By By DAVID WHITEHOUSE

FOLLOWING A year of blows to his popularity, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf is scrambling to find a new base of support. British and U.S. officials have helped out the military dictator by brokering talks for a power-sharing deal between Musharraf and exiled two-time prime minister Benazir, Bhutto—who leads a party that has long opposed his rule.

Many factors could upset the deal, but Bhutto needs Musharraf’s support as much as he needs hers. For one thing, she and her husband face corruption charges stretching back into the mid-1990s. On October 5, Musharraf helped her out with an amnesty bill. The next day, her party returned the favor by helping to legitimize Musharraf’s sham reelection to a second term as president. If her People’s Party of Pakistan (PPP) had joined the flood of resignations from the legislatures, the vote would have been voided, but her delegates kept their seats—and simply abstained to protest Musharraf’s campaigning for office while still in uniform.

Bhutto’s other problem is that the constitution rules out a third term for her as prime minister. Only an electoral alliance with Musharraf’s party could create the two-thirds parliamentary majority she needs to amend the constitution.

By bringing Bhutto on board, U.S. and British officials hope to stabilize a key ally in the “war on terror” by putting a civilian face on the regime. Imperial and Pakistani elites would no doubt prefer the smallest possible shuffle at the top—partly because grievances run deep among the many poor and oppressed, and no party in Pakistan
has the political weight to risk unleashing major forces for change. A September poll by the U.S.-based International Republican Institute gave Musharraf and Bhutto a combined approval rating below 50 percent—21 percent for Musharraf and 28 percent for Bhutto. As Farhan Bokhari wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, the situation “presents a picture of a weakened president and weak politicians leaning on each other to share the spoils of power.”

The U.S. seeks to stabilize the Pakistani state so that it can mount a renewed war against Islamist radicals connected to the Taliban. But the unpopularity of Musharraf and Bhutto shows that collaboration with the U.S. is no method to gain a stable base of support. The only major politician whose popularity has risen lately is another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif—whose approval rating jumped to 52 percent after Musharraf prevented him from returning to the country in September. In recent months, Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League has aligned itself with the street protests of the MMA, a coalition of Islamist parties that backed Musharraf until this year.

The growth of independence in the judiciary has thrown two further uncertainties into the mix. One is that the Supreme Court may invalidate the amnesty of Bhutto, which, by covering politicians only during the years 1986–99, pointedly excludes Sharif. And second, it may invalidate Musharraf’s reelection while still head of the army. The judges, however, may choose to bend the laws for now to avoid throwing Pakistan into a constitutional crisis in the lead-up to fresh parliamentary elections planned for January.

The biggest source of crisis, however, lies deeper than court battles or the rivalries of elite parties. For Pakistan, participation in the war on terror has required the central state to fight recurring battles with Islamist and nationalist forces in the regions that border Afghanistan. Starting on election day, this slow-burning civil war began to heat up to its highest level to date. An Islamist ambush of Pakistani soldiers in the “tribal area” of North Waziristan led to strikes by army helicopters and U.S.-provided F-16s. At least 250 died, including many civilians, in four days of fighting. This new flare-up of civil war highlights the crumbling of Musharraf’s base among Islamists—and suggests that no mere reshuffling of power can solve Pakistan’s crisis.

Musharraf’s base of support

The military itself provides Musharraf’s most important institutional base of support. In class terms, however, the regime has relied, for most of its eight years, on support from three sources—the capitalist class (partners in production), a radical Islamist portion of the middle class (partners in politics), and the U.S. ruling class (partner with a big pocketbook). In a different decade, this three-sided support base was fairly stable for a different military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq. In the 1980s, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan helped Zia to build up Islamist radicalism as a force against the USSR in Afghanistan.

These partnerships continued under the civilian regimes of the 1990s. With U.S. approval, Nawaz Sharif pioneered the neoliberal economic reforms that have produced growth for the capitalists alongside growing poverty. Under Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) collaborated with homegrown radical Islamists to shape the Taliban into a force that could take power in Afghanistan in 1995.

The Taliban’s base was—and is—among the Pashto-speaking tribes that live on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghan border. Ten-year-old American diplomatic cables published this past August estimate that 20 percent to 40 percent of the Taliban’s members were Pakistani from the beginning. Pakistani and U.S. politicians thus saw the Taliban as an extension of Pakistani power into Afghanistan. For the Pakistanis, this fulfilled a decades-long dream of regional influence, and for the U.S., it provided hope for stability in an important region for the transport of Central Asian gas and oil.

The Taliban’s backward social views—its repression of women’s rights, for instance—caused no problem for relations to the U.S., but the fundamentally anti-Western thrust of the Taliban’s ideology began to cause a rift. The Taliban are pupils of Pakistan’s Jamiat-e-Ulema-Islami (JUI). The JUI belongs to the “Deobandi” tradition, which dates back to the period of British rule in India. Its founders conceived of Islam as a rallying point for militant opposition to Western influence, and the JUI carries on in the same spirit. The U.S.-sponsored jihad against the USSR in the 1980s brought together the Deobandis with the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia, thus setting up the future link between the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the 1990s.

After defeating the main enemy, godless communism, the most dedicated jihadis set their sights on the United States. The rift with their former sponsors burst out in full force in the attacks of September 11, 2001. Following the attacks, when George W. Bush told world leaders to choose sides in the war on terror, General Musharraf was one of the people he had in mind.

Musharraf’s relations with the U.S. were already at a low point, following the 1998 nuclear bomb test under Nawaz Sharif and Musharraf’s coup d’état in 1999. Signing up for the war on terror looked like a way for Pakistan to restore the traditionally close relationship with the U.S., and crucially, to restart the flow of aid, trade, and loans. Military aid, which accounts for most of the $10 billion the U.S. has provided since 2002, would be important in shoring up Musharraf’s support in the army. If things were simple, this boost from the U.S. would compensate for the loss of support from the religious parties that he would expect for renouncing the Taliban. But things weren’t that simple—largely because the complications of Pakistan’s politics inevitably play out inside its overgrown army.
The army has always been Pakistan’s dominant national institution, and its structure still reflects the regional and ethnic horse-trading that began under British rule. The army’s top officers were drawn from the landholding class, predominantly from the province of Punjab. Middle officers came disproportionately from the Pashtuns of the northeast border region.

The landholders have since converted themselves into a land-and-factory-holding capitalist class, but the army’s pervasive influence in society means that ruling-class families are directly represented more heavily among the army’s top brass than in most countries. In Musharraf’s eight years, active-duty and retired officers, along with civilian allies, have taken up a much enlarged role in business, administration, and even universities—a trend that has strained relations with other capitalists and fed their desire to see a return to civilian rule.

The role of the middle class in the army is equally crucial. The ideological glue of the country—and the professed mission of the army—has been the “protection of Muslims” in the region. Middle-class Islamists thus find a natural ally in the military, for example, when the ISI sponsors Muslim militants in the Indian-held part of Kashmir. It’s no surprise, then, that the middle ranks of the officer corps are not just heavily Pashtun, but also heavily Islamist.
When Musharraf took support from the U.S. in return for reversing his stand on the Taliban, this ideologically committed layer of the army could not be bought off with U.S.-funded benefits. Many Pashtun officers—who helped train the Taliban’s fighters in the first place—resigned in 2001 and 2002. Some of them are now Taliban commanders.

A double game, and dual power in the borderlands

The war on terror has forced Musharraf into a double game of appeasing two of his allies that are on opposite sides of the war—the Islamists and the Americans. He must cooperate to some degree with the U.S., but he can’t abandon the Islamists entirely, because they are important to his core support in the army. In more general terms, he can’t even sustain nationalist support in the army if he’s seen to be simply an agent of George W. Bush.
Outside the army, the MMA coalition of Islamist parties has been a crucial electoral ally for Musharraf since they polled 15 percent nationwide in 2002. The MMA’s top vote-getter was the JUI—tutors of the Taliban. The party rules the key strategic Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) on the border with Afghanistan, and it is the coalition partner of Musharraf’s party in the nearby border province of Baluchistan.

U.S. pressure has periodically driven Musharraf to military action in the border regions, especially when he can say he is targeting “foreign fighters.” NWFP and the neighboring tribal areas have become home to hundreds of Uzbek, Chechen, and Chinese Uighur militants—loosely connected to al-Qaeda. But the army’s heavy-handed actions inevitably hurt Pakistani civilians, as well as Pakistani Taliban members, who often act in concert with the foreigners. Since 2002, the war has claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Pakistani soldiers, along with many thousands more civilians and Islamist fighters. Residents of the tribal areas already suffer, as the International Crisis Group reports, 60–80 percent male unemployment and 97 percent female illiteracy. Conditions like these, including the raids, have driven civilians closer to the Taliban, and driven the Taliban closer to al-Qaeda.

Periods of open war have led Musharraf to pullbacks and compromises, as in 2006, when he agreed to cease-fires in the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan—granting amnesty to Taliban fighters in return for a meaningless pledge to turn in members of al-Qaeda. In effect, the peace deals left the Islamists free to fight NATO and the U.S. in Afghanistan as long as they didn’t fight the Pakistani army at home. Throughout this whole time, the regime has maintained patronage networks that either give direct support to the Taliban or provide it indirectly through Islamist intermediaries.

Hostilities broke out again this year as the U.S. pressured Musharraf to renew the fight, but the new fighting takes place under changed political conditions. For sixty years, the central government ruled the tribal areas through paid-off Pashtun elders. Special laws have banned political parties and condemned dissenters to jail for years without charge. Over the years, resistance came to be dominated by Islamists through bases in mosques and madrasas, Islamic religious schools. By 2006, the Taliban and foreign fighters in the Waziristans and other tribal areas established an effective monopoly on armed force—even with 80,000 Pakistani soldiers stationed in the region. The Islamists set up new state institutions, including sharia courts, to supplant the “traditional” authorities.

The peace agreements of last year represented an attempt to shore up the influence of the central state and its tribal stooges. But the important players were the Taliban and foreign fighters, who held the real power. Observers say that “Talibanization”—the effective rule of the Taliban and its ideology—is spreading into NWFP with the approval of the JUI.

The split between Musharraf and the Islamist parties broke open at the national level after his bloody July crackdown on radical Islamists at Islamabad’s Red Mosque. Attacks on soldiers escalated in the border areas, while the MMA took to the streets in Pakistan’s cities and revoked its 2002 agreement not to oppose Musharraf in the national parliament. Suicide attacks on security forces in the garrison city of Rawalpindi—the heart of the army’s power near the capital—took the lives of dozens of elite forces in the fall. In September, Osama bin-Laden called for war to bring down the Pakistani state.

The search for a new base

The new level of polarization, driven by the growth of dual power in the borderlands, has forced Musharraf to reach out to Bhutto’s PPP. If the new alliance gets cemented, it would further polarize national politics, because the PPP brings its allies into the bargain—nationalist parties in NWFP and Baluchistan that are perennial opponents of the Islamists.

At some point, there’s a point of no return. What’s at stake is more than Musharraf’s personal power base—it’s the base of support for the army and the state itself. If the ruling class must forego the integration of the Islamists into the army’s middle ranks, it must find other fractions of the middle class to draw in, and must also find new ways of drawing Pashtuns into loyalty to the central state. This is not to mention the challenge of resolving the conflict within the capitalist class over the army’s role in the economy.

When Bhutto visited U.S. senators in Washington in September—on the invitation of Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.)—she seemed to endorse a dream scenario that pundits and imperial planners have floated for a year or more. Pakistan would keep military forces in the borderlands under the lowest possible profile while winning “hearts and minds” by flooding the region with development money. At the same time, the military would crank up pressure on foreign fighters connected to al-Qaeda. Politically, Pakistan would try to split the Taliban. The “good Taliban” could share power in Afghanistan—and promote friendly relations to Pakistan and the U.S.—while the “bad Taliban” would get crushed along with al-Qaeda.

The connection of this scenario to reality is remote. The strategy of winning hearts and minds with economic development in the midst of an escalating war has been tried and found wanting in Iraq. The hope that sharper fighting will make the Taliban crumble and divide it from al-Qaeda runs counter to actual experience—military operations have driven civilians to embrace and join the Taliban, and combat has forged a closer alliance with the foreign fighters. And finally, the idea that part of the Taliban would agree to share power in Kabul while Western troops still occupy Afghanistan was refuted outright in September when the Taliban rejected Hamid Karzai’s offer for peace talks.

The one element of reality in this story may be that despite whatever fury the war may soon reach, the Pakistani state will try to hedge its bets by keeping some connection to the Taliban. The Taliban may be strong enough to force a settlement in Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s rulers will want to back a winner.

Whatever the senators and the Bush administration think of the dream scenario, Bhutto’s most welcome suggestion has been that she would be more pliant than Musharraf in handing over pieces of Pakistani sovereignty. In particular, she endorsed the idea of U.S. strikes against al-Qaeda on Pakistani soil if Pakistani forces aren’t up to the mission themselves. She also agreed to let international investigators interview A. Q. Khan, whom Musharraf pardoned for dealing nuclear technology to U.S. adversaries such as North Korea and Libya. With statements like these, it’s no wonder that her popularity has gone down in Pakistan while it’s gone up in Washington. Overall, Bhutto’s positions show no sign that she’s up to tackling the crisis that’s begun to envelop Pakistan.

In the short run, bringing the PPP into government is Musharraf’s best hope for co-opting the country’s two strongest secular opposition movements. One challenge comes from nationalists struggling for some form of self-rule in Baluchistan, a group that Musharraf and his Islamist partners have persecuted with assassinations and hundreds of “disappearances.”

The other major secular movement for democratic rights is centered around tens of thousands of lawyers who have bravely squared off against the police this year to defend the budding independence of the court system. According to a small socialist group, the Labor Party Pakistan, which has joined forces with the lawyers’ revolt, this layer of the middle class is radicalizing. Its movement could give a boost to the construction of a new Left that’s independent of the elite parties.

Pakistan is going to need a new Left. Even if elite forces eventually muddle into a new alignment to secure their power, the crisis period looks like it’s just begun, and the “solution” looks like it will involve more war and deprivation. Ordinary Pakistanis will need to find the means to fight back.

David Whitehouse is on the editorial board of the ISR. He is the author of “The squeeze on Pakistan” (ISR 20, November–December 2001).