August 20, 2008 Archives

Facing impeachment and exile, Pervez Musharraf has resigned from Pakistan's presidency.

Though he badly wants to be spared the humiliation of fleeing the country like so many of his predecessors, Musharraf will likely spend the next several years in some congenial, secluded spot in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, where he will steel himself for assassination attempts and, one assumes, work on his golf swing. The tragedy of Musharraf is that he had a rare opportunity to remake Pakistan as a stable, prosperous, Muslim democracy at peace with its neighbors, and he squandered it. His bafflingly bad decision to cling to power at all costs in 2002 will haunt him for the rest of his life.

When Musharraf first seized power in a 1999 military coup, he was a familiar political figure - Pakistan has oscillated between brief episodes of sclerotic civilian government and longer periods of military rule since its founding. The military men invariably appear as white knights ready to rescue Pakistan from the depredations of the corrupt landowning class, and committed to strengthening the country against India. Yet over time, the military leadership also grows power-hungry and corrupt. Fattened by American military aid, Pakistan’s military has, over the past three decades, sought to combat India and its internal enemies by embracing radical Islam, in large part - as Robert D. Kaplan has explained - to contain Indian power. Pakistan’s strategic embrace of Islamism has had profound cultural consequences, ranging from the adoption of Sharia law to the spread of madrassas, which have in turned stymied the progress of women and kept the literacy rate dismally low.

At times, it seemed as though Musharraf might reverse these trends. One often got the impression that he wanted to go down in history as a great modernizer, an Ataturk of Pakistan. The central reason Pakistan's democracy has never flourished is the outsized power of its landowning class, which elections have tended to entrench rather than undermine. Though rural Pakistan enjoys a higher standard of living than most of rural India, its society was untouched by the land reforms that drove social mobility in India, Taiwan, and South Korea. Instead, a more-or-less feudal state of affairs has remained in place. Which is to say, Musharraf had a great deal of modernizing to do. But rather than confront the landed oligarchy head on, Musharraf, with the aid of technocrats like Shaukat Aziz, chose instead to spur the urban economy. He embraced robust economic reforms that, along with post-9/11 economic aid and trade agreements, opened and transformed Pakistan’s economy, which, until the recent spike in food and fuel prices, was growing at a rate of 7 percent a year.

By strengthening Pakistan’s secular middle class, however, Musharraf in some sense sealed his own fate. Whereas the Islamist opposition to Musharraf's rule has proved the most notorious and violent, the liberal opposition, sparked by Musharraf's move against an independent-minded Pakistani jurist who proved resistant to government bullying, ultimately proved more potent. The economic boom gave Pakistan's long-suffering bourgeoisie the confidence to face down Musharraf over his declaration of martial law in 2007, and it fueled the success of middle-class candidates in Pakistan’s February elections, a key indication both that Musharraf’s days were numbered and that his reforms had helped loosen the grip of feudalism.

It’s worth wondering what might have happened had Musharraf taken a different path. During a landmark speech in January 2002, Musharraf essentially declared war on the Islamic extremists who’d been hollowing out the Pakistani state from within. Popular support for the government - and for the government’s decision to side with the United States - was extremely high. The United States and its allies had offered a generous aid package, and the Islamists were at their weakest. Had Musharraf sought a power-sharing arrangement with the secular opposition at this point, he would have had tremendous moral authority to crush armed opponents of the government and to reform Pakistani society. But instead Musharraf chose to nurse various Islamist guerrilla armies back to health, to continue to use them against India and, later, Afghanistan. He undermined the rule of law to cling to power, and in doing so he undermined all of the goals he had originally set out to achieve. So it is no wonder that Pakistan's tenuous alliance with the United States has also been discredited in the eyes of the Pakistani masses. After all, the United States stood by as Musharraf made a mockery of his democratic commitments, and turned a blind eye as he armed Islamist militants with one hand while "fighting" them with the other. Indeed, the alliance against Al Qaeda and the Taliban has been so discredited that elected governments in the provinces and in Islamabad are pursuing the same feckless policy.

Despite Musharraf's real accomplishments, he will be remembered as yet another corrupt dictator who left Pakistan a near-ruin. More depressing still, Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, the leaders of Pakistan's two main democratic parties, are both notorious thieves, scarcely better than Musharraf at his worst. But the tentative revival of Pakistan's secular center, still reeling from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and still struggling against the kleptocratic machinations of the landowner class, just might offer a way forward.