The 9/11 Wars (62 page)

So instead of the oft-repeated analysis of Pakistan as a country with a fractured identity, as the first decade of the 9/11 Wars drew to its close, the opposite appeared to be increasingly nearer the truth. Though great ethnic, topographic, linguistic diversity remained, much of the ambiguity that had troubled the country about its identity since its foundation was being resolved, not exacerbated. Baluchis, Pashtuns, Punjabis, Sindhis might disagree on how fairly national resources were distributed and might discriminate or suffer discrimination, but few would disagree with the basic worldview and values articulated by the students of Multan. A fairly uniform, fairly coherent, Pakistani identity was emerging. This identity was broadly established across the country. To describe Pakistan as simply a battleground for extremists and their opposites was to deny the emerging mass of the middle ground – the ‘Pakistani street’ – its true importance. The direction in which they were taking Pakistan was not necessarily the one the West wanted the country to take.

BHUTTO AND THE NEW PAKISTAN

The deal which had allowed Bhutto to return had been arranged with President Musharraf, then in his eighth year of power, in long negotiations over the spring and summer of 2007.
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Corruption charges against the former prime minister and a treason conviction against her historic rival Nawaz Sharif, the fifty-eight-year-old leader of the Pakistan Muslim League party, had been set aside, and the two veteran politicians’ exile ended. In return Bhutto and Sharif, who had been in Dubai and Riyadh respectively, promised to support Musharraf’s bid to be re-elected by parliament as president for a further five-year term. Both British and American diplomats had acted as go-betweens, and it was fervently hoped in London and Washington that Bhutto would win the parliamentary elections scheduled for early 2008. With Bhutto as prime minister and Musharraf still president, though no longer chief of the army staff, Pakistan would have a pro-Western government which would retain, through the man President Bush had described as his ‘buddy’ only a year or so earlier, the support of the military.
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This would, it was hoped, assure most Western strategic interests in the country while giving the Pakistani government the legitimacy of something at least resembling, however imperfectly, democracy. Musharraf detested both Bhutto and Sharif but was weak politically and had little choice but to accept the arrangement.
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Despite the violence that had greeted her return, Bhutto, after a verbal broadside at the ‘dark forces’ that wanted her dead, threw herself into campaigning with energy undiminished by her lengthy exile. She would not comment on her chances of victory, simply saying the ‘people of Pakistan’ would decide.
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Recognizing that she needed to win over the undecided, Bhutto focused her efforts not on the heartland of her traditional support in the south but on the major population centres of the north, around the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi and further west, towards the Afghan frontier. Each day followed a similar routine with rallies, meetings, driving, more rallies, more meetings, more rallies. On December 17, 2007, for example, Bhutto left her home in Islamabad at around 9 a.m., was driven rapidly through the capital’s wide, quiet streets in a white armoured landcruiser and then up the pristine six-lane highway which slices through the rural backcountry of the Punjab before crossing the Indus river and then swings in a broad arc through the fields and villages of the lowland areas of the North West Frontier province towards Peshawar. Since the highway had been opened exactly a year earlier, much of the fencing that lined it had been stolen to be resold as scrap, and the palm trees planted in the central reservation had died. But the surface remained good, and there was little traffic.
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The convoy swept by villages where the mosque was the only concrete structure and dried cow dung the only fuel. Smoke from cooking fires rose straight into the still, chill morning air. Bullocks pulled carts down dirt roads which ran parallel to the motorway for a few hundred yards and then turned away across the fields, where small boys played cricket with sticks and goats wandered in search of weeds.

At Nowshera, a scruffy mid-sized town 30 miles from Peshawar, Bhutto had lunch with local candidates from her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and then addressed a crowd. She spoke of the need for moderation, human rights, basics for the poor, an end to terrorism.
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After the rally in Nowshera, Bhutto drove away, sufficiently exhilarated to stand up through the hatch cut in the roof of her vehicle and wave to bemused locals on the old Grand Trunk Road as she headed back towards the motorway and Islamabad. In the town of Pabbi, once a centre of militancy in the 1980s and early 1990s, she suddenly ordered her vehicle to stop and, to the consternation of the police escort, plunged almost alone into a roadside bazaar to buy oranges. Returning to the car, she told the author that, after such a long period out of her homeland, she needed to get to know her country again and that learning the price of fruit was an essential part of that process. ‘I am out of touch, Mr Burke,’ she said. ‘I am out of touch, and that must be changed. I can now tell you what oranges cost.’

Bhutto was out of touch in ways that were more significant than simply not knowing the price of fruit. For it was apparent that the fifty-four-year-old politician had not taken full measure of the changes within Pakistan over the eight years of her exile. Weeks before returning to Pakistan, Bhutto had listed those whom she said she represented: ‘the underprivileged, the peasants, women, minorities, all those who are neglected by elite government, the middle class’.
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But it was exactly these constituencies that were changing the most rapidly, sucked into the cities, transformed by the rising incomes of the previous ten years, suddenly exposed to images from Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan on the new satellite channels on their new televisions after years of turgid state broadcasting, dealing with the complex and conflicting streams of political and cultural thought flowing throughout the Muslim world during the 9/11 Wars. Equally, it was Bhutto’s hardcore of supporters among the feudal aristocracy and the educated and moderate or even secular elite who were finding themselves increasingly challenged by the loud and numerous urban middle class or those who had once unquestioningly worked the fields and followed orders. In the new Pakistan, Bhutto’s own Westernization, her backing from America or Europe, her ideas about opening up Pakistan’s nuclear facilities to international inspectors, even her moderation on Kashmir, Afghanistan, Israel and other issues that had become touchstones in the new more international consciousness of many Pakistanis jarred with many more of her compatriots than would have been the case a decade previously. Potential allies – such as the new civil society groups that had emerged over previous years and were receiving so much international attention – were too few to fill the gap. An adept and perceptive politician, Bhutto clearly sensed the need to adapt to the broad shifts in her native land but was either unable or unwilling to do so in the short time she had.

Bhutto had also underestimated the capabilities and the intentions of Pakistan’s militants. Bhutto was thinking in terms of the 1990s, with discrete groups pursuing discrete largely local agendas – sectarian, Kashmiri, criminal – and the independence of action of the vast proportion of militants heavily constrained by their dependence on the resources and protection of the state security establishment. In conversations with Bhutto over the months before her return, it was clear that the rapid evolution of Pakistani Islamic militancy over recent years, particularly in the pressure-cooker conditions of the 9/11 Wars, had escaped her.
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Though, during the 100 or so days after her return from Pakistan she spoke often about her need for greater protection, the threat, she repeatedly said, came from her old enemies within the army, the ISI and the government. The source of the immediate danger was in fact very close to where she had stopped to buy her fruit: in the FATA and the broad zone along the frontier where new and potentially more dangerous actors had emerged while she had been in Dubai, Washington and London.

On December 27, 2007, as Bhutto was leaving a rally in Rawalpindi, waving to the crowd through the hatch of her vehicle, a fifteen-year-old boy fired three shots at her with a pistol before detonating a suicide bomb strapped to his waist.
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In her last speech she had run through the same themes as throughout her campaign: the need for moderation, justice, food and shelter for the needy, an end to violence. In the seconds before the shots and the blast, the crowd shouted ‘Bhutto de naray … wajan ge’ (the slogans of Bhutto … will always be chanted).
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She died in Rawalpindi general hospital of a wound probably caused by the blast of the explosion smashing her head into the metal handle of the hatch as she ducked to avoid the shots fired at her.
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Bhutto became the single highest-profile casualty of the 9/11 Wars to date. Twenty-three less-high-profile casualties died in the same attack, and ninety-one were injured.
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PAKISTAN POLITICS 2007–8

After the relative political stability of the six years after 9/11, the year following the death of Bhutto saw Pakistan plunged once more into political chaos reminiscent of that of the previous decade. President Musharraf was eventually forced to resign the presidency in August 2008, but five main political groupings – each representative of a broader constituency within Pakistan – had been battling for a share of power long before his final departure from power. The incumbent and his close allies within the military and among various key political powerbrokers whose interests had been well served over previous years constituted one faction in the mêlée. A second was composed of those within the army who had become frustrated with the president. Some had purely personal motivations, as Musharraf’s long tenure had blocked the promotion of many senior officers; others were concerned by potential emerging threats to the material position of the military with its privileged lifestyle and commercial interests; still others were genuinely worried by the increasingly autocratic nature of Musharraf’s rule. The power of these disaffected senior officers had been amply demonstrated when, following heavily managed presidential elections in October 2007, Musharraf was forced to rescind a state of emergency and resign as chief of army staff. A further show of strength came when the elections scheduled for January but postponed after the death of Bhutto were finally held in March 2008, and Musharraf’s replacement at the head of the army, the dry, moderate and effective Ashfaq Kayani, made it very clear that he would resist any attempt by his predecessor to use the military or the various intelligence services to influence the vote. The elections, to most observers’ surprise, were broadly seen as free and fair, something of a novelty for Pakistan.
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The third major group of players jockeying for power and influence were, of course, the extremists and religious conservatives. However, the Islamists of Jamaat Islami and the Deobandi clerics of the Jamaat Ulema Islami as well as the various religiously orientated splinter or smaller groups were largely absent from the democratic political process during this period, restricting their participation to large demonstrations ‘in protest at the lack of true democracy in Pakistan’, as Qazi Hussein Ahmed, the veteran leader of JI, put it over tea in the sprawling compound of offices, homes and schoolrooms that comprised the organization’s national headquarters in Lahore.
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In the North West Frontier province and in Baluchistan, provincial polls held simultaneously with national polls provided an unwelcome dose of ‘true democracy’ for the hardline religious alliance which had been in power or shared power in both provinces since 2002. The conservatives were unceremoniously dismissed from office by voters, who had had enough of government that was exceptionally incompetent even by low local standards, a useful reminder that appeals to religious or cultural identity do not always trump the basic human desire for a better quality of life.

The fourth of the factions contesting power in this turbulent period was Nawaz Sharif and the various lobbies he represented. Many Western analysts and policy-makers had difficulty understanding the appeal of the tubby, balding, middle-aged politician. Certainly his record of atrocious economic management, reputation for graft, poor English, lack of charisma, poor oratorical skills and total failure to articulate any kind of coherently formulated policies failed to impress successive Western interlocutors. Sharif’s home was the Punjab, and it was to Lahore, or more specifically the family estates at Raiwind just outside the city, that Sharif had returned when his long exile in Saudi Arabia had ended. He had immediately mobilized his old power base – major Punjabi industrialists, businessmen, conservative powerbrokers. To them Sharif was a known quantity. In his two previous stints in power in the 1990s, the main beneficiaries, beyond his own family, had been his supporters among the commercial classes of the Punjab who had been handed soft loans from banks, hugely profitable tariff arrangements and licences or development funds that they themselves could spend, on themselves or on those whose votes they wanted to secure as they saw fit. Many such people had rallied to Musharraf during Sharif’s exile. Now, the political winds were changing, and their support was flowing back to the returning former prime minister.