In My View

Tough Love for Musharraf

It takes one piece of good news to erase weeks of misfortune. President, Gen Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan was searching for one such big event that could turn the tables on his tormentors inside Pakistan and his main ally, the USA. He found it in the ejection of the militant mullahs from Lal Masjid in Islamabad.

Just a few weeks ahead a leading South Asia pundit, Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution, had proclaimed that the problem with Musharraf was that he likes to be *loved.* As a sure sign of his apparent weakness, Cohen had charged that Pakistan*s military ruler did not even promulgate *martial law* after he took over power in a coup against the tottering Nawaz Sharif regime.

A few weeks later Musharraf took on an entrenched bastion of political Islam, much promoted by a preceding military dictator, Gen Zia-ul Haq – one who was closely studied by Cohen himself. The ones who read tea leaves to gauge the power barometre, found Musharraf firmly in control. He, on cue, promised to root out extremism from “every corner” of the country and ensure that seminaries and mosques were not misused. Some believe that he actually means business, this time again.

But the US media, like carrions, wanted more. They wanted Musharraf removed lock, stock and barrel. They wanted Washington to severe ties with his regime and *rededicate* to its cause of supporting the people of Pakistan.

Amidst all this cross currents of opinion, Musharraf would need to seize the political initiative and chart out a course that not only satisfies his clientilist relations with Washington but also appeals to his core constituency of the uniformed forces who showed a marked desire to lay down their lives for a cause championed by their chief. Along the way he could try to regain ground with a section of Pakistan*s population whom he should have courted assiduously much before he signed on to the American enterprise of cleaning Afghanistan off the evil of Islamic radicalism, loved only till the former Soviet Union had to be evicted.

These were the people who had begun to bite his baits about being inspired by a Kemal Ataturk, thus a reformer who would challenge the growing influence of Islamism. They had been his countrymen – the so called liberal elite - who were fearful of the new concert of Islamist militancy with the underprivileged and the disenfranchised, threatening their edifice of pelf and power.

While that pressure had been building up from the bottom, there was also the weight of decades of excesses at the top, thus leading up to the argument of a *failed state.* But Musharraf got distracted with 9/11 and the desire to do a Zia-ul Haq – thus get a quick fix solution to systemic malaise.

What he would need to do now would be far more stringent, if he has the stomach to follow through on Lal Masjid. He would have to address the issue of young boys from the poverty stricken families populating the ranks the jihadists. One aspect of that problem lies in the economic backwardness of Pakistan, which has two serious dimensions.

First is the failure of the State system to deliver economic respite to the lower rungs of the society due to systemic inabilities to create an equitable environment, further exacerbated by such endemic slippages due to widespread corruption – a charge that Musharraf has levelled against the chief justice of the country, Ifthikar Choudhary.

Second, he would have to stop the highly corrosive influence of unaccounted flow of funds from dubious sources in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that go into funding the seminaries and mosques – the veritable rabbit warrens religious radicalism.

The other aspect is more ideational. That too has essentially two sides. One is to define the waltenschuung for Pakistan*s existence. No longer can the country define its nationhood on the negation of the reality of India and its accidental Hindu roots. It would have to find an alternative, which is suitably modern and yet retaining certain elements of the Fichtian vein that stated *any alleged revelation of God's activity in the world must pass a moral test: namely, no immoral command or action, i.e., nothing that violates the moral law, can be attributed to Him.*

Last, Musharraf would have to cut Pakistan*s umbilical chord with its primary ally, the USA who has taken more out of Pakistan that it has given. Earlier, Washington had used the country as a pawn in Cold War politics, and now it has turned the alliance into a self-serving tool to take on the dark forces of Islamic fanaticism, without catering to Pakistan*s own needs of nationhood.

A view from India would seem that Musharraf*s plate is full and his glass, half empty.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in