In October 1998, Nawaz Sharif, then in his second stint as prime minister, scored a fleeting victory by forcing his Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Jehangir Karamat, to step down. Sharif had taken exception to his proposal for the army’s role in key decision-making. In a fateful decision, reminiscent of Ziaul Haq’s appointment by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1976, he appointed Pervez Musharraf to the post, superseding two officers.
He came to rue the decision within months. Serving as Deputy High Commissioner in Islamabad, I sought the opinion of a Pakistani politician about Musharraf. He described him as very adventurous. Musharraf’s adventurism was in ample evidence in the years to come — in Kargil, his October 1999 coup and iron-fisted rule with scant regard for constitutional norms. A commando by training, he pursued and held on to power audaciously. However, he spent his last few years as a fugitive in Dubai before succumbing to a rare disease.
Following his coup, Musharraf suspended the constitution and appointed himself as the Chief Executive, while holding on to the post of COAS. He coerced supreme court judges into endorsing his actions and granting him executive and legislative authority for three years by invoking the infamous “doctrine of necessity”. He elevated himself to the presidency in June 2001 and secured five years in that office with a whopping 98 per cent of the vote in a referendum held in April 2002. The constitution was restored in August 2002 after heavy engineering to bring back the Zia-era power of the president to dismiss the prime minister and order fresh elections.
The rigged election of 2002 brought to power a government led by the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), a breakaway faction of Nawaz Sharif’s PML, aligned with Musharraf – it was dubbed the King’s Party. The need to renew his presidential mandate in 2007 in the face of growing opposition from mainstream political parties and public dissatisfaction with his rule unleashed the process of his downfall. He contested the presidential election held in October 2007, while still clinging to the post of COAS, and won it once again with 98 per cent of the votes cast in the electoral college. Faced with the prospect of the supreme court invalidating the election on account of his continuing to hold two positions, he declared a short-lived emergency in November 2007, suspended the constitution yet again and arrested the Chief Justice of Pakistan and several other judges. He finally doffed his uniform following growing political pressure at home and US advice.
The PPP victory in the February 2008 election and threat of impeachment forced him to resign from the presidency in August 2008 and leave for London. He returned to Pakistan in 2013 to pursue a political career, but failed miserably. After Nawaz Sharif came to power in June 2013, Musharraf faced multiple court cases, including for treason in suspending the constitution in 2007, which he dodged with the help of the army leadership, who secured his exit from Pakistan in 2016 to live in Dubai. A death sentence for treason awarded to him subsequently by a special court was strongly opposed by the army and annulled by the Lahore High Court.
Musharraf styled himself after Kemal Ataturk and propagated “enlightened moderation”. However, his continued use of extremists for advancing foreign policy goals meant that Musharraf failed to curb the rampant religious extremism in Pakistan His flagship madrassa reform project remained a damp squib. He continued Pakistan’s policy of brazen terror as an instrument of state policy until 9/11 brought the US warning to bomb Pakistan back to the stone age in case it did not cooperate in Afghanistan. He turned this into a personal opportunity to get international legitimacy, which he had lacked since his coup, and adopted the Janus-faced approach of making Pakistan a frontline state in the US’s “war on terror”, while continuing to harbour terrorists. This gave rise to Pakistan’s policy of “good and bad terrorists”, with some of its own creations turning against the state; and a steep rise in violence within Pakistan. Musharraf’s peace deals with the rogue groups unravelled quickly.
Pakistan registered a decent growth rate of about 6 per cent and above during 2003-06, when it got liberal US assistance after Musharraf’s policy U-turn on Afghanistan. However, he failed to remedy the structural flaws of the economy, including Pakistan’s living beyond its means, privileges enjoyed by certain groups, heavy debt burden and unaccountable defence expenditure. He did make a positive contribution by allowing private ownership of electronic media, resulting in the proliferation of radio and TV channels which, together with social media, have made it difficult for the Pakistani establishment to control the national narrative.
Musharraf’s posture towards India fell in two phases. First, when he gave full play to the Pakistan army’s animosity against India in the form of the Kargil incursion, of which he was undoubtedly the chief architect, the Indian Airlines aircraft hijacking and an uptick in terror, culminating in attacks on the J&K assembly and the Indian Parliament. His rigid stance resulted in the failure of the Agra summit in July 2001. The pulls and pressures generated by 9/11 and the need for international legitimacy to prolong his rule made him revise his policy towards India. This resulted in the LoC ceasefire of November 2003 and his assurance not to permit the use of any territory under Pakistan’s control to support terrorism. Violence went down in J&K, though terror attacks from Pakistan, including the 2006 Mumbai train bombings and the horrendous Mumbai attack within three months of his departure from power, continued to bedevil the relationship.
This phase also saw constructive backchannel dialogue on Kashmir from 2004 to 2007, which resulted in pragmatic and forward-looking understandings that would have constituted an important step towards a non-territorial solution — the only feasible peaceful solution — of the Kashmir issue. However, Musharraf was unable to take these understandings to a logical conclusion because of his growing internal problems and ouster from power in 2008.
Few in Pakistan, other than those who thrived during his rule, would shed a tear over Musharraf’s death. He, together with Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq, will remain a powerful symbol of the single most important factor underlying Pakistan’s dysfunction and current state — civil-military imbalance and army’s stranglehold over the polity.
