VIEW: Pakistan in 2015 —Shahid Ilyas

Musharraf served the masses by enabling the mullahs to control Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for five years during which they provided space to the Taliban to strengthen their hold and make inroads into the rest of Pakistan

“Our conferees concluded, (Pakistan) will not recover easily from decades of political and economic mismanagement, divisive politics, lawlessness, corruption and ethnic friction. Nascent democratic reforms will produce little change in the face of opposition from an entrenched political elite and radical Islamic parties. Further domestic decline would benefit Islamic political activists, who may significantly increase their role in national politics and alter the makeup and cohesion of the military — once Pakistan’s most capable institution. In a climate of continuing domestic turmoil, the central government’s control probably will be reduced to the Punjabi heartland and the economic hub of Karachi” — ‘US National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2015’, published in December 2000.

The above estimate is a grim reminder of what we are up against. Our successive rulers — from 1947 to 2010 — have brought the country to the state of affairs where we find ourselves today. In fact — to be fair to the politicians — the representatives of the people might have done well had they been allowed by the establishment to focus on serving the people without interruption. But we were not so fortunate. General Ayub ‘served’ us as defence minister while at the same time remaining commander-in-chief of the army. Then he decided to ‘serve’ us even better by sending the politicians home and to jail and himself becoming president-cum-field marshal.

After being served by the military for a decade — which General Ayub and his cronies called “the decade of development” — we were handed over to yet another general — General Yahya Khan — who, although he conducted “the fairest” election in the country’s history, was trying to do a job for which he was not trained, could not handle things, and this led to the country’s break-up in 1971.

Then the poor masses handed us over to Z A Bhutto, who rather than taking tough decisions for fear of losing power, made a mess of things by nationalising everything in the spirit of a socialist. Ironically, he himself hailed from one of the biggest feudal families in Pakistan. He, rather than handling foreign policy in a statesmanly manner for the long-term interests of Pakistan, chose to follow a populist agenda. He started developing our ‘bomb’ (could a poor country like Pakistan afford it?) and harbouring Afghan religious extremists to settle scores with Afghanistan rather than sitting with its leaders and talking to them. Many here will argue that Bhutto was right in harbouring Afghan dissidents because Afghanistan was doing the same by hosting Pakhtun and Baloch dissidents. This argument is not fair on two grounds. First of all, two wrongs do not make a right and secondly, the Baloch and Pakhtun leaders hosted by Afghanistan were not religious fanatics. They wanted due rights for their respective national groups inside the parameters of Pakistan. Today the Pakistani state is offering them all they were persecuted for in the 1970s, but alas! It may be too late.

Z A Bhutto would have been remembered today as a national hero had he not bowed before the mullahs. He agreed to declare Ahmedis as non-Muslims. This gave a wrong signal to fundamentalist elements as despite not having a substantial public following, they could still misuse religion for pressuring governments into following a certain track.

Then came the worst dictator in Pakistan’s history to serve us for yet another decade. General Zia played havoc with the state and society by pitting various religious and ethnic groups against each other to cling to power for as long as possible. He systematically ‘Islamised’ the military, bureaucracy, parliament and society at large. He can rightly be called the father of jihadism in Pakistan — a monster that, today, sends shock waves not only through its neighbours, but as far away as New York and London. One wishes his friends, including Nawaz Sharif, had advised him against such deadly policies.

The 1990s were, by and large, wasted in perpetual power-struggles between Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto and the military. The teeming masses carried the burden of grinding poverty, disease and illiteracy. Fundamentalist groups were lining up for their next jihadi adventures after they were told by their godfathers that it was they who had defeated the communist Soviet Union. The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan (apart from their ongoing jihad project in Kashmir) provided them a golden opportunity to convert that country into ‘Darul Islam’. The Pakistani military, perfectly Islamised by General Zia, took this cause upon itself and deputed its regular personnel to Afghanistan to help their Muslim brethren — the Taliban — in their endeavours of Islamising Afghanistan.

Then came the final calamity to befall the Islamic republic in the person of General Pervez Musharraf. He worked really hard to make sure that Pakistan was well on track towards its projected destiny by the year 2015. He served the masses by “devolving” powers to them, enlightening them with his “enlightened moderation”, playing double games in the war on terror, pushing the country to its worst and apparently irreversible energy shortages, declaring a war on the Baloch and Pakhtuns, introducing “real democracy”, enabling the mullahs to control Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for five years during which they provided space to the Taliban to strengthen their hold and make inroads into the rest of Pakistan.

The present government may genuinely want the country to emerge as a stable state, but the ground realities of today’s Pakistan seem almost impossible to change. These realities — the fact that the military and the mullah are well entrenched in the state and governance structures — have roots in bad governance and corruption over the past 60 years. They cannot be done away with in a short period of just five years. And let us not forget, the year 2015 is close at hand.

The writer is a freelance columnist, hailing from Waziristan. He can be reached at ilyasakbarkhan@gmail.com