Pakistan – Musharraf forced out
On 18 August, hours before the Pakistani parliament
was due to consider formal impeachment proceedings against him, General
Musharraf resigned from his post as Pakistan’s president. Ninety per cent of
the Pakistani people greeted this with genuine relief and happiness.
Hated regime
What made him a special target of hatred was his
total subservience to US imperialism in the latter’s ‘war on terror’ – a war
which most Pakistanis loathe. Under this Faustian pact with the devil, the
Pakistani army, instead of being an instrument for guarding Pakistan’s borders
against foreign intruders, became a deadly vehicle for waging war on its own
people in the tribal areas of the Frontier province along the border with
Afghanistan. This aroused fierce opposition to his regime and spawned an armed
resistance against the Pakistani army in the tribal heartlands, resulting in
the killing of hundreds of soldiers and the capture of even larger numbers.
It was in pursuit of this menial task in the
service of US imperialism that the Musharraf government found itself in a
confrontation with the Pakistani judiciary – a confrontation sparked by the
insistence of Iftikhar Choudhary, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of
Pakistan, to investigate the disappearance of suspected Islamic radicals at the
hands of the security forces, with some of them, like Khaled Sheikh Mohamed,
surreptitiously handed over to the US intelligence agencies, to be whisked away
to dungeons in Guantanamo Bay and other centres of torture.
General Musharraf’s response to the refreshing
display of independence by the Chief Justice was to sack him, an act which
sparked widespread protests, in which tens of thousands of lawyers poured on
to the streets of towns and cities across the length and breadth of Pakistan in
protest against the government’s arbitrary action. The government’s
humiliation was absolute and complete when a few months later, on 20 July 2007,
Chief Justice Choudhary was reinstated by the Supreme Court of Pakistan,
dealing a deadly blow to the regime of General Musharraf, whose standing went
into free fall and left it in total isolation, from which it was never to
recover.
General Musharraf could only cling to power through
the backing of the army and the support – financial, military and diplomatic –
of US imperialism. The problem with this was that he could only secure US support by doing the latter’s bidding through an active participation in the so-called war on
terror, that is, by unleashing the Pakistani army on the population in the
tribal areas, which harbours sympathy for, and gives assistance to, the Afghan
resistance. And the more he resorted to this extreme measure, the more
desperate became his position and the more hated and discredited became the army
in the eyes of the Pakistani people.
This produced the disconnect between his popularity
with US imperialism and his total isolation and lack of legitimacy at home. The
more support he received from US imperialism, the more discredited he became
inside Pakistan. No wonder then that he was the target of attacks on his life
on three occasions, all of which he survived narrowly.
Reliance
on US and fundamentalism
Musharraf lasted as long as he did by, on the one
hand, playing on US fears that he was all that stood between Pakistan and an Islamist takeover, and on the other hand, letting fundamentalism grow on
his watch. Guided as he was solely by the motivation to keep himself in power,
lacking as he was in popular support, he had no option but to rely on fundamentalism
and the socially most conservative forces to build a support base for himself
while keeping at bay the relatively secular bourgeois parties such as Bhutto’s
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N) of
Mr Nawaz Sharif. Encouraging fundamentalist forces to gain support, his regime
every now and then cracked down on them. While a section of his army officers
were actively engaged in egging on the Jihadis, another section was busy
arresting some of them and handing them over to the tender mercies of the CIA
or torturing them within Pakistan. This game of being able to run with the
hare and hunt with the hounds could not be carried on indefinitely.
His sacking of the judges, his inability to satisfy
either the Pakistani élite or the masses, isolated him and the army to such an
extent that, through a US brokered arrangement, he had to allow the return from
exile of Benazir Bhutto, drop all corruption charges against her, and hold
elections as a way of legitimising his military rule. Benazir paid with her
life for collaborating with this US-hatched conspiracy.
Meanwhile Musharraf stepped down as head of the
army and was sworn in for a second five-year term as president on 29 November
2007 by a rubber stamp parliament brought into existence through a rigged
election a few years earlier. Since his power was based on his position as head
of the army, the moment he shed his uniform power began to drain away.
The election held in February this year was won by
the PPP and PML-N, while Musharraf’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam) (PML-Q), and other fundamentalist outfits were
wiped out. The Coalition government formed by the two major parties – the PPP
and the PML-N – was under mass pressure to get rid of Musharraf, either through
the judicial route or impeachment proceedings in parliament. After the
provincial assemblies had overwhelmingly passed resolutions of no-confidence in
the president, the hollowness of his position was there for all to see even if these
resolutions were non-binding.
Impeachment
This set the stage for the parliament to consider
formal impeachment proceedings. General Ashfaq Kiyani, Musharraf’s hand-picked
successor as the head of the army, distanced himself from his former boss and refused
to intervene on his behalf, just as he had not permitted the army to rig the
February election in favour of the army-supported parties, for fear of volcanic
popular uprisings against such a course of action. Without the army backing,
General Musharraf was nothing. Having no popular base and being hated by the
masses, having been deserted by the army, he had no option other than to
resign, for US imperialist support alone could not keep him in the presidential
palace. The only other option open to him, that of dissolving parliament was
equally unavailable in the circumstances.
As he leaves, Pakistan is in a mess, for which
Musharraf’s army regime bears a larger share of the blame, as does the Bush
administration which fully supported and kept in place his army dictatorship.
Musharraf’s departure brings to an end the barely disguised military rule in Pakistan.
With his disappearance, the danger is that the
Coalition between the PPP and PML-N will disintegrate[1] as
each of them goes its own way seeking short-term political advantage, when in
fact they should be seeking to address the serious economic and political
problems facing Pakistan. Inflation is running at 24.3 per cent, which hurts
the poorest sections of society the most; the country is experiencing declining
economic growth, dwindling investment and a fiscal meltdown; the Pakistani
rupee has slid to an exchange rate of 76 to the dollar (down 23 per cent since
January); the army is always in the wings, ready to take over at any
opportunity; last, though not least, while there is a state of rebellion in the
tribal areas, there is intensified pressure from US imperialism for the
Pakistani government to wage war on its own people in the interests of US’s
‘war on terror’.
If the newly elected government is to have a life
and meaning, it must bring some relief to the Pakistani masses, who have
suffered long and hard. It must also resist US pressure by refusing to wage
war on its own people. The overwhelming majority of the people of Pakistan, as indeed of the people throughout the world, support the Afghan resistance
against imperialist aggression, as they do the Iraqi and Palestinian
resistance.
The elected government, instead of accepting US
dictate and clamping down on its people, ought in fact to give expression to
the yearning of the Pakistani masses to resist imperialist brigandage in
Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine and Lebanon, as well as interference in the
affairs of Pakistan. Such a stance will have the effect of weakening
imperialism and give a moral boost to the resistance movements in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, and win over the Pakistani people, especially in the
tribal areas, away from fundamentalism to the mainstream secular forces. The
alternative course cannot but end in total disaster. Pakistan is no longer able, as the Pakistani masses are no longer willing, to cooperate with the US in its ‘war on terror’. Any attempt by the new government in this direction will alienate the
Pakistani masses, lay the conditions for the fragmentation of the army and the
break up of Pakistan.
Time alone will tell which way the government will
move. All the same, the end of the Musharraf military rule is one of the best
things to happen in Pakistan for a decade. While being a devastating setback
for the carefully laid plans of US imperialism, it has created a space for the
development of a working-class movement and the mobilisation of the vast masses
of Pakistani people in the struggle for a people’s democratic revolution which,
by clearing away the lumber of feudal oppression and exploitation, cannot but
end up preparing the conditions for the next – socialist – stage.
NOTE
1. In fact, as we go to press, this is
already happening. Nawaz Sharif’s party have withdrawn from the government
over the refusal by the PPP leadership to restore Iftikhar Chaudhary to the
position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Obviously the PPP
is apprehensive that Chaudhary might challenge the validity of the
reconciliation order signed by General Musharraf which withdrew the corruption
charges against Mrs Bhutto and her husband and paved the way for her return to Pakistan under the US-brokered agreement.