The devastating Kashmir earthquake is once again testing the skills of one of the world's great political survivors. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has few friends and many enemies. Pakistan's major political parties oppose him. For the religious right and the mullahs, he is an agent of the US, the great Satan, and has thus betrayed the cause of Islam.
Somewhere out there, gunning for Musharraf, are Islamic militants furious at being dumped after they fought his covert wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Many in Musharraf's own army despise him for the same reason. For Pakistan's small and embattled liberal and left-wing forces, he is yet another military dictator who seized and holds power by force, undermining the development of democracy.
So how does Musharraf survive? In large part, he can thank Sept. 11. Faced by a US bent upon bloody vengeance, Pakistan's military establishment scurried to join the US-led coalition and take up arms against its own creation, the Taliban. Only a few senior officers with an Islamic bent resisted this straightforward betrayal. They were soon marginalized, drawing praise from Washington.
With US help, an economy that had nearly run aground was suddenly righted by a wave of international aid and loan write-offs. Even more important was a decision, taken in the hope of choking off funds to extremist groups, to require all expatriate Pakistani earnings to be remitted through official banking channels.
In a curious way, nuclear weapons also are crucial to Musharraf's survival, for they create conditions that distract Pakistan's highly ideological army from its objective of war with India.
The dispute over Kashmir had occupied the minds of military planners throughout Pakistan's history, and war had been the raison d'etre for maintaining the world's eighth-largest standing army. But nukes, a belief in deterrence and the growing realization that Kashmir is a lost cause, have freed the army from the hard life of the trenches. Ideology is increasingly irrelevant as the officer class scrambles to build vast personal fortunes.
A look at Pakistan's economic landscape says it all. The chief executive officers of many, if not most corporations, public and private, are retired military officers -- many fairly young. The military owns airlines and freight companies, petrochemical factories, power generation plants, sugar mills, cement and fertilizer plants, construction firms, banks and insurance companies, advertising agencies and more. Vast tracts of prime real estate in cities, sold to officers for a pittance, have turned into mega housing developments.
Musharraf defends the military acquisitions, claiming that they are economically efficient, and angrily dismisses criticism as the ranting of unpatriotic Pakistani pseudo-intellectuals. But they are "efficient" only in the sense that they dampen the threat to Musharraf posed by the military.
Not so Pakistan's Islamists, however, whom Musharraf infuriated yet again last month, when he ordered his foreign minister to initiate the first official contact with Israel. But the Islamists' call for nationwide protests flopped. The military, after decades of rule, has dismantled all forms of political organization -- parties, trade unions and student associations -- leaving a Pakistani society immobilized, apathetic and incapable of articulating its preferences.
As Islamists' anger at Musharraf's betrayals increases, so does his global standing and image as a world statesman. Scenes of wild-eyed mullahs demonstrating in the streets of Pakistani cities are a boon to his position. Surely the Pakistani public needs to be tamed by a strongman. No harm if it is an army general.
But the truth is more complex. Musharraf flits effortlessly between personae. At one moment he is the "responsible" world leader who speaks charmingly to the international media about moderate Islam; at the next, he is the cunning conspirator who rigs elections, destroys political opponents, breaks promises on relinquishing power, enters into mutually beneficial relationships with mullahs and castigates human-rights activists as "Westernized fringe elements" that "are as bad as the Islamic extremists."
To forestall the possibility of a coup, the army is being cleansed of hardline Islamists. Soldiers charged with mutiny have received the death penalty. This process has deepened pro- and anti-US divisions within the army, both among commissioned and non-commissioned officers, but nothing in Pakistan today suggests that radical change is imminent.
To be sure, more incidents of global terrorism associated with Pakistan, such as July's London bombings, will bring new pressures. The US and Europe will make their usual demands to close down the country's hate-spewing madrassas, and to reform a public-school system that, unhindered by the government, churns out young militants burning to kill and die for Islam.
For Musharraf, this means that continuing to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares might get harder. But the current constellation of forces suggests that, barring unforeseen developments, his survival instincts will serve him well for years to come.
Pervez Hoodbhoy is a professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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