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EDITORIAL: General Musharraf is right, but...

President Pervez Musharraf has talked in his usual candid style to an English daily about a number of salient issues facing Pakistan. We do not have any disagreement with what he said about the need to resolve the Kashmir and other disputes with India, about the need to construct the ‘big dam’, about the need to raise three new military cantonments in Balochistan. But one will have to take a close look at how he intends to handle these issues. In each case, there is no clear national consensus on what a final solution may look like. Therefore one wonders how he is able to justify his air of supreme confidence that he can execute the projects without titling the country into instability. Indeed if there is no legal ground for him to doff his uniform in December as he claims, isn’t it worth asking whether or not this assertion creates more uncertainty in a country already lacking in stability?

In his interview he denied that the Indo-Pak talks had run aground over Siachen and Sir Creek, but asserted that nothing would stick unless India was ready to resolve the Kashmir dispute once and for all. According to him, Indian leaders were making declarations at home that belied the pledges they were inclined to make bilaterally, but that, he thought, was perhaps their way of gradually disarming a long-frozen public attitude to Kashmir. But he was determined the keep the issue on the front burner, so to speak, linking it to a final normalisation of relations. He went so far as to say that “if we find a solution on Kashmir with India, all jihadi organisations will have to pack up”. Here President Musharraf’s ‘institutional’ persona seems to come to the fore, obscuring what may be in the ‘national’ interest. How has the ‘institutional’ factor become mixed up with the ‘national’ interest?

President Musharraf has arrived on the scene in Pakistan at a time that calls for a paradigm shift. He has partially sensed this but its full realisation is concealed from him by his ‘institutional’ training. The big change has come in the wake of a decade of low-intensity conflict in Kashmir with non-state actors. Pakistan has been so damaged by jihad that it has steadily been drained of its internal sovereignty. States can survive with curtailed external sovereignty but a collapse of internal sovereignty means the end of the state itself. The lack of any “national consensus” on virtually all subjects of “national interest” is symptomatic of the decline or failure of the state. That is why the erstwhile non-state actors are pushing the country into anarchy and even succeeding in persuading state functionaries to commit acts of terrorism against the country’s head of the state. There can thus be no going back to jihadi organisations. Why then is President Musharraf implying that they are being kept in waiting for a resolution on Kashmir? Not long ago, he nearly got killed by the activists of these jihadis-in-waiting. The only way to move forward is the process that he has himself started with India. There is no clear script here, but it is quite clear that this time around normalisation will have to precede resolution of difficult disputes.

Equally, no one will disagree with General Musharraf’s view that Pakistan needs a big dam ‘now’. If one is realistic about the water needs of the next two decades, Pakistan might actually need two big dams by the year 2010. The president concedes that there is no national consensus on the subject. In fact ‘lack of national consensus’ is a euphemism for separatist sub-nationalism and possible civil strife. What if he takes the big step of starting construction of the Kalabagh Dam since the Basha Dam would be too dangerous and come on line too late? Without a political smoothing of the feathers in the NWFP and Sindh a big dam would be in peril from day one and could become a national calamity if abandoned in the middle owing to agitation or disruption of General Musharraf’s rule. Indeed, given the kind of ‘institutional’ approach he has towards national politics, one can’t see him putting together even a minimal across-the-board agreement on the construction of the Dam. That means we shall have to imagine that General Musharraf will remain in control for the ten years that it normally takes to build such a dam. Is that a realistic assumption?

Similarly, there can be no argument about his intention of building three additional cantonments in Gwadar, Sui and Kohlu in Balochistan. The province needs to be brought under law and order and he is right once again when he says that he has ordered more development funds for it. Gwadar needs to be protected against sabotage just like Sui; and there is speculation that ultimately if an Iranian pipeline is to run through Balochistan it too will have to be safeguarded. The province is also a crucial piece in the imaginary jigsaw of offering a sea outlet to the exports of Central Asia and China. But the fact is that although Pakistan allowed its imagination to be fired about the ‘opening to Central Asia’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it soon found that it did not have the imagination needed to shift from its ‘institutional’ military mindset to that of a trading nation. The unpleasant fact is that General Musharraf is still looking at Balochistan through his military binoculars and is ignoring the reality of the Baloch-Pushtun self-image of ‘oppressed nations’.

There is much ‘political’ work to be done in all the three issues that he has raised in his interview. But real progress on his agenda will depend on the extent to which President General Pervez Musharraf can transcend his ‘institutional’ groove to uphold the ‘national interest’. *

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