On october 16, 1999, The Economist’s cover story “Oh Pakistan” showed a shalwar kameez–clad Nawaz Sharif sitting next to a uniformed General Pervez Musharraf sharing a thought bubble: “You Are Fired!” Military coups had become a rarity in the world by the end of the twentieth century but, as the British weekly noted, for Pakistanis there was something familiar about General Musharraf’s coup. The takeover had followed the script for the state of martial rule pioneered by General Ayub Khan and fine-tuned by Generals Yahya Khan and Zia-ul-Haq. On October 12 soon after the announcement of Musharraf’s dismissal as chief of army staff on national television, the screens went black, then martial music erupted against the backdrop of soldiers marching in patriotic earnestness. As was standard, no tears were shed for the sacked prime minister and his corrupt government. No street demonstrations were held to protest the fourth bloodless coup by an army that had ruled the country for twenty-five years during the fifty-two years since independence. Without endorsing the military seizure of power, the Economist thought Nawaz Sharif’s departure from the scene might turn out to be for the better. Everything depended on General Musharraf, who had “the power to make his country a better place, or to destroy it.”
The New York Times editorial “Dangerous Coup in Pakistan” was more forthright in denouncing the intervention, calling it a “cause for alarm in South Asia and the rest of the world.” A newly armed nuclear power with a history of wars and internal upheavals, Pakistan’s relapse into military rule under General Musharraf, who had so recently shown an inclination to be confrontational with India, had again made the subcontinent “one of the most dangerous places in the world.” Whatever the faults of the sacked civilian government, the coup had no justification. Democracy had to be restored in Pakistan at once. The United States needed to work with China and Saudi Arabia to ensure that Musharraf and his top generals did not embark on another military misadventure against India. There were simply “no military solutions to Pakistan’s problems.” The editorial line mirrored the Clinton administration’s adverse reaction to a coup it had tried preventing. On September 20, 1999, officials of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council had issued four separate statements warning the army against taking any extraconstitutional step. Such unprecedented backing by Washington for a civilian government in Islamabad was not without its quid pro quo. Committed to capturing Osama bin Laden before leaving the Oval Office, Clinton wanted Nawaz Sharif’s help in getting the Pakistani Army to stop supporting the Taliban and instead use its intelligence networks to locate bin Laden.
Fearing a military coup, the Pakistani prime minister was only too willing to oblige. A week before the drama that led to the overthrow of the PML-N government, both the Sharif brothers publicly condemned the Taliban, leading to speculation that “the government was pushing an American agenda in the region.” This fueled resentments in GHQ and was one of the less well-publicized reasons for the coup. As a liberal-minded columnist of an English daily put it, the Sharifs responded to their mounting internal problems by becoming “the greatest lackeys of the Americans that we have ever had.” They had beaten Benazir Bhutto “hollow” in this shameful race and “bartered national self-respect in a bid to seek American support.” With even prodemocracy liberals applauding Sharif’s fall, the coup was a major setback for the American drive to find the Al Qaeda leader. Anticipating the problems ahead, a State Department spokesman tartly said that the United States wanted the immediate restitution of democracy in Pakistan and would not “carry on business as usual” with the military regime.
International disdain greeted the army coup. Even China reacted cautiously, veiling its concern about the specter of “Talibanization” by noting that the two countries were “friendly neighbors” and the situation in Pakistan was being watched carefully. The Chinese had been annoyed to discover links between the ISI and Islamic Uighur militants in Xinjiang. “We need a Khomeini-style or Taliban-style campaign to cleanse society,” a Pakistani shopkeeper was quoted as saying in the economic daily Zhongguo Jingji Shibao brought out by the Chinese State Council’s Development Research Center. More worrying, the paper noted, was the growing influence of “fundamentalism” in the Pakistan military. Russia feared that closer military cooperation between Pakistan and the Taliban would increase tensions in its southern regions, including the Caucasus. Moscow had intelligence reports about Chechen envoys visiting Afghanistan to buy Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and receiving four of them “as a gift.” Voicing its own unique concerns, Iran instead rebuked the West for backing Pakistan and the Taliban regime. One Iranian newspaper asked rhetorically whether the military regime would end Pakistan’s international isolation by suspending support for the usurpers of power in Afghanistan. Taliban-ruled Kabul described the coup as Pakistan’s internal affair and expressed a desire for good and friendly relations with each successive government in Islamabad.
Of the regional neighbors, India had most reason to be alarmed. The main architect of the Kargil operation had taken control of Pakistan. Deeply suspicious of Musharraf and unwilling to take any risks, the government of India set the ball rolling for military exercises to test the combat fitness of its army along the western border with Pakistan. At the same time, New Delhi mounted an effective diplomatic offensive to force Musharraf to back off. It did not have to work too hard. At UN headquarters in New York, there was deep consternation. A few weeks before the change of government in Pakistan, the United Nations Drug Control Program had reported that Afghanistan produced 4,600 metric tons of opium, a figure that was three times higher than the combined world production of the drug. As far as the UN was concerned, Afghanistan under the Taliban was the “biggest narco-power in the world.” With the Pakistani military high command now in a position to back the Taliban without any hindrance from a civilian setup, there was nothing to stop the export of opium from Afghanistan.
Amid grave misgivings in the neighborhood and the world at large, Pakistan slipped into another phase of military rule. If the script was familiar, the geostrategic context had dramatically changed. The Cold War was over for the rest of the world, but its enduring legacies were only too visible in Pakistan. Past military interventions and misgovernance by unstable and short-lived civilian governments had deeply polarized politics and damaged the economy, with perilous effects on the exercise of state authority. Decades of centralization had fragmented state institutions that were now more susceptible to political influences and outright capture at the regional and local levels by interweaving networks of sectarian and criminal militias. The implications of these existential threats were largely lost on the military high command, the main stakeholder of Pakistan’s increasingly dysfunctional centralized state system. Wedded to an India-centered national security paradigm, the military high command was single-mindedly committed to pursuing their strategic objectives in Afghanistan. The United States had assisted Pakistan in attaining a viable defense against its premier enemy and in the process strengthened the army and its intelligence services, which now posed the biggest obstacle to American objectives in the region. Instead of propping up military dictatorships around the world to contain communism as they had during the Cold War, the Americans were now more interested in forging a strategic and economic partnership with the rising regional giant India.
On the eve of the twenty-first century, authoritarian Pakistan was an international pariah for supporting the Taliban regime and initiating the Kargil incursion. A nearly moribund economy and widespread corruption and insecurity of life and property had demoralized the citizenry. The blowback of the Afghan war had reared a thriving arms and drugs economy run by criminal mafias protected by state officials and politicians. Pakistan’s growing urban landscape was dotted with mosques and madrasas. The products of religious seminaries offering extreme and militant versions of Islam were either recruited to fight “jihad” in Afghanistan and Kashmir or turned into killing machines by would-be religious ideologues battling rival sectarian communities. Confronted with intense internal and external pressures, Pakistan needed deft and swift handling on several contradictory fronts. By placing himself in the line of fire, had General Musharraf bitten off far more than he could chew? As before, the fate of a military dictator would be shaped by developments beyond Pakistan’s borders. In Musharraf’s case, September 11, 2001, would prove to be the decisive turning point in determining the longevity of his regime.
~~The Struggle for Pakistan -by- Ayesha Jalal
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