Sandeep Dikshit  

After backing a favourite, the Pakistan army soon loses patience with its handpicked politician. This time, the Pak army should give Imran Khan latitude to attend to the cleaning of domestic stables and try a new tack with India.

Sandeep Dikshit

It is after a long time that the Pakistan army's chips have fallen into place. Its patient groundwork, laced with intimidation and disappearances, has produced an unexpected multipronged outcome.

In the army's eyes, the performance by the Imran Khan-led Pakistan's Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is the icing on the electoral cake. Pakistan's elections, along with a few strategic and deadly bomb blasts, have decimated the anti-army secular formations in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Perhaps, the implosion of Baloch and Pashtun nationalists due to five years of pincer pressure from the army and the militants may never help them attain their earlier prominence. In Karachi, a fragmented MQM, often at odds with the army, lost its way, while the battering of PML (Nawaz) and PPP on their home turfs was compounded by their washout elsewhere. The pesky Hafiz Saeed has been shown his place in the political sun — proxies are the lowest in the pecking order. More important, the polls have exposed him as expendable, completing dependent on the Pak army’s mercies. Besides, even Imran Khan’s PTI does not have a majority and will have to rely on the Deep State’s `azad’ Parliamentarians.

It may appear that the election has buried all of Pakistan army's security- related headaches from the legitimate, over-ground opposition. It can never be forecast when the army may decide to govern itself. But the civilian in the hot seat, too, has to make a fatal mistake.

In each coup, the army wrote the politicians' epitaph after they began encroaching on its turf on the assumption that the army chief appointed by them — usually after superceding a couple of senior generals or getting too-quickly promoted — would remain eternally grateful to them. That is not how institutions work, at least all the time. Personal interest in getting the coveted perch in the General Headquarters gets gradually subsumed by the hold, obligations and security offered by the institution in question which in Pakistan has enormous patronage — extending and favour-dispensing authority.

Gen Iskandar Mirza was one from the ranks, but the pretext of having departed from the army's ethos provided the ideological justification for Gen Ayub Khan to mount the first coup in Pakistan. So strong was the antipathy with this fauji breaking ranks that Ayub was able to deny him a burial in Pakistan when he died abroad. Bhutto was an army protégé. Like Imran, he arrived with the potential to change Pakistan.

Bhutto made two mistakes in his dealings with the army, if his leading the army up the garden path in the 1965 conflict is overlooked. One, he put Yahya Khan under house arrest in humiliating circumstances. Second, his arrogance led him to call Gen Zia ul Haq as his "monkey general'' who would perform tricks when commanded to.

Benazir Bhutto's first term also promised much, but she got herself embroiled in fighting the Establishment and taking on Nawaz Sharif at the same time. Her husband Asif Ali Zardari, too, played a role in eroding her credibility and sincerity of purpose.

The then Governor of Punjab, Gen Jilani Khan, and the President, General Zia, were Nawaz's initial benefactors. Nawaz Sharif was reckless enough to make a hash of all his three terms and holds the unique distinction of being dismissed from office by a separate branch of the executive - the president, the army chief and the judiciary, respectively.

Imran will enter the Prime Minister's residence with a much greater promise of being a self-made man, unlike Nawaz who had the backing of generals and his father's millions or Benazir with a power base in Sindh and general goodwill elsewhere (no more in evidence for the past two elections). Unlike the other two who merely promised, Imran has an enviable track record — lifting the cricket World Cup as dark horses and his admirable single-mindedness in raising a cancer hospital in memory of his mother. Imran has also turned around his private life, severing all connections with the watering holes of London and Karachi and the other appended temptations.

As happened in each battle against India, the Pakistan army would do well to not push the envelope too quickly. An election does not solve accumulated historical problems. Nawaz and the Bhuttos are down but will well remember the mullah-army-Imran partnership that harassed their governments. An organisation calling itself ISIS has arisen in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Given the experience of how proxy militant organisations quickly escape the ministrations of their benefactors, its dangerous shadow over the regime may only grow.

Imran needs to keep in mind Zulfiqar Bhutto's advice which he, unfortunately, did not follow himself: "To succeed in politics, one must have light and flexible fingers to insinuate under the bird sitting on its nest and take away the eggs.''

But the Pakistan army also needs to look within and examine why each brilliant plan to undo India-inflicted historical wrongs blew up in their faces — a weak Maharaja ripe for unseating (1948), squabbling within the Congress (1965), inability of India to go the distance (1971) and negotiations on Kashmir under the shadow of a nuclear card (1999). And now the unabated use of militants threaten international opprobrium, grey-listing of the country by the Financial Action Task Force and, even, pressure from all-weather buddy China.

India has become economically too big and, therefore, influential in world affairs to be brought to the negotiating table by a show of arms. Imran Khan will better serve his country and the institutions by focusing on the basics that Pakistan is severely short of. The army's third protégé should not be rushed into a repair job with India. Tackling India needs a different tack.

sandeepdixit@tribunemail.com

DISCLAIMER:

The views expressed in the Article above are Author’s personal views and kashmiribhatta.in is not responsible for the opinions expressed in the above article.

Courtesy: The Tribune: Jul 30, 2018