– Challenges for Pakistan

This is a piece from Shahid Javed Burki – one of the saner commentators on the Pakistani newspapers. He has the ability to look at world in a more global context!

One way to look at what Zia’s rule did to Pakistan as well as his extremist and terrorism policy of strategic depth did.. it would be good to see the Per Capita GDP stats of Pakistan vs India for 1989 and 1999. In 1989 Pakistan was far ahead of India’s stat.. but by 1999 Pakistan had been left tottering way back… A decade of mal-intentioned violent policies did it in for our neighbors..

… if they could learn from it!

LET me return for a moment to the Zia period in order to go forward with the analysis I began to offer in this space last week. The third takeover by the military was poorly timed; in fact, the country would have benefited from the political accommodation that seemed on the way between the government headed by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the forces of opposition. Military intervention set back the process of political maturation.

Was it political ambition that propelled General Ziaul Haq to take over power? Or, had the military senior command, given the rapid deterioration of law and order on the street, become too restive to be ignored by the chief of staff? I asked these questions in several conversations I had with President Zia but he always maintained that the law and order situation had deteriorated to the point where the military had no choice but to intervene.

It is interesting that of the four generals who have led the military into Pakistan’s political space only the first, Muhammad Ayub Khan, admitted that he had planned that action for a long time. All others have pleaded that they reacted to extraordinary circumstances. The position they took reflected the thinking on political development at the time of their intervention. In the late 1950s, there was a widely accepted view among political and economic experts that military rule could hasten development in developing societies. That view changed after the spectacular failure of military regimes in many parts of the world in the half century after Ayub Khan’s coup d’etat.

How did the military governments fare in Pakistan? This is an important question and I will attempt to provide some tentative answers for the fourth regime, the one headed by General Pervez Musharraf. However, before getting into the subject, I should mention one conclusion that is clear from an examination of the performance of the military in politics. The legacies left by military governments in Pakistan had more to do with the personality, thinking and beliefs of the leader in charge and little to do with the military as an institution. The Zia government is a particularly good example of that.

The Zia administration succeeded in some areas such as bringing growth back to the economy but, in retrospect, his legacy was extremely negative. Zia’s one contribution was to bring fundamentalist Islam to the country that had lived comfortably for centuries with a considerably more benign form of the religion. Pakistan is still dealing with the plants that sprouted from the seeds sown by General Ziaul Haq.

What about the fourth intervention by the military? Would General Pervez Musharraf have taken over the country’s administration had Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif not made the clumsy attempt to change once again the military’s top command? Did the military incursion into Indian held Kashmir and the way the aftermath of the Kargil episode was handled by the political authorities create so much tension between the civilian government and the military command that only a takeover by the army could resolve it? General Musharraf knows the answers to these questions but he continues to maintain that it was the attempt to hijack his plane that provoked his colleagues to intervene. What would have happened had he not taken over the administration?

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