Author: Shaheen Sehbai
Publication: South Asia Tribune
Date: June 29-July 5, 2003
URL: http://www.satribune.com/archives/jun29_jul05_03/P1_summit.htm
Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf
has received enough sugar-free, fat-free lollypop samples from President
George Bush to go back home, jumping with joy on his controlled media,
to convince confused Pakistanis that he was returning as a conqueror of
Camp David and not a man put under greater scrutiny and pressure.
The high-sounding, outwardly confident
Musharraf as he may appear on Pakistan TV, must be a very worried and concerned
man deep inside because what he has got, along with a lot of patting on
his back, is a bagful of tasks to perform, benchmarks to meet, orders to
deliver.
In the words of a senior Punjabi
diplomat in the Pakistani side, Musharraf has been told in so many words:
"Puttar Hunh Sher Bun" (which is the punch line of a dirty joke involving
a jungle lion and a domestic donkey, and when put in decent words means:
"Get ready for the real pain").
The bottom-line of the Camp David
deal is that Musharraf has to keep his Masters happy, he will be under
close scrutiny for almost two years before any of the goodies that have
been promised actually start flowing and he will have to behave in terms
of nuclear technology and on Kashmir (according to what the Indians want:
100 per cent stop to Cross Border Terrorism). For rewards, basically for
now it is a mouthful of promises and more promises.
American officials are very apt
at putting the record straight in such matters as they have to keep a domestic
audience intelligently informed, a Congress adequately satisfied and a
Press reasonably managed. That is exactly what a "Senior Administration
Official" (SAO) did on the same day as Musharraf and Bush had their "Lollypop
Briefing" at Camp David.
This SAO is normally a very senior
person, sometimes the Deputy Secretary or the Under Secretary who is present
in the talks, who answers media questions on back ground, which means he
or she cannot be named. That briefing did take place on June 24 and took
out all the joy and excitement out of Musharraf's claims.
Just for quick reference here is
what the SAO said on what the US side expects from Musharraf:
"This is a multi-year program, Congress
has to approve it, we have to make sure that it makes sense. That is where
-- I'm not using the term, conditionality, but basically you've heard me
raise major issues, as I was talking earlier. And for Congress to appropriate
the funds -- and, indeed, for the government to seek the funds -- I think
we're going to have to be satisfied that Pakistan is indeed working vigorously
with us in the war against terrorism, is working vigorously to ensure that
there is no onward proliferation and is moving smartly towards democracy...I'm
not calling those conditions, but let's be realistic, three years down
the road, if things are going badly in those areas, it's not going to happen.
We're not going to request it, Congress won't appropriate it. And that
is a bargain that the Pakistanis are entering into with their eyes wide
open." For Full Briefing Text Click here
When a journalist pointed out that
those kind of "conditions" have been considered, the SAO said: "Yes, and
you know -- I mean, any of those would blow apart in assistance programs.
So that's the understanding." And the SAO also made it clear that the assistance
would begin in 2005, two years from now after Congress had passed it in
the Budget for 2005 presented next March.
When bluntly asked did the US show
any concern for the so-called road to democracy in Pakistan that General
Musharraf has engineered, the SAO said: "Well, as I've sort of implied
a couple times, the President made it clear that Pakistan's movement towards
democracy must continue, that this is really sort of the -- part of the
bedrock of our relationship. And President Musharraf reiterated that he's
committed to moving down that road and we expect him to continue to do
so."
These are the basic tasks Musharraf
has been given by the Bush Administration for whatever he has been promised.
Can Musharraf deliver all or most of them? He is not clear and does not
know because the way he has been phrasing the issue is confusing. In one
of the speeches after meeting President Bush, Musharraf said this regarding
democracy in Pakistan: "There are anti- democratic forces waiting to take
advantage of the democratic process to undo reforms and restructuring [that]
my government has introduced during the last three years."
What does he mean? He leads the
biggest anti-democratic force in the country as a military dictator who
came through an army coup against an elected government and introduced
fundamental changes in the Constitution using an intimidated and largely
subservient judiciary. So is any one working against his dictatorship to
be called an anti-democratic force. This argument is hanging upside down.
What is the US administration expecting
in terms of democracy? This is what the SAO had to say: "Obviously, a functioning
parliament...But, basically, a functioning democratic system with functioning
parliaments and functioning representation, including down to very low
levels."
What Musharraf has succeeded in
selling, and Bush people have agreed to buy for the moment, is the topsy-turvy
idea that Pakistan has only two choices in terms of its political future
--- either the present military dictatorship which supports the US or an
out of control fundamentalist Mulla regime which will turn everything in
the region on its head and force the US to do in Pakistan what they did
in Afghanistan or Iraq.
This concept is totally flawed as
Musharraf has conveniently sidelined and ignored the large liberal, secular
and modern mass of political spectrum which has won all the elections,
including the one Musharraf conducted under supervision of his secret agencies.
This part of the political landscape is exactly what the US should be working
with. It is pro-West and both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have been
almost obediently working with Washington. It is anti- fundamentalism as
in all free elections it did not allow the religious right to get more
than 2-3 per cent of seats. It wants better ties with India as Nawaz Sharif
and Benazir demonstrated by hosting Indian Prime Ministers in Pakistan.
What Musharraf has done is to secretly
boost the Mullas, give them all establishment support and props to turn
them into a formidable electoral force in Parliament so that he could then
present them as a threat to the West and seek concessions. Enough evidence
has already surfaced to prove this secret Mulla-Musharraf alliance.
What Washington should now demand
from Musharraf in the 24 months before the money starts flowing into Pakistan,
should be a serious effort by Musharraf to bring back the mainstream liberal
political parties into play, sidelining the Mullas as these parties form
the natural allies of any US administration in the long term. Washington
cannot depend for ever on military dictators, or the Mullas as these dictators
are presenting them as the only alternative.
