“The Complete Intoxication of Qalandar”

The Economist - London, U.K.
Thursday, September 13, 2007

The rebuffing of Nawaz Sharif has only made Pakistan more unstable

Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister of Pakistan, landed in Rawalpindi on September 10th with his head bowed in prayer and his supporters erupting around him.

He was back from a seven-year exile to challenge Pervez Musharraf, an army coupster who had toppled and imprisoned him. “Go, Musharraf! Go!” screamed his retinue as Mr Sharif's plane rumbled to a halt.

But four hours later it was Mr Sharif who was on the move. In the airport's VIP arrivals lounge he was charged with corruption, arrested and deported to Saudi Arabia.

It was almost certainly what he had expected. During the flight, Mr Sharif made many bold promises: to wage a “final battle” against military dictatorship, bring “undiluted democracy” to Pakistan, and so forth. He is not the first Pakistani politician to have promised these things. Indeed, as a political drama, his homecoming was squarely within Pakistani tradition.

(...)

Radical opinions are casually expressed in Pakistan, by members of the English-speaking elite as well as the Urdu-speaking masses.

But even with Machiavellian help from the intelligence agency, the MMA [Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, an alliance of Islamist parties previously allied with the general] won only 11% of the vote in 2002. In the coming election, if they participate, they may do better. Nonetheless, except for the stringent Pushtuns, most Pakistanis are moderate.

Last week in Sehwan, a town in central Sindh, half a million Sufi pilgrims gave a demonstration of this fact. They are followers, like most Pakistanis, of the heterodox Barelvi school of Sunni Islam. And so they whirled, chanted prayers and blew kisses to celebrate the 755th anniversary of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, a Sufi saint.

“We are the anti-Taliban,” claimed Ahmed Bhutto (no relation), in a room thick with the scent of incense and rose petals. “We stand for love, tolerance and the great infinity.”

If only the mortal world of international relations were so far-sighted. But it is not.

That is why, even as General Musharraf's popularity plummets, America is stoutly backing him. The general's campaign in north-western Pakistan may be disastrous, but America has no better idea of how to quell the mayhem there.

Indeed the campaign is, more or less, according to an American design. General Musharraf invaded the tribal areas at America's urging. America is closely involved in prosecuting the campaign, especially at an intelligence level. After all, it is paying for it. In the past five years, America has swollen General Musharraf's coffers with an estimated $10 billion.

(...)

The most alarming aspect of the current political crisis, is that no Pakistani leader seems to be genuinely popular. Even if General Musharraf had not locked up the [Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) party ] PML-N's leaders, it is doubtful they could have produced much of a multitude to greet Mr Sharif. Ms Benazir Bhutto, [leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and another exiled prime minister] who said she would announce the date of her return on September 14th, might fare better. But she would be most unlikely to draw the adoring hundreds of thousands who welcomed her after her last return from exile, in 1986.

For Pakistan's other crisis, Islamist-stoked insecurity, there will be no ready solution. Pakistani Pushtuns may stay on the warpath as long as foreign troops remain in Afghanistan. They always have before. And if Islamist militancy is to be a fixture in Pakistan, America should worry about where Pakistani allegiances may be heading.

General Musharraf will not worry about this. He wants to cling to power, and he has two options. First, he can seal a deal with Ms Bhutto. So long as there is no popular backlash against Mr Sharif's ejection, especially by the country's lawyers, who provoked mass protests against General Musharraf earlier this year, she may agree to this—provided the general sheds his uniform by early next year at the latest.

He is reluctant to do so. There is a notion, dear to America, that General Musharraf could be a strong civilian president, overseeing the prime minister and the army. But there is no history to support this belief. The army, and it alone, is General Musharraf's constituency and the source of his power. By stripping himself of its uniform he reasonably fears that he would be an emperor without clothes.

His alternative is to go it alone. He already has a simple majority in Parliament, which is sufficient for a presidential re-election. Without the PPP, he will not have the two-thirds majority necessary to make constitutional changes. In effect, that means that if his re-election were challenged on legal grounds—as it surely would be—General Musharraf would be at the mercy of the Supreme Court.

On recent form, the judges might rule against him. If so, General Musharraf would probably then declare martial law. This would allow him to re-run the events that followed his 1999 coup: he would gut the Supreme Court of dissidents, ask the remaining sycophants to rule on the legality of his suspension of democracy, then hold elections. So long as a fair portion of the opposition participated in these, they would probably pass muster with America. But how would Pakistanis respond?

The name of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, that Sufi saint, is linked in Pakistan with both unshakeable tolerance and unrestrainable agitation. A famous Urdu poem, “The complete intoxication of Qalandar”, explores this duality. But in real life, alas, there can be no such co-existence.

[Elections in Pakistan are expected to take place the first week of October]

Article background: Pervez Musharraf, an army general, seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999. Two years later he promoted himself from “chief executive” of Pakistan to president—though he refuses to honour his promise to quit the army. In February 2007 he announced plans to have the parliament re-elect him to another term before dissolving it later in the year, ahead of elections that his party might need to rig to win.

A worrying surge in Islamic militancy, beginning in western Pakistan and now spreading throughout, led to the deaths of 300 people in clashes and suicide-bombings in July 2007 alone. General Musharraf's struggle to hold on to power in the face of such challenges has emboldened former prime ministers. One, Benazir Bhutto, has been trying to cut a deal with the general; another, Nawaz Sharif, returned to Pakistan from exile—for all of four hours—on September 10th.