By Ahmed Quraishi
Islamabad, Pakistan
General Anthony Zinny, the US Central Command chief, was in a reviewing stand with Defense Secretary William Cohen in the Egyptian desert. It was November 1999, and the world’s largest annual military exercise was underway. Amid the mock battle, Zinny received a call on his satellite phone from Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s new strongman.
The call was just another reminder of the strong ties between the Pakistani and American militaries despite the strained relationship elsewhere. Politicians, and especially the liberal Democrats, impaired the ties. Cohen, for example, permitted Zinny to “take the call” but stressed on him not to make “any commitments.” Zinny recalls in his memoirs, “It was a personal call between friends.”
As we mark the fifth year of the Musharraf administration and its ambitious reform agenda, it’s appropriate to recall a few words from that private conversation between two friends.
“Democracy and the ballot,” Musharraf said to Zinny, “are both a sham when any government that results can offer anything it controls up for sale. We’ve had a democracy of form, not a democracy of substance. I want democracy in substance. I’ll work for that, no matter what it costs me.”
Musharraf was not done. “There’s one more thing I have to make clear,” he continued in his usual straightforward tone, “I don’t care what most others think about my motivations or intentions; but it’s important to me that you know what they are.”
Zinny almost agreed. “The point (Musharraf) made then was a powerful one,” he said.
The truth is Musharraf’s agenda and policies remain powerful and far better than any alternative offered by our inept, outdated political system. Today’s Pakistan moves forward with a difficult but ambitious transition, toward stronger institutions, a new political culture, a growing economy and an indestructible defense. With more than six thousand local governments, a rising private media, tough political accountability, and a healthy open debate on national issues, Pakistan is ready for a leap. We never felt so confident in decades. And it feels good to be here.
This is not about one man’s right to be in or out of government. It’s about strengthening Pakistan regardless of how it’s done. Ends, in this case, certainly justify the means.
This transition is filling a gap that emerged immediately after our Independence and was never fixed since. The direction that Pakistan is taking under this military-guided administration is akin in many ways to finishing a job that was left incomplete: The task of guided nation-building, strengthening the national identity and creating a system where democracy evolves gradually within well-defined rules of the internal political game, so that we may never see again destructive politics deviating from the foundations of Pakistani nationhood.
Only we can do this job. No one will do it for us. And no system of governance, no experience of political evolution in other countries, will fit us. We have to evolve our own system; our own experiment in governance that is suited to our circumstance. This system will evolve and take us eventually to a stable democracy, with a future mature political class comfortable with the concept of rotating power, and educated in the important role of the opposition.
Sure, we are not developing our model of governance in ideal circumstances. We’d like to have free-for-all democracy in its ideal form. But we also need to tread carefully and not repeat the mistakes of a country like Russia, where idealism was prematurely imposed on a nation not completely ready for it, leading to anarchy. It’s easy to be cynical, self-defeating, and look at the empty half of the cup. But we are moving steadily toward our goal of a stable, prosperous, and democratic Pakistan, all at once. And it takes courage to get out of the low morale that had beset this great nation in the 1990s.
Let’s not forget that we have resolved five years back to make a clean break from the destructive politics of the 1990s. The best indictment I’ve read so far of our elitist political class came from our western neighborhood, from people who have always supported us and wished us well. “The problem with politicians in Pakistan,” wrote Mr Mohammed Galadari in UAE’s Khaleej Times a couple of weeks back, “is that they do not know how to function in a democracy. (...) Politicians in Pakistan are not comfortable with being in the opposition. They will do everything to pull down the government at the nearest opportunity and are not ready to wait [for] the next elections. They would go to the Chief of Military Staff to dislodge a government and then complain about military dictatorships.”
Idealism with this kind of political culture is suicide. Those well-intentioned analysts who claim that more freedoms are the only way to reform this disfigured political culture are wrong. We tried that free-for-all style of government for a decade, from 1989 to 1999, and we ended with the worst record of mismanagement and corruption in our entire history. In fact, under that system, Pakistan nearly reached the point of a failed state for the first time.
Former premier Mr Nawaz Sharif, who set in motion his own downfall, has the added distinction of introducing in Pakistan irresponsible politics of the worst kind. The whole episode of trying to get rid of the army chief in mid air in a James Bond-style operation showed how low our politics had gone and why drastic and complete overhaul of our system had become inevitable.
“A top official (like the army chief) sent in to sign agreements on behalf of the Government of Pakistan being let down in such a way was bad diplomacy,” writes Mr Galadari. “It affected the credibility of Pakistan as a nation. A plane suspended in the air, with the General and others in it, and with no fuel to last for more than ten minutes. It was something like a mafia operation. What a shame for the government.”
It goes to Musharraf and his team’s credit that he pushed for the most extensive and ambitious reforms in our modern history. Those reforms will not satisfy everyone. Some people think he was heavy handed. Others believe he should have ruled with an iron fist, dismissing the entire political class that led the nation to the cliff. But in hindsight, he chose the wisest possible course. Had he banished the entire political elite, Musharraf would have been sucked into a confrontation that would have left him no time to manage the crisis at hand when he took power, with money in the treasury and the nation about to default on its loans. The slow and gradual course undertaken by the military-led administration in restraining our wild political elite has probably been the right one. There might have been room for a little bit of rough handling, but given Pakistan’s circumstances it may not have been wise to open multiple fronts in the battle to revitalize Pakistan.
The fifth anniversary of our military’s corrective action of 12 October 2004 also calls for a special focus on the man that our military institution groomed and then placed in our way on that momentous day. This is not about turning Mr Musharraf into a cult figure. But he certainly seems to be expanding the circle of admirers both at home and abroad.
His hardcore opponents may hate him anyway, but they hate him the most when he goes out to represent Pakistan in world capitals. That’s when his impeccable statesmanship appears to eclipse the hollow stars of our elitist political class. It’s amazing how our politicians - and especially those who have been sidelined by the military - have failed in the last five years to produce a single charismatic figure to rival the current Pakistani President and army chief. Gen Musharraf is probably our most consummate public speaker in as many decades.
Recently on his New York visit, Mr Musharraf’s speaking engagements elicited unprecedented interest. The New Yorker magazine noticed how tickets to the Pakistani President’s public appearances were selling like hotcakes.
Take for example his appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations last month. Writes the New Yorker, “Among the warm-up acts were the Emir of Qatar and President Mikhail Saakashvilli, of Georgia. But it was Musharraf whose talk brought out the greatest array of armchair diplomats and the special pleading for last-minute seats ... The waiting list among council members ran about a hundred deep. Two overflow rooms, with closed-circuit television, had been set up to accommodate the audience.”
But my favorite anecdote is drawn from January’s World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, when a Forum official, Frank Richter, addressed President Musharraf in a special session with these words: “... you are one of the most important people in the world and I also think you really have it in your hands to influence the future course of geopolitics and prosperity in this world.”
The last time we had a Pakistani chief executive who elicited such awe and respect abroad was probably Gen Ayub Khan. It’s been a long four decades since. So it’s good to be on the rise. General Musharraf must ensure the continuation of his legacy by strengthening the political system that he has founded. Let’s resolve not to go down again.