Musharraf, Bhutto, Et Al

The power situation that Pakistan’s dictator, Parvez Musharraf unknowingly provoked when he over-reached himself in the spring this year and fired the Chief Justice is not likely to resolve itself any time soon. Instead, it is more likely to sustain itself in a truly Pakistani pattern as it spirals itself indefinitely aided by events even as it claims some unsuspecting victims including the dictator himself and even his regime. Apart from Musharraf and his regime, it seems like former Prime Minister Benizar Bhutto is quickly positioning herself as a possible victim of events that she played little or no role to trigger into place in the first instance.

If that happens, it’s only clear that she must blame her extensive opportunistic tendencies more than anyone or anything else for that outcome. Our suspicion is that she may have pre-occupied herself more with listening to the Bush White House than reading the tea leaves on the events more correctly for herself, as the events unfold. In which case, one can only see her as being too myopic to the degree that makes it difficult for her to discern that US desires in Pakistan and in the sub-region has little or nothing to do with whatever her own desires are for herself, her political party, and Pakistan. If she is unable to realize that US desires to save Musharraf and his tottering regime would not further her own ambition to return to Pakistan and to power in the long run, it might be partly because of the issues in her own past that came together to help force her from power some years back. One such issues relates to the corruption charge that was leveled against her husband who could have spent an extended time in jail if she hadn’t embraced the forced choice of exile. If she hopes that the best way to simultaneously protect her husband and return to power is to lend herself and her party to the US gamble to save Musharraf and his regime, she needs to be told that she might not be that lucky.

She and the Bush White House ought to be aware that the circumstances that got Musharraf and his regime to where they are at the moment in Pakistan’s perilous political landscape were made possible by other actors who are highly unsympathetic to US desires in both Pakistan and the sub-region. They should listen to and not ignore the lawyers who successfully saved the Chief Justice from Musharraf's over-reach. That Musharraf’s over-reach was responsible for triggering the situation that gave vent to the anger in the civil society that subsequently produced the defiance that encouraged the Supreme Court to reinstate the Chief Justice and the ruling that exiled former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif has the right to return to Pakistan as a citizen is insufficient grounds for either the US or Musharraf, talk less of Bhutto to presume that they can successfully cash in and benefit is far from the truth. More than the Islamists, who have allied themselves in the past with Musharraf when they deemed it convenient, it’s the secular elements in the civil society who have the upper hand at the moment in the unfolding power game in Pakistan. They were responsible for mobilizing the agitation that compelled Musharraf to blink. They can and will do that all over again if and when they discern that the ploy to save Musharraf in power is about to be off-loaded on Pakistan by the troika of Musharraf, Bhutto and the US.

Even if Musharraf, Bhutto, and the US succeed in installing the former as president, and Bhutto prime minister in a power-sharing deal predicated on Musharraf’s removal of his general’s uniform, there’s no guarantee that the resultant truce would be durable, to say the least. How will they handle Sherrif, the civil society and a Supreme Court, which has found its constitutional voice and place as an independent player? In its quest to isolate Pakistan’s Islamists, the US will certainly ignore the need to ponder this question. But it is a question that will not go away. At the end of the day, the only guarantee for durable stability in Pakistan is a democratic arrangement, which encompasses the secularists and the civil society and places the military under civilian control in Pakistan. Anything short of that will simply sustain a perilous situation that will someday produce a regime controlled by Islamists.