Pervez Musharraf was the most interesting leader Pakistan has had. He was a general; so he took what he thought were reasonable risks. He was a leader; so he talked a lot. He tried hard to reach a settlement with India; his idea of dividing Kashmir into four was a promising start. Unfortunately, he invaded Kargil heights secretly, and thereby destroyed any trust Indians might have had in him; after that, India's BJP rulers were no longer prepared to believe him, and he lost his chance. This was my reaction to a speech of his, published in Business Standard of 22 January 2002.
A CRASH COURSE IN LEADERSHIP
GIM – the Great Indian Middle Class – has almost cured me of television; the great family epics it loves bore me to death. Ten minutes of Aaj Tak or half an hour of Australia vs South Africa is about as much as I can take. But looking for the news on Aaj Tak, I blundered onto General Pervez Musharraf. I could not tear myself away. It was a riveting performance.
The late Shantanu Rao Kirloskar had a publicity
adviser for some time. He used to make Kirloskar rehearse his speeches – record
them, make him listen and improve his delivery. It would seem that Musharraf
does not have a media adviser or has one who is scared of being locked up. For
most of the time, he appeared in the bottom left-hand or bottom right-hand
corner of the screen. It depended on whether the top left-hand corner was
occupied by a picture the venerable Qaid-e-Azam or the top right-hand corner
was occupied by the venerable flag of Pakistan. Someone – maybe Musharraf
himself – decided that the emblems of power had to be given prominence. Good
for the emblems, but they diminished the President. Being at the bottom of the
screen, he looked like a schoolboy peering over a desk. The desk was invisible,
but it could not be missed, for Musharraf mostly read from a text. He did not
use a teleprompter. A teleprompter would in any case have found it difficult to
cope with, since he switched unpredictably from Urdu to English. Often the
whole sentence was in Urdu, but the key words were in English. Understandable,
since he had so many audiences to address. He addressed Atal Bihari Vajpayee by
name, but also the US, the international community, and of course his home
audience. It was a difficult, an ambitious speech.
So naturally, its basic object was obscured, most of
all from Indian audiences, which hear what they want and not what they need to
from Pakistan. Its basic aim was to avert an Indian military attack. I do not
know what our rulers want to do – whether they want to attack Pakistan or just
win the UP elections. But they have certainly tried to give Pakistan a scare;
as General Padmanabhan said, the army has prepared for a war, not a military
exercise. Words do not matter; but five corps have been moved to the border, and
three have been placed just behind in reserve. These actions are meant to
speak, and they speak unambiguously: India has prepared for a war.
And it is a war Pakistan cannot afford. Why not? On
the face of it, Pakistan is better placed to fight a war today than it was in
1971. The military balance is roughly the same, and Pakistan does not have to
divide its armed forces between the east and the west. Against India’s 1.1
million men under arms, Pakistan has 550,000. Whereas in 1971 Karachi was left
defenceless, Pakistan today has submarines and destroyers that can put up a
fight. It has 387 fighters and bombers against our 869 – an air force with no
aggressive capability, but enough for defence. It has 3450 armoured vehicles
against our 5271, and 1752 guns against our 4455. On paper it has a big enough
force to fight a defensive war.
So why does Musharraf, the man who launched the
Kargil adventure, not want to fight? I cannot read his mind; but if I were him,
I would ask: what objective will I achieve with a war? The answer has to be,
none: there is no respect in which he can alter India’s behaviour to his
advantage by going to war. To be a worthy leader of his country, he had to find
an honourable way of not going to war.
That is what his speech was about. To stop India
from attacking, he had to convey a message that he will stop cross-border
terrorism, and make it credible. To this end he banned Lashkar-i-Tayyaba and
Jaish-e-Muhammad. He banned Tahrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammad, which was to
Afghanistan what Lashkar and Jaish were to India: it trained and sent
Pakistanis to fight in Afghanistan – and could, now that it was unemployed,
have taken up the business in Kashmir. He banned Lashkar-e-Jangvi and
Sipah-e-Mohammad, the two principal private armies fighting the civil war
between Sunnis and Shias. And a few more. He said, “No organization is allowed
to form Lashkar, Sipah or Jaish”; in other words, he has announced a ban on the
training and marshalling of private armies. “It is for the government to take a
position on international issues. Individuals, organizations and political
parties should restrict their activities to the expression of their views.” He
promised the Americans: “Pakistan will not allow its territory to be used for
terrorist activities anywhere in the world.” It does not matter whom he made
the promise, as long as he keeps his word.
All this he did to dissuade India from attacking.
But he also had internal reasons. We in India have little inkling of the social
conditions in Pakistan. We are so busy thinking ill of it that we do not
observe what has been happening there. Something between 300,000 and half a
million Indians went to the Middle East after the oil boom of the 1970s. Many
more Pakistanis did – probably a million or a million-and-a-half from a
population a sixth our size. Most of the Indian migrants’ remittances were used
to smuggle in gold, so they had little effect on the rest of the economy. But
the flood of foreign currency into Pakistan was so huge that exchange controls
and import controls were overwhelmed. The imports destroyed all industry except
a rather sickly textile industry; as Musharraf remarked, Pakistani Mullah
warlords go about in Pajeros. The surfeit of foreign exchange enabled the rich
people of Pakistan to live half their time in the west. When the Middle Eastern
oil boom ended, Pakistani workers fanned out further west. I have been
approached by homesick Pakistanis in Amsterdam; the last time I went to Oslo,
many kiosks there were manned by Pakistanis. Arab grandees picked up concubines
in Pakistan; Arab eccentrics financed mosques, religious schools and private
armies. Osama bin Laden was one such eccentric. The 1990s have been
particularly bad for Pakistan; there was no growth of productive employment,
and idle young men turned to crime, often financed by money from the rich
abroad and at home.
It is this disintegration of Pakistan, its turning
into a lawless state, that concerns Musharraf; that is what he would, in his
own fumbling way, like to address. It is worth watching him do it because he is
a leader in the making, a leader who was thrown into his job because Nawaz
Sharif’s dirty trick against him failed, a leader who is teaching himself to
run a country.
