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GEOPOLITICAL DIARY: THE IMPLICATIONS OF MUSHARRAF'S FALL

Pervez Musharraf, who ruled Pakistan for nearly nine years, was forced to resign Monday in the face of moves by the South Asian country's recently elected coalition government to impeach him. Musharraf's resignation has been a long time coming, with stops along the way over the last nine months during which he was forced to give up control over the military and then the government.

Almost immediately following his announcement, Pakistanis took to the streets to celebrate, demanding that he be tried for crimes against the nation. Musharraf's personal fate is of no consequence to the continuity (or discontinuity) in the geopolitics of Pakistan. But the conditions in which he fell from power have wide-ranging geopolitical implications not just in his country, but for U.S. policy toward Southwest Asia.

His exit from the scene symbolizes an end of an era for many reasons. The former Pakistani leader was the pointman in U.S.-Pakistani cooperation in Washington's war against jihadism, which many Pakistanis -- both within the government and in wider society -- feel has destabilized their country. Now, the country's democratic government must search for the elusive balance between domestic and foreign policy considerations. This will prove challenging for all the stakeholders in the post-Musharraf state. It also will complicate (to put it mildly) U.S. efforts to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.

A far greater implication of the decline and fall of the Musharraf regime, however, is that the process has altered the nature of the Pakistani state. Until fairly recently, the Pakistani state was as robust as its army's ability either directly to govern the country or to maintain oversight over civilian administrations. Policies pursued under the Musharraf government generated two very different kinds of potent opposition to the state, however. The state found itself caught between democratic forces on the one hand and Islamist militant forces on the other, something compounded by a deteriorating economic situation.

As a result, for the first time in the history of the country, the army is no longer in a position to step in and impose order as before. Recognizing that any attempt to impose order militarily on a growing crisis of governance would only further destabilize the country, the army's new leadership has put its weight behind the civilian government. But since Pakistani civilian institutions historically have never really functioned properly, serious doubts about the viability of the newly democratic Pakistan arise.

Musharraf's decision to quit has greatly empowered parliament, but the legislature is a collection of competing political forces that for most of their history have engaged in zero-sum games. Meanwhile, the civil-military imbalance -- despite the desire of the army to back the government -- remains a source of tension within the political system. Moreover, at a time when parliament really has yet to consolidate power, the rise of an assertive judiciary is bound to further complicate governance.

Islamabad will be searching for pragmatic prescriptions to balance the domestic sentiment against the war against jihadism with the need to play its role as a U.S. ally and combat the extremism that also threatens Pakistan. At the same time, however, the legislature and the newly empowered judiciary will be playing an oversight role over the actions of the government in keeping with public sentiment. It will emphasize due process, which will force the hands of the government in the fight against both transnational and homegrown militancy. In other words, an already weakened state will be further handicapped in dealing with the need to combat a growing jihadist insurgency.

The multiple problems Pakistan faces now that the military no longer can simply step in and stabilize the system underscore the potentially dangerous situation in the South Asian country. And this has obvious and grave geopolitical implications for the wider region and the United States.

The fall of Bush's man in Pakistan
Despite Pervez Musharraf's despotism and double-dealing with U.S. enemies, George W. Bush, John McCain and the GOP embraced him to the bitter end.

By Juan Cole, Salon, August 18, 2008

Aug. 19, 2008 | It is a measure of the Bush administration's broken foreign policy that the departure of Pervez Musharraf, the corrupt, longtime military dictator of Pakistan, is provoking fears in Washington of "instability." Despite Bush's warm embrace, Musharraf gutted the rule of law in Pakistan over the previous year and a half, including sacking its Supreme Court. He attempted to do away with press freedom, failed to provide security for campaigning politicians and strove to postpone elections indefinitely.

The Bush administration has made a regular practice of undermining democracy in places where local politics don't play out to its liking, and in that, at least, Musharraf was a true partner. But stability derives not from a tyrannical brake on popular aspirations; it derives from the free play of the political process. Musharraf's resignation from office, in fact, marks Pakistan's first chance for a decent political future since 1977.

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The fall of Bush's man in Pakistan

Despite Pervez Musharraf's despotism and double-dealing with U.S. enemies, George W. Bush, John McCain and the GOP embraced him to the bitter end.

By Juan Cole

Aug. 19, 2008 | It is a measure of the Bush administration's broken foreign policy that the departure of Pervez Musharraf, the corrupt, longtime military dictator of Pakistan, is provoking fears in Washington of "instability." Despite Bush's warm embrace, Musharraf gutted the rule of law in Pakistan over the previous year and a half, including sacking its Supreme Court. He attempted to do away with press freedom, failed to provide security for campaigning politicians and strove to postpone elections indefinitely.

The Bush administration has made a regular practice of undermining democracy in places where local politics don't play out to its liking, and in that, at least, Musharraf was a true partner. But stability derives not from a tyrannical brake on popular aspirations; it derives from the free play of the political process. Musharraf's resignation from office, in fact, marks Pakistan's first chance for a decent political future since 1977.

Musharraf as a general had been known in the 1990s as a hawk, foolhardy in his provocation of India and deeply wedded to supporting the Taliban (and implicitly al-Qaida) in Afghanistan. Unlike some of his colleagues, there was nothing ideological about his belligerence. Brought up in part in secular Turkey as the son of a diplomat, he displayed no interest in fundamentalist Islam. His was the belligerence of opportunism and ambition.

Musharraf deposed then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in October of 1999. As army chief of staff, he had earlier that year launched the disastrous Kargil War against India in the Himalayan area of Kashmir, and been forced to withdraw. The encroachment on Indian-held territory had not been cleared with the prime minister, who was all too happy to yield to American entreaties to withdraw. Musharraf might well have been brought up on charges over the catastrophe, but he decided to overthrow the civilian government instead.

George W. Bush has been a staunch supporter of Musharraf. When campaigning for president in the fall of 1999, Bush praised Musharraf's coup as promising stability for Pakistan. Sen. John McCain also supported the coup, and has recently dismissed the civilian government of the 1990s as a "failed state." It is true that Sharif had begun exhibiting dictatorial tendencies before his ouster, but that is not a failed state, it is tyranny. How civilian authoritarianism could have been cured by military dictatorship remains unclear.

Pakistan was founded in 1947 by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and other leaders of the Muslim League as a refuge for the Muslims of British India. Jinnah fulminated against theocracy and fully expected Hindus and Sikhs to constitute a plurality of the new state's population. He thought of it as a state for Muslims, not as an Islamic state, and simply wanted to save South Asian Muslims from laboring under a Hindu majority in India.

But Pakistan did not become the enlightened, parliamentary democracy with guaranteed constitutional rights that its founder, a Shiite trained in British law in London, had envisaged. It constituted the most rural and least industrialized parts of British India. It never implemented proper land reform, ensuring the survival of a corrupt and imperious class of large landlords who are not exactly clamoring for their peasants to become literate and politically aware. Its social indicators, whether literacy, health or urbanization, remained disappointing. A small fundamentalist movement, the Jama'at-i Islami, came to have influence all out of proportion to its membership, despite its general inability to garner more than 3 percent of the vote in most elections.

The military was the most ambitious bureaucracy inherited from British India, and it made its first coup in 1958. After a return to civilian rule in 1971, the military under Gen. Zia ul-Haq struck again in 1977, hanging Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979. Gen. Zia was viewed by the Reagan administration as indispensable to its covert war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Zia, isolated and without popular support inside Pakistan, made an alliance with the fundamentalist Jama'at-i Islami and began the "Islamization" of Pakistani law, which had earlier been a mixture of British legal principles with precedents derived from Muslim customary practice.

Zia's Inter-Services Intelligence, the feared military intelligence branch, received some $5 billion from Reagan and a matching sum from King Fahd in Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviets, and the ISI funneled much of that money to the most hard-line fundamentalist guerrillas among the Afghans. The Reagan-backed jihad against Moscow attracted the enthusiasms of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and thousands of other Arab volunteers, leading to the creation of al-Qaida.

Zia died in a mysterious plane crash in 1988, allowing a partial return to civilian rule. Bhutto's daughter, Benazir, won the elections to become the country's first female prime minister. But the military only let her take office after she pledged to cede Afghanistan policy to them, so that entire policy sectors remained under military control.

Gen. Zia had extensively and arbitrarily amended the constitution, giving the president enormous powers, including the authority to dismiss the prime minister. His successor dismissed Bhutto in 1990, allowing her rival, Nawaz Sharif, to come to power. In 1993, she swept back to power in that year's parliamentary elections, but she was dismissed once more in 1996, again succeeded by Sharif, who was overthrown by the military in 1999. The military's continued control of much of government policy during that decade and the repeated intervention of the president or the chief of staff to overturn the results of popular elections stunted the growth of political parties and institutions such as the courts. Contrary to McCain's assertion, it was not the civilian parties that created a failed state but the generals who did it.

Musharraf ostensibly turned his back on his allies, the Taliban and their al-Qaida colleagues, after 9/11, acquiescing in Bush's demand that he join Washington in a global war on terror. Musharraf, who had long backed not only the Taliban but also jihadi groups inside Pakistan that the Pakistani military sent to hit Indian Kashmir, was the least likely poster child for counterterrorism imaginable. But Bush's propaganda machine painted him and the Pakistani military as anchors of stability -- after they had spent decades destabilizing Pakistan and Afghanistan and cynically deploying the most virulent forms of Muslim fundamentalism to fight India and Indian influence.

Musharraf was an embarrassment to the Bush administration once Bush began using a rhetoric of democratization. So Musharraf conveniently turned himself from mere military dictator into a "president" by the expediency of a referendum on April 30, 2002.

Next page: The man Bush had so eagerly enlisted helped put fundamentalists in control of the very provinces where the fight against terrorism was most important

For a dictator, a referendum has the advantages that it does not require one to run against a rival candidate, and virtually any vote tally can be declared a victory. Musharraf held crooked parliamentary elections in fall 2002, interfering in the free campaigning of the left-of-center, secular-leaning Pakistan People's Party and the right-of-center, big landlord-dominated Muslim League (N), which had been led by Nawaz Sharif (hence the "N"). The party that did best was a pro-Musharraf, breakaway faction of the Muslim League, called "Q" for the "Great Leader," Qa'id-i A'zam, the honorific of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the country's founder. It was essentially what it would be like if an American general led a coup, suppressing the Democrats and Republicans, and ruling through something he called the "George Washington Party."

After Musharraf rigged the elections against the popular parties, a coalition of fundamentalist parties saw unprecedented success, getting 17 percent of seats in the federal parliament and taking over two major provinces, the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. Those provinces were preciscely where the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaida who fled to Pakistan were hiding out. The Jama'at-i Islami and its partners in the Islamic Action Council (MMA) promptly denied that there was any such thing as al-Qaida. But some of the MMA leaders had trained, or even been Taliban.

So the man Bush had so eagerly enlisted for the war on terror, by his dictatorial tinkering with the electoral process, helped put pro-bin Laden Muslim fundamentalists in control of the very provinces where the fight against militancy and terrorism was most important. And in reality, Musharraf needed the jihadi militants too much for his struggle with India over Kashmir to thoroughly root them out.

Although the Pakistani security forces did capture more than 600 Arab al-Qaida fugitives in Pakistan, and did engage in sometimes hard fighting against tribal forces in the northwest allied to the Taliban or neo-Taliban groups, Washington's depiction of Musharraf as a critical ally in the war on terror was blatant propaganda. Elements of the ISI even went on cultivating and using Taliban elements based in Pakistan to assert control of southern Pakistan, a policy that had, in part, led to 9/11 in the first place. Musharraf either was unable to purge ISI of fundamentalist elements, or cynically continued to use them in his rivalry with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, who deeply dislikes and distrusts the general.

Musharraf's unwillingness or inability to root out fundamentalist extremism brought him into disrepute with middle-class Pakistanis, especially educated women, who feared the Talibanization of their own society. Musharraf's economic policies helped grow a large, literate, urban middle class that grew attached to free access to independent and foreign media, and depended for business and professional purposes on a rule of law.

When Musharraf came into conflict with Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry in spring of 2007, he highhandedly dismissed him. Pakistan's middle classes, attorneys and other legal professionals staged continual protests and rallies. Musharraf was forced to reinstate Chaudhry in summer of 2007. But when he attempted to become an elected president that fall without resigning first as military chief of staff, the Supreme Court was set to rule against him. He therefore sacked the whole Supreme Court and packed it with yes men who allowed him to call himself president. He also imposed strict press censorship and excluded some independent channels from broadcasting over cable in Pakistan. This series of dictatorial actions, including interfering with free access to the media, caused Musharraf's popularity to plummet.

Musharraf's grip on power had clearly become too feeble for his main external backers, the Bush administration and the Saudi royal family, to trust him to continue to ride the tiger of popular discontent. He had to resign his military commission to remain believable as a civilian president. After Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on Dec. 27, 2007, while campaigning for prime minister, he was forced to hold credible parliamentary elections. The Pakistani public dealt a crushing rebuff to Musharraf last February, turning the country over to Benazir's PPP and to Sharif's Muslim League. The two major, long-standing parties made a political alliance and began planning for Musharraf's impeachment, spurred on by the lawyers and popular activists. It was over for Musharraf by last February.

Pakistan's middle classes have spoken. They want a return to civilian rule and a reestablishment of the rule of law. They are skeptical that the corrupt and imperious establishment political parties can deliver to them the better life to which they aspire for themselves and their children. Given the chance, they gave the biggest number of seats in parliament to a left of center, secular-tinged party, the PPP. The Pakistani people have given the lie to the stereotype often visited upon them, that a majority are religious fanatics and are incapable of participating in an open democracy.

The Pakistani military and its tacit alliance with militant fundamentalists has in fact caused most of the country's problems. If the U.S. and Europe are wise, they will give the elected prime minister their full support and pump in aid to help ensure that democracy in Pakistan, still an embryo, actually has a fighting chance.

White House: U.S. had nothing to do with resignation

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States and Britain praised Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's contribution to the war on terror while the Bush administration claimed no role in the leader's resignation Monday.

A senior State Department official familiar with the situation told CNN U.S. officials were in touch with Musharraf in the week leading up to the resignation.

However, the official said, the United States made it clear that it would not get involved in the struggle between Musharraf and the newly elected Pakistani parliament. "If he made a decision to go, or fight against it -- we didn't advise him either way," the official said. "We really did keep our fingers out of this one."

Musharraf is viewed as a keen ally of the West in the fight on terror, receiving billions in military aid from both and launching attacks on militant groups near the country's border with Afghanistan. Watch Musharraf resign »

"President Musharraf has been a friend to the United States and one of the world's most committed partners in the war against terrorism and extremism," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after Musharraf's announcement.

"We will continue to work with the Pakistani government and political leaders and urge them to redouble their focus on Pakistan's future and its most urgent needs, including stemming the growth of extremism, addressing food and energy shortages and improving economic stability," she added.

"The United States will help with these efforts to see Pakistan reach its goal of becoming a stable, prosperous, democratic, modern, Muslim nation."

The Bush administration's main priority is a crackdown on Taliban and al Qaeda militants in Pakistan's tribal regions. The administration believes Pakistan's intelligence service is full of al Qaeda and Taliban loyalists, an accusation Pakistan denies. View a timeline of Musharraf's time in power »

"There is a great deal of frustration on the part of the U.S. government with Pakistan's inability to follow through on what the U.S. sees as its clear commitments," said Robert Grenier, a former CIA counterterrorism official, now a managing director at risk consultation firm Kroll.

"It remains very much to be seen whether this new democratically-elected leadership will really be able to follow through in a sustained and coherent way," he said. "They haven't demonstrated an ability to do that."

The United States has stepped up missile strikes inside Pakistan, killing dozens of militants, and head of the Army, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, is now the United States' closest ally in power.

But some experts warn that U.S. pressure could go too far. "The U.S. military has to be extremely cautious," said Rick Barton, a director and adviser with the non-profit Center for Strategic and International Studies who is a former U.N. and U.S. official. "It could actually be setting the torch to the kindling inside the country."

Musharraf told the nation in a televised address Monday that he would step down -- nearly nine years after he seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999.

"I don't want the people of Pakistan to slide deeper and deeper into uncertainty," he said.

Until now, Musharraf, 65, had stubbornly resisted pressure to resign. But his once-considerable power eroded significantly since February's election that pushed his party out of power. That pressure increased in the past few weeks as the new ruling party began making plans to impeach him.

Only time will tell whether the power shift will benefit Pakistan, but "it puts a lot more responsibility squarely on the government. There is no more excuse any more. They have to stand up and do things. They can't blame Musharraf," the State Department official said. The official said Musharraf isn't expected to try to undermine the government.

"I really don't think he has been a factor for six months," the official said. "He hasn't been able to do that while he was in the presidency, and he won't be as well-positioned [out of the presidency] to interfere."

Mohammedmian Soomro, the chairman of the upper house of the National Assembly, stepped into the president's role and will act as caretaker until a new president is chosen, which is expected to be in the next few weeks.

Under Pakistan's constitution, the president is elected by a majority vote of Pakistan's four provincial assemblies and the two houses of the National Assembly. Since Musharraf's resignation, the United States hadn't yet spoken to the government under newly elected Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani, who visited Washington late last month.

In a statement released by U.S. National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe, President George W. Bush said it was committed to a "strong Pakistan that continues its efforts to strengthen democracy and fight terror."

"President Bush looks forward to working with the Government of Pakistan on the economic, political and security challenges they face."

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it was strongly committed to its alliance with Pakistan following Musharraf's resignation.

He praised Musharraf's economic and security achievements, described Pakistan as a "vital friend" and said Britain's aid program for the country would continue.

Meanwhile, an Afghanistan government spokesman said Musharraf's resignation would be good for Afghanistan.  The Indian government said in a statement that it had no comment to make.

"This is an internal matter of Pakistan."

FRONT-PAGE ROUNDUP: Musharraf's resignation

 

 

Above: Jam-e-Jam of Teheran

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