Tariq Ali editorial on Pakistan coup

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nation Magazine, November 1, 1999

Pakistan: No Way Out

For the third time in Pakistan's traumatic history, the army has seized
power--this time, apparently, against the advice of the United States. The
country is under martial law. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his brother
Shahbaz and Gen. Mohammad Ziauddin of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) are
under house arrest. The people--disillusioned, apathetic, weary--appear
indifferent to the fate of their venal politicians. For several years, the
rot at the heart of Sharif's government had been a national scandal.
Politicians busy lining their own pockets had no time for the welfare of
the people.

A half-century of decay, abetted by US policy, has brought us to the
present crisis, and now with no progressive force in the country
whatsoever, every choice is a bad one. For three weeks before the coup,
military representatives and civilian politicians hastened to Washington
like colonial minions, and word has it that the US government was split in
choosing sides. Since 1951 Washington has felt that the army was the best
guarantor of its interests. The State Department backed Gen. Ayub Khan's
dictatorship until it was swept aside following a popular uprising in 1968.
The Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency, eager for a proxy in
Afghanistan, spawned General Zia, whose monstrous regime brutalized the
political culture until 1988. Now the military houses some of the same
forces nourished by Zia and his US sponsors in creating the Afghani
Taliban, and Washington is nervous.

Sharif was no better a bet against a fundamentalist challenge. In elections
after the 1997 palace coup against Benazir Bhutto, he captured 80 percent
of Parliament, but only 25 percent of the electorate had bothered to vote.
He promised much and delivered nothing. Pakistan has never provided the
bulk of its population with free education or healthcare, but in the past
it at least subsidized the price of food and protected the majority from
random killings. No longer. A country that spends money to build nuclear
weapons forces its poor to eat grass. Every day people driven insane by
poverty commit suicide. Last January a transport worker in Hyderabad who
had not been paid for two years soaked himself in petrol and set himself
alight. He left a letter: "I have lost patience. Me and my fellow workers
have been protesting the nonpayment of our salaries for a long time. Nobody
takes any notice. My wife and mother are seriously ill, and I have no money
for their treatment. My family is starving, and I am fed up with quarrels.
I don't have the right to live. I am sure the flames of my body will reach
the houses of the rich one day."

The Sharif brothers and their father, faithful neoliberals, created an
enterprise culture in which everything was for sale, including politicians
and generals. Rumors abound that to buy time and extract yet more money,
the Sharif family provided sacks full of dollars to friendly generals, to
no avail. When Sharif decided to oust the army chief, Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, then on an official visit to Sri Lanka, and replace him with the
ISI's General Ziauddin, Musharraf's supporters moved swiftly. Ziauddin,
Pakistan's principal supplier of the Taliban, had been promoted by Sharif
to appease the fundamentalist opposition, but was loathed by secular
officers, who had their own resentments as cold war orphans.

"Pakistan was the condom the Americans needed to enter Afghanistan," a
retired general once told me. "We've served our purpose, and they think we
can just be flushed down the toilet." Sharif had begun contemplating a
trading relationship with India, and last year, fearful that such a
rapprochement might lessen its power and reduce its budget, the army played
the nuclear card. Now it has seized power, but in changed conditions. If
Washington refuses to tolerate a new dictator, the most likely scenario is
a caretaker government of IMF-approved technocrats. That, too, will achieve
little. And then what? Groups of ISI-armed fundamentalists are in the
wings, and if they decide to split the army and unleash civil war, the
consequences for the entire region could be devastating.

Tariq Ali


Louis Proyect

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