Love him or hate him: Musharraf not a tyrant

The emotion evoked by the propagation of Pervez Musharraf as a "tyrant" lies somewhere in between amusing and unfortunate. Objectively-speaking, he can hardly be considered a “tyrant� or a “despot�. In a country where there have been a slew of tyrannies throughout its brief history and civilian governments have effectively proven to be oppressive dictatorships and marked with extremely high levels of corruption, the reality is that Musharraf's time may have been a much better breath of fresh air.

Musharraf was far from being an ideal leader; he committed many mistakes, which he alluded to in his final speech: his (further) relinquishing of whatever shreds of autonomy Pakistan had remaining to the US government following 9/11; the behavior of the Pakistan army resembling a foreign military in places like Wana, Waziristan with brutal killings of Pakistani villagers; demolishing mosques in Islamabad [1]; allowing the US military to bomb religious seminaries and villages and killing dozens of young students [2], farmers and labourers [3]; the massacre at Islamabad's Red Mosque; handing over countless people to be put into American secret gulags without charges or (fair) trials; letting Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan take the fall for the leaked nuclear information allegations; and his mistreatment of the Chief Justice of Pakistan are just a few key incidents that many people consider to be erroneous. However, his greatest mistake may have been to pardon the massive charges against the very criminals who have forced him out of office today.

The question remains that would matters have been different had Nawaz Sharif or Benazir Bhutto been in power instead? History suggests that perhaps things would have been even worse for Pakistanis with someone else at the helm - particularly the above-mentioned proven criminals. For every "mistake" Musharraf has made, these two have made more: the systematic incarceration, torture and slaughter of thousands of political activists in urban Sindh in the early 1990's by both; terrorizing any type of opposition through hired goons; mistreatment of the then Chief Justice and contempt of Pakistan laws in general; mishandling of foreign affairs, including the Kargil conflict in 1999; and the rape of unimaginable amounts of wealth from the country are just a few. If either of these two individuals were put in the same difficult situation as Mr. Musharraf following 9/11, the outcome may have been that all of Musharraf’s “mistakes� would have been committed at an even greater level and the Pakistani population would have been eating grass for food while the leadership erected a few more edifices and palaces in Dubai and Europe.

Musharraf did not hide his secular outlook - but neither did the country's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, whose idea was never for an Islamic state, but for a Muslim one: a country where Muslims would be in charge of the state of affairs but the population would be heterogeneous and free to practice whatever faith they adhered to. In Pakistani politics, many of the "religious" alternatives are no better; hiding behind their beards and turbans are politicians with similar selfish ambitions as most of their secular counterparts.

At least Musharraf was not a thief. He suffered from a "Messiah" complex, in which none can save the country but him - but he did not hoard his people's money. He was sincere to Pakistan in the context of his own mindset and thinking (when someone publicly states that he idolizes men like Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" and Ayub Khan, how can things be expected to be different?). All Pakistani cities were given their fair share of funds for development and there indeed was development for public use as opposed to private bank accounts (unlike Nawaz Sharif, during whose time development was only occurring in Lahore and Islamabad despite the majority of the entire country's wealth coming from Karachi). The press largely remained free and protests were not met with gunfire as have been seen with previous governments in anti-injustice rallies in cities like Karachi and Hyderabad.

All in all, in comparison with the real despots and tyrants littering the Arab world and elsewhere, Musharraf was a baby with a milk bottle in his hands on numerous levels. He never properly exercised his potential authority as an unquestioned military dictator. He allowed for more freedom of the people than previous governments. It is this "leniency" and relatively soft attitude, along with the veritable underlying racist attitudes towards his minority ethnic background, that has contributed to Mr. Musharraf resigning with the threat of facing impeachment charges.

No "tyrant" – particularly a battle-hardened military veteran – can be forced to resign so civilly, as was done with Pervez Musharraf. In his resignation, Musharraf proved much more than that which is heaped at him. Love him or hate him, it is a fact that must be acknowledged.