Dawn
December 3, 2007
Anatomy of survival
by Kaiser Bengali
GENERAL Musharraf has, in blatantly Machiavellian pattern, crossed all constitutional and legal hurdles to continue to occupy the office of the president. Continuation in power has been his paramount objective.
Where laws have come in the way, they have been changed; where the courts appeared to place limitations, they have been emasculated; where the Constitution has proved to be a restraint, it has been suspended; and when judges, lawyers, media persons, civil society activists, and political leaders and workers have protested, they have been roughed up and tossed into prison.
The deadly bomb attack on Benazir Bhutto’s cavalcade in Karachi also served to put on notice all those contemplating the hazard of challenging the ruling junta. The common refrain to General Musharraf’s brazen behaviour is that he is an individual who is determined to hang on to power.
This appears to be an over-simplification. No individual can manage to wield power for even one day if he or she does not command the loyalty and support of the upper echelons of the state structure and its internal and external collaborators and supporters. Clearly, General Musharraf commands that support.
That General Musharraf’s support base does not have either extent or depth is by now all too obvious. The question then arises as to where from does his support emanate. Several inferences can be made. At the top of the list must come the military high command. Notably, the decision to launch the coup in 1999 was launched by the military leadership while General Musharraf was incommunicado on his way home from Sri Lanka.
The composition of that leadership has since changed, but the policy parameters guiding its decisions remain unchanged. General Musharraf is merely the face and the spokesman for this leadership.
The military has by now amassed enormous economic and political power and influence through industrial, financial and commercial companies operating under the cover of military foundations and trusts as well as vast agricultural holdings and several housing schemes.
This level of control and authority over the resources of the country has enabled it to create a military corporate empire and allowed it to liberally distribute patronage to its principal constituents — the military officer class.
It is this constituency that continues to extend support to General Musharraf and will continue to do so until his prolongation in power turns into a liability for its economic and political interests. That stage does not appear to have been reached as yet. And until then, the military high command and officer class is prepared to condone contempt for basic principles of law and political morality and to disregard repeated violations, howsoever serious, of constitutional and legal provisions and of civilised political norms.
That the military considers itself able to carry out such shenanigans is primarily on account of the support it receives from the powerful neo-conservative faction in the United States government. This faction spawned abjectly unscrupulous, even murderous, client regimes across several Third World countries headed by the likes of Somozas, Pinochets, Marcoses, Suhartos, Pahalvis, Ziaul Haqs and Musharrafs. Most of these countries have by now democratised and acquired a respectable place in the comity of nations.
The Pakistani military elite is one of the remaining few that continues to relish its client role and the exploitative control it allows them over the country and its resources. That such a role has reduced Pakistan to the status of a third rate Third World country appears to be of little consequence to it. The military’s continued support to General Musharraf can be viewed in this context.
Yet another relatively recent source of external support for the military regime is that of international financial interests. These interests have acquired a near monopoly of Pakistan’s financial markets, rendered possible on two counts.
One, privatisation of the banking sector to foreign investors and, two, explicitly pro-financial markets monetary policies pursued by the military’s coterie of economic managers led by a middle level career bank officer, Shaukat Aziz.
This coterie virtually took on the role of the ‘country representative’ for these financial lobbies. Consequently, the level of profits that these interests have earned in their operations in Pakistan can only be described in terms of historic records. The active support of these interests to General Musharraf can be viewed in this context.
Allied to the international financial interests is the domestic financial lobby: Pakistani banks and financial, commodity trading and stock market brokerage houses. With strategic assistance from the coterie of economic managers, these lobbies have managed to manipulate financial markets and rake in profits within weeks that most business houses around the world take years to accumulate.
That all attempts to investigate stock market manipulations have failed is indicative of the powerful links that financial market manipulators have with the inner sanctums of the corridors of power.
It is indeed instructive that the stock market index has never dipped throughout the ups and downs of the political crisis that has gripped the country since March 2007 and, in fact, soared after the carnage caused by the bombing of the PPP rally in Karachi. Yet, unfounded rumours of a coup against General Musharraf caused the market to crash! The support of financial interests as well to General Musharraf can be viewed in this context.
Yet another powerful lobby propping up General Musharraf is that of land market operators. Pakistan’s land market has always been subject to speculative manipulation, but the level of such exploitation reached new heights under the Musharraf regime. A low interest rate policy allowed cheaply obtained credit to flow into the real estate sector, causing land prices to rise five to seven fold and accruing windfall gains to real estate brokers.
A significant factor in recent years is the emergence of the Defence Housing Authorities as the largest real estate development entities in the country and their operations in collaboration with multinational construction interests.
That the army corps commanders hold concurrent positions as heads of these housing authorities has produced a powerful alliance between the military and the land market. The land lobby’s support to General Musharraf can also be viewed in this context.
Added to this bandwagon of powerful external and internal collaborators is an array of fortune seeking cronies of General Musharraf’s dozen odd ‘kitchen cabinet’ members. These include politicians – imported and home-grown, self-promoted and ISI-promoted — and established as well as newly-sprung businessmen, contractors and professionals who have exploited the calculatedly skewed policy environment to inflate their bank balances. There have been many innovative souls among them; with one, for example, setting up a fake university to acquire several acres of land in one of the emerging ‘education cities’ in the country — with the not-so-thinly-veiled purpose of commercialising the property at an opportune moment in the future and collecting windfall gains.
It is these robber barons, fortune hunters and charlatans from abroad, from within the military and from within the civilian domain who constitute the mainstay of General Musharraf’s military regime.
The battle for establishing a respectable and civilised democratic order in Pakistan, untainted by institutionalised white-collar sleaze, will need to go beyond the mere removal of the General's uniform or the general himself.
