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| Can Zardari be trusted? | | |
Hiranmay Karlekar
Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari is known for making breathtaking statements. His exclamation about her charm, with which he greeted United States’ vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin not so long ago, is an example. It will take some living down, as will much of his conduct during his meeting with her. Let that be. One has now to contend with yet another of his gems, scattered during a recent interview with CNN. “Democracies,” he said, and by all indications without his tongue in his cheek, “have never gone to war. No Pakistan (sic) democratic Government has ever gone to war with India.” Had Mr Zardari been an ordinary citizen of Pakistan, one could have dismissed his remark as being the result of nothing more serious than a perfunctory acquaintance with history or India-Pakistan relations. But then Mr Zardari is the President of Pakistan and New Delhi can hardly afford to ignore the implications of what he says.
History is replete with examples of democracies waging war, some of them horridly unjust. The one in Vietnam during the 1960s and early-1970s is an example; another was the Anglo-French intervention in Suez in 1956. Knowing his background, one did not expect Mr Zardari to display the kind of familiarity with history that US President Barack Obama has or the late President John F Kennedy or his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, had. One, however, did expect a certain measure of acquaintance with relatively contemporary events like the Kargil war, which occurred when a democratic Government with Mr Nawaz Sharif at the helm was running Pakistan.
Any claim that Pakistan’s President was unaware of this fact will be a trifle difficult to believe, as it will be that Mr Sharif’s Government was not democratic because Mr Zardari was in prison during its tenure. A more credible explanation will be that Mr Sharif did not know when the infiltration into Kargil began in the winter of 1998-99. According to Brig Shaukat Quadir of the Pakistani Army in “An Analysis of the Kargil Crisis 1999”, published in the journal of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI Journal) of April 2002, four Pakistani Generals, led by Gen Pervez Musharraf, had planned the occupation of the heights of Dras and Kargil from which the Indian Army had withdrawn in winter. That was in November 1998 and Mr Sharif was casually informed about the plan in December 1998. He, however, was not told about its intended scale and possible consequences. The rest, including Pakistan’s retreat from the heights, is history.
Neither Gen Musharraf, who had planned to create a threat to Jammu & Kashmir which would draw international attention to the issue and force India to negotiate, nor the Pakistani Army, was amused. The result was the coup of October 12, 1999, which pitchforked Mr Sharif from the office of the Prime Minister to prison. How he was later released and sent off to Saudi Arabia is another story. The version of the coup most widely in circulation is that Mr Sharif precipitated a crisis by ordering Gen Musharraf’s replacement and trying to prevent the Pakistan International Airlines plane, by which he was travelling from Sri Lanka, from landing in Pakistan.
There is, however, more than what meets the eye not only in Gen Musharraf’s but all other coups staged in Pakistan. Mr Husain Haqqani, currently Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, writes in his extremely significant work, Pakistan between Mosque and Military, “The Pakistani military always insists on an immediate provocation as a trigger of its coups. This narrative presents every Pakistani military ruler as a reluctant coup-maker: Ayub Khan came to power after a violent scuffle in the East Pakistan legislature; Yayha Khan took over after months of rioting against Ayub Khan and the failure of Ayub Khan’s round-table conference with politicians; Zia-ul Haq’s coup was the result of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s inability to compromise with politicians protesting a rigged election and the possibility of civil war; and now the Army had deposed Sharif because he was trying to replace their commander and possibly endangering his life. The Army’s ability to swiftly execute a military take-over within hours of a supposed provocation is often attributed to its having contingency plans for such occasions.”
The fact is that Pakistan had not had a truly democratic Government, to which the military was subordinate, ever since 1954 when Gen Ayub Khan was included in the Cabinet. The same goes for the present one under Mr Zardari’s presidentship. Witness his and his Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s flip-flop over the despatch of the Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to India to share information on the attack on Mumbai on November 26 last year. After having promised to do so following their telephone conversations with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on November 28, and publicly announced their decision, they went back on their commitment under pressure from the Army.
But then all elected Governments in Pakistan have functioned within limits laid down by the military. Aziz Siddiqui writes in “March of the Generals” in On the Abyss edited by Tariq Ali, “The democratic experiment in Pakistan has had a further, even more decisive faultline. The military’s looming presence in politics from almost the start, and later the precedent of its direct assumption of power, has had a distortional, even destabilising, influence on almost every stage of the process. Every civilian Government has had to reckon with the possibility of the military playing favourites behind the scenes, even of its contemplating a direct intercession. The former has had to keep itself open to the latter’s wishes, try to create loyalties for itself and, when possible, try and build safeguards for itself.”
Whether Pakistan again goes to war against India would depend not on any elected Government but its military. New Delhi needs to remember this in the context of Mr Zardari’s other statement during his interview with CNN that he is looking forward to a fresh dialogue with India after the current election is over. Such a dialogue will be pointless unless India has a cast iron guarantee that Pakistan’s military has listened to Mr Obama’s exhortation and regards fundamentalist Islamist terrorists, and not India, as its enemy, and Mr Zardari can deliver
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