all costs and, if I may suggest, reconsider the practice which gained ground during their movement of beating up the odd Naeem Bokhari. The time for such Jacobin tactics is past. I suspect there may also be efforts to undermine the unity of the Supreme Court. Let their lordships beware of such tactics.

Is this the end of the glorious season heralded by the events of March 9? Half my head says it is. The other half, still swept by visions of Bastilles being stormed and impregnable towers coming crashing down, says no. The next few days are going to be crucial. Even so, it was a glorious summer which, come what may, will leave its imprint behind.

Tailpiece: Only by the evening of Sept 9 when I saw roads leading to ‘Pindi/Islamabad being blocked by huge containers (a la the MQM in Karachi on May 12) was I convinced that Nawaz Sharif would be deported. I even agreed to bet a bottle of Black Label (what’s that?) to this effect. Earlier I was firmly of the opinion that Musharraf had become too weak a figure to carry out the threat of deportation. So much for high-class punditry.



http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/20070914.htm
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  #22  
Old Saturday, September 22, 2007
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Real parrots are less funny




By Ayaz Amir
Friday, Sep 21,2007

“IF elected for second term as president, General Pervez Musharraf will (step down as army chief).” The Supreme Court is hearing petitions regarding the Generalissimo’s eligibility as presidential candidate. This assurance was conveyed to it by Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, dedicated counsel to military heroes past and present.

Pirzada conveyed one such assurance in 1977 when he told the Supreme Court, in a petition against Gen Zia’s takeover, that the general would hold elections in six to eight months. Those six to eight months turned into the longest 11 years in Pakistan’s history.

Anyway, the operative part of the assurance is “If…” which amounts to saying that the general better be “elected” president if his uniform is to go. As threats go, a civilised one.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has already rushed to the general’s lair in Rawalpindi to offer his congratulations at this momentous decision. As a columnist aptly points out, a department of congratulations is an additional office attached to every ministry, including the PM’s secretariat.

Savvy Mushahid who had appeared to go underground prior to Nawaz Sharif’s expected arrival in Pakistan but who has emerged from the woodwork after Sharif’s re-exile to the Holy Land, has hailed the announcement regarding the general’s uniform as the end of khaki democracy. Trust him to have a line for every occasion, no matter how grotesque.

Pity a baffled nation. For eight years parrots professionally employed to sing the praises of the Musharraf order held “unity of command” (euphemism for uniform) essential for national survival. Now they are swinging to a different chorus. If their master, whose voice they are, were to don a Roman toga, they would hail it as another momentous decision.

Time was when wearing khaki was a matter of pride. Even after the disaster of the ’71 war — I was a captain in air defence — the army was not denounced. Instead, allowances were made for the comforting myth that it had been let down by a bunch of drunken generals, the identification of liquor with incompetence being one of the more lasting after-effects of that conflict.

That tolerance for things military is a thing of the past. Now officers and men attired in uniform are reluctant to show their faces in public.

Several reasons account for this trend: the army’s presence in every sector of national life; the army command’s surprising failure to understand that lavish defence housing colonies are a red rag for the public; the Generalissimo’s treating his uniform as his last insurance policy; and, above all, the army fighting America’s war in Waziristan.

Is the army responsible for all the ills plaguing Pakistan? No. We could do with a better class of politicians (and better municipal services…look at the garbage in our cities).

As Justice Javed Iqbal has rightly observed in the ongoing hearings in the Supreme Court, the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution which validated Musharraf’s actions as military ruler, and allowed him to retain his uniform, was an extra-constitutional step and political parties voting for it, including the holy fathers of the MMA, cannot be absolved of blame.

The same holy fathers are now challenging one of the central provisions of that foul compromise…in other words, expecting the Supreme Court to clear the mess they themselves had helped create in 2002.

After the lawyers’ movement triggered by the events of March 9, we have a different Supreme Court, less willing to play the role of military collaborator. Even so, it is too much to expect that it alone should pull all the nation’s chestnuts out of the fire. What about the responsibilities of the political class?

Even at this late hour when the presidential election — the great exercise in sham democracy we are headed for — is upon us, Benazir Bhutto is still trying to cut a deal with Musharraf and there’s no knowing what, when the chips are down, that great political gymnast, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, will do. Their words drip with sincerity. Over their actions hang thick clouds of suspicion.

Such great confusion, so much uncertainty. What is the fear lurking behind the curtains of Army House? The nation is receiving an education into the meaning of courage. Courage and daring, we were given to understand, were the hallmarks of the commando. Hmm.

The fate of individuals is important but what about the fate of the wretched country we say we love so much? Where is it headed? Military stewardship has pushed Pakistan into a fatal embrace with America, the iron logic of this relationship sucking the army into a war against our own people in the tribal areas. This is not our war. This is America’s.

But it is important to fight “extremism”, we are told. Yes it is, but not by stoking the fires of extremism. Before we started taking instructions from the US there were no Nek Mohammads or Baitullah Mehsuds in our tribal areas, just as there was no violence in Iraq before the Americans stepped in to “liberate” it. George Bush is being held up as an idiot and a disaster in his own country. Strange, therefore, that under Musharraf’s baton Pakistan should remain his foremost loyalist.

Perhaps under a democratic dispensation Pakistan would still have sided with the United States after Sept 11. But chances are it would have done so with open eyes and without the open-ended commitment made, behind a curtain of fear, by Musharraf and his generals.

We need a return to civilian rule not because Rousseau or Tocqueville said democracy was a good thing but because we won’t be able to rethink our American alliance as long as the generals remain in command of politics.

The present high command especially is compromised by its close ties to the US.

So we need a changeover and we need it fast. Not that the civilians on offer — Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif or anyone else — will not gyrate to American music.

Benazir bows in the direction of Washington and Nawaz, as we know, is no Hugo Chavez. Still, any political leader with a semblance of popular support would be marginally (no, infinitely) better than the rabbits-framed-in-headlights we have at present.

President for five more years: that’ll really do us in. Egypt may be able to afford a timeless Hosni Mubarak. But we live in a different part of the world and this luxury is beyond us. Some good may have been done these past eight years.

But some good was also done by Mrs Thatcher. After she had played her part her own party pushed her off the stage, and Britain moved on. Stagnation is a sign of death and what we have is a cesspool with its surface frozen. For us too time to move on.

Tailpiece: After the bumper wheat harvest this year, it needed spectacular incompetence to create a wheat shortage and jack up the price of flour. The wizards of this government have achieved the impossible. We exported some wheat earlier this year. Now we are all set to import it at higher prices. Economic management can’t get any better than this.



http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/20070921.htm
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  #23  
Old Monday, October 29, 2007
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Still time for a salvage mission



By Ayaz Amir
Friday, Oct 26,2007



THE anti-Musharraf movement in full bloom this summer has passed. The opposition parties fluffed it or our stars were not in the right conjunction. We have entered a new phase in our political life, calling for a shift in strategy and a new order of battle.

No army general in power has ever been removed by a popular upsurge in Pakistan. Ayub Khan, self-appointed field marshal for wars unknown, does not count. He was not army chief when he faced a popular uprising. Yahya was the army chief who conspired against him to engineer his ouster.

When the wheel turned for Yahya he went because of defeat in East Pakistan. Zia was blown out of the skies. But before that his power was diminished after the 1985 elections when Mohammad Khan Junejo became prime minister.

Gen Pervez Musharraf has arrived at the same twilight zone in his presidency. As long as he enjoys the army’s backing he will remain in power. But he faces a general election and there is pressure on him from Washington to cut a power-sharing deal with Benazir Bhutto, which makes her (paradoxical as it may sound) his possible Mohammad Khan Junejo.

Admittedly, there is much cynicism around and the political parties are falling back into their traditional mode of mutual vituperation and mudslinging. But if they are not to make a hash of things again, if they are not to play the mutually destructive game Musharraf and his coterie would like them to play, they have to be realistic and see what the possibilities for expanding democracy are in the current situation.

Benazir Bhutto must know that Washington may have brought her back to Pakistan but Washington cannot fix the coming elections for her. The powers-that-be — under which rubric fall Musharraf, Q League president Chaudhry Shujaat, Punjab chief minister Pervaiz Elahi, Sindh chief minister Arbab Rahim, and all those who are congenitally averse to a PPP comeback — will do all in their power to ensure that the PPP is cut down to size.

A PPP majority in the elections may be Washington’s heartfelt desire. It doesn’t suit Musharraf or his allies. Benazir can come close to winning the elections only if she has the support of other opposition parties, principally Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N.

Simply unbelievable, isn’t it? The N League supporting the PPP? But what options does Nawaz Sharif have? He can rave from the sidelines and see his party repeat its lacklustre performance in the 2002 elections or he can play a subtler game not by entering into an open alliance with Benazir Bhutto — because the establishment won’t allow it — but a seat-adjustment formula at the district level.

Not a national alliance with drums beating and flags flying because that would scare Musharraf’s inner circle out of its wits but loose seat-winning alliances across the country — the PML-N supporting the PPP where it is strong, the PPP backing the PML-N where it is the other way round. Baloch nationalists can be a part of this arrangement as can the ANP. This is the only way to beard the lion in his den, the only way to get a pro-democracy majority in the next National Assembly.

The obstacles along this path are formidable but they are mostly in the mind, a mix of mistrust and prejudice lingering from an era long since over. The Alliance for Democracy may have fallen apart and Benazir may have cut a deal with Musharraf but Pakistan’s political landscape today is not what it was in the 1990s when the PPP and PML-N were at each other’s throats. Today their enemies are different, putting them under the necessity of looking for new friends.

Who are the persons most upset by Benazir’s homecoming? The Chaudhries in Punjab and Arbab Rahim in Sindh who see their position as Musharraf’s leading political guns threatened. The MQM is not afraid of Benazir because it is sure of its popular base in Karachi and Hyderabad. The Chaudhries and Arbab are not similarly confident because their power is contrived, a gift from Musharraf and his camarilla.

Shujaat thinks he is the regime’s Cardinal Richelieu, the power behind the throne. Pervaiz Elahi, not satisfied with the satrapy of Punjab (which is more than half of Pakistan), has dreams of becoming prime minister. That is why he is running a private election campaign, and has been doing so for some time, so as to make his run for the prime ministership unstoppable. Son Moonis is standing for MNA from Lahore. Hoardings there proclaim him ‘Pride of Lahore’, doubtless proving that there is no end to our talent for grim humour.

Who are Nawaz Sharif’s deadliest political rivals? Not the PPP for times have changed but Shujaat and Pervaiz Elahi. Doesn’t this point to a convergence of interests between Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto? Don’t both share a common interest in reducing the power of the two Chaudhries?

In Rawalpindi, for instance, the PPP and the PML-N share an interest in putting a zip on the biggest lip in Pakistani politics, Sheikh Rashid. They won’t succeed unless they field a common candidate against him.

Musharraf can’t be assaulted frontally. He presents too strong a line of defence for that. But whether in love or war a frontal assault is seldom the best policy. That is why down the ages the best captains of war have favoured the indirect approach: rolling an enemy’s flanks or taking him from the rear. So if Musharraf is not to be assaulted frontally, the next best thing is to whittle away at his satellites in the Q League.

Both parties should put up a single candidate against Moonis in Lahore and against the Chaudhries in Gujrat, and so on. As the elections approach, my reckoning is that voices from the grassroots calling for a seat-to-seat adjustment between these two major parties will grow louder.

The holy fathers (of the MMA) are sincere only to themselves. Only a fool will trust them. Any party taking them on board is likely to find it an unwelcome bargain in the end. They should be left to stew in their own juice. Indeed, no outcome should be more welcome than for Maulana Fazlur Rehman to be hoisted on the petard of his own cleverness.

But for Imran Khan and others of his ilk to train all their guns at Benazir Bhutto is to bark up the wrong tree. There will be a time and place for opposing the Daughter of the East. But that is not yet because today’s problems are different.

The last thing anyone should want is for Musharraf to cast himself in the mould of a Suharto or a Hosni Mubarak. That will be the end, giving rise to a level of frustration and despair we won’t know how to eliminate. No, we must look to safer alternatives.

Benazir is the camel who with American help has entered the Bedouin’s tent. It is in the national interest to see that the camel occupies more space, leaving progressively less space for the Bedouin. But for that to happen, our political parties will have to chuck the baggage of the past and leave their adolescence behind.

So why not cool down the overheated rhetoric regarding deals, betrayal of ideals and the dry-cleaning of corruption? Let us concentrate on essentials, on first things first. Let’s see Musharraf getting out of uniform and the Chaudhries confined to Gujrat where they belong. The long march to idealism and high principles can be resumed later.



http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/ayaz.htm
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Old Friday, November 02, 2007
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FATE HANGING IN THE BALANCE

Friday, November 02, 2007
By Ayaz Amir

NOT an individual’s fate but the nation’s because if we get it wrong this time, and take the wrong turning, the gods won’t forgive us and we will have time enough to bewail the consequences.

Even if Mossad and RAW together had scripted a plan for subverting Pakistan, they couldn’t have bettered what we are doing to ourselves. Parts of Balochistan long swept by unrest, terrorists striking at will across the country, and now the fires of insurrection burning in an arc from Waziristan to Swat. All because of a mixing of roles: the army neglecting what it should be doing and doing that for which it is entirely unequipped.

The most striking thing about Pakistan today is the yawning gulf between danger and response. While the country is in turmoil and Pakistanis who care to think about such things are fearful of the future, those at the helm — whom God knows we never chose as our saviours — are lost in a world of their own, concerned only about self-preservation, this at a time when their inadequacy stands proven beyond words.

If they had the nation’s good at heart they would be thinking of an orderly exit. But in the turbulent world of Pakistani politics this is one manoeuvre we have yet to master. Our horse riders are great at grand entrances but a tad clueless about how to leave the arena when their time is up.

Nero at least was aware that Rome was burning. The guys we are saddled with seem unaware of the price of their ineptitude. Why else would they be playing power games that are only making the nation sicker and adding to the sum of its cynicism? Pakistan has withstood external enemies and is more than a match for them but the gathering rot within is proving more powerful than external machinations.

Insurgencies were supposed to happen elsewhere: in Afghanistan, in Indian-occupied Kashmir. But hand it to our Napoleons for bringing the chickens home to roost, pursuing policies which have sparked uprisings within Pakistan, leading to the image increasingly advertised of this being one of the most dangerous places on earth.

In the tribal areas, and now in Swat, the army is stuck in low-intensity conflicts it has no heart or stomach for fighting. Facing an external enemy is one thing but fighting your own countrymen, especially when of the same racial stock (a distinction which did not apply to our brethren in East Pakistan), is quite different.

This is not a battle for the soul of Pakistan, or to slay the dragon of extremism, as our foreign godfathers wish us to believe so that the more readily we jump to their commands and do their bidding. This is a fight for American interests in Afghanistan and we are only performing the role of unwilling mercenaries, hardly the higher purpose of an army whose motto is ‘jihad in the name of Allah’.

We know how we have got into this mess. Our military leadership thought it was being smart when it signed on with the United States post-Sept 11. Six years down the road we are living with the consequences. Fear and greed lay behind that fateful decision. Fear of what the US might do to us should we refuse; and greed fuelled by the belief that an alliance with America would legitimise military rule.

Anyhow, no use crying over the past, we have to move on.

But how? Not by becoming indifferent to what is happening in the tribal areas, for that is a luxury we cannot afford, but by looking at the causes of the insurgency there, how the Baitullah Mehsuds have taken up arms, why their clout is increasing, and why, conversely, the state is so helpless to meet the challenge they pose.

One answer is that the military leadership is simply distracted, embroiled in politics so much and in the battle for self-survival that it has time for no other battle. That is why we have seen that problems that could easily have been settled when they first reared their heads, such as the Lal Masjid episode in Islamabad, were left unattended and tackled only when they had become monsters, naturally exacting a heavier price then. The same thing happened earlier in Waziristan and now in Swat.

The army is in a soup and so is the nation. Regardless of what is happening those in power are driven only by the ambition to stick to power come what may. The leading political players are interested only in a share of the cake and to listen to their discordant, self-serving chorus is to get the impression that Pakistan is a carcass on the table waiting to be cut up by a bunch of hungry, salivating souls.

No, I don’t think most Pakistanis will warm to the idea of their country left to the tender mercies of power-seeking vultures. Sick and tired of the present situation they want their country’s future secured. They want it rescued from its current predicament but they also know that this rescuing won’t come from the army command which is a part of the problem, or from the leading lights of the political class who, alas, have proved all too small-minded to show any concern about the larger picture.

This rescue operation has to come from some other source, perhaps the Supreme Court. One clutches at straws that are available and in our reduced circumstances it is only the Supreme Court which is keeping the nation’s hopes alive even though much of the euphoria kindled by the lawyers’ movement and the judicial crisis has since abated.

Even so, it says something about the new assertiveness of the highest judicial body that the president’s election is still dangling in the air, the petition regarding his eligibility still before the Supreme Court. How it is decided will have an important bearing on the future: either giving a blow to controlled democracy, our bane throughout our history, or giving it another lease of life.

The argument being advanced against a radical verdict is that it will derail the march to democracy. Call the games of Islamabad a move towards democracy? This shambles is not worth preserving and five more years of it and we will be done in completely: army compromised further, nuclear programme threatened, the last hopes of political stability disappearing.

Therefore a clean break with the past to dispel the clouds of confusion and uncertainty over the nation, sapping its will and destroying its spirit, and restoring the Constitution as understood by its framers to its rightful place are the needs of this fateful hour. Half-measures will only make matters worse.

Small wonder the government is resorting to delaying tactics in the Supreme Court and to confuse matters further the air is full of doomsday theories about a state of emergency and the like. If this talk indicates anything it is of a ruling dispensation in trouble, unsure of itself and heedless of the uncertainty it is visiting upon the country.

All the more reason for corrective steps because of a strange mood we are caught in. The waters are rising but all that the powers-that-be are concerned about are their petty interests.Hard to imagine a greater disconnect between fantasy and reality. National bankruptcy can’t travel further than this. Such moods at other times and in other places have been the prelude to revolutions. Only in our case no such luck, this country not created for revolutions and its soil not conducive to such dangerous enterprises.

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/20070211.htm
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Old Friday, November 09, 2007
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GETTING AWAY WITH FARCE?

By Ayaz Amir
November 09, 2007 Friday

THIS is unsustainable and cannot last. You can’t mock the heavens and think there will be nothing to pay for it.

These are the acts of desperate men who know that their moment in the sun is up, from whose fingers power is slipping but who want to stave off the inevitable.

Irony is that by their desperate actions they may have brought the inevitable nearer. Sometimes a crisis has to intensify and contradictions have to sharpen before a solution opens up. Our man on horseback by one desperate lunge has brought everything into the open, so brilliant the masterstroke of Nov 3 that he and his increasingly glum supporters are on one side and the entire nation on the other. Folly can’t get any better than this.

The Constitution has been packed up and judges whose integrity rankled with Army House have been sent home (or rather confined to quarters) because their lordships were lenient with terrorists. Or so we are told. As the entire world knows by now, the two judges who released Lal Masjid students (or ‘terrorists’) on bail, Abbasi and Khokar, continue to be judges in the revamped Supreme Court. Abbasi was most zealous in taking up the cases of the Lal Masjid brigade. Wonder why.

Something more odd happened just a day after the trashing of the Constitution: the hush-hush release of over 20 men on Nov 4 accused of planning suicide bombings, and their handing over to the militant commander, Baitullah Mehsud, in return for the release of over 200 captured army personnel. Included in this number was Sohail Zeb, Mehsud’s cousin, caught allegedly with a suicide jacket on. How would this help the fight against terrorism?

No one is fooled by this spin. The knives out on Nov 3 were meant for the Supreme Court because an adverse verdict was expected regarding our man on horseback’s presidential ambitions. But what have the knives actually done? The judiciary may have been purged but the ousted judges have been taken into the hearts of the Pakistani nation.

All of them — Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, Bhagwandas, Ramday, Javed Iqbal (his stock sky-high), all those in the Supreme Court and the various high courts who have refused to take oath under the Provisional Constitution Order — are today the undisputed heroes of the Pakistani nation.

Time was when Pakistan had few people to be proud of. Now so many, a whole string of men of integrity and principle who we can look up to, that counting has become difficult. Never was it truer that to the darkest clouds there can be a silver lining. This may be a bleak moment in our history — indeed, perhaps the bleakest — but it has brought out some of the best in the Pakistani nation.

This is not the first PCO in Pakistan’s history but the first to be so openly and widely resisted, the first to draw such widespread condemnation and ridicule. In times past judges used to be so many circus performers eagerly leaping through the loop of a PCO. This time the great majority of them have treated it with the contempt such an unholy instrument deserves.

The call sounded earlier this year that this was a ‘defining moment’ in our collective lives may therefore not be all that forlorn or irrelevant. The nation faces a test and a challenge, an opportunity that could yet define our future.

So the last thing we should be guilty of is to lose heart or give way to despair, or say that Pakistan is a doomed enterprise from which nothing good can come. These are the counsels of defeat. This is the only homeland we have and seeing it fail or collapse is not a luxury we can afford.

When Afghanistan was ravaged by strife and civil war, millions of Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan. If, God forbid, because of the folly and greed of ambitious and shortsighted souls clinging to power something happens to Pakistan, where will we go? We can’t trek beyond the Himalayas and we can’t set up tented villages across the Indian border. We have no choice but to see that the experiment called Pakistan — even if ridden for most of its history by incompetent, second-rate horsemen — succeeds.

Therefore, as my Lord the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, said in his telephonic address to the lawyers of the Islamabad bar (while he was under detention), the tocsin of defiance must sound, the masses must make their voices heard, the Constitution must be restored and horses running wild across the Pakistani landscape must be returned to their stables. (He didn’t actually say the last but you get my meaning.)

The people of Pakistan are agitated, no doubt about this. But this is the kind of emotion from which great things can arise. Provided the leadership that this burning moment requires steps up to the breach and assumes the responsibility of leading the masses. The political parties have not given a good account of themselves during the last eight years. They have either connived with the riders on horseback, to pick up what crumbs they could get from the table of power, or withdrawn into the sweet comfort of inaction. Victims for the most part of the politics of compromise they should know that the time for such attitudes is past. Tumultuous events await a decision. There is disorder under the heavens and, as Mao might have said, the situation is excellent. But if history calls, who will answer the summons?

Wise rulers don’t allow critical situations to develop. It requires rulers of another kind to trigger mass upheavals. So let us be grateful for the possibilities opened up by the latest events in our country. Before Nov 3 most of us were resigned to the fact of another five years for the present rider-in-chief, another step towards the Hosni Mubarakisation of Pakistan. Now that desired outcome is not so sure. So much outrage has been sparked that a different outcome is a distinct possibility.

Even our paymasters, who have poured billions into its coffers to help prop up the present setup, are dismayed. Or so the signs suggest. They were working for a ‘military-liberal’ coalition, Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto atop the same wagon. What they have got instead, thanks to the ineptitude on display in Islamabad, is this mess threatening to become a disaster. For the Yanks a destabilised Pakistan is bad enough but a nuclear-armed Pakistan teetering at the edge of chaos comes close to their ultimate nightmare.

That is why hard questions will be asked in Washington. No one likes backing a liability. So hardly reassuring to see in Islamabad a regime losing its way and falling back on the last resort of exhausted dictatorships: the thumbscrews of repression. How long can the police keep beating protesters? How many people will the police arrest? We will have to build new jails to accommodate all dissidents.

This won’t work and for once the people of Pakistan seem in no mood to accept what has been imposed on them. Something will have to give.

Tailpiece: Lt Gen Hamid Gul has been arrested and is in solitary confinement in Adiala Jail. Why only one Hamid Gul? Islamabad/Rawalpindi has the densest concentration of retired bozos anywhere in the world. How they manage to remain invisible in times of unrest is a mystery waiting to be resolved.


http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/20070911.htm
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Default Freedom doesn’t come easy(Nov,16)

FREEDOM DOESN'T COME EASY

Friday, November 16, 2007
By Ayaz Amir

“WHEN the nation is about to be declared a failed state,” asks embattled Pervez Musharraf, “tell me whether…so-called democracy is important or efforts to save the country?” After saving the country for the last eight years he obviously wants to do it all over again.

If memory serves, the primary excuse for his first coup in Oct 1999 was the same chestnut: that Pakistan was about to be declared a failed state. As self-indictments go this is quite a devastating one. But in his present saviour-mode Musharraf can’t be expected to have much time for such fine distinctions.

“Have you thought of (resigning)?” asks Sky News. The answer: “But should it be given up now and we will have better Pakistan, a stabler Pakistan and we could have very good elections, without me? Very good, maybe I take that decision, OK?” (No kidding, the very words.)

As the BBC Urdu Service’s Mohammad Hanif observes (in his hilarious “The case of Musharraf and the drunk uncle”), “Musharraf deserves our sympathy. Not because he has been forced to carry out a coup against his own regime, not because his troops are being kidnapped en masse by Pakistani Taliban and then awarded Rs500 for good behaviour, not because he himself has become a prisoner in his Army House and can’t even nip out for coffee and paan as he used to, but because he has utterly lost his grip over grammar.”

Musharraf may have done the nation a final service by lifting the last veil of illusion from Benazir Bhutto who now says, after a somewhat longish journey into the kingdom of make-believe, she will have no truck with him and their ways have parted. Better late than never. There is no shortage of Pakistanis fervently hoping she sticks to this position, considering her to be the key to opposition unity at this juncture.

The luckiest thing to have ever happened to Musharraf was not American aid post-Sep 11 but the dithering, weak-kneed opposition he has enjoyed, his dictatorship made easy first by Nawaz Sharif’s un-seasonal pilgrimage to the Holy Land in Dec 2000, then by the support of the religious parties at the time of the 17th Amendment (sanctifying his rule) in 2003 and, last of all, the purported deal with Benazir Bhutto under American sponsorship. Hopefully this is now over. Anyone could have told Musharraf it was not in his interest to burn his bridges with Bhutto. But when paranoia takes over, as it has nowadays in the corridors of power, subtlety is an early casualty. Credit must also be given to Bhutto for finally being able to read which way the wind is blowing. Siding with Musharraf now would be worse than political suicide.

Even our American godfathers are getting frustrated with him because he is getting nothing right. Indeed, after Mar 9 almost everything he has done has turned into a blunder, the action of Nov 3 of course qualifying for a higher title: catastrophe.

Against the Taliban Musharraf has won no victories. In fact under his watch it is the Taliban who have conquered territory and inflicted heavy losses on the army. His victories have been against the last outposts of liberal thought in Pakistan: the superior judiciary, the legal community, the media, political activists and students (from upscale schools and colleges). But he professes to uphold the banner of progress and enlightenment. There is a mangling of language we are witnessing in Pakistan today with words being used in a manner Goebbels would have approved of.

But wailing alone availeth nothing. Dictators don’t give up power easily. They go not when their time is up, they being notoriously insensible to the march of time, but when the issue is forced. When anger boils over and becomes an unstoppable political movement.

Musharraf will do all he can to remain in power. Of this we can be sure. What will the forces claiming to speak on the people’s behalf do? That is the important question.

Can the political parties finally discover the unity that has eluded them these last eight years? Can they forget their differences and coalesce around a one-point agenda of having nothing to do with the farce of the coming elections (under martial law)? If they can, hope is not lost. If they cannot, they deserve every last bit of what they are getting at the regime’s hands.

The opposition parties will gain nothing by participating in the coming elections (that is, if the regime holds out until then). But they stand to lose a great deal in terms of lost credibility. Musharraf is not holding elections so that the opposition parties win or Bhutto becomes prime minister. He is holding them so that his supporters win. But without the participation of the opposition parties these elections would not look credible.

This brings me to Imran Khan’s manhandling at the Punjab University, Lahore, by activists of the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba, the student wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami. Not only was he prevented from holding a demonstration and courting arrest, as he had intended, but he was seized and confined in one of the departments before being handed over to the police. Words fail me to describe this shameful incident.

But Imran has not been diminished by it. He continues to stand tall. He is a brave man who has showed great courage during the post-martial law period. It is the Jamiat and its parent body, the Jamaat, which look small. Manhandling one of the few national heroes we have and then handing him over to the police: can anything be more despicable?

But even in evil there can be some good. If May 12 exposed the true face of the MQM, Nov 14 has revealed the ugly face of the Jamiat and the Jamaat. Qazi Hussein Ahmed’s populist posturing had led many simpleminded souls to believe that the Jamaat had changed its spots. The incident with Imran dispels such illusions.

The Jamaat remains wedded to an ideology suspiciously close to fascism, (which makes one wonder about the uses to which Islam has been put in this country). From Gen Yahya onwards it has worked as a handmaiden of our spook agencies, the dark forces who have always undermined democracy. As a matter of policy its student wing has practiced unabashed violence to promote its political ends. Indeed, when the definitive history of the collapse of Pakistani education is written, the Jamiat’s ‘danda-bardar’ (baton-wielding) tactics will figure prominently in it.

Therefore any chastising of the Jamaat and its works is welcome. No one has educated the Jamaat and Jamiat more than the MQM. Indeed, about the only good thing the MQM has ever done, since its baptism at Zia’s hands in the mid-1980s, is to give the Jamaat a taste of its own medicine in Karachi. For this one service, if no other, the MQM is to be applauded.

This incident underscores an important lesson: that the religious parties, at least the two biggest — Qazi Hussein’s Jamaat and Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s JUI -- can never be reliable partners in the struggle for democracy. They will always have an angle of their own and they will always be wired to the establishment.

PPP, PML-N, ANP, Tehrik-i-Insaf and the Baloch nationalists constitute the core of the dream alliance--the other elements of it being lawyers and civil society-- which can still take Pakistan’s ship, now tossed about on stormy seas, to safer shores. The holy fathers have proved themselves to be beyond the pale. Let them stew in their own juice.

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/ayaz.htm
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Charlatans, humbugs and a few heroes
Nov,23,2007
By Ayaz Amir


OUR tin-clad Generalissimo may not be blessed in his own talent or powers (if he were he wouldn’t be in the mess he is in) but he sure is blessed in the humbugs masquerading as the people’s champion.

With a stellar cast that includes Benazir Bhutto, one thing in the morning and another in the evening, and Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the deadliest secret weapon in Musharraf’s arsenal, it is no wonder the opposition parties are in such a state of confusion.

But if they are not to miss the bus altogether they better make up their minds quickly. The Generalissimo, political genius that he is, has put himself in a desperate hole and the only way he can get out is if the opposition parties are foolish enough to fall into the trap of his Jan 8 election.

If they participate, Musharraf is home and dry, the crisis he faces abating. But if they have sense not to, the election will lose all credibility and the hole the general is in will become deeper.

Repression can’t be kept up indefinitely. People can’t be locked up all the time. Even the police get tired in the end and the army seems not in a mood to behave like the Myanmar army.

If the political class and the intelligentsia are in a state of shock it should be of some consolation for them to know that Musharraf and coterie are also not having much fun. What is the fun of being absolute ruler when assailed from all sides, enduring lectures from the likes of John Negroponte and having to plead with the Saudis to keep Nawaz Sharif in the Holy Land?

There are real ‘strongmen’ and there is then the tinpot variety, helpless and distraught when the weather turns wet, as it has for the paladins of this setup. Amazing, isn’t it, that Nawaz Sharif should prey so much on their nerves? Amazing too that they should be afraid of so many shadows.

Afraid of My Lord Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, afraid of Justice Ramday, Rana Bhagwandas, retired Justice Wajihuddin Ahmed, Muneer Malik, fiery Ali Ahmed Kurd, Aitzaz Ahsan.

Power becomes a poisoned chalice when there are so many ghosts at the feast to be terrified of. Even the great Hakim Luqman, it is said, had no cure for wehm (suspicion or the fear of the unknown). For the paranoia gripping Islamabad there is also no cure.

The president has issued an ordinance amending the Constitution whereby no action of his post-Nov 3 can be challenged in any court of law. He can issue a hundred ordinances and amend the Constitution a hundred times but the fears preying on him, and of which he is already a victim, will not go away.

A hundred Sharifuddin Pirzadas can be set to work day and night to amend the Constitution in the president’s favour, the entire commando strength of the Pakistan army can be deployed around Army House, still those fears will not depart.

According to Chinese tradition, a ruler losing the mandate of heaven is doomed. Something similar seems to have happened to the present order of things after March 9. No move, not a single step, has been in the right direction, everything having the opposite effect to that intended.

We now approach the end-run of this crisis. Gen Musharraf has run out of options, his bag of tricks empty. He can either follow the path of repression which, as already said, can’t be sustained for long. Or he can be saved not by his own efforts but the treachery of the opposition parties. Only if they throw him a lifeline — by agreeing to fall into the trap of the Jan 8 election — can he make it to the other shore.

Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif have it right. Asfandyar Wali has it right. The Baloch nationalists — Abdul Hayee, Hasil Bizenjo, Mahmood Achakzai, Akhtar and Sardar Ataullah Mengal — are on the right track. These people have their hearts in the right place. They are not keen to fall into the general’s trap.

But others are playing a double game, none more so than that undisputed master of double-talk, Maulana Fazlur Rehman. Perhaps the time has come for the rest of the opposition parties to bid him farewell and say ‘good riddance’. A Trojan horse like him in their midst can only be a danger, spreading confusion and undermining unity from within. Better to be without such allies.

Benazir Bhutto’s is a slightly more complicated case. She is too intelligent not to realise that any election under Musharraf will be a farce. But there are skeletons in her cupboard — let’s not go into details — limiting her freedom of action. She also cannot ignore American wishes entirely because it is the United States which is her principal backer, desperate to push Musharraf and her into some kind of understanding.

She faces a tough choice. Does she go along with America’s reading of the situation or can she bring herself to do the right thing by her own party and the people of Pakistan? In any case, she should be under no illusion. If she decides to participate in the coming election she will have thrown a lifeline to Musharraf, in effect siding with his neo-martial law.

What a picture this will present: Q League, MQM and assorted allies the king’s party and Benazir Bhutto and Maulana Fazlur Rehman standard-bearers of his generalship’s loyal opposition. Holy fathers are used to such transmutations but from his eyrie up in the clouds hard to imagine the great Zulfikar Ali Bhutto being amused.

As for the Jamaat-i-Islami, time perhaps to call a spade a spade. It has to decide whether it will remain a satellite orbiting around Maulana Fazlur Rehman or it has a mind of its own. Qazi Hussein Ahmed’s rhetoric is loud but the Jamaat so far has not proved very effective in the ongoing struggle. Where does its true heart lie and can it ever be a sincere partner in the struggle for democracy?

The Jamaat and its student wing, the Jamiat, both now realise the extent of the blunder committed when Jamiat goons misbehaved with Imran Khan on Nov 14. This has brought a searching light to focus on the Jamiat’s politics, exposing it and the Jamaat to perhaps the severest criticism in their blood-charged history.

The Jamiat, desperate to make amends, is now saying it will arrange a reception in Imran’s honour. Imran will have to be a fool to go along with such a charade. Such double-faced companions are best kept at a distance.

But you’ll have to hand it to Imran for being so plucky. The kind of setbacks he has suffered would have made a lesser man say goodbye to politics long ago. But he persevered and is now reaping the fruits of his perseverance.

If there is one politician who has emerged tall during the stormy events of this year it is Imran. To judge by the courage and keen judgment of events he has shown, he may well be coming into his stride.

Courage not fine speeches is what we need and if Nov 3’s neo-martial law has thrown up chicanery and brutality in ample measure, this most glorious of years in our history, 2007, has thrown up a new leadership consisting of judges, lawyers, civil society activists, and a new breed of students (from the most ‘liberal’ campuses, by the way). In this lies our hope for the future.

But first a clear decision regarding the forthcoming election.
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Tragedy in uniform



By Ayaz Amir

Nov 30,2007 Friday

OUR history, sad and comic by turns, is full of might-have-beens. Pervez Musharraf could have been the golden boy of Pakistani history. If only his vision had not been clouded; if only, to echo Mao, he had the courage to clasp turtles in the deep seas and throw a rope around the stars in the stormy heavens.

But his vision was limited and in the end -- I mean his soldier’s end -- he had lost the ability to differentiate between what was good for him and what might have been good for the country.

In 2004, as he had pledged, if he had taken off his commander-in-chief’s uniform, there would have been some glory in the act and a nation, all too prone to be seized by fits of emotion, would have hailed him as a saviour and deliverer, the story of Pakistan marked by the search for redeeming heroes.

But squelched by his fears or (who knows?) blinded by the temptations of high office, he broke his pledge and took to the road which must have seemed mightily attractive at the time but which undercut his presidency.

It was a bit of a fiction which he had nurtured that he was a man of his word. After his broken pledge the impression spread that the pretence was just that and he was not to be trusted. Thus the few more years he gained as absolute power-wielder were at the cost of shattered credibility.

So when, much too late, he has finally surrendered his military trapping, there are no cheers and hosannas, just a huge sigh of relief across the land, glory turned to dust.

Wherein is the grievous fault? In our stars (although we can’t pin the blame for everything on them) or in the academies of military training which first select and later groom aspiring young men with every quality under the sun except the gift of vision and a sense of history?

Yet it is such men — or should I say commanders — who, every now and then, have galloped out of General Headquarters to grab power, claiming, their voices dripping with sincerity and their faces pictures of innocence, that their aim was to save the nation, not satisfy, God forbid, any lust for power.

In the fifty years after the Second World War no nation on earth has been saved so often as Pakistan, by the likes of Ayub, Yahya Khan, Ziaul Haq and, for the last eight years, Pervez Musharraf, all modelled on the same pattern, arriving on the back of high expectations, leaving only when disaster overtook them or cracks had begun to appear in their citadels of untrammelled authority. All of them sad monuments to broken hopes and promises.

History is no stranger to dictators. In fact its pages are littered with the species. The world as we know it has been shaped less by democracy and the rule of law, both pretty late inventions, than by blood and iron, the thud of horses’ hooves and the rise and fall of empires.

Also, I must hasten to add, by the power of ideas, religion being one idea, democracy, even if a latecomer, another idea, Marxism another and so on.

Anyhow, if we have had riders galloping out of GHQ and seizing power that in itself is nothing strange. What is exceptional about our riders is something else: the legacy of waste and destruction they have invariably left behind.

The economy grew in Ayub’s time. GDP growth rates were high under Zia. The economy has witnessed growth under Musharraf.

But what is Ayub’s lasting legacy? In the end mass resentment, the feeding of despair and the inexorable rush of events culminating in the break-up of Pakistan. Yayha Khan merely presided over the baptismal rites of separation. The foundations were laid long before.

What is Zia’s legacy? The seedbeds of extremism from which have sprouted the dragons we are still having to contend with.

Beyond the infusion of greenbacks to revive Pakistan’s economy, what will be Musharraf’s legacy? The destruction of institutions, a mockery of the Constitution as complete, if not greater, than at any time in the past, and a diminishing of the nation’s spirits.

Who is the intrepid Pakistani totally at peace about the state of the republic? Who is the Pakistani not fearful about the future?

What monuments erected or feats of administration performed so as to be able to claim that God gave him the opportunity to be the absolute ruler of a hundred and sixty (or is it now seventy?) million souls and he lived up to the trust placed in his hands?

To grab power through a coup and then to preside over a state of affairs ending in another virtual coup eight years later is hardly a record reminiscent of Sher Shah Suri or Akbar the Great.

Yet it could have been different. With a bit of vision and understanding it could have been so different. If only fear and limited understanding had not stood guard, and vigilant guard at that, at the gates of power. Musharraf played the dictator too long when he should have graduated into a civilian head of state long before Nov 28.

But he couldn’t rise above his fears and perhaps, in the end, he had it not in him to clutch turtles in the deep seas or reach out for the stars.

And since he left no opportunity go by without chanting the mantra that he couldn’t take off his uniform because it was so essential for the national interest, now that circumstances have compelled him to do precisely that, what previously for him was unthinkable, he is bound to be looked upon henceforward as a man shorn of his locks and his power.

The reality may be different and we yet may see another meddling head of state not satisfied with his semi-retirement but the perception will be of a weakened figure.

Try as he might to assert himself as a civilian president — and we need go no further than Ghulam Ishaq Khan to think of civilian presidents who had enough power to play havoc with the country’s fortunes — the comparison with his years when he was army chief-cum-president will always work to his disadvantage.

In the local body elections two years ago there was no shortage of Q League flunkeys who would flaunt Musharraf’s portraits to demonstrate their loyalty or to show how closely attuned they were to the realities of power.

It would be a brave man doing the same in the coming elections. Since wonders never cease the thought may even have crossed the minds of Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, standard-bearers of Musharraf allegiance these past eight years, to put Musharraf’s portraits in the attic — his visage in this election less a guarantee of success than a sure kiss of death.

So therefore amid the turbulence of national affairs spare a thought, and shed a tear of sympathy, for the agony visiting the house (in fact many houses) of the two Chaudhrys of Gujrat. When the glory of their present pomp is fled, one remark of Pervaiz Elahi’s will haunt them. We will elect Musharraf as president in uniform not once but five, ten times, he memorably declared. Now their dreams lie shattered.

From thy nest every rafter will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter, When leaves fall and cold winds come.

They have enjoyed a long summer. Now, arguably, comes the winter of their discontent.
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Opening fresh wounds

By Ayaz Amir

WHEN Pervaiz Elahi who, judging by his anti-PPP tirades, seems to be getting more desperate by the hour, arrived in Talagang on Nov 26 to file his nomination papers he got the protocol befitting a mansabdar of the Punjab. From Balkassar on the Motorway up to Talagang the police were lined up to pay him due homage.

The Musharraf order, whatever brave front it puts on, is in mourning because the uniform which was its mightiest emblem now adorns another person. But in the fullness of its powers, two kinds of civilian puppets stood with it, cheering it on and hailing its achievements: the district nazims and the drumbeaters of the Q League. Ample funds and local powers were with the nazims, who now are moving heaven and earth on behalf of the Q League’s sad-faced candidates in this election (sad-faced because time has moved on).

The entire election process, from filing of nomination papers to the declaration of the results, is overseen by the subordinate judiciary. Without independent judges how is it possible even to contemplate free elections? After the havoc wrought by the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO), we know the state the judiciary is in.

Yet having acquiesced in the games which saw General Musharraf getting himself ‘elected’ president, the opposition parties have left themselves with no choice except to participate in the heavily-loaded affair which lies ahead.

But the dangers lurking on this road are pretty obvious. Prediction about other things may be difficult but about one thing we can be reasonably certain. On the evening of Jan 8, much before all the results are in, a great cry will go up across the land accusing the government of a historic act of rigging. Far from settling anything, the election will open fresh wounds.

Why are all the blinds pulled down so completely in the Presidency? Why are its denizens, psychologically besieged behind those frightened walls, so cocooned from reality? A tainted election is the last thing Pakistan needs or wants at this juncture yet it is towards a tainted election that we seem to be marching.

The Presidency is living in a world of its own. On the mind of its chief resident rests neither the burden of posterity nor history. Self-preservation is the only wisdom holding sway behind those worried walls.

The ‘wasteland’ looks set to be the final title given to the Musharraf years: an opportunity squandered. Yet the shorn-of-his-locks president could still find some honourable mention in history’s footnotes -- alas, in a crowded book the only space available -- if, in the twilight of his powers (and we know how fast the shadows are closing in), he can bring himself to conduct elections reasonably free and fair.

This requires all the instincts honed during the last eight years. And that is why a sudden change of heart is so impossible. The second half of a man’s life, says Dostoyevsky in The Possessed, is merely a continuation of the first half. Radical departures are a virtue of youth, not declining evening. Musharraf can only be what he was. So I think destiny’s lines are written. These elections will be what they are and when the tocsin sounds on Jan 8 we will be well and truly into another crisis.

What was it in the circumstances of our birth to make us so prone to crises, one having scarcely ended before the fault lines of another emerge? We seem not to have it in our capacity to break the inexorable logic of this endless cycle.

I have nothing against Shujaat Hussain and Pervaiz Elahi, the two Chaudhrys of Gujrat. But to have a nation’s domestic agenda dictated by this duo, which is what happened when Musharraf was Gen-President, is a joke gone too far. In local or constituency politics no one comes near them. But it’s like making Chicago’s celebrated mayor, Richard Daley, who ruled Chicago back in the 1950s-60s and who also was peerless when it came to gravy-train politics, president of the United States. Or Al Capone chairman of the Sunday league of Baptist preachers (not that there is any organisation by this name, but you get my point).

Shujaat and Pervaiz are Chicago material but Pervaiz’s heart is set on the prime minister’s mansion. Some truly funny things have been played on the people of Pakistan (Shaukat Aziz being one of them). But Pervaiz nursing the idea of prime minister takes the prize. Whence the encouragement? President Musharraf. This is one presidential favour the country could do without.

Despite Dostoyevsky’s observation about repetition in life, people grow in office, their horizons widen and they learn new things. But we seem to be caught in a time warp and Musharraf, somehow, is not coming to terms with the cropping of his locks in the form of his diminished presidency. The Presidency thinks he should be called President, not General. But can any amount of official circulars change the way people think? Protecting the Q League and trying to turn the wheel back are not the best ways to find a place in a nation’s heart.

Pakistan’s never-ending turmoil, our so far fruitless quest for stability, has led to at least one happy outcome: some of the finest, most resonant poetry of protest written anywhere in the world. At mountain’s top is Faiz, after him Jalib and a host of others. Protest and rebellion against the established order of things, elusive love, and love never quite reached or consummated, love unfulfilled, is what our poets have sung of, in timeless words and imagery.

Munir Niazi, quintessential poet of love, or perhaps doomed love, but also the shrewdest of commentators on the national condition. As, for example, in that verse in which he talks about frantic movement (harkat tez tar) but journey’s progress halting and slow, an apt description of Pakistan. Or that haunting verse: “Ik aur darya ka saamna hai Munir mujh ko, mein aik darya key paar utra tau mein ney dekha”: ‘there is another river in front of me Munir, I saw this when I had crossed one river’, lines which the opposition parties may have cause to remember when they cross one river on Jan 8.

Metaphor and imagery, the distillation of so much into a few words, constitute the essence of poetry. And having produced some of the finest latter-day poets of rebellion, we should have a natural affinity for the symbolic meaning of words and events. But our ruling classes seem singularly free of this failing. Time and again they have proved themselves blind to the symbolism triggered by political choices.

Consider two examples. Q League is the name of the political grouping, made up largely of turncoats, which has supported Musharraf from the 2002 referendum (of glorious memory) onwards. Were the founders of this rag-tag political grouping oblivious to the loaded nature of the name Quisling? Musharraf has announced that ‘emergency’ (actually martial law) would be lifted on Dec 16. In the besieged walls of the Presidency was there no one to tell him that Dec 16, the day our troops in East Pakistan under the command of that famous soldier, Lt Gen ‘Tiger’ Niazi, laid down their arms is the darkest day in our national calendar?

The task before the nation is immense. We have to honour our judges who have resisted dictatorship. We must never forget them. Their resistance constitutes the best thing to have happened to Pakistan for over fifty years. And we have to find rulers, from what corner I do not know, not totally insensible to the meaning of poetry and symbolism.
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Reinventing the nation

By Ayaz Amir

Dec 14, 2007
OR rather reinventing the nation’s politics, for the old directions are dead, heaped up like fossils of an age gone by on the dung-heap of what passes for our history.

The old ways can’t go on and although on the mind of Pakistan’s Hosni Mubarak, Gen (retd) Musharraf, rests nothing more pressing than arranging for his perpetual staying in power, the nation’s priorities have to be different if it is to reclaim the space lost to our two main scourges: (1) military adventurism and (2) the fires of religious extremism.

“Ultimately, it is the will of the people and their support that is decisive,” pronounces the new army chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, while addressing officers in Kharian cantonment. “It is critical,” he says, “that Pakistan Army’s efforts are backed by the nation.”

It is hard to remember Gen (retd) Musharraf saying the same thing. He was given to weaving the different strands of national destiny around his own person, leaving little doubt in anyone’s mind that when he said Pakistan first, he meant himself first. Gen Kayani’s words in Kharian therefore represent a welcome change in emphasis.

Under Musharraf’s direction we saw two things happening: the top one per cent of the population getting richer, leaving other sections of society far behind; and the gulf between the people and the army widening, exposing the army to criticism even in its recruiting heartland of northern Punjab. If Gen Kayani and his colleagues are cognizant of this reality, they should also realise that the army can reconquer the hearts of the people only if it bids a final farewell to politics.

When Musharraf took off his uniform, with what willingness we know, it was hoped that his many favours to the nation would finally cease. Alas, a forlorn hope, as it turns out. When he lifts the ‘emergency’ (the softest name yet given to a Pakistani martial law) more changes in the Constitution are expected, the power to amend the Constitution Musharraf having bestowed on himself on Nov 3. No sage is required to tell us that these amendments will be another act of self-insurance. So shed a tear for the 1973 Constitution, that most abused of documents in our troubled history.

As another favour to the nation, Gen (retd) Musharraf has resuscitated the doctrine of the trichotomy of powers: president, prime minister, army chief. After eight years in the saddle this is the stability and respect for the Constitution that we get. The army chief commands the army’s divisions, leading the army in war and preparing it for the worst in times of peace. It is none of his business to be a prong of any triad of power. So happy the day when Gen (retd) Musharraf ceases to bestow more favours on the nation.

We are in for a period of more uncertainty, the coming elections adding to this mood instead of dispelling it. Let us hope some of this instability is creative and leads to the final rout of those elements in the forefront of supporting the Musharraf order. The Q-League was an instrument of convenience, designed to serve as the civilian front of what was essentially a military-dominated order. After the elections, whichever way the wind blows, its irrelevance should become more apparent. When dictatorship’s sun sets, its creatures, as a matter of course, must disappear into the shadows, mourned as much as the departure of Shaukat Aziz — remember him? — has been mourned.

The dangers facing Pakistan are real. We have to guard against the spread of religious militancy because its spread negates the idea of Pakistan as presented by the country’s founding fathers. But we also have to realise that the rise of religious militancy is a response to the failure of the state to protect its democratic ethos. The Taliban have their own war to fight in Afghanistan and whether that war is a just war or not is for the people of Afghanistan to decide. We should have no truck with the Taliban. At the same time we should not be pushed into fighting America’s war against our own people in the tribal areas.

True, the Americans are paying us to fight this war. But hasn’t the time come for us to decide whether American largesse is worth more than the wounds that we ourselves are inflicting on Pakistani nationhood? Britain is retreating from its commitment in Iraq. We will not step out of the shadows of the Musharraf era unless we rethink our commitment to America’s war in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the political arena is marked by a poverty of alternatives. Most of the choices on offer are of the same colour, and those that are not are too inconsequential to count. The PPP and the PML-N, whatever their champions say, are both establishment parties. The PPP has chosen to hitch its wagon to America’s star, Benazir Bhutto’s long journey back to Pakistan representing a triumph of American ‘mediation’. If she comes into a position of influence, expect her not to sing any songs not to America’s liking. The PML-N’s fight is with Musharraf’s person, perhaps also with aspects of his policies. But it represents no radical alternative to the current stream of national thought and action.

Instinct and perception will be influencing the way people cast their votes on Jan 8. By way of reasoned discourse or passionate argument there is very little to sway popular sentiment. The leaders of the lawyers’ movement were armed with the best arguments. They had a case to sell and their persons were unblemished. That is why the people responded to them. But now we are onto a different terrain.

This makes a radical departure from present national trends all the more essential because being a partner in George Bush’s Afghan crusade means taking on a never-ending commitment. We need to bury the mercenary instinct. The American alliance may have been a shot in Musharraf’s arm back in Sep 2001. But it is now a millstone round the nation’s neck, compelling us to pursue a course arguably not in our best interests.

The lawyers’ movement kicked off by the events of March 9 and thereafter may not have achieved its aims. After all, far from the rule of law being more firmly established, it came under savage assault on Nov 3. But it will reverberate in the minds of the Pakistani people, as will the courage and integrity of our senior judges who refused to bow before wilful and unprincipled authority.Martyrs such as Shaheed Bhagat Singh and the great Tipu Sultan of Mysore don’t return from the dead. But their example becomes an inspiration for those who follow. So too with us. When the history of Pakistan comes into its own and in some mound, over which for sure a befitting monument will be raised, the last remains of dictatorship are buried — ensuring the fulfilment of that promise which lay behind Pakistan’s creation — the courage of our non-PCO judges and that of the legal community will be written in glowing letters.

Dictatorship has diminished Pakistan. Our judges, lawyers and, I daresay, those manning the media’s trenches have raised its standing. Freedom may have been stifled for the moment but the hope that it will eventually triumph remains alive, burning brightly in hopeful breasts.
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