By Abhijit Bhattacharyya
The Telegraph
Sept 11, 2008
Asif Ali Zardari has arrived at last. He was sworn in as the Pakistani president on September 9. What next? What would be the president’s priority — keeping the polity intact by responding to Nawaz Sharif’s call, avoiding conflict with the army, mollifying the mullahs, taking on the Taliban, terrorists and al Qaida, or starting talks with India? It is indeed a tough call for Zardari as the future of Pakistan depends on his diplomatic skills.
There is one thing that Zardari should surely avoid doing — incurring the wrath of the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence, keeping in mind the role played by both in Pakistan’s history till now.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was ousted from power and hanged to death by the army chief, General Zia-ul-Haq, in 1979. His daughter, Benazir Bhutto, too got it all wrong while dealing with General Mirza Aslam Beg and the ISI chief, Hamid Gul, in the Nineties and ultimately lost her life in 2007 during General Pervez Musharraf’s reign. Zardari’s back room manoeuvring before he became the president to bring the ISI chief under the prime minister’s office backfired badly in July 2008. Hence Zardari needs to tread cautiously.
At present, however, the current army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, does not seem keen on the thorny throne of Islamabad, focussing more on the professionalism of soldiers and skills of the ISI spies. Yet in Pakistan the army still continues to rule, albeit less blatantly, the advent of legal presidency notwithstanding.
The new president should also be careful because he has dethroned an ex-chief of the Pakistani army with the threat of impeachment. Musharraf left, humbled by the civilians. No previous Pakistani army chief had to go like this. In Pakistani tradition, coup is the privilege of the army and not of the civilian, however high and mighty he or she might be.
Cure for headache
The army apart, perhaps the most tricky of all the factors facing Zardari is the geography of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, consisting of the seven tribal regions of Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, North Waziristan and South Waziristan. Endowed with the three characteristics of melmastia (honour and hospitality), nanawati (the pledge never to deny hospitability to a fugitive) and badal (right to revenge), Fata has been renamed by the al Qaida and Taliban as the “Islamic Emirate of Waziristan”. The fight by the tribals for their unique brand of freedom will continue to be a headache even for the best of presidents.
Zardari may also like to decide as to whether or not there is a need to take mid-course correctives, avoiding a repeat of the past actions of Zulfiqar and Benazir, who tried to make the military subservient to the civilians. The Bhuttos also, theoretically at least, had sought better relations with the Pakistani army’s traditional foe, India, and had opposed Islamic extremists whom the army supported.
President Zardari’s greatest test could lie in the fact that he assumed power on the eve of the seventh anniversary of 9/11, when Osama bin Laden continues to be at large and the various factions of the Taliban and al Qaida vie with one another to get the top slot for violence. Zardari now faces the daunting task of balancing the actors and factors in the high drama of Islamabad. First, it is Zardari versus Nawaz Sharif; then the army’s traditional distrust of the Bhuttos; the Bhutto clan’s bitter memory of ruthless Generals; the ISI pursuing its own plans; and finally, the suicide-bombers spanning from Khyber to Quetta, from Mohmand to Multan. Last, but not the least, is the psychology of the Baluch leaders who view the Pakistani armed forces “not as a national military, but a Punjabi force with a mercenary and exploitative character”. Will Zardari succeed?
