Transcript

Host:  This is On The Line, and I'm Eric Felten.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is calling on President Pervez Musharraf "to step down, to quit, to leave, to end martial law." Ms. Bhutto was put under house arrest for a second time after General Musharraf suspended Pakistan's constitution. Several thousand have been detained under Mr. Musharraf's state of emergency, including opposition leaders, lawyers, and protestors.

The U.S. is calling for Mr. Musharraf to lift the state of emergency, resign his army post, and go forward with parliamentary elections. Mr. Musharraf said he will step down from his military command and hold elections by January 9th, but will not end emergency rule. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice commented on the situation:

Rice: "My reaction is that the positive element here, that the elections are going to be held and held very soon and also that the president said he was going to take off his uniform - these have both been essential to getting Pakistan back on a democratic path. Obviously, we are also encouraging that the state of emergency has got to be lifted and lifted as soon as possible."

Host: Ms. Rice said that Mr. Musharraf's martial law comes at a time when Pakistani civil society has been growing stronger, with a freer press and more vocal calls for democratic reform and judicial independence:

Rice: "It is all the more sad that this clearly bad decision about the imposition of the state of emergency has made a detour for Pakistan off the path of democratic development."

Host: Can Pakistan get back on a democratic path? I'll ask my guests: Shuja Nawaz, journalist and author of the forthcoming book: "Crossed swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within"; Frederic Grare, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Sadanand Dhume, a fellow at the Asia Society Washington Center and author of the forthcoming book, "My Friend the Fanatic" on the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia. Welcome and thanks for joining us.

Shuja Nawaz, President Musharraf told “The New York Times” in an interview that the emergency is to ensure elections go in an undisturbed manner. What do you make of that?

Nawaz: I think this is not a detour. This is more like a cul-de-sac and one that was created by General Musharraf of his own doing because there is no military solution to the problems besetting Pakistan today. The many wars within and now the wars on the frontier which have come into the settled areas are of great concern. And they do not have a military solution. They have a political and an economic solution. And under these conditions with the media muzzled, with the judiciary turfed out on short order, it’s impossible to have free and fair elections, which is the promise that he made.

Host: Frederic Grare, impossible to have free and fair elections?

Grare: Well, I’ve always appreciated President Musharraf’s sense of humor because, you know, in 2005, the local elections were about controlling the electoral machinery, which he actually did. It was not at all about who was going to win the election, per se. So, now we know that besides controlling the electoral machinery, he wants to do it under emergency, which makes it even more interesting because, as Nawaz said, there is no independence of the press. It’s almost impossible to campaign. It’s almost impossible to do anything political. So, if we can call it a farce, then we can again just appreciate Mr. Musharraf’s sense of humor.

Host: Sadanand, what does this mean for democracy in Pakistan?

Dhume: I think it sort of shows that the game is really up for Musharraf. And after having been in power for eight years and having fooled all of the people most of the time, he can’t sort of hold on to it anymore. For Pakistan, it’s really a question of moving on. But even if they do move on -- and I think they will if this is the end game for Musharraf – it’s going to take a lot more than having just one election for Pakistan to be on any kind of path to democracy. Because as you know, Pakistan has had elections. And the past several times, the problem is that they haven’t found a way to stick with the governments that are then elected. And there’s a tendency to lose patience and for the army to come back in again and again and again. And it’s that pattern that we should be looking to break.

Host: Shuja Nawaz, do you agree that this is an end game for Musharraf? Is he stronger or is he weaker at this point?

Nawaz: I think this was a sign of desperation, and so I would say that he is weaker than he was before because before he was talking of a political system. He was talking to political parties and their leaders. He was talking of reconciliation, a national reconciliation. I think that is out of the window now. No one is prepared to reconcile based on the current events. It’s also put him in a very difficult position with the Pakistan army because as the Chief of Army Staff, he imposed a state of emergency. So, he’s basically now pitting the coercive power of the army against the authority of the constitution and the state. And if the people do come out for whatever reason and as a result of any action that might occur, including attacks on the army itself, then it will be very difficult for the army to come out and quell those disturbances in the cities, especially after Punjab.

Host: Frederic Grare, what’s your sense of Mr. Musharraf’s grip on the army at this point?

Grare: This is the one million dollar question. We don’t really know what his grip on the army is. On the one side, it’s clear that, for example, Benazir’s strategy is to try to mobilize as many people as possible so as to make sure that gradually the army will dissociate itself from Perez Musharraf because it will feel alienated from the rest of society. But so far we have no indication that the army is going to move in that direction. We have no indication of the opposite either. And what could be seen as an indicator is the fact that Musharraf is definitely and almost desperately holding to his uniform because he knows that the day he takes off the uniform, he will gradually lose his power over the army. And if he loses control, this is, in a sense, the end of it. This may not happen overnight because he has been careful enough to name a few loyalties at the head of the army recently. But, I mean, it’s difficult to foresee a situation where it will be totally illegitimate in the country, where the army would have less and less stake in obeying to him and him staying where he is.

Host: Sadanand, do you agree that his resigning his Army Generalship will be a significant factor in whether the army would continue to follow his lead?

Dhume: I agree entirely with Frederic. You see, this is really -- This is the source of his power. When he came to power in 1999, he was the head of the army, but he was also reasonably popular, especially among the media and the middle classes and so on because it was seen as a break from the terrible governance of Nawaz Sharif. Now this is a deeply unpopular man. And so the uniform becomes even more significant because that’s really what’s keeping him where he is right now. So I’d agree one hundred percent with Frederic on this.

Host: Now, Shuja Nawaz, President Musharraf, in various interviews, has said that what he’s done is very popular and that he’s told that this is just what the people of Pakistan really want. Now, is that a brave face that he’s putting on this, or does he believe it himself? Is he that out of touch?

Nawaz: I think he believes in it himself, and that’s probably what he’s been told. But there is no accurate measure of that except some of the polls that have been conducted by other institutions. For instance, the International Republican Institute has a poll, the most recent one, which asks people to rate which institutions they respect the most. And this is just before the state of emergency. And they rated the media as the highest, followed by the judiciary. And the army, which traditionally has always been the most respected in a situation within the country, was way down. So, there is a change that has occurred. And this is not a change that’s lost on the army. It is still a very disciplined institution. It follows the hierarchy. But as Frederic said, the moment he drops his -- The moment he drops his uniform, that’s the end in terms of his loyalty from the troops below him.

Host: Frederic Grare, let’s talk a little about the media, then. Most independent media shut down as part of this state of emergency, but now President Musharraf is saying, “Well, you can come back on the air, you can publish again if you sign a code of conduct.” What’s that all about? What’s in this code of conduct?

Grare: I think that it speaks for itself. If the media speaks for a code of conduct, this means that it will just be compliant to whatever whoever defined the code of conduct is saying. So, in other words, free media is free just as long as it does comply with what the military says. Again, we can just appreciate Mr. Musharraf’s sense of humor.

Dhume: It’s entirely ironic.

Host: Sadanand Dhume.

Dhume: You can be free as long as you promise not to be free.

Host: And this code of conduct entails criminal penalties for “ridiculing the President”?

Dhume: Right, you’re not supposed to ridicule the President or ridicule the government and so on. It ceases to be a free media if it can’t criticize the government and if it can’t criticize him. So, this is obviously farcical.

Nawaz: There’s also the new Army Act, which has been expanded so that civilians can now be brought within its purview for, among other things, creating mischief, howsoever defined. So, this is really empowering the regime in ways that because there’s no Parliament, a simple ordinance allows the President to make these changes. I used to work for Pakistan Television in the old days when there was only one television in the country, and I know exactly what it means and what the government would like. I don’t think in today’s world that that’s possible any longer. We have the Internet, and we have satellite dishes. And people are getting the news. It’s impossible to control them.

Host: Frederic Grare, when President Musharraf instituted this state of emergency, he made a point of saying that this was all in order to fight extremists and terrorists and then also judges and lawyers who were posing inconvenient rulings for him. But what’s been happening as the lawyers and the judges have been rounded up and protestors by the thousands -- What’s been happening in the Northwest territories, where the problem with terrorist organizations has been going on?

Grare: Literally nothing new. There is an interesting saying in this whole crisis that of course everybody knows that the whole thing was not about terrorism. The whole thing was just about Pervez Musharraf holding on to power, removing the Supreme Court, replacing it with a more compliant one, and move on once his election had been validated. But, you know, for all the people who say, “Look, this could be a problem in the war on terrorism,” we have seen no shift of unit from the border, for example, back to Islamabad or anything, which seems to indicate this is definitely not a problem on this front at least, meaning also that for all the babble about the loose nukes and all the rest of it, there is absolutely no base for that except sort of a propaganda exercised and aiming at justifying the support to Pervez Musharraf. That’s about all there is into that.

Host: Sadanand Dhume, do you agree that it’s only a -- that the threat of Islamic terrorism within Pakistan and perhaps even the threat of what might happen to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal should not be of concern at this point to the West?

Dhume: I think it should definitely be of concern. I’d agree that it’s not -- It’s not likely. It’s unlikely. But just because of the gravity of a possibility, even a small likelihood should be something of serious concern, though I agree that it’s not very -- But, you know, more broadly, if Musharraf was serious that this emergency was about fighting extremism, then he would have gone and arrested senior people involved with militant outfits. We would have seen some kind of moves against some of the big madrassas which are associated with militant Islam. Instead he has gone after human-rights activists, lawyers, people who are associated with the secular opposition. So, this idea that he is taking these steps to fight extremism simply does not wash.

Host: Shuja Nawaz, what’s your sense on where the Pakistani military’s efforts against the Islamic extremists near the Afghan border stands?

Nawaz: They haven’t done very well till now, and there’s a simple reason for that. Most of the front-line troops were the Frontier Constabulary and the Frontier Corps, which is a ragtag bunch of militia, who are really there for local, minor policing activities, have never really fought battles, are not equipped, do not have personal body armor, do not even have helmets, do not -- operate in thin-skinned vehicles, in many cases do not even have replacement boots when those are needed. And many of them have been surrendering, often to their fellow tribesmen because they wouldn’t want to fight them and die. So, in the frontier, that’s not gone too well. In Swat, which is a settled area of the North-West Frontier Province, it’s a much older issue. It goes back to ‘94 when there was the first agreement under Benazir Bhutto with the Islamic militants allowing them to establish Sharia in the area. And then President Musharraf, when he took over, banned the party in 2001. But after 9/11, the leader of the party [Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi], a man named Sufi Muhammad, decided to take ten thousand people to fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan. And he was imprisoned. His son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, known as Maulana Radio because of his F.M. radio broadcast, is now leading the fight, and according to different accounts [has] eight hundred, some say a few thousand militants. And we’ve got at least 7,000 Frontier Corps and Constabulary forces in there. And now the army has taken over. So, this is now -- There is no other alternative left. The army is now in there. If they don’t succeed in the settled area, it’s going to be very bad for the army’s morale.

Host: Frederic Grare, what do you make of that?

Grare: I think that what had to be said regarding the actual situation was said. What I would like to point out is the very survival of Pervez Musharraf will mean one thing. It will mean that the civil society will have to be silenced, meaning that the more radical voice will occupy the public space even more than they do now. Underground, this will have also very practical implications because we speak of the frontier. We speak of some parts of Balochistan and Swat. What will happen tomorrow at the heart of Punjab when the P-M-L-(Q)[Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam)] will be left to itself and when its most conservative element will start aligning or continue their alignment with some sectarians against whatever opponent there is there. So, the question is to be asked whether the very survival of Mr. Musharraf is actually in the interest of the fight against terrorism and in the interest of Pakistan in general.

Host: Sadanand Dhume, is Mr. Musharraf’s survival a boon to the extremists or a threat to the extremists?

Dhume: I mean, I really don’t see too many good options, frankly. If he survives and as Frederic said, you could sort of see -- you could give the extremists a chance to ally with politicians from Nawaz Sharif’s former party and so on. But, you know, this has been a process -- And we have to step back and look at this. This has been a process that has been going on in Pakistan for thirty-five years now. We’ve seen it start with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. We’ve seen it intensify with Zia-ul-Haq. It’s been a process of the Islamicization of Pakistani society, and that has gone hand in hand with militants and extremists having a larger and larger voice in society. So, whether or not you have Musharraf is a sort of -- It’s almost irrelevant to me. I’d like to see any Pakistan ruler in fact get serious about madrassa reform -- the ten to fifteen percent which are associated with either Shi’a-Sunni violence or with international terrorism in some form. And that we haven’t seen happen. And we haven’t really seen that happen with any Pakistani government for the past thirty-five years. That’s really a deep problem as I see it.

Host: Shuja Nawaz, what are the prospects for the opposition in Pakistan now to mount some sort of effort, democratic, against Musharraf?

Nawaz: The timetable, as announced, really makes it impossible for them to do much with these ruling house arrests for Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, with Nawaz Sharif out of the game. As Frederic was saying, with these two parties not being able to participate, you will have a kind of a vacuum, which the Islamic parties have been very carefully sitting out this conflict. And they will benefit. I should add, too, what Sadanand was saying that the Islamicization of Pakistani society is now paralleled by an Islamicization of the Pakistan army. However, we must not equate Islamicization with terrorism or extremism. The army is still not in that mode. And we have to recognize that it is gradually more reflective of Pakistani society in general as its recruitment base is spread through the other provinces and not restricted to the three districts that originally formed the bulk of the army.

Host: Frederic Grare, what’s your sense of what’s next for civil society in Pakistan?

Grare: Well, I just indicated in a sense what’s next for the civil society if Pervez Musharraf fell in power. I would just like to now acerbate what has been said. I think that rather than speaking of Islamicization, it would be, I think, more accurate to say that the Pakistani society is perhaps more religiously conservative, but there is absolutely no link, no inevitability of a religiously conservative society becoming extremist on the one side. I mean, if there is a lesson to be drawn from the past six months, this is clearly that by and large, the Pakistani society is pro-democracy, whatever it means, by the way. And the same people who actually opposed Musharraf after March 9th and even more after May 12th did support him when he did move against the radicals in the Red Mosque incident. Questions were asked about the method later on. But by and large, the same people did oppose him because he is a military dictator and did support him when he moved against radicalism -- those people are no less religious than anybody else in Pakistan. This is, to me, really not the issue.

Host: I’m afraid that’s going to have to be the last word for today. We’re out of time. But I’d like to thank my guests: Shuja Nawaz, journalist and author of the forthcoming book “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within”; Frederic Grare of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Sadanand Dhume of the Asia Society Washington Center and author of the forthcoming book “My Friend the Fanatic.” Before we go, I’d like to invite you to send us your questions or comments. You can reach us through our website at www.voanews.com/ontheline. For “On the Line,” I’m Eric Felten.