Mosharraf Zaidi

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Locating the threat within, outside. Again.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009
by Mosharraf Zaidi

President Asif Ali Zardari is the product of a legitimate election, by a legitimate parliament. He could do a lot worse than he already has, and he will always remain a better president than his predecessor. And yet, somehow, the more that Zardari is supposed to be less like his predecessor, the more he seems more and more like his predecessor. As he approaches a full year in office, it is to the enduring shame and ridicule of the PPP that it presides over one of the most farcical constitutional eras in Pakistani history: a people’s government that refuses to live up to the most basic of its promises to the people — to give back the country to parliament of the people.

The keen appetite that President Zardari shares with Gen Musharraf for retaining absolute power through the mutilation of the constitution is only the tip of the iceberg. The more striking and much more insidious resemblance between this president (legitimate, standing tall and all) and the last one (hardly legitimate enough to walk away in shame) is in their foreign policy doctrine. Both presidents have used the art of charm as the single and only instrument of foreign policy available. While Gen Musharraf had truckloads to dispense with of his own, built up over a career filled with tiny exploits made to look bigger with rhetorical bluster, President Zardari uses the substantial stock of charm gleaned from years of sacrifice by the PPP, and the gold mine of charm that the PPP came across when Husain Haqqani stumbled into, and onto the feet of Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto.

Being a charming president to a country of 172 million is no crime at all. Except of course if all the charm is reserved for everybody outside the country, and none at all is reserved for anybody in it. And let’s be frank, being charming only for foreigners isn’t such a bad thing for a country widely seen to be the most dangerous in the world. Unless of course what you consider charming is in fact just disingenuous pseudo-intellectual drivel. And it is this, most depressing of realities, that makes this current, most legitimate of presidents, seem like a rerun of his predecessor, a most illegitimate one.

Gen Musharraf ran out of party tricks with the Bush administration when it became widely accepted conventional wisdom in Washington DC that though he was telling the Americans everything they wanted to hear, the general wasn’t the kind of kitten they had thought, but rather a different kind of cat deep down inside. By the time he left office, Musharraf’s invisible alter ego, to the Americans at least, was a dude with a turban, a long beard, with a chair deep in the heart of the ISI headquarters, ready to take it to the next level in Kabul, Delhi and anywhere else he had to, to deepen Pakistan’s ’strategic depth’.

So now, Uncle Sam and Nephew Pak have a democratic government, led by President Zardari, to deal with. And what’s different about Zardari, clearly, is that he isn’t part of the ‘establishment’, that he’s from the ‘progressive and secular PPP’, that he’s the head of the ‘most popular political party in the country’ and that he’s not ‘Punjabi’. Asif Ali Zardari, unlike the Punjabi-ised General Musharraf of Old Delhi and New Londontown, is none of the things that Washington DC has come to loathe in this Islamic Republic.

President Zardari has lived up to the hype thus far, mostly thanks to his man in Washington DC. Ambassador Haqqani makes sure his master in Islamabad speaks to the nervous ticks and muscular spasms that get any kind of airtime at all in DC. Every speech, op-ed and press conference must inspire a new memo, a new telegram, and a new talking point.

For serious followers of politics and policy in Pakistan, President Zardari’s quotes are nothing more than an entertaining sideshow, not the core of Pakistani foreign policy. In true Pakistani tradition, however, the only tempering mechanism for President Zardari’s pronouncements is American gullibility. So while Pakistan’s dysfunction is entirely Pakistan’s fault, American naivete cannot get a pass because Pakistan is a basket case. In the Age of Obama, America has to do better. Anyone that was really interested in debilitating the Punjabi-dominated, Hindu-hating, right-leaning, military-dominated Pakistani establishment would have to be recklessly foolish if it went and helped rebrand the Pakistan army in the wake of eight years of Musharraf and a devastating and humiliating defeat at the hands of the country’s lawyers. Yet that’s exactly what President Zardari has done since the May 8 offensive was launched into Swat. The Swat offensive has helped rehabilitate the image of the military.

Pakistanis should be ecstatic. No country should have to demonise its own military to enjoy democratic freedoms. But the rehabilitation of the military’s image in Pakistan comes with inherent costs. One of them is the credibility of the Haqqani framework for counter-establishment rhetoric that President Zardari uses with such abandon, such as “the existential threat to Pakistan is from within”, and the classic, “India is not the enemy, the Taliban are”.

Not only are these statements technically debatable, they are logically inconsistent with the purported joint mission of the PPP in Pakistan, and its supporters in Washington DC. This mission, to weaken the undemocratic strains of the Pakistani establishment, and strengthening its democratic credentials, is a noble one. However, good intentions alone don’t cut it in ‘the world’s most dangerous country’.

On existential threats, honest brokers know that countries are not insects, or cigarettes. They don’t disappear. All the post-partition rage, confused liberal mumbo-jumbo, and irrational right-wing bluster can’t change the reality of Pakistan’s existence, and its vitality — no matter how many terrorists attack its innocent people. In South Asia’s real politick, there is no such thing as an existential threat to Pakistan.

On the differentiation between internal threats and external ones, Pakistan’s worldview is best demonstrated by what it does, not what it says. It uses the army, rather than the police (even though the enemy keeps trying to engage the police!) to fight internal threats. More tellingly, if Pakistan really believed that the threat (deep and serious as it is) is internal, would every government minister, army general and armchair pundit be blaming India, Afghanistan, and the US as the sources of the terrorists’ funding, weapons and training? Pakistan can keep towing the American line on who its enemies really are in the Washington Post — but it clearly does not believe it can afford to do so at ministry of interior press conferences in Islamabad, much less on Pakistan’s eastern border.

The truth is that neither Gen Musharraf nor President Zardari is incentivised to tell the truth. Why would they tell unpleasant truths when they know that they can tell pleasant lies and get some money out of the bargain? They can milk the US taxpayer for the injection of American assistance into the Pakistani economy (albeit in a manner most inefficient) by continuing to whisper sweet nothings into the ears of members of the Unholy Trinity of Dicks — Dick Armitage, Dick Boucher and now Dick Holbrooke. When they are in town, Pakistani presidents don’t need to tell the truth.

The truth is that Pakistan — even under heavy moral and tactical compulsion — cannot, and will not, accept Indian dominance in Afghanistan. More urgently, the truth is that in negotiations between India and Pakistan henceforth, the conversation needs to begin with Afghanistan, if Pakistan were to be honest, rather than Kashmir, which is now, a secondary foreign policy issue for Pakistan. Finally, perhaps most urgently, the truth is that Pakistan does not want, and cannot help sustain, an American troop presence in Afghanistan.

None of this is to say that the terrorists are not recognised as a threat to Pakistan. They are. Nor is it to suggest that anybody has a better alternative to a US troop surge in Afghanistan to quell the increasing fortitude of the terrorists there in the present scenario. They do not. Nor is it to suggest that the brave Pakistani soldiers that are taking on the Taliban are not fighting the right war for the right reasons. They are.

But the realities and implications of Pakistan’s lesser-told truths are important. To understand Pakistan’s foreign policy dysfunction, the starting point cannot be a barrel of a gun, or the shining tip of a pen about to sign a $1.5 billion cheque. Pakistan will continue to take the money, its generals will continue to think the way Pakistan is ‘existentially’ wired to think, and Pakistan will continue to confound analysts because the set-piece frameworks in vogue in Washington DC, in London and beyond, simply don’t work. They are spurious, to say the least.

One-liners can’t change the course of the behemoth called Pakistan, nor can money, even $1.5 billion of it. This beast has momentum. To paraphrase the great American poet, Walt Whitman, does Pakistan contradict itself? Very well then, Pakistan contradicts itself. It is large. It contains multitudes.

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Iran’s Broken Election

Tuesday, June 23, 2009
by Mosharraf Zaidi

What is happening in Iran is not a CIA conspiracy to destabilise the Middle East. It is simply more evidence of the incapability of Muslim societies to competently conduct their affairs within the confines of an agreed set of rules. The Great Satan is not in Washington DC, or at the CIA headquarters. The Great Satan is the unfettered and dysfunctional state. In Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and almost everywhere else where Muslims make up a majority of the population, this Great Satan is feeding monsters that are always a few speeches away from being out of control. It is not unnatural that the United States should applaud some of these monsters (like those in Iran) and not others (like the millions of Pakistanis that, for two years, protested for the restoration of the judiciary). Iran’s democrats are more convenient for US foreign policy than Pakistani democrats. The United States is a rational animal, and the US state, as problematic as it may be, is not the unfettered and dysfunctional beast that mullahs in every corner of the Muslim world pretend it is.

Many contest the use of the term Muslim world, and perhaps there are good reasons to do so. There continue to be enough reasons however not to get rid of the term. At the top of that list is the collective inability of Muslim societies to construct viable and sustainable states that work. At the top of the list of examples of states that don’t work is Iran. And at the top of the list of examples of how it doesn’t work is the June 12 election.

Iran’s post-election riots and instability are the products of public policy dysfunction. The fuel that is being added to the fire may very well be the product of Fox News’ intense desire to see the back of Ahmedinejad, but the fire itself is all-Persian, all-Islamic republic, and all too avoidable.

Since Iran does not allow for the free and unfettered expression of political opinions, public opinion polls from within the country have no credibility. So those that are interested in Iran depend on opinion polling conducted by external actors. This year for example, between May 11 and May 20, The Centre for Public Opinion at Terror Free Tomorrow, the New America Foundation, and KA Europe SPRL conducted a nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians. Thirty-four per cent of all respondents said they would vote for Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, fourteen per cent said they would vote for Mir Hussein Moussavi, two per cent said they would vote for Mehdi Karroubi, and one per cent said they would vote for Mohsin Rezaee. A staggering 27 per cent said they did not know who they would be voting for, but that they would indeed vote. However, of those 27 per cent, more than 60 per cent planned to vote for a reformist candidate (which would mean either Moussavi or Karroubi). The poll therefore suggested that there would be a two-way race that would pit Moussavi and Ahmedinejad in a close race for president — with Ahmedinejad holding a small but significant lead.

The official elections result, when announced, sparked almost immediate protests because it came out to be 63 per cent for Ahmedinejad, 34 per cent for Moussavi, two per cent for Rezaee and one per cent for Karroubi. That two-to-one margin for Ahmedinejad was bad news for Iran, because it ran against the grain of established political wisdom, and did not reflect, in any way, the expected closeness of the race.

On June 17, as the protests began to engulf more and more of the airwaves, the fabrications, counter-fabrications and propaganda began in earnest. Already rocked by a crisis of confidence in the system, the Iranian people began to get bombarded with different kinds of versions of the truth. One of the most popular ones, reported on by Robert Fisk, in The Independent, was an allegedly secret letter, whose copies are being distributed all over Tehran and in the countryside. This secret letter, written by Minister of Interior Sahdeq Mahsuli to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, states that the actual results were nothing like what has been officially declared, and that in fact, Moussavi took 50 per cent of the vote, Karroubi took 35 per cent, Ahmedinejad took only 15 per cent and Rezaee took less than 0.2 per cent.

Fisk and other commentators make cases both for and against the validity of this letter. But the veracity of the letter is a train that left the station a long, long time ago. The real issue here is that if Robert Fisk is reporting on an allegedly secret letter, then it has newsworthiness within the context of the Iranian election. If people believe that Iran has been duped by President Ahmedinejad, then all the nutty speeches in the world, by him or by his best friend, the equally incorrigible Hugo Chavez, won’t do him any good. The viability of the best statesman, or the worst tyrant, is rooted not in the mechanics of elections or public opinion polls but in the quantum of credibility afforded to the processes involved.

The truth of this should be most apparent to Pakistanis, who have now endured almost a full year with President Asif Ali Zardari — a president who is legitimate because the process that produced his victory was credible, even though he, as a political entity, really was not.

That an election result should generate both such wildly different versions of the truth and such dramatic and sustained civil disobedience in Iran is most ironic. Iran has developed a credible elections process, though it does not conform to democratic convention, and does not really represent a free choice of the people (given the vetting of candidates by unelected clerics). The most telling nugget of the electoral system’s credibility in Iran is the voter turnout. Iranian election regularly produce 50 per cent voter turnout, but in 1997, on the cusp of ushering in the Khatami era, voter turnout peaked to more than 80 per cent. In the 2005 election, when Ahmedinajad ran against Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the turnout was above 60 per cent. This year, according to the official result, turnout was over 85 per cent.

Voter turnout may be the only place where there is any kind of agreement between the TFT opinion poll, the official result and the alleged real result in the secret letter to Khamenei. In all three, voter turnout is said to be in excess of 80 per cent.

Why is voter turnout so important? Because citizens that really believe in the system tend to engage with it. Iranians may not agree with one world view or another, but they have repeatedly expressed, with their votes, an unusual degree of confidence in the expression of their voice as an important one in shaping the leadership of their country.

The contested election result is structurally damaging for the Islamic Republic and for the Khomeini Revolution because it has dramatically eroded confidence in the Iranian system. This confidence was not just demonstrated by Iranian citizens in election after election, but even by its adversaries, who never liked the post-revolution Iran, but rarely questioned the legitimacy of its regimes. This does not mean that the state is about to fall apart, or that Iran won’t continue to operate within the framework of the revolution of 1979. It simply means that the fragility of that framework is dramatically greater than it was before this election.

The susceptibility of the Iranian system to a single contested election is the typical behaviour of a weak and ineffective state. The weakness and ineffectiveness of states is not a commodity that can be bought, even by the mighty CIA. Foreign powers, no matter how resourceful, cannot mine the political and institutional capacity of any country to the extent of immobilising them. Conversely, neither can state effectiveness and strength be bought, even by the mighty USAID. A corollary that may be useful for Iran’s most important and perhaps even more dysfunctional neighbour to the east.

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Cock the hammer, it’s time for action

Wednesday, June 10, 2009
by Mosharraf Zaidi

The targeted killings taking place in Karachi have brought back memories of the 1990s and Operation Cleanup. That military operation effectively routed the street power of Version 1.0 of the MQM, disabled the organization of the MQM to mobilize young people for demonstrations of street power, and through the courts system, systematically delegitimized its leadership. It was an operational victory that disembowelled Karachi and its politics. Sensing that undercurrent of bitter resentment against the operation, Gen Musharraf and the military adopted a different strategy when they took power in 1999. The idea was to re-engage the MQM, largely on the back of the economic promise of Karachi, a massive urban area, by all international standards, that was left far behind in the global race between cities for investment capital, jobs and infrastructure. Karachi’s retarded growth in the 1990s was not only a problem for Karachi, and for Muhajirs. It was a Pakistani problem. Solving the problem would produce many benefits, from rejuvenating the microeconomy of Karachi, to healing the political economy of Pakistan.

The strategy seemed to have worked. By engaging the MQM, the military was able to defuse much of the tension that had defined relations between urban Sindh and the Pakistani establishment. The engagement of course, came in the shape of making the MQM a partner in the traditional patron-pillage model of Pakistani politics. It did not come in the shape of substantive improvements in governance, but rather in the bells and whistles of roads, bridges, parks — not to mention pomp and privilege for MQM ministers at the federal and provincial levels that had previously been hard to win, and easily lost. Of course, even though it achieved some things immediately, the strategy was also wrought with danger. The original grievances of the people that formed the MQM were never, ever, really addressed. One needn’t have endorsed the original agenda of the MQM to see how linearly consistent it was Muhajir identity in urban Sindh. Simply put, the MQM wanted an end to the affirmative action (or positive discrimination) quota system in Sindh province and it wanted the repatriation of the almost 300,000 Pakistanis stranded in Bangladesh, back to Pakistan.

Instead of challenging the established political Holy Cow of Sindh’s quotas, or beginning a process of reconciliation with itself, by absorbing the stranded Pakistanis of Bihar into Pakistan, the military supported Musharraf to do simply what any dictator would do. He bought his way out of the problem by providing the massive infrastructure grants to the MQM-dominated Karachi district government (but only after the people of Karachi got smart and elected an MQM administration at the local level).

The army and its chief, much the same way that the bureaucracy (and any given district commissioner) would have done, decided that a political force (like the MQM) cannot simply be killed off, or wished away. The plan was to simply mainstream the MQM into Pakistan’s politics, neutralize the violent streak of a still nascent political entity, and allow the people of Karachi to live in a city they deserved — peaceful, prosperous and ready for the 21st century. As formulated, it was a pretty good plan.

Of course, very much like a district commissioner, Gen Musharraf did what all bureaucrats trained to think in short-term tactics, instead of long-term strategy, do. He did whatever was necessary to achieve desirable outcomes in the present, disregarding both the past, and the future. Disregarding the past was a dangerous mistake because the clues to the MQM’s political legitimacy did not lie in the party’s ability to mobilize young people to exercise street power, it lay in the issues around which the All Pakistan Muhajir Students’ Organization (APMSO) was originally formed, and which the MQM ostensibly stood for in its early days.

Disregarding the future was an ever more dangerous mistake, because there was no attempt during the Musharraf-era of trying to address the blemishes on the MQM’s reputation, and hold people to account for indiscretions, crimes and misdemeanours. How could a military dictator dictate political ethics or moral equilibrium to a political party? Of course, he couldn’t. But the point is that the baggage of being a steadfast ally of Musharraf is very heavy baggage to carry.

The mistake that Pakistanis will make, in trying to understand the latest string of violence in Karachi is to either demonize or defend specific political parties — the MQM, the ANP, and others. But arresting violence in Karachi is not fundamentally about politics, even though violence wears political clothes all the time. It is about the Pakistani state and its duty to protect citizens from violence — no matter who is pulling the trigger. Failure to protect citizens is a grave failure. All around the country, this failure is increasingly prevalent.

Pakistan simply cannot afford the luxury of normative discussions about good and evil. Those days are over, and the era of endlessly meandering moral questions and answers in Pakistan needs to come to screeching halt if this country is to survive, in any meaningful way, these most testing of times.

It seems that no matter what the cause, and what the era, Karachi is like a theatre for mayhem – ready to go, raring to go in fact, at the drop of whatever hat one can find — where people that like to kill people can do it, and do it with impunity. No matter who is doing the killing, it is almost always innocent Pakistanis that are the ones dying. Everyone remembers the targeting of Shia doctors in the 1990s, but no Sunni was safe from bullets and bombs either. Muhajirs were not safe, and neither were Sindhis, Pakhtuns, Punjabis or Baloch. Now the battle lines are drawn differently, but similarly. The Winter ‘08 and Spring ‘09 collection was a barrage of ANP versus the MQM violence. And it seems Summer ‘09 is going to be peppered with the MQM versus the MQM.

Some will call identity politics a poison. They’d be wrong. The ability of perpetrators of violence to indulge in violence, and to get away with it is the poison. There is really only one antidote to such poison. It is a state that can stand up to being bullied. It is a frontline police service capable of disincentivizing violence. Such a service must not only be a deterrent, it must also be ready to “cock the hammer”, when “its time for action”.

If someone wants to make living in Pakistan unsafe — whether in Karachi, or Bajaur (or any place in between) — the Pakistani state has to make the cost of doing so, prohibitively high. In other words, to quote Barack Obama, from a year ago, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” The Pakistani state has to start bringing guns to knife fights.

So far, the equation in Pakistan is that indulging in violence of any kind only accrues material and political benefits — hardly any costs. As we’re finding out in Swat, the tough guys aren’t so tough when Pakistan demonstrates the kind of chutzpah that any state claiming to be an Islamic republic should have — a keen eye for the violent guy. Using that keen eye to identify and disable violence is not only a functional necessity; it is the morally correct thing to do.

The caveat is that to uphold and retain moral superiority in the face of perpetrators of violence, the executors of counter-violence (government) need to have moral authority. Traditional politicians, (and indeed military officers that don’t get out much) all continue to believe that their land holdings, wealth, popularity or uniforms afford them some kind of moral authority. They are wrong. Mad mullahs have discovered, thankfully, that their pulpits too are no source of moral authority.

Where there should be moral authority, Pakistanis have traditionally afforded little of it. Policemen are dying left, right and centre in the line of duty. They fall silently and with little pomp. They not only need to be feted for their bravery, they need better equipment, better training, and a legal and regulatory framework that does away with the ambivalence of the Police Order 2002, the amendments to the order, and the impact of the rightful death of the magistracy as it had existed previously — affording agents of the executive branch — commissioners, district commissioners and assistant commissioners — levels of authority that are completely inconsistent with democracy.

Unpacking this is a job, that is sadly far beyond the capacity of a ruling political elite that is still blinded by petty patronage. In NWFP and Balochistan, led by whatever second-tier resources that remain in the emaciated, but once proud and competent District Management Group, provincial governments are begging to be allowed to press the refresh button, and return to the “good old days” of magistracy. That train has left the station. A return to a Gen Zia’s version of local governments (the 1979 law), as an escape from Gen Musharraf’s version (the 2001 law) is like cutting off the nose to spite the face. It is a typically Pakistani state response to a problem. If this state wants to survive, it will have to do better.