BY TARIQ ALI
Mumtaz Hussain Qadri smiled as he surrendered to his
colleagues after shooting Salmaan Taseer, the governor of the Punjab,
dead. Many in Pakistan seemed to support his actions; others wondered
how he’d managed to get a job as a state bodyguard in the carefully
screened Elite Force. Geo TV, the country’s most popular channel,
reported, and the report has since been confirmed, that “Qadri had been
kicked out of Special Branch after being declared a security risk”, that
he “had requested that he not be fired on but arrested alive if he
managed to kill Taseer” and that “many in Elite Force knew of his plans
to kill Salmaan Taseer”.
Qadri is on his way to becoming a national hero. On his
first appearance in court, he was showered with flowers by admiring
Islamabad lawyers who have offered to defend him free of charge. On his
way back to prison the police allowed him to address his supporters and
wave to the TV cameras. The funeral of his victim was sparsely attended:
a couple of thousand mourners at most. A frightened President Zardari
and numerous other politicians didn’t show up. A group of mullahs had
declared that anyone attending the funeral would be regarded as guilty
of blasphemy. No mullah (that includes those on the state payroll) was
prepared to lead the funeral prayers. The federal minister for the
interior, Rehman Malik, a creature of Zardari’s, has declared that
anyone trying to tamper with or amend the blasphemy laws will be dealt
with severely. In The New York Times version, he said he
would shoot any blasphemer himself.
Taseer’s spirited defence of Aasia Bibi, a 45-year-old
Punjabi Christian peasant falsely charged with blasphemy after an
argument with two women who accused her of polluting their water by
drinking out of the same receptacle, provoked an angry response from
religious groups. Many in his own party felt that Taseer’s initiative
was mistimed but in Pakistan, the time is never right for such
campaigns. Bibi had already spent 18 months in jail. Her plight had been
highlighted by the media, women had taken to the streets to defend her
and Taseer and another senior politician from the Pakistan Peoples
Party, Sherry Rehman, had demanded amendments to the blasphemy laws.
Thirty-eight other women have been imprisoned under the same law in
recent years and soon after a friendly meeting between Yousaf Gilani,
the prime minister, and the leader of the supposedly moderate
Jamaat-e-Islami, a member of the latter offered a reward of 10,000
dollars to whoever manages to kill Bibi.
Taseer’s decision to take up Bibi’s case was not made on
a whim. He had cleared the campaign with Zardari, much to the annoyance
of the law minister, Babar Awan, a televangelist and former militant of
the Jamaat-e-Islami. He told journalists he didn’t want the
sociocultural agenda to be hijacked by ‘lunatic mullahs’, raged against
governments that had refused to take on fanaticism and brushed aside
threats to his life with disdain. He visited the prison where Bibi was
detained – the first time in the history of the Punjab that a governor
has gone inside a district jail – and at a press conference declared his
solidarity with her. “She is a woman who has been incarcerated for a
year and a half on a charge trumped up against her five days after an
incident where people who gave evidence against her were not even
present,” he told an interviewer. He wanted, he said, “to take a mercy
petition to the president, and he agreed, saying he would pardon Aasia
Bibi if there had indeed been a miscarriage of justice”.
Two weeks after this visit, Taseer was dead. I never
much cared for his business practices or his political affiliations and
had not spoken to him for 20 years but he was one of my closest friends
at school and university and the two of us and the late Shahid Rehman –
a gifted and witty lawyer who drank himself to death many moons ago –
were inseparable. Some joyful memories came back when I saw his face on
TV.
It is 1960. The country is under a pro-US military
dictatorship. All opposition is banned. My parents are away. The three
of us – we are 17 years old – are at my place and we decide that
something has to be done. We buy some red paint and at about 2 a.m.
drive to the Cantonment bridge and carefully paint ‘Yankee Go Home’ on
the beautiful whitewashed wall. The next morning we scrub the car clean
of all traces of paint. For the next few weeks the city is agog. The
story doesn’t appear in the press but everyone is talking about it. In
Karachi and Dhaka, where they regard Lahore as politically dead, our
city’s stock rises. At college our fellow students discuss nothing else.
The police are busy searching for the culprits. We smile and enjoy the
fun. Finally, they track us down but, as Taseer notes with an edge of
bitterness, Shahid’s father is a Supreme Court judge and one of my aunts
is married to a general who is also the minister for the interior so
naturally we all get off with a warning. At the time I almost felt that
physical torture might be preferable to being greeted regularly by the
general with “Hello, Mr Yankee Go Home”.
Two years previously (before the dictatorship), the
three of us had organised a demonstration at the US consulate after
reading that an African American called Jimmy Wilson had been sentenced
to death for stealing a dollar. On that occasion Salmaan, seeing that
not many people had turned up, found some street urchins to swell our
ranks. We had to stop and explain to them why their chant of ‘Death to
Jimmy Wilson’ was wrong. Money changed hands before they were brought
into line. Years later, on a London to Lahore flight, I met Taseer by
chance and we discussed both these events. He reminded me that the stern
US consul had told us he would have us expelled but his
ultra-Lutheranism offended the Catholic brothers who ran our school and
again we escaped punishment. On that flight, more than 20 years ago, I
asked him why he had decided to go into politics. Wasn’t being a
businessman bad enough?
“You’ll never understand,” he said. “If I’m a politician
as well, I can save money because I don’t have to pay myself bribes.” He
was cynical in the extreme but he could laugh at himself. He died
tragically but for a good cause. His party and colleagues, instead of
indulging in manufactured grief, would be better off taking the
opportunity to amend the blasphemy laws while there is still some anger
at what has taken place. But, of course, they are doing the exact
opposite.
Even before this killing, Pakistan had been on the verge
of yet another military takeover. It would make things so much easier if
only they could give it another name: military democracy perhaps?
General Kayani, whose term as chief of staff was extended last year with
strong Pentagon approval, is said to be receiving petitions every day
asking him to intervene and ‘save the country’. The petitioners are
obviously aware that removing Zardari and replacing him with a nominee
of the Sharif brothers’ Muslim League, the PPP’s long-term rivals, is
unlikely to improve matters. Petitioning, combined with a complete
breakdown of law and order in one or several spheres (suicide terrorism
in Peshawar, violent ethnic clashes in Karachi, state violence in Quetta
and now Taseer’s assassination), is usually followed by the news that a
reluctant general has no longer been able to resist ‘popular’ pressure
and with the reluctant agreement of the US embassy a uniformed president
has taken power.
We’ve been here before, on four separate occasions. The
military has never succeeded in taking the country forward. All that
happens is that instead of politicians, the officers take the cut. The
government obviously thinks the threat is serious: some of Zardari’s
cronies now speak openly at dinner parties of ‘evidence’ that proves
military involvement in his wife Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. If the
evidence exists, let’s have a look. Another straw in the wind: the
political parties close to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI),
Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, have withdrawn from the central
government, accusing it of callousness and financial malfeasance. True,
but hardly novel.
Another necessary prerequisite for a coup is popular
disgust with a corrupt, inept and failing civilian government. This has
now reached fever pitch. As well as the natural catastrophes that have
afflicted the country, there are local wars, disappearances, torture,
crime, huge price rises in essential goods, unemployment, a breakdown of
basic services – all the major cities go without electricity for hours
at a stretch and oil lamps are much in demand in smaller towns which are
often without gas and electricity for up to 12 hours. Thanks to the loan
conditions recently imposed by the International Monetary Fund – part of
a gear change in the ‘war on terror’ – there have been riots against the
rise in fuel prices in several cities. Add to this Zardari’s
uncontrollable greed and the irrepressible desire of his minions to
mimic their master. Pakistan today is a kleptocracy. There is much talk
in Islamabad of the despised prime minister’s neglected wife going on a
shopping spree in London last month and finding solace in diamonds,
picking up, on her way back home, a VAT rebate in the region of
Ł1,00,000.
Can it get worse? Yes. And on every front. Take the Af-Pak
war. Few now would dispute that its escalation has further destabilised
Pakistan, increasing the flow of recruits to suicide bomber command. The
CIA’s New Year message to Pakistan consisted of three drone attacks in
North Waziristan, killing 19 people. There were 116 drone strikes in
2010, double the number ordered in the first year of the Obama
presidency. Serious Pakistani newspapers, Dawn and The
News, claim that 98 per cent of those killed in the strikes over the
last five years – the number of deaths is estimated to be between two
and three thousand – were civilians, a percentage endorsed by David
Kilcullen, a former senior adviser to General Petraeus. The Brookings
Institution gives a grim ratio of one militant killed for every 10
civilians. The drones are operated by the CIA, which isn’t subject to
military rules of engagement, with the result that drones are often used
for revenge attacks, notably after the sensational Khost bombing of a
CIA post in December 2009.
What stops the military from taking power immediately is
that it would then be responsible for stopping the drone attacks and
containing the insurgency that has resulted from the extension of the
war into Pakistan. This is simply beyond it, which is why the generals
would rather just blame the civilian government for everything. But if
the situation worsens and growing public anger and economic desperation
lead to wider street protests and an urban insurgency, the military will
be forced to intervene. It will also be forced to act if the Obama
administration does as it threatens and sends troops across the Pakistan
border on protect-and-destroy missions. Were this to happen, a military
takeover of the country might be the only way for the army to counter
dissent within its ranks by redirecting the flow of black money and
bribes (currently a monopoly of politicians) into military coffers.
Pakistani officers who complain to western intelligence operatives and
journalists that a new violation of sovereignty might split the army do
so largely as a way to exert pressure.
There has been no serious breach in the military high
command since the dismal failure of the 1951 Rawalpindi conspiracy, the
first and last radical nationalist attempt (backed by communist
intellectuals) to seize power within the army and take the country in an
anti-imperialist direction. Since then, malcontents in the armed forces
have always been rapidly identified and removed. Military perks and
privileges – bonuses, land allocations, a presence in finance and
industry – play an increasingly important part in keeping the army under
control.
Meanwhile, on a visit to Kabul earlier this month, the
US homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, announced that 52
‘security agents’ were being dispatched to the Af-Pak border to give
on-the-spot training to Afghan police and security units. The insurgents
will be delighted, especially since some of them serve in these units,
just as they do in Pakistan.
(Tariq Ali is the author of The Duel: Pakistan on
the Flight Path of American Power. This article was published in
London Review of Books, Vol. 33, No. 2, January 20, 2011.)