Musharraf: LBW, but not out!

MK Bhadrakumar.

NEW DELHI: A successful person is one, it is said, who has use for the bricks that others throw at him.

The political controversy over Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s move to sack the Chief Justice of Pakistan Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhry should in all probability die down in another week. But, it had its use for Musharraf.

Prima facie, he seeks to exercise better grip over the judiciary during an election year that holds too many variables.

But Chaudhry’s removal also calms apprehensions among powerful quarters within the security establishment over looming judicial probes on hundreds of jihadi elements picked up by the intelligence agencies in the course of the five-year-old “war on terror,” which since disappeared from the face of the earth.

Most certainly, American counterpart agencies that collaborated, were end-users, or at the very least, remained passive witnesses of human rights violations in Pakistan will heave a sigh of relief. The skeletons rattling in the cupboard are already profoundly damaging — Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib….

In a curious way, the current controversy also reveals a few Pakistani home truths — lest anyone forgot. First, Pakistan’s robust civil society has its limitations in mounting agitational politics.

Second, the disarray in party politics virtually rules out accretion of political discontent capable of erupting into mass movements.

Third, common people view the political class with distaste, and see no alternative to army rule despite their possible aversion to it. Musharraf will strive to capitalise on this dismal landscape to advance his case for a credible re-election.

Why shouldn’t he? He is entitled to manipulative politics as his peers anywhere. He is a rare soldier gifted with acute political instincts. Even Zia-ul Haq would trail behind him. Ayub Khan or Yahya Khan would appear novices.

More than at any time, Musharraf may stake claim that he stands between Pakistan and the deluge of extremism. That cry will resonate in Washington. The political continuity that he offers is of vital interest to Washington.

To be sure, he draws enormous sustenance from US political support of him, but that also makes him keen to be of relevance to the American regional policies.

From Washington’s perspective, there might be shortfalls in his performance on the warfront in Pakistan’s lawless, devilishly obscure tribal agencies, but his commitment to the war as such hasn’t been in doubt. Nor for that matter his genuine aversion toward radical Islam, expediencies apart.

At any rate, Afghanistan forms part of a Clusewitzean war in the wider arc of the Muslim world.

Musharraf is locked in a matrix of “inter-dependence” with the US at a defining moment of the post-Cold War era when the potentials of US dominance are in ferment in the swathe of Islamic world to the west of Pakistan stretching to the Levant.

He will be a key protagonist if the US was to mount relentless pressure for a “regime change” in Iran. Creating a crisis of governance in the GHQ in Rawalpindi is the last thing in Washington’s consideration zone.

New Delhi has rightly focused on working with the Musharraf regime. Our composite dialogue with Pakistan may wear a diffident look at times, but objective factors are involved, irrefutable and complex, some in India, some in Pakistan, though the gains so far are of genuine satisfaction nonetheless.

To keep the dialogue process on track is never easy when incremental steps are involved against a backdrop of compulsions that is the stuff of domestic politics, and prone to get noisier in the coming weeks and months.

(Bhadrakumar is former ambassador to Turkey & Uzbekistan. He has been
visiting faculty at JNU)