Will new Pakistan PM challenge US agenda?

That is a question I ask in my most recent piece on Pakistan, published today in NewMatilda.com:

On the afternoon of Tuesday 25 March, Yousaf Raza Gilani was sworn in as Pakistan's 26th Prime Minister.

The ceremony was noteworthy for a number of reasons. For one, Gilani took his oath from President Musharraf, the same man who had him jailed on corruption charges seven years earlier. Gilani spent the next five years in prison for his troubles. Now Gilani's coalition government is very publicly seeking to remove Musharraf from office.

Musharraf meltdown

My latest piece, on Musharraf's clamp down on dissent in Pakistan, has been published in this week's NewMatilda.com:

Perhaps inspired by his counterparts in Burma, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan has proceeded to clamp down on political dissent like never before. What began as a knee jerk reaction to increasing disenchantment with his regime has spiraled towards ever more draconian measures that have completely erased any remaining claim Musharraf may have to being called a moderate.

The full article is available here.

Identity and resistance

For the foreseeable future (which is far from forever), my core intellectual interest will be ideology, identity and resistance. What are the features of identity that persuade people to resist those that are 'different' to them? What role does ideology play? These questions might seem quite abstract, but in fact they are very concrete.

The most obvious example is nationality. Nationality represents a relationship of association between an individual and a state. It means, for example, that you can travel to and from a certain territory relatively unmolested (with numerous exceptions which I won't go into for now). But there are problems with the concept of nationality because it tends to discriminate in an arbitrary way. Some of the most dedicated, good people get locked up as illegal immigrants while others are offered citizenship or residency simply because they have a lot of money or have the right skin colour. Whether people indigent to the country of nationality are particularly nationalistic is often quite uncertain. Most Pakistanis, for example, are either Pahtan, or Sindi, Balochi, Punjabi or from a region like Karachi or Lahore first. And they are Pakistani second. Even then our patriotism tends to most manifest itself only when we play cricket.

Resistance is another key feature of identity. To resist, by definition, you need to identify whom you are resisting and whom you are fighting on behalf. My particular interest in this inevitably stems from recent geopolitical events. I'm simply not convinced that there's a clash of civilisations, or, even, that there is a Western world fighting a Muslim world. But I want to empirically investigate this.

I find it concerning that there is now a lot of research on 'what Muslims think'. Inherent in this project is the assumption that religious identity, for Muslims at least, is the pre-eminent marker of identity. Therefore, it is the likely source of resistance to outside interference, real or perceived. But what about cultural affinities, nationality, 'race', and gender? And what about the elephant in the room; what about socioeconomics? That is, what about class distinctions?

Another problem with the clash of civilisations model is the way it marginalises most of the world's populations. Not only does it marginalise Muslims, it marginalises most others as either too benign or intellectually undeveloped to merit attention. Hence, the concern with India or China, for example, is not that their peoples will out think the West, but will instead out produce it.

All of these things are lost in the emphasis on religion.

Dictatorship Pakistan

Musharraf's dismissal of the Pakistani Chief Justice reveals the true face of the War on Terror.

Friday, or ‘Jumma’ as it is known to Muslims, is the holiest day of the week. It is usually a day of rest and reflection. It was on a Friday, 9 March 2007, that President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan told the country’s senior most judge, Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry of the Supreme Court, that he was being dismissed due to allegations of misconduct. Little detail of the alleged misconduct was made public by the Government. What information is known of the allegations came from an open letter to the Chief Justice from a noted pro-Government lawyer and television presenter, Naeem Bokhari.

Bokhari alleged that Chaudhry excessively intimidated advocates in court, that he used his influence to get his son a comfortable Government job and shielded him from a court investigation, and that the Chief Justice abused his government transport privileges (an allegation that Justice Michael Kirby of the Australian High Court may well appreciate). In a country rife with corruption, where ‘contacts’ and family networks are necessary to get everything from your driver’s licence to electricity, and where it is a well known ‘secret’ that President Musharraf himself has acquired many acres of public land for his private use, dismissing such a senior government official on such flimsy allegations seems rather harsh. In fact, it appears the allegations are a smoke screen for a politically motivated dismissal.

According to one of Pakistan’s most senior constitutional lawyers, former Law Minister Syed Iftikhar Hussain Gilani, Chief Justice Chaudhry told him:

[T]he president had given him [Chaudhry] two options — either to resign and the government would take care of him which meant that he would be accommodated at some lucrative post, and second to face the reference [alleging his misconduct]. And he told him that he would face reference.

Confusion has reigned over the dismissal. Originally, it was asserted that he had been removed from office. Then, perhaps after Government lawyers inspected the nation’s constitution, it was announced that Chaudhry was still the Chief Justice and had merely been placed on “forced leave” while an investigation into the allegations unfolded. There were also reports that he was under house arrest. Yet only a few days after his removal, Musharraf, through the Acting Chief Justice, confidently assured all that Chaudhry was not under house arrest and was free to do as he pleased – except return to the Supreme Court.

After private television stations broadcast images of the Chief Justice and members of his family being manhandled by police, a Supreme Court panel was hastily set up to investigate the incident. At least one of these stations was ransacked by police for showing images of police clashing with lawyers protesting the Chief Justice’s removal. Soon after, the Government took both private television stations off air. The public outcry from these actions eventually forced the Government to allow the television stations back onto the airwaves and compelled Musharraf to personally apologise live on air.

Given this environment, it is very unlikely that Chaudhry will be able to serve as Chief Justice with the same level of freedom and impartiality as before. His best hope of returning to the Court at all would be through concerted political pressure. In a dictatorship heavily reliant on foreign military, economic and political support, the most effective form of pressure would be from key international allies, particularly the United States but also Britain, and even Australia. I will elaborate on this further later.

The real reasons for his dismissal

It is widely understood in Pakistan that Chaudhry has been removed not because of any misconduct but because he threatened Musharraf’s absolute rule, as demonstrated in a number of Supreme Court decisions which condemned the corruption and oppression of Musharraf’s Pakistan. Last year the Chaudhry Supreme Court refused a government request to dispose of a matter seeking to trace the whereabouts of hundreds of missing persons believed to have been abducted by Pakistani intelligence services. Chaudhry and a majority of the Supreme Court have been highly critical of the Musharraf Government’s inability to prosecute individuals guilty of ‘honour’ crimes against women and children, particularly in rural Pakistan. Last year the Chaudhry Supreme Court over turned the sale of the National Steel Mills to a private consortium on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Prior to the decision, the Government had virtually completed the sale of the National Steel Mills to a consortium headed by a close friend of Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz at below the steel mill’s market price.

Another perceived reason for Chaudhry’s removal was Musharraf's fear that Chaudhry would not endorse his re-election as President while also holding the office of Chief of the Armed Forces later this year, presumably on the basis of its questionable constitutionality.

Although these decisions suggest that Chaudhry is something of a judicial activist, he is also a respected member of Pakistan’s elite society. In 2004, Chaudhry supported President Musharraf’s amendment of the national constitution to enable him to serve as both Chief of the Armed Forces and President at the same time. The following year Chaudhry was promoted to Chief Justice. Such is the ever increasing impunity of the Musharraf regime that simple judicial accountability has become a heresy, even when practiced by a respect member of elite society.

A dangerous vacuum in legitimate authority

Chaudhry’s dismissal has increased Pakistan’s already fragile political fabric in a way that is difficult to underestimate but easy to misinterpret. One obvious repercussion has been the further erosion of the Musharraf regime’s legitimacy as the government of Pakistan. Already a deputy Attorney-General and at least five judges have resigned in protest at the dismissal. Thousands of lawyers throughout Pakistan have staged boycotts of the country’s courts system. The main opposition parties have also condemned the dismissal, some even demanding that Musharraf resign. What is most interesting about this opposition is that it has united, at least for the time being, parties from both the religious and secular sides of the political spectrum.

Whereas the general perception in the West is that Musharraf is a bulwark against a growing Islamist movement in Pakistan’s Army and frontier regions, Chaudhry’s dismissal undermines one of Pakistan’s most powerful surviving secular institutions – a common law judiciary modeled on its English counterpart.

In an environment where governance is mired in corruption and human rights abuses are frequent, the Supreme Court has been one of the few institutions capable of challenging the twin threats of fundamentalist violence and increasing authoritarianism. Pakistan has a system of Sharia or ‘Islamic Law’ Courts whose decisions only the Supreme Court has the power to overturn. This has been demonstrated over the past few years in a string of matters where the Supreme Court overturned decisions of the Sharia Court which allowed a number of sex offenders to go unpunished, and which had limited the rights of women in property disputes. The Supreme Court’s scrutiny of the Musharraf regime has already been described above.

Silence from the West

There has been a deafening silence from the United States, Britain, and Australia – all key allies of Pakistan – over the Chief Justice’s dismissal. The US State Department’s first response to the dismissal was to assert that it was an internal matter for the Pakistan Government to sort out. A US Department of State spokesperson later explained:

We believe that President Musharraf has made a commitment to change Pakistan and we think that is a positive thing. We're not going to dictate to him or anybody else and the Pakistani people exactly what those changes are going to be or specific steps that they might need to take. Of course we can offer guidance and counsel and encouragement to continue along the pathway to democracy. But President Musharraf is good -- has been a solid friend in fighting the war on terror.

Neither the British nor the Australian Governments have issued any public statement on the dismissal.

This remarkable silence is not an insignificant matter. Pakistan is heavily reliant on economic and political support from the West, particularly from the US. Without this support there is a real prospect that Pakistan would become a failed state like its eastern neighbour Afghanistan.

Prior to September 2001, the Pakistan economy was severely depressed due to an international economic embargo in response to its decision to go nuclear and refusal to become a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That situation quickly changed as Musharraf realized a dramatic shift in the political winds. As the US State Department country profile for Pakistan explains:

The events of September 11, 2001, and Pakistan's agreement to support the United States led to.. military assistance… to provide spare parts and equipment to enhance Pakistan's capacity to police its western border and address its legitimate security concerns. In 2003, President Bush announced that the United States would provide Pakistan with $3 billion in economic and military aid over 5 years. This assistance package commenced during FY 2005.

Incredibly, that economic support is expected to increase over the next few years despite the present crisis.

It would be unsurprising if, in the event a regime unfriendly to Western interests came to power in Pakistan, there was a sudden well spring of concern and condemnation of Pakistan's poor human rights record, lack of democratic reform, and support for militant orthodox Muslims – all of which the present regime that is allied to the West is already guilty.

A telling contradiction

At the same time as current events were unfolding in Pakistan, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer found time to condemn the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe:

The brutal suppression of a rally in Zimbabwe over the weekend by the Mugabe Government, including killing an opposition activist, is further evidence of the regime’s utter disregard for basic democratic principles and the human rights of the people of Zimbabwe.

Both the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett made statements to the same effect.

The sad irony is that countries like the United States, Britain and Australia can play a bigger role in fomenting democracy in Pakistan than Zimbabwe because they have stronger and much more cordial military, economic and political ties with Pakistan. A bureaucrat from any one of these countries might claim that they are doing 'all they can' behind the scenes to protest the removal of the Pakistani Chief Justice. But there is no better way to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of ordinary Pakistanis and the global Muslim community than to issue a strong public condemnation of the dismissal.

Part of the thinking in the West, especially the US, Britain and Australia, may be that Musharraf provides stability in a volatile region of the world. The problem with this thinking is that it is incredibly shortsighted and naïve because it does not take into consideration the very dynamic nature of geopolitics in Pakistan and its surrounding region. Moreover, it places too much emphasis on Musharraf as an individual as an agent of stability. By investing so much in one individual, Pakistan’s western allies actually consolidate his grip on power instead of developing institutional stability in the country. Further, rather than being a vanguard against religious fanaticism and militancy, Musharraf is in fact creating a vacuum in legitimate authority that is improving the prospects of a militant Islamist takeover.

In other words, by supporting Musharraf and ignoring his contempt for democratic reform, of which the dismissal of Chief Justice Chaudhry is but the most recent example, Pakistan’s Western allies are actually undermining their own stated aim of combating religious fanaticism and promoting democratic reform around the world.

An edited version of this piece is available at New Matilda.

Masterminds and confessions

It seems that every so often a new terrorist mastermind emerges who is to be hunted down and brought to justice. Now it seems these masterminds also offer blanket, if remarkably convenient confessions. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the latest individual to fit this description. Mohammed has allegedly confessed to being the mastermind behind the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States and to beheading American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Most of the media has reported these confessions with remarkably little skepticism. In the United States, and in much of the rest of the world, the image of yet another Arab-looking man with scruffy hair confessing to committing a serious act of terrorism is unlikely to solicit much skepticism.

But skepticism is something that is necessary when seeking to understand the present situation, and there are a number of good reasons for this. First among these is the likelihood that the confession was obtained under torture. The United States actively seeks information obtained under torture. A number of Guantanamo Bay detainees past and present have made allegations of being tortured. Pakistan, where Sheikh Mohammed was captured, is known to routinely use torture. There is also the well documented use of torture at a number of prison facilities operated by the United States, Britain and others in Iraq of which Abu Ghraib is but one well publicized example. Lastly, there is the United States’s long standing practice of extraordinary renditions – the secret abduction of individuals suspected of involvement in terrorist activities, who are often later found to be totally innocent, to be interrogated in countries known to actively practice torture in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and north and central Africa.

Given the immense importance placed on him as a top Al Qaeda operative, and the nature of the sweeping confessions he has provided, it is not far-fetched to presume Mohammed’s confessions were obtained under torture. This gives good reason to question the evidentiary value of these confessions.

There is a further reason to be skeptical of Mohammed confession and this has everything to do with politics. The Bush Administration has been under immense pressure in the wake of a revitalized Democratic Party and a string of scandals and errors including but not limited to the occupation of Iraq. Immediately prior to the Sheikh Mohammed confession being made public, both Democrats and Republicans started calling for Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales’s resignation following allegations that he dismissed a string of federal prosecutors for political reasons, and that the FBI improperly accessed personal information the Patriot Act. On 7 March former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney Louis Libby was found guilty of lying to FBI agents and grand jurors investigating the disclosure of a CIA operative. And in Iraq, an unpopular and illegal war continues to kill more and more Iraqis and Americans with no clear denouement in sight.

Announcing Mohammed’s confession at this juncture gives the Bush Administration an ‘announceable’ – something which tells the public that the Bush White House has delivered on its major stated policy of bringing terrorists to justice, while at the same time diverting attention from its mistakes. Even Mohammed’s capture three years ago on 1 March 2003 seemed remarkably expedient. Debate in the US and around the world in those days was thick with pronouncements of war with Iraq for its alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorists. For the Musharraf regime in Pakistan, there was pressure from within and without. The US was putting pressure on Musharraf to support a further United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq. Within Pakistan, the US’s soon-to-occur invasion was intensely unpopular, some even claiming that any overt support of the invasion by Pakistan could lead to Musharraf’s ouster. Moreover, at a moment when much of public awareness in the West had been focused on the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his alleged support for terrorists, it would not take much imagination to wonder why Pakistan was not the focus of an American invasion. The announcement of Mohammed’s capture at this time therefore gave Musharraf and Pakistan a wonderful bargaining chip with which to sit on the fence – avoid closer scrutiny of the strong links between the State and militant Islamists, and avoid overt support for the American invasion of Iraq.

Following Mohammed’s capture, the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, one of the most powerful institutions in the country, Hamid Gul spoke to Reuters.com:

Gul said news of the arrest appeared to have been leaked at a critical time, just as Pakistan was facing huge U.S. pressure to support a U.N. Security Council vote authorizing war on Iraq.

On Monday night, a senior ruling party official told Reuters the government, under massive domestic pressure to oppose war on a fellow Muslim state, had decided to abstain in the vote, news that shocked British and American diplomats in Islamabad.

The ISI earlier said it had called its first news conference in Pakistan's history to counter criticism in the Western media that it had not done enough in the war on terror.

Gul said the raid may have been staged -- and news of the arrest leaked -- for the same reason, against the backdrop of the U.N. vote.

Gul, who ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, said the raid was conducted in far too casual a fashion to have been real, with police failing to properly surround or secure the house in a middle-class Rawalpindi suburb.

Unfortunately, the doubt over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed does not end there. Leaving aside whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is actually the mastermind the US claims he is, there is uncertainty as to whether the man who is in US custody is actually Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. On 3 March 2007 The Guardian reported that the family living in the house where he was believed to have been captured denied that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had ever been there:

At no point, the family say, was Mohammed or any other man in the house. The agents did not even ask about them. "The only people in the house were my brother, his wife and their kids," Qudsia said. "I have absolutely no idea why the police came here."

On 11 September 2002, Pakistani officials claimed that they had killed or captured Mohammed during a raid in Karachi, Pakistan. It was later reported in some quarters that he had escaped but no mention was made of efforts to recapture him until the surprise disclosure of his capture almost 6 months later. To add to the uncertainty, following the announcement of his capture, officials from Pakistan and the United States variously claimed that Mohammed was being interrogated in Pakistan, by Pakistan, or outside Pakistan by the United States.

But perhaps the most surprising revelation of all was where Mohammed was allegedly captured. For not only was it claimed that he was captured in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the two most powerful institutions in Pakistan – the Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence, the home which was raided was in a district where many retired Army generals and ISI officers live. It is hard to imagine that either the Army or the ISI did not know for some time that Mohammed was there.

Taliban representatives in Pakistan also expressed doubt as to whether the man captured was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. As Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali explained on Australian television in March 2003:

Reports from Pakistan are coming out from what are described as Taliban sources, ie members of the former government in Afghanistan who are now around in Pakistan, who are denying that he has been captured and saying, "We know exactly where the guy they're claiming to have captured is," and until he is produced before a court of law or interviewed or allowed access to the press or lawyers, we will not know who he is.

These uncertainties alone do not indicate that an innocent man has given a false confession to US authorities. It is possible that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is currently facing trial at Guantanamo Bay and that he was involved in the 11 September attacks. The dilemma in the present situation is not that it points to a vast global conspiracy. Rather, it demonstrates the dangers of the very secretive and unaccountable practices of the United States security apparatus and its Pakistani counterparts. In the present climate, it is impossible to know fact from fiction because those arms of government charged with the impartial identification of security threats have been subsumed by political pressures. This creates a dangerous environment of distrust and uncertainty where no one is quite sure who is telling the truth, least of all the public but perhaps by government also. There is a real prospect that the United States’s and Pakistan’s politically motivated revelations of terrorist threats and confessions will mimic the old children’s fable of the boy who cried wolf. The question is will they be ready to respond when the real wolf strikes?

An edited version of this piece is available at New Matilda.