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EDITORIAL: Pressure on Musharraf?

As the November electoral deadline for President Bush draws near, the screws seem to be tightening on Islamabad to deliver on Al Qaeda. Washington wants to show how George W Bush is a stronger candidate that John Kerry by showcasing Pakistan as his hunting grounds for international terrorism. Islamabad, too, seems to be playing along nicely, its acting ambassador in Washington asserting that Pakistan now has 100,000 troops along the 1,600-kilometre border with Afghanistan. Leaks in the American capital are coming thick and fast to shore up the incumbent president’s ‘strongman’ image even at the cost of the actual prosecution of war against terrorism.

The opposition in Pakistan says Islamabad is bending too far backward to obey the election-related fiats coming from the United States. They accuse President Pervez Musharraf of making war against his own people on the orders of George Bush. No one believes the government’s version of the Wana Operation and everyone tends to ignore the latest flurry of arrests of the so-called Al Qaeda agents in the country. The government says that the Jamaat-e-Islami, the party of the chief of the religious alliance MMA, has been found sheltering the terrorists, which hardly anyone believes because of the general impression that everything Islamabad says is usually dictated by the United States. What is the truth?

The fact of relentless American pressure is difficult to deny. Pakistan’s great volte-face against the Taliban and jihad after 9/11 took place because of the extraordinary pressure applied directly by Washington on the military rulers of Pakistan. Indeed the coercive change has been so sudden that most Pakistanis simply cannot understand it. But what is of interest and concern is the pressure being applied now as a compulsion of America’s national politics. For George Bush to win against John Kerry, Pakistan is expected to deliver some ‘high-value’ terrorist targets before the Americans go out to cast their votes. The contest this time is going to be cut-throat as the Democrat voters are expected to abandon their traditional apathy and come out in large numbers.

Pakistan has been boasting about its deployment on the Western border, saying it was the largest ever when it sent 50,000 troops to the Durand Line. But when Kabul and Islamabad started squabbling over the Taliban infiltration from Pakistan’s Tribal Areas, Pakistan’s view was that with this kind of unprecedented mobilisation on the border no infiltration was physically possible. Indeed, when Kabul said Osama bin Laden could be somewhere in Pakistan, Islamabad shot back saying he could only be on the Afghan side of the border because on the Pakistani side the border was completely sealed. What has happened since then to cause the beefing up of the troops to 100,000?

We are told that the increase has been gradual, that it first went up to 70,000 before becoming 100,000. Since no one announced the increase here, we have to presume that it must have happened quickly rather than gradually.

After General Musharraf turned on a dime in 2001, there was political dislocation in Pakistan. The following year an entire swath of its population in the NWFP and Balochistan voted against the big change. The jury is still out on whether the election was rigged in favour of the MMA but a strong impression remains that General Musharraf did not exactly anticipate the electoral backlash against the big change in the army’s Taliban policy. There is evidence also that the 2002 election saw the playing field fixed against the two parties that General Musharraf wanted to splinter and render ineffectual. But by far the bigger challenge emerged in the shape of an aggressive clerical opposition with which he finally negotiated himself into some sort of political legitimacy through the 17th Amendment of the Constitution.

Equally, it may not just be American pressure that is compelling General Musharraf to take up arms against religious extremism in Pakistan. Surely, these moves fit in nicely with the medium-term objectives of President Musharraf himself. His own “uniform” issue deadline of December is in many ways tougher than George Bush’s November electoral deadline. There is a bipartisan consensus in the United States on the usefulness of Pakistan as an ally in the war on terrorism. Thus, whether President Bush is returned or not, President Musharraf has to be in power beyond 2004. That is what has been very clearly implied in some of the interviews he has recently given. How will he achieve that? What will become of the commitment given in the agreement he reached with the MMA over the Legal Framework Order (LFO) that he would take off his uniform before the year was out? There may be a clue concealed in the latest allegation (so far awaiting effective proof in a court of law) that the toughest of the MMA components has been harbouring the Al Qaeda terrorists. Does it mean that the “pressure” will finally persuade a not-too-harmonious MMA to agree to an extension in his tenure as army chief?

Such American and personal “compulsions” apart, there is a purely Pakistani perspective to consider too. As a consequence of the “strategic depth” policy followed by the army with the Taliban after 1996, Pakistan’s internal sovereignty had been all but bartered away. The jihadi organisations virtually ruled the big cities while the law enforcement agencies worked slavishly as their handmaidens. Then the pressures emanating from 9/11 began the process of rolling back the jihad, something on which President Musharraf may have the support of the vast silent majority of Pakistan. Would he have done it without the American pressure? Would he have done it if there hadn’t been assassination attempts on his life? Those who say that the sincerity of his commitment against Islamic extremism should be assumed after the attempts on his life by the erstwhile jihadis should remember that he also repeated his commitment to jihad in Kashmir in a recent interview to a Pakistani English daily. *

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