Imran’s arrest – Geo coverage

 

Imran thrown into Lahore jail

By Bruce Loudon – The Australian 

FORMER Pakistan cricket captain Imran Khan was facing the prospect of a long prison term last night after being shifted from police custody to one of the country’s most notorious jails.

Mr Khan, 55, leader of the small Tehrik-in-Insaaf (Justice) party and an outspoken critic of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, was taken under heavy guard to the Kot Lakhpat jail on the outskirts of Lahore.

The move came as Attorney-General Malik Mohammad Qayyum announced last night General Musharraf would stand down as army chief before December 1.

General Musharraf and other officials had said he would wait for the Supreme Court to rule on the legality of his October 6 re-election as president before quitting the army.

Kot Lakhpat has for decades been one of Pakistan’s most feared jails and has frequently been used by military rulers to imprison their opponents. It was where former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, father of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, was incarcerated after he was overthrown by General Mohammed Zia-ul Haq.

According to sources, Mr Khan, who was seized by police outside the Punjab University on Tuesday, was told last night that he faced charges under Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act. The act stipulates a possible prison term of between seven years and life.

Lahore’s police chief, Malik Mohammed Iqbal, said yesterday Mr Khan was being charged for inciting people to take up arms, calling for civil disobedience and “spreading hatred”. Mr Khan’s former wife, Jemima, was quoted yesterday as saying that his arrest was a further sign that General Musharraf had become “one of Pakistan’s most brutal and oppressive dictators ever”.

When the state of emergency was declared, and before he went into hiding, Mr Khan called for General Musharraf to be put on trial for violating the constitution. He also called for him to be executed.

Mr Khan was put under house arrest as the emergency was declared, but managed to escape his captors and go into hiding.

Later he issued a video denouncing General Musharraf, and his intention on Tuesday was to go to the Punjab University to start what he said would be a student-led agitation against the military regime. Instead, hardline Islamic students helped police to arrest him at the gates.

Mr Khan was bundled into a van and driven away to a police station before being taken to Kot Lakhpat last night.

Unlike most of the thousands of others who have been detained in Pakistan since the emergency was declared, Mr Khan is not being held under the country’s 90-day detention law but the far more severe Anti-Terrorism Act.

This means he can be held indefinitely without any recourse to the courts.

Mr Khan’s move to Kot Lakhpat came after General Musharraf set himself on a collision course with the US yesterday, defying intense pressure from the White House to lift the state of emergency before elections are held.

A protest by supporters of Ms Bhutto against her house arrest ended with the deaths of two boys, who were killed when gunfire erupted.

The protest deaths were the first since the state of emergency was imposed on November 3.

Police said a demonstrator opened fire but a Bhutto party spokesman denied the claim.

“We do not believe in gun culture,” Ijaz Durrani said. “Our people were peaceful, they never indulge in such incidents.”

Ms Bhutto said last night she hoped to form a government of national unity to replace General Musharraf before elections, and is contacting other opposition parties to get them on board.

“I am talking to the other opposition parties to find out whether they are in a position to come together,” she said from her home in Lahore.

 

Imran Khan arrest details

 

Students ‘humiliated’ by IJT

LAHORE: Students of several educational institutions slammed the Islami Jamiat Talaba (IJT) for detaining and manhandling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan. They termed it the worst example of hypocrisy because the IJT had itself invited Khan to lead the students in their protest on the Punjab University (PU) campus. The students also criticised the misbehaviour of IJT workers with foreign journalists and the victimisation of several students in their protest rally. Ali Natiq, a student of FAST-NU, said, “We strongly condemn the IJT for beating a national hero.” Amal Azhar, a student of the PU’s Institute of Communication Studies (ICS), said IJT high-ups were hypocrites.She said that female students had gone there to support Imran Khan. A LUMS student, who was present at the PU for the rally, said the LUMS students were protesting against the emergency and for the restoration of human rights in the country. She said the PTI chief had inspired the LUMS students to stand up for their rights. She said, “The IJT humiliated our leader and we condemn it for this.” She said the students would not involve the IJT in their protests again. Naveed Alam, a PU student, said IJT workers had misbehaved with him because he was shouting slogans in Khan’s favour. He said the IJT had humiliated the PU in the presence of many students, who had come from other institutions.

 

Imran Khan’s message to UK: ‘My life is in danger’

By Kim Sengupta and Andrew Buncombe – The Independent

Imran Khan, the Pakistani opposition leader and former cricketer, was arrested yesterday, less than 48 hours after sending a desperate text message to his solicitor saying that he feared for his life.

Mr Khan had emerged after 11 days in hiding, having gone on the run to escape arrest in the aftermath of General Musharraf’s declaration of emergency on 3 November. Until he was detained by police yesterday lunchtime, he was the last major political opponent of the general still not arrested or under detention. He was charged under Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act, which includes penalties that can carry the death sentence or life imprisonment.

However, Mr Khan had earlier expressed his grave concern for his security in a text message sent to his lawyer in the UK, in which he warned that failure by British authorities to prosecute a key London-based ally of General Musharraf, Altaf Hussain, could lead to lethal repercussions. His message to his lawyer, also named Imran Khan, suggested another possible cause for his arrest.

Mr Hussain, the leader of the MQM party, has been accused of a range of criminal acts, including soliciting murder and inciting violence. A dossier compiled by Mr Khan, the London solicitor and human rights campaigner, on behalf of his namesake has been handed over to Scotland Yard and an investigation is now under way into allegations of money laundering.

In the text message, seen by The Independent, Imran Khan says: “Once MQM [Mr Hussain] thinks he is safe then my Karachi workers and my own life will be at great risk.”

Members of the MQM are said to work alongside the security forces and friends and colleagues of Mr Khan the politician say they fear for his safety because of his campaign against Altaf Hussain.

Mr Khan travelled to London in the summer to press for the prosecution of Altaf Hussain under the UK’s anti-terror laws after gunmen opened fire on supporters of Pakistan’s sacked Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, sparking a day of violence in May in which 42 people were killed.

Members of the security forces are said to have stood by allowing MQM members to open fire. Mr Khan – along with opposition parties, lawyers, and human rights activists and journalists – accused Mr Hussain of orchestrating the violence from London. The MQM denied the accusations. Mr Hussain claimed at the time “it was a completely peaceful gathering by MQM supporters that was targeted by a collaboration of three other parties”.

Mr Hussain, 53, left Pakistan for Britain in 1992 after an arrest warrant was issued in connection with a murder. The chief justice is reported to have said that he would pursue the murder charge against Mr Hussain if he ever returned to Pakistan.

Following General Musharraf’s announcement that the state of emergency would not be lifted prior to elections being held, Mr Hussain said in a statement from his offices in north-west London that all parties “should support the present government and President General Pervez Musharraf so that the emergency can be lifted, constitution could be restored and elections could be held on schedule. I pay tributes to President General Pervez Musharraf on making courageous and positive announcements.”

Just before his arrest, Imran Khan criticised British authorities for being slow in investigating Mr Hussain and maintained this may have been due to government interference. The Independent revealed that the British Government had liaised with Mr Hussain in an attempt to ensure the safety of Benazir Bhutto when she returned to Pakistan from exile to take part in elections which the general says will proceed on schedule in January, but under the state of emergency.

In a statement he said: “My legal team presented evidence to Scotland Yard in September 2007 regarding Altaf Hussain’s criminal activities … I am very disappointed that over six weeks have gone by and although my lawyers have been keeping in contact with Scotland Yard, a decision has still not been arrived at…

“I sincerely hope that the British government does not unduly influence Scotland yard … Altaf Hussain happens to be someone that President Musharraf regards as an ally in his dictatorship in Pakistan.”

Imran Khan, the solicitor, said: “There is genuine worry about the safety of my client and he is in real fear. The MQM people knows of his campaign and the information which has been passed on to the police and we know that MQM are allies of General Musharraf … Failure to prosecute Altaf Hussain means that MQM members in Pakistan will think that he is untouchable and that will give them more confidence to act against their opponents like Imran Khan and other opposition leaders.”

 

Imran Khan’s arrest video

 

Imran Khan faces terror charges after Islamist rivals halt protest

By Jeremy Page – Times 

Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricketer turned politician, was facing up to 90 days of house arrest and possible terrorism charges last night after his attempt to launch a student protest movement against President Musharraf ended in chaos.

Mr Khan, the leader of a small opposition party, was cheered by several hundred student supporters when he emerged from hiding on a suburban campus of the University of the Punjab. But they were outnumbered by rival protesters from the student wing of Jamaat-i-Islami, an Islamist party that has controlled the campus for several years, banning music and even Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

The Islamists bundled him into a nearby faculty building, the Centre for High Energy Physics, and held him there for an hour as the students scuffled and chanted slogans outside. They then pushed him into a van, drove him to the university gates and handed him to police.

Rana Mansoor, the district police chief, said that Mr Khan would be under house arrest for 90 days. Mohammed Iqbal, the Lahore police chief, said later that he would be charged under antiterrorism laws.

A spokesman for Mr Khan told The Times: “They pulled him out like a piece of cargo and threw him into the police van. We are very worried about his safety.” Jemima Khan, the British socialite who was married to Mr Khan until 2004, said: “This is just one more sign that Musharraf has become one of Pakistan’s most brutal and oppressive dictators ever.” It was Mr Khan’s first public appearance since he narrowly escaped arrest at his home in Lahore in the first hours after General Musharraf introduced emergency rule on November 3.

“Why don’t we start a street movement?” Mr Khan, 55, said the night before he was arrested. “If I get arrested, I’ll try and get out . . . but I have to come into the open to mobilise the students.” He urged Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister who is also under house arrest, to join other opposition leaders in boycotting the parliamentary elections General Musharraf has promised by January 9.

He said that he had negotiated an alliance with Nawaz Sharif, another former Prime Minister who is in exile in Saudi Arabia, and with Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the Jamaat-i-Islami leader. But yesterday’s events high-lighted the obstacles to such an alliance.

The University of the Punjab, Pakistan’s largest, with more than 24,000 students, is a secular, state-run institution, but has been dominated for years by Jamaat-i-Islami.

Moderate students are naturally drawn to Mr Khan as a celebrity and politician, while the Islamists admire him as a cricketer but dislike his politics and fear that he could undermine their grip on the campus. “We want Islam here. Allah rules here,” said one 20-year-old student who gave his name as Mohammad. “Imran Khan cannot protest on this campus.”

But Usmam Liaqat, 22, a third-year engineering student who said that he was with Mr Khan inside the faculty building, accused the Islamists of pursuing their own political agenda. “They pushed him and verbally abused him,” he said. “He is the only honest political leader in our country and all the younger generation are with him.” Mr Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) party, founded in 1997, has only one seat (his own) in the national parliament and critics dismiss him as a political featherweight. However, he is still regarded as a national hero for leading Pakistan to victory in the 1992 World Cup, and his popularity has risen since he took a stand against General Musharraf.

General Musharraf said that he planned to step down as army chief by the end of November, but would not bow to demands that he should resign.

 

Pakistani chief justice to receive Harvard Law School ‘Medal of Freedom’

Following last week’s military crackdown in Pakistan and the detention of hundreds of lawyers, the Harvard Law School Association has decided to award Pakistani Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry its highest honor: The Harvard Law School Medal of Freedom. Chaudhry was detained after he convened the Pakistani Supreme Court to declare the current state of emergency imposed by General Pervez Musharraf to be null and void.

Although Chaudhry has been placed under house arrest and is not free to leave Pakistan, Dean Elena Kagan has reached out to the chief justice regarding the award and hopes that he’ll be able to come to the Law School to receive it when the state of emergency is lifted.

“As lawyers who value freedom and the rule of law, we at Harvard Law School want Chief Justice Chaudhry and all of the courageous lawyers in Pakistan to know that we stand with them in solidarity,” said Kagan. “We are proud to be their colleagues in the cause of justice, and we will do all we can to press for the prompt restoration of constitutionalism and legality in Pakistan.”

Hundreds of lawyers and other critics of Musharraf have been detained since the emergency rule was established more than a week ago. HLS graduates and practicing lawyers in Pakistan Babar Sattar LL.M. ‘02 and Tariq Hassan LL.M. ‘76 S.J.D. ‘80 have spoken out in protest of the suspension of the constitution.

To raise awareness and further promote discussion about the events in Pakistan, the Harvard South Asia Initiative will be hosting campus-wide events on Friday, November 16.

The Medal of Freedom was established by Harvard Law School to honor the achievements of individuals who have worked to uphold the legal system’s fundamental commitment to freedom, justice, and equality. To symbolize this commitment, the award bears the image of Charles Hamilton Houston, whose leadership of the crusade that culminated in the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education exemplifies the highest ideals of our democracy.

Past recipients of the Medal of Freedom include the members of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation team and former South African President Nelson Mandela.

 

In Interview, Musharraf Defends Rule by Decree

By CARLOTTA GALL, DAVID ROHDE and JANE PERLEZ – NYTimes

Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, on Tuesday rejected an appeal by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to lift his state of emergency, insisting in an interview that it was the best way to ensure free and fair elections.

He vigorously defended the emergency decree issued 10 days earlier that suspended the Constitution, dismissed the Supreme Court, silenced independent news stations and resulted in the arrests of at least 2,500 opposition party workers, lawyers and human rights advocates.

“I totally disagree with her,” General Musharraf said in an interview with The New York Times at the presidential building here in the capital. “The emergency is to ensure elections go in an undisturbed manner.” He said Sunday that elections would go ahead by Jan. 9.

Dressed in a dark business suit rather than his military uniform, General Musharraf spoke in a confident tone, saying the decree was justified because the Supreme Court had questioned the validity of his re-election, and because of the seriousness of threats from terrorists.

He refused to say when he would step down as army leader and become a civilian president, a demand that President Bush has made publicly and, in a telephone call last week, privately. “It will happen soon,” he said.

General Musharraf, who has been criticized as being increasingly isolated and receiving poor advice from a shrinking circle of aides, insisted he was in touch with the mood of Pakistanis.

Dismissing consistent reports that a vast majority of Pakistanis oppose his emergency decree, he said he had information from “several organizations” and feedback from politicians and friends that the move was popular.

“I know what they feel about the emergency when all these suicide bombings were taking place,” he said, speaking of the rising number of suicide bombings in Pakistan. “Their view is, Why have I done it so late.”

He sharply criticized the opposition leader Benazir Bhuttosaying she was confrontational and would be difficult to work with. Ms. Bhutto returned to Pakistan last month in a deal brokered by the Bush administration, which hoped that the two could find a way to share power, in order to increase public support for General Musharraf’s increasingly unpopular military government.

The understanding was that she would take part in elections that could make her prime minister, while he would run for re-election as president. Instead, they have engaged in increasingly public sparring, and Ms. Bhutto has come in for criticism that she is an American pawn who is not mounting serious opposition to the general.

Early Tuesday, 900 police officers surrounded the house where Ms. Bhutto was staying in the eastern city of Lahore, preventing her from leading a march to Islamabad to protest what opposition groups say is martial law. After waiting for more than a week, on Tuesday she joined other opposition leaders and called for General Musharraf to resign.

“You come here on supposedly on a reconciliatory mode, and right before you land, you’re on a confrontationist mode,” he said in the interview, conducted in English. “I am afraid this is producing negative vibes, negative optics.”

As for her demand that he resign, he said “she has no right” to ask.

On Nov. 3, General Musharraf imposed emergency rule when it became clear that the Supreme Court was about to declare his re-election last month illegal. That election was carried out by the national and provincial assemblies and boycotted by many opposition parties, though not by Ms. Bhutto’s.

After a more compliant court was impaneled this week, General Musharraf said he expected to be sworn in as a civilian president after the new court validated his re-election. But asked when emergency rule would end, he said matter-of-factly, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

He said Pakistan was suffering from a “disturbed terrorist environment,” and he appeared to be unaffected by calls from Europe as well as the United States for an end to the emergency rule.

Instead, the general, whose government has received more than $10 billion in aid from the Bush administration, mostly for the military, asked for even more support, and more patience.

The Bush administration has called the general the best bet to fight Al Qaeda and Islamic militants, but has also complained that the cooperation of the Pakistani military has been sporadic and often ineffective.

Analysts here and abroad have said that the state of emergency has diverted thousands of police and intelligence agents from the fight against terrorism to the enforcement of the crackdown. But General Musharraf said the decree had done no such thing.

“If we are dealing with moderates, that doesn’t mean that we are not dealing with terrorists,” he said. “Who has said that? They are two different issues.”

He said his army was limited in its resources for taking on the militants. “Ten days back, of 20 Cobra helicopters, we have only one that was serviceable,” he said. “We need more support.”

His army even needed help from the United States on efforts to shut down the FM radio signal of a leading pro Taliban religious leader, Maulana Fazlullah, whose militant followers have been rapidly gaining territory in the area of Swat in the North-West Frontier Province.

“You give us the technical means to do it,” he said. “We’ve tried everything.”

“We’ve adopted all technical means,” he added, but so far his forces have failed to squelch the imam’s transmissions, which are believed to be fairly amateurish.

Militant activity in the rugged northwest has increased markedly this year, raising questions among Pakistanis about how American money for the army was being used. General Musharraf said the army had now regrouped in northern and southern Waziristan, where it faced the strongest challenge from the militants, whom he called a “vicious enemy.”

“Now wherever the disturbance, we will strike very, very strongly,” he said.

In Washington, Bush administration officials said privately that they were increasingly frustrated with both General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto. Administration officials said they were quietly trying to take the temperature of Pakistan’s army for signs that General Musharraf’s top officers were starting to turn cool toward him.

“It’s not a question of trying to prompt anything,” one senior official said. “We’re just trying to make sure we’re keeping tabs of all the concerned parties.”

Ms. Rice, meanwhile, is dispatching John D. Negroponte, her deputy, to Pakistan for a face-to-face meeting with General Musharraf, they said. The envoy, who last week called the general “indispensable” to American interests, is expected to arrive in Islamabad at the end of the week.

But other administration officials fretted that Mr. Negroponte’s efforts may yield as little as the phone calls from his boss, Ms. Rice, and her boss, President Bush.

Officials at both the White House and the State Department also said they were worried that Ms. Bhutto had overplayed her hand in calling for General Musharraf to resign, and that she may no longer be able to accept an olive branch from him on a power-sharing deal, should he decide to extend one.

General Musharraf said Ms. Bhutto had been placed under house arrest because she had accused the chief minister of the province of Punjab, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, of plotting against her.

The detention, he said, was to prevent an incident that she could then use to lay blame on the government. He added that her plan for her party members to participate in the march across the Punjab to Islamabad was “a preposterous thing to do.”

General Musharraf questioned Ms. Bhutto’s popularity, and at one point scanned an article she recently wrote for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that he had brought to the interview.

In reaction to her claim that her party would most likely sweep parliamentary elections, the general said, “Let’s start the elections, and let’s see whether she wins.”

“Constitutionally today she has been prime minister twice,” he said. “What about the third time? She is not legally allowed; she is not constitutionally allowed. Why are we taking things for granted?”

Western governments and Western news media, he said, have overestimated Ms. Bhutto’s support because they listen too much to human rights advocates in Pakistan.

“You go and meet human rights activists,” he said, challenging his interviewers. “Ninety percent of them may have never cast their votes. They sleep on the day of elections.”

General Musharraf said 58 privately owned television channels in Pakistan that had been closed under the emergency decree — including a dozen independent news stations — would be allowed to open if they agreed to a government code of conduct.

“The media is independent,” General Musharraf said. “We have taken certain actions against the media because we want to bring some responsibility to them.”

Journalists and Western diplomats have condemned the code as a blatant attempt at political censorship. The code carries a jail sentence of up to three years for journalists whose coverage “ridicules” the president or other government officials, they said.

Regarding his opponents other than Ms. Bhutto, General Musharraf yielded no ground.

Asked why Asma Jahangir, who heads the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, had been arrested when she attended a meeting at the commission’s headquarters on the first day of emergency rule, he replied, “Because she was agitating and trying to disturb the peace.”

General Musharraf said Ms. Jahangir, the leading human rights advocate in Pakistan and one of the first women to become a lawyer, was too ambitious in her fight for women’s rights. He agreed that Pakistani women deserved more opportunities, and he cited his own legislation amending the laws to protect women against accusations of rape and adultery.

But Ms. Jahangir, he said, wanted to go too fast, and would therefore fail. He called her “quite an unbalanced character.”

 

Imran Khan – Capital Talk

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Jemima Khan sets her tigers on the tyrant

By Margarette Driscoll  – Times Online 
Jemima Khan talks exclusively about why emergency rule in Pakistan has forced her ex-husband to go on the run and how their sons are joining his cause

Early last week a strange number flashed up on Jemima Khan’s mobile phone. Puzzled, she picked up the call to hear a familiar voice on the other end saying urgently: “Jem, it’s me.”

It was her exhusband Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricket captain turned politician, who has been on the run since security forces tried to put him under house arrest last weekend. The brief call – terminated abruptly so as not to be traceable – was to reassure her and their two sons that he was safe. “It was like hearing a ghost,” she says, laughing with relief. “He’s fine. Obviously he’s outraged but he’s safe, thank God.”

Imran was at his father’s home in Lahore – where he and Jemima lived for the first five years of their marriage – when President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency, ostensibly because “terrorists” were threatening his presidency.

Musharraf’s critics believe it was an attempt to preempt a Supreme Court judgment that would have declared his recent reelection as president invalid. For months the president has been at daggers drawn with the judiciary, which prides itself on being a neutral and secular upholder of Pakistan’s constitution.

In the brutal fall-out from the sudden declaration of emergency rule, which also follows the devastating bomb attack on Benazir Bhutto’s welcome-home parade last month – which killed more than 130 people – lawyers, human rights activists and government critics have been rounded up and imprisoned, and political opponents such as Imran and, “for her own security”, Bhutto, have been put under house arrest.

Imran believes that if he had not made a run for it he would have ended up in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat jail. In a statement issued through his ex-wife he said his house had been “ransacked” by the police and his family “roughed up”. His two sisters and their families live in the house with his father and though he told Jemima on the phone that everyone was fine she has not been able to speak to them to establish exactly what happened.

“The police put Imran under house arrest, then went away to get an arrest warrant,” says Jemima. “He was tipped off that they were going to put him in jail and so he managed to escape over the back wall. He’s lucky that he has family bordering the property, so he was able to go straight into another friendly house.”

Much as his flight might sound like a scene from a sitcom, the tenor of the police visit was decidedly menacing. “He said they were very brutal and much more belligerent than he’d ever seen before,” says Jemima.

“Normally the police are very respectful towards Imran, because quite a lot of them are fans from his cricket days. But in this instance they were very aggressive with both him and with everyone in the house. And I think that was probably quite a shock to him.”

Jemima spent last week in a flurry of activity, drumming up support for a protest in Downing Street yesterday that brought together influential expatriate Pakistanis such as Mohammad Sarwar, the Glasgow MP, and Hina Jilani, the lawyer and human rights activist, under the banner of the Campaign Against Martial Law. She and numerous well-placed Pakistani exiles are piecing together information – mainly e-mails – from friends and family back there. She loathes Bhutto, but was hoping her supporters would also turn up. “I hope everyone comes, that anyone who is critical of what Musharraf is doing comes and protests,” she says.

“What’s happening in Pakistan is unthinkable. My sons’ teacher from their old school has been arrested. Lawyers and teachers have been arrested. Despite getting billions in aid, Musharraf has failed to find Osama [Bin Laden], failed to curb the resurgence of the Taliban and failed to control extremists. There are terrorists on the loose now and the jails are over spilling with lawyers, human rights activists, all of civil society. There are so many they can’t even fit them into the jails – they’re sitting in handcuffs in the police stations.

“We probably know more here about what’s happening than they do in Pakistan because the media’s been completely gagged. They’ve gone into radio stations and television stations and beaten up the presenters. They’ve carted the best newspaper editors and journalists off to jail – anyone who has opposed the regime. And such brutality! You can’t imagine the stories of beatings. They’re beating women, beating old people and we are only getting to hear of a small part of what is going on.

“You can’t really call people on mobiles and even if you do get through, they’re terrified to talk. Anyone who is in any way related to Imran – and that’s a large number of people I know and am friends with – are worried about talking on the phone because the authorities are desperate to know where he is.”

Imran and Jemima married in 1995 after a whirlwind romance. She was just 21, he twice her age. The daughter of Sir James and Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Jemima was an impossibly glamorous young socialite – sister of Zac Goldsmith, now David Cameron’s adviser on climate change – whose family split their time between Ormeley Lodge, the family home in southwest London, a Paris mansion, a villa in Marbella and an estate on the coast of Mexico.

Friends wondered how she would cope with her new life in Lahore with the serious-minded former cricketer who had just founded the Movement for Justice and was dipping his toes into the hazardous waters of Pakistan politics. Jemima was part-Jewish by birth and raised a Roman Catholic but converted to Islam and “learnt Urdu and really impressed everyone”, according to Imran.

She gained a masters degree in international politics, but her life in Pakistan was dogged by controversy. At one point she was accused of exporting antiques from the country, a charge later dropped and widely believed to have been politically motivated in order to smear her husband. She admitted later she had felt his marriage was, politically, his “Achilles heel”. She tried to help Imran on the campaign trail but confessed that she felt lonely during his long absences from home.

In 2004 the marriage was dissolved and she moved back to London with their two sons, Suleiman, now 10, and Kasim, eight. It is interesting that in his time of need it is Jemima that Imran should turn to for help.

Talking to her in her beautiful, high-ceilinged drawing room in London, surrounded by books and pieces of Islamic art, it’s easy to see why. In high-waisted jeans and white shirt, with her hair scraped up into a ponytail she is an elegant and passionate advocate for democracy in Pakistan.

“It’s no surprise I feel passionate about it. I lived in Pakistan for 10 years, my sons have a very strong sense of their Pakistani identity, my exhusband is Pakistani,” she says. “But even friends who have no connection to the country are outraged at what’s happening there.”

She has explained to Suleiman and Kasim everything that is going on. They were in Pakistan only a couple of weeks ago for half-term and she’s thanking her lucky stars that they are back safely. “Sunday is usually the day they travel, so if half-term had been a week later . . .” They were accompanying her to the demonstration yesterday – and bringing friends – and she was spending Friday evening making placards with them to take along. She was amused to receive a message from Imran via a friend saying: “I’m very excited about Saturday’s demo. Make sure my tigers are holding placards.”

Jemima is carrying out his instructions. “I really want the boys to understand how lucky they are. I take it for granted that we live in a democracy and we’re allowed to protest and I want them to understand that that’s actually a privilege and there are a lot of people in the world who don’t have that privilege,” she says. “I want them to understand what their father is trying to do in Pakistan, why he’s not available to them as much as he’d like to be, the seriousness of what he’s involved with.”

Much of the background to politics in Pakistan the boys must have picked up by osmosis. “I should think they’ve sat through hundreds of political meetings out there,” she laughs. “The house is pretty much one big political gathering at all times.

“But I sometimes wonder how aware they are of how volatile it is over there. Obviously I’m aware because since I’ve been there they’ve been through several changes of government. Nobody served out their time while I was there, there was always a forced end to whoever was in charge so everything’s always been very dramatic. They were too small to be aware of that but they know about everything that’s happening now.”

But young as they are, she wants them to take their trip to Downing Street seriously – by writing their own slogans for their placards, for instance. “I want them to think; I want them to be involved. I don’t want to just shove something into their hands and say ‘now just wave this about’ without them understanding. My little one’s a bit young, but the older one’s quite capable of thinking this through so he can decide what he wants to call for.”

Hundreds of Imran’s party workers have been arrested in the past week and, cool as she seems, she must be concerned for his safety. “I can’t imagine he’ll stay in hiding for long. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were arrested next week. He believes that God will protect him,” she says, with a smile. “I’ve always teased him that there’s supposedly a saying of Prophet Muhammad’s, which was ‘Believe in God, but tether your camel’. I used to try to urge him to be a little more cautious, using that as my back-up.”

But he never seemed to take any notice. “He’s not easily frightened,” she says.

Just as well: in Pakistan, politics is a brutal business. If the police were so much more aggressive than before, what does it mean?

“I suppose it signals that they really mean business,” she says. “If Imran hadn’t escaped I’m pretty sure he’d be in jail now and those that are in jail are not being allowed visitors. Nobody knows where they’re being put into jail either – they’re being moved from city to city so the family does not know where they are, to create as much confusion as possible. There have definitely been instances of torture, so it’s a very serious situation.”

It is complicated by the fact that Musharraf has been seen by the West as an ally, a bulwark against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda sym-pathisers in neighbouring Afghanistan. US aid to Pakistan since 9/11 has totalled about £5 billion. But last week President Bush called on Musharraf to give up his army post and restore democracy and David Miliband, the foreign secretary, called for free elections saying this was a “defining moment” for Pakistan and its leadership.

So what does Jemima think Britain and the US should do?

“Pressure, just keep up the pressure,” she says. “America and Britain have enormous influence in the region and if they apply serious pressure on Musharraf, he will listen.”

Jemima hopes yesterday’s demonstration will “make noise, just send the message that what’s going on in Pakistan is not acceptable. Musharraf says he will hold elections sometime before February 15 but it’s very vague. He hasn’t said whether the judges will be restored, whether the courts will be restored, whether the constitution will be restored. He hasn’t talked about political prisoners and whether they will be released, he hasn’t talked about the media – so all those things need to be in place before they can have free and fair elections.

“Right now, all the people the West needs to be talking to are in jail or in hiding. I wouldn’t be getting involved if it weren’t for the fact that so many Pakistanis I know aren’t able to demonstrate themselves. Nobody’s able to protest legitimately because they just get flung into jail or beaten with batons.”

Her vision for Pakistan is simple: “human rights and democracy, what every country deserves”. And she is scathing of the popular notion that democracy is “unIslamic”. “I don’t see any contradictions between Islamic values and democracy. None at all.”

 

Hasan Nisar – on hypocrisy

 

Hasan Nisar – Great interview

Random thoughts on Pakistan … amazing.

Part 1: 

 

Part 2: 

 

Part 3:

 

Musharraf foe looks to youth to lead the way

A rumble of dissent is heard at Pakistan’s colleges. Imran Khan hopes students will funnel their anger into protests. 

By Henry Chu - Los Angeles Times

LAHORE, PAKISTAN — Imran Khan — cricket legend, philanthropist, fugitive — is sprawled on the sofa, looking relaxed and confident for a man on the run. Animation seizes his athletic frame when he addresses a favorite topic: the youth of Pakistan.

“The young have one thing, which is passion and idealism. They look at things in black and white, good and bad,” he said. “They’re not cynical at that stage. They haven’t taken their beatings in life. They’re not concerned about their mortgages.”

But those beatings could happen sooner rather than later if a plan hatched by Khan comes to pass.

In hiding from the police, whom he escaped by jumping over a wall at his home, Khan is aiming to stage a rally here this week that he hopes will draw hordes of young people to protest the state of emergency declared Nov. 3 by President Pervez Musharraf. Thousands of outspoken critics of Musharraf were locked up in the security sweep that failed to catch Khan.

Stirrings of unrest have already begun bubbling up at colleges and universities across the country, from Islamabad to Peshawar to Karachi. Now trying to organize online petitions and on-campus protests, a generation of Pakistanis more used to Pepsi than politics is showing tentative signs of awakening and could open a new battlefront for Musharraf’s military regime.

Last week, hundreds of students at the prestigious Lahore University of Management Sciences, or LUMS, thronged a demonstration against emergency rule. They jeered at Musharraf and waved placards in support of independent judges he has sacked.

For senior Zahra Sabri, the rally gave vent to the despairing anger some of her peers feel at the lack of opportunity and the morass of corruption and repression in which their country seems to be mired.

“This time the students really came out — they’re really fed up. All their lives, they haven’t seen any good times in Pakistan,” said Sabri, 23. “We were born in the early ’80s, and since then, I don’t think we’ve had one moment of hopefulness.”

But the demonstrators last week were blocked from taking their protest into the streets by police, who were lined up outside the university gate, batons at the ready — a scene repeated at other schools around Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. At a local science and engineering university, three students were reportedly arrested after scuffling with authorities.

What haunts the government is the memory of the starring role students have played in toppling previous leaders at key moments over the last 40 years.

In 1968, students were at the forefront of resistance against the despotic, corrupt regime of President Ayub Khan, one in the long line of generals to rule this country. Despite a repressive security apparatus at his disposal, Khan was forced to step down a year later.

Young people also turned out en masse against Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of Benazir Bhutto, Musharraf’s biggest rival and herself a former premier. The elder Bhutto was ousted from power in 1977, then hanged in 1979.

With those examples in mind, later Pakistani governments launched a campaign to de-politicize college campuses, banning political activity and embargoing student unions.

At the same time, many parents of today’s students are disillusioned veterans of the old movements, soured on politics and intent on steering their children clear of activism.

The result, critics lament, is a student body that largely spends its time comparing designer clothes and electronic gadgets when not in the library studying.

“We aren’t given a chance to know what’s happening politically or out in the wider society,” said Adil Shahzad, a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of the Punjab. “Because of this apathy, we don’t even help somebody dying in the road. This is the kind of indifference that’s being instilled in us.”

Many observers were therefore surprised, and in some cases exhilarated, by the inchoate political rumblings beginning to take form on various campuses, particularly LUMS. Students at the private institution hail from some of Pakistan’s most illustrious and well-to-do families.

“The students of these elite institutions were least expected to speak up,” an editorial in the Dawn newspaper said Sunday. “Now that they have done so, catching the analysts and media on the wrong foot, they show how widespread the anger against Musharraf is.”

It is an anger that Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician, is eager to harness. “This is a whole force that’s untapped,” he said.

Khan, 54, has been on the run since the night the state of emergency was declared, when the police came knocking. He has slept in a different bed every night. During an interview with foreign journalists at a secret safe house, the curtains were drawn to keep out prying eyes.

He is revered as one of his sport’s all-time greats and admired for his charitable work, especially a hospital he set up for poor cancer patients. He drummed up the money for that by motivating young people to go out and fund raise for him, as “mini-Imrans,” he said.

Now Khan hopes they’ll answer his appeal to join him in the streets at the rally he is planning later this week, in spite of the threat of arrest for both them and him.

“I want to get the students out,” he said. “If you have to [make] sacrifices, this is the time. What you cannot do is sit on the fence anymore.”

But practicalities intrude. At LUMS, final exams are scheduled this week. New to such dilemmas, some students are also agonizing over whether it’s worth acting on principle if it means jeopardizing their future.

Sabri, the LUMS senior, is on the verge of graduating and has won a Fulbright scholarship to the United States.

“Our parents say, ‘You have this chance that people would die for. . . . Why are you messing it up now? If you go to jail, if you have a record, would the United States give you a visa?’ ” she said.

Many of her peers continue to remain aloof from politics. But Sabri thinks they can be coaxed out of their shells by two different scenarios: Tf there’s an alternative to the uninspiring choice of national leaders out there now, or to the corrupted spoils system that politics has become; or, on the other hand, if there are no alternatives at all to a bleak, depressing future.

“If they see an avenue open, something to get excited about, they’ll come out then,” Sabri said. “Or they’ll come out when they’re so desperate that there’s no other option.”

 

The Color Khaki

By Tariq Ali

Now each day is fair and balmy,
Everywhere you look, the army.
Ustad Daman (1959)

On 19 September 2001, General Pervaiz Musharraf went on TV to inform the people of Pakistan that their country would be standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States in its bombardment of Afghanistan. Visibly pale, blinking and sweating, he looked like a man who had just signed his own death warrant. The installation of the Taliban regime in Kabul had been the Pakistan Army’s only foreign-policy success. In 1978, the US had famously turned to the country’s military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq when it needed a proxy to manage its jihad against the radical pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan. In what followed, the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence became an army within an army, with much of its budget supplied directly from Washington. It was the ISI that supervised the Taliban’s sweep to power during Benazir Bhutto’s premiership of the mid-nineties; that controlled the infiltration of skilled saboteurs and assassins into Indian-held Kashmir; and that maintained a direct connexion with Osama bin Laden. Zia’s successors could congratulate themselves that their new province in the north-west almost made up for the defection of Bangladesh in 1971.

Now it was time to unravel the gains of the victory: the Taliban protectorate had to be dismantled and bin Laden captured, ‘dead or alive’. But having played such a frontline role in installing fundamentalism in Afghanistan, would the Pakistan Army and the ISI accept the reverse command from their foreign masters, and put themselves in the forefront of the brutal attempt to root it out? Musharraf was clearly nervous but the US Defence Intelligence Agency had not erred. In the final analysis, Pakistan’s generals have always remained loyal to the institution that produced them—and to its international backers—rather than to abstract ideas like democracy, Islam or even Pakistan.

The country’s fifty-five year history has been a series of lengthy duels between general and politician, with civil servants acting as seconds for both sides. Statistics reveal the winner: while elected representatives have run the country for fifteen years, and unaccountable bureaucrats and their tame front men for eleven, the Army has been in power for twenty-nine—leading some to suggest that the green-and-white national flag might be re-coloured khaki. It is a dismal record, but the Pakistan high command has never tolerated interference from civilian politicians for too long. The last elected leader to believe he had the Army firmly under his control, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had to be disabused of the notion. In 1977, on the orders of General Zia—an erstwhile favourite whom Bhutto had promoted over the heads of five, more deserving, superior officers—the prime minister was removed from power and hanged two years later.

After Zia’s sudden death in 1988, power alternated between Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (1988–90; 1993–96) and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League (1990–93; 1997–99). By 1998 it looked as if Nawaz Sharif—probably the country’s most venal politician—was forgetting the lessons of Bhutto’s fall. The rickety economy was facing collapse as the Southeast Asian financial crisis swept the region, exacerbated by US sanctions imposed after the 1998 Indo-Pak nuclear tests (Clinton later intervened to soften these on the grounds of US national-security interests). The Chief of Army Staff, General Karamat, called for a National Security Council to be set up to take charge of the situation, with the Army playing a major role. Nawaz Sharif sacked him in October 1998 and installed Musharraf as COAS instead.

Six months later, under Musharraf’s command, the Pakistan Army launched its Kargil offensive, capturing strategic heights in Indian-held Kashmir. Nawaz Sharif came under immediate US pressure and, in July 1999, ordered the troops to withdraw—snatching diplomatic defeat from the jaws of military victory, in the eyes of the high command. Nawaz Sharif, clearly counting on Washington’s support, tried to instigate moves against Musharraf within the Army, while complaining in public that he had not been consulted about the Kargil move. The following October, while Musharraf was on a visit to Sri Lanka, Pakistan TV announced that the COAS had been sacked. Flying home, his plane was denied permission to land. Either while circling Pakistan airspace with dwindling fuel supplies, or after his final touch-down, Musharraf gave the order for Nawaz Sharif to be put under arrest. Announcing that he had been ‘compelled to act, to prevent the further destabilization of the military’, Musharraf suspended parliament and the constitution, appointed himself the country’s ‘Chief Executive’ and established a governing National Security Council. (The Clinton administration ensured a smoother fate for Nawaz Sharif than Bhutto had endured, whisking him out of prison to enjoy a comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia.)

Liberal applause

Initially, there was some rejoicing both at home and abroad at the Pakistan Army’s fourth coup in as many decades. To the popular delight at getting rid of Nawaz Sharif was added the innovation of a military take-over in the face of apparent White House displeasure. This, coupled with the pseudo-modernist rhetoric of the new ruler, encouraged a wave of amnesia. It was as if the institution that had dominated the country’s political life for so many decades had ceased to exist—or undergone a miraculous transformation. Liberal pundits in New York and Lahore lost their bearings, while in the London Review of Books Anatol Lieven decribed Musharraf’s administration as being ‘the most progressive Pakistan has had in a generation’. The bulk of the citizens were more sceptical—indifferent to the fate of their politicians, and with few illusions as to the character or role of the Army.

Like his uniformed predecessors, Musharraf immediately promised to end corruption, reform the countryside, tax the middle-classes, eradicate poverty, educate the poor and restore real democracy. The Pakistani road to absolutism is always paved with such intentions. Why were so many liberal commentators deceived? Partially it was sheer desperation. In the face of the appalling performance of elected politicians during the nineties, they were ready to grasp at straws. They were also taken in by Musharraf’s rhetoric, replete with admiring references to Kemal Atatürk, and by his relatively untypical socio-cultural background. Unlike most of the military high command, Musharraf was not of Punjabi stock. He had no links with the traditional landed elite that has dominated the country, nor was he on the payroll of a heroin millionaire or close to some tainted industrialist. His family, educated and secular, had left Uttar Pradesh during the Partition of 1947 to find shelter in the Land of the Pure. After her son’s rise to fame, his mother had casually revealed in the course of a newspaper interview that, in the fifties, she had been greatly influenced by progressive intellectuals such as Sajjad Zaheer and Sibte Hassan. She never said that her views had been genetically transmitted to her boy, but desperate people will put their hopes in anything.

Within a few months of Musharraf’s seizure of power, however, there was already a strong indication that nothing substantial would change. The Chief Executive had appointed a friend and colleague, General Amjad, as head of the National Accountability Bureau, charged with rooting out and punishing corrupt officials, politicians and businessmen. Amjad was one of the few senior officers in the Army rumoured to have unpolluted hands. His reputation for ‘playing by the rules’ had made him a maverick, even as a junior officer. One story has it that he refused to allow a general to borrow the mess silver for a private dinner party, despite insistent requests. His colleagues, taken aback at his stuffiness, laughed at him in public while privately according him some grudging respect.

Musharraf’s decision to put him in charge of the NAB had potentially serious consequences. Within a fortnight, Amjad had hired the services of a reputable non-establishment American lawyer, William Pepper, to track down the money spirited abroad by Benazir Bhutto and husband Asif Zardari. Simultaneously, Amjad ordered the arrest of industrialists who had borrowed money from the banks and failed to pay even the interest on it. A list of politicians who had done the same was published in every newspaper. The naming and shaming was punishing psychologically but was insufficient to deal with the cancer. Amjad reportedly told the Chief Executive that, to tackle the problem seriously, it would be necessary to create at least one completely clean institution in the country; only then would civil servants and politicians take notice. But any thorough purge of the Augean stables would have required the arrest of dozens of serving and former generals, admirals and air marshals, long rewarded for services to their country by the chance to engage in large-scale corruption. Musharaf naturally baulked at any such prospect, fearing it would divide and demoralize the top brass and could lead to a break-down in discipline. Once discipline went, the Pakistani military risked becoming little different from a Middle-Eastern or Latin American army where any Johnny, regardless of rank, thought he could seize power. Amjad was quietly shifted sideways, first as a Corps Commander and then as head of the Fauji Foundation, a military honey-pot where his own scruples will certainly be tested. The imprisoned capitalists were released, the shamed politicians heaved a collective sigh of relief and it was, in every sense of the phrase, back to business as usual.

A listing economy

If the removal of Amjad had pleased local capitalism, the appointment of New York banker Shaukat Aziz as Finance Minister endeared Musharraf to the IMF. Pakistan’s economy has long been crippled by exorbitant defence expenditure which, amplified by inadequate tax revenues, has led to sky-rocketing debt-service costs. By 2001, debt and defence amounted to two-thirds of public spending—257bn rupees ($4.2bn) and 149.6bn rupees ($2.5bn) respectively, compared to total tax revenues of 414.2bn rupees ($6.9bn). In a country with one of the worst public education systems in Asia—70 per cent of women, and 41 per cent of men, are officially classified as illiterate—and with health care virtually non-existent for over half the population, a mere 105.1bn rupees ($1.75bn) was left for overall development.

Throughout the nineties, the IMF had scolded civilian governments for failing to keep their restructuring promises. Musharraf’s regime, by contrast, won admiring praise from 1999 onwards for sticking to IMF guidelines ‘despite the hardships imposed on the public by austerity measures’. Impoverishment and desperation in the burgeoning city slums and the countryside—still home to 67.5 per cent of the population—were exacerbated further. Some 56 million Pakistanis, nearly 40 per cent of the population, now live below the poverty line; the number has increased by 15 million since Musharraf seized power. Of Pakistan’s four provinces the Punjab, with around 60 per cent of the population, has continued to dominate economically and politically, with Punjabis filling the upper echelons of the Army and bureaucracy and channelling what development there is to local projects. Sind, with 23 per cent of the population, and Baluchistan (5 per cent) remain starved of funds, water and power supplies, while the North West Frontier’s fortunes have been increasingly tied to the heroin economy.

 

The problem is structural. The economy rests on a narrow production base, heavily dependent on the fallible cotton crop and the low-value-added textile industry; irrigation supplies are deficient, and soil erosion and salinity widespread. More damaging still are the crippling social relations in the countryside. Low productivity in agriculture can only be reversed through the implementation of serious land reforms, but the alliance between khaki state and local landlords makes this virtually impossible. As a recent Economist Intelligence Unit report on Pakistan noted:

Change is hindered not least because the status quo suits the wealthy landowners who dominate the sector, as well as federal and provincial parliaments. Large landowners own 40 per cent of the arable land and control most of the irrigation system. Yet assessments by independent agencies, including the World Bank, show them to be less productive than smallholders. They are also poor taxpayers, heavy borrowers and bad debtors.

The weak economy has been further skewed for decades now by Pakistan’s vast military apparatus. For ‘security reasons’, its costs are never itemized in official statements: a single line records the overall sum. In Pakistan, the power of any elected body to probe into military affairs has always been strictly curtailed. The citizenry remains unaware of how the annual $2.5bn is distributed between the Army (550,000-strong, with two-thousand-plus tanks and two armoured divisions); the Air Force (ten fighter squadrons of forty combat planes each, as well as French and US-made missile systems); and the Navy (ten submarines, eight frigates); let alone what is spent on nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Military Keynesianism

This lack of transparency is extended to the maze of loss-making business enterprises run by the Army. The oldest of these is the Fauji Foundation, established as a charity for retired military personnel in 1889. It has since become a giant conglomerate in its own right with controlling shares in sugar mills, energy, fertilizer, cereals, cement and other industries—combined assets worth 9.8bn rupees. The Army Welfare Trust, set up in 1977 under General Zia’s dictatorship, controls real estate, rice mills, stud farms, pharmaceutical industries, travel agencies, fish farms, six different housing schemes, insurance companies, an aviation outfit and the highly accommodating Askari Commercial Bank, many of whose senior functionaries had earlier served at the discredited Bank of Credit and Commerce International; the AWT’s assets have been valued at 17bn rupees. The Air Force and Navy chiefs also have their own troughs: the Shaheen and Bahria Foundations.

Many of these enterprises have been engaged in corruption, although scandals usually erupt only when civilian businessmen have become too greedy in exploiting the opportunities they offer, or where the fall of a government has exposed its shady deals. Benazir Bhutto’s spouse Asif Zardari was implicated, via an intermediary, in short-changing the Air Force’s Shaheen Foundation in a dubious media venture. In another case, it emerged that a private businessman had bribed senior naval personnel in the process of defrauding the Bahria Foundation over a land-development deal. A lawyer petitioned the Supreme Court to outlaw all use of Army, Navy and Air Force insignia in private enterprise. He demonstrated how the foundations were contravening the Companies Ordinance of 1984, accused them and their partners of collusion and corruption, and pleaded with the Court to outlaw all commercial activities by the armed services. Unable to contest his arguments, the judges dismissed the case on a technicality—thereby revealing their own subordination to the colour khaki.

Contrary to the widely propagated myth that the Army can at least run things efficiently (‘probably the only successful modern institution Pakistan possesses’, according to an admirer in the London Review of Books), a detailed investigation by Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha has recently revealed that most of these businesses are run at a loss, with the generals siphoning off funds from the bloated defence budget to make up the difference. The military are also entirely innocent of modern accounting systems: their books tend to ignore such factors as personnel and utilities costs, and in any case government auditors are warned not to examine them too closely. Meanwhile, their stranglehold over many areas of the economy stifles normal development. In the construction and transport sectors especially, the ability of Army-run companies such as the National Logistics Cell and the Frontier Works Organization to monopolize government contracts, whether under civilian or military regimes, forces smaller companies out of business.

Musharraf’s war on terror

By 2001, as a result of skewed spending, stagnating agricultural and industrial sectors and grotesque military mismanagement, the country was groaning under a burden of a $27bn external public debt. Then came September 11. Mercifully for Washington, the Army was already in power in Pakistan. The Pentagon and the CIA were spared the time and energy needed to organize a new military coup. At such a moment of tension, institutional continuity must have been reassuring. As the B52s roared into the newly won bases in Kyrgyzstan, and secret sites along the Baluchistan border were reactivated for Special Service use, the IMF approved a three-year poverty-reduction loan of $1.3bn and helped reschedule over $12bn in debt—resulting in massive budgetary relief for Pakistan, and allowing its State Bank to build unprecedented foreign-exchange reserves (some $7bn by July 2002). By this time, the IMF had also disbursed soft loans totalling around $400m.

Overnight, Musharraf had become halal in the West and was being fêted by Bush and Blair in the same venues in which Reagan and Thatcher had welcomed Zia and Osama’s friends. For its part, the Army high command was united in the view that the born-again alliance with Washington was a severe blow against the Indian enemy. Pakistan’s civilian elite, too, was in jubilant mood. Now at least they were no longer pariahs. A new imperial war, with their very own Army as the principal proxy and the whole country as a base of operations, meant they were needed once again. The more liberal wing of the elite dreamt of a permanent Pentagon–Musharraf axis that would destroy the hold of Pakistan’s dreaded Islamists forever. Overlooking how many times their illusions had been betrayed in the past, its representatives now travelled to Washington to plead that the region never be left unprotected again. For their part, emissaries from the disgraced politicians Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto became familiar if pathetic figures at Foggy Bottom, pleading endlessly with junior functionaries of the State Department not to trust the Army.

The exact role of the ISI during this period remains unclear. In his 19 September broadcast, Musharraf had hinted that his loyalty to Washington’s war on terror would be rewarded not just with cash but with an American wink at Pakistan’s nuclear and Kashmiri aspirations—‘our critical concerns’, as he put it. As early as November 2001, India was protesting at increased Pakistani-backed infiltration into Kashmir. On 13 December, armed gunmen allegedly linked to the ISI-funded Jaish-e-Mohammad attacked the Indian parliament building in Delhi, killing nine people. With tension rapidly escalating, the two countries mobilized close to a million troops along their common border—a mass militarization that served retrograde political interests on both sides.

Khaki democracy

By this stage, Musharraf’s own popularity had begun to list asymmetrically: the more he was appreciated by the State Department the less inclined he felt to undertake any serious measures at home—leave alone implementing the ‘true democracy’ he had promised. Instead, like Generals Ayub and Zia before him, the Chief Executive now attempted to make himself impregnable. Temporarily discarding his uniform, he dressed up in native gear, complete with a particularly stupid turban, and launched his political career at a ‘public’ rally, consisting of peasant-serfs bussed into a large field by a friendly landlord in Sind. The referendum is a time-honoured weapon of dictators in search of legitimacy; Musharraf’s decision to rig the April 2002 plebiscite in his favour disillusioned even his most ardent liberal supporters. The majority of the electorate stayed at home while government employees, soldiers and serfs trooped to the polls and transformed the CE into the country’s elected President.

The next step was equally predictable. The one thing every dictator needs in order to provide his regime with a civilian façade is a political party. Not a problem, Musharraf’s sycophants assured him: a handy instrument could easily be fashioned from the debris of the past. Like an out-of-work courtesan, the Muslim League—the country’s foundational party—was given a shower, dusted with powder and provided with a new wig, before being displayed to the growing queue of potential suitors. Ayub’s pet name for his party was the Convention Muslim League; Zia preferred the Pakistan Muslim League, and allowed the Sharif family to manage it on his behalf. Musharraf, having ditched the Sharifs, needed a new name. A timeserver suggested the Quaid-i-Azam Muslim League and so it came about that this old-new entity entered the lists as the General’s Party, in the General’s Election of October 2002. Its personnel were hardly unfamiliar, consisting of bandwagon careerists of every stripe. In the countryside, these were still the old landed gentry, eager to please the new ruler; in the towns, local notables who had accrued vast sums of money, often through illegal means, and become procurers of power and influence. Where in the past a father or uncle had supported Ayub or Zia, now the son or son-in-law was eager to act as a prop for Musharraf. In the face of mass apathy the bureaucracy, past masters in the art of electoral manipulation, set about ensuring the required outcome.

The results of the October election were much closer than anticipated. Despite the low turnout—under 20 per cent, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan—and skilful ballot-rigging, the official Muslim League (Q) failed to secure an overall majority in the National Assembly, winning 115 seats out of 324, mainly in its traditional bastion of the Punjab. Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party secured eighty seats—again, largely in their Sindhi heartland—and the rump of the Muslim League that had remained loyal to Nawaz Sharif took nineteen. It was the Islamists who scored a really big hit. With 66 seats, their united front Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA—Unified Action Conference) gained the highest ever complement that Islamist parliamentarians had ever achieved in the history of this Islamic Republic, sweeping the Pashto-speaking regions along the Afghan border. Their colourful turbans and long beards literally changed the complexion of the National Assembly. True, they were helped by the first-past-the-post system inherited from the mother of parliaments; but Thatcher and Blair had both benefited from this without too many complaints. The MMA also emerged as the largest political force at provincial level in the North West Frontier, and a dominant influence in Baluchistan: the provincial Governments in Peshawar and Quetta are currently presided over by Islamist Chief Ministers.

Power brokers acting on Musharraf’s behalf finally managed to confect a federal coalition that would exclude the MMA. A block of PPP members was detached from the parent organization with the inducement of senior cabinet posts. A Baluch landlord and hockey enthusiast, Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, who had been responsible for the brutal repression of peasants in 1977—ten were killed in clashes with the police—was anointed as Musharraf’s new Prime Minister. Two decades before, Jamali had slaved to achieve the same position under General Zia, but the latter was not keen on hockey and preferred to employ the cricket-loving Nawaz Sharif as his factotum. Given that 70 per cent of Musharraf’s new Cabinet, including Jamali, had featured prominently on General Amjad’s list of corrupt politicians, the widespread public cynicism was hardly a surprise. Far from regenerating democracy, the khaki election has bared the sordid reality of Pakistani politics; a large majority feels both disenfranchised and alienated from those who govern on its behalf.

The election campaign itself had been largely lacklustre, if not totally apolitical. The mainstream parties had no differences on ideological or policy grounds, either on the domestic or the international level. The People’s Party had long abandoned its populism. Benazir Bhutto, wanted in Pakistan on charges of corruption, attempted to rule from her base in Dubai via her chosen proxy, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, a Pir-cum-landlord from Sind. Politician and religious divine rolled into one, Fahim is hardly a social liberal. Uniquely, even for Pakistan, all his four brothers-in-law are the Koran. Like the different Muslim Leagues on offer, the PPP was concerned with power solely as a means to offer patronage and enlarge its clientele.

Maulana Diesel

The Islamist alliance, for its part, had no disagreements with the other parties on the IMF prescriptions for the economy—there is, after all, a neoliberal reading of the Koran—but campaigned vigorously in defence of Islamic laws and against the US presence in the region. There was hardly a day without a newspaper headline highlighting MMA leader Maulana Fazl ur Rehman’s hostility to the American troops: ‘Fazl Demands Expulsion of US Commandos from Tribal Areas’, ‘West Bent on Initiating Civilizations Clash: Fazl’, ‘Fazl Says Sovereignty Mortgaged to US’, ‘Fazl Demands Halt to US Army Operations’, ‘Fazl Urges US Troops Withdrawal’, ‘MMA Vows to Block Hunt for al-Qaeda’, etc. Much of this was pure bluster, but it proved helpful electorally. The Maulana himself admitted that it was not religion that won him new support, but his foreign-policy stance. In discussions with Musharraf, he declared his willingness to establish a coalition with himself as prime minister. When the General pointed out that his anti-Americanism posed a serious problem, the cleric is reported to have replied: ‘Don’t worry about that now. We’ve worked with the Americans in the past. Make me Prime Minister and I’ll sort everything out.’ The offer was declined.

The MMA is a six-party alliance, with the Jamaat-Ulema-Islam—Party of Islamic Scholars—and the Jamaat-i-Islami, or Islamist Party, its two main pillars. Both JUI and JI have been active for decades, mainly in the frontier regions of the NWFP and Baluchistan. Traditionally, the JUI considered itself anti-imperialist and was involved in coalition governments with radical secular parties during the seventies, under the leadership of Maulana Mufti Mahmood, Fazl’s father. It had always been hostile to the JI—regarding it as an instrument of the US and Saudi Embassies in Islamabad—and had opposed the military dictatorships of both Ayub and Zia; Mufti Mahmood had attended Peace Conferences in both Moscow and Beijing. His own death came just a few years before the collapse of the Communist world, and his son inherited the party. As a student Fazl had dabbled in poetry, writing verses in both Pashto and Urdu, and publicly declaring that the leftist Faiz Ahmed Faiz was his favourite poet. After his father’s death he continued the old man’s policies, working closely with Benazir Bhutto’s government in the mid-nineties. But whereas the farthest old Mufti had gone was to collect his dollar per diems at international conferences, the son, as befitted the new times, was more market-oriented. In return for his active support for Ms Bhutto he succeeded in procuring a lucrative diesel franchise, which covered large parts of the country—and, after the Pak-Taliban victory, most of Afghanistan as well; it earned him the sobriquet of Maulana Diesel.

The bearded, rotund Diesel soon became a great favourite of Benazir’s Interior Minister General Naseerullah Babar, architect of the Taliban triumph in Kabul. Fazl’s political, ideological and commercial links with the Taliban leadership always remained strong, enabling him to outflank his local JI rivals, whose pawn Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—much fêted by Reagan and Thatcher in the eighties—had been effectively sidelined by the new student clerics in Kabul. After the US assault on Afghanistan, the bulk of the Taliban melted into the hills along the Pakistani border. There many of the returnees swelled the ranks of the JUI and other Islamist parties, and the JUI took the lead in organizing mass rallies against the ‘foreign occupiers’. It was Fazl who realized that, given the first-past-the-post system, the Islamists could be wiped out electorally if they remained divided. The Alliance was his initiative and he was duly elected its Secretary-General even though, at 49, he is fifteen years younger than his main coalition rival, Qazi Hussain Ahmed.

Zia’s orphans

Qazi Hussain’s election as Amir of the Jamaat-i-Islami marked a generational shift in an organization that had remained under the control of its founder Maulana Maudoodi and his deputy, Mian Tufail, since its origin in 1941. Where the JUI was populist, had support in the villages and collaborated with the Left, the JI was built on the Leninist-cadre model. Its recruits were literate and carefully vetted, most of them students from urban petty-bourgeois backgrounds. Many had been tested in the campus struggles of the sixties and seventies. During the semi-insurrection of 1968–69 that had toppled the Ayub dictatorship, the Left had dominated the action committees that led the fight. To support the JI in those days required a real commitment to the cause. Its motto: religion is our politics and politics our religion.

Qazi Hussain, a leader of the JI student faction at Islamia College in Peshawar, spent his formative years in battles—some of them physical—against the Left. He joined the parent body in 1970, when the JI’s branch in East Pakistan collaborated fully with the Army in its attempt to destroy the Bengali nation. Their cadres in Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet compiled lists of ‘undesirables’ for military intelligence, which were then used to eliminate the opposition. ‘Chairman Mao supports us, not you’, was a taunt they regularly hurled at the Bengali Left of the time. China and the US both supported the Pakistan Army’s brutal assault on its own people, aimed at nullifying the dramatic 1970 election victory by the Bengali-nationalist Awami League. The Army’s onslaught backfired badly. Bangladesh is the direct outcome of a military refusal to recognize the will of the electorate. In the circumstances, the Army’s self-image as the only institution that holds the country together is somewhat grotesque.

The JI’s role in the 1971 break up of Pakistan had the effect of drawing it closer to the intelligence apparatuses of the rump state. When Zia seized power six years later and joined the US jihad in Afghanistan, the JI became the main ideological prop of the military regime. Qazi Hussain defended the new turn; his skills were noted and he began his rise through the JI apparatus. A former geography lecturer, he now abandoned the low-paid chores of the academy to open a Popular Medical Store in Peshawar’s Soekarno Square. The shop was not just an informal meeting place for local JI cadres but a successful commercial operation, soon to be joined by a Popular Medical Laboratory and a Popular X-Ray Clinic. It now became clear that he also aspired to a more popular Jamaat-i-Islami. Hussein knew that it was not easy for a vanguard party that had always prided itself on its elite character to re-brand and market itself in a more accessible style; in politics, as in business, there is always an element of risk when you decide to expand. His decision to join the 2002 Islamist alliance must have been as carefully calculated as the trim of his pure-white regulation beard (in marked contrast to the wilder salt-and-pepper variety sported by Maulana Diesel).

A rhetorical shift?

Incapable of serious opposition to either Musharraf or his Washington backers, the MMA concentrates its fire against women. It has declared its intention to ban cable-TV channels and co-education, and to institute the shari‘a in the provinces under its control. Given the disaster that befell a more extreme version of this programme in Afghanistan, this could be mere rhetoric designed to keep their followers inebriated while embarrassing the occupant of President’s House. The MMA’s triumph may or may not have been aided by some independent campaigning from sections of the ISI but it has undoubtedly put pressure on the regime to release more of the Islamist militants imprisoned when Musharraf joined the ‘war on terror’; some of the diehard Sunni terrorists responsible for appalling atrocities against minority Shia and Christian communities had already been freed before the election.

More striking was the MMA’s success, in November 2002, in dragooning virtually the entire National Assembly—there were two exceptions—to observe a minute’s silence in memory of the ‘martyred Aimal Kansi’, whose body had been returned to Pakistan after his execution in a US Federal penitentiary for the murder of two CIA officials in Langley, Virginia in 1993. Earlier, some 70,000 people had attended Kansi’s funeral prayers in Quetta, also organized by the MMA. Why did the National Assembly agree to mourn him? Pakistan has not outlawed capital punishment, so it could hardly be seen as a liberal protest. The simple answer is that the MMA’s success has worried its opponents and they are hoping to defeat the Islamists on their own ground. Bhutto père made a similar error in the seventies and paid the price.

Rural intifada

A striking example of the political parties’ unwillingness to defend even the most elementary needs of the population can be seen in their reaction to the two-year struggle that has been waged by tenants working on state farms leased to the Army. Rarely has an event spotlighted the bankruptcy of traditional politics in Pakistan so vividly. The British colonial administration had first leased what were then known as ‘Crown lands’ in 1908, setting up military farms to produce subsidized grain and dairy products for the British Indian Army. After Partition, management of the farms—scattered around Lahore, Okara, Sahiwal, Khanewal, Sargodha and Multan, mainly in the Southern Punjab—passed to the Ministry of Defence and the provincial government. The Army controlled 26,274 acres, the remaining 32,000 acres were leased to the Punjab Seed Corporation. The tenant families who work the farms are the direct descendants of those first taken there in 1908. Forty per cent of them are Christians: mosques and churches function side by side. The religious parties have failed miserably in these regions and the peasants have, since the seventies, tended to vote for the People’s Party. No longer.

The de facto merger of Army and state on virtually every level has meant that the generals act here as a collective landlord, the largest in the country, determining the living conditions of just under a million tenants. The functionaries of the khaki state regularly bullied and cheated their tenants: they were denied permission to build brick homes; the women were molested; and management approval had to be obtained—and paid for—to get electrification for the villages or build schools and roads. Bribery was institutionalized, and the tenants suffered growing debt burdens. The unconcealed purpose of this ruthless exploitation was to drive the tenants off the land so it could be divided into private landholdings for serving and retired generals and brigadiers. The rationale of the prospective new owners was that, when the time came, they would re-employ the evicted tenants as farm-serfs: it would be better for everyone. The aim of such ‘modernization’—in Okara and Sargodha as in Rio Grande do Sul—was, of course, deregulation, privatization and the destruction of tenant solidarity.

The authorities, khaki and civilian, had been attempting to loosen the grip of the tenants over the land by offering short-term contracts and replacing battai—share-cropping arrangements that allowed tenants to keep half of what they produce—by cash-rents. Till now, the colonial administration’s Punjab Tenancy Act of 1887 has safeguarded their rights: male tenants and their direct descendants who had cultivated the land for more than two generations had the right of permanent occupancy. It was illegal to eject them from the land. Despite the misery inflicted on their families, the tenants defied all attempts to divide them along religious lines and remained united in a single body: the Anjuman-i-Muzaireen Punjab, or Punjab Tenants Organization, set up in 1996.

In June 2000, without any consultations, the khaki landlords announced the conversion from a system of shared-produce to cash-rents. The tenants were outraged. Every evening there were informal assemblies to discuss the resistance, involving the entire village—women and children were to play a leading role in this rural intifada. Angered by the daily harassment, the tenants refused merely to defend the status quo and retaliated by demanding complete ownership of the land that their families had worked for decades. Their slogan, Malkiyat ya Maut—‘Ownership or Death’—echoed that of similar struggles in other continents. The first public protest took place on 7 October 2000: a four-hour sit-in on the lawn in front of the Deputy Commissioner’s office in Okara—the second most-powerful post-colonial bureaucrat in the city—by a thousand tenants protesting against the new scheme. Two days later, the Deputy Director of the military farms rang the local police chief and informed him that the tenants were threatening violence and had, in some villages, prevented the managers from removing (i.e. pilfering) wood. The Frontier Constabulary and Elite Force Rangers—their main function to prevent smuggling over the Indian border—arrived in the village and began roughing up the tenants. As women and children saw their fathers, brothers and husbands abused and kicked, they poured out of their homes to hurl stones at the police. A number of tenant activists were arrested.

As news of the confrontation spread to neighbouring villages, the protests began to grow. Attempts by the authorities to divide or buy off tenants were a failure. In the spring of 2002 the Rangers opened fire on protesting tenants: some were killed. Organizers were arrested and beaten up in full view of their families. Women—Christian and Muslim—marched to Okara, carrying the wooden bats they use to beat the clothes as they wash them in the river, and surrounded the police station. Nothing like this had been seen before. The Army realized that, short of a massacre, this could be a protracted struggle. Ironically, the large presence of Christians excluded a blood-bath; it might annoy their co-religionist in the White House. On 9 June 2002, a thousand armed police and rangers surrounded the village of Pirowal. The siege lasted for seven hours, but the police failed to capture the organizers, despite threats to burn the entire cotton crop of the village. They had underestimated the power of peasant solidarity.

In a sharply worded editorial the Karachi daily, Dawn, commented on 24 June 2002:

To win back the confidence of the restive and distraught farmers, the police force sent to harass and terrorize them should be withdrawn immediately and any ill-conceived notion of teaching them a ‘lesson’ must be abandoned. Cases should be registered against government and farm management officials who ordered the police action that led to deaths . . . Once these confidence-building measures have been taken, the government should sit down and negotiate with the tenants, perhaps through the Punjab Tenants Organization, on how to grant the ownership rights due to them.

The generals ignored the advice of a newspaper that has usually been sympathetic to their needs. Instead, Musharraf’s new status as the trusted ally of the West was used against the PTO, and its non-violent leaders charged under the new ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation—just as the real terrorists, most of whom have, at one time or another, been on the payroll of the military intelligence services, were being released. Despite the fact that Pakistan has been a regular port of call for Western media pundits over the last year—the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman preening himself on his intimate knowledge of frontier conditions—none of the visiting journalists deemed this struggle worthy of attention. It distracted from the only story they wanted to tell: fundamentalism. In fact, of course, mullahs are most effectively marginalized when people see them as irrelevant to their real needs—as the PTO farmers have shown. During the campaign of the last two years, church and mosque have alternated as their meeting places. In a discussion with two of their leaders—Dr Christopher John, the PTO senior vice-president, and Younis Iqbal, general secretary—in Lahore in December 2002, both stressed that religious divisions had played no part whatsoever in their conflict with the state. At their meetings, Iqbal said, ‘You couldn’t tell the Muslims and the Christians apart’.

Heroin economy

The only serious breach in the wall dividing an English-educated civilian and military elite—with access to Western universities, medical schools and military academies—from the rest of the population, illiterate or semi-literate (largely, but not exclusively, the product of the madrassahs), has been the one made by the ‘black economy’. Over the last two decades, the cultivation of poppy orchards in Afghanistan and the NWFP has produced a fine crop of heroin millionaires. Many are of peasant or urban petty-bourgeois stock, but their money has funded every political party and thoroughly penetrated the armed forces: cash, kalashnikovs and Pajeros—Japanese Range Rovers—have been distributed in all directions. In return, the humble heroin merchants have been loaded with honours and public displays of affection. As good fathers, they made sure their children were properly educated and became part of the elite. The upward mobility of this layer has slightly altered the composition of the property-owning fraction, without changing much else. Money remains the great leveller in the upper reaches of society, while the price of urban land has reached astronomical heights: the price of an apartment in the Defence Colony of Karachi or the fashionable Parade Ground in Lahore does not compare badly with New York or Berlin.

During the nineties, heroin had been despatched to Europe and North America via two routes. The first led along the Grand Trunk Road from Peshawar down to Karachi and thence in container ships to Mediterranean ports. The second, policed by the Russian mafia, went from Afghanistan via Central Asia and Russia to the Balkans, and then to the capitals of the West. The defeat of the Taliban after 9.11 has brought about the virtual collapse of the Pakistani heroin networks. The Northern Alliance now monopolizes the trade and it is their old Russian friends who prosper, while Kosovo has become the main distribution point for most of the world. The Pakistani economy has only withstood the blow because of the cash that has smoothed the path of the American troops.

Since the country’s foundation in 1947, the Pakistan Army has been the spinal chord of the state apparatus. The weakness of political institutions as the state emerged from British rule, the absence of a bourgeoisie and domination by a rural elite—a parasitical excrescence of the worst sort—led to an over-reliance on the civilian bureaucracy and the Army. Since there was no real consent for landlord rule, force—both direct and indirect—had to be brought into play. Both institutions had been created by the colonial power, which formed them in its mold. Whereas the civil service was soon mired in corruption, the Army held out for a little longer. The impression was created that, while individual officers might be susceptible to bribes—they were, after all, human—the institution itself was clean.

Two long periods of martial law destroyed that image. General Ayub Khan’s family became extremely wealthy during his rule from 1958 to 1969, as did some of his collaborators. And between 1977 and 1989, at least two of General Zia’s Corps Commanders were centrally involved in the heroin trade and gun-running. Corruption on a lesser scale spread through the junior ranks. The failure to crack down on these practices was hardly accidental. The generals adopted a materialist approach to the problem, seeing it as an easy way to preserve the unity of the Army. The loot could not be shared equally since that might promote egalitarian tendencies among the colonels and majors; but at the same time, the subalterns could not be denied some protection money for their crucial role in ‘protecting’ Pakistan.

Military threat?

Does Pakistan really need such a large defence establishment? The khaki ideologues insist that ever since Partition there has been a permanent military threat from India. The notion, as I have argued elsewhere, is ludicrous. On all three occasions on which the two countries have gone to war—twice over Kashmir, and Bangladesh—the initiative was taken by Pakistan. The Indian Army could have taken West Pakistan in 1971, but was not allowed to cross the international border by its political leaders. Today, with both countries in possession of nuclear delivery systems, it is obvious that neither the Kashmir issue nor any other dispute can be resolved through war. Even an India dominated by Hindu chauvinism and saffron demagogues is hardly likely to attempt a conquest of Pakistan. Who would it benefit? It might be different if Pakistan had limitless quantities of oil lying just beneath the surface. In fact, there is no rationale behind the fear of India. It serves only one purpose: the maintenance of the huge military-industrial complex that sprawls across the country and sustains khaki hegemony.

In truth, the threat to the Army’s predominance has always come from its own people. The only time the old Pakistan was genuinely united was during the 1969 uprising from below that saw students and workers in Dhaka and Karachi, Chittagong and Lahore, topple the dictatorship of Field Marshal Ayub Khan. The Army never forgave its Bengali citizens this act of treachery, and embarked on a bloodbath when they proceeded to elect the leaders of their choice. It is worth stressing the point, glossed over in so many recent accounts, that the Army which demands such vast sums to preserve the state actually provoked its break-up in 1971.

The Army is now the only ruling institution; its domination of the country is complete. How long can this be sustained? Till now it has managed to preserve the command structure inherited from the British: Pakistani generals often boast of its inviolability when compared to the Middle East or Latin America. But a great deal has changed since the sixties. The officer corps is no longer the exclusive domain of the landed gentry—a majority of officers come from urban backgrounds and are subject to the same influences and pressures as their civilian peers. Privileges have kept them loyal, but the processes that destroy politicians are already at work. Whereas in the recent past it was Nawaz Sharif and his brother, or Benazir Bhutto and her husband, who demanded kickbacks before making deals, it is now General Musharraf’s office that sanctions key projects.

Of course, high—even stratospheric—levels of corruption are no bar to longevity, if a military regime has sufficiently intimidated its population and enjoys solid enough support in Washington, as the Suharto regime in Indonesia testifies. Can Musharraf look forward to this sort of reign? The fate of his dictatorship is likely to depend on the interaction of three main forces. First will be the degree of internal cohesion of the Army itself. Historically, it has never split—vertically or horizontally—and its discipline in following a 180-degree turn in policy towards Afghanistan, whatever the sweeteners that have accompanied it, has so far been impressive. It is not impossible that one day some patriotic officer might deliver the country of its latest tyrant, as Zia was once mysteriously sent on his way to Gehenna; but for the minute, such an ending appears improbable. Having weathered the humiliation of its abandonment of the Taliban, the high command looks capable of brazening out any further acts of obeisance to orders from the Pentagon.

What of parliamentary opposition to military rule? Vexing though the upshot of October’s election, for all its fraud, proved to be for Musharraf, the parties that dominate the political landscape in Pakistan offer little hope of rebellion against him. The cringing opportunism of the Bhutto and Sharif clans knows few limits. The Islamist front ensconced in Peshawar and Quetta is noisier, but not more principled—cash and perquisites quickly stilling most of its protests. Popular discontent remains massive, but lacks any effective channels of national expression. It would be good to think that their performances in office had discredited the PPP and Sharif’s clique forever, but experience suggests that should the regime at any point start to crack, there is little to prevent these phoenixes of sleaze from arising once more, in the absence of any more progressive alternatives.

Finally, there is the American overlord itself. The Musharraf regime cannot aspire to play the same role as regional satrap that Zia once enjoyed. Pakistan has been ousted as imperial instrument in Afghanistan, and checked from compensating with renewed incursions in Kashmir. But if Islamabad has been forced into a more passive posture along its northern borders, its strategic importance for the US has, if anything, increased. For Washington has now made a huge political investment in the creation of a puppet regime in Kabul, to be guarded by US troops ‘for years to come’, in the words of General Tommy Franks—not to speak of its continuing hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. Pakistan is a vital flank in the pursuit of both objectives, and its top brass can look forward to the kind of lavish emoluments, public and private, that the Thai military received for their decades of collusion with the American war in Indochina. Still, Washington is pragmatic and knows that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were just as serviceable agents of its designs in Kabul as Zia himself. Should he falter domestically, Musharraf will be ditched without sentiment by the suzerain. The Pax Americana can wage war with any number of proxies. It will take an uprising on the scale of 1969 to shake Pakistan free of them.

 

Jemima Khan leads protest against Musharraf

 

Imran Khan @ LUMS

 

Musharraf’s throne

 

Bhutto’s Persona Raises Distrust, as Well as Hope

By Jane Perlez – NY Times

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 10 — A day after she was barricaded in her home, surrounded by police officers and barbed wire, the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was quickly back to a world to which she is more accustomed on Saturday.

By the evening Ms. Bhutto was guest of honor at a high-flying diplomatic reception in the Parliament building here, greeting ambassadors and exchanging nods before television cameras, even as anxieties about the future of Pakistan, now entering its second week of de facto martial law, intensified at home and abroad.

If the sudden turnabout seemed incongruous with the troubles that have befallen her nation, it was telling of just how fluid the crisis here remains — and of how easily Ms. Bhutto moves from rallying her supporters on the streets to soaking up the trappings of power and ceremony with which she has long been familiar.

Such paradoxes have only added to the skepticism that swirls around her here, less than a month after her return from eight years in exile to avoid corruption charges. And it has added to the speculation that, tense as the situation remains, she and her old nemesis, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, may yet have enough ambition in common to run Pakistan together.

Ms. Bhutto, 54, returned to Pakistan to present herself as the answer to the nation’s troubles: a tribune of democracy in a state that has been under military rule for eight years, and the leader of the country’s largest opposition political party, founded by her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, one of Pakistan’s most flamboyant and democratically inclined prime ministers.

But her record in power, and the dance of veils she has deftly performed since her return — one moment standing up to General Musharraf, then next seeming to accommodate him, and never quite revealing her actual intentions — has stirred as much distrust as hope among Pakistanis.

A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she brings the backing of Washington and London, where she impresses with her political lineage, her considerable charm and her persona as a female Muslim leader.

But with these accomplishments, Ms. Bhutto also brings controversy, and a legacy among Pakistanis as a polarizing figure who during her two turbulent tenures as prime minister, first from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996, often acted imperiously and impulsively.

She also faces deep questions about her personal probity in public office, which have resulted in corruption cases against her in Switzerland, Spain and Britain, as well as in Pakistan.

Ms. Bhutto has long seen herself as the inheritor of her father’s mantle, her colleagues say, and she has talked often about how he encouraged her to study the lives of legendary female leaders ranging from Indira Gandhi to Joan of Arc.

Following the idea of big ambition, Ms. Bhutto calls herself chairperson for life of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, a seemingly odd title in an organization based on democratic ideals and one she has acknowledged quarreling over with her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, in the early 1990s.

Saturday night at the diplomatic reception, Ms. Bhutto showed how she could aggrandize. Three million people came out to greet her in Karachi on her return last month, she said, calling it Pakistan’s “most historic” rally. In fact, crowd estimates were closer to 200,000, many of them provincial party members who had received small amounts of money to make the trip.

It is such flourishes that lead to questioning in Pakistan about the strength of her democratic ideals in practice, and a certain distrust, particularly amid signs of back-room deal-making with General Musharraf, the military ruler she is said to oppose.

“She believes she is the chosen one, that she is the daughter of Bhutto and everything else is secondary,” said Feisal Naqvi, a corporate lawyer in Lahore who knows Ms. Bhutto.

When Ms. Bhutto was re-elected to a second term as Prime Minister, her style of government combined both the traditional and the modern, said Zafar Rathore, a senior civil servant at the time.

But her view of the role of government differed little from the classic notion in Pakistan that the state was the preserve of the ruler who dished out favors to constituents and colleagues, he recalled.

As secretary of interior, responsible for the Pakistani police force, Mr. Rathore, who is now retired, said he tried to get an appointment with Ms. Bhutto to explain the need for accountability in the force. He was always rebuffed, he said.

Finally, when he was seated next to her in a small meeting, he said to her, “I’ve been waiting to see you,” he recounted. “Instantaneously, she said: ‘I am very busy, what do you want. I’ll order it right now.’“

She could not understand that a civil servant might want to talk about policies, he said. Instead, he said, “she understood that when all civil servants have access to the sovereign, they want to ask for something.”

Today Ms. Bhutto still rules the party with an iron hand, jealously guarding her position, even while leading the party in absentia for nearly a decade.

While Ms. Bhutto has managed to maintain much of her freedom of movement this week, her biggest rival in the party, Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers’ movement against General Musharraf, was jailed on the first night of the emergency rule.

Mr. Ahsan is a Cambridge University-educated lawyer who served in her father’s cabinet, and then hers, and he defended Ms. Bhutto in a series of corruption cases in the early 1990s.

But in an illustration of Ms. Bhutto’s attitude to competition, he was quickly frozen out by Ms. Bhutto after he was introduced around Washington last year as a possible counterbalance to General Musharraf, senior members of the party said.

Mr. Ahsan’s wife, Bushra Ahsan, said Ms. Bhutto, a frequent e-mailer who is addicted to her Blackberry, failed to congratulate her husband when he won the case to reinstate the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in July.

Both men have spearheaded the resistance to General Musharraf’s military rule this year at great personal risk.

When Mr. Ahsan won election as the leader of the Supreme Court Bar Association this month, again he heard nothing from Ms. Bhutto, Ms. Ahsan said. “She has not shown any approval of my husband,” Ms. Ahsan said.

Members of her party who have rallied around Ms. Bhutto on her return argue that she has attributes in Pakistan’s sparse political landscape that make her the best choice against General Musharraf. Chief among them, they say, is sheer determination.

“I’ve tried to suggest to her that Musharraf is not willing to share power,” said Syeda Abida Hussain, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington. “If he can dodge the world, why can’t he dodge you?” Ms. Hussain said she asked Ms. Bhutto.

But in returning to Pakistan, Ms. Bhutto believed that it was possible to join General Musharraf in some kind of transition to democracy, she said.

Of Ms. Bhutto’s personal qualities, Ms. Hussain said: “I see her as a vulnerable, hurt person. She’s a chilly, imperial person. She’s firm.”

In the last few months, as she has prepared her comeback, Ms. Bhutto has attended a swirl of public and private events, including a black-tie dinner for 150 at the Royal Air Force Club in London, and she has sought to bring her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, back into the public fold.

Ms. Bhutto’s marriage to Mr. Zardari was arranged by her mother, a fact that Ms. Bhutto has often said was easily explained, even for a modern, highly educated Pakistani woman.

To be acceptable to the Pakistani public as a politician she could not be a single woman, and what was the difference, she has asked, between such a marriage and computer dating?

Ms. Hussain, the former ambassador, described Mr. Zardari as “a warm-hearted fool,” who lacked Ms. Bhutto’s education. He is known for his love of polo and other perquisites of the good life like fine clothes, expensive restaurants, homes in Dubai and London, and an apartment in New York.

He was minister of investment in Ms. Bhutto’s second government. And it was from that perch that he made many of the deals that have haunted the couple in the courts, said a former prosecutor general at the National Accountability Court, Farooq Adam Khan, who in 2000 headed the body set up to investigate corruption among public officials.

In an interview, he said the court believed the couple had illegally taken $1.5 billion from the state. It is a figure that Ms. Bhutto has vigorously contested.

Indeed, one of Ms. Bhutto’s main objectives in seeking to return to power is to restore the reputation of her husband, who was jailed for eight years in Pakistan, said Abdullah Riar, a former senator in the Pakistani Parliament and a former colleague of Ms. Bhutto’s.

“She told me, ‘Time will prove he is the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan,’” Mr. Riar said.

One of Ms. Bhutto’s informal advisers is a longtime friend, Peter W. Galbraith, a former senior staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former American ambassador to Croatia.

Mr. Galbraith said he and Ms. Bhutto believed they first met in 1962 when they were children: he the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, the American ambassador to India; she the daughter of the future Pakistani prime minister. Mr. Galbraith’s father was accompanying Jacqueline Kennedy to a horse show in Lahore.

They met again at Harvard, where Mr. Galbraith remembers Ms. Bhutto arriving as a prim 16-year-old fresh from a Karachi convent who liked to bake cakes.

Cohabitation — with Ms. Bhutto as prime minister and General Musharraf as president — made a lot of sense for Ms. Bhutto and the Bush administration before last week, Mr. Galbraith said.

As prime minister, Ms. Bhutto would not be able to control the military, the institution that mattered most in Pakistan, he said. But she would confer legitimacy to a government that has seen its authority steadily erode under General Musharraf.

By this weekend, with General Musharraf giving little sign of when he would let up on his emergency powers, Ms. Bhutto was straddling a fine line, Mr. Galbraith said.

“Now,” he said, “Benazir can only cohabit with him at great cost to her legitimacy.”

 

MY FEARS FOR IMRAN, BY JEMIMA

By Stuart Winter – Sunday Express  

JEMIMA Khan spoke of her fears for ex-husband Imran last night as she led a protest against Pakistan’s military regime.

The heiress joined demonstrators outside Downing Street to call for the ending of the martial law imposed by besieged president General Pervez Musharraf.

 

Ms Khan, who was married to the Pakistan cricket-legend-turned-politician for a decade before their divorce in 2004, has only had “sporadic contact” with her ex-husband since the state of emergency was declared last Saturday.

 

Opposition politician Imran was forced to escape house arrest and go underground within hours of Musharraf’s crackdown on all forms of dissent.

 

Before the protest in Whitehall, Ms Khan said: “He is moving around constantly and cannot use one number. I have no way of contacting him. I wait for him to contact me and our two children.

 

“I worry what will happen if they catch him. According to reports they are using torture in some of the jails.