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Musharraf:
Walking the knife-edge
Ajai
Sahni
The
coup and the assassination have been integral to political
transition in Pakistan virtually since the moment of its creation
[the country's first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, was
assassinated in 1951, and violence or machinations have marked
virtually every change of regime since]. This ruinous legacy
continues to reassert itself at each crucial turn of the country's
history. So, again, even as the Pakistani dream continues to
unravel, the country's military dictator General Pervez Musharraf -
himself in power as the result of a coup against an elected
Government - came under two serious attempts on his life within
eleven days, on December 14 and December 25, 2003, the latter
involving two separate suicide attacks within moments of each other.
Speaking on national television after the second assassination
attempt, Musharraf spoke harshly about the "cowardly people who
attack while hiding", and declared that "terrorists and
extremists" opposed to the global war against terrorism might
have plotted the attacks, adding further that he would not be cowed
down by such actions. It would appear that the lines between the
Pakistani state and the Islamist extremist forces that have long
been its protégés would finally harden into a clear antagonism.
Both the assassination attempts and such a crystallization of
attitudes have been expected ever since Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin
Laden's top lieutenant, speaking on the second anniversary of the
September 11 attacks on the US, had declared in a message to
"our brother Muslims in Pakistan": "How long will you
be patient with Musharraf, the traitor who sold out the blood of the
Muslims in Afghanistan and handed over the Arab emigrant Mujahideen,
the descendants of the Companions of the Prophet, to crusader
America?"
Things, however, are never entirely clear in Pakistan, and the
establishment has so long been in bed with the terrorists that the
disengagement is far from simple or inevitable. Thus, even as
President Musharraf was denouncing the "cowardly people"
who had attacked him, his Information Minister, Sheikh Rasheed
Ahmad, was arguing that 'the jehadi culture in Pakistan could
not be changed and he who denied jihad had no place in
Islam', adding, however, that "whether or not it is jihad
can only be decided by the state." The distinction between 'our
jehadis' and 'their terrorists' has evidently survived in Pakistan's
political rhetoric, despite the attacks on the country's current
President. The ambiguity is also reflected in an interesting turn of
phrase in reports on the assassination attempts on Pakistan
television; the expression "khud kush hamlavar" or
'suicide attacker', a decidedly pejorative description, was used
repeatedly to describe the failed assassins. Islamist suicide
bombers in Kashmir, in Palestine, and in other parts of the world
are routinely glorified as 'fidayeen', 'those who sacrifice
themselves', and this has been the conventional appellation on
Pakistan TV as well.
Such ambivalence is, however, becoming progressively unsustainable
in Pakistan, if only because the line between 'our jehadi'
and 'their terrorist' is being rapidly obliterated. Many of the
prominent terrorist groups that are perceived as being close to the
state and substantially controlled by the Inter Services
Intelligence (ISI) now have cadres moonlighting for, and deeply
sympathetic to, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, even where the top
leadership remains apparently compliant.
The growing danger to Musharraf and his regime, however, does not
come from the swelling ranks of 'their terrorists' alone.
Preliminary disclosures blame the Christmas assassination attempt on
the Al Jihad, a relatively minor terrorist group that has been
virtually inactive for several years, but matters are far from
simple. Both the recent attacks reflect high levels of complexity as
well as of complicity within at least a section of the
establishment, and these discredit the possibility of a rag tag
operation. Both incidents occurred within a hundred yards of one
another in Rawalpindi, which is the General Headquarters of the
Pakistan Army and the most militarised city in a militarised
country; they occurred within the high security Cantonment areas;
they occurred on the President's daily route, which can reasonably
be expected to be completely sanitized. The December 14 incident is
particularly significant in this context. Over half a tonne of
explosives had been transported to, and then unloaded, concealed and
primed at, a bridge that is heavily guarded round the clock, on the
regular route between the President's office and residence; and had
been detonated by remote control, presumably by an assassin lying in
wait in sight of the bridge [the attempt failed, according to the
official Pakistani line, because of the jammers on the President's
cavalcade, though it is still unclear how or why the explosion
eventually did occur over a minute after the procession had passed
beyond the bridge]. Again, on December 25, reports indicate that
there were two Presidential motorcades - one of them a decoy -
moving simultaneously on two different routes, but the terrorists
were able to correctly identify and target Musharraf's motorcade.
There is, consequently, in both incidents, substantial
circumstantial evidence to suggest an 'inside job'.
If disaffected elements in the Army, presumably at a level
sufficiently high as to engineer such operations, are now, indeed,
targeting Musharraf (and this remains essentially in the sphere of
informed speculation) the fragile equation that has been contrived
between powerful and ideologically incompatible political entities -
including armed non-state groups - to maintain a modicum of order in
Pakistan is now dangerously imperilled. To the extent, moreover,
that much of the world, including the US and increasingly India, has
invested almost its entire faith on the survival of this tenuous
arrangement, and in General Musharraf, to contain the burgeoning
dangers of this epicentre of terrorism, the situation is grim. As The
Washington Post noted, "The past week has given the Bush
administration more cause to reconsider its heavy reliance on a
single general, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, to maintain stability
in one of the world's most dangerous areas."
The assassination attempts in Pakistan also underline the frailty
and brittleness of the current and vaunting peace processes in South
Asia. While both the Indian and Pakistani leadership are, in the run
up to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)
Summit in January 2004, currently competing to outdo one another in
the rhetoric of South Asian 'unification', the fragility of the
balance, the contingent nature of all plans and enterprises in the
region, and the degree to which the initiative lies with
organisations committed to terrorism, make a mockery of all such
projections.
For the moment, Musharraf has survived and the SAARC summit is
expected to go ahead on schedule, with all regional leaders having
reconfirmed their participation, despite serious and legitimate
security concerns. To believe, however, that peace is somewhere
around the corner, is delusional. Pakistan and its leaders -
including Musharraf and his generals - have only just begun to pay
the price for their long sponsorship of terrorism, what one leading
Pakistani commentator described as "the 'globalisation' of
terrorism we performed in the past decade", and the
conflagration will escalate substantially before it is eventually
doused. Regrettably, it is not Pakistan alone that will have to pay
the price of its past and ongoing transgressions.
Ajai
Sahni is the Editor, SAIR; Executive Director, Institute
for Conflict Management. |
