glad & gloomy

CHAOS IN THE BACKYARD;
EMERGENCY IN PAKISTAN
CAUSES, REASONS, AND THE AFTERMATH


“Now, I will be famous”.
Wrote, Robert Hawkins, in the suicide note, before randomly shooting eight people in a mall. Albeit, Hawkins had no relations with Pakistan’s President Parvez Musharraf. They might, even had not heard of each other, before. But their deeds shook the two hemisphere, at the same point of time. Ironically, between them, only one would live to see the world agonizing over his debacle, and justify the reason, that led to this. It’s no puzzle, who survived Hawkins or Musharraf? While the former succumbed to self caused wounds, the later addressed the nation of Pakistan, on the night of November 3, urging it’s countrymen, to remain calm, while their rights are being snatched away by the Government, for the third time, in the short history of sixty years.
"I suspect that Pakistan's sovereignty is in danger unless timely action is taken. Extremists are roaming around freely in the country, and they are not scared of law-enforcement agencies. Kindly understand the criticality of the situation in Pakistan and around Pakistan. Pakistan is on the verge of destabilisation. Inaction at this moment is suicide for Pakistan and I cannot allow this country to commit suicide," said General Musharraf, in the national broadcast. “Therefore emergency is necessary to curb a rise in extremism in Pakistan.” He concluded.
Neither, Musharaff look deterrent, while declaring the emergency, nor his compatriots seem to be apprehensive about it. They were like rabbits, waiting to be hunted. Pak media created a big fuss, a week earlier, when they flashed on the television screens, that Musharraf is having a high profile meeting with his officials, that may result in emergency. While that did not happen, an air of uncertainty clouded the nation for next fourteen days. It finally rained on the evening of November 3, when the media forecast came true, and all Pakistan news networks, except government PTV were pulled of the air, Pakistan Supreme Court Judge Iftikhar Chaudhary was taken into custody and troops entered most of the government buildings.
Two weeks after he brought in the state of emergency and suspended the Constitution, thus virtually imposing martial law, Musharraf continued to defend his decision as the only course available to him “in the best interests of Pakistan”. His first steps after imposing the emergency were to dismiss all the judges of the higher judiciary; invite some to take the oath under a newly promulgated provisional constitutional order; lock up top lawyers, civil rights activists and other political opponents; and ban private television channels, eventually shutting down two of them. But, according to him, all this did not derail democracy. Instead, it helped prevent the Supreme Court from derailing democracy in Pakistan.
At first the rumor arose, which even reached Capitol Hill, that President Musharraf was deposed by his own army. But soon, when Musharraf came on PTV, and declared to the Pakistan and the world that for the third time he is dissolving the constitution and implementing the emergency, he even crossed the limit of paranoia, of his dictating predecessors. He became, the first reigning dictator to implement the Martial law. The previous generals, followed the traditional dogma; they first take army under their confidence, then oust the ruling democratic government and at last declare themselves, the ruler of the people.
But, Musharraf, the non believer, decided to do the unprecedented. He declared emergency, during his own reign. And it was not an impulsive decision, it was a well planned rationale choice, taken after much consideration.
He had to take this action because the judges were threatening to frustrate his political push for democracy, with their “confrontational” attitude towards him. Their judgments had left the government and law administration officials “demoralized and paralyzed” in the “war against terror”, and the “terrorists encouraged”. He held the judiciary responsible for worsening the law and order situation by ordering the release of terror suspects picked up by the intelligence agencies and also during the Lal Masjid crisis in Islamabad. He blamed the media, which he had “freed and liberated”, for reporting “untruths” and “distortions” and said they needed lessons in responsibility and that was why some channels had to be banned.
Now that the troublesome judges – “the source of the problem” – had been sacked and placed under house arrest, everything could go ahead as planned. He would get sworn in as President for his new term as soon the new-look Supreme Court gave him the go-ahead, stepping down as the army chief before he takes the oath of office. This he expects to happen by the end of November. The National Assembly finished its term on November 15 and elections are to be held, on schedule, in the first week of January 2008. Meanwhile, the war on terror could continue uninterrupted by the judiciary.
For Musharraf, this neat political calendar proves that the emergency has “put democracy back on the rails”. The Pakistan ruler has often said that his plan was to “introduce” democratic rule in Pakistan in three guided phases: the first phase was from October 1999, when he seized power after ousting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup, up to 2002, “when I was in absolute control”. The second phase was from 2002, when a government came in after elections and he took office as President, playing a “supervisory” role while remaining the Army chief. The third phase, which according to him will begin when he takes oath as the civilian President, will mark the beginning of the transition to full democratic rule.
But as Pakistan braces for elections under emergency rule and a relentless crackdown on Musharraf’s political opponents, there are few takers for this story in the country or in the international community. The emergency is described as Musharraf’s “second coup”, this time against the judiciary to pre-empt a verdict against him. Even schoolchildren say that he imposed the emergency only to hang on to power and not, as he claimed, because the country was in danger of being taken over by extremists owing to some Supreme Court judgments. People are demanding to know how, if deteriorating law and order situation due to the terrorist threat was one of the reasons for the emergency, the Army could make a bargain to release militants in exchange for the release of soldiers held hostage by pro-Taliban tribal people in the frontier areas even as they arrested moderate lawyers and civil rights activists. They ask why the army had taken so long to launch an operation against Mullah Fazlullah, a radical preacher in Swat in the North West Frontier Province, until his private army took control of large swathes of territory. They compare it to the six-month inaction in the case of Lal Masjid.
Musharraf has said that the emergency will help in conducting free and fair parliamentary elections, but no one is buying that. Prime Minister Muhammedmian Soomro, who heads the caretaker government, is a member of the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid), the ruling party since 2002, and is hardly seen as neutral.
Initially it looked as if Musharraf, despite his unpopularity in Pakistan, would still be able to come up trumps on his gamble of imposing the emergency. The reaction from the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and its leader Benazir Bhutto was muted. Exiled to Jeddah, Nawaz Sharif could hardly be expected to whip up a storm against Musharraf, especially as his party had shown its inability to collect a respectable enough crowd even for his September 10 aborted return to Pakistan. The only resistance came from lawyers and civil society activists. But the police crackdown on protests meant fewer and fewer people were coming out on the streets to protest. Those who could mobilise crowds had been jailed on day one of the emergency. Their list included prominent lawyers such as Aitzaz Ahsan and office-bearers of bar associations countrywide. The government also placed Asma Jahangir, the prominent human rights activist, under house arrest.
Musharraf also brought in an amendment to the Army Act empowering military courts to try civilians for a range of offences from sedition, terrorism and the making of statements that could instigate “public mischief”. He denied that it was aimed at silencing critics and claimed that it was meant only to strengthen the government’s hands against terrorism. But it was condemned by the opposition parties and international human rights organizations as a reaffirmation that the emergency was indeed martial law.

TROUBLE IN THE TRIGGER; ARMY, WAZIRSTAN & RED MOSQUE FIASCO

Internal and external troubles in army observers claim that, another reason which prompted the Premier to take such drastic step. During the last few months, military personnel have increasingly become targets of ambushes and kidnappings. The headless bodies of several kidnapped soldiers have been found, with messages from the militants warning the army to pull out of the area.
In some of the latest fighting on Monday, the army reported 50 troops missing when a supply convoy to one of the garrisons in the north eastern part of the district was ambushed. Local reports say all 50 were killed and their bodies set on fire. The army says only 25 were killed. In August, militants in the neighbouring South Waziristan district kidnapped nearly 300 troops, including at least nine officers, who are yet to be released.
Significantly, many of these troops are reported to have surrendered without firing a shot.
This has landed the government in a tight spot. One way of restoring the morale of the troops would be to go in with a clearly defined surgical operation, having a set time-frame.
This could be followed by a prompt and efficient programme of economic aid and political reform aimed at winning friends and isolating the "enemies". But the government is arguably already past that stage, mainly due to its early policy of protecting the Taleban and their "foreign guests". For months after the country joined the US-led "war on terror" in 2001, North and South Waziristan districts continued to serve as a transit point for Taleban, Arab and other foreign fighters escaping US military operations in Afghanistan.


When it came under pressure from Western powers to do something about this, the government decided to send in the army. That sidelined the tribal administration which had the experience of governing the tribal areas over the years. As a result, the army suffered disastrous losses in 2004. Soon after, it signed a string of peace treaties leaving the militants in virtual control of the region.
However, it did occasionally act on specific US intelligence to destroy the odd target, or claimed to have carried out a strike that was actually conducted by the US inside Pakistani territory. Two such strikes in the tribal regions of Bajaur and South Waziristan in late 2006 and early 2007 enraged militant leaders who vowed revenge. In July, the army's storming of the radical Red Mosque in the country's capital, Islamabad, added fuel to the fire. More than 200 people were killed in the three attacks.
The government described the occupants of the Red Mosque as militants, but they and their political allies said they were either religious students or innocent civilians.
In any event, the militants unilaterally cancelled their peace agreements with the government and started targeting the army and the police.
Over the years, Pakistan says it has deployed more than 90,000 troops in the tribal areas, the bulk of them in Waziristan. Following peace deals with the militants, these troops were pulled out of check posts and were either deployed on the border with Afghanistan, or stationed in scores of fortified military posts dating from the British period.
Troops in North Waziristan are supplied from two roads, one coming in from the east and another from the north. Those in South Waziristan only have one supply road, which links Wana with Dera Ismail Khan, a city in the south of the North West Frontier Province. Once inside the tribal region, these supplies are transported via a network of roads and dirt tracks that connect various military posts.

It is these roads and tracks that are most vulnerable. Over the last couple of months, no supply convoy has traversed the region without the escort of a helicopter gunship.
But combat troops are reluctant to face the militants on the ground, apparently because their knowledge of the area is limited and the "enemy" is indistinguishable from the civilian population. Earlier this year, the army succeeded in evicting foreign fighters from Wana by supporting a Taleban commander, Maulvi Nazir.
But in Mir Ali, another major hub of foreign militants linked to al-Qaeda, there is no evidence that a similar strategy is going to be repeated. The Pakistani military is well and truly bogged down.




THE NEO LIBERAL AMERICANS & THEIR IDEALS OF DEMOCRACY

The Americans have tended to use their crucial financial and military support selectively against democratic governments. The pattern is unmistakably clear. The first large-scale American food and military aid started to pour into Pakistan in late 1953, months after the dismissal of its first civilian government. It continued for a decade as Pakistan under a military regime joined various US-sponsored defence pacts against the Soviet Union.
The US started having problems with Pakistan when an elected government came to power in 1972, but poured billions of dollars into the country when another military regime took over in 1977 and agreed to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Similarly, while the elected governments that followed during 1988-99 had to live with a decade of US sanctions, the military regime of Gen Musharraf, that ousted the last civilian government in 1999, remains a 'well supplied' ally in the US' 'war on terror'.
In the days immediately after the recent coup, Washington gave out mixed signals, expressing disapproval of the emergency but making it clear that it was still throwing its weight behind Musharraf, “a trusted ally” in the “war on terror”, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior figures in the Bush administration described him. But by the end of the second week of the emergency, very different signals were emerging from Musharraf’s most important international ally.
The George Bush administration backed a Benazir-Musharraf alliance as the best course for a stable Pakistan and, by extension, for its “war on terror”. But with that idea looking shaky, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte arrived in Islamabad with a “strong message” for President Musharraf to lift the emergency immediately, step down as Army chief, remove the restrictions on the media and release all political prisoners. He was also expected to convey that the U.S. was evaluating the aid to Pakistan in the light of the emergency, even as Benazir demanded that Washington must threaten Musharraf with the suspension of financial assistance. It is not clear whether her new confrontationist position is a result of her reading of the tea leaves in Washington and sensing that the Bush administration is now resigned to change, or whether the U.S. stills sets store by a Benazir-Musharraf power-sharing deal and sent Negroponte to explore whether that is still in the realm of the possible.


As elections approach, exiled leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, both former prime ministers, threaten to return to the country with the express aim of effecting a regime change.
But Gen Musharraf, like his predecessors, is fighting to keep his military office and his special powers under the constitution to dismiss governments and parliaments.
Thus, the story of Pakistan continues to be one of despotic regimes using religious extremists and external support to keep the secular democratic forces at bay; and when these forces do assert themselves, to tie them down in legal constraints that are designed to ensure their failure.
It is the story of a society that has been going round in circles for the last 60 years.




A NATION BEHIND BARS

Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhary: Sacked from the Supreme Court and under house arrest in Islamabad, as are 11 other judges of the court who did not take the oath under the Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO). The approach to his villa in Judges Enclave, a hillock with a scenic view of the Marghalla hills, has been blocked with barricades and barbed wire. Chaudhary can still communicate with the outside world and has sporadically sent out messages to the legal community to resist the emergency and boycott the judges who have taken the oath under the PCO.

Aitzaz Ahsan, Munir Malik, Ali Ahmed Kurd, Tariq Mehmood, are few of many prominent lawyers who have been arrested.

Asma Jahangir: Has been freed from house arrest. chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and a Supreme Court lawyer, she is known internationally for her three-decades of struggle against injustices in Pakistan against women, children and members of minority communities.
Jahangir’s battle on behalf of the people who have disappeared since 2001, allegedly after being picked up by intelligence agencies as terror suspects, has been a finger in the government’s eye. She praised Musharraf for bringing changes to the draconian Hudood laws, which inflicted misery on thousands of women, but said the changes were insufficient.


Politicians

Javed Hashmi: The acting president of Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (N), Hashmi seemed never too far away from arrest. In August, in one of his first anti-Musharraf judgments after being reinstated, Iftikhar Chaudhary freed Hashmi, who had been behind bars since 2003, convicted of treason for trying to incite a mutiny in the Pakistan Army.
His release gave the PML(N) some leadership in the absence of the exiled Nawaz Sharif. Jail did not mellow this parliamentarian. In his very first speech on the floor of the National Assembly after his release, he lashed out at the military for being involved in politics.
In the months since then, Hashmi was in and out of jail as police cracked down on political activists.
Imran Khan: The former cricketer and leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf escaped house arrest in Lahore Robin Hood style, by scaling two – in his reckoning – 10-foot-high walls. But he was captured by the police 10 days later when he emerged from hiding to lead a students’ rally at the Punjab University campus.
Students of the Islami Jamiat-e-Taliba (IJT), the youth wing of Imran’s apparent ally, the Jamaat-i-Islami, herded him into a building on campus, locked him up, and handed him to the police.
It was an abrupt end to his attempt to mobilise students against the regime, but his arrest could actually help him gain a constituency among the youth who are angry with the IJT for helping the regime.

GOODBYE GENERAL!

On November 28, after relentless poking from bureaucrats, people and media, in and outside the Pakistan, Musharraf finally gave up his Army uniform and nominated another US adored, General Ashfaq Kayani as the new chief of staff.
Observers of the Pakistan military are divided on this, why Musharraf, decided to quit now and nominated Kayani?
According to one school of thought, articulated in a recent editorial in The Friday Times, Musharraf went to the extent of naming his successor as Army chief, and continues to insist that he will shed his uniform to become a civilian President, only because he is confident that the army will never turn against him. If he suspected otherwise, he would not have done this. Nor would he have risked imposing a virtual martial law, in defiance of opinion at home and abroad.
The Army’s loyalty to him is said to spring from its deep apprehension that handing over power to politicians can only worsen the dangers that Pakistan is facing to its integrity from Islamist, Al Qaeda-inspired militants who already control considerable territory inside Pakistan and a simmering insurgency in Balochistan while the presence of U.S.-led coalition troops on the Afghan border constitutes a threat to the country’s sovereignty. This school argues that the military wants a civilian that it can trust, and Musharraf is their candidate for a powerful President. Musharraf himself said in an interview that the Army had such faith in his leadership that it was impossible that it would move against him.
But another school of thought believes that if the Army begins to sense that its reputation as an institution is becoming damaged through Musharraf, it may act to save itself. In this, the role of General Ashfaq Kayani, who is the new Vice-Chief of the Army Staff and the named successor to Musharraf when he steps down as the Army chief, is said to be crucial.
Kayani owes his rise in the Army to Musharraf, but he is also believed to be close to Benazir, whom he served as military secretary during her first term as Prime Minister. His rapport with Benazir is said to be one reason that Musharraf named him his successor, to prepare the ground for a power-sharing deal with Benazir, and ensure a smooth working relationship between the troika of the President, the army chief and the Prime Minister. Kayani was also one of the principal negotiators with Benazir – he was then heading the Inter-Services Intelligence – as the two sides hammered out the deal.


THE NEW DAWN?

With all the major news channel in the dump and his political opponents under arrest, on November 29, Musharraf, took the presidential oath for another five-year term. It was administered by the new Chief Justice Abdul Hamid Dogar.
With elections on January 8, and formation of a new alliance among the political heavyweights (PML-N, PPP, TIJ et al) against Musharraf, the Pakistan is impatiently waiting for a transition. That could take it to the era of democracy. But the world has it’s qualms.
A recent study, by an American agency concluded Pakistan as a ‘Failed State’. With the sixty years of failed experiments with democracy, the analysis deduced that It has inherited this problem. It is the facing a dilemma in choosing a path to govern; whether to be an Islamic emirate or a budding democracy. It tried to opt for the third option, a hybrid of the two. As the history observes, it failed drastically. It resulted in coups, corruption and a nation on the verge of collapse.
While it is impossible to conduce, there is still hope for this nation. The recent protests against the autocratic control, were noted in almost every section of Pakistan’s society. Lawyers, who are in vanguard, have instigated a fire, that had seem to hijacked by the fundamentalists at one point of time. But as the, dynamics of the scenario, project the veritable thought would prevail. I would be better for everyone, for India, for the world and more prominently, for a nation, that has been called a ‘failed state.