Walking the Knife-Edge
Ajai Sahni
Editor, SAIR; Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management
The coup and the
assassination have been integral to political transition in Pakistan
virtually since the moment of its creation [the country's first Prime
Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951, and violence or
machinations have marked virtually every change of regime since]. This
ruinous legacy continues to reassert itself at each crucial turn of the
country's history. So, again, even as the Pakistani dream continues to
unravel, the country's military dictator General Pervez Musharraf -
himself in power as the result of a coup against an elected Government -
came under two serious attempts on his life within eleven days, on
December 14 and December 25, 2003, the latter involving two separate
suicide attacks within moments of each other.
Speaking on national television after the second assassination attempt,
Musharraf spoke harshly about the "cowardly people who attack while
hiding", and declared that "terrorists and extremists" opposed to the
global war against terrorism might have plotted the attacks, adding
further that he would not be cowed down by such actions. It would appear
that the lines between the Pakistani state and the Islamist extremist
forces that have long been its protégés would finally harden into a
clear antagonism.
Both the assassination attempts and such a crystallization of attitudes
have been expected ever since Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top
lieutenant, speaking on the second anniversary of the September 11
attacks on the US, had declared in a message to "our brother Muslims in
Pakistan": "How long will you be patient with Musharraf, the traitor who
sold out the blood of the Muslims in Afghanistan and handed over the
Arab emigrant Mujahideen, the descendants of the Companions of the
Prophet, to crusader America?"
Things, however, are never entirely clear in Pakistan, and the
establishment has so long been in bed with the terrorists that the
disengagement is far from simple or inevitable. Thus, even as President
Musharraf was denouncing the "cowardly people" who had attacked him, his
Information Minister, Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad, was arguing that 'the
jehadi culture in Pakistan could not be changed and he who denied
jihad had no place in Islam', adding, however, that "whether or not
it is jihad can only be decided by the state." The distinction
between 'our jehadis' and 'their terrorists' has evidently survived in
Pakistan's political rhetoric, despite the attacks on the country's
current President. The ambiguity is also reflected in an interesting
turn of phrase in reports on the assassination attempts on Pakistan
television; the expression "khud kush hamlavar" or 'suicide
attacker', a decidedly pejorative description, was used repeatedly to
describe the failed assassins. Islamist suicide bombers in Kashmir, in
Palestine, and in other parts of the world are routinely glorified as 'fidayeen',
'those who sacrifice themselves', and this has been the conventional
appellation on Pakistan TV as well.
Such ambivalence is, however, becoming progressively unsustainable in
Pakistan, if only because the line between 'our jehadi' and
'their terrorist' is being rapidly obliterated. Many of the prominent
terrorist groups that are perceived as being close to the state and
substantially controlled by the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) now
have cadres moonlighting for, and deeply sympathetic to,
Al Qaeda
and its affiliates, even where the top leadership remains apparently
compliant.
The growing danger to Musharraf and his regime, however, does not come
from the swelling ranks of 'their terrorists' alone. Preliminary
disclosures blame the Christmas assassination attempt on the Al Jihad, a
relatively minor terrorist group that has been virtually inactive for
several years, but matters are far from simple. Both the recent attacks
reflect high levels of complexity as well as of complicity within at
least a section of the establishment, and these discredit the
possibility of a rag tag operation. Both incidents occurred within a
hundred yards of one another in Rawalpindi, which is the General
Headquarters of the Pakistan Army and the most militarised city in a
militarised country; they occurred within the high security Cantonment
areas; they occurred on the President's daily route, which can
reasonably be expected to be completely sanitized. The December 14
incident is particularly significant in this context. Over half a tonne
of explosives had been transported to, and then unloaded, concealed and
primed at, a bridge that is heavily guarded round the clock, on the
regular route between the President's office and residence; and had been
detonated by remote control, presumably by an assassin lying in wait in
sight of the bridge [the attempt failed, according to the official
Pakistani line, because of the jammers on the President's cavalcade,
though it is still unclear how or why the explosion eventually did occur
over a minute after the procession had passed beyond the bridge]. Again,
on December 25, reports indicate that there were two Presidential
motorcades - one of them a decoy - moving simultaneously on two
different routes, but the terrorists were able to correctly identify and
target Musharraf's motorcade. There is, consequently, in both incidents,
substantial circumstantial evidence to suggest an 'inside job'.
If disaffected elements in the Army, presumably at a level sufficiently
high as to engineer such operations, are now, indeed, targeting
Musharraf (and this remains essentially in the sphere of informed
speculation) the fragile equation that has been contrived between
powerful and ideologically incompatible political entities - including
armed non-state groups - to maintain a modicum of order in Pakistan is
now dangerously imperilled. To the extent, moreover, that much of the
world, including the US and increasingly India, has invested almost its
entire faith on the survival of this tenuous arrangement, and in General
Musharraf, to contain the burgeoning dangers of this epicentre of
terrorism, the situation is grim. As The Washington Post noted,
"The past week has given the Bush administration more cause to
reconsider its heavy reliance on a single general, Pakistan's Pervez
Musharraf, to maintain stability in one of the world's most dangerous
areas."
The assassination attempts in Pakistan also underline the frailty and
brittleness of the current and vaunting peace processes in South Asia.
While both the Indian and Pakistani leadership are, in the run up to the
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Summit in
January 2004, currently competing to outdo one another in the rhetoric
of South Asian 'unification', the fragility of the balance, the
contingent nature of all plans and enterprises in the region, and the
degree to which the initiative lies with organisations committed to
terrorism, make a mockery of all such projections.
For the moment, Musharraf has survived and the SAARC summit is expected
to go ahead on schedule, with all regional leaders having reconfirmed
their participation, despite serious and legitimate security concerns.
To believe, however, that peace is somewhere around the corner, is
delusional. Pakistan and its leaders - including Musharraf and his
generals - have only just begun to pay the price for their long
sponsorship of terrorism, what one leading Pakistani commentator
described as "the 'globalisation' of terrorism we performed in the past
decade", and the conflagration will escalate substantially before it is
eventually doused. Regrettably, it is not Pakistan alone that will have
to pay the price of its past and ongoing transgressions.
Courtesy:
South Asia Terrorism Portal |
