The Pretender to Pakistan’s Throne,
Foreign Policy
In 1960, president
and field marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan, Pakistan's first military dictator, built
the city of Islamabad almost from scratch. Pakistan's original capital,
Karachi, was roughly 800 miles away from his headquarters in Rawalpindi, and
Ayub Khan -- as the story goes -- wanted to reduce his commute in order to more
easily serve the requirements of both his military office and the presidency of
Pakistan. In relatively short order, Rawalpindi had a new twin city and
Pakistan had a new capital. Instead of flying from one office to the next, Ayub
Khan could now walk, jog, or drive.
That little slice of Pakistania
illustrates the most important rule of the decades-long contest between
Pakistan's unruly civilian democrats and its unconstitutional military rulers:
When the Army wants something, it gets it.
Since Aug. 14, Islamabad has been in
a state of constant uncertainty and insecurity. Politicians opposed to Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif have been leading a sit-in of thousands of protesters
demanding nothing less than the resignation of Sharif -- who has been prime
minister twice before and deposed in coups both times.
Today in Pakistan, there are two big
questions: Is the military attempting to stage-manage Sharif's third exit? And
is his political tormentor, the temperamental former cricket star Imran Khan
(unrelated to Ayub Khan), the Army's choice as his replacement?
Two separate camps
are conducting the Islamabad protests against Sharif: Khan leads one, and
Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, an anti-Taliban cleric formerly based in Canada, leads
the other. The two leaders are a study in contrasts, but they share one
explicit objective -- to oust Sharif. Pakistani fatigue with the saga has been
growing, and on the night of Aug. 28, the Army became explicitly involved as a guarantor of talks between the
opposition camps and the government. The announcement of the Army's role as the
adult in the room is nothing new for Pakistan, and though expectations are that
the crisis is petering out, protests could continue as long as Sharif stays in
power.
Where did this mess
begin? The 2013 elections brought Sharif back to power for a third term and saw
Khan's party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice),
emerge as a major force in politics. Khan's complaints that Sharif stole the
election received little attention until Qadri entered the picture. A colorful
cleric with a superb network of philanthropic activities and a politically
insignificant but deeply committed corps of disciples, Qadri has a history of
agitating against democratically elected governments. When Qadri announced his decision to return in June from his adopted
home in Canada to Lahore to launch yet another agitation, alarm bells went off
for Sharif.
On June 17, things
took a tragic turn. Already exercised by the 100 degree-plus Fahrenheit heat
and smarting at the way senior leaders within Sharif's government had spoken of
Qadri, supporters of the clericclashed with police in Lahore's tony Model Town
neighborhood. Fourteen people died, including a teenager and at least two
women, with much of the blame for the violence placed squarely on
police brutality. The Model Town tragedy galvanized Qadri's supporters and
stripped Sharif of whatever moral high ground he had. The shifting national
mood after the affair buoyed the opposition's spirits, and Khan could smell
blood.
In July, Khan announced his decision to march on Islamabad --
with the objective of ousting Sharif -- on Aug. 14, Pakistan's Independence
Day. On Aug. 10, Qadri announced that he would march on Islamabad as well. The
processions to Islamabad received wall-to-wall coverage from Pakistani media,
with some questioning whether the size and diversity of the protesters deserved
such lavish 24-hour exposure. As it has dragged on across two weeks, the crisis
has developed a momentum of its own. Khan has planted himself and several
thousand protesters in front of the Pakistani parliament building, insisting that he will leave only when Sharif resigns.
Few, if any
Pakistanis, would argue against the substance of Khan's complaints -- that the
electoral process needs major reforms and that corruption throttles the
economy. Instead, most debate focuses on just why Khan is so confident that he
will succeed in dethroning Sharif -- despite the prime minister's nationwide support and Khan's falling stock.
Khan's bravado is,
on the surface, perplexing. His level of popular support has dropped significantly since the May 2013 election, and
his performance since then has been pedestrian, at best. His speeches at these
protests have been cavalier, even vulgar: He threatened to send his enemies to the Taliban so that the group could
"deal with them," according to the New York Times. He
denigrates parliament and the prime minister; in one speech, he proudly proclaimed that the fear of protesters has caused
Sharif to "wet his pants." This is hardly the kind of leader whom
soldiers from any country would want to call boss -- much less the
ultraconservative ranks of the Pakistan Army.
For some, this kind of confidence only comes from
the knowledge of having the support of Pakistan's military brass. Could it
really be betting the house on Khan?
For some, this kind
of confidence only comes from the knowledge of having the support of Pakistan's
military brass. Could it really be betting the house on Khan?
Probably not.
Pakistan's military faces a hostile India on its eastern border and a
dysfunctional peace process in Afghanistan on its northwestern one. In between,
it is trying to stamp out the remarkably resilient and potent Tehrik-i-Taliban
Pakistan, also known as the Pakistani Taliban, against which it recently
launched a massive operation in the remote Pakistani region of Waziristan.Now
is not a good time for the Army to manage a chaotic political transition.
And removing Sharif
would probably complicate the country's fiscal situation. Pakistan is a poor
country with an even poorer record of fiscal management. Outside aid is vital
to the country -- be it from the IMF and World Bank or from friendly nations
like the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia. International lenders hate
instability and coups, and they have a long-standing man-crush on Sharif and
his team because they are the big-business, Barbarians-at-the-Gate-type
capitalists who love to privatize things while disproportionately taxing the
poor instead of the rich. Khan, on the other hand, is a wild man when it comes
to economic policy. Just this week, he instructed Pakistanis living abroad to stop using legal means
of sending home remittances and once again start using the hundi system -- the preferred
cash-mobility solution for terrorists everywhere.
Finance Minister
Ishaq Dar, who unsurprisingly is a close relative of Sharif, is surprisingly
good at what he does: managing exchange rates, borrowing cheaply, and stamping
out dissenting views on the economy. While growth is still sluggish, Dar has
convinced lenders that Pakistan is becoming a less risky investment. Bureaucrats from the
World Bank and IMF love him because he is an old-school chartered accountant.
Sharif loves him because he is family. And though the Army may not love him,
they probably like Dar a lot more than they like the prospect of dealing with
Khan's cuckoo ideas about how to get remittances to Pakistani shores.
Many in the armed
forces think Sharif is being needlessly vindictive in pursuing legal cases
against Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the former chief of army staff who seized power
from Sharif in October 1999, imprisoning Sharif and later exiling him to Saudi Arabia. Now Sharif is pursuing a
case against Musharraf, who is stuck in Pakistan, unable to leave because of a court
injunction related to a treason case against him -- though Sharif's people
insist the motivation is rule of law and not revenge.
Additionally,
Sharif's overtures to India, especially to its newly elected Hindu nationalist
prime minister, Narendra Modi, may make some of the generals deeply nervous.
Sharif accepted Modi's invitation to his inauguration, and in a
break from Pakistani tradition, Sharif did not meet with separatist
leaders from Kashmir whom Pakistan supports. If Pakistan and India become
normal neighbors, the military's influence in Pakistan automatically decreases.
The hawks clearly won't go easily.
But the fears of
Sharif improving relations with New Delhi too quickly have likely been assuaged
by the rank
incompetence with which he implements decisions. Even if
he wanted to, Sharif cannot move any faster than a bored glacier on a cold day.
He is hamstrung by an obsession with surrounding himself with loyal but inept
advisors and bureaucrats.
Sharif has severely undermined his
own rule. His shambolic treatment of his own party members, to say nothing of
the opposition, is legendary -- often ministers can't get meetings for weeks on
end. The presence of his family members in government grates all segments of
Pakistani society: Dar's son is married to Sharif's daughter, Asma Nawaz. Chief
Minister of Punjab Shahbaz Sharif is his younger brother; Water and Power
Minister Chaudhry Abid Sher Ali is his nephew, as is prominent parliamentarian
Muhammad Hamza Shahbaz Sharif. If only his strategic vision for the country
were as consistent as his nepotism.
On the other hand, the best thing
Sharif has going for him is the quality of his competition.
Pakistan with Khan at the helm would be a disaster of epic proportions
-- and that's even with the country's extremely high tolerance for shambolic
leadership.
Pakistan
with Khan at the helm would be a disaster of epic proportions -- and that's
even with the country's extremely high tolerance for shambolic leadership.
Khan may be the world's oldest
teenager, with a captive national audience. He thumbs his nose at political
niceties and employs an invective that dumbs down the discourse. Like Justin
Bieber, Khan focuses on electrifying the urban youth who genuinely believe him
to be a messianic solution to the disenchantment they feel about their country.
And Khan's understanding of Pakistan's problems is probably only slightly more
sophisticated than Bieber's. Khan does not have the policy chops to fix what
ails Pakistan: The crux of his efforts during these few weeks has been that he,
not Sharif, should be prime minister.
Sharif is a known
entity and one easy to tame. Khan is wild and unpredictable. He proudly calls
his supporters junoonis -- or
"crazies." The military might enjoy the troubles Khan gives the prime
minister, but it is unlikely to tie its institutional fortunes to unstable and
irresponsible political actors like Khan. Pakistani democracy under Sharif will
continue to muddle along as it has in the past. Pakistan optimists will be
disappointed, because this crisis is unquestionably a setback for democrats.
But things could be worse. For now, the most Khan is likely to achieve in challenging
Sharif is further strengthening the military's already strong hold on key
decisions guiding the country's future.
As Americans watch in horror as
Syria, Libya, and Iraq come apart, perhaps they will warm to the idea of a
Pakistan managed by its highly disciplined and professional armed forces. That
would be exactly the wrong conclusion to draw from the political chaos in
Pakistan. Now more than ever, Pakistan needs the rest of the world to reiterate
its strong support for democracy.
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