Ataturk II?: Pakistan's Musharraf has a chance to be a great man

National Review, Feb 25, 2002 by David Pryce-Jones

Gen. Pervez Musharraf is every inch a professional soldier. On October 12, 1999, he was army chief of staff in Pakistan and flying home from a visit to Sri Lanka. He had recently fired a senior officer for meeting the Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif without permission. Musharraf was pleased with himself; but Sharif felt insulted. A power struggle was underway.

Calculating that Musharraf couldn't do much about it in mid-air, Sharif fired him. Wrong. Landing at Karachi airport, Musharraf arranged a coup, put Sharif on trial, and sent him into exile in Saudi Arabia. Musharraf installed himself in Sharif's place. That's the way politics are conducted pretty much throughout the Muslim world. Personalities in this context are real, while principles are nebulous.

The military is the one and only institution in Pakistan that can be said to function. It is unwise to tamper with it. Military coups occur at regular intervals, and the country has had long spells under martial law -- without which it would have disintegrated into anarchy. An assortment of different peoples and languages are engaged in permanent jostling, without benefit of democracy or the rule of law. Government writ does not hold in the northwest frontier where al-Qaeda and maybe Osama bin Laden could be sheltering. In major cities like Lahore and Karachi, people die regularly in obscure shootings, whether committed by political extremists or criminals. Civil society does not exist. What has brought these people together is only the chance that they are all Muslims.

In the words of a famous clerihew, that peculiar but pointed verse form, "George the Third / Ought never to have occurred. / One can only wonder / At so grotesque a blunder." Pakistan ought never to have occurred either, and one can only wonder at the way the British manufactured it without regard to what they themselves believed, and ignoring the experience of two centuries of empire.

Governing the Indian subcontinent, the British were careful to keep the balance between Hindus and Muslims. Although predisposed by temperament to favor the Muslims -- who seemed to them livelier and more capable than the Hindus -- they administered the law impartially, and laid the basis for the democracy that India itself is now perpetuating. Responsible Muslim leaders were on equal terms with their Hindu counterparts, and Muslim extremism appeared to be a thing of the past.

At the start of the 20th century, the British honored a promise to initiate a public debate about the coming of self-rule for the peoples of the empire. In a reaction that surprised them, this provoked an identity crisis everywhere. From India to Egypt to Ireland, the resulting wave of nationalism is still working itself out. Hindus had their National Congress, and Muslims should have been encouraged to join it in a power-sharing spirit. Instead, one of the viceroy's advisers, a man with the resonant name of William Shakespear, suggested that Muslims should form a counterpart, known as the Muslim League.

Out of such seeds were to grow the division of the subcontinent into two religious and national communities contending for supremacy in fear of each other; then three countries (with Bangladesh splitting away from Pakistan -- probably one day there will be a fourth country, Kashmir); and so incessant warfare; and now finally a nuclear standoff. In 1947, the British agreed to partition and immediately scuttled home ashamed of themselves, to allow all on the ground to do their worst and finalize the horrors to come. Millions of people were left at one another's throat.

Why independent India succeeded while independent Pakistan failed is a question inviting many answers, having to do with religion and culture, expectation, circumstances, bad government, and various imponderables. In one of his penetrating phrases, V. S. Naipaul has written that to most Muslims the state that had been won out of the subcontinent came "as a kind of religious ecstasy, something beyond reason, beyond quibbles about borders and constitutions." Nothing to do with democracy, the Muslim League and other political parties have been so many religious or ethnic mass movements whereby ambitious individuals lever themselves into absolute power.

The ruling elite has mercilessly exploited the religious ecstasy that came with the birth of the state. Pakistan today is second only to Saudi Arabia as a source of Islamic militancy. Islam provides an identity above ethnicity, tribe, or clan. Some 7,000 madrassahs, or religious seminaries, fanaticize otherwise uneducated boys by teaching them to memorize the Koran in Arabic (which is not their language, and which they do not understand), and no other subjects at all. Thousands of mullahs preach incendiary sermons in order to mobilize the mob against unbelievers. In the supposed cause of Islam, successive rulers have sponsored and exploited a variety of militant groups, notably the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba to terrorize Kashmir. The military and its most powerful agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence force, the ISI, exploited Islamic extremism by means of a doctrine of "strategic depth" whose purpose was to spread Pakistani influence in Kashmir and throughout Central Asia.