Seven things we should not do to help the Islamic Republic of Pakistan

The general elections may be around the corner, but Pakistan continues to careen dangerously out of control. Specific incidents and events are not the issue, but the totality of developments that have been taking place, beginning last year.
A convenient date would be March 9, 2007, the fateful day on which President Pervez Musharraf began his ill-advised campaign to edge out Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry from the country’s Supreme Court. This enraged the community of lawyers, who have since led the civil protest movement against Musharraf.
Parallel to this, the general also managed to botch up the Lal Masjid situation. The mosque, located near the ISI headquarters in Islamabad, had a reputation for radicalism since the time of Zia ul Haq. It had links with the North West Frontier Province because it drew a number of its students from there. The mosque was used by radicals who railed against Musharraf’s US policy and even called for his assassination, yet he failed to act against it. In early 2007, students of the mosque’s two madarsas — one for men and the other for women — began to enforce a puritanical law in parts of Islamabad. They shut down video shops and assaulted people they said were involved in immoral activities.
Finally in July 2007, Musharraf sent in the army. A bitter clash took place, leaving scores dead. While the senior imam of the mosque was captured, his younger brother Abdul Rashid Ghazi was killed. The army action led to the breakdown of a truce between the Pakistan army and anti-government tribesmen in North and South Waziristan, and a spate of suicide bombings aimed at Pakistani army personnel, and even the ISI.
Musharraf’s meltdown has led to a great deal of nervousness across the world. Concerns over the safety of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal have been voiced in the US and India. But New Delhi has few options beyond tailing the US. For the present the Pakistan army remains a strong force and is unlikely to take kindly to any Indian intervention. Yet there are things that India can do to help Pakistan. But first New Delhi must understand that there are things it must not do to help Islamabad.

First, see Pakistan as a basket case. It is easy when you are up in South Asia, to see the other as down and out. It was just the other day, in the early 1990s, when in their arrogance of having helped the US win the jehad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Islamabad thought India could be brought low by supporting separatist movements. In the wake of the 1989 elections, India was indeed in bad shape, its polity shot to hell, separatist movements taking roots in key states like Punjab and its economy in a shambles. The ISI could have been excused for thinking that one more push would have India come apart. But it did not. So, let’s be clear that Pakistan is not about to keel over, just as India was not at that time.

Second, New Delhi must not delay its internal negotiations with Kashmiri parties on the issue of autonomy or whatever. In the past year, while Musharraf has grappled with the judiciary and the mullahs, the India-Pakistan talks have maintained their formal continuity. But there has been little forward movement. But there is one element in which India does not need to involve Pakistan — the issue of internal democracy in Jammu & Kashmir. Addressing the second round table meet on Kashmir in May 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said that the first task was to see “what are those political institutions and arrangements which can strengthen the relationship between the Centre and the state.” In line with this he had set up a working group under former Justice Saghir Ahmad to come up with a report on the issue of autonomy or self-rule. Though four other working groups on issues relating to economy and cross-border trade have finished their reports, little or nothing has been heard about the workings of the autonomy group.

Third, India must not demand that the US and other countries accept Indian primacy in South Asia. This is a mug’s game. Indian primacy cannot be got by request or grant. It is an existential fact. Anyone who tries to deny it — like Pakistan has in the past 60 years — has had his head buried firmly in the sand.

Fourth, India must not pander to Pakistan's sense of entitlement on Kashmir or Afghanistan. Islamabad has no locus standi in J&K and we must deal with it as such. There are issues that have arisen in the wake of the Pakistan-engineered tribal invasion in 1947 — the creation of Azad Kashmir, the UN resolutions and the no-man's land status of the Northern Areas — that need to be worked out through negotiations, but not the status of the state.
In normal times — and you can count the period 1947-1979 as “normal” in the context of Pakistan-Afghanistan affairs — the relationship between the two was positively chilly. New Delhi need not insert itself into the equation to deny Pakistan what it did not have in the first place — a pliant Afghanistan. Pakistan’s ability to “manage” Afghanistan of the Taliban era was strictly limited. Islamabad is learning now that the seemingly barbarian Taliban were shrewder than the ISI thought. Instead of Pakistan getting strategic depth, it is the Taliban which has obtained it in the NWFP, Balochistan and Swat at the expense of the Pakistani central authority.

Fifth, we must not encourage fissiparous trends in Pakistan. In other words, do unto Islamabad what Islamabad has been doing to us. As long as Pakistan remains together even in a tattered form, there is hope that it can be repaired. But if it falls apart like Yugoslavia, there will be little chance of putting it back together again. To say that such a development would be counter-productive would be to make an understatement.

Sixth, New Delhi must not privilege the Pakistan Army over the mainstream political parties and civil society in the country. It is one thing to deal with the army when it wields power, it is quite another thing to be happy about it. India's strategic position must always be that the final settlement on anything will have to be with a democratically elected government. India’s relations with Musharraf have been quite proper, and they should continue to be so as long as he is the head of the government. But New Delhi needs to clearly put across the message that while it deals with the army, it does so at sufferance, and not because it thinks that the army is the only viable political institution in the country, because it is not. Fortunately, Musharraf’s own actions have brought this message home to Pakistan far more effectively than through anything that India could have done.

Seventh, we must not give up on Pakistan. It is tempting to say “The hell with you”, redouble the border fence, strengthen the army and maintain bare minimum relations with our western neighbour. This is not an option. While we need not worry about millions streaming across the border from a failed state, we need to understand that “shining” or “incredible” India will not be going anywhere if its neighbours, in this case Pakistan, do not go with it. A Great Power does not have the option of turning its back on failing neighbours.

In the meantime, the new army chief in Pakistan can take six steps to set things right: Get the president to resign, restore the Supreme Court and higher judiciary, set up a neutral caretaker government, get all-party consent for a neutral commission and then hold the elections.

The article was published in Mail Today February 12, 2008

Bush's system-destructive years provide a clean slate for an American renewal

The democratic world seems to be coming up with a magic figure for the tenure of a high office. It is approximately eight years. Margaret Thatcher exceeded it by three years and had to be pushed out of office, as was Tony Blair who was two years over par. The Americans, whose love for organisation is well known, have institutionalised it to two 4-year terms for their president.
But the pushing process begins early; ask George W Bush. Till two years ago he could do no wrong. He led his country into an extraordinary adventure in Iraq and they voted him back to power in 2004 with a greater majority. He used the fiscal surpluses he inherited to pursue the conservatives’ favourite agenda — tax cuts — even after defence expenditure soared. He systematically undermined American civil liberties and the people seemed not to care.
Bush has already been condemned to the prison specially reserved for democratic politicians — irrelevance. Tony Blair is there, as are V.P. Singh, Inder Gujral and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Politics is a cruel profession. It takes a protagonist to unprecedented heights and then, without fear or favour, lets go of them. You can be a dictator like Stalin or a Mao, feared and adored in their lifetimes, but getting their comeuppance in history.
The high, and the let down, for politicians in the democratic system may not be as dramatic, but it must nevertheless be painful. In the United States, the process usually begins with a president’s last state of the union address. Last year around this time, when Bush delivered the address, the economy was doing well and the war badly. Poor Dubya, he got slammed for the war and little praise for the economy. This time, the war in Iraq is doing well and the economy on the brink of recession, and no one is talking about the war.

Iraq

He was a Teflon president till last November when his party lost its majority in the US Congress because of the war in Iraq. Given the iron control that the neocons retained on the system, it is more than likely that in the coming years the Bush “legacy” will be more about discovering the ways and means through which the President damaged and devalued the system, rather than the touted achievements. Last week, the Center of Public Integrity went through the process of counting the lies of his administration on the issue of Weapons of Mass Destruction and concluded that it had lied on a grand total of 935 occasions in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Bush has sought to strike an uncharacteristically non-confrontationist tone in his latest state of the union address, hoping perhaps to use the next 51 weeks that he had to salvage something of a legacy. But his thrust still seems to be the “what’s in it for me” approach. Take the war in Iraq. Violence may be down, but anyone who believes that the addition of 20,000 soldiers changed things around in Iraq is living in cloud cuckoo land. The change has come by the creation of the 80,000 strong Sunni militia paid $300 per month by the US to police the Sunni-majority areas. As for the Shias, they run the government and are biding their time for Uncle Sam’s departure. What will happen to this militia when the US leaves, no doubt after Bush is well settled at his ranch in Crawford, Tx? No one knows. But one thing is clear, neither the Iraqi army, nor the national police are capable of providing security for the country that has been torn apart by a war of George W. Bush’s making.

Afghanistan

Typically, Bush has sought to use this last opportunity to push for institutionalising his tax cuts. The cuts, heavily weighted in favour of the rich, are supposed to produce a budget surplus by 2012 — the end of the next president’s first term. But the predictions do not take into account the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that currently cost some $200 billion per annum.
The US president has simply papered over the huge problems confronting the war in Afghanistan. They are not just those connected to fighting the resurgent Taliban and the deteriorating situation in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. They are related to the quarrels within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and its partners on the way the Afghan mission should be prosecuted, and the contribution of the nations involved. As it is, only the British, Canadians and Dutch, along with the Americans, permit their troops to fight. The others focus on “reconstruction”. Yet if there was a single issue that was to define the Bush Administration it was the “war on terror”; but the struggle in Afghanistan indicates that it is far from being won, leave alone fought with any degree of effectiveness.
The problem for Bush, and for the rest of the world, is that the American voter has moved on and is focusing on the coming presidential poll. As of now the election is wide open. We are not sure as to who would be the Democratic and Republican candidates, and circumstances could actually take the race to the summer when the delegates elected at the primaries will formally vote for their respective candidate in party conventions. Predicting what way the election will play out is even more confounding because different outcomes could be suggested with different pairs of contestants.
But certain consequences of the Bush presidency are becoming evident. According to the Economist, “the proportion of Americans who think their country should be active in the world is the lowest it has been since the early 1990s.” This is bad news. Someone recently pointed out that we have reached an era where when America sneezes the world does not catch a cold. But if the turbulence in the world economy is anything to go by, the sneeze still has the ability to generate the shivers.
But the bigger problem the world will face from an isolationist America is that of managing the world system. In an alternative world, Bush should have led the world to an era where the United Nations could fulfill its mandate of maintaining world peace and directed the efforts to combat climate change. But that and other possibilities were wantonly destroyed by Bush’s policies.
Countries like India need to reflect on a US that is less attentive to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A facile view can be that with the big bad Americans back in their own country things will work just fine. But that is simply not true. There may be 25 NATO allies and 15 partner countries involved in Afghanistan. But more than half of the 53,000 troops there are American, as is the overwhelming portion of the air and naval effort.

Renewal

The US has been an interfering busy-body ever since they became the world’s hegemonistic power. But when it comes to crises — be it in Burma, Kenya, Darfur or Pakistan —the world looks to the US for leadership. The contrast with the rising role of China cannot be more marked. Beijing’s amoral approach to foreign policy has encouraged the proliferation of nuclear weapons to Pakistan and compelled countries like India to upturn its pro-democracy foreign policy in Burma.
Every election in a democratic country shifts its political paradigm. George Bush’s system-destructive tenure may actually be setting the stage for his successor to reconstruct the US on a new basis. That seems to be the sentiment that is propelling the once implausible candidacy of Barack Obama. The change of drivers has begun in the US, the old is virtually gone, but we do not yet know who will be the new driver, or his, or her’s, chosen direction.
This article appeared in Mail Today January 30, 2008