As election fever grips Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and amidst President Pervez Musharraf's continuing slide in popularity, the emergence of centrifugal forces do not portend well for Pakistan's future. Pakistan is desperately searching for a new leadership that could set the agenda for a return to national unity and democracy.
The slide began when less than a month after celebrating the seventh anniversary of his coup against elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan launched his own "second coup" on 3 November 2007, putting the constitution in "abeyance", dismissing the Supreme Court that was getting ready to rule against his candidacy for re-election, and muzzling the media that had helped foster the civil protests against his earlier attempt to dismiss the court. Amidst public outrage, his personal popularity plummeted to all time lows and he had to resort to a United States-brokered deal with former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to return and give some credence to the political process.
Musharraf had himself re-elected as President by the parliament that was ending its term and had the re-election validated by a hand-picked court. Then he shed his army uniform and appointed a new army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. He called for new elections to the national and provincial assemblies on January 8, postponed to February 18 after the recent assassination of Bhutto on 27 December 2007 in Rawalpindi. But Pakistan's transition for democracy may be marred by the lack of a transnational leadership that can hold together the forces that threaten the unity of the federation and that have always lain beneath the political surface.
As an army chief, Musharraf headed the one institution that represents all of Pakistan, its army; although many contend that it is dominated by the Punjab. Yet, recent data indicate that its officer class comes from an increasingly wider, national and urban base and many of its senior generals are from the group that once was termed "refugees", that is émigrés from India to Pakistan at independence in 1947. The fact that only around one-fifth of Pakistanis today want him to stay is not because of his émigré status.
What Pakistanis are looking for now is a leadership that can not only hold their country together but also improve the lot of the vast numbers of the dispossessed who have not benefited from the economic growth of the Musharraf period. Bhutto, with her support in all four provinces, promised them that transnational leadership. That is why her loss will be a major blow to Pakistan's political development and survival. No other national leader has such wide support. The closest is former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif whose Pakistan Muslim League (N) has a major base in the Punjab. Musharraf's main support, the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), or the "King's Party", is also largely Punjab-based.
So, who will bring Pakistan together after the elections?
Unless Musharraf is willing to face the new realities and adjust his stance, the odds are that it will be someone other than Musharraf, as the forces of civil society continue to rise and as he may be seen as a liability even by his erstwhile base: the Pakistan army.
When he took over in 1999, Musharraf set an overly ambitious seven-point agenda for reform that promised to rebuild the national morale, strengthen the federation, revive the economy, ensure law and order, depoliticize state institutions, devolve power to local levels, and ensure swift accountability. Today, the federation, while economically well integrated, is wracked by political discontent fed by perceptions that the nation is dominated by an over-powerful Punjab province and the gap between the rich and the poor has widened.
The report card on Musharraf's original seven-point agenda for a new Pakistan has a fair amount of red ink. The biggest gap between talk and action is on the missing issue from Musharraf's original list: the rise of radical and militant Islamic extremism of the Jihadi groups. Despite proclamations of de-weaponization of Pakistan, little real action was taken. Certain radical groups were banned, only to re-emerge under new names. Even Musharraf acknowledged the possibility that ex-officers of the Inter Services Intelligence may be aiding the newly emerging Taliban. But what he left unsaid was the continuing links and sympathies of current and past ISI officers with militant Jihadi groups whom they consider a pliable asset and employ as a strategic reserve against India in Kashmir. The Kalishnikov Culture still prevails and it is a sense of 'sauve qui peut' that pervades Pakistani society today. Even the President was seen sporting a Glock 17 pistol strapped to his thigh, just in case.
Musharraf's main political support comes from the disaffected Punjabi cliques that broke with Nawaz Sharif to form their own rump PML- Q. He also made alliances of convenience with the volatile language-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement of urban Sindh and the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, an Islamic coalition. A unifying factor was their desire to deny Sharif and Bhutto re-entry to the corridors of power.
While many Pakistanis acknowledged Musharraf as a "liberal" and wished him success initially, today they chafe at his highly personalized and central control over the levers of power. Now, as Pakistan faces new elections, he faces the question whether he will allow the President to be balanced by a strong and independent Prime Minister, and a professional and apolitical army chief. The local betting against him seems to be affected by fears of a disruptive change, soon after these elections, as the power equations are changed. Most people in Pakistan recognize that Pakistan can ill afford an upheaval that could send the economy and indeed the country's polity into a tailspin. But what to do?
These hasty and flawed elections, marred by allegations of pre-rigging and now political murder, may not yield a clear majority for any party. Rather than subject the country to a divisive political squabble in the wake of the elections, Musharraf could forestall the political train wreck by bringing in the relatively moderate PML of Nawaz Sharif and the PPP into a national unity government, while jettisoning the Islamic parties. In doing so, he may need to go against the overconfident views of some his army colleagues who feel they can control these Islamic parties and are suspicious of the so-called moderates. The fears remain that if ethnic or sectarian trouble erupts on the streets of Pakistan and an army ill-equipped for low intensity conflicts within its borders balks at controlling civil dissent, the younger generals (most more than 9 years his junior) may well be tempted to take over again.
The sentiment within the army is against any such moves. General Kayani, a professional soldier, has hinted at the power of the people to influence events in Pakistan when he told his senior-most generals recently that "Ultimately it is the will of the people and their support that is decisive." Past army chiefs have often made such general statements as a sop to the public. He may have to give a clearer public statement of the army's support for whatever government emerges in post-election Pakistan. Without such a guarantee, the elections may produce more turmoil this spring, turmoil that may affect the ability of Musharraf to stay in power and thereby unleash the centrifugal forces that threaten the tenuous federation.
Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistani analyst, is the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan and its Army (forthcoming) from Oxford University Press.