As Musharraf
completes 5 years of absolute power
The Scorecard
of a Confident Bunker-Trapped Dictator
By
M. Ziauddin
ISLAMABAD,
October 12: On Oct 12, 1999 he had "moved as a last resort
to save the country", and he is still at it - saving the
country - even after five years of uninterrupted and absolute
rule in uniform.
The
general had purportedly moved in to save the country from demoralization,
national disharmony, a collapsing economy, deteriorating law and
order situation, politicization of state institutions, concentration
of power in the hands of a few at the top, exploitation of the
poor by the ruling elite, and corruption.
This
is what one had gathered from the seven-point agenda that he had
announced on October 17, 1999.
Interestingly,
while announcing this agenda he also revealed that it was not
to save the country that he had taken over, but that his armed
forces did it to save the aircraft he was traveling on from Sri
Lanka, from being hijacked by the former prime minister. But that,
of course, is another story.
What is more relevant under the circumstances
obtaining in Pakistan today is his seven-point agenda, which entailed:
• Rebuilding national confidence
and morale
• Strengthening the federation, removing inter-provincial
disharmony and restoring national cohesion
• Reviving economy and restoring investor's confidence
• Ensuring law and order, and dispensing speedy justice
• Depoliticizing state institutions
• Devolving power to the grassroots level, and
• Ensuring swift and across-the-board accountability
Midway through the last five years,
however, he added another point to his agenda; eliminating terrorism
from the face of the earth.
And it has perhaps been the last
task that has engaged most of his attention in the latter half
of his rule of the last five years. Of course, this task has made
it a lot easier for him to revive the economy (if achieving macro-economic
stability is regarded as such), as the 9/11-related economic assistance
to Pakistan was, and still is, rather extremely generous. But
here, too, the continued reluctance of foreign investors to take
Pakistan seriously has to a large extent made it almost impossible
for him to show any meaningful progress on the economic front.
But before we discuss the issue of
the economy in some detail, let us first go back to the seven
points on General Musharraf's original agenda, and discuss it
in order of the rankings he had himself given to each one of them.
The level of officially-notified
national confidence and morale that we see today is very much
the same as the one that we saw when our first military dictator,
Field Marshal Ayub Khan, had completed the first five years of
his 11-year rule. And it was the same as well when the third military
dictator, General Ziaul Haq, had completed the first five years
of his own 11-year rule.
Like
in those two instances, this time, too, it is the military ruler
who is exuding confidence, not the people of Pakistan. In fact,
like them - Ayub and Zia - at this point in time of their respective
rules, General Musharraf also appears to be suffering from an
overdose of confidence. And his morale today appears to be as
high as was the case with Ayub and Zia when they were completing
their respective first five years in absolute power.
And, like the two, Musharraf also
seems to be drawing his confidence from Washington, and his morale
seems to be high because, like his predecessors, he, too, is being
wooed by the US like nothing as he completes his fifth year in
the saddle.
As for the nation itself, it is just
as confident - or otherwise - today as it has been all through
the last 57 years, and its morale, as such, continues to be directly
proportionate to the level of confidence.
When
it comes to strengthening the federation, removing inter-provincial
disharmony and restoring national cohesion, for starters, he failed
miserably last year to get the four federating units to reach
a consensus on the resource-distribution formula between the center
and the provinces, and then among the provinces themselves.
He has made water-distribution issue
even more contentious among the provinces than what was the case
five years ago. And on the issues of dams, every time he opens
his mouth on the matter, he makes one or the other province react
sharply. And recently on the issue of uniform, he has managed
to divide the nation right through the middle, with Punjab and
Sindh voting for it, and the NWFP and Balochistan going against
it.
By going after the so-called foreign
militants along the border with Afghanistan without first building
a national and local consensus, he has alienated the FATA people
unnecessarily. Besides, by deciding unilaterally to build military
cantonments in the heart of Balochistan, far away from any enemy
location, he has added to the sense of deprivation among the people
of that province.
The third point related to economic
revival, and, as observed earlier, 9/11 and its consequences have
resulted in the creation of a substantial fiscal room for the
government. While the overall economic growth rate has touched
a significant level in the last two years, with the last year
showing a growth rate of 6.4 per cent, the trickle-down effect
of this significantly high growth rate seems to have stopped well
above the poverty line.
It appears plausible when the detractors
attribute the remarkable growth rate in 2003-04 to the purchase
of three new Boeings for the national airline. These aircraft
were purchased from the nearly $2 billion or so borrowed from
the US Exim Bank.
In
any case, for the trickle-down theory to be effective in developing
countries like Pakistan, their economies need to grow at an annual
average rate of around 11-12 per cent. And such kind of growth
can only be achieved if the flow of foreign investment somehow
improves to around $2-3 billion annually, instead of the meager
$700 million that came in last year, and that, too, was mostly
from the privatization process.
Public-sector
spending on socio-economic infrastructure appears too little compared
to actual needs, as gaps are widening fast and long. The economic
managers appear to have been totally brain-washed by the IMF-World
Bank theorists and the Washington Consensus. They continue to
hope that the private sector would take up the responsibilities
being given up by the public sector. But this is not happening.
And as long as these managers manage the economy with this outdated
and obscure mind set, the gap between the poor and the rich is
likely to widen, as it did during the regimes of Ayub Khan and
Ziaul Haq.
The fourth point on the agenda was
law and order and dispensation of speedy justice. Well, today,
the law and order situation in the country is no better than what
it was five years ago. The rule of law has completely disappeared
from Pakistan. The man in the street has lost all confidence in
the system of justice. When he see the ruler himself violating
all laws of the land - including the Constitution - without any
fear of accountability, and justifying all his illegal acts on
the pretext of supreme national interest, they can hardly be expected
to feel reassured about the safety of their life and property.
The
rule of law is the basic minimum that guarantees that the guardians
of the status quo would not keep the poor in perpetual bondage
and that there would be equitable distribution of the fruits of
development. Its absence, therefore, encourages the law of the
jungle in which the powerful takes all. The sectarian violence
is continuing unabated. Murder, rapes, kidnapping for ransom and
police brutalities have only increased. People in general are
as wary of going to the police or to a court of law for redress
as they were before, because these two institutions have become
highly exploitative and continue to serve the interests of the
oppressors.
General
Musharraf's fifth point on the agenda had promised that he would
depoliticize the state institutions. But most of the institutions,
including the defence services, today stand more politicized than
ever before. The Chief of the Army Staff not only offered himself
for a referendum in 2002, but in 2003 he even got himself elected
as the president of Pakistan. He says 96 per cent of Pakistanis
want him to continue to keep his uniform for an indefinite period.
His uniform was the subject of voting in three of the four provinces.
Not only this. Through the National Security Council, General
Musharraf has politicized even Navy and the Air Force by inducting
their respective chiefs in the 13-member supra-parliamentary body.
All other institutions, including
the civil service, the police, the judiciary and even the National
Accountability Bureau, have become political tools in the hands
of the ruler of the day. Both the offices of the president and
that of the COAS are supposed to be politically non-partisan,
but the general has made both of them completely partisan by patronizing
the ruling alliance and persecuting the mainstream political parties.
His victory dance after he had delivered
his presidential address to parliament following the passage of
the 17th amendment clearly pointed to where his heart is. After
the speech, he turned to the treasury benches and saluted them
before turning towards the opposition benches to whom he raised
his two clenched fists as if warning them to fall in line.
General Musharraf's promise to devolve
power to the grassroots level, which was the sixth point, has
remained only that, even though the next local government elections
are only about nine months away. The power is still firmly in
the hands of the army, with the general keeping a tight leash
on this institution as well as on the elected parliament, the
provincial assemblies and the local bodies.
At the local level, the traditional
feudal is still calling the shots as he has won most of the Nazim
seats. It is almost the same story at the level of National and
provincial assemblies. Just as the Nazim has his strings firmly
controlled by the local feudal, the local bodies remain dependent
on Islamabad, and together they are that much less autonomous
in their efforts to improve the delivery systems at the grassroots.
Ensuring swift and across-the-board
accountability was the last point on General Musharraf's agenda.
The elected parliament and the provincial assemblies speak for
themselves on this score. To begin with, corruption of many potential
winners was ignored at the time of elections. Next, many of them
were accommodated in the cabinet. The claim of eliminating corruption
at the top level went by the board when two senior-most members
of this government washed their dirty linen in public recently
over human smuggling to the United Kingdom. There was this wheat
scandal as well, which is still to be subjected to transparent
accountability. And the public perception of the NAB is totally
negative.
Let us now come to the eighth point
on the agenda; terrorism. The general seems to be fighting a lone
battle on this front, and this strategy has led to three attacks
on his person. No doubt, if he converts this war into a national
effort against terrorism instead of keeping it totally personal,
he would lose his importance in the capitals of the world where
he is today treated like the prima donna. But then what would
happen to the country and to this war against terrorism if God
forbid one day the general's luck runs out?
It
is, therefore, necessary that he transfers the responsibility
of this effort to the nation - through the cabinet and the elected
parliament - by taking off his uniform. His seemingly blind faith
in his own ability to protect the national interest seems to have
kept him from making terrorism a national issue requiring a national
effort to overcome it and eliminate it. He is even touting a time-tested
and highly effective concept of enlightened moderation as his
own, but makes no effort to follow through with measures on the
domestic front to translate this concept into a national endeavor.
Actually, it is Musharraf himself
who has created the impression that he is fighting the terrorists
all alone and on behalf of Washington. He can only dispel this
impression if he were to let the democratic process in the country
take its natural course, to stop persecuting the mainstream political
parties, and to put an end to the mullah-military alliance for
all times to come.
This mullah-military alliance was
actually set up to promote on the one hand the army's agenda of
nourishing and sustaining a perpetual state of confrontation with
India on the excuse of Kashmir, and, on the other, to achieve
the so-called strategic depth across Pakistan's western borders.
Now that the army itself is trying to mend fences with India despite
Kashmir, and the concept of strategic depth had been hit for a
six after 9/11, there appears to be no logic in continuing with
this unholy and extremely dangerous alliance which to a large
extent has only undermined the supreme national interest of Pakistan
in the past.
This
brings us finally to General Musharraf's performance viz-a-viz
India. He started off with denouncing both the Simla Accord and
the Lahore Declaration. And at Agra in 2001 he refused to denounce
militancy in return for India accepting Kashmir as the core issue.
But in the joint statement that was issued on January 6, 2004,
he promised not to allow militants to use Pakistani soil for exporting
terrorism. And then in the joint communiqué issued after
Natwar Singh-Khurshid Kasuri meeting in New Delhi, in the first
week of September, he allowed the Congress-led government in India
to make him agree to base the future peace talks on the basis
of Simla Accord.
One
has no quarrel with policies that would bring peace in the region.
But one feels very bad to see that national honor and dignity
is being sacrificed at the altar of personal ego while pursuing
this policy of peace.
And
last, but definitely not the least, in the previous five years,
Pakistan's political culture has been completely destroyed - that
is whatever was left of it when Musharraf took over on October
12, 1999. This has been done again in the supreme national interest
and on the plea that it is pragmatism, not idealism, which needs
to be practiced in the affairs of nations.
Political
patronage is the name of the game today as it was never before.
The fact that more than half of the total ruling alliance parliamentarians
sitting in the two houses (244 in all) have been obliged with
one job or the other speaks volumes about the state of governance
today and the level of political patronage that is being practiced
now.
Today, the election process carries
as much credibility - or lack of it - as it did before 1999. And
by not handing over power to the elected parliament on the due
date in 2002, General Musharraf has actually turned the parliamentary
system of government on its head, and made it into a presidential
one without even getting the Constitution amended accordingly.
And, now, by refusing to take off the uniform, he is making another
valiant effort to bring the army in to keep it out (as this will
bar a new coup for as long as he kept the uniform).
So,
in the last five years President General Pervez Musharraf has
effectively succeeded in pushing the country back to where it
was on August 16, 1988, when we had a president in uniform heading
an elected parliament. So much for his promise to usher in genuine
democracy. -Courtesy Daily Dawn
