Pakistan’s Pinstripe Revolution- Newsweek

[Sam Dhanraj]

Pakistan’s Pinstripe Revolution​

Gen. Pervez Musharraf never wanted to be a politician. But his emergency decree has made the return of civilian politics inevitable

By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK
Nov 19, 2007 Issue

The first time I saw president Pervez Musharraf in person was in September 2000, about a year after he had assumed power in Pakistan, at a small gathering at New York's Council on Foreign Relations. It was the week of the United Nations General Assembly, and a galaxy of heads of state were in town. Immediately after Musharraf came Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. The two men couldn't have been more different. Musharraf delivered a scripted address while barely looking up from his text. He ticked off a series of substantive points, recited facts and statistics, and left abruptly once he was done. Chávez, on the other hand, was full of smiles and guffaws. He mingled before and after his talk, gave an off-the-cuff speech, spoke of his great love of America, its people, culture and baseball. He quoted Walt Whitman. When it was time to leave, he reluctantly walked away.

This difference might help explain the two leaders' divergent fates. Musharraf, for all his flaws, has been a far better president than Chávez—who despite Venezuela's oil bonanza has run the country into the ground. And yet Musharraf was never able to master the key skill you need to lead a nation—politics. He ruled his country in an aloof, controlled manner, never really embracing the hurly-burly of its politics and never finding a secure political path to maintaining his presidency. Convinced that he had rescued Pakistan from collapse, he was outraged that anyone might try to put obstacles in his way.

In a meeting with some 80 foreign envoys in Islamabad last Monday, Musharraf revealed the real reason for suddenly declaring a state of emergency on Nov. 3. Gone was the fiction that he was acting to save the country from the menace of terrorism. Speaking to the diplomats, he seemed to have one target in mind—the country's activist Supreme Court, which he blamed for aiding terrorists and targeting his presidency. "Ninety-six percent of what he said to the envoys was about how threatening the Supreme Court was to his political survival," says one Western diplomat in Islamabad, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

This is telling. From the start of his presidency Musharraf has had difficulties with the Supreme Court. On assuming office he ordered its justices to swear an oath that they would take no decisions against the military. Several refused and resigned. Even the ones that stayed did not prove as docile as he might have expected. The Court ordered him to hold elections by 2002 (which he did, although they were widely considered to be not entirely free and fair). This past March, Musharraf tried to fire the independent-minded chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, backing down only after mass protests. In the past two weeks, it was becoming apparent that the Court would rule that Musharraf was ineligible to be re-elected president for a second five year term in October while continuing to serve as the powerful Army chief.

Last September, in a predawn phone call, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had talked Musharraf out of declaring an emergency. But this time Musharraf listened to no one. He decided to act against the advice of his chief of staff, several cabinet ministers, the U.S. ambassador, and Adm. William Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command. He suspended the Constitution, placed dissenting judges under house arrest and ordered the detention of opposition politicians, human-rights activists and anyone who defied the ban on assemblies of more than five people. Musharraf's approval rating had already dwindled over the past year to around 20 percent. It is surely lower now.

It did not have to come to this for Musharraf. When he took office in 1999, Pakistan was in free-fall, economically bankrupt, politically isolated and in close alliance with the Taliban (and, by extension, Al Qaeda). He broke the country's fall and for many years, moved it toward moderation and modernity. He turned the country's strategic orientation away from the Taliban, revived the economy with real reforms, empowered women and spoke out against the pernicious influence of Islamic extremism. He opened up the media, allowing genuinely independent television channels (all of which were shut down last week), and tolerated considerable domestic criticism. He even inched closer to good relations with India, which might explain why the Indian government refused to criticize him last week

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