The Real Issue Facing Pakistan

The elections in Pakistan are not about winning but rigging. The strategic decision by the two parties to contest the election was to use the forum to mobilize their core constituencies in to action after the elections results are announced. Nawaz Sharif is concentrating on the urban Punjab, where the dissatisfaction with the current regime runs high. The Punjabi cities have shown their opposition to Musharaf and his Quisling League during the restoration of the Chief Justice campaign by the Lawyers. Now it seems that Nawaz is banking on the same audiences and is just pumping them up for the movement after the elections. Benazir too is working in Sindhi cities. Her campaign is paying lots of attention to the cities around the National Highways. She perhaps sees those cities as the focal point of agitation in Sindh.

Would this mobilization be enough to confront the Musharaf regime after the elections results are announced? The PPP has a network of dedicated workers in both Sindh and Punjab, but over the years, she along with her party leaders had shown an utter lack of organizing skills. Nawaz in the past just relied on workers that are mostly apolitical to garner support during the elections. His party has no ideological base nor had shown any skills in developing a core group of workers for agitation politics.

Nawaz knows that his chances of leading Pakistan in the presence of Musharaf are next to nothing. Musharaf might have made commitment with the US to allow Benazir to form the government after the elections. It is doubtful that he is going to rig the elections in favor of Benazir. She might lead the largest party after the elections without enough support to form the government all by herself. She will need to seek support from other smaller parties. After the elections, her choices would be the Quisling League with some seats and the PMA of Fazlur Rehman.

The odds of Nawaz Sharif winning enough seats to help Benazir in forming the Government are zero, Zilch. The real rigging of elections will take place against his party and he may end up with handful of seats in some cities of Punjab. The ANP and the Baloch parties will win some seats but chances are they will stay away from the national political drama and would concentrate on the local issues and perhaps provincial governments.

Would the realignment after the elections resolve major political issues in Pakistan?

Would the elections move Pakistan forward or further move Pakistan towards a point where conflicting ideologies would take hard lines and attempt to resolve the election disputes through force?

The issue in Pakistan is not the battle between the fundamentalists and the moderate sections of the population. As the things are unfolding, it is clear that the moderate in Pakistan have a complete control over the public opinion and they form the majority in Pakistan.

The real battle in Pakistan is between the various factions of the army and its intelligence agencies on one side and the people of Pakistan on the other side.

The Pak army is the only supporter of the fundamentalism in Pakistan. Without the support from the Pakistan army, the fundamentalists would not find any suicide bombers in the country. The Pak army as a whole has bought in to the Jihadi ideology and even the officers that are from the better educated sections of the Punjab population believe that the war that Islamists, the Taliban supporters, and the other Jihadi organizations are waging against the moderation and the US occupation of Afghanistan is justified.

The army officers’ sympathies lie with the Jihadi elements rather than the moderate population of Pakistan. They to a certain extent, reflect the anti US sentiments in Punjab. However, the civilian population considers its local and national issues before the international or the religious issues. The Pak army officers have no such compulsions. Immediately after joining the army they are cutoff from the local issues and even though they reflect the public sentiments in their political and ideological outlook, they tend to stay in the cocoon that the Army culture creates for its officers and conscripts.

The Armies, the world over, tend to be conservative and the brand of Nationalism that they buy into is all about force and resolving issues through muscle. The conservatism coupled with the religious fervor that has been indoctrinated in to the Pakistan army culture, has turned the Pak army into the biggest supporter of the Jihadi organizations.

The religious parties in Pakistan don’t believe in democracy and the rule of law. The largest Islamic ideological political party in Pakistan, the Jamaat Islami, is not a believer of the election process. The JI believes that to establish Nizame Islam it needs to get support from the army. The Jamaat may not have enough active political support in the army but it ideological grip on the army is deep.

Three recent events in Pakistan have shown how reluctant the army is in dealing with the clearly anti State elements of Islamic fundamentalism.

1) The Lal Masjid affair

The Lal Masjid was clearly a product of the army intelligence agencies and the top army brass was reluctant to deal with the Lal Masjid militants until enough pressure was brought down by the media and the public opinion. The Lal Masjid affair had made the army rule in Pakistan a laughingstock and the army had to deal with that situation. Then the army dealt with the issue in a brutal manner even though many less aggressive solutions were available to the army. This perhaps was done on purpose to motivate the Jihadi elements to protest to overshadow the lawyer’s movement in Pakistan. The army failed to achieve that results was due mainly to the awareness in the moderate political sections in the country of the true army motives behind brutally suppressing the militants in the Lal Masjid.

2) The Swat Valley affair.

Since 2002, the army allowed the valley to become a sanctuary for some fundamentalists that had always allied with the Pakistan intelligence agencies. The core groups of the fundamentalist do not believe in any political process, they do not believe in the rule of law, and they don’t believe in any law other than the Islamic laws. Incidentally, most of these fundamentalists are not educated enough in the Islamic Laws also. So they promote local cultural taboos as Islamic laws. That helps them garner support in the local population. Where do they get finances or the arms supply is well known.

Their historical relations with the various intelligence agencies, in and outside of the Pak army, have helped them thrust to prominence in Swat, an extremely backward area in the country. The Swat valley was already known for supplying a good number of Pesh Imams to both Pakistani and Indian masjids. The Madrassah that provided Pesh Imam all over the country, were turned in to militant providers for the benefit of narrow goals that the army supports. The army only took half hearted measures to quell the insurgency in Swat. It is still reluctant to take a decisive action and book the leaders of that insurgency, thus leaving room for them to come back after the civilian and the media pressure subsides.

3) The insurgency in the Northern tribal areas.

The Pak army, and before the partition, the British army had strong relations in the tribal areas. The tribal Pathan might have fought the British forces in the late 19th century but in the ensuing years they had cooperated with the British army in exchange of monetary benefits. That cooperation continued after the independence. Ironically, the settled areas in NWFP, over the years, had shown more resistance to first the British rule and then against the army rule in Pakistan. While the tribes were benefiting from special relationship with the Pakistan army, the Pathan in NWFP were at the forefront of the democracy and the civil rights struggles in Pakistan. The fall of Ayub Khan was instigated by a Pathan who attempted to take Ayub’s life in Peshawar thus removing the veil on invulnerability from the army rule in Pakistan.

The army used its strong relations with the tribes to mount an Anti Afghanistan movement in the tribal areas and most of the recruits that initially fought in Afghanistan during the late 70s and the early 80s, were not afghan but the Pathan from the tribal areas.

A good portion of the army conscripts come from the tribal areas and many army pensioners live in the tribal areas. The army and the political officers in the tribal area maintain a string of agents and paid intelligence informers there. The strong historical relations and the complete sway over the political and military events during the 1977-2001 period shows the extraordinary control the Pakistan army and the Intelligence agencies had over the area.

The questions are: why the army lost that control in a relatively short period of time? Was this a deliberate act or the army support, which was cultivated for decades, just dried up in a matter of months?

All pointers suggest that the break from the army was deliberately designed to initially help the US prolong its occupation of Afghanistan. The tribal support of afghani Taliban was a deliberate act to keep the real issues that the afghan people faced buried under the perceived Taliban threat. The tribal support of the Taliban has allowed the foreign forces to extend their stay in that country and it has helped the Pak army get enormous support from the US and helped the US in its regional strategic goals.

A cursory look at the main characters in the tribal insurgency would show their strong links with the army in the past. Evidently, those links still persist and the army is not willing to take any decisive actions there to maintain its own agents in prominence.

We are now in the 21st century and not in the 19th century that these insurgents cannot be handled in a relative short period of time. Both the US/NATO armies and the Pak army are capable of taking them out within a matter of couple of months. How hard it is to cut off their support lines when both the Pak army and the US army control the immediate geographical areas surrounding the tribal belt? Unless, of course, the sources of their support are within the Pak army itself!

In Pakistan, the Pak army is the issue and without any substantial maneuver to remove the army from the power, political issues in Pakistan would remain unresolved. The Pak army through its unrelated support of the fundamentalism has brought disgrace to the peace loving and moderate people of Pakistan. The people of Pakistan and the Politicians will have to do more to resolve the army issue in the near future.