Within a matter of days, events on the Afghan border seem to be creating a perfect storm of mistrust and conflict between the United States and Pakistan: The recent US heliborne attack with troops inside Pakistan’s tribal area; the report that President George W. Bush had signed off on such attacks in July, allowing US forces to conduct these raids without clearance from Pakistan; the short-term shutting down of the US supply route to Afghanistan by Pakistan, ostensibly for “security reasons”; and finally an unequivocal riposte from Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani that “There is no question of any agreement or understanding with the coalition forces whereby they are allowed to conduct operations on our side of the border.” Unless good sense prevails, the US-Pakistan alliance may be heading for the rocks in a storm that could rent the tenuous alliance between these two “allies”.

There may be good grounds for the US to feel that it has been let down by Pakistan in the past. Pakistan’s ambivalent approach to the Afghan Taliban and continuing hidden links to former Afghan Mujahideen commanders, such as Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Siraj, came to be at odds with its partnership with the US against militants in the border region. Coming clean on that score may not have satisfied the US. Hence the Bush signature on unilateral attacks even perhaps as he entertained the new Pakistani prime minister in Washington this July.

Suddenly the old policy of “a wink and a nod” that worked for President Pervez Musharraf and that appeared to be continuing under the new democratically elected Peoples’ Party government seems to have been set aside. Kayani’s tough statement appears to have widespread public support in Pakistan. The Prime Minister echoed his words. But President Asif Ali Zardari uncharacteristically has been silent. If this portends fissures in the ruling hierarchy then the signs are not good for the balance of power inside Pakistan.

Other dangerous possibilities appear likely in the US-Pakistan relationship. The next time the US physically invades Pakistani territory to take out suspected militants, it may meet the Pakistan army head on. Or it may face a complete a cut-off of war supplies and fuel in Afghanistan via Pakistan. With only two weeks supply of fuel available to its forces inside Afghanistan and no alternative route currently available, the war in Afghanistan may come to a screeching halt. The Bush approach may prove to be yet another example of short-term thinking that damages the longer term objective. The Taliban meanwhile will be applauding from the sidelines.

A major consequence of the US invasion of Pakistan’s territory will be the further alienation of the Pakistani public and a serious internal problem for the fledgling civil government that took over from Musharraf’s autocracy. The US may think it has considerable leverage over the Pakistani government because of the latter’s economic ills and financial straits and its overwhelming reliance on US aid. But it is failing to measure the power of the Pakistani street. Already, a vast majority of people in Pakistan, including inside the army, see the United States with hostile eyes. Anyone in Pakistan seen as aligning with the Americans would lose public favor. And the nationalists and religious extremists will then get a chance to say “we told you so!” and gain the upper hand.

All this is happening as the lame duck Bush presidency is getting ready to pack its bags. But the campaign to succeed Bush is heating up. Cross border US attacks inside Pakistan will distract from the war on terror in the region. They will also divert the campaigns of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama from finding solutions to hurling new rhetorical bombs at each other to prove that each is tougher in the use of military force than the other.

Both Pakistan and the United States need to rethink their actions. Pakistan must prove with actions not just words that it is willing to shed its ties to all militants. The United States must ratchet down the rhetoric and the use of force, especially against an “ally” in this war on terror, a war that will last well into the next president’s term and may be beyond. And it must fully equip the Pakistan army to fight a mobile counter insurgency in its borderlands. Otherwise, the US will not only lose an ally in Pakistan but ignite a conflagration inside that huge and nuclear-armed country that will make the war in Afghanistan seem like a Sunday hike in the Hindu Kush.

Author’s Note: This article has also appeared on The Huffington Post. I have been traveling in Pakistan, specifically in the border region, and doing more detailed analyses of the situation in the Federally Administered Tribal Area. Please wait for more articles in due course.

New Delhi

Even as two civilian governments struggle to maintain their political hold in both India and Pakistan, recent developments indicate that both recognize that the Possibility of Peace trumps confrontation. This change of mood between two formerly hostile neighbors is a reflection of economic necessity in both countries and the need for civilian rather than military-dominated rule in Pakistan. A couple of weeks ago, while I was in India, the Foreign Ministers and Foreign Secretaries of both met in Islamabad and the focus appeared to be on opening up economic ties, even as conflict resolution proceeded on a somewhat slower track. The head of the leading Pakistan Peoples’ Party of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, called for the removal of visas for travel between the two countries.

If the reactions in New Delhi of Indian officials, journalists, and senior and retired military officials is representative of the general Indian population, there is deep support for this kind of Great Leap towards normalcy. The key is economic necessity. As a leading Indian economist explained to me, India desperately needs Pakistani cement for its rapidly growing economy, enough to install a conveyer belt system at the border to speedily clear shipments from Pakistan. The foreign ministers spoke of their continuing efforts to consummate a gas pipeline deal that would allow Iranian gas to flow through Pakistan to India; this despite US opposition to such trade with Iran. Pakistani businesses have already begun investing in warehouses and infrastructure along the border with India near Lahore, waiting for trade to open up.

Basic economic laws dictate that a country’s major trading partners are its immediate neighbors. Today, Pakistan’s major trading partner is it major military partner: the United States, some ten thousand miles away! It could learn from the Indian example of expanding its trade with neighboring China that is expected to rise from billion today to billion by 2010. In New Delhi, Indians speak wistfully of their trips to Pakistan to stock up, among other things with consumer goods likes ladies shoes. A strong Indian rupee goes far in Pakistan. For the huge Sikh population in the provinces that border Pakistan, there is tremendous potential for both trade and religious tourism: their major religious shrines are located inside Pakistan. If visa-free travel were allowed, Lahore that now has barely two major hotels might find that even 50 such hotels might be inadequate.

I raised the issue of visa-travel travel with President Pervez Musharraf, the architect of the diplomatic opening to India in recent years, and the then Director General Inter Services Intelligence and now army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in conversations over the past two years. Both recognized the potential benefits of such a move but expressed the fear that there would be opposition from the vocal but tiny religious groups that consider India the perennial “enemy”. Now that he is army chief, General Kayani is in a better position to lead from the front on this issue.

Now, as a new civilian leadership has emerged in Pakistan, led by peace makers Zardari and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and the Indian government is laying the grounds for fresh elections while facing tests in provincial polls, it may be time for leaders in India and Pakistan to create a South Asian Compact that would create prosperity for both. If they do this, both countries could reduce their crippling defence expenditures and better meets the vast unmet basic needs of their poorest populations.

Shuja Nawaz is the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within released in Pakistan and India in May and in the United States and United Kingdom in June. He can be reached at www.shujanawaz.com

Pakistan today is taking baby steps back to becoming a democracy again, after nearly eight years of the rule by fiat of General Pervez Musharraf, the “liberal autocrat”. The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe put it very well: “Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again”. Pakistan has been through that cycle twice before, after military rulers and keen US allies, Field Marshal Ayub Khan and then General Zia ul Haq stayed in power for over a decade each. The announced agreement between former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Mr. Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party about the restoration of the judiciary represents a major attempt by the newly elected government to respond to the democratic needs of Pakistan and its people.

If the US alliance with Pakistan is to remain but this time with the people of Pakistan, not with any individual, then the US needs to show greater patience and allow Pakistan to reconstruct its political system and make decisions based on the norms of democracy not autocracy. This means, among other things, involving the people of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, bordering Afghanistan, in discussions that will allow them to be consulted in their governance, giving them greater autonomy of action and providing them security through the presence of a well trained military on the one hand and well targeted economic opportunities on the other. Simply upping the military ante will not do the trick.

The US made no attempt to take these wider needs into consideration after it invaded Afghanistan. It was only in late 2006 that the Pakistanis came to the US to seek help in developing the area and building the capacity of the ill-equipped Frontier Corps and other military and para-military forces in the region. Now, the US, Pakistan, and importantly Afghanistan have agreed on a tripartite plan to improve collaboration and operations in the border region on both sides of the frontier. But the earliest training will not begin till this fall. And none of the economic work has begun in earnest. Even when it does it will be a paltry 750 million over 7 years. Of the 150 million a year that was promised, a sizable chunk will flow back to the United States through contracts for consultants. And crippling legislative restrictions on the flexible use of the funds (e.g. to help “convince” local tribes and leaders to collaborate) will mean that only a small amount will find its way to the ground. Unless Pakistan and its overseas partners can show change occurring rapidly in FATA, the Taliban will have the upper hand. After all they are already reported to be paying some Rs. 15,000 a month to their fighters. We have to outbid them in real terms.

In the meantime, Pakistan must bring back some semblance of normalcy to that region by allowing the local tribes to police themselves and work with the government in maintaining law and order. This will help isolate the militants who thrive on the chaos and confusion of constant and sweeping military actions. But, the Pakistan army and paramilitary forces must not cede the space to the Taliban to establish their writ, as happened in the hasty deal of 2006. And the government needs to re-establish for now, and only as a transitional measure, the role of the tribal Maliks and local political administrators who know how to manage the affairs of their tribal society. For the longer term, it needs to find effective ways of integrating FATA into NWFP and Pakistan proper and to raise the quality of life and services available to its inhabitants.

The impatience being shown by elements in the United States government with the attempts of Pakistan’s new democratically elected government to fight the war against terror inside its borders reflects a deeper divide in the way both countries view their past and future relationships. Under Secretary John Negroponte’s forceful pronouncement and body language at the conference that he addressed in Washington DC on May 5 indicated a lack of understanding about the ground realities in FATA and Pakistan. Over the horizon attacks are no substitute for action on the ground and human interaction and intelligence gathering. Moreover, each side needs to understand how the other operates. The US has a shorter time horizon and seeks a quick and simple solution to its difficulties in Afghanistan, a country where, because of the diversion of forces to Iraq, it invested less than necessary military resources and where economic development since the US invasion of 2001 has been spotty at best. Pakistan has a longer memory and time horizon. It recalls how the US decamped from the region and left it in the lurch after the Soviets departed Afghanistan in 1989. It fears that the US will do the same again. It may not take much for that to happen: some well directed and continuous Taliban attacks on the British and Canadian forces would push the politicians in those two countries, who are teetering in their support of the coalition, into pulling out of Afghanistan. That would make it difficult for the US to go it alone, since the rest of the “Coalition of the Almost Willing”, including aspirants to membership of the Western European Club are largely what my fellow analyst Michael Scheuer calls “ditch diggers” not fighting forces.

The fledgling and rather tenuous coalition government in Pakistan has a huge task before it: restoring democracy, the judiciary, and the economy (buffeted by waves of global price increases in food and energy). It will need to reach clear and unambiguous agreements amongst itself, without footnotes or reservations that could be exploited by opponents of democracy and the proponents of the status quo ante. And it will need to gradually restore civilian supremacy over the huge and dominant military. Fighting the wars within Pakistan, against foreign and home-grown terrorists and Islamists, will demand patient planning and careful navigation through the constitutional and bureaucratic minefields sown by the ancien regime. The leaders of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party, Mr. Zardari, and the Pakistan Muslim League (N), former Prime Minister Sharif, have till now shown a desire to talk their way through difficult situations. The political glue holding them together seems to be opposition to General Musharraf. If they fail to work together, their coalition will fracture, giving Musharraf the upper hand again. The new army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, wisely has given space to the new government to make its own decisions and by maintaining a low profile allowed it to operate fairly autonomously. So must the United States. Otherwise, we risk seeing Pakistan’s latest experiment in democracy fail like many others before it. We do not have the time to re-learn the lessons of democracy every decade or so.

"Democracy is the best revenge." These words of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto must have reverberated in the minds of millions of Pakistanis today, as Pakistan took its first steps toward the true democracy that General Pervez Musharraf promised over eight years ago but could not deliver. The National Assembly elected Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party Prime Minister with an overwhelming 2/3rds majority of 264 votes. His opponent, Pervez Elahi of Musharraf’s supporting Pakistan Muslim League Q Group garnered only 42 votes. Significantly, the first executive order of the new Prime Minister was the release of the 60 judges, including the Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, from house arrest. A host of lawyers and members of civil society marked their new freedom this evening with an impromptu procession to the former Chief Justice’s home where they raised the Pakistan flag. Standing with him on the balcony as this scene unfolded were fellow Justice Tariq Mahmood and the President of the Supreme Court Bar Association, Aitzaz Ahsan, who led the lawyers’ movement against Musharraf. This flag that had been removed when Musharraf dismissed and incarcerated the Chief Justice through an executive order as the Chief of Army Staff on November 3, 2007. He later had this extra-constitutional order validated by his self-appointed Supreme Court.

Today Prime Minister Gillani promised to restore supremacy to parliament, ending the ersatz presidential system that Musharraf had introduced in Pakistan in contravention of its constitution. Gillani also promised to restore the judiciary to its rightful place. Against this background, a report emerged that Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte will be visiting Pakistan tomorrow to meet with Musharraf. Might it not make sense for the United States administration to finally recognize that power is shifting in Pakistan to parliament and that the presidency will need to return to its titular role without the power to make decisions on behalf of the people of Pakistan? If so, Negroponte’s first call should be on the Prime Minister. And tempting though it may be, he should avoid trying to sweep the army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, into the US’ stifling embrace. Kayani has promised to take the army back to its professional roots and away from politics. The US needs to stop trying to portray Kayani as a special friend of America. The US now should let the leaders of Pakistan act on behalf of Pakistan. This political change of today may also provide Kayani an opportunity to make his own changes in the army’s high command that Musharraf had stuffed with his favorites before handing over to Kayani last November.

The election of the Prime Minister marked some huge landmarks in Pakistani politics: first, this is the first time that the PPP has a Prime Minister who is not a Bhutto. Indeed, for the first time, the PPP has a Prime Minister from the Punjab, a key province in Pakistan’s polity. Significantly, Gillani is from Southern Punjab, an area that borders Bhutto’s native Sindh province. Second, for the first time, the leaders of the major two political parties in the coalition government, the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League N Group are not sitting in parliament nor heading the government. Both Asif Ali Zardari, the co-chair of the PPP and Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif of the PML N will run their party’s affairs outside the national assembly. Meanwhile an isolated and seriously wounded Musharraf watched these developments from Army House, lacking direct command of the army, previously his sole "vote bank." Moreover, he has no meaningful political support in the national assembly, as today’s vote attested. His extra-legal steps of the past one year are now subject to challenge and risk being overturned by the new coalition government, with its two-thirds majority. Even the PML Q’s majority coalition in the upper house, the Senate, risks being depleted now in the wave of change that emerged from the lower house today and may be unable to block any constitutional changes passsed by the lower house.

In the flush of victory, the Pakistan Peoples’ Party of Bhutto and its coalition partners should pause to take stock of the enormous challenges they face in trying to dismantle eight years of autocratic rule. They will need to hold the coalition together, as individual party objectives clash. Both Sharif and Zardari will have to strongly resist the temptation to call all shots and allow the new Prime Minister to manage the business of government. As a start, the new government could set the tone for its tenure by keeping to a small cabinet rather than the 70 member cabinet of the previous regime that allowed all coalition partners and party factions in parliament to be bought off with ministries.

The other major challenge will be to avoid repeating the past politics of spoils and cronyism that created disillusionment among the population and eventually allowed the army to reassert itself as the key political player on the scene. Restoring the political system should be the first priority. Another major issue will be the restoration of balance to the economy that has had imbalanced growth and recently saw a resurgence of inflation and shortages of key staples and energy. Though it may be tempting for the new government to destroy the local governments that Musharraf’s regime introduced, it may be in the longer term interest of the new government to strengthen these local institutions by giving them greater fiscal and financial autonomy, something that the previous regime resisted. Bringing government closer to the people can only be good for governance. If there are any failures, the independent media in Pakistan with their new-found freedoms will pose sharp challenges to any government n Pakistan today.

Finally, on the security front, the government will need to seriously study and take over the fight against militancy in Pakistan to attack its root causes. It will need to work with the military in this regard to ensure that there is a proper balance between politico-economic measures and military actions in the border region where Al Qaeda and the homegrown Taliban now threaten Pakistan’s stability. Short-term salves and deals will not do the trick. Indeed, the amalgamation of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas into Pakistan proper may need to be put on the fast track. And, the new government will need to carry forward the initiatives that Musharraf launched to normalize relations with India, to reduce the defence burden on Pakistan’s economy, and to allow it to divert resources toward education and health. Some 50 million of Pakistan’s children have slipped through the education net, according to estimates by leading economist Parvez Hasan. The new government will have to turn back this dismal tide.

Pakistan has to play catch up economically and politically. Parliamentary democracy offers it a great chance. Will the politicians live up to these challenges? The time for celebration will be short. And, as the new government will no doubt discover, the time to get the country back on track may also be too short.

Published on The Huffington Post 24 March 2008

It took the United States government over six years after 9/11 to concentrate on designing a strategy for the war against the militants in the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan. It was not alone. Pakistan too managed to ignore the deeper issues at stake and pursued a half-hearted strategy that allowed the Taliban to make inroads into Pakistani territory and challenge the writ of the state and the Pakistan army itself. Now, as the militants have brought the war into the Pakistani hinterland, things seem to be moving in the direction of a new war strategy. But the remarkable lack of public discourse of the emerging approaches in both countries is symptomatic of the secretive and top-down thinking on this critical issue. For years the US pushed a Pro-Musharraf policy and relied on one man to help it fight its "war on terror" in the region. Now, rushing to put it into effect a new war strategy, even before a new popularly elected government takes over in Pakistan may compound the difficulty in shifting to a Pro-Pakistan policy.

First some background: the US made a serious mistake in Afghanistan by shifting its focus and resources from that country to Iraq before it had consolidated its position against the Taliban. A nominal force was left in Afghanistan under very difficult conditions and all attempts to reinforce its numbers were resisted, for instance by the offer of the Marine Corps to send a special expeditionary force. In effect, the US military command and its diffident NATO allies conceded the countryside to the Taliban, content to policing the cities and their immediate environs. Even the Special Forces, who had gained some rural traction, were largely withdrawn for duty in Iraq. The allies also failed to provide good governance and security for the population of Afghanistan, allowing its Pashtun majority to coalesce with the Taliban and against the regime in Kabul.

On its part, Pakistan recognized the cross-border influence of the Pashtun tribes that sit astride the border with Afghanistan but chose to ignore the Taliban that sought sanctuary inside FATA. In return for the injection of US payments for the army’s expenses in entering FATA, Pakistan concentrated only on trying to curb the "foreign" elements in FATA, the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Arabs, and sundry other nationalities under the umbrella of Al Qaeda that had made their homes in the tribal badlands, some even marrying into local tribes.

Nothing was done to control the Afghan Taliban, who then spawned a Pakistani offshoot. More important, nothing was done to integrate FATA into Pakistan proper and give it the economic, legal, and political benefits potentially available to other Pakistani regions. Ignoring the Taliban only emboldened them, as they fought for space against an under-equipped and weak Frontier Corps and other local para-military outfits. And lack of training and individual command failures contributed to poor morale, defections galore, and ignominious surrenders. Meanwhile the FC and army suffered heavy casualties, showing their lack of preparation for counter insurgency warfare.

In November 2006, the Pakistan army came to the US with a 5 million plan for building up the capacity of the Frontier Corps. Discussions since then have led to a heightened US interest in FATA, with CENTCOM actively entering the picture. The result was a billion Government of Pakistan plan over a nine-year period to help improve governance, economic development and security in the FATA and enhance the Pakistan army’s capabilities in the region. The U.S. contribution will be a little over billion, the most well known part of that effort being a 750 million contribution for development in FATA for the next five years. Another part of the U.S. contribution is the Security Development Plan (SDP) to improve security by enhancing the capability of the paramilitary Frontier Corps.

In the face of a deteriorating security situation, the first phase of the SDP, approved for FY 2007, concentrated on improving the policing and antinarcotics capabilities of the FC and assisting the Pakistan army’s commandos, the Special Services Group’s operational capacity in the region with helicopter support. Much more is (pardon the pun)en train:

• 2 training centers for the FC
• 2 intelligences bases
• 4 sector headquarters for increased Command and Control, and
• A series of Border Coordination Centers to share intelligence, develop a common operational picture on both sides of the Durand Line, and help coordinate the activities of the US, Afghan, and Pakistan army in the area; the first one opening in Torkham on the Afghan side shortly, the second one being built.

The US hopes to begin training of the FC, starting in October 2008, especially its newly raised Wings, through a "Train the Trainers" program. Current FC officers will be trained in counter insurgency warfare. And intelligence training will be imparted to personnel of two new intelligence battalions of the FC. When all is said and done, the overall cost of these measures in the SDP may exceed 0M. But much time will have been lost by these plans become reality. Senator Joseph Biden has proposed an even larger aid plan for Pakistan to help it on its path toward democracy that would triple the non-security aid to .5 billion annually for a decade. He has also proposed a "democracy dividend" of billion to encourage the shift from autocracy to democracy.

But there are causes for concern on both sides. First, in the direct military-to-military discussions there have been no exchanges on the need to politically and economically integrate FATA into Pakistan proper. The Department of Defense has conceded that ground to the Department of State that has been demure in pushing this agenda forward, only recently waking up to the issue. As a result FATA remains an anachronistic appendage, and its population deprived of the full benefits of Pakistani citizenship. A disconnected population will not actively participate in any development plans and this may led to "carpetbaggers" from the settled areas of the North West Frontier Province or other provinces taking advantage of economic opportunities and tax breaks in FATA. Second, there has been no sharing of information by the previous government of Pakistan with its general population of what is planned for FATA with the United States and what conditions for the entry and operation of US forces in Pakistan are being agreed upon and by whom. As a result, the few bits of information that leak out into the pages of the newspapers tend to paint the cooperation in the darkest hues. The danger seen by critics of the US plan is that Pakistan’s leadership may be bartering away its sovereignty by allowing the US unbridled access to the borderlands. Third, a new civilian government is being formed in Pakistan these days. If it is not brought into the picture and allowed to make final decisions on the future plans for FATA and collaboration with the US in Pakistan’s own interests, this whole enterprise may collapse for lack of political support. It would behoove the US and the Pakistan army to bring the new political leadership on board and allow it to decide on future plans so it takes ownership of these ventures before signing any agreements. This would also strengthen the move toward civil supremacy.

Finally, the enhancement of the FC should be seen only as a short-term transitional measure, with a greater and longer-term shift towards improving the capacity of the regular Pakistan army in counter insurgency warfare. Most thinking officers in the Pakistan army probably know that they will not be fighting any large-scale conventional war in the near future, especially against India. The posture there is purely defensive and the presence of a well trained, mobile Pakistan army, backed by nuclear weapons, should be enough to deter any regional hegemon from exerting undue influence on Pakistan.

Pakistan’s wars within, against homegrown insurgencies, will demand a different type of force and a different mind-set. This will take time. Despite his desire to move towards this new objective, the new army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has only three years to complete his tenure. The shift in the army’s posture and capacity for the new kind of warfare will likely extend even beyond the term of his successor.

But, the rush to get the US plans into action and to improve the FC’s capacity, without looking at the more important longer-term issues affecting the region and the Pakistan army itself may not yield the intended results. Rather, pitting a locally-recruited FC against its own tribal cousins may end up creating more problems and feed the very insurgency they are meant to quell. Both the US and the Pakistani public need to be part of this important discussion. Haste and secrecy can only undermine these efforts.

This appeared on Huffington Post.com

As the newly-elected representatives of the opposition parties and their unelected leaders, Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, position themselves to take over power in Pakistan’s National Assembly. They face the dwindling power of President Pervez Musharraf, weakened by the loss of his supporting party, the Pakistan Muslim League Q, and all his other camp followers, many of whom are seeking to hitch their wagons to the Pakistan Peoples’ Party of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto or Sharif’s PML-N. Meanwhile the most powerful man in Pakistan, the army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, bides his time in the General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi. A major concern of his is the undue attention given to the army by the militant Islamists whom Musharraf had riled and then been unable to control. It was Kayani’s public separation from Musharraf in the days leading up to the February 18 elections that spelt doom for Musharraf and his party. By forbidding the army from contacts with all politicians, including Musharraf, and dissociating it from the running of the elections, Kayani made the army neutral. In other words, it would not participate in intimidation of the electorate nor condone blatant vote rigging. That allowed the opposition parties to win back their rightful quota of power in the elections. Now, Sharif is calling for Musharraf to resign and the Western powers are trying to find ways of keeping him on, with Zardari and the PPP hedging their bets for fear of “rocking the boat”. That was the telling phrase used by PPP Prime Minister-in-waiting, Amin Fahim, yesterday. Attention shifts to the role of the army chief. Kayani’s actions and inaction both will mean a lot in the days ahead, especially in signaling a shift in relative power between the President and the army chief.

It reminds me of the events surrounding Pakistan’s first national Martial Law in 1958 when President Iskander Mirza imposed Martial Law but appointed the army chief General Ayub Khan to run it. Mirza’s plan was to ease out Ayub and replace him with another chief. Within days, it was becoming evident to observers in the media and the diplomatic corps that the duumvirate would not last. Elie Abel of The New York Times recounted how he detected a palpable change in the atmosphere of the room when Ayub entered the room for a joint interview with Mirza conducted by Abel and Watson Sims of the Associated Press on 9 October in Karachi. ‘It was immediately clear who was in charge,’ said Sims. Within days Ayub was to overthrow Mirza and take over as President. (I cover these events in detail in my forthcoming book Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within; April 2008, Oxford University Press.)

The same sort of shadow play is being conducted between the Army House where Musharraf lives (instead of the Presidency in Islamabad) and its rightful occupant, the new army chief, Kayani. While technically Musharraf can still replace the army chief, he may have run out of time. The extent of Kayani’s unilateral declaration of independence from his former boss will become evident in the next few weeks as he shifts some of his principal aides at army headquarters. The first to go may be his Director General Military Intelligence, Major General Nadeem Ijaz Ahmed, reportedly a relative of Musharraf. Next will likely be the Director General, Inter Services Intelligence, Lt. General Nadeem Taj, a former Military Secretary to Musharraf. The DG ISI normally reports to the Prime Minister and the new Prime Minister will want his own person in that slot and most likely will accept Kayani’s choice. Another key position that Kayani will need to fill with a new person who owes his loyalty to him and not to Musharraf is the Corps Commander X Corps in Rawalpindi that controls the key 111 Brigade. This brigade is the one that guards all the key residences of the President, Prime Minister, and other sensitive installations in the capital area and Rawalpindi. It is also the one that undertakes all the operational aspects of a coup d’etat. At GHQ, he will be looking to the Chief of General Staff’s slot also for someone of his own choice, replacing Lt. General Salahuddin Satti, who once commanded X Corps under Musharraf. Satti commanded 111 Brigade when Sharif was overthrown in October 1999. How quickly Kayani makes his new appointments and consolidates his own position in command of the army will indicate the shift of power from Musharraf to the army chief. His window of opportunity is narrow: he can do it now, while Musharraf is still reeling from the shock of the elections and before the new Prime Minister has had a chance to establish his control over government.

A thoughtful man, not given to impetuous behavior, Kayani will be weighing these matters before taking action in the weeks ahead. Watch those posting orders from GHQ!

The euphoria over the successful democratic elections in Pakistan on February 18 has unleashed a torrent of commentary on what next for the US “War on Terror”? The biggest question that seems to be leading to sleepless nights in Foggy Bottom and parts of even academia it seems is whether a democratically elected government might now decide it is not in Pakistan’s interest to prosecute the US’s war in Afghanistan. President Pervez Musharraf had agreed to allow limited US operations from Pakistani soil but did not level with his own countrymen it seems. The story now breaking from the US is that the Predator drones that often attack targets inside Pakistan fly from a base in Pakistan.

Will a democratic government continue this practice of deception? In other words, was the US better off having an autocrat at the helm in Pakistan?

The latest hand-wringing statement on this conundrum comes from Graham Allison of Harvard, an expert on nuclear issues, who now has become an expert on foreign policy and Pakistan in particular. In his Op Ed, marked by some inaccuracies, in The Boston Globe he states:

A Pakistani government whose actions align with its citizen’s views on these issues would be at loggerheads with the United States.

Such misguided analysis miss the point that the reason why the Pakistani citizenry opposes the US is because the US supported a military regime for the past eight years in Pakistan against the people of Pakistan. Musharraf was seen by increasingly large numbers of Pakistanis as doing the US’ bidding and ignoring the wishes of his own people. Gradually, he lost the support of all major social groups that initially supported him: the intellectuals, the media, the lawyers.

Today Musharraf is isolated. No one in Pakistan speaks for him, except his own ex-military spokesman, who is paid to do so. Not even his King’s Party, the now discredited and defeated Pakistan Muslim League Q that has gone eerily silent. The only voices of support now seem to emerge from his few American well-wishers, like Allison, who are looking to maintain the comfortable old patron-client relationship between the US and Pakistan.

This confuses the ordinary Pakistani: Isn’t America supposed to welcome democracy? If so, why does it distrust it in Pakistan?

While the past history of Pakistan’s politicians is not one to inspire confidence, they have lived through difficult times in the past eight years and if they learned any lessons, it will be critical for them to put “Pakistan first” in everything that they do. Musharraf used that slogan too but never translated it into action. He put himself first. Indeed, it will be in Pakistan’s interest that the war on terror now becomes Pakistan’s own war, since the battles will be fought within Pakistan and not just militarily but also with economic and political weapons. For once, the Pakistan army will need to work in tandem with the political system to address the underlying issues that fostered the spread of Talibanization in Pakistan, as Musharraf’s regime dithered. If they cannot work together, the country faces dire prospects. And time is not on its side.

The challenge now facing the US is to accept this fledgling democracy and allow it to find its feet. And for Pakistan’s new government to be bold in attacking the insurgency with all the weapons at its command, not just military might. The deal making with the militants that failed Musharraf will fail the new government too. It’s a huge responsibility. But the new government should not sacrifice Pakistan’s sovereignty to the US’s short-term interest as the ancien regime did.

Early results from the Pakistan elections indicate a routing of the leadership of the Pakistan Muslim League (Q Group) that supported President Pervez Musharraf for the past five years and allowed him free reign effectively to convert Pakistan from a parliamantary to a presidential system. It appears that the Pakistani voter saw this election as a referendum on Musharraf. If so, he lost big.

Now what?

There is a possibility of a grand alliance at the center, involving former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League (N), the Pakistan Peoples Party, and the mainstream Awami National Party of the North West Frontier Province, with even the urban Muttahida Qaumi Mahaz of Sindh joining in. This kind of government would provide a useful counterweight to the power that resided in the presidency for the past eight years plus. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto must be smiling in heaven: democracy indeed is the best revenge!

If Musharraf learns to co-habit with this new dispensation at the center, then he may be able to salvage his place in history. One hopes he resists the temptation to resort to political engineering which brought a previous president to his fall at the hands of an army chief who felt the impending chaos was not in Pakistan’s interest. Indeed, the new army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, must be credited with having helped prepare the ground for the people to exercise their franchise with confidence that the army would not be party to rigging. He and the army can now move back to the military part of the war on terrorists inside Pakistan.

The new government in Pakistan should now see the insurgency inside Pakistan and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) as Pakistan’s own war and not that of the US alone. And it needs to employ military tactics as part of an overall strategy that envelopes economic, social, and political approaches. The US should not have to push Pakistan into doing what is in its own interest on that front. Senator Joseph Biden must be pleased that the US can now have an alliance with the people of Pakistan and not with an autocrat, no matter how personally liberal he might be. And one hopes and prays that the new leadership in parliament will not wish to pander to the religious right, as the PML-Q did. Cutting deals with the Pakistani Taliban falls in that category. It never worked and never will.

An important part of the political puzzle now will be control of the critically huge province of the Punjab. If it is in concert with the government in Islambad then Pakistan have a chance of stability that will allow it to regain its political footing and restore the teetering economy.

Stay tuned!

Looking forward to next Monday’s elections in Pakistan, my thoughts go back to the 1970 elections, when I helped PTV cover the elections in “real time” and reported them directly to the population without any intermediaries. Neither the Election Commission nor the Inter Services Intelligence at that time had the nous to manage the results. In fact, the ISI had predicted that the populist Pakistan Peoples Party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto would get a bare minimum of seats, as would the Bengali nationalist Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman in East Pakistan. They predicted a hung parliament that would allow the military dictator General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan free rein to manipulate the system, to his liking. (Shades of what we are hearing these days!) Little did they know what the people of Pakistan would do. Hungry to exercise their right to vote for the first time in a free manner since the 1956 elections (that were overturned by a military coup in 1958 and followed by direct or indirect military rule for 12 years), Pakistanis overturned all expectations and predictions.

Some 63 per cent of Pakistan cast their votes on December 7, 1970. The eastern wing chose Mujib, the west chose Bhutto. The East Pakistanis by rights could have ruled the country. But the west, the army, and Bhutto, would have none of that. Civil strife erupted. The military was caught in a bind. And to “save” Pakistan, Yahya let loose a reign of military terror in East Pakistan, in the end losing that province to an Indian invasion. Thus was born Bangladesh. Pakistan has never been the same since.

But those elections in 1970 were a huge shot of adrenalin for the electorate and for us in Pakistan Television news. I recall how we set up a system to gather results from each district and reported them to our central office. As they came in, we announced them from a special election studio in Chaklala, Rawalpindi, with a wall-sized chart that listed progressive results for each party by province. We stayed on the air for 29 hours non-stop, sleeping in shifts and then getting on the air again. Shoaib Hashmi, an intellectual from Lahore,  and Ubaidullah Beg, the brilliant mind who was co-host of a popular twenty questions-type of program called Kasauti, anchored the Urdu reportage. I cut in with the English updates. We were on an emotional high, seeing the peoples’ right to select their leaders being exercised in a bold manner. And for the first time, the people of Pakistan believed what we told them from official PTV. They responded warmly.

To help pass the time, I had brought in a book of elephant jokes. We began filling the gaps on air with those jokes. Even translated into Urdu they struck a chord with our audience. We had started getting letters, cards, and parcels with mini-elephants from or viewers while we were still in the midst of our marathon broadcast. They stayed up with us. We were in reporting heaven! I recall coming out of the studio in the middle of the night to see my friend Gareth Gwenlan, standing on the lawn of the TV station waiting for me. Gareth, later famous as the producer of Fawlty Towers and other top BBC shows, had been sent with another colleague to help train us in TV production by the BBC. He said he was watching the reporting of results from his home in distant Islamabad and could not stay away. “I had to be where the excitement was!” he said.

That night’s excitement was repeated with the provincial elections ten days later when we were on the air for another 17 hours non-stop. But it did not last too long after that, as the country slipped into chaos and confusion and street protests led to open rebellion in East Pakistan and then an unnecessary war with India that Pakistan lost. The country wept as our once proud but badly led and misused army surrendered in the Race Course Ground in Dacca on 16 December 1971. Pakistan was never going to be the same again.

Subsequent elections never produced the same vitality and huge turnouts. Even the election after the death of another military dictator General Ziaul Haq in 1988 that brought Benazir Bhutto to power had a turnout of only 40 percent. When Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif won his so-called landslide in 1997, only 35 per cent of Pakistanis went to the polls. The heavily circumscribed election of 2002 under President Pervez Musharraf was said to have brought out 41 per cent but that figure may be open to doubt.

On Monday, February 18, 2008 when Pakistan goes to the polls again, the turnout may well be below 30 per cent, as threats of terrorism scare the population from coming out in large numbers. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto took the excitement out of this election for many Pakistanis. The absence of Nawaz Sharif and his brother from the races also detracts from the validity of the process. Musharraf’s falling popularity among Pakistanis at large will be reflected in the turnout and the results this time around. He may well lose in the long run. He has promised a “free, fair, and safe” elections. But the real losers on Election Day will be the people of Pakistan, deprived of participating in a truly unfettered election.

Private TV channels will do their best to cover the voting. But the threat of controls and sanctions weighs heavily on their operations. PTV will do what is expected of it, toe the official line. Word of mouth, what Franz Fanon called “the native telephone”, will prevail in the end. No amount of government controls or threats can silence that. No matter what the announced party results are on February 19th, in the end the people of Pakistan will win. I hope it is not too long in coming.

With the current election campaign coming to an end in Pakistan, the leading light of the opposition to President Pervez Musharraf has joined the discourse from beyond the grave and raised it to a higher level. Benazir Bhutto’s posthumously-released extended essay-cum-memoir Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West was released this week and likely will get a good reception in the West at which it is aimed. It bemoans the intellectual stasis in the Islamic world and calls for self-criticism among Muslims at large as the basis for a better understanding with the West. However, if past trends hold, it will be less read and understood in her native Pakistan and even less so in the Muslim World. Unfortunately, the oral tradition still prevails in Pakistan and in the heart of the Muslim world. And open discussion of profound issues in religion and politics has been displaced by drawing-room banter about conspiracy theories, the latest overseas trips, and acquisitions of the ostentatious trappings of wealth.

I visited Pakistan right after President Musharraf’s autobiography In the Line of Fire was released in 2006 and found over a period of two weeks that the book was being discussed at every lunch and dinner party I attended. But when asked, only four persons in those two weeks had actually read the entire book. The rest relied simply on excerpts or newspaper reports or what they had heard from others about it!

Bhutto’s book, like Musharraf’s, is an important addition to the paltry literature from Third World leaders on the issues facing their countries. Musharraf’s book, self-centered and slight, was in his own voice, probably because he dictated large segments of it after getting input from others. The Bhutto volume has relatively more heft but reeks of many hands.  It truly comes to life with her own words, dealing with the memories of Pakistan and of her arrival in Pakistan after her recent exile. And then there are the surprisingly candid pen portraits of many of the countries and leaders of the Muslim world, who do not come up to her exacting standards of democracy. Other parts remind us of plodding research assistance that yields a potted history of Pakistan and the emergence of the modern Islamic World, with copious quotations from other authors that drown out her own powerful views and voice. What could have become a major call for change in the Muslim World thus is reduced to an undergraduate essay in those parts. Those who follow Pakistan’s history will note the skipping over or rationalization of thorny issues such as the rise of the Taliban during her tenure as Prime Minister or charges of corruption or maladministration, with the practiced ease of a politician.

What makes the book important and interesting is the conflict that Bhutto’s own background and actions created for her as leader of a progressive and populist political party, while remaining at once a western-educated member of the feudal class, assigned to power by birthright. Yet, a strong nationalism and sense of destiny pervaded her thinking and led her to devote all her energies to returning to Pakistan and its benighted politics. I could see that steely determination when we last met in Washington just before she took off for Dubai en route to Pakistan. She lived and breathed Pakistan. And in the end she died for Pakistan. She understood full well that her return was fraught with danger. But she persisted and even after the first attack on her arrival procession on October 27, 2008 in Karachi, she was not fearful and continued with her public campaigning. That was the only way of ensuring that her people, her so-called vote bank, would be galvanized into action. Unlike Musharraf, who has sought safety behind multiple layers of security, she connected with the masses. And she paid the price for it.

Of all the current Pakistani leaders she recognized clearly, as she states in her book, that “extremism thrives under dictatorship and is fueled by poverty, ignorance, and hopelessness”. She was prepared to speak publicly about these issues. Whether she would have been able to change the situation in Pakistan or not, we will never know. The confluence of the forces of extremism and dictatorship, which she heavily criticizes in this book, may well have led to her horrific death.

The question now is whether the Pakistani electorate will listen to her voice from beyond this world and take back its country from the cancerous inroads of predatory politics that have debilitated Pakistan’s quest for democracy. This is at once her legacy and her dream for Pakistan. Who will fulfill it?