[Reader-list] The new great game

[Wali Arifi]

 An Indian View: How Pakistani Liberals Thrashed Their Homeland

Almost all Pakistani liberals, including member of women's and human rights
organizations, journalists, writers, and lawyers, are celebrating a divine
"national mandate". They have dodged the obvious question: Why did the
majority of Pakistani voters ignore, perhaps even boycott, the elections?
And don't give me the self-serving claims that fear of violence and suicide
bombings discouraged a large number of people. A Majority of Pakistanis
didn't vote because elections here simply give a democratic veneer to rule
by feudal and tribal coteries whose nepotism and corruption is legendary.


By S. SATHANANTHAN

Wednesday, 19 March 2008.

WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM





NEW DELHI, India—A few days after the February 2008 general elections, I met
an acquaintance - an investment banker - in Karachi who looked ecstatic.


He bubbled, "these elections have been so cathartic for the entire nation".



With a pathetically low 30% turnout of voters, I puzzled how he concluded
the "entire" nation had participated in the experience.

He is not alone in slurring over the damaging implications of the low voter
turnout.



Almost all liberals - who include member of women's and human rights
organizations, journalists, writers, lawyers and assorted professionals -
are thrashing about to divine a "national mandate" in the election results.
They have dodged the obvious question: Why did the majority of Pakistani
voters ignore, perhaps even boycott, the elections? Instead the liberals
trotted out self-serving claims that fear of violence and suicide bombings
discouraged a large number of people.

About an hour after my encounter with the investment banker, my wife and I
were on our way back home in a metro cab. As the car cruised down the new
flyover that meets with Shahrah-i-Faisal we saw a couple of trucks
over-flowing with agitated men, shouting slogans and waving flags.

We casually asked the driver what that was about; and words cascaded out of
his mouth as if he had been waiting for the flimsiest excuse to unburden his
misery. "Just wait and see all the politicos will come out of the woodwork
to make our lives hell. We don't need any elections for 20 years, just a
disciplined ruler. We are not made for elections, we
need the stick to keep us in line. And if after 20 years we still haven't
learnt then I would say we hand the country over to America. What else can
we do? But at least let's give it a try for 20 years."

He wanted to continue: "I am not a pro-Musharraf man but I have to say if he
put ten per cent in his pocket he put ninety per cent into this country. We
can see it all around. Never in my life had I seen the highways so safe -
women drive on them at night".

I think the 70% of the country that didn't vote is like Attaullah, our taxi
driver. They don't believe elections serve any useful purpose for good
reasons. Elections have entrenched the status quo; they bestowed a
democratic veneer to rule by feudal and tribal coteries whose nepotism and
corruption is legendary, whilst the 70% remained mired in poverty.

For weeks and months liberals cried themselves hoarse demanding "free and
fair" elections. They made dire predictions that pre-poll rigging had
already begun and alleged darkly in private that President Pervez Musharraf
has received expert advise on the subject from U.S. President George W.
Bush's campaign staff, who deftly executed pre-poll rigging in Florida
during the 2000 U.S. presidential election.


Their own exalted duty, asserted some liberals, is to minimize manipulations
so that the 2008 general elections accurately reflect the will of the
Pakistani people; but in fact they hoped the voters, muddled by the sympathy
factor following the PPP leader Benazir Bhutto's assassination, would usher
in a PPP government. But liberals also feared that, despite their strenuous
efforts, President Musharraf and Pakistan Muslim League (PMLQ) would
nevertheless rig the elections in their favor, as they were alleged to have
done in 2002. Some liberals gleefully looked forward to again wielding the
democracy stick against the President and the anticipated new PML(Q)
government.

But Gen. Musharraf, in the capacity of Chief Executive, had delineated the
next two stages in his road map to build the foundations of democracy. In
the second stage he intended to hold the offices of both Chief of Army and
President, which he did. In the final stage, he said he would doff the
uniform and ensure free and fair general elections. He kept his word. And to
the consternation of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Muslim
League-Nawaz (PMLN), he blocked their rigging ploys.



By all accounts, the 2008 general elections were more free and fair than
those held by the two parties when they alternated in power during the
1990s.

Born-Again Democrats?


Having screamed for genuine elections, the liberals have to live with the
results: namely, the return of PPP's Asif Zardari and PML(N)'s Nawaz Sharif,
both of whom have controversial antecedents in Pakistani politics.

Almost seven years ago,
columnist-turned-politician-turned-columnist-turned-politician again, Ayaz
Amir, had posed the following rhetorical questions: "Does any
newspaper-reading man in Pakistan doubt Benazir's and Asif's guilt? Does
anyone think they got no commission from the Swiss firm, SGS-Cotecna? Does
anyone doubt the financial acumen of the then ruling couple who turned
Islamabad into an open auction mart where every deal, no matter how
outrageous, was on offer provided the right palms were greased?"



Amir recalled, "the longstanding love affair between GHQ and the Sharifs
(the Sharifs having been discovered and groomed for great things by General
Zia himself, Lt-Gen Jillani, Lt-Gen Hamid Gul and a whole line of minor
geniuses in ISI)...The Sharifs' notions of government were intensely
private: which is to say, have your own man at every key post. They began
with commissioners and police DIGs, the dregs of both services pandering to
their whims and enriching themselves in the process ... In the person of
Justice Qayyum at the Lahore High Court they had the closest thing they
could get to a personal judge. Division of family assets, balancing of huge
bank loans against dummy collateral, tightening the noose around Asif
Zardari and Benazir: the
only judge who could handle these sensitive matters was Justice Qayyum".

And Amir concluded: "The common factor between both parties is gangster-ism
and corruption. Shahbaz Sharif resembled nothing so much as a Mafioso don.
What does Asif Zardari look like? In any Godfather sequel he can easily get
a part. As for moneymaking it is hard to figure out who beat whom: the PPP
leadership or the Muslim League? My own guess is the Sharifs were
professionals: subtle about their money. Zardari left a
trail, which goes all the way to Rockwood, French submarines, Amer Lodhi,
and my favorite grand admiral, Mansur-ul-Haq." (Dawn, April 20, 2001).

Liberals have been baying for President Musharraf's resignation partly
because he, as an army general, overthrew the democratically elected Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif in October 1999.



But Rifaat Hamid Ghani documented the near universal welcome people had
extended to Gen. Musharraf at that time:



"There is no doubt the ouster of Mr. Nawaz Sharif ... was welcomed, and the
primary reason was the constitutional amendment Mr. Sharif was seeking (and
which politicos like Mr. Kasuri and Syeda Abida Hussain had endorsed) that
united civil and moral legislative and executive inquisitorial powers in the
prime minister's office, in what was touted as the paradigm of a true Emir.
The common Pakistani, as distinct from those gracing the treasury benches,
had no truck with twisting religion into justifying totalitarianism. They
could see the way elected parliament was leaning and the military takeover
was a happy release from Mian Nawaz Sharif's emerging fascistic theocracy."
(Dawn, Oct. 25, 2004).

Benazir had not been far behind. She donned the headscarf to placate
Islamists; and her government provided funds and granted diplomatic
recognition to the Afghan Taliban regime in 1995. During the run-up to the
2008 elections liberals wanted the Pakistani
people to believe that the same Zardari and Sharif are in effect the
'farishtas' who would lead the country to the promised democracy-land; that
they could resurrect the pre-Emergency judiciary, set its independence in
stone and force President Musharraf out of office.

But the PPP had politicized the judiciary in 1996 when Benazir appointed her
favorite as Chief Justice ignoring more senior judges. Sharif's subsequent
run-ins with judges do not instill confidence either.


"During his second stint in power with his a 'massive mandate'," reminisced
Ardesher Cowasjee, "Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif wished to rid himself of an
awkward Chief Justice of Pakistan, Sajjad Ali Shah. So he consulted his
confidantes. On November 5, 1997, as recounts Gohar Ayub Khan in his
recently published book, Glimpses into the Corridors of Power, Nawaz "asked
me to accompany him to the PM's House. In the car, the PM put his hand on my
knee and said, "Gohar Sahib, show me the way to arrest the Chief Justice and
keep him in jail for a night".



Naturally, Gohar was "shocked" and advised him against even thinking about
it. But deep-thinking Nawaz thought further, and on November 27, 1997, he
had his goons
physically storm the building of the Supreme Court of Pakistan while Sajjad
Ali Shah
was hearing a contempt case brought against him (Nawaz) and then proceeded
to engineer, with the help of Sajjad's brother judges, the successful
removal of their Chief Justice." (Dawn, Aug. 5, 1997).

As Masud Mufti noted, "The parties do not have an effective or long term
commitment to democracy, an independent judiciary, merit and public welfare
... [they offered] lukewarm support to the lawyers' movement for the
restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and other judges."
(Dawn, Mar. 10, 2008).



The track record of PPP and PML(N) are grotesquely undemocratic; and they
have blocked and will continue to block an independent judiciary that could
challenge their authoritarian excesses.

To cover up their ill-advised opposition to President Musharraf, after the
elections liberals are desperately wriggling to reinvent Zardari and Sharif
as 'democrats'.



Ayesha Siddiqa enthusiastically dubbed the polity a "democracy in
transition." (Dawn, Feb. 28, 2008), presumably under the elected leaders
Zardari and Sharif, together with Awami National Party (ANP)'s Asfandyar
Wali Khan and lesser figures, if at all they form a coalition government.



Self-aggrandized, another analyst and former foreign secretary, Tanvir Ahmad
Khan: "Let there be no mistake. We are resurrecting a state that all but
perished" (Dawn, Mar. 1, 2008).



"The importance of Mr. Zardari," gushed S.A. Qureshi, "will be determined by
his success in spelling out a charismatic vision for each geographical area
[of the country] and how he intends to deliver it." (Dawn, Feb. 27, 2008).



Worse still, in their haste to lay claim to the curative effects of
democracy, Pakistani liberals distorted the victory of the ANP in the North
West Frontier Province (NWFP); they made the outlandish contention that the
defeat of the alliance of religious parties, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal
(MMA), proved once again that the vast majority of voters reject Islamists.



But extremists are not exclusive to religious parties. In fact they are very
much in control of mainstream PPP and PML(N) and, as we saw above, are far
more skilled in promoting Islamisation than the flatfooted Islamists in
religious parties.



What the NWFP election results in fact show is that local Pukhtun
nationalism over-rode general Islamic identity, a development with important
parallels to the primacy of
Bengali nationalism in the former East Pakistan. The hapless liberals have
yet to discover this.

The fact of the matter is that liberals may reinvent till they are blue in
the face but neither Zardari nor Sharif would ever become the stuff of
democracy. When confronted with this reality, they fall back on what is now
the post-election 'wisdom': holding regular elections, claim liberals, is
the indispensable learning process leading to a democratic polity. This
assertion raises a host of questions.

On Ballot-Box Democracy

Are elections society-neutral? That is, do they have the same or similar
outcomes irrespective of the history, culture and class structure of diverse
societies?



Even a cursory survey of countries would show this is untrue. What is true
is that elections - ballot-box democracy - legitimize and entrench the
status quo, which is particularly problematical in pre-modern (feudal,
semi-feudal and tribal) and authoritarian societies.

Many Pakistani liberals routinely point to India as evidence of how people
by participating in regular elections, uninterrupted by military rule,
schooled themselves in democracy.



This utterly absurd parallel ignores the dominance of the modern
entrepreneurial class, which is buttressed by a burgeoning middle class that
inherited the crucial lesson of the anti-colonial freedom struggle: namely,
that rights are never given; they are always taken.



The third condition is that no single ethnic group dominates the state and
armed forces.



The single largest group, the Hindi-speaking people, is not more than 35 per
cent of the population in the most optimistic assessment; in effect every
ethnic group and nationality is a minority. So the Hindi belt learned the
hard way it cannot ride roughshod over other peoples and ethnicities (after
early bruising attempts at Hindi hegemony, spearheaded by using Hindi as
official language, failed in the 1950s); in the process the major non-Hindi
peoples and nationalities carved out the political space to reform the
post-colonial state; and the process continues today. The modern class
structure, historical experience of struggle, weak ethnic hegemony and a
reformed post-colonial state constitute the foundation of the culture of
democracy that has taken root in India; these conditions have no parallel in
Pakistan.

The appropriate comparison is with Sri Lanka, which is a living proof that
ballot-box democracy, in the absence of modernist pre-conditions, would in
all likelihood deliver the opposite of genuine democracy.


Regular, largely free and fair elections have been held in that country for
more than a century (beginning in 1933) and incumbent parties have been
regularly put out of office. The military never took power. The population
has a very high literacy level (92%). But the dominant class almost
exclusively from the Sinhala ethnic group is a semi-feudal oligarchy steeped
in pre-modern pageantry.



The historical experience of 'peaceful' transfer of power from the British
to Sri Lankans in 1948 was devoid of the lessons of struggles for political
rights. And the Sinhala ethnic
group is a dominant 70 per cent of the population and controls the state and
armed forces. So it confidently rejects reforms of the centralized, unitary
post-colonial state that are essential to accommodate the democratic
aspirations of other peoples in the island. All four factors combined to
smother prospects, if any, for the development of a culture of democracy,
the absence of which is the main reason for the growth of armed resistance
by Sinhalese working classes (1971). Tamils (1976) and, more recently, by
Muslims (1989).



Not surprisingly the unreformed post-colonial state has, under guise of
fighting "terrorism", transmuted into a military-bureaucratic authoritarian
state. Sri Lanka's
pre-modern class structure, the paucity of anti-colonial struggles, ethnic
hegemony and the unreformed post-colonial state have strong parallels in
Pakistan.

>From its birth, Pakistan has been under either bureaucratic-authoritarian or
military-authoritarian regimes. The elected assemblies serve as the
institutional interface between the regimes and the people and are dominated
by feudal and tribal leaders and notables, who indulged in the charade of
ballot-box democracy while collaborating with successive
regimes to legitimize their exercise of political power and to feather their
own nests.



For historical and cultural reasons the Pakistani people did not inherit the
lessons of anti-colonial struggles in British India. The 65 per cent strong
Punjabi ethnic group controls the state and the armed forces to the
detriment of the democratic rights of other ethnic groups. To consolidate
its power, the Punjabi ethnic group retained the centralized post-colonial
state virtually unchanged and further concentrated power in Islamabad.



As in Sri Lanka, in Pakistan too the culture of democracy is non-existent
not despite ballot-box democracy but in many ways because of it.

Perhaps the Pakistani liberals' most glaring duplicity is their willingness
to mislead the people of Pakistan into believing that the country has a
political party system on which foundation a free and fair election-based
democracy could be built. The cruel reality is that so-called political
parties are feudal outfits that autocratic feudal/tribal rulers
control with an iron fist and, therefore, cannot deliver the democracy
dividend.



In a refreshing break from the liberals' shibboleth, Kunwar Idris made
forthright observations after the 2008 elections about the acutely
undemocratic rule of succession by inheritance in the major parties:



"The mantle of the PPP's leadership has fallen on Benazir's widower Asif
Zardari till their son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari...comes of age. Sibling
Shahbaz Sharif will head the Muslim League's parliamentary group until Nawaz
Sharif is constitutionally eligible to become prime minister for a third
term. Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi is succeeding his aging cousin and
brother-in-law, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, as the president of his faction of
the Muslim League while their sons Wajahat Hussain and Munis Elahi wait in
the wings. The leadership of Wali Khan's ANP and Samad Achakzai's MAP has
also been inherited by their sons. Amir Haider Hoti, who has been nominated
to become the chief minister of NWFP, is also a youth of Wali Khan's family.



Religious parties, with the rare exception of the Jamaat-i-Islami, are
similarly mired in feudal inheritance practices. Members of the councils or
caucuses of parties who ought to
promote inner-party democracy "have hardly ever shown any inclination to
elect their leaders for they themselves are nominated by the party bosses
and not elected by the general body of members."

In short, "the difference between a prime minister and a military ruler is
one of origin and not of values or accountability."



Idris concludes: "The parties which are not democratically organized, quite
obviously, are neither qualified nor inclined to establish democracy in the
country. They cannot safeguard the fundamental rights of the citizens ...
when their own members do not have them." (Dawn, Mar. 9, 2008).


Adds Masud Mufti: "More than a 100 political parties still follow the same
dictatorial patterns that revolve around a single person, or family. Their
epicenter is active in dubious deals with the establishment to the complete
exclusion of other members." (Dawn, Mar. 10, 2008).

But liberals and particularly human rights and civil liberties activists
effectively whitewashed the feudal monoliths as democratic political
institutions. None of the liberals, either individually or through their
organizations, has campaigned to expose the anti-democratic dinosaurs that
the political parties actually are.



Indeed there was not a whimper of protest from liberals, including the
much-touted legal
fraternity, against the autocratic rule and succession by inheritance within
the parties. Instead they have championed the parties as hallowed vehicles
of democracy and betrayed the people's fundamental rights, largely because
liberals themselves are rooted in the same feudal/tribal social milieu.
President Musharraf's political modernization project threatens their
archaic world. Not surprisingly they exploited his unwise confrontation with
the judiciary to undermine his authority and thereby discredit his vision
for a far-reaching structural change.

Towards Structural Change

The core issue of democracy in Pakistan is structural change, which, in the
context of politics, are always both cause and consequence of power
struggles, both internal and external power struggles. Power struggles throw
up losers and winners; and losers often grow into implacable enemies; and
President Musharraf earned many of them.

Islamists were quick to label Gen. Musharraf an American puppet dancing to
orders from the Bush administration. The immediate reason was that he
torpedoed the alliance between Sharif and the minority Islamist faction in
the armed forces. Further reasons are that he banned extremist organizations
between 1999 and 2001 and launched the war against Jihadis.



The liberals, pathetically oblivious to this decisive power struggle in the
country's history, joined the Islamists' chorus to pillory Gen. Musharraf as
an unelected leader. It reached a crescendo post-9/11; they bereted him as
an American stooge when he withdrew Pakistan's support for the Afghan
Taliban regime.


Almost simultaneously Gen. Musharraf, backed by the modernist majority
faction, moved against Islamists within civil society who challenged the
army. These are armed, battle-hardened Pakistani Jihadis who returned from
Afghanistan flushed with victory over the Red Army and obsessed with
repeating the success against the Pakistani army and ushering in an Islamic
revolution in the country. A few benchmarks of that power
struggle are the assassination attempts against President Musharraf,
Waziristan Operation and siege of the Red Mosque; and suicide bombers; and
the power struggle is continuing it to this day. Liberals, not known for a
grasp of the dynamics of power, faulted President Musharraf for not dealing
with Jihadis early on and, when he did take action, spun around to blame him
for human rights violations!

President Musharraf also attempted several other structural changes between
2000 and 2007. He proposed an amendment to blasphemy laws but without
success. His attempt to remove the undemocratic religion column in passports
similarly fell foul of the religious establishment. He succeeded to push
through legislation to protect women's rights. He
also eviscerated the dreaded district-level nexus between the police,
bureaucracy and feudals in the inherited colonial administrative structure -
which democratically elected previous leaders had left untouched – by
introducing for the first time representative, elected local government
institutions (Unions and Nazims) that transferred a modicum of political
power to the poor and may well evolve into competing centers of people's
power.



This earned him the undying hatred of the feudal and religious forces, which
intensified further when he abolished the moribund religious apartheid by
ending the system of separate electorates for religious minorities. As part
of educational reforms, he ordered school history textbooks be rewritten to
remove mindless extremist and anti-Indian propaganda inserted during Gen.
Zia-ul-Haq's rule. Indeed, by all accounts President Musharraf's
path-breaking initiatives have improved bilateral relations with India.

Over the years, President Musharraf's reforms have thrown up numerous
enemies from the feudal, patriarchal and religious vested interests and
anti-Indian lobbies. They can be found in the PPP and PML(N), in religious
parties and civil society institutions – especially professionals'
associations - and in the most conservative of occupations, the legal
profession.

The New Great Game

President Musharraf made enemies outside Pakistan too. He faced a major
challenge in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. Washington intensely pressured
Islamabad to join the laughable "Coalition of the Willing".


The U.S. bribed (loan write-offs) or coerced (aid cut-offs) most countries
in that decrepit "Coalition" It is to the eternal credit of President
Musharraf that he nimbly sidestepped American demands. For instance, at one
stage he agreed to send troops under the umbrella of the OIC.


Politically naïve liberals promptly moaned that President Musharraf was
caving into U.S. pressure. But he calculated that diverse ideological
stances of Muslim counties would not allow them to initiate such joint
action and therefore Pakistan's participation cannot arise, which proved
correct.

Meanwhile Benazir, living in self-imposed exile, was busy convincing
Washington and London that if she had been the Prime Minister, Pakistan
would have naturally joined the "Coalition". Inevitably Washington took a
jaundiced view of President Musharraf's determination to strike an
independent furrow while, of course, making positive public
pronouncements about his role as "ally" in the War Against Terror.

In contrast, President Musharraf prioritized Pakistan's national interests
when steering the ship of state through the choppy waters of the emerging
New Great Game. His foreign policy decisions over time convinced Washington
that under his leadership, Pakistan would not side with the U.S. and Britain
in the unfolding New Great Game to contain Russian and Chinese influence in
Central and West Asia.



First, he refused to isolate Iran. Second, he pursued the
Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline
in the face of stiff American opposition. President Musharraf further
angered Americans be deepening Pakistan-China bilateral relations, offering
Beijing naval facilities at Gwadar and extending nuclear cooperation.


Perhaps the last straw was his success in gaining Observer Status for
Pakistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Russia and China
are spearheading the SCO, which includes four other countries: Kazakhstan,
Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan; Iran and India are also Observers. The
SCO is widely perceived as a rising eastern
counterweight to western security and economic groupings.

To rub salt into the wounds, President Musharraf refused permission for
western intelligence agencies to interrogate Dr AQ Khan and firmly rejected
Washington's repeated demands that U.S. troops should be allowed into
Pakistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his Taliban associates.

But Anglo-Americans were not in a position to overthrow President Musharraf.
Instead of a "regime change", they sought a "regime adjustment" in which he
continues as President but is weakened sufficiently to serve their interests
in the region. That is the logic underlying the two major demands of their
sustained pro-democracy campaign. The first demand was that President
Musharraf must doff his uniform; that would remove
his power base in the army. The second, that he should hold free and fair
elections expected to sweep away his political power base, the PML(Q).

Washington and London couched their neo-imperialist demands in tear-jerking
rhetoric about the welfare of the people of Pakistan. Anyone who believes
that shibboleth should have his or her head thoroughly examined. For them,
Pakistan is nothing more than a pawn in the New Great Game and Americans are
looking for nothing less than a pliable regime in Islamabad with great
urgency, given the debacles they face in Iraq and
Afghanistan.



As Harish Khare perceptively observed, "The Americans would want to enlarge
their military presence in Pakistan. After all, it does not require any
great diplomatic expertise to understand that the American carping over the
'free and fair' election in Pakistan is part
of Washington's strategic design: the Musharraf regime must be kept on its
toes, it should be continuously badgered into feeling that its legitimacy
ultimately depends on American certificates of good conduct, and, having
been rendered so vulnerable, it should be pressured into letting the
American/NATO forces have the run of the Pakistan-Afghan border in pursuit
of the Taliban militants." (The Hindu, Feb. 14, 2008).

Pakistan's deracinated liberals - a ghastly hangover from the colonial past
- willingly weighed in on the side of Anglo-Americans and operated primarily
through human rights and civil liberties organizations and the
English-language media. Nudged by U.S. and British diplomats, and not
forgetful of western sources of funds and frills, before the 2008
elections liberals obediently harassed President Musharraf about his
legitimacy and mindlessly cheered Benazir as the dyed-in-the-wool patriot
and democrat. Blissfully ignorant of the unfolding realpolitik, journalists
wrote reams on everything that's wrong in the country under the President. A
human rights activist, Asma Jahangir, emailed "friends of Pakistan"
worldwide ostensibly to pressure U.S. not to support President
Musharraf but in fact to rally them against the President. Lawyers, led by
Aitzaz Ahsan, repeatedly implored America to help re-establish the rule of
law. Another activist, Hina Jilani, materialized opposite the doorstep - 10
Downing Street - of the erstwhile colonial ruler begging for "justice". Not
to be outdone, Imran Khan and his former British
wife Jemima joined the neo-colonial flotsam and jetsam in London.

The celebrated liberal Benazir, ever willing to serve Anglo-American
interests, obligingly let it be known that if she were Prime Minister she
would allow U.S. intelligence agencies access to Dr A.Q. Khan (Dawn, Sept.
26, 2007) and invite U.S. troops into Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden.


In short, she willingly prostrated herself as America's doormat; and U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that she couldn't see democracy
in Pakistan without Benazir. So the Bush administration arm-twisted
President Musharraf to grant her an amnesty against all charges and allow
her to re-enter Pakistani politics.

Washington's intentions were quite transparent. President Musharraf,
weakened with the help from liberals, should remain at his post to prosecute
the War on Terror and to keep the unruly politicians in line, with a little
help from the army. Benazir was to take over as Prime Minister with control
over foreign policy and prostitute Pakistan as the Anglo-American camp's
'cat's paw' in the New Great Game.

By assassinating Benazir, the Al Qaeda threw into disarray the Bush
administration's designs to bring Pakistan to heel. Zardari has reiterated
PPP's support for the U.S. After the 2008 elections, Anglo-American
diplomats in Islamabad are feverishly working to cobble together a puppet
coalition government led by PPP and PML(N) as a counter weight to President
Musharraf.

What Next?

My wife and filmmaker Sabiha Sumar ran into activists who had virulently
demanded President Musharraf must reinstate the pre-Emergency judges.


Sabiha: So will PPP reinstate the judges?

Woman: That's just the point. Now they are saying that they won't.

Sabiha: Sounds a bit like the Hudood Ordinances.

Woman: Well that was different. Because they didn't have a two-third
majority in Parliament.

Sabiha: And they still have that excuse.

Woman: But you see Nawaz Sharif is saying that he will reinstate the judges.
So they [PPP] should agree with that.

Sabiha: So why don't they?

Woman: That's the thing!

Sabiha: So I would rather go with the one who has done something like bring
women into Parliament, make the Hudood Ordinance ineffective....

Woman 1 and 2 in chorus: Then why didn't he do more?!

Woman: He could have done everything but he didn't. You know political
parties don't have so much power. They have to be careful. But this man had
all the powers then why didn't he just kill the jihadis.

Woman's husband: And the thing is that they actually like him in India.
[Editor's note: Visit the campuses of Chinese universities. Pakistan's
Musharraf is hero to young Chinese women and men.]


In Pakistan today liberals should be relieved that President Musharraf held
free and fair elections. But they are not. The election results have forced
liberals to confront their monumental folly of helping to elect despotic and
corrupt rulers. So they are turning around and biting the President's leg,
blaming him for not being a full-blooded dictator. President Musharraf is
damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.


Also, the warriors of democracy are faltering. Liberals are losing
enthusiasm for re-instating that pillar of democracy - the judiciary - since
the Bush administration has signaled its opposition. The PPP too is waffling
on the issue. Speaking to the press, "Zardari parried several questions on
issues like reinstatement of deposed judges ... the PPP leader said that the
matters would be decided by parliament." (Dawn,
Feb. 20, 2008).



For the same reason, liberals' hysterical cries for the President's
resignation have subsided.



Thus lamented Ahmad Faruqui: "Sadly, many Pakistani political leaders and
even some analysts have begun to argue that judicial restoration is not in
the country's interest." (Dawn, Mar. 10, 2008).




And Zardari is backing the U.S. position and Sharif has also fallen in line.
So, in their Mar. 9 Murree Summit Declaration they skillfully passed the
buck on reinstating the judiciary to the National Assembly: "The restoration
of deposed judges as on November 2, 2007, shall be brought about through a
parliamentary resolution to be passed in the
National Assembly within 30 days of the formation of the federal
government." (Dawn, Mr. 10, 2008).



Even a cursory knowledge of fratricidal Pakistani politics will show that
the resolution will not see the light of day. In other words, reinstatement
has been shelved as per instructions from the U.S. embassy. (Flat-footed
analysts predictably missed the obvious sleight of hand and gloated the
Declaration is a serious set back to President Musharraf.).

The backsliding continues. While addressing the Sindh High Court Bar
Association, Aitzaz Ahsan glibly abandoned the demand for justice for
victims of the Karachi bloodbath: "I have forgotten the May 12 mayhem," he
advised the lawyers, "and would like to request that it is better for all of
us to forget that tragic incident." (Dawn, Mar. 6, 2008).