The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Moment of reckoning

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Tuesday, Dec 09, 2008
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Moment of reckoning

Tariq Ali states that only distance between Pakistan and the U.S. can lead to regional stability

THE DUEL — Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power: Tariq Ali; Simon & Schuster UK Ltd., I Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London, WC IX 8 HB. £ 12.99

Nirupama Subramanian

If Tariq Ali had to text Barack Obama one message before the U.S. President-elect bids farewell to his Blackberry, it would go something like this: “Quit Pakistan.”

That is the main takeaway from Ali’s new book, The Duel — Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. Or more precisely, that in order to recover as a nation, Pakistan needs to break free of its fatal embrace of the U .S. And alongside, or as a precursor, it also needs to overthrow its own military-feudal rulers who pushed the country into that embrace in order to pad their own nests and keep their powers intact. Only distance between Pakistan and the U.S. can pave the way for regional stability, says Ali.

Not new

All this is not new. It is well-known how Pakistan’s rulers flaunted the country’s “geo-strategic position” to sell it to the U.S. as its “frontline ally” all through the Cold War, eventually offering it as the launching pad for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in return for millions of dollars. At least had all those dollars gone into the development of the country, Pakistan would not be such a no-hope place as it now appears, joined at the hip with Afghanistan and its troubles. The U.S.-Pakistan alliance was never popular, but ruler-generals do not need the people’s permission to follow a particular course of action. If the generals sold the country to the U.S., Pakistan’s elected rulers too — as everyone knows, these are no fire-brand revolutionaries but hugely wealthy, landed aristocracy — are America worshippers. After all, there has long been the adage that the road to Islamabad goes through Washington. For those of us who witnessed the process of Benazir Bhutto’s comeback through a negotiated deal with Pervez Musharraf guided by the U.S., and then watched her widower Asif Ali Zardari calling on the U.S. Ambassador in Islamabad after the Pakistan People’s Party’s (PPP) victory in the February 18 elections, there could have been no bigger truth.

No one spared

But Ali’s merciless pen retells the tragedy of Pakistan in its own ruthless way, sparing no one for the mess that the country is in today. Not the Americans or the West in general, including its media, not his friend Benazir Bhutto, not her father, certainly not her husband and the Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari. Not even the country’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah, at whose door he lays the blame for planting the first seeds for the new country’s evolution into a corrupt American “satrapy”. The Pakistan-born Ali is known to hold no cows so sacred that they are above criticism. No surprise that the book is moving fast off the shelves in Pakistan’s book stores.

He writes that when the first U.S. Ambassador went to meet Jinnah, he prepared himself for discussions on matters of state. Jinnah and his sister were preoccupied with something else altogether — putting up Flagstaff, their house in Karachi, for sale to the U.S. Embassy. The Americans could not oblige but the State Department sent Jinnah and his sister four ceiling fans as a gift for their home, which were accepted. Later rulers would turn what Ali dubs as “flag staffing” into a fine art — Jinnah offered only his home for sale to the U.S., but his successors would sell and re-sell the entire country and grow fat on the proceeds of the sale. Several times, he draws an almost wistful contrast with Nehru’s non-alignment next door.

Despite a long association, Ali pulls no punches on Benazir, calling her the “Daughter of the West” (a play on the title of her autobiography Daughter of the East), and coming down heavily on her deal with Musharraf. The U.S. would not have so assiduously worked on a power-sharing arrangement between their “strongman” in Islamabad and Benazir, had it not been for a lawyers’ movement that began in March 2007.

Change possible

It began at first as a protest against the summary removal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary but soon weakened Musharraf to the extent that it became obvious to his international allies that he could not continue as before. Benazir was careful to maintain her distance from the movement, even as she used it to negotiate with Musharraf. As Ali notes wryly, no congratulatory messages went from Benazir’s famous Blackberry to Aitzaz Ahsan, a PPP stalwart who was leading the lawyers’ movement and fought his case in the Supreme Court. Despite the bleak picture he paints, Ali, who in his two previous books on Pakistan was pessimistic about the country’s future, believes Pakistan can be “recycled” if it can shake the U.S. off its back, and implement serious changes that will lead to sustainable economic development and a stable democratic order. The first of those changes would have to be land reform, but he concedes this as close to impossible on account of the landlord-military alliance. He believes that the PPP, the only party with which the bulk of the people identify, has the capacity to become the agent of true democratic change, but only if it can rid itself of the Bhutto “harness”. The Bhutto family, he says, has “long exhausted its historical function.” But the PPP under Zardari, he predicts, is more likely to split within five years.

Ali also draws hope from the lawyers’ movement. The fact that something like that ever erupted means it is not impossible that a new party or movement may come up to challenge the existing power structure. The book is almost up to date, stopping sometime before Musharraf’s impeachment. It does assume that Obama would emerge the winner of the U.S. presidential race. Wonder what Ali would have had to say about the impact of the world economic crisis on U.S.-Pakistan relations and the war in Afghanistan.

As a full-throated participant in many episodes of Pakistan’s history — he was active in the campaign against Ayub Khan, and later travelled to East Pakistan, where he urged the Bengalis to join hands with their brethren in West Bengal and jointly declare independence of both Pakistan and India — Ali writes with compassion for his country and its people, and complete contempt for its rulers.

Gripping

One of the interesting highlights of the book is his conversation with Indira Gandhi a few months before she was killed in 1984 during which she asked him if Pakistani generals were planning an attack on India. He came away from the discussion with the feeling that India was close to a pre-emptive strike. Her assassination a few months later, he speculates, may have been the work of the CIA which had got wind of the Indian plan, which would have destabilised the Zia-ul-Haqregime, which in turn would have put paid to the U.S.-Pakistan operation in Afghanistan. By way of evidence, he offers what an unnamed senior intelligence officer told him about the mysterious plane crash that killed Gen. Zia — it was the Soviets. They owed India a favour, and Rajiv Gandhi asked for Zia’s head in return for his mother’s. All in all, a great read, almost as gripping as The Case of Exploding Mangoes — another incisive book on Pakistan this year, as fiction — even if you know it all already.

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