Opinion

Open Letter to President Bush
By Muzaffar K Awan, MD
Detroit, Michigan

Mr. President, you and the key members of your administration still believe that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is the best hope for US interests in the region. But thus far, your policy toward Pakistan clearly has not delivered what Washington invested and had hoped for on the Afghan front. Several episodes in Pakistan have seriously handicapped Musharraf and sharply reduced his moral authority domestically. He faces an indirect election for the Presidency and direct elections for the National and Provincial Assemblies in the coming weeks. Both the sequence of these elections and his desire to retain the dual hats of Army Chief and President are being legally and politically contested, and will be challenged in the courts.
The courts could well rule against him. His government’s action against the defiant law-breaking by the staff and students of Islamabad’s Red Mosque raised Musharraf’s standing briefly, but the high death toll during and since that operation, and the continued fighting in the frontier regions, has made the action -- and Musharraf -- even more controversial. Your administration has maintained a Musharraf policy rather than a Pakistan policy for the past five years while the balance in Pakistan has been shifting in recent months. Washington has on the one hand reiterated its call for free and fair elections, on the other hand Musharraf still remains the embodiment of US policy toward Pakistan as “the partner we need”. When everyone favors strengthening the political side of Pakistan’s government and holding free and fair elections, there are disagreements about how important an issue this should be for the Bush administration.
The most difficult aspect of your policy is how to reconcile the dominant role the Pakistani Army has played in politics for much of Pakistan’s history and with the army’s track record in dealing with extremist organizations. Thus far under Musharraf’s rule, the Pakistani army has generally designed its occasional crackdowns on extremist organizations to bring them under better control but has failed to put them out of business. Many people believe that this is the best that can be hoped for.
Partly as a result, and especially in light of the Pakistani Supreme Court’s recent decision against Musharraf’s dismissal of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, I believe the US needs to strengthen its call for genuinely free elections in Pakistan, openly urging Musharraf to choose between heading the army and running for President. Empowered civilian political leadership will have greater legitimacy than what Musharraf now enjoys. If a genuine democratic political process is allowed to take its course, and Pakistani people truly elect their leadership, it will have a better shot at suppressing the extremists who have been brazenly flouting the most basic authority of the militaristic state.
If a future leader of Pakistan -- and there will be a genuine civilian leader some day regardless of what happens in the present elections -- wants to shift from controlling violent extremist groups to suppressing them, he or she will need to use the army for this purpose. The army will need to be a participant in such a decision, and the new democratically elected leader will need to command the army, in fact, and not just in name. The army is more likely to be persuaded if the campaign is based on the extremist groups’ violent challenge to state authority rather than on their religious character. The trick will be to sustain the effort for as long as necessary, to create a democratic political consensus behind the new policy, and to change the hedging policies that have looked on violent groups as a foreign policy asset. The recent shocking events in both Islamabad and the Northwest Frontier Province make clear that they are now a pressing internal threat.
Musharraf’s Pakistan is passing through many crises, all at once, and the Bush Administration must see Pakistan beyond Musharraf alone. There is a political power struggle that illustrates the continuing tension in Pakistan between a democratic movement and the vulnerability to military rule. Simultaneously, the state is confronting violence from religious extremists that extends into Islamabad, the capital; clashes in the Pushtun tribal areas between the military and local forces hosting the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban; a nationalist rebellion in Balochistan; the lingering conflict with India over Kashmir; and simmering popular resentment at Musharraf’s alliance with the United States
Pakistan has indeed become an indispensable partner in fighting the war on terror and because it is a nuclear power, Washington cannot be indifferent to the outcome of Pakistan’s political and security crises. Mr. President, your administration must be careful to distinguish immediate concerns about Musharraf’s fate from the US long-term interests in a stable democratic Pakistan.
Musharraf and his cronies like to recall, that the civilian governments of the two exiled former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, were stained by corruption. But it is also true that extremist religious forces have thrived under military dictatorships including Musharraf’s.
Under the present circumstances, the US administration’s support for Musharraf only inflames popular indignation against the Bush administration as a backer of military dictatorship. At the same time, it paints Musharraf as the stooge of a superpower that many Pakistanis have come to regard either as an unreliable ally that remains hostile to the Islamic World. Justified or not, those views must be taken into consideration as the US administration weighs its policy options for a Pakistan in crisis.
Washington may have rejoiced what the Musharraf lawyer told the Pakistani Supreme Court this week: that the general will relinquish his post as army chief of staff after he wins a presidential election that is to be conducted before Oct. 15 by the current Parliament and provincial assemblies. This gesture is a belated concession to Pakistani legal norms, and it will not satisfy critics who say Musharraf is still violating the Constitution by running for a third term. The critics also complain that Musharraf disregarded a Supreme Court ruling in his treatment of Sharif, the exiled leader of a major political party when the former prime minister flew into Islamabad on September 10 and Musharraf illegally deported him back to Saudi Arabia.
The more Musharraf learns to bow to the democratic will of the public and to constitutional rules affirmed by an independent judiciary, the better for Pakistan and for long-term US interests. The United States should place itself on the side of democratic legitimacy in Pakistan, and not on the side of a dictator who has repeatedly bent the rules to stay in power.
I respectfully extend the following suggestions to the Bush administration that I sincerely believe will serve the best interests of the United States, Pakistani people and the world at large:
1. The US should strongly and publicly warn Musharraf against the imposition of emergency rule or any other measure to stifle constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms of speech, association, assembly and movement in Pakistan.
2. Urge the Pakistani military’s high command to accept a return to genuine democracy, by concurring in the following steps:
(a) Return of exiled party leaders;
(b) Free and fair general parliamentary elections before a new president is selected;
(c) The new assemblies only should be acting as the presidential Electoral College; and
(d) Total and permanent separation of the posts of president and army chief.
3. Assist the democratic transition by:
(a) Sending adequately resourced and staffed election observation missions well in advance of the elections to assess whether the polls are held in an impartial way and strictly meet international standards;
(b) Conditioning military assistance to the government of Pakistan on meeting international standards for free, fair and democratic elections and making such assistance after the elections conditional on the military accepting the supremacy of civilian government; and
(c) Providing strong political and financial support to an elected civilian government.

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