Pakistan, Can It Get Worse? Yes!

February 07, 2011

Straws in the Wind

by Tariq Ali

Mumtaz Hussain Qadri smiled as he surrendered to his colleagues after shooting Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, dead. Many in Pakistan seemed to support his actions; others wondered how he’d managed to get a job as a state bodyguard in the carefully screened Elite Force. Geo TV, the country’s most popular channel, reported, and the report has since been confirmed, that ‘Qadri had been kicked out of Special Branch after being declared a security risk,’ that he ‘had requested that he not be fired on but arrested alive if he managed to kill Taseer’ and that ‘many in Elite Force knew of his plans to kill Salman Taseer.’

Qadri is on his way to becoming a national hero. On his first appearance in court, he was showered with flowers by admiring Islamabad lawyers who have offered to defend him free of charge. On his way back to prison, the police allowed him to address his supporters and wave to the TV cameras. The funeral of his victim was sparsely attended: a couple of thousand mourners at most. A frightened President Zardari and numerous other politicians didn’t show up. A group of mullahs had declared that anyone attending the funeral would be regarded as guilty of blasphemy. No mullah (that includes those on the state payroll) was prepared to lead the funeral prayers. The federal minister for the interior, Rehman Malik, a creature of Zardari’s, has declared that anyone trying to tamper with or amend the blasphemy laws will be dealt with severely. In the New York Times version he said he would shoot any blasphemer himself.

Taseer’s spirited defense of Asiya Bibi, a 45-year-old Punjabi Christian peasant, falsely charged with blasphemy after an argument with two women who accused her of polluting their water by drinking out of the same receptacle, provoked an angry response from religious groups. Many in his own party felt that Taseer’s initiative was mistimed, but in Pakistan the time is never right for such campaigns. Bibi had already spent 18 months in jail. Her plight had been highlighted by the media, women had taken to the streets to defend her and Taseer and another senior politician from the PPP, Sherry Rehman, had demanded amendments to the blasphemy laws. Thirty-eight other women have been imprisoned under the same law in recent years and soon after a friendly meeting between Yousaf Gillani, the prime minister, and the leader of the supposedly moderate Jamaat-e-Islami, a member of the latter offered a reward of ten thousand dollars to whoever manages to kill Bibi.

Taseer’s decision to take up Bibi’s case was not made on a whim. He had cleared the campaign with Zardari, much to the annoyance of the law minister, Babar Awan, a televangelist and former militant of the Jamaat-e-Islami. He told journalists he didn’t want the socio-cultural agenda to be hijacked by ‘lunatic mullahs’, raged against governments that had refused to take on fanaticism, and brushed aside threats to his life with disdain. He visited the prison where Bibi was detained – the first time in the history of the Punjab that a governor has gone inside a district jail – and at a press conference declared his solidarity with her. ‘She is a woman who has been incarcerated for a year and a half on a charge trumped up against her five days after an incident where people who gave evidence against her were not even present,’ he told an interviewer. He wanted, he said, ‘to take a mercy petition to the president, and he agreed, saying he would pardon Asiya Bibi if there had indeed been a miscarriage of justice’.

Two weeks after this visit Taseer was dead. I never much cared for his business practices or his political affiliations and had not spoken to him for 20 years, but he was one of my closest friends at school and university and the two of us and the late Shahid Rehman – a gifted and witty lawyer who drank himself to death many moons ago – were inseparable. Some joyful memories came back when I saw his face on TV.

It’s 1960. The country is under a pro-US military dictatorship. All opposition is banned. My parents are away. The three of us – we are 17 years old – are at my place and we decide that something has to be done. We buy some red paint and at about 2 a.m. drive to the Cantonment bridge and carefully paint ‘Yankee Go Home’ on the beautiful whitewashed wall. The next morning we scrub the car clean of all traces of paint. For the next few weeks the city is agog. The story doesn’t appear in the press but everyone is talking about it. In Karachi and Dhaka, where they regard Lahore as politically dead, our city’s stock rises. At college our fellow students discuss nothing else. The police are busy searching for the culprits. We smile and enjoy the fun. Finally they track us down, but as Taseer notes with an edge of bitterness, Shahid’s father is a Supreme Court judge and one of my aunts is married to a general who’s also the minister of the interior, so naturally we all get off with a warning. At the time I almost felt that physical torture might be preferable to being greeted regularly by the general with ‘Hello, Mr Yankee Go Home.’

Two years previously (before the dictatorship) the three of us had organized a demonstration at the US Consulate after reading that an African-American called Jimmy Wilson had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. On that occasion Salman, seeing that not many people had turned up, found some street urchins to swell our ranks. We had to stop and explain to them why their chant of ‘Death to Jimmy Wilson’ was wrong. Money changed hands before they were brought into line. Years later, on a London to Lahore flight, I met Taseer by chance and we discussed both these events. He reminded me that the stern US consul had told us he would have us expelled, but his ultra-Lutheranism offended the Catholic Brothers who ran our school and again we escaped punishment. On that flight, more than 20 years ago, I asked him why he had decided to go into politics. Wasn’t being a businessman bad enough? ‘You’ll never understand,’ he said. ‘If I’m a politician as well I can save money because I don’t have to pay myself bribes.’ He was cynical in the extreme, but he could laugh at himself. He died tragically, but for a good cause. His party and colleagues, instead of indulging in manufactured grief, would be better off taking the opportunity to amend the blasphemy laws while there is still some anger at what has taken place. But of course they are doing the exact opposite.

Even before this killing, Pakistan had been on the verge of yet another military takeover. It would make things so much easier if only they could give it another name: military democracy perhaps? General Kayani, whose term as chief of staff was extended last year with strong Pentagon approval, is said to be receiving petitions every day asking him to intervene and ‘save the country’. The petitioners are obviously aware that removing Zardari and replacing him with a nominee of the Sharif brothers’ Muslim League, the PPP’s long-term rivals, is unlikely to improve matters. Petitioning, combined with a complete breakdown of law and order in one or several spheres (suicide terrorism in Peshawar, violent ethnic clashes in Karachi, state violence in Quetta and now Taseer’s assassination), is usually followed by the news that a reluctant general has no longer been able to resist ‘popular’ pressure and with the reluctant agreement of the US Embassy a uniformed president has taken power. We’ve been here before, on four separate occasions. The military has never succeeded in taking the country forward. All that happens is that, instead of politicians, the officers take the cut. The government obviously thinks the threat is serious: some of Zardari’s cronies now speak openly at dinner parties of ‘evidence’ that proves military involvement in his wife Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. If the evidence exists, let’s have a look.

Another straw in the wind: the political parties close to the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, have withdrawn from the central government, accusing it of callousness and financial malfeasance. True, but hardly novel.

Another necessary prerequisite for a coup is popular disgust with a corrupt, inept and failing civilian government. This has now reached fever pitch. As well as the natural catastrophes that have afflicted the country there are local wars, disappearances, torture, crime, huge price rises in essential goods, unemployment, a breakdown of basic services – all the major cities go without electricity for hours at a stretch and oil lamps are much in demand in smaller towns, which are often without gas and electricity for up to 12 hours. Thanks to the loan conditions recently imposed by the IMF – part of a gear change in the ‘war on terror’ – there have been riots against the rise in fuel prices in several cities. Add to this Zardari’s uncontrollable greed and the irrepressible desire of his minions to mimic their master. Pakistan today is a kleptocracy.

There is much talk in Islamabad of the despised PM’s neglected wife going on a shopping spree in London last month and finding solace in diamonds, picking up, on her way back home, a VAT rebate in the region of £100,000.

Can it get worse? Yes. And on every front. Take the Af-Pak war. Few now would dispute that its escalation has further destabilised Pakistan, increasing the flow of recruits to suicide bomber command. The CIA’s New Year message to Pakistan consisted of three drone attacks in North Waziristan, killing 19 people. There were 116 drone strikes in 2010, double the number ordered in the first year of the Obama presidency. Serious Pakistani newspapers, Dawn and the News, claim that 98 per cent of those killed in the strikes over the last five years – the number of deaths is estimated to be between two and three thousand – were civilians, a percentage endorsed by David Kilcullen, a former senior adviser to General Petraeus. The Brookings Institution gives a grim ratio of one militant killed for every ten civilians. The drones are operated by the CIA, which isn’t subject to military rules of engagement, with the result that drones are often used for revenge attacks, notably after the sensational Khost bombing of a CIA post in December 2009.

What stops the military from taking power immediately is that it would then be responsible for stopping the drone attacks and containing the insurgency that has resulted from the extension of the war into Pakistan. This is simply beyond it, which is why the generals would rather just blame the civilian government for everything. But if the situation worsens and growing public anger and economic desperation lead to wider street protests and an urban insurgency the military will be forced to intervene. It will also be forced to act if the Obama administration does as it threatens and sends troops across the Pakistan border on protect-and-destroy missions. Were this to happen a military takeover of the country might be the only way for the army to counter dissent within its ranks by redirecting the flow of black money and bribes (currently a monopoly of politicians) into military coffers. Pakistani officers who complain to Western intelligence operatives and journalists that a new violation of sovereignty might split the army do so largely as a way to exert pressure. There has been no serious breach in the military high command since the dismal failure of the 1951 Rawalpindi Conspiracy, the first and last radical nationalist attempt (backed by Communist intellectuals) to seize power within the army and take the country in an anti-imperialist direction. Since then, malcontents in the armed forces have always been rapidly identified and removed. Military perks and privileges – bonuses, land allocations, a presence in finance and industry – play an increasingly important part in keeping the army under control.

Meanwhile, on a visit to Kabul earlier this month, the US homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, announced that 52 ‘security agents’ were being dispatched to the Af-Pak border to give on the spot training to Afghan police and security units. The insurgents will be delighted, especially since some of them serve in these units, just as they do in Pakistan.

TARIQ ALI’s latest book “The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad’ is published by Verso.

The General in his Labyrinth

by Tariq Ali

If there is a single consistent theme in Pervez Musharraf’s memoir, it is the familiar military dogma that Pakistan has fared better under its generals than under its politicians. The first batch of generals were the offspring of the departing colonial power. They had been taught to obey orders, respect the command structure of the army whatever the cost and uphold the traditions of the British Indian Army. The bureaucrats who ran Pakistan in its early days were the product of imperial selection procedures designed to turn out incorruptible civil servants wearing a mask of objectivity. The military chain of command is still respected, but the civil service now consists largely of ruthlessly corrupt time-servers. Once its members were loyal to the imperial state: today they cater to the needs of the army.

Pakistan’s first uniformed ruler, General Ayub Khan, a Sandhurst-trained colonial officer, seized power in October 1958 with strong encouragement from both Washington and London. They were fearful that the projected first general election might produce a coalition that would take Pakistan out of security pacts like Seato and towards a non-aligned foreign policy. Ayub banned all political parties, took over opposition newspapers and told the first meeting of his cabinet: ‘As far as you are concerned there is only one embassy that matters in this country: the American Embassy.’ In a radio broadcast to the nation he informed his bewildered ‘fellow countrymen’ that ‘we must understand that democracy cannot work in a hot climate. To have democracy we must have a cold climate like Britain.’

Perhaps remarks of this sort account for Ayub’s popularity in the West. He became a great favourite of the press in Britain and the US. His bluff exterior certainly charmed Christine Keeler (they splashed together in the pool at Cliveden during a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference) and the saintly Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman published a grovelling interview. Meanwhile opposition voices were silenced and political prisoners tortured; Hasan Nasir, a Communist, died as a result. In 1962 * by now he had promoted himself to field-marshal * Ayub decided that the time had come to widen his appeal. He took off his uniform, put on native gear and addressed a public meeting (a forced gathering of peasants assembled by their landlords) at which he announced that there would soon be presidential elections and he hoped people would support him. The bureaucracy organised a political party * the Convention Muslim League * and careerists flocked to join it. The election took place in 1965 and the polls had to be rigged to ensure the field-marshal’s victory. His opponent, Fatima Jinnah (the sister of the country’s founder), fought a spirited campaign but to no avail. The handful of bureaucrats who had refused to help fix the election were offered early retirement.

Now that he had been formally elected, it was thought that Ayub would be further legitimised by the publication of his memoirs. Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography appeared from Oxford in 1967 to great acclaim in the Western press and was greeted with sycophantic hysteria in the government-controlled media at home. But Ayub’s information secretary, Altaf Gauhar, a crafty, cynical courtier, had ghosted a truly awful book: stodgy, crude, verbose and full of half-truths. It backfired badly in Pakistan and was soon being viciously satirised in clandestine pamphlets on university campuses. Ayub had suggested that Pakistanis ‘should study this book, understand and act upon it . . . it contains material which is for the good of the people.’ More than 70 per cent of the population was illiterate and of the rest only a tiny elite could read English. In October 1968, during lavish celebrations to commemorate the ten years of dictatorship as a ‘decade of development’, students in Rawalpindi demanded the restoration of democracy; soon Student Action Committees had spread across the country. The state responded with its usual brutality. There were mass arrests and orders to ‘kill rioters’. Several students died during the first few weeks. In the two months that followed workers, lawyers, small shopkeepers, prostitutes and government clerks joined the protests. Stray dogs with ‘Ayub’ painted on their backs became a special target for armed cops. In March 1969 Ayub passed control of the country to the whisky-soaked General Yahya Khan.

Yahya promised a free election within a year and kept his word. The 1970 general election (the first in Pakistan’s history) resulted in a sensational victory for the Awami League, Bengali nationalists from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The Bengalis were disgruntled, and for good reason: East Pakistan, where a majority of the population lived, was treated as a colony and the Bengalis wanted a federal government. The military-political-economic elite came from West Pakistan, however, and all it could see in the Awami League’s victory was a threat to its privileges.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, which had triumphed in the western portion of the country, should have negotiated a settlement with the victors. Instead he sulked, told his party to boycott a meeting of the new assembly that had been called in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, and thus provided the army with breathing space to prepare a military assault. Yahya prevented the leader of the Awami League, Mujibur Rahman, from forming a government and, in March 1971, sent in troops to occupy East Pakistan. ‘Thank God, Pakistan has been saved,’ Bhutto declared, aligning himself with what followed. Rahman was arrested and several hundred nationalist and left-wing intellectuals, activists and students were killed in a carefully organised massacre. The lists of victims had been prepared with the help of local Islamist vigilantes, whose party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, had lost badly in the elections. The killings were followed by a campaign of mass rape. Soldiers were told that Bengalis were relatively recent converts to Islam and hence not ‘proper Muslims’ * their genes needed improving.

The atrocities provoked an armed resistance and there were appeals for military aid from New Delhi, where the Awami League had established a government-in-exile. The Indians, fearful that Bengali refugees might destabilise the Indian province of West Bengal and no doubt sensing an opportunity, sent in their army, which was welcomed as a liberating force. Within a fortnight, the Pakistan troops were surrounded. Their commander, General ‘Tiger’ Niazi, chose surrender rather than martyrdom, for which his colleagues, a thousand miles from the battlefield, were never to forgive him. In December 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh and 90,000 West Pakistani soldiers ended up in Indian prisoner of war camps. Nixon, Kissinger and Mao had all ’tilted towards Pakistan’ but to little effect. It was a total disaster for the Pakistan army: the first phase of military rule had led to the division of the country and the loss of a majority of its population.

Bhutto was left with a defeated army and a truncated state. He had been elected on a social-democratic programme that pledged food, clothing, education and shelter for all, major land reform and nationalisation. He was the only political leader Pakistan has ever produced who had the power, buttressed by mass support, to change the country and its institutions, including the army, for ever. But he failed on every front. The nationalisations merely replaced profit-hungry businessmen with corrupt cronies and tame bureaucrats. As landlords flocked to join his party, the radical reforms he had promised in the countryside were shelved. The poor felt instinctively that Bhutto was on their side (the elite never forgave him) but few measures were enacted to justify their confidence. His style of government was authoritarian; his personal vindictiveness was corrosive.

Bhutto attempted to fight the religious opposition by stealing their clothes: he banned the sale of alcohol, made Friday a public holiday and declared the Ahmediyya sect to be non-Muslims (a long-standing demand of the Jamaat-e-Islami that had, till then, been treated with contempt). These measures did not help him, but damaged the country by legitimising confessional politics. Despite his worries about the Islamist opposition, Bhutto would probably have won the 1977 elections without state interference, though with a reduced majority. But the manipulation was so blatant that the opposition came out on the streets and neither his sarcasm nor his wit was any help in the crisis.

Always a bad judge of character, he had made a junior general and small-minded zealot, Zia-ul-Haq, army chief of staff. As head of the Pakistani training mission to Jordan, Brigadier Zia had led the Black September assault on the Palestinians in 1970. In July 1977, to pre-empt an agreement between Bhutto and the opposition parties that would have entailed new elections, Zia struck. Bhutto was arrested, and held for a few weeks, and Zia promised that new elections would be held within six months, after which the military would return to barracks. A year later Bhutto, still popular and greeted by large crowds wherever he went, was again arrested, and this time charged with murder, tried and hanged in April 1979.

Over the next ten years the political culture of Pakistan was brutalised. As public floggings (of dissident journalists among others) and hangings became the norm, Zia himself was turned into a Cold War hero * thanks largely to events in Afghanistan. Religious affinity did nothing to mitigate the hostility of Afghan leaders to their neighbour. The main reason was the Durand Line, which was imposed on the Afghans in 1893 to mark the frontier between British India and Afghanistan and which divided the Pashtun population of the region. After a hundred years (the Hong Kong model) all of what became the North-Western Frontier Province of British India was supposed to revert to Afghanistan but no government in Kabul ever accepted the Durand Line any more than they accepted British, or, later, Pakistani control, over the territory.

In 1977, when Zia came to power, 90 per cent of men and 98 per cent of women in Afghanistan were illiterate; 5 per cent of landowners held 45 per cent of the cultivable land and the country had the lowest per capita income of any in Asia. The same year, the Parcham Communists, who had backed the 1973 military coup by Prince Daud after which a republic was proclaimed, withdrew their support from Daud, were reunited with other Communist groups to form the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), and began to agitate for a new government. The regimes in neighbouring countries became involved. The shah of Iran, acting as a conduit for Washington, recommended firm action * large-scale arrests, executions, torture * and put units from his torture agency at Daud’s disposal. The shah also told Daud that if he recognised the Durand Line as a permanent frontier the shah would give Afghanistan $3 billion and Pakistan would cease hostile actions. Meanwhile, Pakistani intelligence agencies were arming Afghan exiles while encouraging old-style tribal uprisings aimed at restoring the monarchy. Daud was inclined to accept the shah’s offer, but the Communists organised a pre-emptive coup and took power in April 1978. There was panic in Washington, which increased tenfold as it became clear that the shah too was about to be deposed. General Zia’s dictatorship thus became the lynchpin of US strategy in the region, which is why Washington green-lighted Bhutto’s execution and turned a blind eye to the country’s nuclear programme. The US wanted a stable Pakistan whatever the cost.

As we now know, plans (a ‘bear-trap’, in the words of the US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski) were laid to destabilise the PDPA, in the hope that its Soviet protectors would be drawn in. Plans of this sort often go awry, but they succeeded in Afghanistan, primarily because of the weaknesses of the Afghan Communists themselves: they had come to power through a military coup which hadn’t involved any mobilisation outside Kabul, yet they pretended this was a national revolution; their Stalinist political formation made them allergic to any form of accountability and ideas such as drafting a charter of democratic rights or holding free elections to a constituent assembly never entered their heads. Ferocious factional struggles led, in September 1979, to a Mafia-style shoot-out at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, during which the prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, shot President Taraki dead. Amin, a nutty Stalinist, claimed that 98 per cent of the population supported his reforms but the 2 per cent who opposed them had to be liquidated. There were mutinies in the army and risings in a number of towns as a result, and this time they had nothing to do with the Americans or General Zia.

Finally, after two unanimous Politburo decisions against intervention, the Soviet Union changed its mind, saying that it had ‘new documentation’. This is still classified, but it would not surprise me in the least if the evidence consisted of forgeries suggesting that Amin was a CIA agent. Whatever it was, the Politburo, with Yuri Andropov voting against, now decided to send troops into Afghanistan. Its aim was to get rid of a discredited regime and replace it with a marginally less repulsive one. Sound familiar?

From 1979 until 1988, Afghanistan was the focal point of the Cold War. Millions of refugees crossed the Durand Line and settled in camps and cities in the NWFP. Weapons and money, as well as jihadis from Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt, flooded into Pakistan. All the main Western intelligence agencies (including the Israelis’) had offices in Peshawar, near the frontier. The black-market and market rates for the dollar were exactly the same. Weapons, including Stinger missiles, were sold to the mujahedin by Pakistani officers who wanted to get rich quickly. The heroin trade flourished and the number of registered addicts in Pakistan grew from a few hundred in 1977 to a few million in 1987. (One of the banks through which the heroin mafia laundered money was the BCCI * whose main PR abroad was a retired civil servant called Altaf Gauhar.)

As for Pakistan and its people, they languished. During Zia’s period in power, the Jamaat-e-Islami, which had never won more than 5 per cent of the vote anywhere in the country, was patronised by the government; its cadres were sent to fight in Afghanistan, its armed student wing was encouraged to terrorise campuses in the name of Islam, its ideologues were ever present on TV. The Inter-Services Intelligence also encouraged the formation of other, more extreme jihadi groups, which carried out acts of terror at home and abroad and set up madrassahs all over the frontier provinces. Soon Zia, too, needed his own political party and the bureaucracy set one up: the Pakistan Muslim League.

With the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 it became obvious that the Soviet Union would accept defeat in Afghanistan and withdraw its troops. It wanted some guarantees for the Afghans it was leaving behind and the United States * its mission successful * was prepared to play ball. General Zia, however, was not. The Afghan war had gone to his head (as it did to that of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues) and he wanted his own people in power there. As the Soviet withdrawal got closer, Zia and the ISI made plans for the postwar settlement.

And then Zia disappeared. On 17 August 1988, he took five generals to the trial of a new US Abrams M-1/A-1 tank at a military test range near Bahawalpur. Also present were a US general and the US ambassador, Arnold Raphael. The demonstration did not go well and everybody was grumpy. Zia offered the Americans a lift in his specially built C-130 aircraft, which had a sealed cabin to protect him from assassins. A few minutes after the plane took off, the pilots lost control and it crashed into the desert. All the passengers were killed. All that was left of Zia was his jawbone, which was duly buried in Islamabad (the chowk * roundabout * nearby became known to cabbies as ‘Jawbone Chowk’). The cause of the crash remains a mystery. The US National Archives contain 250 pages of documents, but they are still classified. Pakistani intelligence experts have told me informally that it was the Russians taking their revenge. Most Pakistanis blamed the CIA, as they always do. Zia’s son and widow whispered that it was ‘our own people’ in the army.

With Zia’s assassination, the second period of military rule in Pakistan came to an end. What followed was a longish civilian prologue to Musharraf’s reign. For ten years members of two political dynasties * the Bhutto and Sharif families * ran the country in turn. It was Benazir Bhutto’s minister of the interior, General Naseerullah Babar, who, with the ISI, devised the plan to set up the Taliban as a politico-military force that could penetrate Afghanistan, a move half-heartedly approved by the US Embassy. Washington had lost interest in Afghanistan and Pakistan once the Soviet Union had withdrawn its troops. The Taliban (‘students’) were children of Afghan refugees and poor Pathan families ‘educated’ in the madrassahs in the 1980s: they provided the shock troops, but were led by a handful of experienced mujahedin including Mullah Omar. Without Pakistan’s support they could never have taken Kabul, although Mullah Omar preferred to forget this. Omar’s faction was dominant, but the ISI never completely lost control of the organisation. Islamabad kept its cool even when Omar’s zealots asserted their independence by attacking the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul and his religious police interrupted a football match between the two countries because the Pakistan players sported long hair and shorts, caned the players before the stunned crowd and sent them back home.

After Benazir’s fall, the Sharif brothers returned to power. And once again, Shahbaz, the younger but shrewder sibling, accepted family discipline and Nawaz became the prime minister. In 1998 Sharif decided to make Pervez Musharraf army chief of staff in preference to the more senior General Ali Kuli Khan (who was at college with me in Lahore). Sharif’s reasoning may have been that Musharraf, from a middle-class, refugee background like himself, would be easier to manipulate than Ali Kuli, who came from a landed Pathan family in the NWFP. Whatever the reasoning, it turned out to be a mistake.

On Bill Clinton’s urging, Sharif pushed for a rapprochement with India. Travel and trade agreements were negotiated, land borders were opened, flights resumed, but before the next stage could be reached, the Pakistan army began to assemble in the Himalayan foothills. The ISI claimed that the Siachen glacier in Kashmir had been illegally occupied by the Indians and the Indians claimed the opposite. Neither side could claim victory after the fighting that followed, but casualties were high, particularly on the Indian side (Musharraf exaggerates Pakistan’s ‘triumph’). A ceasefire was agreed and each army returned to its side of the Line of Control.

Why did the war take place at all? In private the Sharif brothers told associates that the army was opposed to their policy of friendship with India and was determined to sabotage the process: the army had acted without receiving clearance from the government. In his memoir, Musharraf insists that the army had kept the prime minister informed in briefings in January and February 1999. Whatever the truth, Sharif told Washington that he had been bounced into a war he didn’t want, and not long after the war, the Sharif family decided to get rid of Musharraf. Constitutionally, the prime minister had the power to dismiss the chief of staff and appoint a new one, as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had done in the 1970s, when he appointed Zia. But the army then was weak, divided and defeated; this was certainly not the case in 1999.

Sharif’s candidate to succeed Musharraf was General Ziauddin Butt, head of the ISI, who was widely seen as corrupt and incompetent. He was bundled off to Washington for vetting and while there is said to have pledged bin Laden’s head on a platter. If Sharif had just dismissed Musharraf he might have had a better chance of success but what he lacked in good sense his brother tried to make up for in guile. Were the Sharif brothers really so foolish as believe that the army was unaware of their intrigues or were they misled by their belief in US omnipotence? Clinton duly warned the army that Washington would not tolerate a military coup in Pakistan and I remember chuckling at the time that this was a first in US-Pakistan relations. Sharif relied too heavily on Clinton’s warning.

What followed was a tragi-comic episode that is well described in Musharraf’s book. He and his wife were flying back from Sri Lanka on a normal passenger flight when the pilot received instructions not to land. While the plane was still circling over Karachi, Nawaz Sharif summoned General Butt and in front of a TV crew swore him in as the new chief of staff. Meanwhile there was panic on Musharraf’s plane, by now low on fuel. He managed to establish contact with the commander of the Karachi garrison, the army took control of the airport and the plane landed safely. Simultaneously, military units surrounded the prime minister’s house in Islamabad and arrested Nawaz Sharif. General Zia had been assassinated on a military flight; Musharraf took power on board a passenger plane.

So began the third extended period of military rule in Pakistan, initially welcomed by all Nawaz Sharif’s political opponents and many of his colleagues. In the Line of Fire gives the official version of what has been happening in Pakistan over the last six years and is intended largely for Western eyes. Where Altaf Gauhar injected nonsense of every sort into Ayub’s memoirs, his son Humayun Gauhar, who edited this book, has avoided the more obvious pitfalls. The general’s raffish lifestyle is underplayed but there is enough in the book to suggest that he is not too easily swayed by religious or social obligations.

The score-settling with enemies at home is crude and for that reason the book has caused a commotion in Pakistan. A spirited controversy has erupted in the media, something that could never have happened during previous periods of military rule. Scathing criticism has come from ex-generals (Ali Kuli Khan’s rejoinder was published in most newspapers), opposition politicians and pundits of every sort. In fact, there was more state interference in the media during Nawaz Sharif’s tenure than there is under Musharraf and the level of debate is much higher than in India, where the middle-class obsession with shopping and celebrity has led to a trivialisation of TV and most of the print media.

When Musharraf seized power in 1999, he refused to move house, preferring his more homely, colonial bungalow in Rawalpindi to the kitsch comfort of the President’s House in Islamabad, with its gilt furniture and tasteless decor that owes more to Gulf State opulence than local tradition. The cities are close to each other, but far from identical. Islamabad, laid out in a grid pattern and overlooked by the Himalayan foothills, was built in the 1960s by General Ayub. He wanted a new capital remote from threatening crowds, but close to GHQ in Rawalpindi, which had been constructed by the British as a garrison town. After Partition, it became the obvious place to situate the military headquarters of the new Pakistan.

One of the 19th-century British colonial expeditions to conquer Afghanistan (they all ended in disaster) was planned in Rawalpindi. And it was also from there, a century and a half later, that the Washington-blessed jihad was launched against the hopeless Afghan Communists. And it was there too that the US demand to use Pakistan as a base for its operations in Afghanistan was discussed and agreed in September 2001. This was a crucial decision for the army chiefs because it meant the dismantling of their only foreign triumph: the placing of the Taliban in Kabul.

Heavy traffic often makes the ten-mile journey from Islamabad to Rawalpindi tortuous, unless you’re the president and the highway has been cleared by a security detail. Even then, as this book reveals in some detail, assassination attempts can play havoc with the schedule. The first happened on 14 December 2003. Moments after the general’s motorcade passed over a bridge, a powerful bomb exploded and badly damaged the bridge, although no one was hurt. The armoured limo, fitted with radar and an anti-bomb device, courtesy of the Pentagon, saved Musharraf’s life. His demeanour at the time surprised observers. He was said to have been calm and cheerful, making jocular allusions to living in perilous times. Unsurprisingly, security had been high * decoys, last-minute route changes etc * but this didn’t prevent another attempt a week later, on Christmas Day. This time two men driving cars loaded with explosives came close to success. The president’s car was damaged, guards in cars escorting him were killed, but Musharraf was unhurt. Since his exact route and the time of his departure from Islamabad were heavily guarded secrets the terrorists must have had inside information. If your security staff includes angry Islamists who see you as a traitor and want to blow you up, then, as the general states in his memoir, Allah alone can protect you. He has certainly been kind to Musharraf.

The culprits were discovered, and tortured till they revealed details of the plot. Some junior military officers were also implicated. The key plotters were tried in secret and hanged. The supposed mastermind, a jihadi extremist called Amjad Farooqi, was shot by security forces.

Two questions haunt both Washington and Musharraf’s colleagues: how many of those involved remain undetected and would the command structure of the army survive if a terrorist succeeded next time around? Musharraf doesn’t seem worried and adopts a jaunty, even boastful tone. Before 9/11 he was treated like a pariah abroad and beset by problems at home. How to fortify the will of a high command weakened by piety and corruption? How to deal with the corruption and embezzlement that had been a dominant feature of both the Sharif and Bhutto governments? Benazir Bhutto was already in self-exile in Dubai; the Sharif brothers had been arrested. Before they could be charged, however, Washington organised an offer of asylum from Saudi Arabia, a state whose ruling family has institutionalised the theft of public funds.

Musharraf’s unstinting support for the US after 9/11 prompted local wags to dub him ‘Busharraf’, and was the motive behind the attempts on his life. (In March 2005 Condoleezza Rice described the US-Pakistan relationship since 9/11 as ‘broad and deep’.) Had he not, after all, unravelled Pakistan’s one military victory in order to please Washington? General Mahmood Ahmed, who headed the ISI, was in Washington as a guest of the Pentagon, trying to convince the Defense Intelligence Agency that Mullah Omar was a good bloke and could be persuaded to disgorge Osama, when the attacks of 11 September took place. That his listeners were freaked out by this is hardly surprising. Musharraf tells us he agreed to become Washington’s surrogate because the State Department honcho, Richard Armitage, threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if he didn’t. What really worried Islamabad, however, was a threat Musharraf doesn’t mention: if Pakistan refused, the US would have used Indian bases.

Musharraf was initially popular in Pakistan and if he had pushed through reforms aimed at providing an education (with English as a compulsory second language) for all children, instituted land reforms which would have ended the stranglehold of the gentry on large swathes of the countryside, tackled corruption in the armed forces and everywhere else, and ended the jihadi escapades in Kashmir and Pakistan as a prelude to a long-term deal with India, then he might have left a mark on the country. Instead, he has mimicked his military predecessors. Like them, he took off his uniform, went to a landlord-organised gathering in Sind and entered politics. His party? The evergreen, ever available Muslim League. His supporters? Chips off the same old corrupt block that he had denounced so vigorously and whose leaders he was prosecuting. His prime minister? Shaukat ‘Shortcut’ Aziz, formerly a senior executive of Citibank with close ties to the eighth richest man in the world, the Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal. As it became clear that nothing much was going to change a wave of cynicism engulfed the country.

Musharraf is better than Zia and Ayub in many ways, but human rights groups have noticed a sharp rise in the number of political activists who are being ‘disappeared’: four hundred this year alone, including Sindhi nationalists and a total of 1200 in the province of Baluchistan, where the army has become trigger-happy once again. The war on terror has provided many leaders with the chance to sort out their opponents, but that doesn’t make it any better.

In his book he expresses his detestation of religious extremists and his regrets over the murder of Daniel Pearl. He suggests that one of those responsible, the former LSE student Omar Saeed Sheikh, was an MI6 recruit who was sent to fight the Serbs in Bosnia. Al-Qaida fighters had also been sent there (with US approval) and Sheikh established contact with them and became a double agent. Now Sheikh sits in a death-cell in a Pakistani prison, chatting amiably to his guards and emailing newspaper editors in Pakistan to tell them that if he is executed papers he has left behind will be published exposing the complicity of others. Perhaps this is bluff, or perhaps he was a triple agent and was working for the ISI as well.

Next year there will be an election and rumours abound that Musharraf is offering Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party a deal, but one that excludes her. A few years ago she could be spotted in Foggy Bottom, waiting forlornly to plead for US support from a State Department junior on the South Asia desk. All she wanted then was a cabinet position under Musharraf, so that she could remain a presence on the political scene. Musharraf is much weaker now and she may decide not to play ball with him, but to hang on for something better.

And then there is Afghanistan. Despite the fake optimism of Blair and his Nato colleagues everyone is aware that it is a total mess. A revived Taliban is winning popularity by resisting the occupation. Nato helicopters and soldiers are killing hundreds of civilians and describing them as ‘Taliban fighters’. Hamid Karzai, the man with the nice shawls, is seen as a hopeless puppet, totally dependent on Nato troops. He has antagonised both the Pashtuns, who are turning to the Taliban once again in large numbers, and the warlords of the Northern Alliance, who openly denounce him and suggest it’s time he was sent back to the States. In western Afghanistan, it is only the Iranian influence that has preserved a degree of stability. If Ahmedinejad was provoked into withdrawing his support, Karzai would not last more than a week. Islamabad waits and watches. Military strategists are convinced that the US has lost interest and Nato will soon leave. If that happens Pakistan is unlikely to permit the Northern Alliance to take Kabul. Its army will move in again. A Pakistan veteran of the Afghan wars joked with me: ‘Last time we sent in the beards, but times have changed. This time, inshallah, we’ll dress them all in Armani suits so it looks good on US television.’ The region remains fog-bound. Pakistan’s first military leader was seen off by a popular insurrection. The second was assassinated. What will happen to Musharraf?

Was it the will of God that your leaders collaborate with Mubarak?

A few questions for the Muslim brothers in Tahrir Square, Cairo, on 29 July

Patience exhausted
You emerged from the shadows
To tell us what was forbidden and why.
You spoke loudly and clearly,
Each chant a whiplash:
God is Great!
The laws of God transcend democracy!
Liberals and secularists are the scum of the earth!
Copts too!
And uncovered women!
And leftists, trapped on the wrong side of history,
Their rage impotent, their numbers miniscule!
We Brothers represent the will of God!
Who told you?
Why did you believe him?
Was it the will of God that your leaders collaborate with Mubarak?
What of your rivals at home who claim the same?
And your noisy neighbours, each with their preachers in tow?
The Sultans in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh?
The Ayatollahs in Qom and Karbala?
The godly warlords in the White House?
The Pope in the Vatican?
The Rabbis in the Jerusalem Synagogue?
Their God is great too, is he not?
The Book teaches us there is only one God,
Omnipotent, indivisible, all-seeing.
Why does He speak in so many different tongues and voices?
Is He trying to please all at the same time?
Both Israel and Palestine?
Both oppressor and oppressed?

Leave Him alone for the moment,
Tell us what else you believe in?
How will you deal with our exploiters
starting with those inside your ranks?
Does the sun belong to you alone?
Is your God a neoliberal?
Must the poor live off charity for ever?
Why are our people despairing?
How long will you chain their freedoms?
Whose side are you really on?

Tariq Ali
31 July 2011
I address this poem to the Muslim brothers who demonstrated in Cairo’s Tahrir Square after Friday prayers on 29 July—Tariq Ali

About the Author:
Tariq Ali has been a leading figure of the international left since the 60s. He has been writing for the Guardian since the 70s. He is a long-standing editor of the New Left Review and a political commentator published on every continent. His latest book is The Obama Syndrome (Verso). From Gaurdian.co.uk

Benazir: Daughter of the West by Tariq Ali

Arranged marriages can be a messy business. Designed principally as a means of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or transcending clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work. Where both parties are known to loathe each other, only a rash parent, desensitised by the thought of short-term gain, will continue with the process knowing full well that it will end in misery and possibly violence. That this is equally true in political life became clear in the recent attempt by Washington to tie Benazir Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf.

The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both sides engaged in lengthy negotiations on the size of the dowry. Her broker was and remains Rehman Malik, a former boss of Pakistan’s FIA, who has been investigated for corruption by the National Accountability Bureau and who served nearly a year in prison after Benazir’s fall, then became one of her business partners and is currently under investigation (with her) by a Spanish court looking into a company called Petroline FZC, which made questionable payments to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Documents, if genuine, show that she chaired the company. She may have been in a hurry but she did not wish to be seen taking the arm of a uniformed president. He was not prepared to forgive her past. The couple’s distaste for each other yielded to a mutual dependence on the United States. Neither party could say ‘no’, though Musharraf hoped the union could be effected inconspicuously.

Fat chance.

Both parties made concessions. She agreed that he could take off his uniform after his ‘re-election’ by Parliament, but it had to be before the next general election. (He has now done this, leaving himself dependent on the goodwill of his successor as army chief of staff.) He pushed through a legal ruling – yet another sordid first in the country’s history – known as the National Reconciliation Ordinance, which withdrew all cases of corruption pending against politicians accused of looting the national treasury. The ruling was crucial for her since she hoped that the money-laundering and corruption cases pending in three European courts – in Valencia, Geneva and London – would now be dismissed. This doesn’t seem to have happened.

Many Pakistanis – not just the mutinous and mischievous types who have to be locked up at regular intervals – were repelled, and coverage of ‘the deal’ in the Pakistan media was universally hostile, except on state television. The ‘breakthrough’ was loudly trumpeted in the West, however, and a whitewashed Benazir Bhutto was presented on US networks and BBC TV news as the champion of Pakistani democracy – reporters loyally referred to her as ‘the former prime minister’ rather than the fugitive politician facing corruption charges in several countries.

She had returned the favour in advance by expressing sympathy for the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, lunching with the Israeli ambassador to the UN (a litmus test) and pledging to ‘wipe out terrorism’ in her own country. In 1979 a previous military dictator had bumped off her father with Washington’s approval, and perhaps she thought it would be safer to seek permanent shelter underneath the imperial umbrella. HarperCollins had paid her half a million dollars to write a new book. The working title she chose was ‘Reconciliation’.

As for the general, he had begun his period in office in 1999 by bowing to the spirit of the age and titling himself ‘chief executive’ rather than ‘chief martial law administrator’, which had been the norm. Like his predecessors, he promised he would stay in power only for a limited period, pledging in 2003 to resign as army chief of staff in 2004. Like his predecessors, he ignored his pledge. Martial law always begins with the promise of a new order that will sweep away the filth and corruption that marked the old one: in this case it toppled the civilian administrations of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. But ‘new orders’ are not forward movements, more military detours that further weaken the shaky foundations of a country and its institutions. Within a decade the uniformed ruler will be overtaken by a new upheaval.

Dreaming of her glory days in the last century, Benazir wanted a large reception on her return. The general was unhappy. The intelligence agencies (as well as her own security advisers) warned her of the dangers. She had declared war on the terrorists and they had threatened to kill her. But she was adamant. She wanted to demonstrate her popularity to the world and to her political rivals, including those inside her own fiefdom, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). For a whole month before she boarded the Dubai-Karachi flight, the PPP were busy recruiting volunteers from all over the country to welcome her. Up to 200,000 people lined the streets, but it was a far cry from the millions who turned up in Lahore in 1986 when a very different Benazir returned to challenge General Zia ul-Haq. The plan had been to move slowly in the Bhuttomobile from Karachi airport to the tomb of the country’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, where she would make a speech. It was not to be. As darkness fell, the bombers struck. Who they were and who sent them remains a mystery. She was unhurt, but 130 people died, including some of the policemen guarding her. The wedding reception had led to mayhem.

The general, while promising to collaborate with Benazir, was coolly making arrangements to prolong his own stay at President’s House. Even before her arrival he had considered taking drastic action to dodge the obstacles that stood in his way, but his generals (and the US Embassy) seemed unconvinced. The bombing of Benazir’s cavalcade reopened the debate. Pakistan, if not exactly the erupting volcano portrayed in the Western media, was being shaken by all sorts of explosions. The legal profession, up in arms at Musharraf’s recent dismissal of the chief justice, had won a temporary victory, resulting in a fiercely independent Supreme Court. The independent TV networks continued to broadcast reports that challenged official propaganda. Investigative journalism is never popular with governments and the general often contrasted the deference with which he was treated by the US networks and BBC television with the ‘unruly’ questioning inflicted on him by local journalists: it ‘misled the people’. He had become obsessed with the media coverage of the lawyers’ revolt. A decline in his popularity increased the paranoia. His advisers were people he had promoted. Generals who had expressed divergent opinions in ‘frank and informal get-togethers’ had been retired. His political allies were worried that their opportunities to enrich themselves even further would be curtailed if they had to share power with Benazir.

What if the Supreme Court were now to declare his re-election by a dying and unrepresentative assembly illegal? To ward off disaster, the ISI had been preparing blackmail flicks: agents secretly filmed some of the Supreme Court judges in flagrante. But so unpopular had Musharraf become that even the sight of judicial venerables in bed might not have done the trick. It might even have increased their support. (In 1968, when a right-wing, pro-military rag in Lahore published an attack on me, it revealed that I ‘had attended sex orgies in a French country house organised by [my] friend, the Jew Cohn-Bendit. All the fifty women in the swimming-pool were Jewish.’ Alas, this was totally false, but my parents were amazed at the number of people who congratulated them on my virility.) Musharraf decided that blackmail wasn’t worth the risk. Only firm action could ‘restore order’ – i.e. save his skin. The usual treatment in these cases is a declaration of martial law. But what if the country is already being governed by the army chief of staff? The solution is simple. Treble the dose. Organise a coup within a coup. That is what Musharraf decided to do. Washington was informed a few weeks in advance, Downing Street somewhat later. Benazir’s patrons in the West told her what was about to happen and she, foolishly for a political leader who has just returned to her country, evacuated to Dubai.

On 3 November Musharraf, as chief of the army, suspended the 1973 constitution and imposed a state of emergency: all non-government TV channels were taken off the air, the mobile phone networks were jammed, paramilitary units surrounded the Supreme Court. The chief justice convened an emergency bench of judges, who – heroically – declared the new dispensation ‘illegal and unconstitutional’. They were unceremoniously removed and put under house arrest. Pakistan’s judges have usually been acquiescent. Those who in the past resisted military leaders were soon bullied out of it, so the decision of this chief justice took the country by surprise and won him great admiration. Global media coverage of Pakistan suggests a country of generals, corrupt politicians and bearded lunatics: the struggle to reinstate the chief justice had presented a different picture.

Aitzaz Ahsan, a prominent member of the PPP, minister of the interior in Benazir’s first government and currently president of the Bar Association, was arrested and placed in solitary confinement. Several thousand political and civil rights activists were picked up. Imran Khan, a fierce and incorruptible opponent of the regime, was arrested, charged with ‘state terrorism’ – for which the penalty is death or life imprisonment – and taken in handcuffs to a remote high-security prison. Musharraf, Khan argued, had begun yet another shabby chapter in Pakistan’s history.

Lawyers were arrested all over the country; many were physically attacked by policemen. Humiliate them was the order, and the police obliged. A lawyer, ‘Omar’, circulated an account of what happened:

While I was standing talking to my colleagues, we saw the police go wild on the orders of a superior officer. In riot gear . . . brandishing weapons and sticks, about a hundred policemen attacked us . . . and seemed intensely happy at doing so. We all ran.

Some of us who were not as nimble on their feet as others were caught by the police and beaten mercilessly. We were then locked in police vans used to transport convicted prisoners. Everyone was stunned at this show of brute force but it did not end. The police went on mayhem inside the court premises and court buildings . . . Those of us who were arrested were taken to various police stations and put in lockups. At midnight, we were told that we were being shifted to jail. We could not get bail as our fundamental rights were suspended. Sixty lawyers were put into a police van ten feet by four feet wide and five feet in height. We were squashed like sardines. When the van reached the jail, we were told that we could not get [out] until orders of our detention were received by the jail authorities. Our older colleagues started to suffocate, some fainted, others started to panic because of claustrophobia. The police ignored our screams and refused to open the van doors. Finally, after three hours . . . we were let out and taken to mosquito-infected barracks where the food given to us smelled like sewage water.

Geo, the largest TV network, had long since located its broadcasting facilities in Dubai. It was a strange sensation watching the network in London when the screens were blank in Pakistan. On the very first day of the emergency I saw Hamid Mir, a journalist loathed by the general, reporting from Islamabad and asserting that the US Embassy had given the green light to the coup because it regarded the chief justice as a nuisance and wrongly believed him to be ‘a Taliban sympathiser’. Certainly no US spokesperson or State Department adjunct in the Foreign Office criticised the dismissal of the eight Supreme Court judges or their arrest: that was the quid pro quo for Washington’s insistence that Musharraf take off his uniform. If he was going to turn civilian he wanted all the other rules twisted in his favour. A newly appointed stooge Supreme Court would soon help him with the rule-bending. As would the authorities in Dubai, who suspended Geo’s facilities.

In the evening of that first day, and after several delays, a flustered General Musharraf, his hair badly dyed, appeared on TV, trying to look like the sort of leader who wants it understood that the political crisis is to be discussed with gravity and sangfroid. Instead, he came across as a dumbed down dictator fearful for his own political future. His performance as he broadcast to the nation, first in Urdu and then in English, was incoherent. The gist was simple: he had to act because the Supreme Court had ‘so demoralised our state agencies that we can’t fight the “war on terror”‘ and the TV networks had become ‘totally irresponsible’. ‘I have imposed emergency,’ he said halfway through his diatribe, adding, with a contemptuous gesture: ‘You must have seen it on TV.’ Was he being sarcastic, given that most channels had been shut down? Who knows? Mohammed Hanif, the sharp-witted head of the BBC’s Urdu Service, which monitored the broadcast, confessed himself flummoxed when he wrote up what he heard. He had no doubt that the Urdu version of the speech was the general’s own work. Hanif’s deconstruction – he quoted the general in Urdu and in English – deserved a broadcast all of its own:

Here are some random things he said. And trust me, these things were said quite randomly. Yes, he did say: ‘Extremism bahut extreme ho gaya hai [extremism has become too extreme] . . . Nobody is scared of us anymore . . . Islamabad is full of extremists . . . There is a government within government . . . Officials are being asked to the courts . . . Officials are being insulted by the judiciary.’

At one point he appeared wistful when reminiscing about his first three years in power: ‘I had total control.’ You were almost tempted to ask: ‘What happened then, uncle?’ But obviously, uncle didn’t need any prompting. He launched into his routine about three stages of democracy. He claimed he was about to launch the third and final phase of democracy (the way he said it, he managed to make it sound like the Final Solution). And just when you thought he was about to make his point, he took an abrupt turn and plunged into a deep pool of self-pity. This involved a long-winded anecdote about how the Supreme Court judges would rather attend a colleague’s daughter’s wedding than just get it over with and decide that he is a constitutional president . . . I have heard some dictators’ speeches in my life, but nobody has gone so far as to mention someone’s daughter’s wedding as a reason for imposing martial law on the country.

When for the last few minutes of his speech he addressed his audience in the West in English, I suddenly felt a deep sense of humiliation. This part of his speech was scripted. Sentences began and ended. I felt humiliated that my president not only thinks that we are not evolved enough for things like democracy and human rights, but that we can’t even handle proper syntax and grammar.

The English-language version put the emphasis on the ‘war on terror’: Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, he said, would have done what he did to preserve the ‘integrity of their country’ – the mention of Lincoln was obviously intended for the US market. In Pakistan’s military academies the usual soldier-heroes are Napoleon, De Gaulle and Atatürk.

What did Benazir, now outmanoeuvred, make of the speech as she watched it on TV in her Dubai sanctuary? Her first response was to say she was shocked, which was slightly disingenuous. Even if she had not been told in advance that an emergency would be declared, it was hardly a secret – for one thing, Condoleezza Rice had made a token public appeal to Musharraf not to take this course. Yet for more than 24 hours she was unable to give a clear response. At one point she even criticised the chief justice for being too provocative.

Agitated phone calls from Pakistan persuaded her to return to Karachi. To put her in her place, the authorities kept her plane waiting on the tarmac. When she finally reached the VIP lounge, her PPP colleagues told her that unless she denounced the emergency there would be a split in the party. Outsmarted and abandoned by Musharraf, she couldn’t take the risk of losing key figures in her party. She denounced the emergency and its perpetrator, established contact with the beleaguered opposition, and, as if putting on a new lipstick, declared that she would lead the struggle to get rid of the dictator. She now tried to call on the chief justice to express her sympathy but wasn’t allowed near his residence.

She could have followed the example of her imprisoned colleague Aitzaz Ahsan, but she was envious of him: he had become far too popular in Pakistan. He’d even had the nerve to go to Washington, where he was politely received by society and inspected as a possible substitute should things go badly wrong. Not a single message had flowed from her Blackberry to congratulate him on his victories in the struggle to reinstate the chief justice. Ahsan had advised her against any deal with Musharraf. When generals are against the wall, he is reported to have told her, they resort to desperate and irrational measures. Others who offered similar advice in gentler language were also batted away. She was the PPP’s ‘chairperson-for-life’ and brooked no dissent. The fact that Ahsan was proved right irritated her even more. Any notion of political morality had long ago been dumped. The very idea of a party with a consistent set of beliefs was regarded as ridiculous and outdated. Ahsan was now safe in prison, far from the madding hordes of Western journalists whom she received in style during the few days she spent under house arrest and afterwards. She made a few polite noises about his imprisonment, but nothing more.

The go-between from Washington arrived at very short notice. Negroponte spent some time with Musharraf and spoke to Benazir, still insisting that they make up and go through with the deal. She immediately toned down her criticisms, but the general was scathing and said in public that there was no way she could win the elections scheduled for January. No doubt the ISI are going to rig them in style. Had she remained loyal to him she might have lost public support, but he would have made sure she had a substantial presence in the new parliament. Now everything is up for grabs again. The opinion polls show that her old rival, Nawaz Sharif, is well ahead of her. Musharraf’s hasty pilgrimage to Mecca was probably an attempt to secure Saudi mediation in case he has to cut a deal with the Sharif brothers – who have been living in exile in Saudi Arabia – and sideline her completely. Both sides deny that a deal was done, but Sharif returned to Pakistan with Saudi blessings and an armour-plated Cadillac as a special gift from the king. Little doubt that Riyadh would rather him than Benazir.

With the country still under a state of emergency and the largest media network refusing to sign the oath of allegiance that would allow them back on air, the polls scheduled for January can only be a general’s election. It’s hardly a secret that the ISI and the civilian bureaucracy will decide who wins and where, and some of the opposition parties are, wisely, considering a boycott. Nawaz Sharif told the press that in the course of a long telephone call he had failed to persuade Benazir to join it and thereby render the process null and void from the start. But now that he is back in the country it’s unclear whether he will still go ahead with the boycott or try and negotiate a certain number of seats with the Chaudhrys of Gujrat, who had betrayed him by setting up a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, the PML-Q, to support Musharraf. Perhaps a shared bout of amnesia will bring them together again.

What will Benazir do now? Washington’s leverage in Islamabad is limited, which is why they wanted her to be involved in the first place. ‘It’s always better,’ the US ambassador half-joked at a reception, ‘to have two phone numbers in a capital.’ That may be so, but they cannot guarantee her the prime ministership or even a fair election. In his death-cell, her father mulled over similar problems and came to slightly different conclusions. If I Am Assassinated, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s last will and testament, was written in semi-Gramsci mode, but the meaning wasn’t lost on his colleagues:

I entirely agree that the people of Pakistan will not tolerate foreign hegemony. On the basis of the self-same logic, the people of Pakistan would never agree to an internal hegemony. The two hegemonies complement each other. If our people meekly submit to internal hegemony, a priori, they will have to submit to external hegemony. This is so because the strength and power of external hegemony is far greater than that of internal hegemony.

If the people are too terrified to resist the weaker force, it is not possible for them to resist the stronger force. The acceptance of or acquiescence in internal hegemony means submission to external hegemony.

After he was hanged in April 1979, the text acquired a semi-sacred status among his supporters. But, when in power, Bhutto père had failed to develop any counter-hegemonic strategy or institutions, other than the 1973 constitution drafted by the veteran civil rights lawyer Mahmud Ali Kasuri (whose son Khurshid was until recently the foreign minister). A personality-driven, autocratic style of governance had neutered the spirit of the party, encouraged careerists and finally paved the way for his enemies. He was the victim of a grave injustice; his death removed all the warts and transformed him into a martyr. More than half the country, mainly the poor, mourned his passing.

The tragedy led to the PPP being treated as a family heirloom, which was unhealthy for both party and country. It provided the Bhuttos with a vote-bank and large reserves. But the experience of her father’s trial and death radicalised and politicised his daughter. She would have preferred, she told me at the time, to be a diplomat. Her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, were in London, having been forbidden to return home by their imprisoned father. The burden of trying to save her father’s life fell on Benazir and her mother, Nusrat, and the courage they exhibited won them the silent respect of a frightened majority. They refused to cave in to General Zia’s military dictatorship, which apart from anything else was invoking Islam to claw back rights won by women in previous decades. Benazir and Nusrat Bhutto were arrested and released several times. Their health began to suffer. Nusrat was allowed to leave the country to seek medical advice in 1982. Benazir was released a little more than a year later thanks, in part, to US pressure orchestrated by her old Harvard friend Peter Galbraith. She later described the period in her memoir, Daughter of the East (1988); it included photo-captions such as: ‘Shortly after President Reagan praised the regime for making “great strides towards democracy”, Zia’s henchmen gunned down peaceful demonstrators marking Pakistan Independence Day. The police were just as brutal to those protesting at the attack on my jeep in January 1987.’

Her tiny Barbican flat in London became the centre of opposition to the dictatorship, and it was here that we often discussed a campaign to take on the generals. Benazir had built up her position by steadfastly and peacefully resisting the military and replying to every slander with a cutting retort. Her brothers had been operating on a different level. They set up an armed group, al-Zulfiqar, whose declared aim was to harass and weaken the regime by targeting ‘traitors who had collaborated with Zia’. The principal volunteers were recruited inside Pakistan and in 1980 they were provided with a base in Afghanistan, where the pro-Moscow Communists had taken power three years before. It is a sad story with a fair share of factionalism, show-trials, petty rivalries, fantasies of every sort and death for the group’s less fortunate members.

In March 1981 Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto were placed on the FIA’s most wanted list. They had hijacked a Pakistan International airliner soon after it left Karachi (a power cut had paralysed the X-ray machines, enabling the hijackers to take their weapons on board); it was diverted to Kabul. Here Murtaza took over and demanded the release of political prisoners. A young military officer on board the flight was murdered. The plane refuelled and went on to Damascus, where the Syrian spymaster General Kholi took charge and ensured there were no more deaths. The fact that there were American passengers on the plane was a major consideration for the generals and, for that reason alone, the prisoners in Pakistan were released and flown to Tripoli.

This was seen as a victory and welcomed as such by the PPP in Pakistan. For the first time the group began to be taken seriously. A key target inside the country was Maulvi Mushtaq Hussain, the chief justice of the High Court in Lahore, who, in 1978, had sentenced Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to death, and whose behaviour in court had shocked even those who were hostile to the PPP. (Among other charges, he had accused Bhutto of ‘pretending to be a Muslim’ – his mother was a Hindu convert.) Mushtaq was in a friend’s car being driven to his home in Lahore’s Model Town area when al-Zulfiqar gunmen opened fire. The judge survived, but his friend and the driver died. The friend was one of the Chaudhrys of Gujrat: Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi, a dodgy businessman who had ostentatiously asked General Zia to make him a present of the ‘sacred pen’ with which he had signed Bhutto’s death warrant. The pen became a family heirloom. Zahoor Elahi may not have been the target but al-Zulfiqar, embarrassed at missing the judge, claimed he was also on their list, which may have been true.

It is the next generation of Chaudhrys that currently provides Musharraf with civilian ballast: Zahoor Elahi’s son Shujaat organised the split with Nawaz Sharif and created the splinter PML-Q to ease the growing pains of the new regime. He still fixes deals and wanted an emergency imposed much earlier to circumvent the deal with Benazir. He will now mastermind the general’s election campaign. His cousin Pervez Elahi is chief minister of the Punjab; his son, in turn, is busy continuing the family tradition by evicting tenants and buying up all the available land on the edge of Lahore. It has not been divulged which member of the family guards the sacred pen.

The hijacking meanwhile had annoyed Moscow, and the regime in Afghanistan asked the Bhutto brothers to find another refuge. While in Kabul, they had married two Afghan sisters, Fauzia and Rehana Fasihudin, daughters of a senior official at the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Together with their wives they now left the country and after a sojourn in Syria and possibly Libya ended up in Europe. The reunion with their sister took place on the French Riviera in 1985, a setting better suited to the lifestyles of all three siblings.

The young men feared General Zia’s agents. Each had a young daughter. Shahnawaz lived in an apartment in Cannes. He had been in charge of the ‘military apparatus’ and life in Kabul had exacted a heavier toll on him. He was edgy and nervous. Relations with his wife were stormy and he told his sister that he was preparing to divorce her. ‘There’s never been a divorce in the family. Your marriage wasn’t even an arranged one . . . You chose to marry Rehana. You must live with it,’ was Benazir’s revealing reply, according to her memoir. And then Shahnawaz was found dead in his apartment. His wife claimed he had taken poison, but according to Benazir nobody in the family believed her story; there had been violence in the room and his papers had been searched. Rehana looked immaculate, which disturbed the family. She was imprisoned for three months under the ‘Good Samaritan’ law for not having gone to the assistance of a dying person. After her release she settled in the United States. ‘Had the CIA killed him as a friendly gesture towards their favourite dictator?’ Benazir speculated. She raised other questions too: had the sisters become ISI agents? The truth remains hidden. Not long afterwards Murtaza divorced Fauzia, but kept custody of their three-year-old daughter, Fatima, and moved to Damascus. Here he had plenty of time for reflection and told friends that too many mistakes had been made.

In 1986 he met Ghinwa Itaoui, a young teacher who had fled Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982. She calmed him down and took charge of Fatima’s education. They were married in 1989 and a son, Zulfiqar, was born the following year. Benazir returned to Pakistan in 1986 and was greeted by large crowds who came out to show their affection for her and to demonstrate their anger with the regime. She campaigned all over the country, but felt increasingly that for some of the more religious-minded a young unmarried woman was not acceptable as a leader. How could she visit Saudi Arabia without a husband? An offer of marriage from the Zardari family was accepted and she married Asif in 1987. She had worried that any husband would find it difficult to deal with the periods of separation her nomadic political life would entail, but Zardari was perfectly capable of occupying himself.

A year later General Zia’s plane blew up in midair. In the elections that followed the PPP won the largest number of seats. Benazir became prime minister, but was hemmed in by the army on one side and the president, the army’s favourite bureaucrat, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, on the other. She told me at the time that she felt powerless. They wouldn’t let her do anything. ‘Tell the people,’ was my advice. Tell them why you can’t deliver on your promises to provide free education, proper sanitation, clean water and health services to improve the high infant mortality rate. She didn’t tell them; in fact she did nothing at all apart from provide employment to some of her supporters. Being in power, it seemed, was satisfaction enough. She went on state visits: met and liked Mrs Thatcher and later, with her new husband in tow, was received politely by the Saudi king. In the meantime there were other plots afoot – the opposition was literally buying off some of her MPs – and in August 1990 her government was removed by presidential decree and Zia’s protégés, the Sharif brothers, were back in power.

By the time she was re-elected in 1993, she had abandoned all idea of reform, but that she was in a hurry to do something became clear when she appointed her husband minister for investment, making him responsible for all investment offers from home and abroad. It is widely alleged that the couple accumulated $1.5 billion. The high command of the Pakistan People’s Party now became a machine for making money, but without any trickle-down mechanism. This period marked the complete degeneration of the party. All that shame-faced party members could say, when I asked, was that ‘everybody does it all over the world,’ thus accepting that the cash nexus was now all that mattered. In foreign policy her legacy was mixed. She refused to sanction an anti-Indian military adventure in Kargil on the Himalayan slopes, but to make up for it, as I wrote in the LRB (15 April 1999), her government backed the Taliban takeover in Kabul – which makes it doubly ironic that Washington and London should be promoting her as a champion of democracy.

Murtaza Bhutto had contested the elections from abroad and won a seat in the Sind provincial legislature. He returned home and expressed his unhappiness with his sister’s agenda. Family gatherings became tense. Murtaza had his weaknesses, but he wasn’t corrupt and he argued in favour of the old party’s radical manifesto. He made no secret of the fact that he regarded Zardari as an interloper whose only interest was money. Nusrat Bhutto suggested that Murtaza be made the chief minister of Sind: Benazir’s response was to remove her mother as chairperson of the PPP. Any sympathy Murtaza may have felt for his sister turned to loathing. He no longer felt obliged to control his tongue and at every possible opportunity lambasted Zardari and the corrupt regime over which his sister presided. It was difficult to fault him on the facts. The incumbent chief minister of Sind was Abdullah Shah, one of Zardari’s creatures. He began to harass Murtaza’s supporters. Murtaza decided to confront the organ-grinder himself. He rang Zardari and invited him round for an informal chat sans bodyguards to try and settle the problems within the family. Zardari agreed. As the two men were pacing the garden, Murtaza’s retainers appeared and grabbed Zardari. Someone brought out a cut-throat razor and some warm water and Murtaza shaved off half of Zardari’s moustache to the delight of the retainers, then told him to get lost. A fuming Zardari, who had probably feared much worse, was compelled to shave off the other half at home. The media, bemused, were informed that the new clean-shaven consort had accepted intelligence advice that the moustache made him too recognisable a target. In which case why did he allow it to sprout again immediately afterwards?

Some months later, in September 1996, as Murtaza and his entourage were returning home from a political meeting, they were ambushed, just outside their house, by some seventy armed policemen accompanied by four senior officers. A number of snipers were positioned in surrounding trees. The street lights had been switched off. Murtaza clearly understood what was happening and got out of his car with his hands raised; his bodyguards were instructed not to open fire. The police opened fire instead and seven men were killed, Murtaza among them. The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation – false entries in police logbooks, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated, the provincial PPP governor (regarded as untrustworthy) dispatched to a non-event in Egypt, a policeman killed who they feared might talk – made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister’s brother had been taken at a very high level.

While the ambush was being prepared, the police had sealed off Murtaza’s house (from which his father had been lifted by Zia’s commandos in 1978). The family inside felt something was wrong. At this point, a remarkably composed Fatima Bhutto, aged 14, decided to ring her aunt at Prime Minister’s House. The conversation that followed remains imprinted on her memory and a few years ago she gave me an account of it. It was Zardari who took her call:

Fatima: I wish to speak to my aunt, please.

Zardari: It’s not possible.

Fatima: Why? [At this point, Fatima says she heard loud wails and what sounded like fake crying.]

Zardari: She’s hysterical, can’t you hear? Fatima: Why? Zardari: Don’t you know? Your father’s been shot.

Fatima and Ghinwa found out where Murtaza had been taken and rushed out of the house. There was no sign on the street outside that anything had happened: the scene of the killing had been wiped clean of all evidence. There were no traces of blood and no signs of any disturbance. They drove straight to the hospital but it was too late; Murtaza was already dead. Later they learned that he had been left bleeding on the ground for almost an hour before being taken to a hospital where there were no emergency facilities of any kind.

When Benazir arrived to attend her brother’s funeral in Larkana, angry crowds stoned her limo. She had to retreat. In another unusual display of emotion, local people encouraged Murtaza’s widow to attend the actual burial ceremony in defiance of Islamic tradition. According to Fatima, one of Benazir’s hangers-on instigated legal proceedings against Ghinwa in a religious court for breaching Islamic law. Nothing was sacred.

Anyone who witnessed Murtaza’s murder was arrested; one witness died in prison. When Fatima rang Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested and not the killers she was told: ‘Look, you’re very young. You don’t understand things.’ Perhaps it was for this reason that the kind aunt decided to encourage Fatima’s blood-mother, Fauzia, whom she had previously denounced as a murderer in the pay of General Zia, to come to Pakistan and claim custody of Fatima. No mystery as to who paid her fare from California. Fatima and Ghinwa Bhutto resisted and the attempt failed. Benazir then tried a softer approach and insisted that Fatima accompany her to New York, where she was going to address the UN Assembly. Ghinwa Bhutto approached friends in Damascus and had her two children flown out of the country. Fatima later discovered that Fauzia had been seen hobnobbing with Benazir in New York.

In November 1996 Benazir was once again removed from power, this time by her own president, Farooq Leghari, a PPP stalwart. He cited corruption, but what had also angered him was the ISI’s crude attempt at blackmail – the intelligence agencies had photographed Leghari’s daughter meeting a boyfriend and threatened to go public. The week Benazir fell, the chief minister of Sind, Abdullah Shah, hopped on a motorboat and fled Karachi for the Gulf and thence the US.

A judicial tribunal had been appointed by Benazir’s government to inquire into the circumstances leading to Murtaza’s death. Headed by a Supreme Court judge, it took detailed evidence from all parties. Murtaza’s lawyers accused Zardari, Abdullah Shah and two senior police officials of conspiracy to murder. Benazir (now out of power) accepted that there had been a conspiracy, but suggested that ‘the hidden hand responsible for this was President Farooq Ahmad Leghari’: the intention, she said, was to ‘kill a Bhutto to get rid of a Bhutto’. Nobody took this seriously. Given all that had happened, it was an incredible suggestion.

The tribunal said there was no legally acceptable evidence to link Zardari to the incident, but accepted that ‘this was a case of extra-judicial killings by the police’ and concluded that such an incident could not have taken place without approval from the highest quarters. Nothing happened. Eleven years later, Fatima Bhutto publicly accused Zardari; she also claimed that many of those involved that day appear to have been rewarded for their actions. In an interview on an independent TV station just before the emergency was imposed, Benazir was asked to explain how it happened that her brother had bled to death outside his home while she was prime minister. She walked out of the studio. A sharp op-ed piece by Fatima in the LA Times on 14 November elicited the following response: ‘My niece is angry with me.’ Well, yes.

Musharraf may have withdrawn the corruption charges, but three other cases are proceeding in Switzerland, Spain and Britain. In July 2003, after an investigation lasting several years, Daniel Devaud, a Geneva magistrate, convicted Mr and Mrs Asif Ali Zardari, in absentia, of money laundering. They had accepted $15 million in bribes from two Swiss companies, SGS and Cotecna. The couple were sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to return $11.9 million to the government of Pakistan. ‘I certainly don’t have any doubts about the judgments I handed down,’ Devaud told the BBC. Benazir appealed, thus forcing a new investigation.

On 19 September 2005 she appeared in a Geneva court and tried to detach herself from the rest of the family: she hadn’t been involved, she said: it was a matter for her husband and her mother (afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease). She knew nothing of the accounts. And what of the agreement her agent Jens Schlegelmilch had signed according to which, in case of her and Zardari’s death, the assets of Bomer Finance Company would be divvied out equally between the Zardari and Bhutto families? She knew nothing of that either. And the £120,000 diamond necklace in the bank vault paid for by Zardari? It was intended for her, but she had rejected the gift as ‘inappropriate’. The case continues. Last month Musharraf told Owen Bennett-Jones of the BBC World Service that his government would not interfere with the proceedings: ‘That’s up to the Swiss government. Depends on them. It’s a case in their courts.’

In Britain the legal shenanigans concern the $3.4 million Rockwood estate in Surrey, bought by offshore companies on behalf of Zardari in 1995 and refurbished to his exacting tastes. Zardari denied owning the estate. Then when the court was about to instruct the liquidators to sell it and return the proceeds to the Pakistan government, Zardari came forward and accepted ownership. Last year, Lord Justice Collins ruled that, while he was not making any ‘findings of fact’, there was a ‘reasonable prospect’ that the Pakistan government might be able to establish that Rockwood had been bought and furnished with ‘the fruits of corruption’. A close friend of Benazir told me that she was genuinely not involved in this one, since Zardari wasn’t thinking of spending much time there with her.

Daniel Markey, formerly of the State Department and currently senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, explained why Washington had pushed the marriage of convenience: ‘A progressive, reform-minded, more cosmopolitan party in government would help the US.’ As their finances reveal, the Zardaris are certainly cosmopolitan.

What then is at stake in Pakistan as far as Washington is concerned? ‘The concern I have,’ Robert Gates, the US secretary for defense, recently said, ‘is that the longer the internal problems continue, the more distracted the Pakistani army and security services will be in terms of the internal situation rather than focusing on the terrorist threat in the frontier area.’ But one reason for the internal crisis is Washington’s over-reliance on Musharraf and the Pakistani military. It is Washington’s support and funding that have given him the confidence to operate as he pleases. But the thoughtless Western military occupation of Afghanistan is obviously crucial, since the instability in Kabul seeps into Peshawar and the tribal areas between the two countries. The state of emergency targeted the judiciary, opposition politicians and the independent media. All three groups were, in different ways, challenging the official line on Afghanistan and the ‘war on terror’, the disappearance of political prisoners and the widespread use of torture in Pakistani prisons. The issues were being debated on television in a much more open fashion than happens anywhere in the West, where a blanket consensus on Afghanistan drowns all dissent. Musharraf argued that civil society was hampering the ‘war on terror’. Hence the emergency. It’s nonsense, of course. It’s the war in the frontier regions that is creating dissent inside the army. Many do not want to fight. Hence the surrender of dozens of soldiers to Taliban guerrillas. This is the reason many junior officers are taking early retirement.

Western pundits blather on about the jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger. This is pure fantasy, reminiscent of a similar campaign almost three decades ago, when the threat wasn’t the jihadis who were fighting alongside the West in Afghanistan, but nationalist military radicals. The cover story of Time magazine for 15 June 1979 dealt with Pakistan; a senior Western diplomat was quoted as saying that the big danger was ‘that there is another Gaddafi down there, some radical major or colonel in the Pakistani army. We could wake up and find him in Zia’s place one morning and, believe me, Pakistan wouldn’t be the only place that would be destabilised.’

The Pakistan army is half a million strong. Its tentacles are everywhere: land, industry, public utilities and so on. It would require a cataclysmic upheaval (a US invasion and occupation, for example) for this army to feel threatened by a jihadi uprising. Two considerations unite senior officers: the unity of the organisation and keeping politicians at bay. One reason is the fear that they might lose the comforts and privileges they have acquired after decades of rule; but they also have the deep aversion to democracy that is the hallmark of most armies. Unused to accountability within their own ranks, it’s difficult for them to accept it in society at large.

As southern Afghanistan collapses into chaos, and as corruption and massive inflation takes hold, the Taliban is gaining more and more recruits. The generals who convinced Benazir that control of Kabul via the Taliban would give them ‘strategic depth’ may have retired, but their successors know that the Afghans will not tolerate a long-term Western occupation. They hope for the return of a whitewashed Taliban. Instead of encouraging a regional solution that includes India, Iran and Russia, the US would prefer to see the Pakistan army as its permanent cop in Kabul. It won’t work. In Pakistan itself the long night continues as the cycle restarts: military leadership promising reforms degenerates into tyranny, politicians promising social support to the people degenerate into oligarchs. Given that a better functioning neighbour is unlikely to intervene, Pakistan will oscillate between these two forms of rule for the foreseeable future. The people who feel they have tried everything and failed will return to a state of semi-sleep, unless something unpredictable rouses them again. This is always possible. 30 November Tariq Ali’s The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power will be published next year.

Tariq Ali’s Interview

By David Barsamian* 
April 2003  

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Tariq Ali, born in Lahore, Pakistan, is based in London where he is an editor of New Left Review. A prolific writer, Tariq Ali is author of more than 20 books, including history, politics, and fiction. His most recent books are Protocols of the Elders of Sodom (2009) and The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008). His latest book is the The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian, New Left Review, and the London Review of Books. In his spare time he is a filmmaker and novelist.  I talked with him at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in late January 2003.

Q. Imperialism is not a word that is often used in polite discourse in the United States.

I’ve always found it very strange, traveling and speaking throughout the United States, that it’s a word they don’t like. They assumed that an empire consisted of colonies abroad that were ruled and staffed by people sent from the imperial country, whether it was Britain in India or France in Algeria or Germany in Namibia or Belgium in the Congo. And they said, “Well, we don’t do it like that.”

For a long period the U.S. kept to its own sphere. What caused them to move out was not so much the need for colonies, which they didn’t need in that sense, given the size and scale of the United States itself and the natural resources it possessed, plus the fact that they dominated South America. What forced them to move out was the Russian Revolution. There is a very interesting parallel that at the same time as the Russian Revolution was taking place, Woodrow Wilson decided it was time for a major U.S. intervention because they were nervous now that the threatening of capitalist interests in Europe could actually threaten them in the long term. That’s when they decided they had to go international.

The victory of the Russian Revolution meant that it had an enemy. Here was a country that challenged capitalism quite openly. So for 70 years they fought that system. Finally they defeated it by forcing it to go on a binge of military spending, which was completely unnecessary. So the USSR imploded. That was a big, big victory for this empire.

To what extent is imperialism connected to or is an outcome of capitalism?

All the early empires were founded by the need for capital to expand, the need for capital to find new markets. It was this struggle for markets that finally created the British empire, the Dutch empire, the Belgian empire, the French empire. World War I was a war fought over colonial expansion. Who would control the trade routes? Who would control the markets? Germany, which had unified late and came to capitalism later than the other powers, decided it wanted its own empire. It felt that the way to get it was to defeat Britain, and then it could actually move forward.

For a while this got disguised because while the Soviet Union and that whole bloc of states existed, there was talk of imperialism, but by and large people in the West saw this as essentially fighting a war against an evil enemy, an evil empire. Now the slate is clean once again. We have the world before us naked. We see exactly what is going on. The September 20, 2002 strategy doctrine put out by the Bush administration makes it crystal clear what this is all about. They say a holy moral principle is the defense of free trade, i.e., free trade as we see it and according to rules that we make and how we regulate it. In order to defend this, we are prepared to go to war. That has been the principle of all empires. The difference between the American empire and previous empires is that the United States usually prefers to work through local compradors, local rulers who are on their side. They don’t like ruling directly because they know it’s an enormous expense. Why send your own people out to run a country when you can find locals to do it? That is how they’ve always operated. For example, they occupied Japan after World War II, they created a constitution and MacArthur was like a viceroy. But they pulled out after a few years and let their local relays in Japan carry on, as they still do. The Japanese Liberal Democratic Party was created by the United States to do the job for them.

At a distance, they see the Far Eastern region, the united Korean peninsula, Japan, and China, as a combination that could be deadly if it ever got together economically, politically, and militarily. They fear that if this happened, within ten years this area would become economically hegemonic. Thus, American strategic policy is designed to keep these countries separate from each other. That’s why the Bush regime is now trying to stop Korean reunification because they are fearful that a unified Korean peninsula with nuclear weapons would make the Japanese go for nuclear weapons. Then you would have three nuclear powers in the region: Japan, Korea, and China. If that happened, I think they would try and make them fight each other because they are really fearful of a link-up in this region. That would severely threaten their interests.

If you read Thomas Friedman’s article on the war in Iraq, this guy spells it out. He says, It’s laughable to pretend it’s not about oil. He says, It’s not just about oil and of course we know it’s not just about oil, but he says oil does play a big part in it. So they are no longer trying to conceal their real aims. They are saying, This is the situation. We’re the world’s mightiest power. These are our economic interests, these are our strategic interests, and these are our geopolitical interests. You’d better watch out, guys, because we’re going to defend them. This is imperialism, different from the past, in a new situation. In the war in Iraq they will assert new, raw imperial power in a way they have not done before.

Walter Rodney, a political thinker and writer from Guyana, talked about what he called “the local lackeys” of imperialism. Tell me more about this class of collaborators.

In the middle of the last century, you have the Korean War—a three-year war fought by the United States under the banner of the United Nations, in the course of which the industrially strong part of Korea, which was the north, is completely devastated. Not a single building was left standing. Its entire infrastructure was destroyed.

Then you had the Vietnam War. First, the French were defeated in Vietnam. The United States was not prepared to see that defeat and stepped in. The aim of the American empire was, by hook or by crook, to get rid of these governments somehow; to maintain a nationalist pretense and to get in a different group of people who could pretend to be anticolonial nationalists, but who would actually be serving the needs of the great metropolitan empire.

How did they do this? They failed in Vietnam. They succeeded in dividing Korea. But they couldn’t rule South Korea democratically because no lackeys could be found who could be elected. So when you don’t find lackeys who can be elected democratically, you put the army in power. They did the same thing in Pakistan. When a general election was planned for April 1959 that would have returned a government that would have withdrawn from the security pacts into which they tied Pakistan, they organized a coup d’etat and put the military in power in October 1958 to preempt a general election. The country that worried them the most in the middle of the last century was Indonesia because this country had the world’s largest Communist Party outside China and Russia, with a million members, with an additional two million people in front organizations. It had a big influence on the government and the armed forces. So what do they do? They organized one of the most dastardly actions we have seen since World War II, a military coup, where they put Suharto in power. Suharto proceeds to kill a million people and wipes out the most powerful social movement in the country. In 1975 he invaded East Timor, killed several hundred thousand people there and wiped out all the secular, radical opposition in the country. Then people are surprised the Islamists are so powerful because the Islamists are the people who were used in 1965 to kill “Reds.”

Then you have a new phase, which is the post-Cold War phase, where basically the triumph of the United States and world capitalism totally disarmed even seminationalist politicians, who said, Now there is nothing else to do. Just work with them, serve them. This led to a phenomenal growth in corruption all over the Third World, and not just the Third World, in the First and Second Worlds as well. Massive corruption in politics. Politics became part of corporate life, which they had been in the States for some time, but that process then began to seep through. It’s been very difficult for the last 20 years to get elected leaders who are prepared to fight for their own people.

Interestingly enough, we’re having this interview in Latin America, and this is a continent that has been in revolt for some time. You have seen the election of Chavez. You have seen the failure to topple Fidel Castro after 40 years of the blockade. You’ve seen a victory of Lula in Brazil. You have seen the victory of Gutierrez in Ecuador. Evo Morales in Bolivia, came very close to defeating the corporations’ candidate. So we are seeing beginnings of a new wave of, let’s call it, subnationalism or protonationalism, which wants to resist. But by and large, in Asia and Africa they have, so far, been pliable regimes.

I don’t think this can last indefinitely. I think, curiously enough, the war in Iraq and the occupation of Iraq and the substitution of Saddam with a U.S. puppet government, so the oil can be shared out as war trophy is bound to create resistance sooner or later. It may take four years. It may take ten years. We don’t know. But it will happen. In that sense, the American empire is no different from other empires. It is slowly sowing the seeds of the forces that will one day confront it.

Clearly, 19th century European imperialism was predicated on racism, the white person’s burden, bringing Christianity and enlightenment to the benighted natives. That was then. What about now?

You can’t deny the underlying feeling of white superiority in all this. I’ll give you a concrete example. The tragedy of 9/11, when lots of civilians were killed in New York and some in Washington, the whole world was forced to weep for them in public. Why? Because they were citizens of the United States of America. When Afghan citizens are killed by indiscriminate bombings, by so-called accidental bombings and the deaths from starvation, these deaths don’t count for much. No one will ever build a monument for the Afghan civilians who died in the bombing raids. Just a crude war of revenge, as I called it at the time.

Why not? Why are Afghan lives not as important as any other lives? Because underlying all this is still the belief that we are a superior nation, a superior race, and a superior people.

Look at the cavalier way in which casualties are discussed in the case of Iraq. There was a conference organized by the State Department and its favorite Iraqis and an Iraqi friend of mine attended who wasn’t on their list. He told me, “What shocked me was the way they were discussing casualties, how many civilian deaths would be acceptable.” He said the figure the Iraqis and the Americans were talking about was 250,000. It shouldn’t go above that. A quarter of a million civilian deaths acceptable? When 3,000 deaths are not acceptable in the United States of America, but a quarter of a million Iraqi lives are acceptable, what is that if not the most grotesque demonstration that the lives of these poor Arabs don’t matter a damn. The form racism takes is different from the old empires, but it’s still there.

Talk about the role of the media in shaping and forming public opinion. For example, the media constantly repeat that Saddam Hussein represents a grave threat to the United States.

This notion of Saddam Hussein being a threat to the United States makes everyone in Europe laugh, including European politicians. Recently, I was at a debate in Berlin at a big theater, 1,000-2,000 people there. I was debating Professor Ruth Wedgewood. She is an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld. To my amazement she suddenly turned to the Germans and she said, I know the reason you are opposed to this war. It’s because you’re scared of Saddam. Afterwards, people came and told me, “We were really taken aback by that. What does she mean?” I said, “This is what they say in the United States all the time. They frighten the people that Saddam represents a real threat. I’m staggered that they’ve begun to believe their own rhetoric.”

Why is Tony Blair such an enthusiastic partner of George Bush in his war on terrorism?

In terms of foreign policy, I think Blair decided very early on after he came to office that he was going to continue the deals Thatcher had done with Reagan. What these deals have done, basically, is they have locked the British Ministry of Defense into the Pentagon. It’s to the point now that when the Pentagon upgrades, the British Ministry of Defense, which doesn’t need to do it, has to do it because it’s part of the same system.

Now the British are totally committed to this alliance. It reminds you of what Charles DeGaulle used to say when he kept on vetoing British entry into the Common Market. He used to say that Britain will always be an American Trojan horse in the European Union. How right he was. Blair likes to go and tell the Europeans, I’m close to Bush. I can influence him. He tells Bush, It’s important I’m in the European Union, because I can make sure that your views there are properly defended.

Underlying Blair’s servility to the United States is how he sees the country. Britain is a medium-sized, northern European country. It no longer has an empire. The country has quite an exploitative deregulated system, which attracts foreign capital because wages and taxes are low. This is what Thatcher achieved. Blair believes this has to be maintained because he doesn’t have any other vision. One of the ways it can be maintained is by hanging alongside the United States in whatever they do, sharing part of the proceeds and being seen by Washington as a loyal ally. It’s classic.

I have to also tell you, because it would be one-sided not to do so, that he is hated by large numbers of people in Britain for doing this, including the British establishment, who find that sort of servility to the United States to be incredibly debased and vulgar and low. Both within the mandarin civil service and the military establishment there is a lot of nervousness and hostility to the war on Iraq. For the first time also in Britain you have a majority of public opinion against the war. So Blair is really putting his future on the line.

The United States, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been fervently looking for an oppositional force to replace it. They tried Noriega in Panama, Qaddafi in Libya, and the Cali and Medellin drug cartels. Now they’ve zoomed in on Islam, fundamentalist and militant, as the new archenemy.

It’s crazy to make Islam into a monolith. It’s just as divided as any other part of the world. The maximum number of people al-Qaeda has, 3,000? Maybe 4,000? Though no one has agreed on it, it’s definitely somewhere between 2-3,000, ensconced in different parts of the world, including Europe and the United States. So how come this can’t be destroyed? It could be. But the problem is not al-Qaeda. The problem is the conditions that create this mood, which drives young people to despair. That will not stop unless the central problems in the Middle East are solved.

Bernard Lewis has achieved almost iconic status in the West as an expert on Islam and how Muslims think. He wrote an essay for Atlantic magazine in 1990 called “Roots of Muslim Rage,” in which he used the term “clash of civilizations.” That term was picked up later by Harvard University professor, Samuel Huntington. He wrote a book called The Clash of Civilizations. Now you have written a book called The Clash of Fundamentalisms. What do you think about this so-called theory?

The Lewis theory is largely based on a view of a world that I don’t recognize. I grew up in that world and have traveled throughout it. There is rage in the Muslim world, obviously, and the reasons for that rage are the imposition of a settler state in the heart of the Arab world and the attempt to destroy the Palestinians and their identity. I know in the United States this is a sensitive subject, but before the formation and foundation of Israel, there was very little anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Large Jewish communities lived in the Maghrib, North Africa, or in the heart of the Middle East, in Egypt and Iraq.

The Baghdadi Jews in particular had a special flavor culturally in terms of cuisine, in what they did, in how they operated, and many of them were founders of the Egyptian and Iraqi Communist Parties. That’s how integrated they were in those societies. This was all destroyed by the Zionist project and the creation of Israel. Obviously, the result has been a lot of crude anti-Semitism. But please don’t think it comes out of something, which is fundamental to Islam. It doesn’t. It did not exist in that shape or form until the 20th century.

So the rage of which Bernard Lewis talks is a different rage from the rage I see because he sees it as inherent in civilizational differences. I see the differences as being fundamentally political and economic.

If you read Huntington’s book, you see that he has these formulas, which he’s now modified subsequent to 9/11. He said, we, the West, are a Judeo-Christian civilization. We are now confronted by all the other civilizations: Islamic civilization, Chinese civilization. African civilization he didn’t mention because he said he was not sure such a thing existed. The big danger, he said, came from a possible unification of Chinese and Islamic civilizations. When you read between the lines, these are coded messages for the phenomenal growth of the Chinese economy and Chinese exports to the U.S. and the centrality of Arab oil. That is what all this civilization nonsense boils down to.

In The Clash of Fundamentalisms, I said it was a clash between a tiny religious fundamentalism, which was very retrogressive and retrograde, but that the parent of all fundamentalisms was American imperial fundamentalism. This empire, the most powerful in history, now uses its economic and military muscle to reshape the world according to its needs and its interests. Resistance against this is bound to rise. At the moment, it’s taken the form of an ultrareligious fundamentalism, which will not work because it has nothing to offer. But this will change. Other resistances will come.

The average American might say to you, “Well, even though you’ve said many interesting things, I’m not quite sure. How do I get a better understanding of what the United States is doing and how the world system operates?

One of the suggestions I would make is don’t ignore history. One of the things that has happened in our culture as a whole is that history as a subject has become devalued. If you read the history of the United States, you will find not just the history of an empire in the making, but you will also find the history of dissent in the United States and you will also find many surprising things. Walt Whitman, for instance, is supposed to be the poet of liberation and anti-slavery and pro-Lincoln, but in his earlier years Walt Whitman was a firm believer in American whites as a superior civilization, which had the right to crush Mexicans because they were a second-rate civilization. There was a lot of ambiguity in the early American poets and writers about American expansionism. This changed by the end of the 19th century, with Mark Twain and with Whitman in his last years, by the way. After the end of the Civil War, he was a deeply shaken person, when he saw how much blood had been spilled.

I always say to my American friends that America is a very rich country in every way. It is rich economically. It is rich in the dissenting movements that have grown up within it. It’s rich also as a country that has committed atrocities all over the world. You have to choose which of these riches you want. Martin Luther King, the year before he was assassinated, said, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own country.” People should learn that the most gifted and capable Americans, many of whom were killed by the state, historically are people who have stood up and resisted.

Allah, America & Army: Tariq Ali’s New Book

Allah, Army and America” – or, to put it succinctly, the “3 As” – is a formula coined by social scientists often used to explain the political and social malaise that afflicts Pakistan. Numerous studies have been written on the Pakistani ruling elite’s amour with 2 As, namely Allah and the Army, most recently by Hasan Abbas and Irshad Haqqani on the former, and by Ayesha Siddiqa and Shuja Nawaz on the latter. However, what is usually missing from the discussion is how incurably enamoured the Pakistani ruling elite has become of the greatest imperialist power since the end of the Second World War, and how small the dividends, if any, this dangerous liaison has yielded to the people of Pakistan. 

Tariq Ali’s latest work, The Duel, attempts to bridge this gap in our understanding of the relations between the United States and the Pakistani ruling elite. 

Ali is one of the few prominent Pakistanis on the Left who grew up during the formative years of Pakistan’s birth as a postcolonial state, and the fact that he left it in the 1960s to pursue a more fulfilling political career in Britain has not stopped him from penning three works on his native country. 

His two earlier works on Pakistan created some controversy (not with readers but with Pakistan’s ruling elite), the hallmarks of which can be seen in this latest work. That no doubt played a part in the book’s subsequent unofficial ban in Pakistan, followed lock, stock and barrel by the Pakistani media. 

When I asked Ali during an interview, while he was visiting Pakistan in 2002, whether he had any plans to update his conclusions about the country in Can Pakistan Survive?, he emphatically dismissed the suggestion, saying that the conclusions he drew in 1981 were still relevant. That he had cause to change his mind is disconcerting. In many ways, the book is a mea culpa for his native country’s economic and political woes and a testament to the changes that he has witnessed – and chronicled – in other parts of the world, in Latin America for instance, but never in Pakistan. 

The book begins with a foundational history of Pakistan as a confessional state, brought into being by a political party dominated by feudal potentates. In many ways, the fact that the All India Muslim League looked to the British Empire, rather than the Indian people, for protection and advancement of its interests, and its demand for a separate state had a shaping influence on the actions of independent Pakistan’s ruling elite. The latter also relied selfishly on its relationship with the U.S. for self-preservation rather than on the people who had actually sacrificed their lives and properties in the bloodbath of Partition. 

Most readers will not be amused to find out that even the founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was not immune to the charms of Washington, most noticeably evidenced by the fact that he once tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the Flagstaff House to the then American Ambassador in Karachi. 

This lucrative relationship was facilitated by the fact that for the first decade of Pakistan’s independence, the new country did not have a Constitution or elections: this situation allowed an unelected coterie led by Ghulam Mohammad and Iskander Mirza to strengthen their power and cement a lasting alliance with the landed elite and the military. This coterie also set the tone for Pakistan’s foreign policy slavishly in tune with U.S. strategic interests. A curious thing that happened was the inclusion of this “most Allied of America’s allies” in the Non-Aligned Movement and its building of an all-weather friendship with Maoist China, which survives to this day. 

We all know the sorry state that Pakistan was in after the bureaucratic-military raj gave way to a more direct military takeover by Ayub Khan in 1958. Ali’s description of Ayub’s years in power as well as the resentment that festered in East Pakistan is tinged with uniquely personal insights, especially into the class nature of the new Bangladeshi leadership under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as well as the Mukti Bahini guerilas inspired by Che Guevara, among others. 

The truncated and moth-eaten state that remained after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 had a remarkable opportunity to be refounded by an unchallenged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, with the military’s humiliating retreat to the barracks. However, he squandered the few chances that were made available to him, and the promise of limited land reform, free public education and health, nationalisation of public utilities and an independent foreign policy gave way to a deterioration of democracy not only within the PPP but in the country as a whole. This, combined with Bhutto’s intransigence vis-a-vis the U.S. over Pakistan’s nuclear bomb precipitated the overthrow of the first democratically elected leader in the country’s history. It also led to the brutalisation of Pakistan’s political culture at the hands of a dictator who was greenlighted to power by Washington, having firmly established his credentials for the job earlier in 1970 by brutally crushing Black September, a popular Palestinian uprising against the Jordanian monarch. 

Tariq Ali, who was close to Bhutto, and was later in touch with Bhutto’s daughter Benazir, devotes a whole chapter to the rise and fall of the Bhutto dynasty. As with all charismatic postcolonial leaders of the Third World, the tragedy of this dynasty is inevitably the tragedy of modern Pakistan. The PPP was formed by a dedicated cadre of people who wanted a thoroughgoing structural transformation of the state. But petty dynastic politics and attempts to be on the “right side of history” have gradually isolated the PPP from its mass base, with the result that the post-Zulfikar Ali Bhutto leadership reposes more trust in the halls of power in Washington and London than in the Pakistani people. As a result, Pakistan’s largest political party is now little more than a patronage-doling machine dominated by feudal elements, opportunists and bandwagon careerists of every hue who have now anxiously hopped onto the Washington Consensus to preserve their privileges. This can only lead to tragedy, as in the case of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. 

The failure of the Bhuttos, however, does not absolve the other dynasties that have ruled Pakistan in the past and, unlike the Bhuttos, owe their origins to benign dictators – the Sharifs and the Chaudharys of Gujrat, whose servility to power is well known and do not offer any hope for the future. 

The price Pakistan has paid for being steered into the flight path of American power has been great and is growing. One of its most disastrous results is the events in Afghanistan, where state-led efforts at modernisation and establishment of secular nationalism were repeatedly stalled by foreign powers, Pakistan included. All that eventually boomeranged on America, in the form of 9/11, and on Pakistan, which has a murderous imperial war going on on its western borders involving the Taliban, the Pakistan Army and the U.S. forces. 

In the absence of a secular-nationalist Left, and with a puppet imported from California in power in daytime Kabul, the task of resistance to foreign occupation in Afghanistan is inevitably left to the remnants of the Taliban. The latter might very soon be reclaiming their past status as rulers of Afghanistan, thanks to the spectacular corruption of a tiny U.S.-backed elite and the success of the resistance. Only a total withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan and an alliance with China, Pakistan, India and Iran that guarantees non-interference in that country’s affairs can salvage a lasting peace for this tortured land. 

Ali shatters a few myths about Pakistan, which in the West fill tonnes of paper, devoted to proving that Pakistan is a failed state. Firstly, the duel that he alludes to in the title of his book is not one on its western borders between the Taliban and the government, but the duel between the people of Pakistan and the American-backed elite, who have historically ruled and plundered the country. In fact, this duel is a familiar story in many parts of the world – Colombia, Afghanistan, Israel, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the scores of tiny American protectorates in the Gulf, the Balkans and the Caucasus are part of this distinguished club. Secondly, that Pakistan is on the verge of a takeover by the Taliban and that the only party able to do business with them are the khaki ironclads. Indeed, the way Washington is currently dealing with the new regime in Islamabad proves that the latter claim is false. 

The way forward for Pakistan, according to Ali, lies in the end of the American search for a perpetual khaki-clad to manage Pakistan. In addition, Pakistan has to evolve from a national security state to one where desperately needed land reforms are carried out, with free health care, education and housing for the poor. Peace with India should be the foremost priority, as also the formation of a South Asian Union with increasing political and economic ties to China and Iran in order to counter American efforts to put a permanent military presence there. Ali places little faith in the traditional political parties but hails the enthusiasm of the judicial activism that erupted in March 2007. 

One wishes he had also mentioned the scores of social movements that have been battling to change the status quo in various parts of the country – the Anjuman Mazareen Punjab in Okara, the Baloch resistance, the peasant resistance in Hashtnagar in the NWFP and the Fisherfolk Forum in Sindh, all refreshingly secular and having no truck with religion. But he makes up for it with warm references and homages throughout the book to regional poets and writers to show that art and culture have never been coopted by the Washington consensus. 

Earlier, in September 2008, the Pakistan government paid its own tribute to Ali’s book when it unofficially banned the work in Pakistan. However, the learned mandarins within the Ministry of Information did not have to wait for long to discover that books and ideas are never hindered by frontiers. Ali’s book, like his previous two on Pakistan, succeeded in finding a large black-market readership before the ban was ultimately revoked. 

Tariq Ali: A Tragedy Born of Military Despotism & Anarchy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2232632,00.html

Friday December 28, 2007
The Guardian

Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto’s behaviour and policies – both while she was in office and more recently – are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again.An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination in Rawalpindi yesterday. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order – and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and eight other judges of the country’s supreme court for attempting to hold the government’s intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law? Their replacements lack the backbone to do anything, let alone conduct a proper inquest into the misdeeds of the agencies to uncover the truth behind the carefully organised killing of a major political leader.

How can Pakistan today be anything but a conflagration of despair? It is assumed that the killers were jihadi fanatics. This may well be true, but were they acting on their own?

Benazir, according to those close to her, had been tempted to boycott the fake elections, but she lacked the political courage to defy Washington. She had plenty of physical courage, and refused to be cowed by threats from local opponents. She had been addressing an election rally in Liaquat Bagh. This is a popular space named after the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed by an assassin in 1953. The killer, Said Akbar, was immediately shot dead on the orders of a police officer involved in the plot. Not far from here, there once stood a colonial structure where nationalists were imprisoned. This was Rawalpindi jail. It was here that Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in April 1979. The military tyrant responsible for his judicial murder made sure the site of the tragedy was destroyed as well.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death poisoned relations between his Pakistan People’s party and the army. Party activists, particularly in the province of Sind, were brutally tortured, humiliated and, sometimes, disappeared or killed.

Pakistan’s turbulent history, a result of continuous military rule and unpopular global alliances, confronts the ruling elite now with serious choices. They appear to have no positive aims. The overwhelming majority of the country disapproves of the government’s foreign policy. They are angered by its lack of a serious domestic policy except for further enriching a callous and greedy elite that includes a swollen, parasitic military. Now they watch helplessly as politicians are shot dead in front of them.

Benazir had survived the bomb blast yesterday but was felled by bullets fired at her car. The assassins, mindful of their failure in Karachi a month ago, had taken out a double insurance this time. They wanted her dead. It is impossible for even a rigged election to take place now. It will have to be postponed, and the military high command is no doubt contemplating another dose of army rule if the situation gets worse, which could easily happen.

What has happened is a multilayered tragedy. It’s a tragedy for a country on a road to more disasters. Torrents and foaming cataracts lie ahead. And it is a personal tragedy. The house of Bhutto has lost another member. Father, two sons and now a daughter have all died unnatural deaths.

I first met Benazir at her father’s house in Karachi when she was a fun-loving teenager, and later at Oxford. She was not a natural politician and had always wanted to be a diplomat, but history and personal tragedy pushed in the other direction. Her father’s death transformed her. She had become a new person, determined to take on the military dictator of that time. She had moved to a tiny flat in London, where we would endlessly discuss the future of the country. She would agree that land reforms, mass education programmes, a health service and an independent foreign policy were positive constructive aims and crucial if the country was to be saved from the vultures in and out of uniform. Her constituency was the poor, and she was proud of the fact.

She changed again after becoming prime minister. In the early days, we would argue and in response to my numerous complaints – all she would say was that the world had changed. She couldn’t be on the “wrong side” of history. And so, like many others, she made her peace with Washington. It was this that finally led to the deal with Musharraf and her return home after more than a decade in exile. On a number of occasions she told me that she did not fear death. It was one of the dangers of playing politics in Pakistan.

It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People’s party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country’s first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.

Benazir’s horrific death should give her colleagues pause for reflection. To be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organisation. The People’s party needs to be refounded as a modern and democratic organisation, open to honest debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilise occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. This can and should be done. The Bhutto family should not be asked for any more sacrifices.

· Tariq Ali’s book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power is published in 2008 tariq.ali3@btinternet.com

Tariq Ali’s Heart Bleeds for Pakistan

Tariq Ali – My heart bleeds for Paksitan My heart bleeds for Pakistan. It deserves better than this grotesque feudal charade By Tariq Ali, Pakistan-born writer, broadcaster and commentator The Independent Six hours before she was executed, Mary, Queen of Scots wrote to her brother-in-law, Henry III of France: “…As for my son, I commend him to you in so far as he deserves, for I cannot answer for him.” The year was 1587. On 30 December 2007, a conclave of feudal potentates gathered in the home of the slain Benazir Bhutto to hear her last will and testament being read out and its contents subsequently announced to the world media. Where Mary was tentative, her modern-day equivalent left no room for doubt. She could certainly answer for her son. A triumvirate consisting of her husband, Asif Zardari (one of the most venal and discredited politicians in the country and still facing corruption charges in three European courts) and two ciphers will run the party till Benazir’s 19-year-old son, Bilawal, comes of age. He will then become chairperson-for-life and, no doubt, pass it on to his children. The fact that this is now official does not make it any less grotesque. The Pakistan People’s Party is being treated as a family heirloom, a property to be disposed of at the will of its leader. Nothing more, nothing less. Poor Pakistan. Poor People’s Party supporters. Both deserve better than this disgusting, medieval charade. Benazir’s last decision was in the same autocratic mode as its predecessors, an approach that would cost her – tragically – her own life. Had she heeded the advice of some party leaders and not agreed to the Washington-brokered deal with Pervez Musharraf or, even later, decided to boycott his parliamentary election she might still have been alive. Her last gift to the country does not augur well for its future. How can Western-backed politicians be taken seriously if they treat their party as a fiefdom and their supporters as serfs, while their courtiers abroad mouth sycophantic niceties concerning the young prince and his future. That most of the PPP inner circle consists of spineless timeservers leading frustrated and melancholy lives is no excuse. All this could be transformed if inner-party democracy was implemented. There is a tiny layer of incorruptible and principled politicians inside the party, but they have been sidelined. Dynastic politics is a sign of weakness, not strength. Benazir was fond of comparing her family to the Kennedys, but chose to ignore that the Democratic Party, despite an addiction to big money, was not the instrument of any one family. The issue of democracy is enormously important in a country that has been governed by the military for over half of its life. Pakistan is not a “failed state” in the sense of the Congo or Rwanda. It is a dysfunctional state and has been in this situation for almost four decades. At the heart of this dysfunctionality is the domination by the army and each period of military rule has made things worse. It is this that has prevented political stability and the emergence of stable institutions. Here the US bears direct responsibility, since it has always regarded the military as the only institution it can do business with and, unfortunately, still does so. This is the rock that has focused choppy waters into a headlong torrent. The military’s weaknesses are well known and have been amply documented. But the politicians are not in a position to cast stones. After all, Mr Musharraf did not pioneer the assault on the judiciary so conveniently overlooked by the US Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, and the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. The first attack on the Supreme Court was mounted by Nawaz Sharif’s goons who physically assaulted judges because they were angered by a decision that ran counter to their master’s interests when he was prime minister. Some of us had hoped that, with her death, the People’s Party might start a new chapter. After all, one of its main leaders, Aitzaz Ahsan, president of the Bar Association, played a heroic role in the popular movement against the dismissal of the chief justice. Mr Ahsan was arrested during the emergency and kept in solitary confinement. He is still under house arrest in Lahore. Had Benazir been capable of thinking beyond family and faction she should have appointed him chairperson pending elections within the party. No such luck. The result almost certainly will be a split in the party sooner rather than later. Mr Zardari was loathed by many activists and held responsible for his wife’s downfall. Once emotions have subsided, the horror of the succession will hit the many traditional PPP followers except for its most reactionary segment: bandwagon careerists desperate to make a fortune. All this could have been avoided, but the deadly angel who guided her when she was alive was, alas, not too concerned with democracy. And now he is in effect leader of the party. Meanwhile there is a country in crisis. Having succeeded in saving his own political skin by imposing a state of emergency, Mr Musharraf still lacks legitimacy. Even a rigged election is no longer possible on 8 January despite the stern admonitions of President George Bush and his unconvincing Downing Street adjutant. What is clear is that the official consensus on who killed Benazir is breaking down, except on BBC television. It has now been made public that, when Benazir asked the US for a Karzai-style phalanx of privately contracted former US Marine bodyguards, the suggestion was contemptuously rejected by the Pakistan government, which saw it as a breach of sovereignty. Now both Hillary Clinton and Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are pinning the convict’s badge on Mr Musharraf and not al-Qa’ida for the murder, a sure sign that sections of the US establishment are thinking of dumping the President. Their problem is that, with Benazir dead, the only other alternative for them is General Ashraf Kiyani, head of the army. Nawaz Sharif is seen as a Saudi poodle and hence unreliable, though, given the US-Saudi alliance, poor Mr Sharif is puzzled as to why this should be the case. For his part, he is ready to do Washiongton’s bidding but would prefer the Saudi King rather than Mr Musharraf to be the imperial message-boy. A solution to the crisis is available. This would require Mr Musharraf’s replacement by a less contentious figure, an all-party government of unity to prepare the basis for genuine elections within six months, and the reinstatement of the sacked Supreme Court judges to investigate Benazir’s murder without fear or favour. It would be a start.