Pakistan Leader's Predicament Shows Power of 'Deep State'

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Prime Minister Sharif Tried to Emulate Turkey's Erdogan, Now Risks Sharing Fate of Egypt's Morsi


ISLAMABAD-After winning elections by a landslide last year, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif quickly moved to emulate another budding Muslim democracy, Turkey, in neutering the army's political might.
Now Mr. Sharif is finding out the hard way that the success of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan in defanging the generals is more of a rare exception than a workable model to follow. His predicament shows just how hard it is for elected politicians to challenge the "deep state" of the military and security establishment that forms a bedrock of power in countries from Algeria to Bangladesh.
With downtown Islamabad taken over by protesters baying for his resignation, Mr. Sharif increasingly risks following another example—that of Mohammed Morsi, the Egyptian president who was ousted by the army after similar protests in Cairo last year, just a year after winning the popular vote.
The Pakistani army, instead of unconditionally backing the elected prime minister as protesters overran Islamabad's government quarter in late August and erected a tent city modeled on Cairo's Tahrir Square or Kiev's Maidan, has positioned itself as an essentially independent third force, publicly demanding that both sides avoid violence.
"Even a message of neutrality in this game tilts the balance against the government. The dice is loaded against Sharif," said Rasoul Bakhsh Rais, director-general of the Institute of Strategic Studies, an Islamabad think tank. "He started out as an Erdogan, but I am afraid he may end up as a Morsi. Very likely."
Defense Minister Khawaja Asif, a civilian and a close aide to Mr. Sharif, said that despite recent "jolts," there is "absolutely no damage" in the civilian government's relations with the military. But he acknowledges that the Turkish model of asserting civilian control isn't applicable to Pakistan anymore, at least not for now.
Mr. Erdogan moved to strip the Turkish army of political power only after years of rapid economic growth and rising living standards solidified his support base. Pakistan's economy, by contrast, remains sluggish and Mr. Sharif can point to few major successes in his term.

"The Turkish ruling party has delivered to the people of Turkey, and this gives them a lot of leverage," Mr. Asif said. "If we are given time, as they had, for more than a decade, and we are able to perform and we are judged by our performance in the 3½ years until the end of our term, then perhaps the political forces of democracy will be much more strengthened."
Whether Mr. Sharif has that time, however, is uncertain at best.
The Pakistani and Egyptian militaries are similar in many ways: Both enjoy huge U.S. funding and run vast business empires sheltered from civilian oversight. But the Pakistani army, which ruled the country for half of its history, is still recovering from the 1999 coup that ended Mr. Sharif's previous term in office. For now, at least, it is reluctant to openly seize power, knowing how unpopular such a takeover would be.
This means that Mr. Sharif could survive the current protests, launched by opposition politician Imran Khan and Islamic cleric Tahir ul Qadri, who claim that last year's elections were illegitimate because of fraud and violations of electoral law. Messrs. Khan and Qadri, as well as the army, deny allegations by Mr. Sharif's supporters that the protests are secretly orchestrated by the military.
Even if Mr. Sharif clings to office for now, he is likely to limp on as a much diminished figure, vulnerable to the kind of intrigues that the army, headquartered in the city of Rawalpindi, repeatedly used to unravel past Pakistani governments from behind the scenes.
Following the latest protests, "the balance of power…rests not in Islamabad, but rests unfortunately in Rawalpindi," Sen. Raza Rabbani of the Pakistan Peoples Party, which ran the previous government and backs Mr. Sharif in the current standoff, told parliament last week.
Mr. Sharif, to be fair, wasn't nearly as reckless as Egypt's Mr. Morsi. Within a few months of taking office, the Egyptian president alienated all the main political forces outside his Muslim Brotherhood, seized legislative powers and infuriated the Egyptian army by backing Islamist rebels in Syria. He even embraced Egypt's own former Islamist terrorists, including those involved in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat.
Yet Mr. Sharif didn't come close to emulating Mr. Erdogan's patience, either. Almost immediately after assuming power in June 2013, Mr. Sharif stubbornly pressed for a treason trial of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the former army chief who ousted and imprisoned him in 1999 and who now faces the death penalty. Mr. Sharif also irked the army by trying to take over its traditional oversight of relations with India and Afghanistan, and by backing the Geo TV network that accused the military's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency of trying to assassinate its star anchorman. As a result, he has quickly found himself in open conflict with the army chief whom he picked in November. (Mr. Morsi, too, was overthrown by the supposedly pliable army chief he himself had appointed.)
"The prime minister is very fond of shooting himself in the foot," said retired Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, who was the Pakistani military's chief spokesman until 2012. "He has fallen out with the army, and the army has fallen out with him…In this environment, if you try to clip the wings of the army, the army will react—and the army has reacted."