At war with the law: Pakistan faces the consequences of a power grab

Five days after he declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, the president and army chief, remains defiant. Unprecedented diplomatic pressure had by last night failed to persuade him to restore the constitution and set the country back on the path to elections.

As pro-democracy protests gather momentum, fears are growing that the 64-year-old commando’s initial plan for a three- to four-week “surgical martial law” may fall victim to events, resulting in a lengthy period of dictatorship. That would confound western hopes that his military regime might acquire a veneer of popular legitimacy via a power-sharing arrangement with Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister.

Far from enhancing Pakistan’s contribution to the “global war on terror”, the state of emergency could weaken it further, the US and its allies fear. It would delay polls that offer the prospect of giving a much-needed civilian face to an increasingly unpopular regime and divert military resources.

Such concerns were given substance on Tuesday. As thousands of paramilitaries fanned out across Lahore, Karachi and other cities to arrest lawyers and human rights activists demanding the restoration of democracy, armed Islamists in North-West Frontier province lost no time in moving in to fill the vacuum.

Jihadist fighters loyal to Maulana Fazlullah, also known as “Mullah Radio” for his penchant for broadcasting three-hour sermons via a private FM station, seized control of Madyan, a town in the north-west’s picturesque Swat valley, once a favourite destination for honeymooning couples. Mr Fazlullah’s men, emboldened by their capture of the nearby towns of Matta and Khawazakhela, scared off 40 para­militaries who, in a by now familiar pattern, surrendered their base and weapons without even firing a shot. It was the latest humiliating defeat for the army in what was its first big confrontation with pro-Taliban militants outside the federally administered tribal areas.

The loss of Madyan came only two days after the government, in an even more damaging blow to the military’s prestige, freed 25 militants in exchange for 213 army personnel who had been held hostage for more than two months in Waziristan, the centre of violence in the tribal areas. Some of the freed militants had been convicted by an anti-terrorism court. The swap brought an end to one of the most embarrassing episodes in the army’s history. But it came at a high cost to the self-image of an organisation that has long prided itself on being the country’s sole functioning institution.

Western diplomats say the military setbacks illustrate how Gen Musharraf’s protracted struggle to hold on to power is proving a costly distraction from the fight against pro-Taliban insurgents. “It has been very difficult to get his attention for quite some time,” says one.

Moreover, the pattern of mass surrenders is a worrying indication of a serious malaise in a US-funded fighting force that is of critical importance to the west’s ability to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. While the 92,000 Pakistani troops deployed along the Afghan border may not be mutinous, their will to fight against fellow-Muslims in the tribal areas, and now also in much of northern Pakistan, is ever more in question.

Granted an audience at the president’s palace on Constitution Avenue on Monday morning, several of the 100 or so members of the international diplomatic corps confronted Gen Musharraf, demanding that he explain how deploying thousands of troops in Lahore and Karachi to arrest secular, progressive Pakistanis would contribute to the battle against extremism.

“It is a real setback because things were all moving forward in accordance with the timetable for him to take off his uniform by November 15, in keeping with the January deadline for free and fair elections,” says one western diplomat in Islamabad. “But all of that has now come to a screeching halt.”

Asked by Robert Brinkley, the UK high commissioner, whether he intended to keep his pledge to step down as army chief by next Thursday and hold elections on schedule, Gen Musharraf provided only slender reassurance. It remained his intention to take those steps, he is said to have responded, but the timing could no longer be guaranteed.

Politicians close to the president have been giving out mixed signals. Senior figures in the pro-Musharraf ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q) party hinted that martial law would last another two or three weeks. Shaukat Aziz, the prime minister, said on Monday that elections would be held as scheduled – a day after he suggested that they might be delayed for a year.

One diplomat described Gen Musharraf as “confused”, a man who had lost the strategic clarity of his first years in office. When he seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999, the general presented himself as the country’s version of Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, and was in turn largely welcomed. Many were disillusioned with years of unstable civilian governments with reputations for corruption. The matter-of-fact army chief was credited with reining in some of the worst excesses of venal politicians and with overseeing an expanding economy and a more liberal Pakistani society.

Today, it is a different story. Less than one-third of urban Pakistanis support Gen Musharraf’s leadership, according to a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll conducted at the end of September. Pashtuns in North-West Frontier province are overwhelmingly hostile, with most seeing the counter-insurgency as a war of choice waged against fellow-Muslims by a Punjabi-dominated officer class in hock to infidel American paymasters. “Pakistan’s army has traditionally been seen as a people-friendly army, one that never fired on its own people, which is why martial law has in the past been welcomed,” says Zafar Nawaz Jaspal, a strategic affairs analyst and professor at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University.

That is decreasingly the case. “The fighting in the tribal areas is having a very bad impact on the institution of the army,” says Shireen Mazari, director-general of the Institute for Strategic Studies Islamabad, a think-tank. “The antagonism between the civilian and the military is increasing immensely. Soldiers are returning from the tribal areas saying, ‘we’re not going to kill our Muslim brothers’. And now, to make things worse, we’re taking forces away so that they can be deployed in the cities against protesters and as guards of all the private homes of people under house arrest that have become sub-jails. This is no way to fight a war on terror.”

“Any professional army would have sleepless nights if that number of soldiers defected without a fight,” says Fakhr Imam, a senior figure in Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s party and a former speaker of the lower house of parliament. “Armies don’t lay down their weapons with that ease. Their heart is not in this fight at all. Musharraf’s agenda to the west is one thing but the reality on the ground is something else. Creeping Talibanisation is occurring not just in the tribal areas but has engulfed much of the North-West Frontier province and there’s great sympathy for it. Anti-Americanism is sweeping through the Pashtun community in the NWFP.”

In his sermons, Mr Fazlullah, who heads Tehrik Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi, an outlawed jihadist group that has sent hundreds of Pakistani fighters to battle against coalition and Nato forces in Afghanistan, rails against a litany of evils, including barbers’ shops, polio campaigns and female education. Although he is a devotee of FM radio, he detests television, preaching that the heavenly reward for smashing one television set is equivalent to that for killing two Jews.

Combating his message, and that of dozens of other preachers like him, is now the principal challenge facing moderate Pakistanis and countries such as the US with a stake in Pakistan’s survival as a moderate Islamic democracy.

Gen Musharraf’s vicious clampdown on progressive, secular Pakistanis, which has seen civil society luminaries such as Asma Jahangir, a United Nations special rapporteur for human rights, put under house arrest, is making it much harder for Ms Bhutto to enter into a power-sharing agreement with the army chief. Although she has been more restrained than other opposition politicians in her criticism of Gen Musharraf, she has nonetheless been compelled to salvage what remains of her own credibility by publicly ruling out meeting the general or holding any further talks with him.

“If Gen Musharraf wants to defuse the crisis as soon as possible, then there must be constitutional revival and the nation must be assured of the national election dates,” Ms Bhutto said on Wednesdayay. “There must also be a date for him to resign as army chief. These are our demands and we see it as the only way to defuse the current situation.”

Although public gatherings have been banned, Ms Bhutto, who narrowly survived a suicide attack in Karachi last month, said the party would hold a march on the capital next Tuesday to put pressure on Gen Musharraf to quit the army.

Abida Hussain, a close adviser of Ms Bhutto’s, says the attempt by the PPP leader to make a “transition” to democracy has been scuppered by the emergency. “In the wake of the re­instatement of the chief justice in July, the Pakistan political community split into the transitioning school [of Ms Bhutto] and the transforming school [of Nawaz Sharif, another former prime minister]. The PPP thought it would be much more easy to transition to democracy with Musharraf, as he was on his knees, than with whoever might succeed him if he were forced out . . . Her attempt to make a transition has aborted. She is now seeking to gather the political community to make a common front that mobilises the people to get rid of Musharraf.”

The army chief told diplomats on Monday that his weekend imposition of a state of emergency was the “most difficult decision of my life”. But his reasoning left many representatives of foreign governments unimpressed. Whereas his first coup, in October 1999, targeted a Sharif administration widely seen as corrupt, Saturday’s suspension of the constitution and announcement of de facto martial law was aimed primarily at muzzling the judiciary. Above all, he made clear that he was motivated by a desire to rid himself of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary, the supreme court chief justice he had tried to sack in March and who went on to become the lightning rod for a broader pro-democracy movement.

One person present described Gen Musharraf’s presentation to the diplomatic corps as a “rant against Chaudhary” that was astonishing in its violence. The army chief barely mentioned the war on terror. Another said: “Ninety-six per cent of the justification was about judicial interference. He genuinely believed the supreme court was going to block his re-election as president and was therefore putting his survival at stake. And his personal survival, in his mind and myth, is now one and the same as the survival of Pakistan, which is why it proved impossible for the US and others to dissuade him from imposing a state of emergency for a second time.”

By swearing in a raft of pliable supreme court justices over the weekend and consigning Mr Chaudhary to house arrest, Gen Musharraf aimed to shield himself from future constitutional challenges. A shrunken court bench headed by newly installed chief justice Abdul Hameed Dogar on Tuesday overturned Mr Chaudhary’s last decision, which had declared the state of emergency as unconstitutional.

“The order is set aside and declared void, quorum non judice [without jurisdiction] and passed without lawful authority,” the court held – suggesting that the days of an independent senior judiciary are over for now.

If Gen Musharraf feels confident that this is indeed the case, the way would in theory be clear for him to move into the role of a civilian president and then hold elections sometime next year that could see Ms Bhutto emerge as prime minister. The court would also by then have thrown out challenges to the presidential waiver of corruption cases filed in 1985-1999, a decree rushed through by Gen Musharraf at the insistence of Ms Bhutto, whom it principally benefits.

It is noteworthy that the international community, anxious to see a power-sharing arrangement between the army chief and the PPP leader materialise in the new year, is not pushing for the reinstatement of Mr Chaudhary.

Even as their governments publicly pile on pressure and threaten to review their aid programmes to Pakistan, US and UK officials privately admit that their ability to exercise leverage over Gen Musharraf is limited.

One senior official says that all western countries with a stake in bringing stability to Afghanistan and in protecting their own publics from terror networks linked to Pakistan are “struggling” to reconcile their short-term interests in securing maximum co-operation from Islamabad with their long-term desire to help in the development of a stable, inclusive and democratic society. “We are all aware of the need to help build institutions that are not dependent on any one person,” the official adds.

Philip Gordon, a US foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says America’s leverage, even though it is by far the most important influence, should not be exaggerated. “We have lost control in Pakistan, to the extent that we had any in the first place. We did threaten Musharraf that there would be consequences for aid, so now the situation is worse. You don’t want to pull the trigger, although you said that you would do it. All indications are that the administration is reluctant to cut off Musharraf and cut off aid because they still see him as a necessary partner in the war on terror.”

He adds: “It’s not just Musharraf against the extremists. It’s also Musharraf against the lawyers, against the people. We could end up – we are ending up – turning the majority of the population against us as the dictator’s supporters. That’s just not a great place to be.”

Additional reporting by Daniel Dombey

A turbulent judge looks to the streets for justice

When mobile phone networks went down on Tuesday in the vicinity of Islamabad’s elite Constitution Avenue, it did not take long to find the culprit: Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary, former chief justice of the supreme court, was trying to make a call, writes Farhan Bokhari.

Mr Chaudhary had just begun exhorting a group of lawyers to protest against President Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency on Saturday. “Go to every corner of Pakistan and give the message that this is the time to sacrifice. Don’t be afraid. God will help us,” he roared from the confines of his official residence, where he has been under house arrest since Saturday. “The time for sacrifice has come, to rise up for the supremacy of the constitution,” he said. But midway through the call, his phone – along with all others in his neighbourhood – mysteriously went dead.

Eight months after his suspension from the supreme court by Gen Musharraf sparked international outrage and domestic protests, forcing his reinstatement in July, Mr Chaudhary remains a popular figure and a thorn in the side of Pakistan’s military. His second dismissal on Saturday seems to have been sparked by Gen Musharraf’s fear that the court had invalidated his re-election as president last month.

In a sign that Mr Chaudhary still commands unswerving support from the country’s judiciary, almost two-thirds of Pakistan’s senior judges have yet to take a fresh oath under the new provisional constitutional order, a post-emergency law that obliges signatories to accept emergency rule. Such oaths are required of judges every time there is martial law or emergency rule in Pakistan and amount to de facto acceptance of the new status quo.

Activists say more than half the 3,000 protesters arrested this week were lawyers, who are Mr Chaudhary’s most diehard supporters.

Observers of Pakistani politics point out he is well positioned to enter politics should he wish. “He is the first judge to become a symbol of resistance and that too against a military ruler. That is what makes him different and that is what makes him one of the strongest leaders of Pakistan’s civil society,” says Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani diplomat and now professor of international relations at Boston university.

Before his show of defiance in March, Mr Chaudhary won praise for standing up to the government through landmark verdicts such as last year’s reversal of the privatisation of Pakistan Steel Mills.

More importantly, Mr Chaudhary provoked the ire of the military when he began summoning senior intelligence and police officials last year to account for the disappearance of hundreds of Pakistanis, most of whom had been picked up for investigation in cases involving terrorism. “In Pakistan, where nobody dares to speak against the military, Iftikhar Chaudhary had the guts to take a stand against a general,” says Shafiq Alamgir, a taxi driver, reflecting sentiment on the street. “Iftikhar Chaudhary should lead Pakistan.”

Friends of Mr Chaudhary warn that he has neither the backing of a political party nor the inclination to run for office. “Why should people assume that Iftikhar Chaudhary wants to be leader? All he wants to do is carry on being a judge with a great reputation,” says one.

But the fact that he is not a politician has obvious appeal. “There are many people in Pakistan who are not happy with any politician. For them, Iftikhar Chaudhary becomes the alternative figure,” saysr Haqqani.