LECTURE 7: THE QUESTION OF PROLIFERATION
The central drama affecting the future of South Asia is not the hunt for remaining elements of Al Qaeda or even the struggle over the fate of Kashmir, it is the continuing institutional decline of Pakistan, the world's seventh most populous country and a potential nuclear version of Yugoslavia. Islam in Pakistan has had no more success in quelling ethnic and tribal animosities than Communism had in Yugoslavia. The Punjabis, through the military and the civil service, run the other provinces in imperial fashion much as the Serbs ran other parts of what was once Yugoslavia.
In ''Pakistan: Eye of the Storm,'' Owen Bennett Jones, a BBC correspondent formerly stationed there, writes: ''No elected government has ever completed its term in office. It has had three wars with India and has lost around half of its territory. Its economy has never flourished. Nearly half its vast population is illiterate and 20 percent is undernourished.'' In ''Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan,'' Mary Anne Weaver, a correspondent for The New Yorker, observes that this vast and arid frontier zone of the Indian subcontinent is where ''angry students cling to a vision of an Islamist utopia, and equally angry mullahs chant prayers from the country's countless mosques.'' There is so little sense of authentic nationhood that when the Baluchi inhabitants of the country's southwestern desert venture elsewhere in Pakistan, they say they are going to ''Hindustan,'' which for most people means India. As a consequence, Weaver says, Pakistan's ruling aristocracy -- once a triumvirate of military officers, tribal chiefs and the feudal landowners who bankroll the political parties -- clings to the British legacy of empire as the only available defense against anarchy. Since independence, the only addition to this triumvirate has been the Islamic clerics.
Though Weaver and Bennett Jones are both journalists, Weaver presents more of a descriptive, traveler's-eye view, exploring subjects like falconry and desert fortresses in addition to politics, while Bennett Jones has produced a more comprehensive, scholarly work, in which everything from the Seraiki national movement in southern Punjab to Pakistani nuclear doctrine is covered. Both books, however -- each the product of impressive expertise -- agree on a fundamental point: the differences between democratically elected leaders and military dictators in Pakistan may be less than the differences between one military leader and another, and prodding Pakistan toward stability and individual freedom is less a matter of the immediate return of democracy than of a sustained and nuanced American commitment to the country.
Together, these books provide an excruciatingly precise account of how in October 1999, Pakistan's last democratically elected leader, Nawas Sharif -- a Punjabi religious conservative who through the bribing of parliamentarians and the intimidation of judges and journalists was erecting a theocratic dictatorship under the guise of democracy -- denied landing rights to a civilian airliner packed with schoolchildren, in order to kill one of the passengers. The passenger was Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the military chief of staff. Musharraf's fellow officers removed Sharif from power literally minutes before the plane's fuel ran out, and installed Musharraf as the country's new leader. Musharraf is described by both Weaver and Bennett Jones as the country's last credible Westernizer: a man who admits to a penchant for whiskey and casinos, and whose greatest concern is that ''75 percent of my officers have never been out of Pakistan.''
Musharraf emerges in these books as the philosophical opposite of another Pakistani general, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. According to Bennett Jones, Zia is ''perhaps the only one of Pakistan's four military rulers to deserve the epithet 'dictator.' '' Zia took power in a coup in 1977 and ruled until 1988, when he was killed in a still unexplained plane crash. He was a courteous middle-class man with a common touch, but uncomfortable as a public speaker and lacking the charisma of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the civilian politician he had toppled. Weak politically, Zia aligned himself with Muslim extremists, institutionalizing radical Islam in almost every branch of the state. Zia's democratic successors, Bennett Jones notes, ''did little to dismantle his legacy.''
Undoing Zia's Islamization program has proved a thankless task for Musharraf, who despite his failure thus far has at least tried: challenging the clerics by denouncing religious practices like ''honor killings'' and blasphemy laws, and speaking out in support of human rights in a way that previous Pakistani leaders rarely did. As Bennett Jones asserts, Musharraf, unlike his democratic predecessors, ''does at least have an agenda. . . . He wants a modernist, liberal Pakistan in which there is religious tolerance and respect for the law.'' Musharraf, a dashing former commando with tons of the self-confidence that Zia lacked, reversed Pakistan's longstanding policy of support for the Taliban, and has assisted the United States in hunting down Al Qaeda to a degree that would have been inconceivable for any previous government. ''It is impossible to avoid the conclusion,'' Bennett Jones writes, ''that the military stand a much better chance of delivering radical change in Pakistan than the civilians.''
The reality is that Pakistan's experience with democracy has so far been unfortunate, beginning in essence with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a slick demagogue who in 1965 played a leading role in instigating Pakistan's disastrous war with India and later, as prime minister in the 1970's, imposed a ban on drinking, gambling and nightclubs even though he was a regular drinker himself. ''He repeatedly pandered to the Islamic radicals in the hope of securing short-term political advantage,'' Bennett Jones reports. Weaver writes of how, in an effort to subdue Baluchi separatism, Bhutto ''bombed and strafed'' the Baluchi ''at random''; 3,300 Pakistani soldiers and over 6,000 Baloch died. It was only after Bhutto's 1977 re-election was marred by fraud and riots broke out that the military, under Zia, took power.
Bhutto's daughter, Benazir, ruled twice, in the late 1980's and 90's, after Zia's death returned the country to democracy. In an affecting profile, Weaver shows how a hostile military and a feudal party apparatus were partly responsible for the gross mismanagement and disastrous decisions that characterized her first turn as prime minister. But, Weaver goes on, when Bhutto returned to power in 1993 and the country began to fall apart, ''she had only herself to blame.'' She and Asif Ali Zardari, her husband as well as the investment minister, ran Pakistan as though it were a ''commercial enterprise.''
As in Turkey, the military has periodically rescued Pakistan from political anarchy. But the Pakistani military, by constituting a state within a state, is itself a fundamental part of the problem, Bennett Jones concludes. Turkey has functioned reasonably well in recent decades because of an implicit division of power between the generals and the civilian leadership. The former, through a national security council, make the key decisions in security and foreign affairs, while the prime minister and parliament are sovereign domestically. One closes these two books thinking that if it is not to go on oscillating between military tyranny and democratic anarchy, Pakistan desperately needs a hybrid regime akin to the Turkish model.
Although the sheer variety of social and economic problems in the world cannot always be solved simply by instituting Western-style democracy, international elites have persistently demanded that Musharraf hold elections. So he did. Last month, Pakistan held its first nationwide election in seven years. With the reported connivance of the military, there were major gains for the hard-line religious parties and other opponents of working with the United States in the fight against terrorism. In two provinces bordering Afghanistan, crucial to American military operations, the religious parties are now dominant.
Near the end of her book, Weaver quotes Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the former
commander in chief of Central Command, the headquarters for Middle East
operations, who tells her: ''It's so important that we work with Musharraf: not
so much because of what Musharraf is or is not, but because what would come
after him would be a disaster.'' Sadly, Zinni may still be right.
READING FOR THE NEXT LECTURE
