But in times of profound change there are also acute dangers of selfish opportunists seeking to maximize their power at the expence of others. But to achieve this it is often necessary in the interim to gain the support of ‘useful idiots’. Consequently, a valuable skill is to decipher and analyse double dealing in which powers that be seek to change the world to their self-perpetuating advantage at the expense of those being used.

In this article Dr. David Bennett identifies potential instances of double-dealing and warns of their inherent (‘lose-lose’) non-viability.

Where Goes Iraq, so too the World

The strategic political situation for the free world with regard to the contemporary situation in Iraq is now (March 2012) dangerous as a result of the premature withdrawal of American troops in January this year. It is quite possible that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has utilized this withdrawal of American troops (who had not undertaken combat operations for over a year) from Iraq to initiate recent covert terrorist attacks undertaken against his own Shiite community.

This evil military strategy is quite probably being undertaken by Maliki to scapegoat the Sunni minority so that he can destroy his own *national unity government to help eventually facilitate an Iranian takeover of the predominately Shiite areas of Iraq. Such a development, coupled with Iranian support for the crackdown in Syria, would ultimately ensure that republican Iran gains effective control of most of Iraq and Lebanon, while consolidating its power in Syria.

(* Maliki is moving to hold an early Iraqi general election. Such an election would destroy the current inter-communal political balance, thereby denying the current potential to form a new (genuine) national unity government led by the Shiite Muslim and Iraqi patriot Ayad Allawi which would have majority support based on the current composition of the Iraqi parliament).

The horrendous consequences of the Iranian republic effectively gaining control of the crescent region of the Middle East will extend to Arab countries in North Africa such as Egypt. Even though the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is overwhelmingly Sunni and elements of the Brotherhood are democratically inclined, an anti-democratic Iranian consolidation in the crescent region of the Middle East could also ensure that a pro-Tehran anti-democratic regime comes to power in the Arab world’s most populous country, thereby aborting Egypt’s continuing (but very painful) progress toward eventual democracy.

The enhanced power that Tehran could derive from gaining and/or consolidating hegemony in Iraq and Syria could also affect political dynamics in Turkey by destroying that nation’s amazing but brittle balance between secular and religious political interests. The current moderate Islamist government in Ankara could subsequently metamorphose into an authoritarian pro-Tehran regime which would help expand Iranian republican power into Central Asian nations such as Tajikistan.

Since Turkey successfully defied an attempt by the Allies to impose a harsh treaty following the First World War, Turkish foreign policy has been astutely conducted to the benefit of the Middle East, the Mediterranean and since the 1990s, Central Asia. The Turkish military must now therefore support Iraq in its crucial hour of need to maintain a peaceful power balance in the Middle East.

If the traditional power of the Turkish military is counteracted by Tehran, then Turkish influence in the former Soviet Central Asian republics will convert to promote the power of the Iranian republic as opposed to political moderation. There is also scope for a future authoritarian Turkey that is aligned with the Iranian republic to develop its own nuclear weapons programme. Saudi Arabia is similar to the Turkish military in that this kingdom is a force for political moderation in the Middle East. Therefore both the Turkish military and Saudi Arabia must bolster a viable and democratic Iraq which to help prevent republican Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Since Maliki became Iraqi prime minister in 2006, Saudi Arabia has consistently warned the United States that he is an agent for republican Iran. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been acutely aware of Tehran’s strategic objectives with regard to taking over both the crescent region of the Middle East and the oil-producing Gulf region. Furthermore, the economic and energy ramifications of republican Iran gaining control of Iraq’s oil supply will be economically disastrous for the world, particularly in the current context of the GFC.

Mediocrity is Predictable: Maliki’s Probable Duplicity

As prime minister, Maliki has bolstered his moderate credentials by ostensibly opposing pro-Tehran militants, such as Muqtada al-Sadr, who effectively commands the Mahdi army, which is the armed wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. The prime minister’s shielding of President George W Bush - when shoes were thrown at him at a press conference in Baghdad in December 2008 - was probably brilliant political theatre because it conveyed that Maliki was a pro-American moderate.

But a biographical overview of Maliki’s political life suggests that he may have a long-standing covert anti-American agenda. After Maliki understandably fled Iraq in 1979, he was alternately based in Iran and in Syria where he held senior positions in the pro-Iranian republic Islamic Dawa Party. In a stroke of strategic genius, Tehran had the Dawa Party convey an ostensible acceptance of the American led liberation of Iraq by having the party participate in immediate post-2003 Iraqi provisional government structures and in subsequent national elections.

The dynamics of post-2003 Iraqi elections are complex because they are dominated by electoral configurations, some of which seemingly accommodate differing constituent parties. Maliki’s Dawa Party dominated the State and Law Coalition configuration, which came second in the March 2010 general elections with 24.2 % of the national vote and is predominately composed of Shiite political parties.

The State and Law electoral configuration has gained an undeserved reputation as relatively moderate because it was in apparent hostile competition with Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s similarly Shiite-political-party-dominated electoral configuration, the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) which came third with over 18% of the vote in the 2010 poll. Jaafari (who had served as prime minister between 2005 and 2006) was so vocally critical of the continuing American presence during the 2010 election campaign that he made Maliki look comparatively pro-American.

The INA further confused matters by having two democratic parties run under its aegis: the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement*. The INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi had previously been the pre-eminent émigré Iraqi exile umbrella group which had been founded in 1992.

(*There was an agreement in the 1990s amongst some Iraqi émigré groups to overthrow Saddam Hussein and restore the Sunni Hashemite monarchy which had been brutally overthrown in the military coup of July 1958. One of the benefits of this eminently sensible plan was that a reinstated Sunni Hashemite dynasty would have placated the Sunni minority who, in a new constitutional monarchy, would co-exist in a democracy with a Shiite majority electorate. The interests of ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds, probably would have been protected in a reinstated Iraqi monarchy as their rights had previously been respected before Iraq became a republic).

Chalabi (a Shiite Muslim who comes from a family that had once supported the Iraqi monarchy and is perhaps a sentimental monarchist) did not run the INC within the democratic Iraqiyya configuration due to the hostile relations he has with that bloc’s leader, Ayad Allawi. He (Allawi) had served as Iraqi prime minister between 2004-2005 and is a Shiite Muslim. Allawi’s party, the Iraqi National Accord (INA), is relatively small but its inter-community composition has been crucial in attracting non-Shiite political parties to run under the Iraqiyya bloc.

Shiite political parties predominate in the Iraqiyya electoral configuration but there is also a strong Sunni Muslim presence within this bloc. It is from the Iraqiyya bloc that the Iraqi Sunni Vice-President, Tariq al-Hashimi hails. The Vice-President (who fled to the Kurdish north after Maliki, so as to destroy a secular Iraq, ordered his arrest) is the leader of the predominately Sunni Iraqi National Movement, which is a key component of the Iraqiyya bloc.

The Iraqiyya bloc narrowly came first in the March 2010 parliamentary elections but Allawi was unfortunately denied the prime ministership because President Jalal Talabani’s Kurdistani bloc (which garnered 10% of the vote) used its balance of power to re-elect Maliki prime minister when the Parliament selected the nation’s leaders in November 2010. Although Allawi was denied the prime ministership, his Shiite supporters still helped ensure the election of a Sunni vice-president, Tariq al-Hashimi. Indeed, a national unity government was formed from amongst the four leading electoral configurations.

The horse trading that occurred at the November 2010 parliamentary session could therefore have been considered a form of paradoxical democracy in an initially sectarian dominated political party system. But such a democracy probably will not eventuate because Maliki has used (or is using) his pre-eminent political leadership position to destroy the nation’s political balance in order to facilitate an Iranian takeover of Iraq.

To gain valuable time, Maliki is denouncing terrorist actions - which he has probably secretly initiated against Shiites to provide him with the pretext to move against President Talabani, Vice-President Hashimi and his supporters. Maliki is effectively unravelling Iraq’s fragile political structure in order to facilitate a subsequent Iranian take-over.

An argument could have been put that Maliki’s links to Iran were a benefit because they helped reconcile relatively moderate political factions in Tehran to the existence of a politically sectarian based but still constitutionally secular Iraq. Optimists could have plausibly hoped that a nascent Iraqi democracy would have led the way for a more democratic Iran which at the very least gave more respect (such as clean conduct of ballot counts in candidate vetted elections) to the political actors within the confines of sanctioned pluralism.

But recent contemporary domestic events in Iraq indicate that the worst case scenario is seemingly coming to fruition - Prime Minister Maliki is proving to be an agent for republican Iran who is trying to facilitate Tehran’s domination of the Middle East. This turn of events is improbable but not impossible due to the Byzantine nature of Middle East politics. But then, taking into account the resources (human, military and financial) that the international community (particularly of the United States) have put into Iraq since 2003, it actually seems impossible that Maliki could be so brazenly ungrateful and duplicitous. But nothing is impossible in contemporary Iraqi politics.

The prospect of the Iranian republic gaining dominance in the Middle East is also mind boggling because it was so frustratingly avoidable. Had a residual non-combat presence of American troops been maintained in Iraq then Maliki would have been denied the capacity to undertake his current destabilization campaign.

Al-Qaeda could therefore establish a base in Iraq from which to later invade Saudi Arabia while Shiite areas of Iraq will eventually officially merge with republican Iran. Furthermore, Republican Iran through de facto control of Iraq (or most of the country) will have a base to move on the Shiite eastern areas of Saudi Arabia. An American inability to maintain its alliance with Saudi Arabia could ensure that that kingdom becomes aligned to the PRC if Peking forges an alliance with republican Iran.

There is also potential for pro-Iranian elements within Turkey’s currently democratic Islamist government to induce a Turkish invasion of the predominately Kurdish north to complete the partition of Iraq. Contemporary political events in Iraq will have to be monitored carefully because domestic changes could have profound international strategic ramifications.

Al-Qaeda’s Eleven Year Campaign Approaches Victory

Due to Maliki’s destabilization campaign, Sunni Iraqis are now beginning to rally to Al-Qaeda as a bulwark against an emerging undemocratic Shiite dominance. It is improbable that Al-Qaeda could have its current regeneration capacity without the prior covert support of pro-Tehran elements of the Maliki government and/or help from republican Iran. It is plausible that Prime Minister Maliki is prepared to eventually cede Sunni areas of Iraq to Tehran’s old enemy, Al–Qaeda, to opportunistically reconfigure power dynamics in the Middle East to their respective advantage.

Saudi foreign policy intentions are also important because it is widely known that Saudi Arabia has its own nuclear weapons programme. It is a risky proposition, to say the least, that non-democratic regimes develop a nuclear weapons capacity. But in the case of Saudi Arabia, it is understandable due to the imminent nuclear weapons threat from Tehran. Although Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, this kingdom has provided extensive social welfare benefits and education opportunities to maintain probable majority support such that there is a capacity for the kingdom to later become a constitutional democratic monarchy.

But in the mean time Saudi Arabia also faces a potentially grave domestic threat which will become viable if Al-Qaeda gains territory in a partitioned Iraq. The prime objective of Al-Qaeda’s current Hydra campaign (which effectively commenced with the 2001 September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States) is to eventually gain control of what is now Saudi Arabia to establish the territorial basis for a future caliphate state. The key calculation that Al-Qaeda has made to achieve this outcome is to incapacitate American will- power.

Al-Qaeda could therefore establish a base in Iraq from which to later invade Saudi Arabia while Shiite areas of Iraq are ceded to republican Iran’s hegemony. Republican Iran could by gaining de facto control of Iraq establish a base with which to move on the Shiite eastern areas of Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, pro-Iranian republican elements within Turkey’s currently democratic Islamist government could try to induce a Turkish invasion of the predominately Kurdish north to complete the partition of Iraq.

Tragically, the point at which the United States had militarily prevailed in Iraq is now becoming the juncture at which American will-power and capacity in the Gulf region is being destroyed. The immediate result will be that republican Iran will gain hegemony in the Gulf region and consequently the Middle East. The colossal disaster of this pending Iranian domination will in turn so further undermine American capacity that Al-Qaeda will be able to move into other areas that it has targeted round the world.

If the above scenarios concerning Maliki’s motives and current probable actions are fanciful (but various intelligence reports indicate that they are not) then the current Iraqi prime minister could resign to assuage any such fears and later return to office after the current crisis has passed. But, if Maliki stays on as prime minister - with the current terrorist carnage continuing that is providing the pretext to purge high officials such as Vice-President Hashimi - then the United States will be facing one of the worst self-inflicted foreign policy failures in its history.

American Military Strategy without Politics is Futile

As a matter of urgency, the American fifth fleet should be despatched to the Strait of Hormuz not only to counteract republican Iran’s threatened naval blockade but to send a message to Maliki to promptly resign or to desist from his destabilization campaign by publicly reconciling with President Talabani and Vice-President Hashimi. Such an American naval despatch should be promptly undertaken because Maliki currently does not have sufficient control of the Iraqi military to the extent that he can immediately impose an outright dictatorship.

To facilitate a reversion to a beneficial domestic Iraqi political balance, fly overs of American planes over Iraq should also be expeditiously undertaken. Such signs of American military support will encourage elements in the Iraqi army that are loyal to the Iraqi constitution to ensure that the parliament is recalled to elect a new government led by Ayad Allawi.

Allawi can garner sufficient Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parliamentary support to form a new government that will be resistant to an Iranian republic takeover of Shiite areas of Iraq and even a possible Turkish invasion (which the secular Turkish armed forces would hopefully refuse to undertake) of the predominately Kurdish north of Iraq. Analysts of the military situation in Iraq have noted that terrorism has substantially decreased because Sunnis have been accommodated within the nation’s political structure.

Unless Allawi soon replaces Maliki as prime minister, then the political/military situation will be far worse than before the successful American led military surge in Iraq. Iraqis have suffered enough and most are sufficiently astute to suspect that the recent spate of violence is being engineered by Maliki following the premature withdrawal of American troops from their country. Consequently, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis will welcome the formation of a new, genuine national unity government that will protect Iraqis from both internal and external threats.

If Maliki is actually innocent of culpability with regard to the current terror campaign, then he can demonstrate his bona fides by resigning and making way for Allawi, who can save Iraq and in doing so stop a catastrophe that now threatens the Middle East and the world. The current global economic situation is such that an Iranian republican takeover of Iraq and an Al-Qaeda resurgence in this vital oil rich region cannot be risked for fear of precipitating another world wide Great Depression.

Turkey and Arab League nations such as Saudi Arabia should support Allawi forming a new national unity government and if necessary be prepared to militarily intervene in Iraq if Iran sends troops to that country. Hopefully, the Iraqi army will pre-emptively safeguard their nation, thereby negating the need for foreign military assistance. An internally viable Iraq will of itself be able to stymie Tehran’s move to take control of the Gulf region’s oil supply which is now being manifested by republican Iran’s ‘naval exercises’ in the Strait of Hormuz.

Republican Iran’s naval exercises in January 2012 were undertaken in the Strait of Hormuz (through which over twenty percent of the world’s oil passes) to test American resolve to see if the Obama administration would later counter its covert nuclear weapons programme. The administration’s failure to counter republican Iran’s provocation has led to the Tehran regime’s assessment that the Obama administration will, for all its rhetoric, not take any military action to stop its nuclear weapons development. Such American weakness is emboldening republican Iran to subvert other *Gulf States.

(*There are now signs that republican Iran is trying to instigate the overthrow of the Bahraini monarchy).

There is no doubt that the United States has the military capacity to prevail over the Iranian republic to protect the Strait of Hormuz. But Tehran since 1979 has had an uncanny capacity to psychologically outmanoeuvre successive Washington administrations and other countries that it wants something from.

Strategic Castroism in the Middle East

Therefore republican Iran’s current ‘naval exercises’ in the Gulf of Hormuz are probably intertwined with maintaining its nuclear weapons programme, preventing threatened American sanctions from being applied, and clearing the way for an Iranian republic takeover of Iraq. Another imponderable that has to be taken into account in assessing Tehran’s possible endgame is an intention to disrupt the Gulf region’s capacity to export in order to bolster the oil exporting capacity of its key ally, the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela.

It should be appreciated that Venezuela also has substantial natural reserves of uranium that could be used for a future Iranian republic nuclear bomb. Iranian President Mahamoud Ahmadinejad’s recent tour of Latin America (visiting Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Cuba) is reflective of the fact that the prime threat to the United States and the more or less free world is communist Cuba.

To indefinitely consolidate their dictatorship in Cuba the Castro regimes (led respectively by Fidel Castro between 1959 and 2006 and since by his younger half-brother Raul) have always sought to incapacitate the United States as a world power. This objective was first pursued by Cuba supporting the Soviet Union during the Cold War during when Moscow gained some of its major strategic victories over the west. Although Central and Eastern Europe broke free from Moscow in 1989 and Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, the Castro regime did not fall.

That the Castro regime did not fall is not surprising because of its domestic and international strategic nous. Fidel Castro demonstrated his continuing strategic genius by forging an alliance with republican Iran which was symbolized by his May 2001 visit to Tehran in which he denounced the United States as a ‘paper tiger’. Castro since 1979 has recognised that despite vividly different ideological assumptions between Havana and Tehran, there was an underlying common interest in fatally undermining the United States.

The Iranian republic is demonstrating great strategic skill in undermining the United States financial and military capacity which in the twenty first century has been focused on achieving victory in the ‘war on terror’ since the September 11th 2001 Al-Qaeda terror attacks on the United States. In essence the success of this war has been gauged by the United States sustaining regime change in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003.

For the late Osama Bin Laden the September 11 2001 attacks achieved their intended aim of facilitating American military intervention abroad. Whether Bin-Laden’s objective of establishing a neo-Caliphate is to be achieved is predicated upon the United States maintaining its international presence around the world or retreats into isolation as a result of the psychological pressures of global engagement.

Bin Laden correctly anticipated that there would be a subsequent American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan due to the September 11th provocations. From Bin Laden’s perspective, provoked American military intervention would precipitate anti-American terrorism in Muslim countries and consequent national destabilization in the affected countries that would eventually lead to takeovers by Al-Qaeda affiliates. That such takeovers would occur was predicated on Bin Laden’s assumption that American capacity would be fatally undermined by breaking the national will-power of the United States.

Ironically, the American military success in killing Bin Laden in May 2011 may have led to a false sense of security by the United States which is posthumously vindicating the late Al-Qaeda chief’s Hydra strategy. An American strategic assumption was that Tehran would never go into an opportunistic alliance with Al-Qaeda due to profound differences which were manifested by Taliban attacks against republican Iran’s allies in Afghanistan.

But the American military withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011 is setting the scene for an explosion in Sunni-Shiite tensions which could lead to the pre-arranged partition of Iraq along sectarian lines between Tehran and Al-Qaeda. Not only does republican Iran now stand to gain control of the Shiite areas of Iraq and all of Syria but possibly of southern Afghanistan.

Afghanistan: Why Fighting for your Enemy’s Ally Eventually Results in Defeat

Afghanistan is frustratingly similar to Iraq in that the United States has seemingly fought for the interests of a regime that is ultimately aligned to American enemies. The Bush administration installed Hamid Karzai as interim leader of Afghanistan in late 2001 and in 2004 and 2009 he was elected executive president. His election to the presidency was ironic because Karzai initially owed his installation as leader of Afghanistan as the nominee of the supposedly monarchist ‘Rome Group’. This group referred to Afghan émigrés who were loyal to the exiled king, Zahir Shah, who died in Kabul in 2007 after His Majesty returned to his homeland in 2002 after twenty nine years in exile.

Zahir Shah was treacherously deposed in a coup in July 1973 by His Majesty’s own cousin and brother in-law, Mohammed Daoud Khan. To help gain aid from the Soviet Union, Daoud declared Afghanistan a republic upon taking power. The substantial military and financial aid that Daoud received from the Soviet Union was a poisoned chalice*. The Kabul section of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU (the Main Intelligence Directory) utilized Soviet military aid to establish a faction composed of members of the hardline Leninist Khalq (Masses) faction of the Marxist People’s National Democratic Party (PNDP) within the Afghan army to stage a bloody military coup in April 1978, the so-called Saur Revolution.

(* Daoud and most members of his family were murdered during the April 1978 coup).

Paradoxically the brutal radicalism of the *Khalq faction of the PNDP led to an outright Soviet invasion (in which the dictator, President Hafizullah Amin was assassinated by Soviet troops) in December 1979. Moscow correctly anticipated that the very unpopular Amin regime would fall and that the new anti-Soviet government in Kabul would support Islamic revivalism in the then Central Asian Soviet republics.

(* Ironically some members of the Khalq faction ostensibly became Islamic Mujahideen guerrillas while others such as General Abdul Dostum remained within the PNDP to fight with the Soviets who grudgingly accepted them out of necessity).

The Soviets installed Babrak Karmal of the comparatively moderate and rival Parcham (Banner) faction of the PNDP as the new president. Although Karmal ended religious persecution, his regime’s reliance on Soviet support overwhelmingly alienated most Afghans. National resistance to Soviet imposed communist rule was undertaken by the Mujahideen guerrillas.

Afghanistan: Why Supporting Your Enemy’s Enemy Works

‘Mujahideen’ (freedom) in the context of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was the generic term which referred to a range of Islamic guerrilla groups that fought to free their nation from de facto Soviet rule. The bravery of the Mujahideen could not have overcome the military advantage that the Soviets had established by brutally using helicopter gun ships. The decision of President Reagan to supply the Mujahideen with Stinger missiles in late 1985 permanently shifted the military advantage to the guerrillas against the Soviet occupiers.

The new Gorbachev regime (which came to power in March 1985) in Moscow shrewdly adapted to the changed military situation by easing Karmal out as PNDP General Secretary in May 1986 and replacing him with Dr. Mohammad Najibullah. The new Afghan ruler had been the leader of the Afghan secret police, the KHAD (the Government Information Agency). The KGB trained KHAD was the only formidable component of the PNDP regime.

The KHAD operated as a brutal instrument of oppression and as a superb domestic and international intelligence gathering agency for the PNDP regime. It was probably KHAD agents who blew up the Ojhri Camp in April 1988, the sprawling Pakistani army depot in Rawalpindi which stored weapons for the Afghan Mujahideen. The death of the PNDP’s nemesis, Pakistan’s president, General Muhammad Zia-ul- Huq in a plane crash in August 1988 was probably the work of the KHAD.

Najibullah: The Puppet Who Pulled His Own Strings

In a domestic Afghan context the KHAD established the National Salvation Society (NSS) which was an association of former officials and supporters of the exiled king, Zahir Shah. The Najibullah regime judiciously put out rumours that it would install Zahir Shah as chief of state before or after the Soviets withdrew so as to establish a broadly accepted provisional government in which the PNDP would be represented.

It was through the NSS as a conduit that talented and honest technocrats served the Najibullah regime in the expectation that such a broad based provisional regime would be formed. The most prominent apparent link between Najibullah and the exiled king was Mohammad Hassan Sharq, who was prime minister between 1988 and 1989. Hassan may have previously held high office under the monarchy but he had done so as a supporter of Daoud such that he accepted the abolition of the monarchy.

For all the justifiable suspicion that monarchists and non-communist Afghans had of Hassan (it is probable that he was a KHAD agent) the prime minister had still established a sufficiently broad based government that the Najibullah regime was initially able to survive the withdrawal of Soviet troops in February 1989. The option that *Najibullah forewent of making way for a new provisional government led by Zahir Shah was manifested by his almost immediate dismissal of Hassan as prime minister as the last Soviet troops departed.

(*The charming Najibullah still managed to persuade many non-communists that had been brought into government to remain in their positions as a supposed counterforce to the regime’s Marxist ideologues).

Hassan’s dismissal might have been precipitated by spontaneous overwhelming monarchist demonstrations by Afghan refugees in camps in Pakistan with news of the final withdrawal of Soviet troops. These spontaneous demonstrations were suppressed by the various Mujahideen faction leaders in their respective camps, who despite ethnic and ideological differences, did not want to subordinate their power to an institution which could have peacefully re-established Afghan national unity.

Due to links that Najibullah had previously established within the Mujahideen via KHAD infiltration, he had invaluable insights regarding the dynamics within and between the different guerrilla groups to engineer divisions so that he was able to hold onto power. Najibullah was also able to maintain his power due to continuing Soviet military support that came with judicious supplying military aid (usually by air transport) on a needs basis so as to avoid corrupt misappropriation by regime officials.

It was therefore ironic that Afghanistan was called the Soviet Union’s ‘Vietnam’ because Moscow ensured the support of its ally by continuing with financial and military aid following the final withdrawal of its troops when the United States did not because of congressional sabotage. Comparisons in the western press in February 1989 were made between the Najibullah regime in Afghanistan and the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Van Thieu in March 1973 following the final withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam that year.

The Thieu regime in South Vietnam in 1973 was not (in contrast with Afghanistan) confronted by a popular guerrilla insurgency but rather predominately North Vietnamese regular army units who infiltrated the country through a series of ingenious trails that meandered through Cambodia and Laos into South Vietnam. With sufficient military aid from the United States, the South Vietnamese army (which heroically held out between early 1974 and 1975 despite insufficient American aid until the North launched a full-scale invasion) undoubtedly would have militarily prevailed. President Thieu in the period following the final American military withdrawal undertook a series of brilliant political manoeuvres which were ultimately futile because they could not overcome his country’s perilous military situation due to fatally diminished American military aid.

Najibullah, similar to Thieu, took deft political action following the withdrawal of foreign troops. But the Afghan president’s wheeling and dealing was consequential in ensuring his regime’s survival because it was coupled with continuing Soviet military aid. Even with Eastern and Central Europe breaking free from communist rule in late 1989, the Najibullah regime was seemingly still secure. Indeed, the Afghan president utilized the downfall of European regimes to convene a congress in March 1990 of the PNDP to repudiate Marxism, thereby transforming the ruling party into the Motherland Party.

Ironically Marxist hardliners became more of an immediate threat to Najibullah than the Mujahideen when they tried to launch a coup at the time of the 1990 ruling party congress. Ironies continued to abound as Najibullah could not have thwarted the launch of a probably successful hardliner coup in 1990 had he not been forewarned by KHAD agents who were Marxist ideologues.

In fact, the Najibullah regime still would have survived the failure of a hardline communist coup in the Soviet Union in August 1991 and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of that year had not the post-communist regimes of central Asian successor states of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan withdrawn their support. They did this due to the hostility and then substantial influence of the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin’s hostility toward Najibullah.

The Central Asian Republics: The Anti-Communist Threat that Never Was

It is underappreciated that the major concern that successive Soviet regimes had with regard to threats to communist rule was focused on the central Asian Muslim nations of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. These nations had had substantial autonomy under the Russian Empire as protectorates with their own ruling royal families. These nations had gained independence in 1918 but by 1921 all had again unfortunately come under de facto Russian rule due to the backing that local communists had received from Moscow in taking power. In 1922 these nominally independent nations ‘voluntarily’ helped form the Soviet Union with the supposed right to secede if they later so desired.

Under the rule (1953 to 1964) of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had previously been the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, ethnic leaders in the central Asian republics replaced some of Russian party leaders in key positions at a local Soviet Republic level. A degree of autonomy ensued under the Brezhnev regime (1964 to 1982) because power was devolved to the party leaders of the central Asian republics with regard to developing their own corrupt systems of patronage.

Yuri *Andropov the KGB chief between 1967 and 1982 was hostile to corruption but not with regard to the Central Asian Soviet Republics because he know that it paradoxically strengthened the capacity of CPSU leaders there to co-opt local collaboration. Through a combination of vigilant and brutal repression of nationalism, allowing local non-Russian communist leaders to build up and maintain patronage networks and calculatedly granting of a sufficient degree of religious freedom, the Soviet central republics were remarkably quiescent at the time that the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991.

(* Andropov stepped down as KGB chief in 1982 to become the party chief of ideology before becoming party leader in November that year which was a position he held until his death in February 1984).

Had the hardline CPSU coup succeeded in August 1991 the leaders of the Soviet Central Republics undoubtedly would have rallied to the new regime. Furthermore, they probably would not have left the Soviet Union had Russia not seceded from its previous empire to manifest its hostility toward its Marxist past. The so-called Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) that was formed in December 1991 did not function as a de facto continuing USSR despite the inclination of rulers of the post-Soviet Central Asian republics. This was due to Russian indifference and the later success of Turkey in forging ties to the west to help counter the possible influence of republican Iran in post-Soviet Central Asia.

An Inverted Cause and Effect? The Afghan Communist Regime Ends Because of the Fall of the Soviet Union

The severance of Russian military aid in effect so fatally undermined the viability of the Najibullah regime that Khalq elements within the army led by the ethnic Uzbek general, Abdul Dostum defected in April 1992. This Khalq general defected to support Mujahideen forces led by Ahmad Shah Massoud in liberating the Afghan capital of Kabul. After the interim presidency of Sibghatullah Majaddedi a new Afghan government was formed in September 1992 which initially represented the interests of the different Mujahideen groups and Khalq defectors.

The new permanent government was led by the respected Islamic scholar, Burhanddin Rabbani. He was a strong ally of Ahmad Shah Massoud who served as Defence Minister. Massoud had been the closest approximation as a national leader of the resistance to Soviet dominance in Afghanistan. The failure of the United States to vigorously support the Rabbani government was to be a major historical mistake in American foreign policy.

The Rabbani government was orientated toward establishing a constitutional democracy in which political differences could be settled within a peaceful framework. Promisingly, the new government officially styled the nation as the ‘Islamic State of Afghanistan’ which reflected an orientation of some of its constituent factions to reinstate the then popular but still exiled Zahir Shah as king or at the very least as chief of state.

That Afghanistan has not had peace following the end of communist rule is due to the determination of Pakistan’s military intelligence, the Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) to gain control of its neighbour. The ISI was established in 1948, the year after Pakistan was founded as a Muslim state on the Indian sub-continent. This intelligence agency took the best officers from the nation’s three armed services and was one of the few institutions that seemed to surmount divisions between East and West Pakistan to effectively defend the national interest. The outbreak of a revolt in East Pakistan and the subsequent Indian invasion helped establish the new nation of Bangladesh in late 1971.

The 1971 debacle helped the ISI become more focused and formidable as an intelligence agency. This was reflected by the extraordinary skill with which the ISI funnelled American and European weapons and material to the Mujahideen after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The ISI utilized its leverage to try to bring the Mujahideen guerrilla groups under its control. That Pakistani intelligence failed to dominate the Mujahideen guerrilla groups in the 1980s and 1990s was primarily due to the stalwart and skilful opposition of Ahmad Massoud.

After the 1979 Soviet invasion Khalq commanders, such as Gulbuddin Heknatyar, with the support of the ISI presented themselves as Islamic fundamentalists. More recent Khalq defectors, such General Dostum, revolted in 1994 against the Rabbani government after the ISI instigated Taliban had been founded. The determination, if not desperation of the Rabbani government to resist an ISI takeover was reflected by its amazing decision to retain the *KHAD.

(* Former president, Mohammad Najibullah took refugee in the United Nations compound in 1992 following his fall from power where he vicariously exercised influence through his links to the still functioning KHAD. Therefore, in a perverse way, the longstanding Khalq and Parcham factional struggles of the defunct PNDP still disturbingly impacted upon a post-communist Afghanistan. The fall of Kabul in 1996 resulted in Najibullah’s brutal execution by the Taliban).

Pakistan’s ISI and the Taliban: Trojan Horses can Eventually Devour Their Creator

The real impact of the ISI backed Khalq revolt was to weaken the Rabbani government so that the Taliban could take Kabul in September 1996. The Taliban were effectively founded by the former Saudi businessman Osama bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden came from a wealthy Saudi family which had links to the Saudi royal family. The then twenty four year old Bin Laden first fought in Afghanistan in 1981 with the Mujahideen. Bin Laden initially seemed loyal to the Saudi royal family so that with the backing of the government in Riyadh he established and headed the Maktab al-Khidamat (Afghan Services Bureau) in 1984.

This bureau organised for Muslims from around the world to come to Afghanistan to fight a Jihad (Holy War) against the Soviets. The Maktab al-Khidamat in effect became a military force under Bin Laden’s personal command. Due to the international connections that Bin Laden had established through the Maktab al-Khidamat, he founded Al-Qaeda (‘The Base’) in August 1988.

As previously mentioned, the strategic objective of Al-Qaeda was (and is) to destabilize and ultimately overthrow governments in Muslim countries to help establish an international Muslim state or Caliphate. It is possible that Maktab al-Khidamat (the precursor of Al-Qaeda) may have received American CIA funding to fight the Soviets and then the Najibullah regime. If this was the case, then Bin Laden was to ultimately prove to be an incredibly ungrateful aid recipient.

Bin Laden’s strategy of destabilizing selected Muslim countries to eventually take power was first applied in 1994 when he, as previously mentioned, effectively founded the Taliban as the Afghan affiliate of Al-Qaeda. The Taliban was established by recruiting students (‘Taliban’ is Arabic for students) from Saudi government funded Sunni Wahabi Quranic Schools in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.

The more than sufficient critical mass that the Taliban established with regard to rank and file recruits was crucially complemented by the defection of various Mujahideen commanders from different factions who were determined to form a uniform organisation. The most important Mujahideen commander to help form the Taliban was Mohammed Omar who became (and still is) that organisation’s leader.

The then popular appeal of the Taliban was that they seemed to be a united coherent organisation that would restore stability and end the faction induced turmoil that had bedevilled Afghanistan since the 1978 communist coup. For all the undoubted skills of Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Omar, the Taliban could not have prevailed against the determined and brilliant Defence Minister, Ahmad Massoud to take Kabul in September 1996 without the financial and logistical support of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s ISI.

The Taliban: Afghanistan’s Non-Genocidal Khmer Rouge

The Taliban’s seemingly primitively brutal misinterpretation of Islamic teachings then came across to many Afghans as simplistic but still sincere and honest that would be conducive to much desired social stability. If there was to be peace in Afghanistan under the Taliban, then it would be the peace of the grave. The Taliban regime (September 1996 to November 2001) did not commit genocide but their gross misinterpretation of Islam imposed one of the most brutal regimes since the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia between 1975 and early 1979.

Despite being cut off from the outside world, the abuses of Taliban misrule in Afghanistan were widely reported in the media around the world as news items. The abuses of Taliban encompassed denial of basic rights for women, banning people from having electrical equipment such as radios and television and compelling men to wear beards. These ordinances might have been considered strange by non-Afghanis as opposed to brutal if it was not for credible reports of the vast numbers of floggings, amputations, imprisonment and executions for the many recalcitrants who did not comply with (or were deemed to have violated) the Taliban regime’s injunctions.

The Taliban may have had a primitively domestic agenda but the regime was crucial to Al-Qaeda’s sophisticated international strategy to establish an Islamic Caliphate. Due to Taliban misrule, Al-Qaeda essentially became a terrorist organisation within its own country. In keeping with Al-Qaeda’s name Bin Laden utilized Afghanistan as a base to secretly train fighters from around the world and to establish links with repressive regimes such as that of Omar al-Bashir in the Sudan.

The attacks that Al-Qaeda planned from Afghanistan were carefully planned with regard to their probable cause and effect in precipitating anarchy as prelude to achieving an Afghan type takeover. Al-Qaeda’s initial areas of operation were in geographically remoter parts of the Muslim world or where anarchy had prevailed. Therefore Al-Qaeda established operations in Yemen (which is geographically isolated with mountainous terrain) or in Somalia (which has been plunged into anarchy since the fall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991).

Ahmad Massoud: The Freedom Fighter That the United States Should Have Consistently Supported

The nation where Bin Laden could best analyse the strategic ramifications of cause and effect from a terrorist campaign was Afghanistan even though this nation had officially become a constituent emirate as part of Al-Qaeda’s envisioned Caliphate. Knowing that the United States would respond to the 2001 September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, the Taliban had Ahmad Massoud assassinated earlier in the month.

It is probable that Al-Qaeda would not have undertaken the September 11 terrorist attacks had Massoud not been assassinated. This was because Bin Laden and Omar would have known that massive American military support would have been forthcoming to the Massoud led Northern Alliance (the name of the Rabbani’s government in exile) which was so-called because it was based in the north where it controlled or influenced approximately thirty percent of Afghanistan’s territory.

The wide gaps (if not chasms) with regard to institutional organisation within the Northern Alliance were more than compensated by the charismatic and actually effective leadership of Ahmad Massoud. Had Massoud being alive, the United States would have been in a position to expeditiously install him as Afghanistan’s new de facto leader. Under a post 2001 *Massoud led Afghanistan, the Americans would have been able to promptly leave after liberation as there would have been a government in place that could have effectively filled the vacuum. Such a scenario would have rendered Bin Laden’s Hydra strategy obsolete.

(*Massoud would probably have officially served as Defence Minister in a restored Rabbani government because this was his official position he held in the northern based government).

The broader questions that need to be asked is why the United States did not adequately support the Rabbani government against the Taliban before 1996 and after when- prior to the September 2001 terrorist attacks- Al-Qaeda was already utilizing Afghanistan as an international terrorist base? The answer probably broadly relates to a recurring American disposition toward the tradition of isolationism.

Pre-Programming for Failure: The United States Supports Hamid Karzai

Having quickly gone from relative indifference to Afghanistan to a determination to overthrow the Taliban, the ramifications of intervention were probably not as thoroughly considered as what they had been by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Bush administration was correct in removing the Taliban regime but they made a colossal mistake by installing Karzai as Afghanistan’s new leader. This is because he is covertly aligned with the Taliban and dependent upon the Khalq military faction. The major political function that Karzai is now fulfilling is that of a stop-gap as the Taliban and the Khalq through the offices of Pakistan’s ISI thrash out a new regime following the withdrawal of coalition troops.

The choice of Karzai was partly due to the immediate vacuum caused by Massoud’s assassination as Khalq forces led by General Dostum (who had previously been a bitter opponent of the Northern Alliance) gave their unexpected support for the American led invasion/liberation of Afghanistan. Apparent Khalq political moderation was again surprisingly manifested by General Dostum supporting Hamid Karzai’s installation as Afghanistan’s interim leader as the nominee of the supposedly monarchist Afghan émigré Rome Group.

Hopes that most Afghans had that their former monarchy would be reinstated were manifested by the huge crowds that turned out in April 2002 to rapturously welcome Zahir Shah’s return in a reception that most deposed and exiled monarchs could only dream of. In what then seemed an auspicious sign, General Dostum was part of the delegation at the airport tarmac to cordially and respectfully welcome His Majesty’s return.

There seemed to be a better than even prospect that strong monarchist sentiment would actually convert into a reinstatement of the monarchy when the Loya Jirga (Grand Assembly) of the nation’s tribal and clan leaders convened in June 2002. The leaders of various linguistic groups as well as Sunni and Shiite religious leaders at the Loya Jirga overwhelmingly supported a reinstatement of the monarchy. Popular support for such a move was reflective of the positive memories and stories told which had established Zahir Shah’s reign as a comparative golden age of peace and stability.

The King’s attendance at the Loya Jirga seemingly bolstered the prospects for a reinstatement. But His Majesty attended the assembly not to secure his reinstatement but to prevent this by supporting Karzai’s continuance as the nation’s leader. This action not only ensured that Karzai would stay on as leader but that a presidential republic would be inaugurated in 2004 with him as its first president.

Zahir Shah (who was accorded the title and status as ‘Father of the Nation’ under the 2004 Afghan republican constitution) forewent a return to his throne not only so that His Majesty could return to a relatively quiet life in his beloved homeland but because that was the condition for the King’s return that had been set by General Dostum. The Khalq general knew that the Afghan people would initially accept an American installed government if its leader came from the Rome Group due to the popularity of His Majesty, Zahir Shah.

It is probable that someone as insipid and corrupt as Hamid Karzai was acceptable to General Dostum as the King’s choice to rule Afghanistan so that the Khalq general could become a military strongman after the Americans withdrew. For the leading members of the Rome Group and the Afghan royal family, the ‘benefits’ of an Hamid Karzai executive presidency have been to gain lucrative appointments and enrich themselves before the probable pall of exile again descends following an American military withdrawal.

The short-term outlooks of Afghanistan’s top political leaders will probably counteract the incredible efforts of countries such as the United States, Australia, Britain and France to establish a viable and democratic Afghanistan which have involved over ten years of tremendous military and financial sacrifices. If the international efforts in Afghanistan (and for that matter Iraq) ultimately come to naught, then people in western countries (which have often had to bear the brunt of Al-Qaeda backed domestic terrorism) will block future foreign engagements and the power of the west in military and economic terms will ultimately unravel.

Why Afghanistan Needs Genuine Democracy, Instead of Drones

With the benefit of hindsight, coalition troops should have violated Afghan sovereignty by guarding polling booths in the 2009 national elections and supervising the ballot count so that Afghanis could have voted Karzai out and elected Dr. Abdullah Abdullah as their president (who was probably the real victor of the 2009 poll). He is still backed by a broad coalition of anti-Karzai Afghans (including hopefully genuine monarchists) that, if they formed a new government, would ensure that the Afghan army defends Afghanistan against a Pakistan ISI takeover.

Although the situation in Afghanistan has been pre-programmed for ultimate defeat due to General Dostum helping ensure Karzai’s installation as leader in 2001, President Obama had not helped matters by overruling a troop surge that General Stanley Mc Crystal proposed in 2009 for Afghanistan. Had the United States achieved a military victory similar to what their troop surge in Iraq accomplished, then there would have been a stronger prospect for facilitating domestic Afghan re-alignments that ensured that a democratic and viable Afghanistan ensued following the final withdrawal of coalition forces from the nation.

President Obama’s action in Afghanistan of vetoing General Mc Crystal’s proposed troop surge strategy was bad policy to say the least. A probable American led military victory in Afghanistan would have changed that nation’s political dynamics so that the Afghan army would have the requisite military and political capacity to thwart a capitulation to the Taliban and the Khalq in the event of the final withdrawal of coalition troops.

In the current context, the American State Department is undermining the United States’ actual national interests by trying to negotiate with the Taliban to allow them to take power after coalition troops withdraw from Afghanistan. *President Karzai’s role in recently stifling such negotiations between the Taliban and the United States is reflective of General Dostum’s interests as opposed to his own. The current political dynamics in Afghanistan are such that the only really vexing political variable is how the Taliban and the Khalq military faction (which have actually fought each other since 2001) can achieve a political balance to jointly rule in a post-Karzai Afghanistan.

(*After coalition troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Karzai and other members of government who came from the Rome Group, will inevitably go into a pampered exile so as to make way for a Taliban/Khalq coalition regime, the establishment of which is now being brokered by Pakistan’s ISI).

If the United States is going to betray and abandon the Afghan people to the Taliban, then the American drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan should be immediately discontinued. These drone attacks are probably killing innocent civilians and inciting anti-American hatred that, for moral and realpolitik reasons, must be discontinued. Instead of trying to look tough as American power is being weakened, the Obama administration should discontinue the drone attacks and help instigate the creation of the post of Afghan prime minister so that a new government can be formed by Dr. Abdullah Abdullah to save Afghanistan.

Instead of focusing on Afghanistan’s political dynamics, the Obama administration is defending the counterproductive use of drones to convey that American power is still strong, if not pre-eminent in the world. In his January 2012 State of the Union Address to Congress, President Obama declared that the United States was not in world decline and visibly congratulated Defense Secretary Leon Panetta for the recent success of US Navy Seals in rescuing two hostages held by Al-Qaeda aligned terrorists in Somalia.

Hopefully, a strategy will not be pursued by the United States having short term military successes to conceal, if not actually facilitate, overall decline in American power due to the pursuit of defective defence and foreign policy.

The drone attacks should also be terminated in Pakistan for the sake of positively affecting political dynamics of that country. The best hope for Pakistani democracy and for political moderation in Pakistani foreign policy is for a political context to be created in which Prime Minister Yousaf Raza *Gilani’s position is bolstered. Therefore, action by American troops of burning Holy Qurans at base in Pakistan (which was allegedly accidental) was so disrespectful and stupid it almost seems that there is a strategy to stir up anti-Americanism in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

(*Prime Minister Gilani is under judicial investigation and challenge but, in relative terms of the ‘rough and tumble’ of Pakistani politics, this is not a grave threat).

A new government in Pakistan does not have to be created per se but rather to help facilitate political change in neighbouring Afghanistan so that the ISI cannot eventually integrate Pakistan into an anti-American alliance of countries led by a nuclear armed republican Iran.

Who Effectively Prepares The Groundwork Prevails

While the Obama administration is currently preparing the groundwork for failure for the forces of political moderation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same could not have been said of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This was reflected by the September 2011 assassination of former Afghan president, Burhanddin Rabbani. Just as the September 2001 Taliban assassination of Ahmad Massoud deprived the Americans of the capacity to install an effective leader of a post-Taliban government and then quickly depart the country, Rabbani’s 2011 murder, at the undoubted instigation of the Taliban, has similar intended ramifications.

The death of Rabbani diminishes the capacity for anti-Taliban and anti-Khalq Afghans to secure their political positions (if not their lives) because they now cannot rally to an effective leader after the final withdrawal of coalition troops. In keeping with Afghanistan’s current overarching political context, the American success in killing Bin Laden in May 2011 by US navy seals has probably actually advanced the formation of a future Taliban/Khalq regime with Pakistan’s ISI fulfilling a power balancing role. This is because it would not have been acceptable to the American people that the Obama administration negotiate with the Taliban (which is integrally aligned to a still formidable Al-Qaeda) had Bin Laden not been killed.

In the context of the Iranian republic gaining a predominant influence in the Middle East and in Central Asia via American abandonment, it is not in America’s national interest that the United States be a party to abandoning Afghanistan to a Taliban/Khalq regime. It does not seem consistent that American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton -having helped rescue the Libyan people and given vital support for Burmese democracy by meeting with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in December 2011 in Rangoon - should be helping pave the way to abandon Afghanistan to a brutal Taliban/ Khalq regime.

Having previously given credence to Saudi concerns that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki was an agent of republican Iran, it is improbable that Secretary Clinton was complicit with Defence Secretary Leon Panetta’s abandonment of Iraq in December 2011. The American people may now not care that the Afghani are abandoned to a cruel regime but the United States will not be able to escape the profoundly negative (if not irreversible) economic ramifications of republican Iran gaining dominance of the Middle East.

For the sake of the human rights of the Afghan people and to prevent republican Iran establishing a strategic hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia, then American influence must be exercised in a political context. To repeat the point, the United States and other coalition countries with military forces in Afghanistan can pressure President Karzai to create the position of prime minister and appoint Dr. Abdullah Abdullah to that post.

Since the coalition went into Afghanistan in 2001, the United States has undermined its position by not aligning with the supporters the late Ahmad Massoud, without whose leadership the Soviets probably would not have been compelled to leave Afghanistan in 1989. Instead, the United States effectively shut out Massoud’s supporters from power by aligning with their arch-enemies, the Khalq-who have exercised power through the ineffectual and corrupt Rome Group.

The appointment of a broad based cabinet,(which should include Karzai supporters who cannot be dealt into a Khalq/ Taliban regime) led by Dr. Abdullah could provoke a violent reaction on the part of the Khalq and would enrage the Pakistani government which is now, due to political dynamics, effectively controlled by the ISI. But the strategic necessities are such that political action is now urgently warranted. Coalition troops would be able to withstand a Khalq revolt. Indeed, most of the Afghan army’s officer corps knows that it all cannot be accommodated and protected by General Dostum following the final withdrawal of coalition forces.

If there is to be a new Afghan *cabinet, the highest priority should be placed on appointing an effective (if not brilliant) defence minister so that a process can now be commenced of coalition forces withdrawing without abandoning the Afghan people to horrendous repression. American abandonment of Afghanistan is now becoming a distinct possibility, if not an inevitability. The insensitivity of American forces in burning copies of the Koran at a military base and the indignation that this caused is causing a scenario in which most Afghans are becoming disenchanted with the United States and with the American public consequently desiring an expeditious withdrawal from the war torn country.

(* The grave situation in Iraq can similarly be politically redeemed by the parliament electing a new government led by Ayad Allawi).

But the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan is really symptomatic of the Obama administration’s negligence –which in itself is reflective of an underlying desire to abandon Afghanistan. If the United States is to redeem the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, then American pressure is needed to precipitate the formation of a capable Abdullah cabinet so that the vacuum can be effectively filled in the wake of a coalition withdrawal. In the event of such a withdrawal, American air support will still be needed to ensure the survival of an Abdullah government. An on-going commitment will help prevent an anti-American alliance of republican Iran and an ISI-dominated Pakistan shutting the United States out of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Pakistan’s Strategic Value to the Free World

The very dangerous situation that is developing in the Middle East and Central Asia is itself due to shifts in Pakistani domestic politics and international relationships. Since the brief Sino-Indian border war of 1962 orientated India toward alignment with the Soviet Union, Pakistan consequently became a strong ally of the United States. The undoubted highpoint of the American-Pakistani alliance was during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980 during which time the ISI worked virtual miracles to supply American military and other foreign military aid to the Mujahideen.

It was at the point of major success in the American-Pakistan alliance in 1988 with regard to supporting the Afghan people that relations began to sour to the point that Islamabad could now become a key adversary of the United States. The issue of concern between the United States and Pakistan was then President General Muhammad Zia-ul-Huq’s determination to develop nuclear weapons. Zia’s desire for nuclear weapons was to counter India’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb in the mid 1970s.

The death of General Zia in a plane crash in August 1988 ended his controversial eleven year rule after he had seized power in a military coup in early July 1977. The General had returned Pakistan to constitutional rule following parliamentary elections in February 1985 in which political parties were notionally banned from running. Due to a boycott of probably the nation’s then most popular party, the Pakistan People’s Party, (PPP) a range of parliamentarians were elected with weak power bases. To remedy this situation, Zia appointed Muhammad Khan Junejo as prime minister in March 1985.

Junejo, a member of a distinguished family in Sindh Province, had the necessary prestige to relaunch the venerable but virtually defunct Pakistan Muslim League (PML) as the nation’s ruling party in 1986 following the legalization of political parties that year. The popular leader of the PPP, Benazir Bhutto had returned to Pakistan in April 1986 after over two years exile. The welcome that Bhutto received was massive as it seemed that entire populations of cities turned out to support her as she toured the country.

The apparently overwhelmingly support that Bhutto received led her to launch a popular civil disobedience campaign to oust Zia. The momentum of Bhutto’s campaign was broken when Prime Minister Junejo had her briefly arrested in August 1986 following a rally after an Independence Day ceremony in Sindh Province. With the benefit of hindsight, Bhutto should not have launched her civil disobedience campaign in her home base of Sindh Province because it was the only region in Pakistan where Prime Minister Junejo could effectively counter her as this was also his domestic base.

Prime Minister Junejo’s success in stopping Bhutto’s campaign also strengthened his power position in relation to President Zia who had apparently fled the country with his family in August 1986 as an apparent revolution was being launched. Junejo’s enhanced position was seemingly apparent when he represented Pakistan at the international Geneva Conference in April 1988 where the withdrawal of remaining Soviet troops from Afghanistan was finalized. With the support of the United States, the prime minister moved to trespass on exclusive prerogatives of the military, such as the secret development of a nuclear bomb-which was a project that Junejo seemed to oppose.

To re-assert full control President Zia dismissed the Junejo government in late May 1988 and in July scheduled national and provincial parliamentary elections to be held in November that year. Having alienated much of his political base in the PML and confronted by a very popular PPP, Zia stipulated that candidates would have to run as independents because party symbols would not appear on ballots that voters marked. It is probable that General Zia did not even intend to allow the non-party elections to take place and was canvassing support amongst senior officers to re-impose martial law and suspend the 1973 Constitution.

The prospect of General Zia plunging his nation into political turmoil was averted when he, thirty senior officers of the armed forces and the new US ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, were killed in a plane crash in eastern Pakistan on August the 17th 1988. It is very plausible that the KHAD engineered the fatal sabotage because it provided the Najibullah regime with its best chance of eliminating General Zia’s and his strongest supporters within the military who had been at the forefront in supplying the Mujahideen.

The deaths of Zia and some of his stalwart military supporters contributed to a smooth constitutional transfer of power with the Senate President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan succeeding as the nation’s acting president. Khan not only confirmed that the November 1988 elections would proceed but permitted political parties to run. Less laudably, the provisional Khan government refused to re-open voting registration, thereby disenfranchising half the electorate and probably depriving the PPP of winning an absolute majority in parliament.

Even with much of its base disenfranchised, the PPP could still have won an absolute majority of the Parliament had the then Director of the ISI, General Hamid Gul not utilized his considerable organisational ability and provided formidable logistical support to anti-Bhutto parties to precipitate their forming an electoral alliance, the Islamic Democratic Alliance (IDA). The IDA was composed of the pro and anti-Zia wings of the PML, regional political parties and former supporters of Benazir Bhutto’s late father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who had refused to accept her leadership of the PPP.

The PPP won a clear plurality of the vote of the 1988 November 16th poll which just fell short of an absolute majority. To gain support of Ghulam Khan, the PPP supported his election to the presidency by an electoral college of national and provincial parliaments in return for his commissioning Benazir Bhutto as prime minister in December 1988. There was considerable jubilation on the part of the PPP’s left-wing rank and file supporters but in hindsight they were always going to be disappointed by the first Bhutto government’s (1988-1990) performance.

The Importance of the PPP to Pakistani Democracy

Since Zulfikar Bhutto founded his party in late November 1967, there has been a Marxist inner organisation within the PPP. The benefit to the PPP of having an inner Marxist organisation has been that it has helped ensure that it did not become the archetypal Third World ephemeral political party whose active membership is essentially confined to the leader’s entourage and their extended family networks.

The establishment of an inner Marxist PPP organisation was probably facilitated by Zulfikar Bhutto’s cordial ties to the PRC which encouraged anti-Soviet Marxists in the 1960s to join the PPP. But Bhutto himself was also staunchly pro-American due to his antipathy toward India and the Soviet Union that the PPP could never have become a stalking horse for a Marxist takeover of Pakistan. The strong support that the PPP has with much of Pakistan’s poor which is reflective of its coherent organisation is also an important reason why Islamic fundamentalist parties have never done electorally as well in Pakistan as might have been expected.

The strength of Islam in Pakistan has also precluded Marxist PPP members from ever trying to instigate a violent revolution. The limited nationalizations and land reform that Zulfikar Bhutto’s government undertook in the 1970s was probably the extent of the dividend that Marxists within the PPP could ever have gained. The organisational involvement of Marxists in the PPP gave the Bhutto family reach into the broad mass of Pakistan’s poor. This is probably the reason why so many Pakistanis still venerate Zulfikar and Benazir Bhutto. Because he is the widower of Benazir Bhutto, Asif Zardari, Pakistan’s current president, is staunchly supported by much of Pakistan’s poor despite his being a scion of the nation’s feudal elite.

There is also a strong base of support amongst the middle class and sections of the landowning elite for the PPP which has counteracted this party’s inner Marxist organisation from dominating the party. The more affluent members of the PPP have committed to their party due to its sense of organisational permanence and knowing that, if they were to depart, the void would be filled by the party’s Marxist wing.

During her on and off again incarceration between 1978 and 1984 and subsequent two year exile, Benazir Bhutto was able to still effectively lead the PPP due to the support of the party’s Marxist inner organisation. During her over two year exile in London between January 1984 and May 1986, Benazir Bhutto focused her activities on leading international campaigns to secure the release and/or prevent the execution of left-wing party activists. This crucially enabled Bhutto to solidify her power base within the PPP.

Following her 1986 return, Bhutto galvanized the PPP’s left-wing base to attempt to overthrow General Zia. Prime Minister Junejo was sufficiently liberalizing the regime that it was not possible for Benazir Bhutto to convert her popular support base into a revolution. Realizing that a support base into the nation’s land owning elite (to which she belonged) and with the middle class had to be developed, or more to the point re-established, Bhutto married the then transparently non-political Asif Zardari in December 1987 in an arranged marriage.

The candidates that the PPP ran in the November 1988 elections therefore predominately came from the land owing elite or had connections to that oligarchy. Had Bhutto not made such accommodations, the IDA would have had a stronger capacity with which to oppose the PPP. Furthermore, the military might not have been supportive of the 1988 elections proceeding if the PPP’s left-wing had predominated in the selection of the party’s parliamentary candidates.

The First Bhutto Government, 1988 to 1990: The Disconnect Between Glamour and Government Effectiveness

The first government that Bhutto led between 1988 and 1990 was a disappointment to say the least to most Pakistanis. The inert nature of the first Bhutto government was perhaps excusable because it lacked a parliamentary majority and was subjected to close parliamentary votes of no-confidence. But the corruption of this government was a surprise to many middle class Pakistanis who read about the Bhutto government’s misdeeds in a now free press. More often than not, the focus on corruption centred round the prime minister’s businessman husband who gained the nick name, ‘Mr. Ten Percent’.

While it might have been expected that someone who had previously shown such personal courage in opposing the Zia dictatorship would lead an honest government, Bhutto’s main strategy to consolidate her power was for Zardari to build up the patronage base of the PPP so that it could later win for Bhutto a parliamentary majority in her own right. The prime minister might have helped her own cause had she at least projected the image of a socially concerned leader which would have had a degree of credence due to her previous reputation in peacefully opposing the Zia regime.

Instead, Bhutto seemed more pre-occupied in indulging her long standing international profile by making official overseas visits where she was a novelty as the world’s first elected Muslim woman leader. Her commentary on the contemporary situation in Afghanistan was often sought on such overseas visits. With regard to Afghanistan, the prime minister was actually sincere in disclaiming an agenda of wanting to annex that country as Najibullah was probably correct in making such a charge.

Bhutto, although hostile to Najibullah, did not share the determination of the ISI to eventually merge Afghanistan into Pakistan. Because the Pakistani prime minister was not sufficiently powerful enough to rein in the ISI, Najibullah was probably contextually correct regarding his warning of a Pakistani intention to take over Afghanistan. From the perspective of the ISI, the lacklustre performance of the prime minister and her distinct lack of enthusiasm for its agenda of annexing Afghanistan were the reasons why the Bhutto government was to be dispensed with.

With the backing of the military/ISI, Bhutto was summarily dismissed in early August 1990. The deposal of the Bhutto government by Pakistani standards was a relatively tame affair with President Ghulam Khan abruptly informing the prime minister in a telephone call that she was dismissed. Even though this overthrow was not a military takeover per se, Benazir still adhered to her late father’s injunction that military coups not be resisted so that a pretext for potentially violent fatal outcomes could be avoided.

Nawaz Sharif Emerges As The Anti-Bhutto Alternative

Although no-one knew it at the time, Bhutto’s tawdry 1990 dismissal did have long lasting ramifications with regard to facilitating the rise to power of Nawaz Sharif as a political leader who acquired the nation’s substantial anti-Bhutto base. The ensuing epic struggle between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif underpinned an essentially adversarial two party system party that has transcended communal/sectarian divisions and has paradoxically endowed Pakistan with needed national unity.

At first it seemed that Benazir Bhutto’s dismissal had consigned her to new political oblivion as the PPP (which ran as the National Democratic Alliance, NDA, in coalition with regional parties) garnered less than half the vote of the IDA. The October 25th 1990 election was in the main, fairly conducted, even if the caretaker prime minister was Ghulum Mustafa Jatoi. He was a former stalwart supporter and possible successor to Zulfikar Bhutto who had split from PPP after Benazir eventually succeeded her father as party leader instead of himself. Jatoi had been the co-leader of the IDA in the 1988 elections with the then Punjab Chief Minister, Nawaz Sharif.

In the October 1990 elections, Nawaz Sharif was the sole leader of the victorious IDA and he first served as prime minister between 1990 and 1993 where he consolidated his position as the leader of the nation’s substantial and committed anti-Bhutto constituency. That is not to say that a substantial pro-Bhutto constituency has not since endured. Indeed, the existence of a pro-Bhutto base is a measure of the continuing impact of Zulfikar Bhutto’s profound impact on Pakistan.

This immense impact of Zulfikar Bhutto on Pakistan was due to his effectively re-founding the nation following East Pakistan’s secession in late 1971. In compensating and addressing some of the mistakes and missed opportunities that the new nation had experienced in the immediate years following its establishment in 1947, Bhutto left his mark on Pakistan.

Back to the Beginning: The Early Political History of Pakistan

Pakistan was established in August 1947 as a nation composed of the predominately Muslim areas of the Indian sub-continent. This new nation could not have been founded without the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876 to 1948). He was born in Karachi into a well to do family, and was appointed to the legislative council of the viceroy in 1910. Jinnah joined both the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League (Muslim League) in the expectation that Indian Home Rule would eventually be granted to India by the British.

Many Muslim advocates of Home Rule, such as Jinnah, envisaged that the structure of government in a future independent India would be so decentralized that there would be no need for a separate Muslim nation. As such, Jinnah then saw no contradiction in belonging to both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. But with the rise of Hindu aristocrat Jawaharlal Nehru (who had the support of Congress’s spiritual leader, Mohandas Gandhi), Jinnah began to become estranged from the Congress Party so that he eventually resigned his membership in 1930 and became president of the Muslim League in 1934.

The Muslim League was founded in 1906 by Aga Khan III specifically to protect the rights of Muslim Indians. The idea that the Muslim League secure the establishment of a separate independent Muslim nation on the Indian sub-continent was adopted at the urging of one of the party’s key members, Muhammad Iqbal in 1930. The prestige of Jinnah was such that his election as Muslim League president in 1934 seemed to transform an initially unusual idea of a separate independent nation into an orthodox proposition for Muslim Indians.

Senior members of the Muslim League interpreted the opposition of the predominately Congress Party to separate voting communal electoral rolls for Muslims for elections to provincial legislatures in the 1930s as indicative that Muslim rights could only be secured in a future predominately Islamic nation. Differences between Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims became pronounced during the Second World War. At the urging of the Congress Party many, but by no means all *Hindus refused to support the Allied war effort while most Indian Muslims did due to the exhortations of the Muslim League.

(*Despite a strong Congress led boycott movement during the Second World War, the Allied position in Burma and in supporting Nationalist China could not have been viable without the support of the vice-regal government of British India. The effectiveness of this government was predicated upon the staunch support that it received from the so-called princely states and the loyalty and efficiency of the overwhelmingly Indian civil service.

It is a tremendous pity that this unity of purpose was not maintained after the end of the Second World War by Indian royalty so that they could have secured their constitutional positions as their Malayan-now Malaysian-regal counterparts did).

The pronounced differences between Hindu and Muslim Indians that the Second World War induced was reflected by Muslims voting overwhelmingly for Muslim League candidates in elections to provincial legislatures in the 1940s. A constituent assembly for all of India convened in early September 1946 whose members were selected by members of the sub-continent’s provincial assemblies. Almost without exception, the Muslim members of the constituent assembly belonged to the Muslim League or allied parties, such as the anglophile Unionist Party.

The unwavering determination of Jinnah was crucial in Muslim League leaders and members insisting that the British grant the establishment of an independent Pakistan, which they did in August 1947. A high degree of unity of purpose was evident which transcended regional differences and massive geographical distance between East Pakistan and West Pakistan when Pakistan came into being in 1947.

The new nation faced other tremendous challenges beside geographical distance between its two constituent parts. These challenges included a federal government that first had to operate with an ad hoc civil service/bureaucracy, resettlement of Muslim refugees from India, the almost immediate outbreak of an unsuccessful war with India over Kashmir after its Hindu royal ruler chose to join India (despite over 80% of his subjects being Muslim) and the reluctance of provincial governments to cede more power to the new central government.

A major asset that Pakistan had upon its establishment was the enthusiasm and commitment of Muslim refugees to their new country. (This enthusiasm of Muslim migrants/refugees (Muhajirs) was particularly apparent in the officer corps of the new Pakistani armed forces). Another key asset that Pakistan initially had was that the Muslim League, which became the Pakistan Muslim League (PML), similar to the Congress Party in India, seemed to unite people across ethnic and geographic divisions to foster a common patriotism.

Pakistan Loses its Equivalent of Jawaharlal Nehru: The Ramifications of the 1951 Assassination of Ali Liaquat

The sense of patriotic unity remained seemingly intact following the death of Jinnah in September 1948. Jinnah, who had been dying from terminal cancer declined to become prime minister and instead became Pakistan’s first Governor-General. The nation still had a sense of positive direction because it was led by a faithful supporter of Jinnah’s, Prime Minister Ali Liaquat. It was Liaquat’s mysterious assassination by an Afghan hit man in October 1951 that plunged Pakistan into a crisis that it is arguably still to fully recover from.

Liaquat’s assassination was a disaster for Pakistan because it fatally undercut the capacity of the PML to maintain its prestige that it had acquired from the pre-independence struggle to continue to unite the country. The PML’s diminished capacity to unite Pakistan has been correctly identified as an important reason why Pakistan broke up in 1971. But the break up of Pakistan has been inaccurately attributed to West Pakistan initially dominating East Pakistan. While there was often extraordinary and convoluted political turmoil in Pakistan between 1947 and 1958, there was still political balance between East and West Pakistan until the Mirza/Khan coup of October 1958.

Pre-dominantly East Bengal (which was distinct from predominately Hindu West Bengal) overwhelmingly supported the Muslim League party in the 1946 provincial elections that it willingly became East Pakistan upon the formation of Pakistan in 1947. East Pakistan was a single province with an elected government and East Pakistanis were amply represented in the new federal government. The eastern component of Pakistan arguably had an advantage over the western division in that it was a single provincial unit while West Pakistan was divided into four provinces.

The PML’s Failures Ultimately Doom Pakistani Democracy and Unity

Indeed, the prime reason why the West Pakistan wing of the PML acrimoniously split in October 1955 would be over the issue of the four western provinces merging into one provincial unit. But it is still true that an important reason why the PML would forgo its capacity to maintain national unity was because the ruling party lost majority support in East Pakistan. This was despite the fact that two of the three PML prime ministers who ruled Pakistan between 1951 and 1956 following Liaquat’s assassination came from East Pakistan.

Perhaps East Pakistanis did not feel an affinity to federal leaders from their region who were ensconced in the provisional national capital of Karachi in West Pakistan. The failure of East Pakistani PML federal prime ministers to ensure that Bengali was not given an equal status as Urdu, the dominant language in West Pakistan, was an important reason why the Awami (People’s) League won a landslide victory in the March 1954 East Pakistan provincial election. The Awami League was a 1949 Bengali breakaway from the PML whose elitist eastern leaders considered Bengali nationalism as akin to dangerous social reform.

The imposition of direct federal rule in East Pakistan between May 1954 and June 1955 and briefly in May 1956 was deeply resented in that province. However, it has been too often overlooked that provincial government led by the Awami League was restored, thereby facilitating a sufficient degree of autonomy to East Pakistan while giving this party a substantial national power base. The PML still easily maintained its ascendancy in West Pakistan where it won landslide election victories against marginal regional political parties in all four provincial elections held in that wing of the nation in 1954.

Although both East Pakistan and West Pakistan had their respective viable ruling parties, the major problem that bedevilled Pakistan on a national basis was the absence of a directly elected federal parliament. Members of Pakistan’s federal legislature came from the members of the Indian sub-continent constituent assembly who had been appointed by provincial legislatures in 1946. The Pakistani constituent assembly had ‘dragged its feet’ with regard to drawing up a new constitution due to chronic division regarding the nature of the constitutional relationship between East Pakistan and West Pakistan and the post-1954 issue of whether the four provinces of the latter territory should merge into one provincial entity.

The constituent assembly/national legislature dissolved in September 1954 with the support of the provincial governments of East Pakistan and West Pakistan. With the consent of the Governor-General and the agreement of the political parties the national government of Prime Minister Ali Bogra (who was an East Pakistani) remained in office until a new constituent assembly was convened. Pakistani democracy might have received the consolidation it needed had the new constituent assembly/national legislature that was convened in July 1955 been directly elected. Instead members of this legislative body were nominated by the nation’s provincial legislatures.

The majority of members of the 1955 constituent assembly represented the predominant and respective interests of the provincial government of East Pakistan and the four provincial governments of West Pakistan. These provincial governments were probably historically unique in that they were unitarian by desiring the amalgamation of their territories so that West Pakistan could become ‘One Unit’.

The pro-centralization components within the PML split away in October 1955 to form the Republican Party which entered into a loose alliance in the constituent assembly with the Awami League. These two parties voted in the constituent assembly to amalgamate the four western provinces and their respective legislatures into one provincial legislature of a new West Pakistan province in September 1955 and, in March 1956, unfortunately voted to convert the Dominion of Pakistan into the Islamic Republic* of Pakistan.

(*It was unfortunate that Pakistan severed its constitutional link with the British Crown).

The worst abuse (besides making Pakistan a republic) of the Awami League-Republican Party alliance was their adoption of what became known as the ‘Parity Principle’. Under this concept there was to be ‘equal’ national parliamentary representation between the two Pakistans. The practical effect of this ‘reform’ was to disadvantage the more populous East Pakistan by reducing their parliamentary representation.

Why the Parity Principle Was A Principal Cause of Pakistani Dis-Unity

The Awami League under the leadership of Shaheed Suhrawardy agreed to the retrograde ‘Parity Principle’ so as to help consolidate West Pakistan into one administrative unit as part of the process of establishing two Pakistans with a weak and ultimately dispensable central government. Had the PML maintained its originally strong position in East Pakistan, cross party support would have prevented the weighting of votes on a regional basis which was to later fatally undermine national unity.

There were however worthwhile suggestions during the interregnum period between 1955 and 1956 that there be a constitutional requirement that, if the president come from one section of Pakistan, then the prime minister must come from the other and vice versa. Such innovative constitutional proposals to facilitate national unity and equity were ultimately doomed. This was because the mutual overriding concern of both the Awami League and the Republican Party was for there to be respectively strong provincial government in both East Pakistan and West Pakistan with a token central Pakistan government.

The above political agenda of the two major political parties was not shared by a powerful force that desired national unity - the Pakistani military. Although it was regretful that a war between India and Pakistan had broken out between 1948 and 1949 over Kashmir, the new Pakistani armed forces (many of whose officers were Muhajirs) gained a patriotic commitment to their new nation. It was the determination of the military to ensure the existence of a strong Pakistani central government that helps explains why the new nation’s armed forces did not follow the scrupulously non-political professionalism of the Indian armed forces.

The first major adverse ramification of the 1951 Liaquat assassination was that it led to the Pakistani military becoming directly involved in Pakistani politics. Jinnah was succeeded as Governor- General on his death in September 1948 by Khwaja Nazimuddin, who was then the PML’s most prestigious East Pakistani leader. Nazimuddin in turn stepped down as Governor-General in October 1951 following the Liaquat assassination to become the new prime minister.

All might have been well had a West Pakistani PML politician of Liaquat’s stature been appointed as the new Governor-General. But on the premise - that the armed forces had the professional capacity, apolitical integrity to maintain national unity and in the heat of the emergency - General Malik Ghulam Muhammad was appointed the new Governor-General. But for General Ghulam his role as representative of the British Crown was to protect the national interest by utilizing his prestigious position to give legitimacy to the centralizing power role of the Pakistani military.

General Ghulam’s worst abuse as Governor-General was to virtually force Nazimuddin in 1953 to resign because the general believed that the prime minister was derelict in his duties in maintaining national unity. In fact, Nazimuddin’s resignation undermined the position of the PML in East Pakistan so that it was a vital factor in the Awami League overwhelmingly winning the 1954 provincial elections. The political situation in East Pakistan was exacerbated when its vice-regal Governor, retired Major-General Iskander Mirza - with the backing of the Governor-General and the army - briefly dismissed the new Awami provincial government in 1954 to show that any orientation toward East Pakistani succession would not be tolerated.

To keep the armed forces on side, Mirza was appointed Governor-General in October 1955 and elected as Pakistan’s first president in March 1956 by the Awami League and Republican Party members of the *National Assembly. The nation’s first president was a Bengal from East Pakistan with a hardline determination to maintain Pakistani national unity. This not surprising because Mirza, a former high civil servant in British India, was Pakistan’s first Defence Secretary and as such the effective founder of the new nation’s armed forces.

(* The constituent assembly upon promulgating the 1956 republican constitution initially granted itself the right to sit as the National Assembly thereby again averting a popular election of a national government).

Although the powers of the Pakistani president under the 1956 Constitution were mainly ceremonial, there were substantial presidential reserve powers and President Mirza had an excellent network in the civil service and the armed forces which enabled him to exercise considerable influence in his own right. President Mirza’s determination that national unity be maintained was manifested when he imposed direct presidential rule on West Pakistan between March and July 1957 to ends calls for greater provincial autonomy.

That an East Pakistani president in apparent conjunction with an East Pakistani prime minister of the Awami League would impose presidential rule then fostered an erroneous belief amongst many West Pakistanis that they were subject to East Pakistan domination. In fact, Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy had only reluctantly acquiesced to presidential rule for West Pakistan to placate the military backed Mirza. Indeed, Prime Minister Suhrawardy helped ensure a restoration of the provincial constitutional government in the western part of the country after just less than six months of direct presidential rule in West Pakistan.

Despite Prime Minister Suhrawardy’s success in helping reinstate West Pakistan’s provincial government, stable federal government was denied to republican Pakistan between 1956 and 1958 due to acrimonious relations between the Awami League and the Republican Party which were derived from their different provincial power bases. Until late 1957, there was a rapid turnover of governments as regional parties and spiteful PML remnants in the National Assembly exploited divisions between the two major parties. The public’s propensity to indulge such instability on the part of their politicians was undermined by the fact that the national parliament was not directly elected.

For all the differences (or perhaps similarities as regionally based parties) between the Awami League and the Republican Party, they were both threatened by the military whose power was embodied in President Mirza. The formation in December 1957 of a predominately Republican Party cabinet (led by Malik Firoz Khan Noon) had the backing of the Awami League and seemingly facilitated the inter party co-operation needed to deny the president and the military any capacity to interfere in politics.

In order to consolidate their respective positions in the interim against President Mirza and the armed forces, the Awami League and the Republican Party arranged for national elections to be held in January 1959. As events in December 1970 were to show, the 1959 elections would have resulted in such an overwhelming victory to the two respectively based regionally based parties that national unity would have been endangered.

To maintain a viable central Pakistan government, President Mirza abruptly and surprisingly dismissed the Noon government in early October 1958, suspended the constitution, imposed direct presidential rule on East Pakistan and West Pakistan and banned political parties! The president took these draconian steps because he was not going to allow either the Awami League or the *Republican Party to consolidate their respective bases to counteract the power of the armed forces. President Mirza feared that, if this occurred, they (the two major political parties) would later have the option of ‘their’ province(s) seceding from Pakistan.

(* President Mirza ironically was the only prominent and powerful East Pakistani who was a member of the West Pakistan based Republican Party. This party almost immediately disappeared following the imposition of military rule in 1958).

The Khan Military Regime ‘Basically’ Fails to Marshal National Unity

Pakistan might have had a military backed East Pakistani centralist dictator in the person of President Mirza had the commander in chief of the army - who also held the recently created position of Martial Law Administrator, General (later Field Marshal) Mohammed Ayub Khan - forced the would be dictator out before the end of the month to become the new president. The Ayub regime (1958 to 1969) would have its successes and failures, but it would be the latter that would give credence to the now widespread belief that West Pakistan had initially and always exploited the more populous East Pakistan as a virtual colony.

The Ayub military regime probably commenced with noble intentions of fostering national unity by breaking with what it regarded as the cynical manipulation by the politicians which had treacherously endangered national unity between East Pakistan and West Pakistan. Civil servants were appointed to most of the cabinet positions, to local government posts and to commissions of enquiry that were established to examine and recommend solutions to pressing national issues, such as land reform.

The major political innovation of the Ayub regime was the institution of over eighty thousand elected ‘Basic Democrats’ or local government administrative ‘unions’ in 1962 for every ten thousand people as well as the lifting of martial law that year. To undermine what the military regarded as the dangerous capacity of political parties to endanger national unity, the Basic Democrats were empowered to elect members of the East Pakistan and West Pakistan legislatures, the National Assembly and the position of president by selecting a presidential electoral college.

An equal parity between in the National Assembly of representation between East Pakistan and West Pakistan was implemented when the indirectly ‘elected’ National Assembly was convened in 1962. Provincial governments and legislatures for East Pakistan and West Pakistan were also established that year by ‘indirect’ election and ‘indirect’ presidential elections were scheduled for January 1965. To bolster the process of political institutionalization, the Ayub Khan regime invoked the prestige of the Jinnah by establishing the Convention Muslim League (PML Convention) in 1962 as the ostensible ruling party and successor to the defunct PML.

The institutional arrangements that the Ayub Khan regime devised might have endowed it with sufficient support had it actually implemented espoused policies such as land reform. But in reality the real power bases of the regime were a feudal landing owning elite and the military of West Pakistan. The interconnection between these two pillars of the regime was due to the fact that most of the senior officer corps came from the wealthy landowning families of West Pakistan.

The pro-Ayub elite eventually became known in the 1960s as the ‘Twenty-Two Families’ whose economic power expanded beyond their agricultural holdings in West Pakistan to encompass the banking sector and industry. Nevertheless, high rates of economic growth and the efficient utilization of generous American financial aid by relatively honest Pakistani civil servants helped conceal the corruption and crony capitalism of the regime. But, by 1968, the benefits of economic growth had virtually petered out so that the self-interested nature of the Ayub regime was apparent and its claims that state support for industrialization would lift millions of Pakistanis out of poverty were shown to be hollow.

The foreign affairs record of the Ayub regime similarly commenced with probably good intentions but eventually fell short in actual accomplishments. Although India and Pakistan had had strained relations since independence, they were both stalwart members of the Commonwealth* and as such President Khan often intimated that disputes between the two nations should be resolved in a spirit of good will and honest communication.

(* President Zulfikar Bhutto withdrew Pakistan from the Commonwealth in 1972 to protest its admission of Bangladesh as a member. Ironically, Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir engineered Pakistan’s re-entry into the Commonwealth in 1989 when she was prime minister. This was one of the few times when she was in power that a foreign affairs objective of Benazir Bhutto’s was achieved because Pakistan’s membership of the Commonwealth did not impede the strategic objectives of the still powerful ISI).

President Ayub’s rational denunciations concerning the futility of war were belied when he had Pakistan invade the province of Jammu and Kashmir*in September 1965. The military advance was halted because the United States placed an arms embargo on Pakistan. This caused great indignation in Pakistan and perhaps, to spite the United States, President Ayub agreed to negotiate with India under the auspices of Soviet diplomatic mediation.

(*Controversy as to whether Jammu and Kashmir as a province should be in union with India or Pakistan is too complicated an issue to be analysed in this article. For greater simplicity of written expression, this province will be referred to as ‘Kashmir’).

Under Soviet mediation, the Tashkent Agreement was reached in January 1966 between India and Pakistan. Under this treaty, New Delhi agreed to Pakistan keeping its recent limited territorial gains in return for the Ayub regime committing to not undertaking in further military action with regard to Kashmir. For many Pakistanis - including its then thirty eight year old foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, - the Tashkent Agreement was a sell out because it constituted a de facto Pakistani acceptance of Indian sovereignty over Jammu and Kashmir. After nearly six months of argument with President Ayub, Bhutto finally prevailed by successfully submitting his resignation as foreign minister in June 1966.

Ali Zulfikar Bhutto First Gains Political Prominence

As foreign minister, Bhutto had maintained Pakistan’s close links with both the United States and the PRC even though they were then ideological arch-enemies. The brief border war between India and China in 1962 had made Peking amenable to an alliance with Pakistan. Therefore Pakistan became the unofficial go-between the PRC and western nations that then did not recognize the Chinese mainland communist regime. Bhutto consequently became one of the world’s most important foreign ministers between 1963 and 1966.

It was ironic that Bhutto’s break with Ayub established the groundwork for his becoming in 1971 Pakistan’s (as West Pakistan became) first civilian leader considering that his political career had commenced as a result of the 1958 coup. The Ayub regime’s initial and continuing reliance upon West Pakistan’s landowning elite to provide it with a powerful but narrow civilian support base was manifested when Zulfikar Bhutto, the scion of a very powerful landowning family in Sindh Province, was appointed a junior minister following the 1958 coup. Bhutto had interesting ideas and publicly unresolved intellectual issues which made him sufficiently paradoxical that Ayub appointed him to successive high offices.

As a graduate student at Oxford University in the 1950s, Bhutto drew attention by his seeming fascination with ‘socialism’ and what this ideology meant. In contrast to other future third world leaders whose British university education exposed them to ‘socialism’, such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Bhutto did not later become an avowed anti-American. This might have been because he had previously studied at Berkeley University where he developed a life long intellectual curiosity as to what he regarded as the miracle of America.

Following his study at Oxford University, Bhutto always considered himself to be a socialist, even though he never really broke with his aristocratic background and was uncertain as to how to implement socialism. The conflicted nature of Bhutto’s political identity helps explain why he is still an ambiguous, but polarizing figure in contemporary Pakistan.

To millions of poor and middle class Pakistanis, Bhutto will always be remembered as a bold reformer whose land reform programmes, nationalizations and genuine support for labour rights in the 1970s positively changed their every day lives. It should be said that the land reform, although beneficial to a minority of emancipated tenants, was too limited and the nationalizations actually undermined the growth of the private sector and corruptly benefited those with ties to the PPP. Nevertheless, Bhutto reforms still constituted a socio-economic revolution for many Pakistanis who now revere him.

Had Zulfikar Bhutto petitioned General Zia-ul-Huq to commute his death sentence in 1979, he probably would have squandered his mass support. By refusing to appeal for clemency, Zulfikar Bhutto helped ensure the transfer of the allegiance of his supporters to his then (1979) twenty-six year old daughter Benazir. Her unflinchingly loyalty to her father throughout the ordeals of his deposition, imprisonment and execution established her as a worthy recipient of her father’s mantle amongst his supporters.

Alternately, but on a similar interclass and inter-ethnic basis, the patrician Bhutto has been denounced as an aristocratic dictator who enriched himself and his close supporters.

The Political Ambiguity of Zulfikar Bhutto

Having a pro-American aristocrat, who as a notional socialist was enamoured of a radical PRC, made Bhutto unique so that President Ayub, appointed him foreign minister in 1963. This was because the United States and the PRC were then Pakistan’s vital allies. Bhutto’s break with Ayub in 1966 over the Tashkent Agreement was also ironic because the Field Marshal president had been his mentor. As a prominent former member of the Ayub regime, Bhutto was not acceptable to the then major opposition *parties, which formed an alliance in May 1967 called the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM).

(*The PDM was composed of the East Pakistan based Awami League, the Council of the Muslim League (PML-Council), Jamaat-i-Islam and Mizam-i-Islam. The last three cited political parties were based in West Pakistan).

Bhutto’s ostracism from the then established opposition was not to impede his later progress because he founded the PPP in November 1967 with the assistance of pro-Chinese (therefore anti-Soviet) Marxists. The PPP was not to be a communist front because Bhutto’s massive popularity enabled him to dominate the new party and thereby recruit personally loyal stalwarts. The strength of the PPP was not only because its left-wing organisational base gave it access to the poor but also because Bhutto’s moral and physical courage in opposing the Ayub regime attracted a massive popular support base in West Pakistan.

The existence of a popular opposition party in West Pakistan in conjunction with the overwhelming support for the Awami League in East Pakistan had placed Field Marshal Ayub in a precarious position which made him even more reliant upon the armed forces. When the armed forces refused to continue to support Ayub against widespread and still growing popular unrest in East Pakistan and West Pakistan, he resigned in March 1969. Instead of passing power onto the Speaker of the National Assembly as the 1962 Constitution stipulated, General Ayub made way for the army commander-in- chief, General Yahya Khan.

Th new president’s abrogation of the 1962 Constitution was welcomed by the respective leaders of East Pakistan’s and West Pakistan’s major political parties, the Awami League’s Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (who became party leader in 1963 upon the death of party founder Shaheed Suhrawardy) and Zulfikar Bhutto’s PPP. These two political leaders tentatively accepted the Yahya presidency due to the prospect that direct elections would be held for a new National Assembly and for respective provincial legislatures for East Pakistan and West Pakistan.

In the light of subsequent events, it might have been better had the Ayub regime previously given way to a more genteel opposition (i.e. the Awami League aligned to the PDM) because the determined personalities of Bhutto and Rahman, combined with the stupidity of General Yahya, would lead to the debacle of 1971. The political leader who might have preserved a united Pakistan and bequeathed a democracy was the initial inspiration for the PDM, Fatima Jinnah.

Fatima Jinnah: The Aung San Suu Kyi of the 1960s

Fatima Jinnah was the spinster sister of the widowed Jinnah who, following the death of his wife became his confidant and key personal support throughout the 1930s. She was one of the few female university graduates in the sub-continent and had won much admiration in Bombay as a dentist whose practice not only serviced the poor but more often than not did so free of charge. As a decent person and the key symbolic link to her late brother, Fatima was the ideal candidate for the then main opposition party in West Pakistan, the PML Council, to run as its candidate for president.

The PML Council had been founded in 1962 by former members of the virtually defunct PML to counter Field Marshal Ayub’s launch of PNL Convention that year. An apparently viable opposition to Ayub was formed when the Awami League and two Islamic opposition parties, Jamaat-i-Islam and Mizam-i-Islam coalesced in 1964 with the PML Council to form the Combined Opposition Party of Pakistan (COPP) to support Fatima Jinnah’s presidential candidacy.

Her apparent popularity among Awami League supporters and East Pakistanis in general (as manifested by massive campaign rallies there) reflected her potential to foster genuine national unity. That Fatima also had the endorsements of Jamaat-i-Islam and Mizam-i-Islam was notable because these two parties had gone from opposing women voting and standing in elections to actually supporting a *female presidential candidate.

(* An argument could be put that acceptance of Benazir Bhutto as a woman leading a major political party and becoming the world’s first elected Muslim female leader in 1988 might not have occurred had it not been for the precedent set by Fatima Jinnah).

Despite the massive advantages that President Ayub derived from his system of Basic Democracies, he still probably would have lost the January 1965 ‘indirect presidential election’ had he not resorted to coercion. Fatima Jinnah was effectively the Aung San Suu Kyi of the 1960s. Similar to Aung San Suu Kyi, who is called ‘The Lady’ by most Burmese, Fatima Jinnah was known as the ‘Lady of Pakistan’ or the ‘Mother of the Nation’. Fatima Jinnah died in July 1967 in Karachi at the age of seventy four. It is still widely believed that the Ayub regime fatally poisoned her.

Had Jinnah Fatima come to power in 1965, it is more than probable that no action against Field Marshal Ayub or his supporters would have been taken. The goodwill that an honest and democratic government would have facilitated would have been conducive to promoting national unity sufficient to have kept Pakistan together. By making way for Fatima Jinnah, Field Marshal Ayub could have secured an honoured place in Pakistani history. Furthermore, under Fatima Jinnah, West Pakistan’s elite might have acquiesced to needed land reform in return for being allowed to hold onto the industrial gains that they had made due to the cronyism of the Ayub regime.

The Regime of General Yahya Khan, 1969 to 1971: The Fine Line Between Achieving Brilliant Success and Colossal Disaster

Ayub’s 1969 resignation had still established the scope for democracy and the maintenance of Pakistani national unity. This was because his successor, General Yahya Khan, was not going to play the game of a Third World general changing into a suit to consolidate his power via electoral institutionalization. Promisingly, the military president did not adopt the former ‘ruling party’ the PML Convention (which would win only two national seats in the December 1970 elections) as he seemed to be committed to making way for a directly elected national civilian government that would be the first in Pakistan’s history.

Other promising steps undertaken by President Yahya were appointing more East Pakistanis to cabinet and promoting more East Pakistanis within the civil service and the armed forces. Furthermore, President Yahya toured East Pakistan to address grievances such as specific human rights abuses. The president’s concern for East Pakistan was seemingly apparent when he ensured the efficient and honest distribution of aid following massive floods in East Pakistan in late 1970. Due to these floods, elections to a national constituent assembly and for provincial legislatures were delayed until December 1970 and staggered into January 1971.

The conducting of democratic and fair elections in December 1970 was the standout achievement of the Yahya regime. The groundwork that the Yahya regime had established for the 1970 elections had also been commendable with the repeal of the so-called ‘parity principle’ which had effectively disadvantaged the more populous East Pakistan by undermining the principle of ‘one vote, one value’. This therefore created the scope for East Pakistan to utilize its bigger population to elect a National Pakistani government in their own right.

Usually, population disparities between different regions are overcome by an electorate voting for competing nationwide parties. This was not to be the case in Pakistan in 1970 because East Pakistan and West Pakistan were to overwhelmingly vote for regionally based parties. The respective dominance of the Awami League in East Pakistan and the PPP in West Pakistan were essentially censuses in which voters identified themselves as either East Pakistani (or more to the point, Bengali) or West Pakistani by voting for either of the two aforementioned parties.

The victories of the Awami League in East Pakistan and the PPP in West Pakistan in elections to the National Assembly and in provincial legislatures therefore transcended class and ethnic differences within the two constituent of Pakistans.

Although the election results were skewed their conduct was beyond reproach. This was essentially due to the superhuman efforts of the national election commissioner, Abdus Sattar. This civil servant might have been revered had it not been for General Yahya’s disastrous subsequent actions which were to make his regime the worst in Pakistan’s history, if not in recent modern world history.

As it often is with negative paradoxes, it is in success that the seeds of failure are planted. The December 1970 elections were probably the fairest that the peoples of what was to become a post-West Pakistan Pakistan and Bangladesh have experienced to date. Because there was horrendous turmoil following the 1970 elections due to the failure to arrive at a co-operative power-sharing arrangement, there is still heated controversy in Bangladesh and contemporary Pakistan as to who was responsible for the 1971 debacle.

Most politically and/or historically minded Bangladeshis blame Zulfikar Bhutto for influencing a politically inept General Yahya to be intransigent in his negotiations with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman by ruling out more autonomy for East Pakistan. This interpretation is supported by some contemporary anti-Bhutto Pakistanis.

However, Bhutto supporters maintain that their leader was prepared to endorse maximum autonomy for East Pakistan and wanted to enter into a national coalition with the Awami League at a national level with himself as national president and Sheikh Mujibur serving as prime minister. Bhutto’s defenders maintain that he was prepared to enter into power sharing arrangements with Mujibur but could not concede on the virtual independence for East Pakistan that the Sheik Mujibur was demanding.

Whoever was ultimately to blame, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman did indeed incur the wrath of President Yahya who had him arrested and deported to West Pakistan in March 1971. The response of most of the people of East Pakistan was swift and massive with an overwhelming popular revolt breaking out. The Pakistani army responded with ‘Operation Torchlight’ in which East Pakistan’s major cities were secured by indiscriminate mass killing. There was however deliberate targeting of university students and academics to deprive the Bengali people of a leadership cadre to continue a resistance struggle.

In what would later happen in East Timor in 1999, the minority in East Pakistan that was opposed to independence formed death squads to help facilitate violent suppression and provide intelligence to the military to carry out their repression. The members of death squads, such as the Razakars, tended to be supporters of the East Pakistan wing of the PML Convention (as distinct from the PML Council).

The scale of repression was horrendous as it is now estimated that between one and three million East Pakistanis/Bengalis were killed in the nine month (March to December 1971) terror campaign! If it were not for the courage of the Anglo/West Pakistani BBC journalist Anthony Mascarenhas in alerting the world to what was actually happening in East Pakistan June 1971, the Yahya regime may have got away with what constituted genocide. Had military repression succeeded in maintaining East Pakistan, there would have been a consequently negligible support in terms of a collaboration base.

The repression by the West Pakistani army is difficult to comprehend, particularly as the Yahya regime had staked and then apparently vindicated the military’s honour by conducting fair national and provincial elections in 1970. The horrendous irrationality of repression that was undertaken was probably due to the military’s strong sense of almost mystical nationalism. This nationalism had enveloped the armed forces since war had almost immediately broken out following partition in 1947 and the Kashmir border war of 1965.

The army’s equation of support for East Pakistani/Bengali interests with outright treason led to massive repression. With the cities ‘secure’, the Pakistani army and local death squads then proceeded to pre-emptively prevent the guerrilla Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army) from establishing an effective guerrilla force in the countryside.

The Birth of Bangladesh

The Pakistani army’s objective may have been met in preventing the Mukti Bahini from establishing an effective rural insurgency in the short term but the terror campaign still wore down Pakistan’s military resources. The scale of repression in East Pakistan was such that by December 1971 an estimated eight to eleven million refugees had fled to India thereby validating Anthony Mascarenhas’s seemingly implausible reports! The humanitarian catastrophe ensued, combined with the diversion of Pakistan’s military resources enabled India to launch a blitzkrieg invasion/liberation of East Pakistan/ Bangladesh on the 3rd of December 1971 which culminated with the taking of Dacca (Dhaka) on the 16th of December.

The fact that it was really the Indian army, as opposed to the Mukti Bahini, who won the military struggle in the new nation of *Bangladesh did not cause any dissatisfaction among Bangladeshis because the Indians prudently did not overstay their welcome. In an irony of history, the people of East Bengal which had once massively voted for the PML in the 1946 provincial legislative elections, overwhelmingly welcomed the Hindu led Indian army as their liberators.

(*’Bangladesh’ means ‘land of the free’ in Bengali, while ‘Pakistan’, means ‘land of the pure’ in Urdu).

That is not to say that East Pakistan could not have been retained had it not bee for the terror that was inflicted on the local population in 1971. The Pakistani officer corps was overwhelmingly West Pakistani but there were talented East Pakistani officers in the ranks who could have ensured continuing Pakistani national unity had it not been for the repression of 1971.

Two future presidents of Bangladesh, General Ziaur Rahman (president from 1977 until his assassination in 1981 who had been military strongman since a 1975 counter-coup) and General Hussain Muhammad Ershad (president from 1983 to 1990 following a bloodless coup in 1982) were respected officers who might have fulfilled an important role within a continuing East Pakistan establishment.

The Rahman and Ershad regimes understandably later did nothing to re-unite Bangladesh with Pakistan but relations between Dhaka and Islamabad became more cordial under their regimes than what they had been when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (who was murdered, along with most of his family, in a military coup in August 1975 which preceded General Rahman’s coup in November that year) was leader. His surviving daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wajed has led Bangladesh as prime minister since 2009 and had previously done so between 1996 and 2001. She tended to be more pro-India than pro-Pakistan. By contrast, Khaleda Zia, the widow of Ziaur Rahman, who was prime minister between 1991 and 1996 and between 2001 and 2006, is more orientated toward Pakistan than India.

The only important East Pakistani politician who consistently supported Pakistani unity was Nurul Amin who was the leader of the Bengal PML at the time of Pakistan’s establishment in 1947. Had Amin done more as chief minister of East Pakistan in the late 1940s and early 1950s to have secured recognition of Bengali with Urdu (the main language spoken in West Pakistan) as the co-official language of Pakistan, the PML probably would have maintained its electoral dominance in the east and therefore have consolidated the initial sentiment there toward national unity.

West Pakistan Becomes Pakistan

There was still a sufficient degree of personal respect for Amin in East Pakistan for the sincerity of his convictions that he was one of the two successful National Assembly candidates in the 1970 elections of the pro-unity East Pakistan based, Pakistan Democratic Party *(PDP). In an absolutely useless act, as it was a belated, attempt to promote forfeited national unity, President Yahya (despite having inflicted genocide on the Bengali people) appointed Amin as vice-president of Pakistan following the Indian invasion/liberation of East Pakistan in December 1971.

(*The PDP would continue on in remnant form in what became Pakistan).

Amin’s acceptance of the vice-presidency was almost as bizarre as his appointment. Although Amin resigned his nominally senior position in April 1972, he refused to reconcile himself to the east’s secession and remained in what became Pakistan until his death in 1974. The short period of time in which Amin was vice-president was symbolic of what could have been but never really was, (despite a promising start) – genuine equality between East Pakistan and West Pakistan.

But West Pakistan in becoming Pakistan at the end of 1971 amazingly managed to make a fresh start under the leadership of Zulfikar Bhutto. The PPP leader took over as president and martial-law administrator on the 20th of December 1971, four days after the surrender of Dhaka. The new president essentially inherited the apparatus of martial law and the absolute powers of a military president. Bhutto utilized his near absolute powers to productively undertake frenetic activity throughout 1972 (particularly land reform) that restored a positive sense of national purpose*.

(*Even some of Bhutto’s harshest critics later conceded that he achieved formidable accomplishments in 1972 such as the repatriation of Pakistani POWs from Bangladesh and India under the Shimla Agreement that he negotiated with Indian prime minister, Indira Ghandi. Although Bhutto and Gandhi loathed each other, the latter as Indian Opposition Leader publicly later called on the Zia regime to spare the life of the former Pakistan president and prime minister from execution in 1979).

Martial law was lifted in April 1972 and a year later the members of the constituent assembly (the West Pakistani members of the constituent assembly elected in 1970) approved a new constitution. The 1973 Constitution introduced (or re-introduced) a parliamentary system under which Bhutto ceded the position of president (which constitutionally became a titular position) to become prime minister in August that year. It was controversially noteworthy that the five year parliamentary term in August 1973 commenced with the promulgation as opposed to new elections being held.

Whether or not new elections should have been held in 1973 was reflective of the broader question as to whether the Bhutto government was really democratic. The regime was probably on a par with Indira Gandhi’s government (1966 to 1977) during the state of the twenty-one month emergency between 1975 and 1977: a legitimately elected authoritarian regime existing within a democratic constitutional framework. For many Pakistanis, the Bhutto government was still a vast improvement over the two proceeding military dictatorships and a contrast to the pre-1958 nominated civilian governments in that it was directly elected in terms of democratic legitimacy.

National parliamentary elections were also held in India in March 1977, but in contrast to Pakistan where the Bhutto government’s conduct of polls was heavy handed to say the least, the *Indian elections were undoubtedly fairly conducted. Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, national parliamentary elections should have been held in 1973 (which a then popular Bhutto undoubtedly would have unquestionably legitimately won) instead of pent up opposition exploding following the March 1977 elections.

(* Indira Gandhi was reliably informed by Indian military intelligence, the Research Analysis Wing, (RAW) that she would lose if she called overdue national parliamentary elections. Acting on the advice of her son Sanjay’s astrologers, this advice was disregarded and fair elections were held in March 1977 which Gandhi lost. It was still ultimately beneficial for Gandhi that she called the elections and fairly conducted them because there were powerful elements within the military that were going to stage a coup to ensure that credible elections were held under a military backed civil service caretaker government).

The Ambiguous Democracy: Pakistan Between 1972 and 1977

Due to the PPP’s overwhelming 1970 election victory, there was no established political party that could compete by itself against the ruling party without dividing the overall opposition vote. That a viable political alliance of political parties in the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) formed to contest early national elections in March 1977 was due to the prestige of the alliance’s leader, Asghar Khan. He was a respected former commander of the air force who following his retirement in 1969 went into opposition against the soon to fall regime of General Ayub which resulted in his brief house arrest that year.

The retired air-marshal drew attention by courageously speaking out against the repression of the people of East Pakistan in 1971 so that he virtually endorsed Bangladesh independence. Blaming Bhutto as having been intransigent and therefore contributing to the 1971 debacle, Asghar became the major opponent of the new civilian government.

Asghar Khan founded a centrist party, the Tehreek-e-Istialal (Independence Movement) which was a viable political party due to his personal prestige. Respect for Asghar was also crucial in assembling of the PNA, whose constituent members were Islamist, regional political parties and pro-Soviet Marxists. The only other secular national based party (despite its name) in the PNA, beside the Independence Movement, was the PML. The two rival PMLs (PML Convention and PML Council) united in 1973 under the leadership of the previously cited Muhammad Khan Junejo.

Ideological differences within the PNA were overcome by both the strength of anti-Bhutto sentiment and respect for Asghar as a worthy alternative leader of Pakistan. It will never really be known if the charge was correct that Bhutto rigged the March 1977 national elections. Certainly the Bhutto government’s repression against the PNA-led protests was not in keeping with that of a democratic government. The arrest and detention without trial of Asghar Khan between March and early July 1977 outraged much of the nation (including a sufficient number of officers in the armed forces) that it provided General Zia ul-Huq with the pretext and capacity to seize power in a coup on the 5th of July 1977 to ostensibly end the impasse.

The then fifty-three Colonel Zia had previously demonstrated that he was a very capable army officer by brilliantly leading the Jordanian army in stopping an attempted takeover of Jordan by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1970. Due to Zia’s military skill (as outstandingly demonstrated in Jordan in 1970) and apparently sycophantic personality that was in keeping with the comedic obsequiousness of a Terry Thomas character, Bhutto appointed this army general, chief of staff in 1976 over a swag of more senior officers.

The Calculated Procrastination of General Zia

It was with the projected persona of a naïve person that General Zia as the new Martial Law Administrator (he formally took over as president in September 1978) proceeded to hold new impartially conducted elections in ninety days time following the July 5th 1977 coup. With injured innocence, General Zia soon claimed that he uncovered a previously covert police state that obliged him to arrest and try Zulfikar Bhutto for murder. General Zia compared Bhutto’s widely reviled Federal Security Force (FSB) to the Gestapo. Therefore, the recently called October 1977 national elections were ostensibly put back to October 1979 so that Zulfikar Bhutto could be tried.

The detention of Bhutto and his trial on a capital offence polarized Pakistan and has made it is challenging to historically to assess him. As a civilian leader who inherited and maintained (although to what degree is contestable) the apparatus of a military dictatorship, there were undoubted human rights abuses under the Bhutto regime between 1972 and 1977. Instances of a failure to apply the rule of law were manifested by Bhutto having his reviled predecessor *General Yahya indefinitely confined to house arrest without trial and most of the leaders of a 1974 abortive military coup similarly subjected to indefinite detention without trial.

(* Ironically, General Zia’s repressive regime released General Yahya in 1977 and gave him a state funeral in 1980).

Due to Bhutto’s previous abuses and Asghar Khan’s prestige the majority of the Pakistani electorate probably would have voted for the PNA had the elections been held ninety-days later after the July 1977 coup as Zia had promised. But Zia probably never intended to hold democratic elections because he wished to remain permanently in power. Whatever Bhutto’s shortcomings, his April 1979 execution was a brutally pre-determined outcome.

The execution of Bhutto was probably instigated by General Zia on the basis that the PPP would disintegrate without his leadership or that the party’s Marxist inner organisation would ineffectively linger as a ginger group. The deposed prime minister’s dignity on trial and his refusal to ask for clemency consolidated his base of support. But unfortunately for General Zia, the courage of Bhutto’s wife Nusrat and daughter Benazir in rallying supporters during his 1977 to 1978 trial thwarted his intended objective of destroying the PPP by executing its founder.

The dignity with which Nusrat and Benazir rejected violence and called for democratic elections re-assured many Pakistanis who might otherwise have been wary of the late Zulfikar Bhutto’s authoritarianism so that the PPP would probably have won the rescheduled October 1979 elections had these elections not been cancelled. The cancellation of the 1979 elections finally alienated the PNA from Zia but he miscalculated that this multi-ideological anti-Bhutto alliance would disintegrate because opposition to his rule now became its source of unity.

The extent of opposition to Zia was such, that in early February 1981, most of the constituent parties of the PNA (with the notable exception of the Junejo led PML) founded a new alliance that included the PPP. The Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD). The PPP’s leadership role within the MRD was vividly conveyed because representatives of the constituent parties signed their adherence to the expanded opposition alliance at the Bhutto’s Pakistani famous home, 70 Clifton Road, in the affluent Karachi suburb of Clifton. It was noteworthy that, despite Zia’s espoused Islamism, Islamist parties such as Jamaat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam joined the MRD.

To incapacitate the functioning of the new MRD, Benazir and Nusrat Bhutto were promptly arrested by Zia in February 1981. The younger Bhutto was imprisoned for ten months before being transferred to house arrest in the family’s country estate in Larkana in Sindh Province in December 1981. The release of Nusrat Bhutto in November 1982 to depart for West Germany for treatment for cancer resulted in her daughter taking her place to be detained at the 70 Clifton residence. The degree of latitude that Benazir had to oppose the regime under house arrest was restricted to say the least but she often ingeniously managed to still communicate directives to PPP members.

It was ironic that PPP members more often than not out of loyalty to Benazir followed the leadership direction of MRD luminaries who had previously been opponents of the Bhutto regime. Due to the efficiency and steadfastness of the armed forces, the Zia regime was able to withstand a mainly middle class led opposition civil disobedience campaign in August 1983 that was principally co-ordinated by MRD leaders but undertaken by PPP activists at the coal face. Perhaps to separate Bhutto from her father’s former opponents in the MRD, General Zia released Benazir Bhutto in January 1984 so that she could be exiled to London.

Even with Benazir Bhutto in exile, the major problem that the Zia regime confronted still had to be overcome – was its insufficient support base. To broaden his support base, General Zia declared himself to be an Islamist, although he stressed his aversion to fundamentalism. Nevertheless, his military regime still failed to gain adequate support because it misapplied Islamic law on a selective and primitive basis. This was reflected by the regime’s introduction of public floggings and amputations for stealing. The regime’s formal adoption of supposed Sharia law in August 1984 was actually un-Islamic because it declared the legal testimony of a woman to be worth half that of a man’s.

Islam as a religion is actually quite prescriptive with regard to social obligations being stipulated to first practically alleviate and then ultimately overcome poverty. Had the Zia regime supported the principles of Islamic banking (which emphasises up front fees as opposed to perpetually paying interest) and other ideas associated with Islam which stress a person’s individual worth within an economic system, then his regime might have developed a massive support base. Instead, the institution of barbaric practices under the guise of Islam actually helped the Zia regime forge an alliance with the nation’s land owning-would be industry/commercial elite by giving them the latitude to suppress their farming tenants and people living in urban communities in regional Pakistan subject to their influence.

Having failed to establish a support base by his espoused support of Islam, General Zia, (who in contrast to Field Marshal Ayub, did not come from Pakistan’s landowning elite as he was a Muhajir) went into an alliance with the anti-Bhutto component of the nation’s land-owning elite. Indeed, even within the nation’s landowning elite, there was stalwart opposition to the Zia regime.

The major civilian base of support for Zia came from those within the landowning/industrial elite who had previously suffered from the Bhutto regime’s limited nationalizations and land reform. Nawaz Sharif was the epitome of the anti-Bhutto element within the elite that supported the Zia regime. The Sharif family’s steel making business was restored to it by the Zia regime and with state support, combined with Nawaz Sharif’s own financial nous; he became one of Pakistan’s leading industrialists by the 1980s.

As finance minister in the military provincial government of Punjab in the 1980s, Sharif developed a sufficient a political base to be ‘elected’ chief minister of Punjab Province in 1985 in ‘non-party’ elections. His provincial government was popular and as such Sharif’s growing support base vicariously became Zia’s following the restoration of constitutional rule in 1985.

The Zia regime’s limited support base reflected its underwhelming domestic achievements. But in the field of foreign affairs and defence policy, the regime accomplished stellar outcomes by overcoming incredible logistical challenges to help resource the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation. Indeed, the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan popularly became known in Pakistan as ‘Brezhnev’s gift to Zia’. This was because massive American military aid (particularly under the Reagan administration between 1981 and 1988) flowed to the Pakistan military due to their importance in supporting the Afghan Mujahideen.

Belated Political Brilliance: General Zia Shrewdly Institutionalizes His Regime

The military aid that General Zia received from the United States helped insulate him against potential military coups (which a vigilant ISI usually detected and prevented). But the Reagan administration, as well as the wily Zia, knew that a military regime that effectively forgoes its provisional status by its duration in power has to eventually institutionalize if it is to survive. General Zia therefore called a referendum in December 1984 which he presented as a political ‘reform’. The regime claimed that over half the electorate voted but diplomatic and foreign intelligence sources put the electoral turnout at approximately 10%.

The referendum question asked the voter if he or she approved of the president’s intention to promote Islam. The purported 98% percent vote that Zia received in the widely boycotted referendum was constitutionally interpreted by the government as a mandate that gave the general a five year presidential term (commencing with a future parliament electing a new government) and presidential emergency reserve powers (the eighth amendment to the 1973 Constitution).

Having staged a sham referendum, the MRD parties (including the PPP) were consequently hostile to unofficially participating in non-party elections scheduled for the following year. But General Zia shrewdly ensured that the conduct of the vote in the February 1985 national and provincial parliamentary elections was impeccable in terms of honestly undertaking the vote count. Soldiers were deployed at voting booths on election day and in a national broadcast the day before the vote, General Zia stated that the posting of military personnel was to ensure that supporters of candidates could not accost voters and to ensure that the ballots were not tampered with in the count.

The protection that the military had given to all candidates (who were not allowed to hold campaign rallies - but could conduct indoor meetings at private residences) during the election campaign - against harassment and the honesty with which the vote was conducted ensured that most regime backed candidates (including cabinet ministers) lost.

A bemused but still ebullient president in a national broadcast declared himself satisfied with the elections because there had been nearly a *53% voter turnout and that the ballot counting was beyond reproach. Although a clear majority of the successful candidates were thought to be anti-regime to the extent that they had run on implicit anti-government platforms, they were (having participated in the elections in the first place) amenable to electing a government that General Zia could work with.

(* Leaders of the MRD correctly estimated that genuine support for the Zia regime ranged between 10% and 20%. They therefore calculated that an eighty percent boycott of the 1985 non-party national and provincial parliamentary elections would have obliged the Pakistani armed forces and the United States to withdraw their support for General Zia. Instead, the disaggregated nature of the non-party 1985 election results rendered the voting boycott an overall failure because opposition to the Zia regime could not be adequately measured. Consequently, General Zia had an adequate base to establish a new civilian government that a sufficient number of Pakistanis were prepared to at least endure).

A diplomat in Islamabad declared that the opposition (which was a pointed but still non-specific reference to Benazir Bhutto and the PPP) had ‘dropped the ball’ by boycotting the non-party elections that had cleared the way for a new civilian government and a new parliamentary opposition. This criticism of Benazir Bhutto was both incorrect and ignorant of the political situation that she was in at the time.

Benazir Bhutto would have alienated her then political base (including the party’s inner Marxist organisation) by having PPP candidates run as independents in the 1985 elections. The still correlating high rate of abstention rate among voters was indicative of the goodwill that Benazir Bhutto would have forfeited had her party unofficially participated in the non-party elections. The PPP stance of boycotting the 1985 non-party elections ultimately benefited Benazir Bhutto even though the similar boycott position taken by former opponents of her father in the MRD later rebounded on them.

Most of the constituent parties of the MRD were still in positions that were similar to the superseded PNA in that they lacked a sufficient national reach in their own reach as parties. By participating in the 1985 non-party elections, marginalized parties from by-gone eras, such as the PDP, could have established a parliamentary base to subsequently re-generate.

Indeed, Benazir Bhutto probably would have had her political base ultimately appropriated had Asghar Khan’s Independence Movement* unofficially participated in the 1985 non–party elections. Asghar could have endowed the new political system with a degree of legitimacy as parliamentary Opposition Leader. (Zia and Prime Minister Junejo could have introduced legislation re-establishing that post). The Independence Movement leader could then have later won parliamentary elections which might have allowed General Zia to safely retire as president or even continue on in that position.

(*The Independence Movement, as with most non-PPP constituent parties within the MRD, were marginalized as a result of their 1985 boycott. The Asghar led Pakistan People’s Alliance subsequently came a distant third with just over 4% of the vote in the 1988 elections. Today, the cricket legend Imran Khan, after previous failures, seems poised to at last establish a viable political base by assuming the leadership of the remnants of Asghar Khan’s marginal but still respected political movement).

The political party that did revive as a result of unofficially participating in the 1985 non-party elections was the PML. How many of the successful candidates in the 1985 elections won with the backing of the PML or covertly belonged to that then near moribund party is difficult to ascertain. But the historical prestige of the PML was still such that a majority of National Assembly members joined the party following the legalization of political parties in 1986, which had been preceded by the lifting of martial law at the end of December 1985.

Due to astute sequencing of political events, General Zia was in a much stronger political position following the 1985 non-party elections than what Field Marshal Ayub had been in the 1960s after he had institutionalized his regime. It is interesting to speculate that had General Zia been the ruler of Pakistan in 1971, whether his political skills could have engineered the maintenance of national unity.

When an Inner Party Factional Struggle is a Family Feud

The real test for Zia as a ruler of Pakistan after the 1985 elections was still how to contend with the intact massive support for the PPP due to the mystique of the late Zulfikar Bhutto and the charisma of his daughter who had established herself as the custodian of his legacy. This challenge was vividly illustrated in July 1985 when Benazir Bhutto briefly returned to Pakistan for the funeral of her brother Shah Bhutto, who had been poisoned in France at the probable instigation of the ISI. Thousands of Pakistanis turned out at the Bhutto family’s burial crypt in Larkana in Sindh Province for the funeral of Shah and in doing so demonstrated their devoted support for Benazir Bhutto and the PPP.

Just prior to Shah’s murder, Benazir Bhutto was politically (but not personally) estranged from him and her other brother Mir for their advocacy of violence to overthrow the Zia regime. The two Bhutto brothers (who their father prudently despatched into exile following the 1977 coup) had formed Al-Zulfikar Organization (AZO), which was originally a PPP émigré youth group based in London.

The AZO was very successful in organising demonstrations in Europe of expatriate Pakistanis on behalf of Zulfikar Bhutto during his trial and following his sentencing to death. The success of these demonstrations could be gauged not only by the protester turn-out but by the international publicity that they generated on behalf of Zulfikar Bhutto’s plight.

The April 1979 execution of Zulfikar Bhutto led the Bhutto brothers to re-locate to the Afghan capital of Kabul to run the AZO as a violent revolutionary group. The AZO gained international notoriety in March 1981 when it ostensibly hi-jacked a domestic Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plan and diverted it to Kabul.

Nearly two weeks of negotiations between KHAD agents posing as AZO militants talking with the Zia regime stalemated over the demand that fifty-five PPP political prisoners be released from Pakistani prisons. Although fifty prisoners were subsequently released the AZO’s cause in Pakistan was substantially undercut because its militants (or more to the point KHAD agents) shot an innocent passenger on the misassumption that he was the son of a senior Pakistani general.

The real leader/controller of the AZO was the then KHAD chief, the previously cited Mohammad Najibullah. It is fashionable to now believe that the challenged Afghan communist regime did not have a capacity to fight back against the Zia government. This assessment negated the KHAD’s concerted and viable attempt to convert the then persecuted PPP into a revolutionary organisation by bringing it into the orbit of the AZO capable of overthrowing the Zia regime.

An ensuing Leninist regime probably would have been headed by the Bhutto brothers who had apparently become ideological Marxists. The demand for the release of political prisoners during the 1981 PIA hostage crisis was reflective of Najibullah’s determination to recruit a formidable nucleus of a Pakistani guerrilla organisation to overthrow the regime.

Najibullah’s failure to convert the AZO into an effective revolutionary force was one of the key reasons why his communist regime later fell. The ISI was brilliant in stopping the AZO from establishing an effective revolutionary organisation despite the proliferation of weapons brought into Pakistan through Balochistan Province along the western border with Afghanistan. This region became a central point for a thriving arms trade where non-discerning gun traders established a thriving industry. Another important reason why Najibullah failed to convert the AZO into an effective Pakistan based revolutionary organisation was due to the stalwart opposition of Benazir Bhutto to this option.

Benazir’s politically estranged brother Mir Bhutto did not help his cause and ultimately that of the Najibullah regime by having the communist government imprison a leading AZO activist, Raja Anwar in 1980, after he renounced violence and declared his willingness to return to Pakistan to support Benazir Bhutto within the mainstream of the PPP. This Bhutto son’s determination to regiment the AZO deterred a sufficient number of potential PPP activists from moving into his orbit. The murder of genial Shah Bhutto in 1985 (who was also apparently estranged from his brother Mir) in France further undermined the AZO’s effectiveness because he was far more popular within that organisation and the PPP than his older brother.

To distance itself from Mir Bhutto, the Afghan communist regime released Anwar following Shah’s murder and obliged the surviving Bhutto brother to depart for the Syrian capital of Damascus where he now nominally led Al-Zulfikar. This organisation’s decline into a rump was also due to the PPP’s inner Marxist organisation pro-PRC orientation alienating it from the pro-Soviet AZO. Nevertheless, there was still then a Marxist PPP wing that could be activated if Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan.

Benazir Bhutto Assumes Her Father’s Mantle

Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in May 1986 opposed to violence but determined to overthrow General Zia. As previously overviewed, Miss Bhutto’s August 1986 campaign failed due to a sufficient public acceptance of Prime Minister Junejo’s government. Nevertheless, General Zia’s surprising lack of nerve (which may have been derived from a guilt complex for having instigated Zulfikar Bhutto’s 1979 execution) was manifested when he briefly fled to Saudi Arabia with his family in response to Benazir Bhutto’s civil disobedience campaign.

The political ramifications of General Zia’s precipitous flight were that Prime Minister Junejo then systematically undermined and challenged the President’s authority until his dismissal in late May 1988.The death of President Zia in an airplane crash (along with his closest remaining supportive senior armed forces officers) in August 1988 at a time when he was bereft of civilian, military and overseas allies possibly created the context for the ‘accident’ to have occurred which was probably instigated by the KHAD.

Despite the isolated political position that General Zia was in at the time of his death, his political heir Nawaz Sharif went on to become one of Pakistan’s now leading two civilian politicians, first as a rival (Nawaz Sharif) to Benazir Bhutto and later to her widower, Asif Zardari. Sharif began to emerge as the pre-eminent leader of the anti-Bhutto opposition following General Zia’s 1988 death when he led a posthumous pro-Zia wing of the PML against a pro- Junejo wing.

The two PML wings essentially united by both entering the IDA electoral configuration which was formed for the November 1988 general and provincial elections under the guidance of the then ISI chief, General Hamid Gul. Due to the support of Mustafa Jatoi, the leader of the National People’s Party, NPP (composed of Jatoi’s supporter who split from the PPP in 1986) and Sharif still being the Chief Minister of Punjab, he became co-leader of the IDA with Jatoi for the 1988 elections, thereby effectively supplanting Junejo as the stronger PML leader.

Sharif’s victory in the November 1990 elections as the sole leader of the IDA was all but assured when President Ghulum Khan appointed Jatoi acting prime minister following Benazir Bhutto’s dismissal in August that year. The advantages of being supported by a sympathetic caretaker government, Bhutto’s underwhelming performance as prime minister and the alleged corruption of her businessman husband Asif Zardari helped ensure that Sharif’s convincingly IDA win in the November 1990 elections.

The First Sharif Government, 1990 to 1993

The first Sharif government (1990 to 1993) was more corrupt than its immediate predecessor but more effective in distributing patronage (even if there was too much a focus on dispensing largess in Punjab Province) to build up a support base. Despite this obvious government’s corruption, it gained a degree of credibility for prosecuting Zardari and later imprisoning him while he was on trial. In foreign affairs and defence policy, the Sharif government, as with the preceding government, effectively adhered to dictates of the ISI which were orientated toward Pakistan eventually uniting with Afghanistan where Pasthuns are the largest ethnic group.

Sharif, despite being an ethnic Punjab (Pakistan’s largest ethnic group) was (and is) more sympathetic to Pakistan’s Pasthuns, (the nation’s second largest ethnic group) who desire eventual unification with Afghanistan. Benazir Bhutto as an ethnic Sindh (Pakistan’s third largest ethnic group) was less inclined toward having Pakistan unite with Afghanistan than the powerful Pasthuns within the ISI and the armed forces’ officer corps. Benazir Bhutto was also more orientated toward reconciling with India but paradoxically recoiled from doing so due so because as a Sindh she was more desirous of Kashmir uniting with Pakistan due to cultural ties between the Kashmiris and Sindhis regardless of their religious faith.

Despite a secure parliamentary majority and relatively harmonious relations with the ISI and the armed forces, Sharif fell from power in 1993. The prime minister’s fall was due to the inexplicable actions of President Ghulum Khan. In April 1993 President Khan, for motives that have never been ascertained, dismissed Sharif as prime minister but at the end of May the former prime minister was reinstated by order of the Supreme Court. Due to the impasse between the president and the prime minister, the armed forces pressured the two in resigning in July to be succeeded by a caretaker government which admirably organised fair and free national and provincial elections in October 1993.

In something of an upset, Benazir Bhutto’s PPP won a plurality, with 39% of the national vote in the October 1993 elections that she was returned to office as prime minister with the parliamentary support of regional parties and independents. Sharif’s wing of the PML (PML-S) ran by itself to garner 37% of the national vote. Due to internal discordances, the United National Movement (*MQM) boycotted the 1993 election which resulted in a lower election turnout that ultimately benefited the PPP.

(*The MQM was founded in 1984 with the discreet backing of the Zia regime to deprive the PPP of Muhajir votes. This party represents the interests of Muhajirs and was (and still is) particularly strong in the PPP base of Sindh Province. As such, the latter’s (PPP) political fortunes are often reflective of the political position of the MQM).

The Second Bhutto Government, 1993 to 1996: Political Tenacity and Corruption

The second Bhutto government (1990-1993) was both more corrupt but more successful than the first Bhutto one. As prime minister, Bhutto had to contend with a shocking level of inter-communal violence that resulted from Pakistan having a vast array of weapons and cottage gun making industry that was a legacy of supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979 to 1989). A particularly virulent and violent inter-factional dispute within the MQM in Karachi almost became a catalyst for an overall breakdown of law and order in Pakistan.

Due to the free hand that Bhutto gave to the ISI (who had prevented a military coup from being carried out in 1995 by Islamic fundamentalist army officers) and the armed forces to support the Taliban in Afghanistan, the prime minister received sufficient support from the security services to maintain order to the extent of preventing anarchy from engulfing the country. The commendable fortitude that the prime minister displayed was counteracted by her toleration of her husband’s brazen corruption which (as previously mentioned) earned him the nickname, ‘Mr. Ten Percent’.

It was alleged that the ‘First Gentleman’ muscled in on major business deals to maintain a power base for the PPP regime to maintain its position within the ruthless world of Pakistani politics. Ironically, it was at the point that Benazir Bhutto had seemingly triumphed in a domestic context by overcoming a myriad of violent challenges that she fell, ostensibly due to an internal party dispute when her supposedly close political ally *President Farooq Ahmed Leghari dismissed her in November 1996.

(*Leghari was elected president by an electoral college November 1993 composed of representatives of the National Assembly and provincial assemblies. The election of this then PPP stalwart capped off an amazingly successful year for Benazir Bhutto).

Prime Minister Bhutto’s 1996 dismissal was ostensibly due to the controversy concerning the murder of her brother Mir in September that year. The younger Bhutto had returned to Pakistan in 1993 to become a focal point of opposition for the PPP’s left-wing inner party organisation which was becoming marginalized and hostile due to Zardari’s growing power and obvious corruption. Mir Bhutto may not have been an ideal alternative to his sister because his previous authoritarianism as leader of Ali Zulfikar suggested a violent non-compromising personality.

A Revived Family Feud Brings Down a Government

Mir Bhutto’s death itself was violent as he was killed by police in September 1996 after a warrant for his arrest had been issued for his previously inciting violent demonstrations. The question regarding his death was whether it was really for resisting arrest or whether his death was premeditated. For many, if not most PPP members, Mir’s death was regarded as a murder and his sister Benazir’s prime ministerial car was pelted with stones thrown by his PPP supporters when she arrived at his funeral. The unease concerning Mir’s death undermined Benazir Bhutto’s credibility to the extent that the nation quietly approved President Leghari’s dismissal of her in November 1996.

Benazir Bhutto’s credibility was further undermined by Malik Mirage Khan being appointed as the succeeding caretaker prime minister. Malik was a highly respected member of the PPP who had previously served with distinction as *national parliamentary speaker. His caretaker prime ministership conveyed an aura of legitimacy regarding the second Bhutto dismissal because Malik had been one of her father’s most popular and honest stalwarts such that his personal integrity had reflected what the PPP had seemingly aspired to be.

(*Similar to Sir Billy Snedden who honourably served as Speaker of the Commonwealth Parliament of Australia between 1976 and 1982).

Nearly twenty years after allegations that the PPP had rigged the March 1977 elections to win a parliamentary majority, the *PML–S apparently won a parliamentary majority in the February 2007 elections with 45% of the vote. This election victory was probably legitimate because the PML-S was able to maximize its vote due to a relatively low turnout of 35% of the electorate. The 20% of the vote that the PPP garnered (with a disproportionate amount of support coming from Sindh Province) represented the core of that party’s support base.

(*The ‘S’ in PML-S, denoted the Sharif wing of the PML).

Benazir Bhutto achieved a victory of sorts in the 1997 elections by persuading her previously hostile mother Nusrat (who had supported Mir against Zardari) to stand in the family bailiwick of Larkana as the PPP candidate against Ghinwa Bhutto, Mir’s widow. Had *Nusrat Bhutto instead stood as a candidate of the breakaway pro-Mir PPP-Shaheed Bhutto (PPP-SB) in the 1997 elections she still undoubtedly would have won the seat and perhaps then been able to attract a majority of the other twelve PPP national parliamentarians to break with her daughter. As it was, the rump of PPP parliamentarians on convening following their election defiantly declared Benazir Bhutto to be Chairperson for Life of the PPP.

(*The real leader of PPP-SB, Ghinwa Bhutto, is still leading this minor party as a potential vehicle should her step-daughter Fatima later go into politics).

Making Benazir Bhutto the Chairperson for life of the PPP was more than a symbolic gesture because the party’s future was essentially tied to the destiny of the Bhutto family. In practical terms however, leadership of the PPP passed to Zardari in 1998 after Benazir departed into exile to escape probable trial and conviction for corruption. Incredibly, it was the previous feckless playboy Asif Zardari who remained in Pakistan to face the music with regard to being tried and imprisoned.

As noble as Zardari’s fortitude may have seemed, his imprisonment was mitigated by a politically shrewd (as opposed to a compassionate) Prime Minister Sharif ensuring that the former ‘First Gentleman’ was well treated in prison. The prime minister allowed Zardari to maintain his business and political contacts to run the PPP. In doing this not only did Prime Minister Sharif prudently take out an insurance policy in case he was later deposed and imprisoned but by having the incarcerated Zardari lead the PPP was shrewd because it was believed that that this party could not win future elections under his leadership.

For the London based Benazir Bhutto, her incarcerated husband’s leadership of the PPP meant that a coherent party organisation was maintained but that the party could not win an election under his leadership. In a nation whose politics are ‘as dog eat dog’ as Pakistan’s, it is difficult to answer the question of whether self-interest is self-generated, undertaken out of necessity or a balance between these two factors?

Certainly, the second Sharif government (1997 to 1999) was an unambiguously self-interested regime that was more powerful and corrupt than the first Sharif government. The only democratic reform that the second Sharif government introduced (with the ironical but still understandable support of the PPP) was to repeal in 1997 amendment eight of the constitution. This clause had given a Pakistani president the right to dismiss a government and schedule elections within 90 days under a caretaker government that he could appoint.

The Second Sharif Government, 1997 to 1999: When Political Consolidation Leads to a Fall

But in 1998 Sharif used the PML-S’s majority in the lower house of the National Assembly to pass the fifteenth amendment to the constitution which would give government virtual dictatorial executive powers to facilitate the application of Islamic law as it saw fit. The passage of amendment eight (which was due for ratification by the Senate in 2000) would have so entrenched the power of the Sharif regime that it might have been possible to have democratically removed that government.

Because the instituting of Islamic law was to be the government’s prerogative, the Sharif regime could have mis-interpreted and thereby mis-applied Sharia law to consolidate its power. Consequently, a de facto civilian dictatorship for Pakistan may have ensued to help the nation unite with Afghanistan which was then ruled by the Taliban.

Sharif’s sincerity with regard to really applying Islamic law was also questionable because his government’s corruption violated the ethical tenants of Islam. Political largess was distributed by the second Sharif government to bolster the PML-S at the expence of undertaking economic reform conducive to national viability. It is a pity that this Sharif government did not use its relatively powerful position to address the profound socio-economic challenges that confront Pakistan such as inequitable land ownership.

Another major problem that confronts Pakistan is an insufficient tax base. Pakistani governments are usually submissive to the interests of wealthy land owners with industrial commercial interests whose political and economic power is often reflected by their paying insufficient taxes. The poor (who make up the bulk of the population) themselves often have insufficient income to be taxed. But the poor in return for receiving largess from the elite, vote and support a particular political party, thereby perpetuating a vicious circle/cycle.

The military is another factor (besides the power of the nation’s land-owning elite) in Pakistan’s politics that helps determine national viability. The leadership corps of the Pakistani armed forces are a mixture of senior officers who come from a wealthy landowning background and those who have risen up the ranks due to their professional leadership skill. As an institution that was forged in war with the nation’s establishment following the 1947 partition, the Pakistani armed forces is both professional and nationalistic.

The leadership of Pakistan’s armed forces will therefore intertwine external foreign relations with domestic dynamic considerations with regard to maintaining national unity. For the Pakistan armed forces and the ISI, domestic national strength and unity are linked to international alliances and the actual strength of external allies. Following the 1971 debacle, the Pakistan armed forces and the ISI assess international alliances based on their allies’ military capacity and political willingness.

The Sharif government in contrast to the second Bhutto government (which was uneasy concerning the Taliban and the prospect of Afghanistan and Pakistan eventually merging) was seemingly aligned to the strategic imperatives of the armed forces and the ISI. The only slight potential area of division within the armed forces and between elements of the armed forces and the ISI was over whether priority should be given to supporting guerrillas in Kashmir opposed to the province remaining in union with India or to assisting the Taliban consolidate its power in Afghanistan following their capture of Kabul in 1996.

Because Prime Minister Sharif was seemingly so entrenched in power, the only remote threat to his power was for him to exploit tepid divisions within the armed forces over Afghanistan and Kashmir to consolidate his power – thereby risking the remote prospect of a military coup. But this is exactly what Sharif did in October 1999 when he attempted to use the ISI against the regular army by dismissing the army chief of staff and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSS), General Pervez Musharraf by replacing him with the then Director of the ISI, General Ziauddin Butt.

The attempted purge of General Musharraf took on a sinister dimension when the prime minister refused the PIA flight that the general was flying on permission to land at Karachi International Airport. A composed General Musharraf was still able to order a military coup from the cockpit of the plane and the subsequent arrival of troops at the airport ensured the plane’s safe landing. This purge may have succeeded had General Butt moved to resist General Musharraf’s coup order. However, *General Butt surprised that his rival’s radio ordered coup was being undertaken himself ordered that there be no resistance to maintain the unity of the armed forces.

(*General Musharraf’s worst personal abuse of power was that he had General Butt detained for two years even though this general’s refusal to oppose the October 12th 1999 coup resulted in its success. Perhaps General Musharraf forewent any sense of gratitude because he believed that General Butt had been complicit in Prime Minister Sharif’s order denying the plane he was travelling on landing rights, thereby endangering his life and that of the flight’s passengers and crew).

A Cautious General Seizes Power in an Audacious Coup

The October 1999 military coup of General Musharraf was the least self-seeking of the two to three coups (if the 1969 transfer of power from Field Marshal Ayub to General Yahya is considered a coup) that Pakistan had experienced. The new military ruler, who styled himself as ‘Chief Executive’ while allowing *President Muhammad Rafiq Tarar to remain in his constitutional position. To the general public’s surprise and that of the armed forces, martial law was not imposed thereby giving credence to the new military ruler’s claim that his rule would be temporary.

(* President Tarar was a staunch supporter of Sharif’s who was elected to this position in late 1997 after the prime minister had virtually forced President Leghari to resign despite his dismissal of Benazir Bhutto facilitating his return to power. General Musharraf politely but suddenly deposed President Tarar in June 2001 to become President in addition to being Chief Executive).

General Musharraf had the initial advantage that most Pakistanis were disenchanted with the exiled Benazir Bhutto and the imprisoned Sharif that most were then prepared to at least endure his rule. The new ruler’s concern seemed to be to prevent the prospect of Nawaz Sharif ever returning to office so that he (General Musharraf) could later return the nation to civilian rule without retribution to himself. Nevertheless, in a seemingly ominous de ju vu when the Musharraf regime appealed against the Supreme Court’s life imprisonment sentence on Sharif in March 2000 for attempted murder (i.e. the denial of landing rights to the plane that General Musharraf was on in October 1999) and for tax evasion, to seek the death penalty for Sharif.

To placate fears that he was going to establish a military regime similar to General Zia’s, General Musharraf eventually accepted Sharif’s life sentence. At the insistence of Saudi Arabia, which are is a staunch supporter of Sharif, the former prime minister was released from prison at the end of 2000 to be banished to that kingdom. With Bhutto in London and her husband in prison the first years of General Musharraf’s rule until the September 2001 terrorist attacks were relatively uneventful. Consequently, the new military ruler was in a comparatively strong position to shape Pakistan according to his personal specifications.

When a Political Liberal Presides Over an Authoritarian Regime

As fervent admirer of Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, General Musharraf considered himself to be a political liberal who found himself in the somewhat invidious position of being a military ruler. The first three non-constitutional years (1999 to 2002) of the Musharraf regime were characterised by a high turnover of politically liberal civilian cabinet ministers who resigned due to their frustration that the general seemed either incapable or unwilling to break the coercive power of the military with regard to their carrying out arrests and indefinitely detaining political prisoners.

The dual nature of the military regime’s first three years was also reflected in allowing the press latitude to personally criticize Musharraf while strictly forbidding any media reference to the pervasive military apparatus which crushed any sign of dissent that was remotely conducive to fostering an Islamist insurgency. An efficient ISI brilliantly and pre-emptily crushed any insurgency from emerging in Pakistan. Crucial to the ISI’s domestic success was its own ties to Al-Qaeda/ Taliban in Afghanistan.

General Musharraf as a senior officer had previously approved the ISI’s support for the Taliban because links could be fostered with Al-Qaeda to support Islamists in Kashmir to oppose the province’s continued union with India. As a Muhajir and a war hero of the brief border conflict between Pakistan and India in 1965 over Kashmir, General Musharraf’s passion was for this province to eventually join Pakistan. Although General Musharraf understandably found the domestic policies of the Taliban regime abhorrent as a matter of strategic realpolitik, he supported the ISI’s alliance with the Afghan regime so long as it was conducive to facilitating Pakistan’s eventual union with Kashmir.

The potentially contradictory nature of General Musharraf’s strategic calculations vividly came to the fore following the September 11 200l Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on American territory. Was Pakistan to essentially forgo its alliance with the United States to support the Taliban or forfeit a capacity to eventually unite with Kashmir by supporting Al-Qaeda backed insurgencies in that province?

When International Strategic Considerations Determine Domestic Policy

While General Musharraf was horrified by the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States he still based his decision on whether or not to support an inevitable American invasion/liberation of Afghanistan on strategic security considerations. As General Musharraf candidly admitted in his 2006 memoirs, he actually considered opposing American-led military action in Afghanistan. The general feared that, if he supported the United States, there could be a pro-Taliban revolt in Pakistan. Although General Musharraf made no reference to the ISI being hostile to an American intervention in Afghanistan, this also would have been an objective factor in orientating him against supporting the United States.

The ISI’s initial acceptance of the American liberation of Afghanistan was undoubtedly due to General Musharraf forwarding his strategic analysis to the military’s top brass (which encompasses the ISI) that Pakistan’s security interests could not afford to alienate a United States that was determined to overthrow the Taliban as part of its strategy of destroying Al-Qaeda. Furthermore, the American decision to install a Rome Group government in Kabul that was aligned with General Dostum’s post-communist Khalq faction would have reconciled the ISI into not opposing the American invasion of Afghanistan.

The American installation of a Rome Group/Khalq regime in 2001 by definition meant the exclusion of the Northern Alliance coalition that could have established a stable regime in Kabul, thereby allowing the American led military coalition to soon expeditiously exit. The return to power at this time of an American supported Northern Alliance Afghan government would have stabilized the military situation to the extent that foreign troops would not have been needed in Afghanistan on a long time basis. Due to a hypothetical Northern Alliance government being dependant upon American non-combatant military and financial aid, the United States would have had the necessary leverage to have fostered democratic political reform in Afghanistan.

It will probably never be known if General Musharraf at the instigation of the ISI advised the Bush administration in 2001 to install a Rome Group/Khalq government in Kabul. The virtual exclusion of the Northern Alliance from the newly installed Afghan government in 2001 and from the subsequently new Afghan armed forces (which allied nations have superfluously expended considerable human and material resources into constructing by forgoing the support of the Northern Alliance) created the scenario for the Taliban/Al-Qaeda to later rebound.

The extent and capacity of the ISI to assist Taliban/Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to rebound has correlated with the degree to which the United States has been militarily and politically focussed in Afghanistan. The overwhelming power of the United States military action in Afghanistan in 2001 and the revulsion that most Afghanis felt toward the Taliban made a comeback implausible. After 2003, the American military focus in Afghanistan was understandably diverted by the United States led liberation of Iraq.

Splitting the Difference: Pakistan Supports Both the US and the Taliban

The United States further undermined its capacity to effectively apply military power in Afghanistan and to influence domestic politics in Kabul by placing coalition forces under United Nations (UN) command. Notionally, it is commendable that an international military force be under a multi-national authority but the reality in Afghanistan has been and is that this ambiguity has allowed the ISI to pursue a ‘double game’ strategy. The essence of this strategy has been for the Pakistani military to alternately provide effective support to both the Taliban and coalition troops.

Ambiguity is the key to the success of the ISI ‘double game’ strategy by keeping the United States sufficiently on side with Pakistan while still endowing Al-Qaeda/Taliban with a regenerative capacity by providing sufficient intelligence of where to hide in order to recuperate. A military force that cannot prevail against a guerrilla force at best can hope for a stalemate. Which side prevails in the context of a stalemated guerrilla war is often determined by the political situation. This will be the case in Afghanistan.

The Karzai government’s inherent weaknesses are such that a stalemated guerrilla war will lead to an eventual Taliban takeover. Indeed, the Karzai government has pursued its own ‘double game’ of alternately opposing the Taliban forces and/or covertly maintaining links with its ostensible enemy so as to later make way for them. The only really substantial political impact of the Karzai government has been to deny the Northern Alliance/Massoud faction from making a contribution to effectively oppose the Taliban.

Afghanistan’s flawed political context could have been countered by a successful American led military strategy. It is therefore unfortunate that President Obama overruled a troop surge in Afghanistan similar to the one previously undertaken in Iraq. This troop surge strategy was proposed by *General Stanley Mc Crystal in 2009 but vetoed by President Obama who as a senator had previously proposed legislation in 2007 that would have impeded the deployment of more American troops in Afghanistan and precipitated an early military withdrawal.

(*General Mc Crystal did however overstep constitutional bounds by publicly trying to pressure the president into accepting his proposed surge strategy. This regrettable action therefore obliged President Obama to dismiss General Mc Crystal as American military commander in Afghanistan in 2009).

Criticism that the president was not dedicated in opposing the Taliban in Afghanistan was apparently off-set by his sending more American troops after 2009 to Afghanistan from Iraq. But why undermine American influence in Iraq where the presence of American troops was crucially underpinning an emerging political balance to another country (Afghanistan) to unnecessarily fight in a protracted war because a probably successful military strategy had not previously been applied?

Having squandered a military victory in Iraq by prematurely withdrawing American troops in December 2011, the political ramifications will be that this nation will pass into the orbit of republican Iran to be partitioned by that nation in conjunction with a resurgent Al-Qaeda and by Turkey as part of the process of converting a stalwart pro-western nation into a close ally of Tehran’s.

The correlation between a military context and a political context is now occurring in Afghanistan as the ramifications of Karzai government’s own ‘double game’ strategy actually transforms American foreign policy. The United States having gone into Afghanistan in 2001 to eliminate the Taliban and having been in that country for over ten years is now prepared to negotiate with that Afghan affiliate of Al-Qaeda the effective terms by which the Taliban will return to power in Kabul!

That the American State Department is now prepared (with the acquiesce of the Karzai government) to release *Al-Qaeda/Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay as part of prelude to negotiations with the Taliban will also create a political context in Afghanistan that will enable its Al-Qaeda affiliate to achieve military victory.

(*It was, and is, wrong of the United States to have detained these probable terrorists for over ten years without trial. But to release them so that they can be part of a soon to be restored Afghan Taliban regime that will have a greater capacity to threaten democratic interests around the world still makes no sense. The Guantanamo prisoner’s rights would not paradoxically be advanced by being promptly charged and receiving a fair trial).

Although Al-Qaeda has previously being hostile to the Iranian republic, these two powers have a common agenda of incapacitating American power in international affairs. Therefore the now impending Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will ensure that Pakistan enters into an anti-western alliance with the Iranian republic. The culmination of the ISI’s ‘double game’ in Afghanistan has been to solidify Pakistan’s covert alliance with republican Iran at the expence of the United States.

The Musharraf Regime: A Transition to What?

The historical significance therefore of the Pervez Musharraf regime (1999 to 2007/2008) was to fulfil a vital transitionary role with regard to Pakistan moving into alliance with republican Iran. Pakistan’s move into the orbit of republican Iran was intertwined with Pakistani domestic politics of the Musharraf era. It was therefore a pity that the United States did not adequately support General Musharraf remaining on as president following the unambiguous return to civilian rule in 2007. Greater care should have been taken by the general and the United States to have safeguarded Benazir Bhutto against assassination in late 2007 because a Bhutto/ Musharraf alliance was the best hope for a democratic pro-western Pakistan.

General Musharraf as a combination of a nationalist and a political liberal who based his decisions on dispassionate strategic analysis as a military ruler was orientated toward eventually establishing a pro-American democratic regime. As often happens in American foreign policy (and is now occurring with regard to Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey) the eye has been ‘taken off the ball’ with regard to focusing on and affecting the dynamics of a nation’s domestic politics at the expense of the United State’s strategic position in the world.

Had the American State Department paid closer attention to Pakistani politics before the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, then the United States would have been in a stronger position to have undermined Al-Qaeda’s capacity to have waged an international terrorist campaign by indirectly challenging their position in Afghanistan.

The above cited gap should have been addressed following the United States post-2001 military engagement because military victory can be cancelled out by political negligence. Until the September 11th 2001 terror attacks, there was probably little American compunction to focus on Pakistani politics following the October 1999 military coup. This was regrettable because the pre-September 11 political balance in Pakistan was such that General Musharraf was obliged to support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan due to the dictates of the ISI in return for military intelligence supporting his determination to have Kashmir enter into union with Pakistan.

With regard to General Musharraf’s domestic political situation, his overriding political objective was initially to ‘dismount the tiger’ by doing what no other previous Pakistani military ruler had yet done: gracefully leave power when his capacity to hold on to power had expired. The first months, if not two years, were promising with regard to Musharraf fulfilling that objective. Unusually for a military government, there was a Supreme Court ruling in 2000 that constitutionally legitimised his 1999 coup as in keeping with the ‘doctrine of necessity’ while giving the military regime three years to cede office to a newly elected civilian government.

With the benefit of hindsight, General Musharraf should have followed the precedent set by General Abdel al-Dahab after he took power in a military coup in The Sudan in April 1985: expeditiously hold democratic elections for a new civilian government. The al-Dahab military government promptly released political prisoners upon taking office, held promised elections a year later in April 1986 and ceded power to the newly elected government a month later.

The broad principle that General as-Dahab adhered to was that of concentrating on the mechanics of organising democratic elections for a new government in lieu of fixing long standing problems. This approach may seem ‘conservative’ (in a negative context of this term) but the role of provisional governments should be to organise elections in order to make way for democratic governments. Provisional governments that do this can triumph despite overwhelming odds by concentrating on the possible to achieve the impossible*.

(*An example of a tremendously successful provisional government was that of Hector Garcia Godoy, who was provisional president of the Dominican Republic between 1965 and 1966).

The general could have achieved the almost impossible feat of being a Pakistani military ruler who, on ceding power, found his reputation enhanced rather than diminished to the point of pulverization had he refrained from formally assuming the presidency and held impartial elections by not forming his own party (or PML wing). By conducting impartial elections, General Musharraf could have been in at least as strong, if not stronger position, than what he was before the October 1999 coup.

Because Sharif (who had been legitimately tried and found guilty) and Benazir Bhutto were both in exile in 2002, this would have ensured that whichever of the two major parties (i.e. PPP and the PML-S) had won elections under an impartial Musharraf regime, the new elected government could not have been led by the two aforementioned leaders. Consequently, either a PPP or a PML led government would have lacked the requisite power to have removed General Musharraf as army chief of staff with their respective leaders politically incapacitated.

As continuing army chief of staff under a future elected civilian government, General Musharraf would have maintained pre-eminence in defence and national security matters. The general could therefore have served out his previously designated term as army chief to be able to retire without fear of retribution.

Therefore whatever the merits of his regime’s avowedly reformist Local Government Ordinance 2000, this reform was a mistake because General Musharraf had commenced on the slippery slope of institutionalizing his regime by holding local government elections in 2000 and 2001. Institutionalization of provisional military governments inevitably leads to the military leader becoming a dictator and having enemies.

The Democracy/Dictatorship Pendulum: The Musharraf Regime Institutionalizes

The point of no-return for Musharraf’s provisional military government becoming a quasi-dictatorship (as opposed to a fully fledged dictatorship) was seemingly reached when the Pakistani people voted in a referendum (which had a verbose and biased question) in late April 2002 asking them to give General Musharraf a five year presidential term. The purported affirmative 98% of the vote, with officially over 43 million people voting, might have been dismissed as another cynical power legitimization by a military dictator. But President Musharraf in a national broadcast following the declaration of the results cited abuses in the conduct of the vote that he apparently subliminally rescinded the referendum result.

Having possibly restored faith with the people by calling into question the validity of a referendum that he had officially won, General Musharraf then scheduled simultaneous national and provincial elections for October 2002. President Musharraf had either consciously or intuitively adhered to the Zia sequence of holding a rigged referendum granting a presidential term followed by credible legislative elections to gain public acceptance of the new constitutional order. A major departure from the Zia model was that the 2002 elections were held on a party basis.

It was ironic that the exiled Sharif was a major opponent of Musharraf’s in the 2002 elections because the former prime minister had been a protégé and political heir to the military dictatorship of General Zia. In another irony, the PML-S -which could not have been established had Zia not previously utilized the PML as his regime’s governmental party- ran as a major opposition party to the Musharraf military regime as it sought to institutionalize. Not wishing to concede the PML mantle to Sharif, General Musharraf established the *PML-Q to run as the governmental party in the October 2002 legislative elections.

(*’Q’ denoted ‘Quaid-e-Azam’ which is part of the honouring citation for Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the founder of Pakistan).

Although the PML-Q was mainly composed of defectors from PML-N, Sharif still managed to maintain a substantial following so that his party remained electorally viable. The convolutedness concerning the issue of PML appellation (there have since been further PML splits and reconfigurations) did not negate that the major non-PML secularist party that competed was the exiled Benazir Bhutto’s PPP, which in the 2002 elections ran as the Pakistan People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPPP). The electoral mix was further complicated by the nation’s established Islamist parties forming a five party alliance called the United Council of Action (MMA).

The 2002 parliamentary elections (despite the protests of Imran Kahn) were, in the main, fairly conducted. The regime backed PML-Q (25.7% of the national vote) came first in the number of seats with the PPPP coming second even though it garnered a slightly higher percentage of the popular vote (25.8% of the national vote). The major upset was that the MMA came third (11.3% of the national vote) in the number of parliamentary seats. Until the 2002 elections Islamist parties (or a configuration of Islamist parties) had not polled as well in Pakistan parliamentary elections.

The major ‘loser’ in the 2002 elections was the PML-S which came fourth (9.4% of the national vote). Nevertheless, there was still consolation for the exiled Sharif because his party had maintained a respectable electoral base despite been wracked by prior defections to the regime backed PML-Q. The MQM came a distant fifth (3.1% of the national vote) but remained the prime representative of Muhajir interests. Regional and minor parties (including electoral configurations) came in behind the MQM.

The political manoeuvres following the elections to form a new government were complicated by the intertwining of domestic and international factors. The MMA having coming in third in the 2002 elections was in a position to form a coalition with the PML-Q but this was understandably impossible because some of the parties within the Islamist alliance had links to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

President Musharraf was able to form a government (with Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali as prime minister) in November 2002 after most parliamentarians from the PPPP ostensibly broke with Benazir Bhutto to form the *Patriots, which in conjunction with the MQM, gave the PML-Q a parliamentary majority. There was a degree of parliamentary instability regarding government formation in the parliamentary term between 2002 and 2007 due to factional disputes within the ruling PML-Q and disagreements between the coalition parties. These political disputes were paradoxically worthwhile because they facilitated a degree of needed democracy in Pakistan’s body politic.

(*The Patriots, which had formally adopted the PPP name to distinguish themselves from Benazir Bhutto’s PPPP, later returned to the Bhutto camp. The re-united party went by the original party name and initials, the PPP. The Patriots/PPP were probably loyal to Benazir’s then imprisoned husband, Asif Zardari).

Nevertheless, the prime ministership of Shaukat Aziz (2004 to 2007) was considered a success by most objective observers of Pakistani politics due to his economic achievements. Aziz (who is a brilliant economist) was able to establish and maintain credit lines due to his international financial connections. These were crucial in securing the viability of the Pakistani economy despite political turbulence in the south Asian/sub-continent region. Prime Minister Aziz had previously been a success as finance minister to which position he was appointed following the October 1999 coup. The Aziz government lasted until the National Assembly’s term expired in November 2007.

The success of the Aziz government did not mean that General Musharraf’s presidency was without controversy- far from it. The major domestic controversy in Pakistani politics was the enactment of the Legal Framework Ordinances (LFO) with the passage of the seventeenth amendment to the constitution by the National Assembly in late December 2003. The adoption of amendment seventeen was really a reinstatement of General Zia’s amendment eight in that it gave the president the power to dismiss national and provincial governments and concurrently dissolve national and provincial legislatures.

The seventeenth amendment could not have been passed without the support of the MMA and the question arises as to why this major opposition parliamentary group voted for this amendment? The essential reason is that the MMA was aligned to the ISI whose power was institutionalized by amendment seventeen creating a new supra National Security Council (NSC).

Since the passage of the seventeenth amendment, responsibility for Pakistan’s defence and national security officially rests with the NSC as opposed to the national government. It is true that the president, prime minister, leader of the opposition and chief ministers are members of the NSC which has helped co-opt the civilian elite into accepting the military’s strategic direction. But effective power on this council rests with the armed forces chiefs of staff and the officers who are co-opted as members. The MMA supported the institutionalization of military-political power via the NSC to facilitate Pakistan’s so-called ‘double game’.

Pakistan’s Double Game

The double game has been where different sections of Pakistan’s armed forces have genuinely assisted the American led coalition war effort in Afghanistan while other components have covertly helped the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The ebbs and flows of this strategy are too complicated to detail, except to say that the functioning of the NSC has maintained the unity of Pakistan’s armed forces despite different sections pursuing conflicting military objectives.

Whether the double game resulted in Pakistan helping the American led military effort succeed or the Taliban to later return to power was ultimately dependant upon domestic political factors. President Musharraf (who, as a Muhajir was focused on Kashmir as opposed to Afghanistan) was generally aligned to the United States. The president’s decision to stay on as army commander after an electoral college composed of the National Assembly and provincial legislatures elected him to a three and a half year term in January 2004 infuriated the *MMA.

(* The MMA had won a majority in the provincial legislature in the North-West Frontier Province. Having a MMA provincial government in a province that neighbours Afghanistan was crucial for the pro-Taliban component of the Pakistani military pursuing a double game strategy).

President Musharraf’s reneging of his prior commitment to the MMA to stand down at the end of 2004 as army chief of staff enraged the Islamist alliance leaders because they knew that, as army commander, he would have the necessary power to tilt Pakistan’s double game agenda toward a coalition victory in Afghanistan. Ultimately General Musharraf’s capacity to stay on as army commander was reliant on the political arrangements he had made to stay on as president. In the context of Pakistan’s domestic and international relations, that meant General Musharraf having to enter into a political alliance with Benazir Bhutto.

How and Why A Bhutto/Musharraf Alliance would have Tilted Pakistan’s Double Game in Favour of the United States

A Bhutto/Musharraf alliance was logical because they had a common arch-enemy in Nawaz Sharif and were both essentially pro-American in that they were opposed to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Although Bhutto was now a tarnished figure for many Pakistanis the PPP still had bedrock support in the family home province of Sindh and the party had an overall national voting base of approximately twenty five percent. General Musharraf therefore secretly met with Benazir Bhutto in the United Arab Emirate city of Abu Dhabi in July 2007 to thrash out a political deal.

It is probable that a deal between Bhutto and Musharraf was reached because the former returned from exile on the 18th of October 2007. The crowds that greeted Bhutto were considerably smaller than those that welcomed her upon her triumphant return in May 1986 but the 2007 supporter turnout still indicated the PPP’s leader’s voting base was intact.

To secure his political base General Musharraf had been elected to a five year term by an electoral college (composed of delegates from the National Assembly and provincial legislatures) on the 6th of October 2007. The immediate challenges that subsequently confronted General Musharraf were to ensure that he was constitutionally secure in his position as president and maintained the support of the armed forces.

It may eventually have been counterproductive but General Musharraf moved to secure his constitutional position by arbitrary means. The Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was suspended in March 2007 thereby precipitating mainly middle class protests led by a lawyers’ movement. The dismissal of other justices from the bench and their replacement by pro-regime appointees only increased unrest. To prevent civil unrest from threatening his position, General Musharraf declared a state of emergency which was lifted on the 15th of December after the pro-regime Supreme Court had inevitably declared his election to the presidency legal.

The heavy handed actions that General Musharraf took to secure his position were ultimately dependant upon the support of the armed forces, so that he resigned as army chief of staff the day before he was sworn in for a five year term on the 29th of November 2007. Musharraf’s replacement as army chief of staff (officially Chief of Army Staff, COAS) was General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, who had retired as ISI Director-General to take up his new position. Kiyani’s successor as ISI chief was General Nadeem Taj. Generals Kiyani and Taj were both considered to be pro-Taliban in the context of Pakistan’s double game.

The respective promotional appointments of General Kiyani and General Taj were due to their apparent loyalty to General Musharraf having previously saved him from an assassination attempt by pro-Taliban officers in December 2003. A paradox of their links to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda was that the two generals were able to thwart terrorist actions by the two-aforementioned organisations in Pakistan.

From General Musharraf’s perspective, the inter-military balance with regard to the double game strategy was viable so long as the unity of the armed forces was maintained via the power balance on the NSC. For President Musharraf to assert his anti-Taliban orientation in the double game context on the NSC, he needed Benazir Bhutto to be a member on the council as prime minister.

The Bhutto/ Musharraf Alliance That Never Was

For Benazir Bhutto to win the January 2008 elections, it was essential that her life be protected. For this reason she was placed under genuine protective house arrest custody on November 8th 2007 due to the plausible threats of assassination by Al-Qaeda operatives. With the benefit of hindsight, Benazir Bhutto should have been kept under protective house arrest to safeguard her life and consequently increase the PPP vote. Both outcomes would have increased, if not virtually guaranteed, that Benazir Bhutto would have formed a coalition government with Musharraf’s PML-Q.

A Bhutto-Musharraf government would have orientated Pakistan’s military toward helping facilitate a coalition victory in Afghanistan with regard to Pakistan’s ‘double game’. As it was, Benazir Bhutto (who had survived an earlier assassination attempt following her return) was assassinated by a suicide bomber on December 27th 2007 in Rawalpindi. That Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the assassination was predictable because it was in their strategic interests that Benazir Bhutto die and it helped conceal possible involvement by elements within the military that supported the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The domestic and international political ramifications of the assassination were profound as they were almost immediate. From his exile in Abu Dhabi, Asif Zardari announced that he and his nineteen year old son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari were succeeding Benazir Bhutto as PPP leaders by becoming co-chairmen of the party. Due to Bilawal’s youth, party leadership effectively passed to Asif Zardari who promptly *returned to Pakistan. The prospects for a previously discredited figure such as Zardari to successfully lead the PPP in the 2008 elections was based upon sympathy for the assassinated Benazir Bhutto.

(*Zardari returned to Pakistan after nearly four years exile which had commenced in 2004 following his release from over seven years imprisonment (1997 to 2004). The conditions of his second incarceration were harsh in contrast to his 1990 to 1993 period of imprisonment).

Caretaker Prime Minister Muhammad Mian Soomoro did live up to expectations by conducting a fair and honest election, even though he was a member of the PML-Q. As expected the PPP increased its national 25% of the vote (achieved in the 2002 poll) to 30% of the vote in the re-scheduled February 2008 polls. The PML-Q vote slightly declined from the approximately 25% that was achieved in the 2008 elections to 23% of the vote in the 2002 poll. This was a respectable vote for the PML-Q because there was an ambiguity as to whether this party was still the governing party going into the February 2008 elections due to the impartiality of Caretaker Prime Minister Soomoro.

In an almost inversion of the 2002 elections, Nawaz Sharif’s PML-S increased its national vote from approximately 9% of the vote to nearly 20% at the expence of the MMA which declined from 11% of the vote in the 2002 election to just over 2% in the 2008 poll. This decline was due to chronic disunity within the Islamist electoral alliance and public disenchantment which stemmed from MMA previously ensuring the passage of the seventeenth amendment in December 2003.

Pro-Taliban elements within the armed forces and the ISI had been the real beneficiaries of the MMA’s strong showing in the 2002 elections because this alliance’s support for the seventeenth amendment/Legal Framework Ordinance in December 2003 had led to the creation of the NSC. The decline of the MMA’s vote also rebounded on President Musharraf because of the corresponding vote gain of Sharif’s hostile PML-N.

Benazir Bhutto’s Assassination Politically Eliminates General Musharraf

It is improbable that had Benazir Bhutto been alive, a coalition government between the PPP and the PML-N would have been formed but this is exactly what happened when PPP stalwart Yousaf Raza Gilani became prime minister in March 2008. Had the PPP entered into a national coalition government with President Musharraf’s PML-Q, then the Bhutto-Sharif rivalry would have ended in a victory for the former because parliamentary members of PML-N would have undoubtedly defected to the president’s party.

Instead, the exact opposite has happened with members of the PML-Q defecting to either the PML–S or the pro-Sharif PML-Zia (PML-Z), led by General Zia’s son, Ijaz. As a result of these PML re-alignments, President Musharraf was forced to resign in August 2008. Having been superseded by defections to the PML-S and PML-Z, the PML-Q reconfigured in 2010 to become the All Pakistan Muslim League (APML). But it is probable that this loyalist Musharraf party will be wracked by further defections to the PML-N, which is now the major opposition party.

The *PML-S promptly returned to opposition in August 2008 following President Musharraf’s resignation. Indeed, the real reason that Sharif’s party did the seeming impossible of entering into coalition with the PPP was to force President Musharraf’s resignation. During the six months (March to August 2008) that the PML-N was in cabinet, Sharif called on President Musharraf to resign. Further pressure was placed on the president with the reinstatement of former judges adding to an atmosphere in which a now fully free media denounced the supposed and actual abuses of the previous military-backed regime.

(*The PPP government of Prime Minister Gilani has continued due to the support of the MQM and the Awami National Party).

During the aforementioned six months in which President Musharraf was subjected to pressure to resign, the army chief, General Kiyani emphasised the armed forces avowed professionalism and political neutrality by banning officers from publicly commenting on politics. The armed forces declared neutrality actually conveyed that the military was withdrawing its support for President Musharraf so that the PPP and PML-S parliamentarians could impeach the president. Under the threat of impeachment, President Musharraf unfortunately resigned in August 2008 and departed for exile in London.

Endgame: Pakistan’s Double Game Moves to Republican Iran’s Advantage

The apparent triumph of civilian rule was seemingly confirmed when *Asif Zardari was elected president of Pakistan in September 2008, after former caretaker prime minister, Mian Soomoro, who as Senate President, had served as interim president. But while the PPP and the PML-S had re-asserted their positions as Pakistan’s two leading political parties after being in disgrace following the October 1999 coup, their new ascendancy was really due to Zardari and Sharif aligning their political interests to the pro-Taliban orientation within the military by having helped force General Musharraf out.

(*Despite the repeal of amendment seventeen in April 2009, the NSC has remained in place as the prime director of Pakistan’s defence and national security direction. Zardari’s institutional power as president is derived from to his membership of the NSC and his political power as the effective leader of the PPP).

Even with the nation’s two principal political leaders (Zardari and Sharif) essentially acquiescent to General Kiyani’s pro-Taliban orientation within the double game context so that Pakistan could eventually unite with Afghanistan, there are still major challenges in affecting such a strategic shift. These challenges include Pakistan’s still tenuous alliance with the United States, pro-American elements within the armed forces and factions within the Taliban and Al-Qaeda still wanting to overthrow the Pakistani government so that Pakistan will become a part of a new Caliphate.

The foundation of an Al-Qaeda affiliated Pakistan Taliban was a supreme irony because the original Afghan Taliban had been founded by the ISI. Between 2008 and 2010, the Pakistan Taliban launched a concerted terrorist military campaign to overthrow the Pakistan state. Logically, this campaign should have tilted Pakistan’s double game against the Taliban to favour the American effort against the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Indeed, the massive financial aid and intelligence assistance that the United States provided Pakistani armed forces to defeat this 2009-2010 campaign should have consolidated a pro-American outcome in relation to Pakistan’s double game.

It is true that American assistance was vital in defeating the Pakistani Taliban in 2009-2010 but it was the ISI links to its ostensible enemy that allowed the Pakistani military to kill or capture its key operatives. The use of American military drones was the major direct means by which the United States assisted the Pakistani military defeat the Pakistan Taliban and Al-Qaeda by 2010. In 2008, an American drone attack killed Abu-Laith al-Libi, senior Pakistani Taliban/Al-Qaeda leader. The following year Al-Qaeda leaders, Usama Al-Kini and Ahmed Salim Swedan were killed by American drones as were Pakistani Taliban/Al-Qaeda leaders, Azmatullah Muawiya and Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim in 2010.

American intelligence provided the Pakistani military with information enabling the army in 2010 to locate another senior leader of Pakistan’s Al-Qaeda, Maulana Fazlullah, who subsequently died fighting. Another senior member of Pakistan’s Al-Qaeda/Taliban, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured by the Pakistani military that year due to information supplied by American intelligence.

The American successes in assisting the Pakistani military needed to be qualified in the context of Pakistan’s double game. The senior leaders of Pakistan’s Al-Qaeda/Taliban who were captured or killed were leaders of factions that were actually determined to overthrow the Pakistani state and as such hostile to the ISI’s double game strategy. By contrast, pro-American Pakistani officers such as Generals Mushtaq Baig and Javed Sultan were killed in 2008 by the Pakistani Taliban/ Al-Qaeda.

Although there were instances when the ISI came under attack from the Pakistani Taliban/Al-Qaeda (such as the bombing of the ISI’s Lahore headquarters in May 2009), the balance of Pakistan’s double game is now against the United States. This was reflected by the Pakistani army’s announcement in January 2010 that no new operations against either the Pakistani Taliban or Al-Qaeda would be undertaken.

The Taliban/Al-Qaeda and republican Iran are enemies but they both have a mutual interest in incapacitating American power around the world which is on the cusp of being achieved. A non co-operative Pakistani armed forces (in the context of supporting the United States) and an emboldened Afghan Taliban essentially means that Pakistan is now moving into the orbit of republican Iran. The Zardari/ Gilani regime will not be overthrown but will rather adapt to the military/ISI’s pro-Iranian orientation which is shared by Nawaz Sharif because he supports the objective of eventual unification between a Taliban ruled Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A nuclear armed Pakistan/Afghanistan aligned to republican Iran will create the foundation not only for a formidable military alliance but economic co-operation as American economic power will wane as the United States is excluded from South and Cental Asia as well as from the Gulf region. A weakened United States will probably result in Saudi Arabia (which has close links with the Pakistani military) being compelled to go into an alliance with republican Iran so as to fend off any potential threat from Al-Qaeda. A political strategic cost that Saudi Arabia may have to pay for an alliance with republican Iran will be to manipulate oil prices to the detriment of the United States and the west.

Who Pakistan will ultimately align with is difficult to ascertain but due to the dangers which now confront the world this nation’s double dealing has to end so that a clear sense of direction can be established international relations.