In My View

Political defeat for Pakistan’s elite

Fourteen months after BenazirBhutto fell to the bullets of Islamist fundamentalists; and a year after the people of Pakistan rejected the Islamist agenda with a thumping victory for the forces ranged against it, Shariat law was imposed in a part of Pakistan. A bigger political defeat for Pakistan’s elite could not have been writ larger than this.

The geographic proximity of Swat valley to the latter’s seat of power, Islamabad – just 130 kms northwest – make Pakistan government’s decision to promulgate Shariat law there even more ironic. It almost seems that Pakistan’s Taliban is knocking on the doors of the elite of that country, asking them to stand up and be counted.

The fact that Monday’s (16 February) decision was taken in a meeting of all the powerful stakeholders of the country; President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gillani, army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvaiz Kayani, ISI chief Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, NWFP Governor Owais Ahmed Ghani and its Chief Minister Ameer Haidar Khan, shows the breadth of the Islamist political victory.

Some of Pakistan’s newspapers in their anger have called it a military defeat of Pakistan’s army. But cool headed analysis would show that the army did not taste the defeat in any battlefield. Any army would be wary of turning its guns, with its full explosive potential on its own population. Plus, if the government were to be believed the Pakistan Taliban, whose agenda have been fulfilled, enjoyed a level of popular support. In that scenario, the army could have done little but to hunker down for a protracted battle against its own people.

Pakistan’s army did not have the time to do that. They were needed to help the US and allied forces in tackling the far more dangerous enemy, the Afghan Taliban and their supporters, the al Qaeda. They were also needed to keep the country functioning with a modicum of normality. This was an army overstretched and tiring. It needed a breather in one front.

But the political elite of Pakistan deserve all the opprobrium. These were the people who enjoyed the highest levels of popular support just a year back because they vowed to eradicate the menace of Islamist forces. They fumed, fretted, fulminated, and bickered and wasted precious time. They failed to launch the political processes that could turn the people away from considering the Pakistan Taliban as a viable political option out of the morass they are in.

This is the population that had chosen the Awami National Party (ANP) to govern the North West Frontier Province because it had promised to end the war. A war that the Islamabad government now concedes to have brought untold misery to the people of the province. The political parties of Pakistan needed to take on the Taliban not just militarily, but ideologically. A task that they were so incapable of doing that they in turn had to embrace the garb of ‘peacemaker’ by succumbing to the regressive agenda of the Islamist forces. In short, they failed to provide not just governance but a political direction to the country.

In the process they frittered away the biggest mandate in favour of moderation that Pakistan has ever given to its rulers. The fact that this 16 February decision was taken around the time US President, Barack Obama’s special envoy on Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, was visiting the region indicated that Washington was in the loop. The US needs Pakistan to focus its energies into ridding Afghanistan of the Islamist forces, thus did not mind if Islamabad chose to buy time by striking a temporary truce with its own dangerous delinquents.

The victory rally Pakistan Taliban cadres held in Swat on 17 February bore the signs of the times. These are the people who have beheaded people for failing to follow the tenets of so called Islam and driven out hundreds of girls from schools because it is apparently ‘un-Islamic’ for women to have an education. In the rally on Tuesday they flaunted their weapons openly in their distinctive headgear. The cleric who had led the demand for imposition of Shariat at the public level, Sufi Mohammad, now claims that he would lead talks with his son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah who is the local Taliban leader for restoring peace to the region.

Pakistan government’s own linkage of actually issuing the order for promulgation of Shariat with restoration of peace gives a sense that in the reward-punishment paradigm it considers, imposition of the retrograde laws is considered a reward. Islamabad has justified this by a logic that if most people wanted it, who are they to stop it.

This hides the fact that most people chose imposition of the oppressive laws to have peace in a war-torn region. They were not given the option of leading their lives in a normal, dignified way. This was a failure of policies and practices of those who were at the helm in the country.

Holbrooke has rightly said this is biggest common challenge to Pakistan, India and the US. India is right to be worried. It would not certainly want the Taliban breathing down the neck of Indian Muslims. What their emergence in Pakistan does to the security situation of the sub continent is an issue nightmares are made of. Let’s hope that the people of Pakistan who are not much different than those who live across their eastern borders get a chance to seize the moment of history.