Ten-hut! There’s an officer on deck!
Someone called him a sinking ship. Others kept distributing sweets on the street on his departure. Yet no one realised that in the land of the pure that the saga of leadership is almost always a tragic story. There is something corroding about Pakistan’s power corridors that waylays the finest among men and women of their high ideals and stature. As Musharraf left the Presidency in haste he must have looked back and wondered, “How did I end up here?”
It is very easy to blame a man when he is gone, very difficult to admire his uniqueness when he is weak and generally detested. The same seems to be true of Pakistan’s former Army Chief, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Chief Executive and President Pervez Musharraf. As someone who has mostly written against the man I believe I will fail the test of objectivity if I forget to mention his virtues.
General (retired) Musharraf during his almost nine years of reign taught this country many things which we would otherwise not have learnt in centuries. When he rose to power, Pakistan’s establishment had already succumbed to a debilitating legacy of obscurantism and denial, courtesy of another general prez Ziaul Haq. Musharraf taught the establishment and a rapidly radicalising army why it is important to keep the affairs of the church and the state separate. It does not take a rocket scientist to remember how the very establishment had dismissed a number of liberal governments on the charge of jeopardising the make believe ideology of Pakistan. Charisma, incentive or mere Pavlovian psychology, a huge bulk of the nation’s defenders bought his new ideas and changed the establishment to its core. Today when you talk to the younger officers of Pakistan Army you are relieved to know that they are free of messianic self-deceptions or any trace of radical obscurantism. They are learning the difference between personal freedoms and professional corruption. I hope the military intelligence can apply itself to better uses than spying on an officer’s secret dreamworld or little indulgences. It is the mark of an excellent officer that he can mould the opinion of his subordinates and inspire them to volunteer for the excruciating ordeal of much needed transformation. If he managed this much we should be thankful at the very least when he is gone.
Again in quite a few circles of the country he is portrayed as a bloodthirsty man who enjoyed mercilessly butchering people. I know on countless occasions like the assassination of Bugti and the condoning of the May 12 riots in Karachi he might have screwed up big and I by no means wish to defend such heinous acts. Yet can we also deny that the reason why Nawaz Sharif can challenge him at all today is owing to Musharraf’s break from Zia’s legacy of hanging the overthrown prime minister? If today the judges can think of prosecuting him it is due mainly to the fact that no matter what happened during his tenure he divorced the tradition of abducting and killing the ruler’s political challengers.
And no matter how serious crackdown against the media took place during the judicial crisis, he was the first fully empowered ruler in whose reign you could get away with whatever you wrote. Oh yes I remember the days before him too and I vividly recall the ordeals we had to face even during some of the democratic leaders too. While he contributed immensely to the thriving media in the country, at the end his paranoia restricted him only to a small coterie of sycophants who made it impossible for him to check the pulse of the nation through the same press he had unleashed.
This is not all. While he might have twice imposed what many called the emergency plus, he remains to this day the only empowered president who never used the Article 58(2)(b) to dissolve an assembly. Let us recall the days when the opposition was busy only in thumping the desks, also the day when addressed the joint session of the parliament and of course when he was on the verge of being impeached. Many of us had begged him not to impose the emergency in 2007. Had he chosen to heed those requests his legacy would have been whole and unblemished.
Let us talk of the general’s tragic flaws too. Ambition rose to the degree of hubris owing to a blind faith in his imagined destiny and a taste for flattery in my views are two most tragic flaws of the man. The general forgot that we are all mortals and our limited destinies leave us capable only of making small contributions to the world. Had he realised it he would have called it a day when he was quite popular everywhere. This tragic ambition also made him insensitive to the plight of many who were apprehended on the allegation of terrorism. Barty Crouch Senior in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire had also got so carried away by the charade of catching the dark wizards that he cared two hoots of the standard legal procedures. That was how Sirius Black ended up in Azkaban despite being innocent. When the general was busy in making a mark in the war on terror he certainly overlooked the basic dictates of human rights and quite a few innocents ended up at Gitmo, Bagram or elsewhere. But that does not mean that his direction against extremism and terrorism was at all wrong. Only his methods can be questioned which he brought this day on him.
Another major failure of the former president and the army chief was to abolish the army’s political role. The army has to be brought in to keep it out, was his constant mantra. In his esprit de corps he might have forgotten that the army and the nation are only to lose if the defenders of the nation were to given any political role. Yet it is true also that the changes he brought in the army, particularly the changes secular in nature, will ensure that officers far superior will rise to the top. Indeed the current army chief who refused to let the army be dragged into political squabbles is an example of this evolution. The fine tradition will evolve further and thanks to the right changes he brought the country will one day become an institutionalised democracy. As I said it is easy to recall his errors and try to pester him now that he is gone. But maybe if it is not pointed out now we will forget even to marvel how such an officer rose to the top in the army left behind by General Zia. Those who want to prosecute him now for personal reasons are requested to see reason as he did in the end. Those who want to do it for the religious are reminded of the generosity of the Prophet (PBUH) of Islam at the time of the conquest of Makkah. He is gone. Let us build Pakistan on the finer contributions of his, forgive and forget the errors of his judgment. After all, we all are human and we all commit mistakes. He should be remembered for the best we can find in an officer and that is all. His legacy might be a bit tarnished and onerous but that direction in which he steered the ship was not altogether wrong. Ten-hut! There’s an officer on deck!
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