It’s Groundhog Day for Pakistan and Musharraf should be shown the door

It is the centre of global terrorism. It is also a nuclear-armed state, one of fewer than 10 in the world, with dozens of nuclear warheads. The fault-line between Pakistan and India is every bit as dangerous as that in the Middle East

ANALYSING what is going on in Pakistan is a fraught business, reliant as we are very largely on British or US news sources. But Pakistan is something of an oddity because Les Anglo-Saxons, as the French call them, for once, don’t see things in quite the same way.

Britain has always had a romantic soft spot for India in its rivalry with its mainly Muslim neighbour. The Americans, meanwhile, long suspected the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty that has dominated independent India of dangerous socialist leanings and tended to have warmer relations with Islamabad.

When it comes to contemporary events, the British media has had a long love affair with Benazir Bhutto. The convent-educated leader of the nominally socialist Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) dazzled all her contemporaries at Oxford where she was elected president of the union following in the footsteps of prime ministers Gladstone, Asquith and Heath. It was an unprecedented achievement for an Asian woman.

American outlets, conversely — taking their lead from the US State Department — treat the PPP with Cold War suspicion.

The American preference has been for a “a strong man” in Pakistan, hence their long support for General Zia, a despot if ever there was one, who ruled from 1977 until his death in a plane crash in 1988.

The Americans thought they had found another Zia in Pervez Musharraf, another army chief who came to power in the wake of a coup d’etat. Following 9/11, Washington hugged Musharraf close. Only very slowly is it dawning on them that Musharraf is a weak, ineffective and foolish dictator, a faithless friend and an impotent enemy. Long a trafficker in terrorism himself, he attempted to justify last week’s second coup by raising the spectre of further terrorism.

Nowhere in the world today is more important, more dangerous or more fluid than Pakistan. And it is all of those things in part because of the personality and performance of its dictator. Sometimes the word “dictator” can prevent clear thinking in the liberal mind, as often does the word “war”. But, as George Orwell observed, wars have results, and different wars have different results, depending who wins.

So it is with dictators. There are more and less ruthless, bloodthirsty, legitimate and effective dictators. The quality of the dictator influences profoundly the quality of the nation. All dictatorships are to be despised, but democracy is not always in the west’s gift. Meantime, some dictators are more useful than others. It is tempting to dismiss Pakistan as a failed state. While China and India, the emergent economic superpowers, are on the lips of everyone in commercial circles, Pakistan is too easily dismissed as a political and economic basket case that only manages to export restaurant workers and cheap cotton goods to European markets.

But Pakistan is about more than curry and cricket. It is the centre of global terrorism. It is also a nuclear-armed state, one of fewer than 10 in the world, with dozens of nuclear warheads. The fault-line between Pakistan and India is every bit as dangerous as that in the Middle East.

Pakistan is also a nation of seething Islamist extremism that has grown rapidly under Musharraf. His powerbase, the army, looks to be in a pretty pathetic state. It might be good at beating up lawyers in Karachi, but any organised military opposition, as from primitive tribal groups in border areas, sees it readily defeated and its soldiers surrendering in their hundreds.

Some signs are emerging to the effect that Musharraf might lift the state of emergency and allow scheduled parliamentary elections in January.

This was always the shape of the deal with Benazir Bhutto: that she would come back and win the premiership and Musharraf would continue as president. That plan has all gone awry, as was entirely predictable: Bhutto and the army are like oil and water.

She has clearly been emboldened by events since her return to Pakistan after eight years in exile. Musharraf, in turn, sensing she has more support than previously supposed, became desperate.

It was because he feared the supreme court would rule illegal his re-election as president by the outgoing parliament last month that Musharraf staged his new coup, sacking the chief justice.

But the confusion and contradictory messages of the past few days betray Musharraf’s weakness. It may be that elections will proceed as he has now promised and notional democracy will be restored, but Pakistan’s deepening crisis appears to be worsening. The chances of a fair election taking place in January, if they are held under martial law, are slim.

Musharraf has failed to deliver results since his first coup in 1999. He has not delivered to his own people or to his American allies.

It is a complete mystery why US President George W Bush continues to heap praise on Musharraf for his part in the war on terror. Musharraf has manifestly not delivered in fighting terror and may even be proceeding to destroy the effectiveness of the army, with unknowable consequences. The Pakistani people initially accepted Musharraf. He was bringing a chaotic and grossly corrupt government to an end and restoring some order to Pakistan, notwithstanding his own murky past involvement in sponsoring terrorism in Kashmir and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the military’s role in global nuclear proliferation network.

BUT Musharraf has delivered almost nothing since then. He has not returned Pakistan to democracy. He has not stamped out terrorist and extremist networks inside Pakistan. He has not reformed Pakistani schools which are increasingly training centres for would-be terrorists. He has not eliminated co-operation by his military with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He has not captured Osama bin Laden. He has struck at the most liberal institutions within his own society, namely the legal system.

Musharraf’s latest coup aroused greater international condemnation than he anticipated, with strong US congressional moves to cut off aid, which has amounted to more than $10 billion since 9/11. There also has been surprisingly strong condemnation of Musharraf from the EU and UN.

He has trotted out all the usual excuses for his dictatorship, most notably in his laughable 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire. He claimed he would restore liberty just as soon as he got on top of the disorder — but he didn’t. He then tried to argue that parliamentary democracy was not suited to Pakistan’s particular conditions — even though it works rather well in next-door India. He then admitted all was not well but the alternative would be worse. All three excuses are transparently false and self-serving.

This is Groundhog Day for Pakistan. When Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif headed governments before, it’s true they were exceptionally corrupt. They had precious little control over military or nuclear policy, allowing the army to involve itself in all kinds of obscene adventures. But those are beginning to look like the good old days. The sooner Musharraf is shown the door, the better.