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Pakistan's new government 'takes
charge'
By Ajai Sahni
The
process to establish a puppet government in Pakistan -
through the manipulation and extensive amendment of laws
and the constitution, through "pre-rigging" and
rejection of the nomination forms of numerous
candidates, through a substantially rigged election, and
finally, through the continuous postponement of the
convening of the National Assembly and orchestration of
defections in support of the "King's party" - has now
come to a "successful" end.
Such elaborate
maneuvers leave little doubt that the new government
will operate entirely at the behest and pleasure of
President General Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistan army
that backs him. If any doubts remained, these are
substantially settled by the personality profile of the
new prime minister, Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, who
distinguished himself over periods of faithful service
to a previous dictator in Zia ul-Haq's federal
parliament and as a minister, holding various portfolios
from 1981 to 1988.
Prominent Pakistani
commentators have characterized Jamali as "the last
description of the spineless", a "rubber stamp prime
minister" and an "inconsequential Baloch leader". Worse,
the prime minister - with the full force of the
dictatorship behind him - barely scraped through to a
majority of one in the National Assembly, claiming 172
votes in a 342 member house. For this, he had to secure
the support of 20 parties - including "dissenters" lured
from the main opposition Pakistan People's Party
Parliamentarians (PPPP) after the reported intervention
of, and alleged pressure from, Musharraf. This creates
an unstable coalition, "held together by threat and
allurement". Musharraf has proclaimed that "power" has
now been "transferred" to Jamali and his 21-member
cabinet, but given the circumstances, the possibilities
of a real transfer of effective powers to civilian
authority, as "promised" by Musharraf, remain remote. As
Ayaz Amir of Dawn newspaper writes, "This is not the
rolling back of military rule but rather its
continuation by other means."
Clearly, the
stranglehold of the military over civil society and
democratic politics in Pakistan will not loosen.
However, the new assembly creates other and grave
dangers for the country's future. The Islamist extremist
parties that comprise the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA)
won an unprecedented 53 seats in the new assembly; they
control an absolute majority in the North West Frontier
Province (NWFP), and are the largest single party in
Balochistan - both on the sensitive border with
Afghanistan - and their prime ministerial candidate,
Fazlur Rehman, received as many as 86 votes in the
three-cornered final face-off (ahead of the PPPP's 70).
The outcome of the elections has also created
what has been described as a "horizontal polarization",
with each of the four provinces going in different
directions. The NWFP has gone to the MMA; Punjab is
controlled by the "King's party", the Pakistan Muslim
League - Qaid-e-Azam (PML-Q); the PPPP retains much of
Sindh, though Karachi and Hyderabad are dominated by the
Muttahida Quami Mahaz (MQM); and with no clear majority
in Balochistan, the MMA is expected to consolidate its
position, despite desperate measures by Musharraf to
keep the party out of power in this province. Indeed,
the maneuvers in government formation and Musharraf's
continuous tampering with the constitution have already
taken rhetoric to unprecedented levels, with Fazlur
Rehman declaring that the country could head towards a
repeat of "the 1971 catastrophe" [the breaking away of
Pakistan's Eastern wing and the creation of Bangladesh].
The MMA has lost no time in asserting itself in
the assembly, and it is both significant and ominous
that the Islamist parties used the execution of Mir
Aimal Kansi in the United States as a first excuse to
reassert their extremist and anti-US agenda. Indeed, the
Pakistan National Assembly - and not just the MMA -
officially mourned Kansi's death when it met for the
first time on November 19, hailing him as a "hero of
Islam". Kansi was executed on November 14 for the murder
of two US Central Intelligence Agency employees outside
the agency's headquarters at Langley, Virginia, in 1993.
Prayers in Pakistan's National Assembly were led by
Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a religious leader elected from
Quetta, who intoned, "God, destroy those who handed him
over to America. God, his murderers, whether in America
or in Pakistan, may they meet their fate soon." (Ahmad
is a member of the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (Fazlur
faction).
Kansi's death was also mourned by
thousands in a stadium in his native Quetta in a funeral
that media described as the "largest in living memory"
in the city. The entire city shut down for the event
with shops closed and black flags on rooftops. This
indicates the beginning of the process of street
mobilization in favor of the extremist agenda that has
been imminent since the declaration of the election
results, and the MMA's "shock sweep" of the NWFP and
Balochistan, as well as its penetration of the other two
provinces, Punjab and Sindh.
The leaders of the
MMA are now "repackaging" themselves as democrats and
parliamentarians, and it is crucial that the current
avatar of the MMA as a democratic political party is not
allowed to cloud the history of its many constituent
members, including several of its most prominent elected
representatives, many of whom comprise the frontline of
the terrorist leadership in Pakistan, and have direct
linkages with Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
The most significant of these are the MMA's prime
ministerial candidate, Fazlur Rehman of the JuI-Fazlur,
Maulana Sami ul-Haq of the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islam
(Sami-ul-Haq faction) and Maulana Azam Tariq of the
Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP).
Fazlur Rehman is
generally believed to be a "supporter" of the Taliban.
He - with Sami ul-Haq - was their creator and remained
intimately linked with both Mullah Omar and bin Laden
throughout the period of the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, and he spearheaded street demonstrations in
Pakistan, vociferously protesting the American campaign
in Afghanistan after September 11. He is also the
creator of the banned terrorist organization
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM, earlier called
Harkat-ul-Ansar) and is closely linked with the
activities of the Harkat ul-Jihad-i-Islami (HuJI), and
the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). HuM and HuJI are active in
India, Bangladesh, Chechnya, the Arakan areas of Myanmar
and southern Philippines, while the JeM is currently
active only in India.
Sami ul-Haq, who heads his
own faction of the JuI, runs the Haqqani madrassa
(religious school) at Akora Khattak, which produced much
of the Taliban leadership. Haq was the principal advisor
to Mullah Omar and was closely associated with bin
Laden.
Azam Tariq is the deputy patron-in-chief
of the SSP, one of the five sectarian groups banned by
Musharraf in January this year. The Pakistan police
blame Tariq's SSP for some 400 killings in the past year
alone. In September 2001, he had declared, "We do not
consider ourselves separate from the Taliban or
Afghanistan. Our history, our religion and blood and
culture are the same … We consider the war against Osama
and the Taliban a war against us, Pakistanis and
Pakistan."
Another faction in the MMA is the
Jamaat-ul-Ulema Pakistan (JuP), whose secretary, Shaykh
Mir Hamzah, was a signatory to the 1998 al-Qaeda
"Declaration of jihad against Jews and Crusaders" which
sanctioned attacks against American civilians.
With increasing evidence of the presence of a
large number of surviving Taliban and al-Qaeda - and,
indeed, increasingly of bin Laden himself - in Pakistan,
the consolidation of the Islamist and terrorist forces
in the surviving institutional structure of governance
in the country will have a snowballing impact on the
mobilization of extremist cadres and their eventual
deployment in acts of terrorism.
These are all
elements that cannot be treated in isolation, as they
constitute a mutually supporting rubric that comprehends
the military-intelligence establishment, the new
quasi-democratic set up, the consolidation of extremist
Islamist groupings in the political process, and the
unchecked activities and infrastructure of terrorism
that exists in Pakistan; and that has great potential
for harm.
Directly, of course, the swearing in
of a new prime minister and cabinet will have very
limited immediate impact, particularly in view of the
constitutional amendments that Musharraf pushed through
before the elections. Specifically, the premier would
have little control over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal or
army. Nevertheless, the pre-election arrangements are
not fail-safe, as the emergence of the MMA at the center
of the power structure has already demonstrated, and it
should be fairly certain that the fundamentalist
groupings will use their position in parliament, backed
by their very substantial street power and terrorist
muscle, to consolidate and expand their constituencies
and secure a far greater and more definitive role in
determining the course and destiny of Pakistan than may
have been imagined by Musharraf when he was planning his
"democratic" strategy. It is not clear, under the
conditions of uncertainty that currently prevail, that
Musharraf would have the power to neutralize or reverse
these trends.
The international community is
still eager to give Musharraf the benefit of doubt,
despite the fact that virtually the entire terrorist
leadership in Pakistan - including the leadership of all
the "banned" terrorist groups (and declared as terrorist
organizations by the US as well) - operates freely in
the country. With many of these leaders now sitting in
Pakistan's National Assembly, it is high time that those
who have put their entire faith in Musharraf's
dictatorship as a bulwark against terrorism begin to
revaluate their strategies and options.
Ajai Sahni, editor, South Asia
Intelligence Review; executive director, Institute for
Conflict Management, a non-profit society set up in 1997
in New Delhi committed to the evaluation and resolution
of problems of internal security in South Asia.
Published with permission from the South Asia
Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism
Portal.
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