by Ali, Tariq
On the country’s sixtieth birthday (as on its twentieth and fortieth anniversaries) an embattled military regime was fighting for its survival: an external war was being waged on its western frontier, while at home it was being tormented by jihadis, lawyers, and judges. None of this seemed to make much impact on the young daredevils in Lahore, who were determined to commemorate the day in their own fashion. Early in the morning, young males on motorbikes, bull and bullfighter in one, took over the streets to embark on what has become an annual suicide race. As if the only thing worth celebrating is their right to die. Only five managed it in 2007, a much lower figure than in previous years. Maybe this is a rational way to mark a conflict in which more than a million people hacked each other to death as the decaying British Empire prepared to scuttle off home.
Meanwhile another uniformed despot was taking the salute at a military parade in Islamabad to mark Independence Day, mouthing a bad speech written by a bored bureaucrat that failed to stifle the yawns of the surrounding sycophants. Even the F-16s in proud formation failed to excite the audience. Flags were waved by schoolchildren, a band played the national anthem, the whole show was broadcast live, then it was over.
The West prefers to view Pakistan through a single optic. European and North American papers give the impression that the main, if not the only, problem confronting Pakistan is the power of the bearded fanatics skulking in the Hindu Kush, who, as the papers see it, are on the verge of taking over the country. In this account, all that has stopped a jihadi finger from finding its way to the nuclear trigger has been General Musharraf. It was already clear in 2007 that he might drown in a sea of troubles, and so the helpful U.S. State Department pushed out an overinflated life raft in the shape of Benazir Bhutto. But what, some of us were asking months before the tragedy of her assassination in December 2007, if they were to sink together?
In fact, the threat of a jihadi takeover of Pakistan is remote. There is no possibility of a coup by religious extremists unless the army wants one, as in the 1980s, when General Zia-ul-Haq handed over the Ministries of Education and Information to the Jamaat-e-Islami, with dire results: Islamist gangs extinguished all democratic opposition on the campuses, and Jamaati propagandists became embedded in the media. Serious problems confront Pakistan, but these are usually ignored in Washington, by both the administration and the financial institutions. The lack of a basic social infrastructure encourages hopelessness and despair, but only a tiny minority turns to armed jihad.
During periods of military rule in Pakistan three groups get together: military leaders, a corrupt claque of fixer-politicians, and businessmen eyeing juicy contracts or state-owned land. Each is by now sufficiently versed in deception and well trained in concealing petty rivalries and jealousies for the sake of the greater bad. The bond that unites them is money and the primitive accumulation of property in town and country. Politicians ill-favored by the military wonder what they’ve done wrong and queue up to correct misunderstandings and win acceptance. The country’s ruling elite has spent the last sixty years defending its ill-gotten wealth and privilege, and the Supreme Leader (uniformed or not) is invariably intoxicated by their flattery.
What of the official opposition? Alas, the system specializes in producing MNAs (Members of the National Assembly) who, in the main, are always on the lookout for ready cash. Brutal and coarse with raucous voices and a sly cunning, they’re experts in cultivating paymasters who become dependent on them. They would be intensely comic figures were they not so dangerous: silkily affectionate when their needs are met, merciless when frustrated. What have the people done to deserve this?
Corruption envelops Pakistan like a sheet of water. The late Benazir Bhutto and her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, had, after two terms in office, accumulated assets of $1.5 billion. The twice prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother, with their intimate knowledge of the business cycle, probably netted double that amount. Given the inspiration from above, lesser politicians, bureaucrats on every level, and their counterparts in the armed services have had little trouble in building their own piles. The poor bear the burden, but the middle classes are also affected. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, small businessmen, and traders are crippled by a system in which patronage and bribery are trump cards. Some escape—twenty thousand Pakistani doctors are working in the United States alone—but others come to terms with the system and accept compromises that make them deeply cynical about themselves and everyone else.
MEANWHILE THE ISLAMISTS, while far removed from state power, are busy picking up supporters. The persistent and ruthless missionaries of Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) are especially effective. The name Tabligh means the “propagation of true Islam,” and the sect has many similarities with born-again Christian fundamentalists in the United States. Sinners from every social group, desperate for purification, queue to join. TJ headquarters in Pakistan are situated in a large mission in Raiwind. Once a tiny village surrounded by fields of wheat, corn, and mustard seed, it is now a fashionable suburb of Lahore, where the Sharif brothers built a Gulf-style palace when they were in power in the 1990s. The TJ was founded in the 1920s by Maulana Ilyas, a cleric who trained at the orthodox Sunni seminary in Deoband, in Uttar Pradesh. At first, its missionaries were concentrated in northern India, but today large groups are in North America and Western Europe. The TJ hopes to get planning permission to build a mosque in East London next to the site of the 2012 Olympic Games. It would be the largest mosque in Europe. In Pakistan, TJ influence is widespread. Penetrating the national cricket team and recruiting stars has been its most conspicuous success: Inzamam-ul-Haq and Mohammad Yousuf are activists for the cause at home, while Mushtaq Ahmed works hard in their interest in Britain. Another triumph was the post-9/11 recruitment of Junaid Jamshed, the charismatic lead singer of Pakistan’s first successful pop group, Vital Signs. He renounced his past and now sings only devotional songs—naats.
The Tablighis stress their nonviolence and insist they are merely broadcasting the true faith to help people find the correct path in life. This may be so, but it is clear that some younger male recruits, bored with all the dogma, ceremonies, and ritual, are more interested in getting their hands on a Kalashnikov. Many commentators believe that the Tablighi missionary camps are fertile recruiting grounds for armed groups active on the western frontier and in Kashmir.
The establishment has been slow to challenge the interpretation of Islam put forward by groups such as Tablighi. It is not groups of this sort that threaten Musharraf’s rule. It is the legal profession that has fought the regime to a virtual standstill. On March 9, 2007, Musharraf suspended Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, pending an investigation. The accusations against Chaudhry were contained in a letter from Naeem Bokhari, a pro-government lawyer. Curiously, the letter was widely circulated—I received a copy via e-mail. I wondered whether something was afoot, but decided the letter was just sour grapes. Not so: it soon became clear that it was part of a plan. The letter began with a few personal complaints before extravagant rhetoric took over:
My Lord, the dignity of lawyers is consistently being violated by you. We are treated harshly, rudely, brusquely and nastily. We are not heard. We are not allowed to present our case. There is little scope for advocacy. The words used in the Bar Room for Court No. 1 are “the slaughter house.” We are cowed down by aggression from the Bench, led by you. All we receive from you is arrogance, aggression and belligerence.
The following passage should have alerted me to what was really going on:
I am pained at the wide publicity to cases taken up by My Lord in the Supreme Court under the banner of Fundamental Rights. The proceedings before the Supreme Court can conveniently and easily be referred to the District and Sessions Judges. I am further pained by the media coverage of the Supreme Court on the recovery of an [abducted] female. In the Bar Room, this is referred to as a “media circus.”
Chief Justice Chaudhry was beginning to embarrass the re
gime. He had found against the government on a number of key issues, including the rushed privatization of the Pakistan Steel Mills in Karachi, a pet project of the then prime minister, Shaukat “Shortcut” Aziz. The case was reminiscent of Yeltsin’s Russia. Economists had estimated that the industry was worth $5 billion. Seventy-five percent of the shares were sold for $362 million in a thirty-minute auction to a friendly consortium consisting of Arif Habib Securities (Pakistan), al-Tuwairqi (Saudi Arabia), and the Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works Open JSC (Russia). The privatization wasn’t popular with the military, and the retiring chairman, Haq Nawaz Akhtar, complained that “the plant could have fetched more money if it were sold as scrap.” The general perception was that the president and the prime minister had helped out their friends. A frequenter of the stock exchange told me in Karachi that Arif Habib Securities, which now owns 20 percent of Pakistan Steel Mills, was set up as a front company for Shaukat Aziz. Tuwairqi, the Saudi steel giant, acquired 40 percent. Musharraf is reportedly on close terms with this company and had previously turned up to open a steel plant set up by the group on 220 acres of land rented from the adjoining Pakistan Steel Mills. Now they have a stake in the whole thing.
After the Supreme Court insisted that “disappeared” political activists be produced in court and refused to dismiss rape cases, some in Islamabad worried that the chief justice might even declare the military presidency unconstitutional. Paranoia set in. Measures had to be taken. The general and his cabinet decided to frighten Chaudhry by suspending him. On March 9, 2007, the chief justice was arrested and kept in solitary confinement for several hours, manhandled by intelligence operatives, and traduced on state television. But instead of caving in and accepting a generous resignation settlement, the judge insisted on defending himself, triggering a remarkable movement in defense of an independent judiciary. This was surprising. Pakistani judges are notoriously conservative and have legitimized every coup with a bogus “doctrine of necessity” ruling. When Musharraf took over, a handful of judges refused to swear an oath of loyalty and resigned, but not Chaudhry, who was elevated to the Supreme Court a year later, in January 2000, and became chief justice in 2005. Prior to this appointment, little or nothing indicated that he was a judicial activist.
When I visited Pakistan in April 2007, the protests were getting bigger every day. Initially confined to the country’s eighty thousand lawyers and several dozen judges, unrest soon spread beyond them, which was again unusual in a country whose people have become increasingly alienated from elite rule. But the lawyers were marching in defense of the constitutional separation of powers. Street demonstrations occurred in virtually every city, and the sight of men in black being confronted by cordons of armed policemen became commonplace. The independent TV stations—Geo, Indus, Aaj, and others—provided daily coverage of events. Musharraf and his ministers were subjected to sharp and critical interviews that must have made the president yearn for the comparative safety of CNN and BBC World. The general would regularly upbraid journalists for not treating him with the same deference shown to Bush and European leaders by Western networks.
This delightfully old-fashioned struggle involved neither money nor religion, but principle. Careerists from the opposition (some of whom had organized thuggish assaults on the Supreme Court when in power) tried to make the cause their own. “Don’t imagine they’ve all suddenly changed,” Abid Hasan Manto, one of the country’s most respected lawyers, told me. “They’re cut from the same cloth as the rest of the elite. On the other hand, when the time comes, almost anything can act as a spark.”
Most people in the Islamabad bureaucracy soon recognized that they had made a gigantic blunder in arresting Chaudhry. But as often happens in a crisis, instead of acknowledging this and moving to correct it, the perpetrators decided on a show of strength. The first targets were independent TV channels. In Karachi and other cities in the south, three channels suddenly went dark as they were screening reports on the demonstrations. There was popular outrage. On May 5 Chaudhry drove from Islamabad to give a speech in Lahore, stopping at every town en route to meet supporters; it took twenty-six hours to complete a journey that normally takes three or four. In Islamabad, Musharraf plotted a counterstrike.
The judge was due to visit Karachi, the country’s largest city, a sprawling, anarchic mass of 15 million people, on May 12. Political power in Karachi rests in the hands of the MQM (Muttahida Qaumi Movement/United National Movement), an unsavory outfit created in 1984 during Zia’s dictatorship. It began life in 1978 as a student group set up by Altaf Hussain with a membership restricted to Urdu-speaking students in the Sind. These were the children of Muslim refugees who had fled India in 1947 and sought a new home in Pakistan. Many remained poor and suffered from job discrimination. The new organization played on these resentments and gave them voice, but soon acquired notoriety for its involvement in protection rackets and other kinds of violence. It has supported Musharraf loyally through every crisis.
Its leader, Altaf Hussain, fled the country in the 1990s to avoid prosecution. He was given asylum in Britain and now guides the movement from a safe perch in London, fearful of retribution from his many opponents were he to return. In a video address to his followers in Karachi just prior to Chaudhry’s arrival, he said, “If conspiracies are hatched to end the present democratically elected government, then each and every worker of MQM . . . will stand firm and defend the democratic government.” On Islamabad’s instructions, the MQM leaders decided to prevent the judge from leaving the airport and addressing his supporters, who were assaulted in different parts of the city. Almost fifty people were killed. After footage of the violence was screened on Aaj TV, the station was attacked by armed MQM volunteers, who shot at the building for six whole hours and set cars in the parking lot on fire.
Senior police officers, the chief minister, and the governor all failed to intervene, and a successful general strike followed, which further isolated the regime. A devastating report, Carnage in Karachi, published in August 2007 by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, confirmed in great detail what everyone already knew: the police and army had been ordered to stand by while armed MQM members went on the rampage:
. . . a matter of grave concern from the perspective of the institutional integrity of the state is the virtual withdrawal of the state’s security apparatus for almost 20 hours and the actual takeover of the city by armed cadres of more than one political party. The spectacle of a disarmed police force operating on the direction of armed cadres was highly disturbing, especially since key officers of the state were reduced to expressing their helplessness.
Musharraf, trying desperately to keep a grip on the country, was now confronted with the possibility that a popular movement in defense of the chief justice might become uncontrollable, especially if the events in Karachi were repeated elsewhere. Fearful of the consequences of further repression, he had little alternative but to sound a retreat. The chief justice’s appeal against his suspension was finally admitted and heard by the Supreme Court. On July 20 a unanimous decision reinstated him, and shamefaced government lawyers were seen leaving the precincts in a hurry. A reinvigorated court got down to business. Hafiz Abdul Basit was a “disappeared” prisoner arrested for “terrorism” without any specific charge. The chief justice summoned Tariq Pervez, the director general of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency, and asked him politely where the prisoner was being kept. Pervez replied that he had no idea and had never even heard of Basit. The chief justice instructed the police chief to produce Basit in court within forty-eight hours: “Either produce the detainee or get ready to go to jail.” Two days later Basit was produced and then released, after the police failed to present any substantial evidence against him. Washington and London were not happy. They were convinced that Basit was a terrorist who should have been kept in prison indefinitely, as he certainly would have been in Britain or the United States.
The Supreme Court then decided to consider six peti
tions challenging Musharraf’s decision to contest the presidency without relinquishing his command of the army. Even though parliament had passed the President to Hold Another Office Act in 2004 to circumvent a challenge to Musharraf’s decision to stay on as army chief while president, the Supreme Court had accepted an appeal against this decision, saying that the language of the amended law was not in conformity with the constitution. There was also the question of term limits: Pakistan’s constitution permits the president only two terms in office. Musharraf had assumed the presidency in June 2001. This was followed by a referendum in 2002 that he claimed was a “democratic mandate” and therefore, his opponents argued, constituted a second term. An added problem was that he was over sixty and, according to government rules, should therefore have retired as chief of army staff. Having done so, he would then have faced a two-year bar on any government employee seeking elected office. Unsurprisingly, there was much nervousness in Islamabad. The president’s supporters threatened dire consequences if the Court ruled against him. But to declare a state of emergency would have required the support of the army, and at that stage, soon after the Karachi killings, informal soundings had revealed a reluctance to intervene on the part of the generals. Their polite excuse at the time was that they were too heavily committed to the “war on terror” to be able to devote resources to preserve law and order in the cities. They would later, with a bit of encouragement from the U.S. embassy, change their minds.
AS THE JUDICIAL crisis temporarily ended, a more somber one loomed. Most of today’s jihadi groups are the mongrel offspring of Pakistani and Western intelligence outfits, born in the 1980s when General Zia was in power and waging the West’s war against the godless Russians, who were then occupying Afghanistan. It was then that state patronage of Islamist groups began. One beneficiary was the cleric Maulana Abdullah, who was allotted land to build a madrassa in the heart of Islamabad, not far from the government buildings. Soon the area was increased so that two separate facilities (for male and female students) could be constructed, together with an enlarged Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque. State money was provided for all this, and the government was the technical owner of the property.