Musharraf’s Faustian Bargain

NEW YORK —  Last week, Pakistan’s reform-minded dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, rolled out plans to directly ask the people of Pakistan to extend his stay in the President’s House five years before October parliamentary elections are held. He did so in fear that the country’s established political parties will find him an untenable leader after the fall vote. It was a disturbing echo: In 1984, Pakistan’s last military ruler, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, called for a similar vote to legitimize his power grab before holding elections in which political parties were prohibited from participating. Musharraf also barred Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s two most notable--and corrupt--political leaders, from running in the fall elections to choose the next prime minister.

On the surface, these moves by the man who many in Pakistan consider the country’s last and best hope for stability and respectability fall well within Pakistanis’ tolerance for bad governance. Musharraf, after all, is widely perceived, in Pakistan as well as overseas, as reversing dangerous trends set in motion by Zia, who curried favor with religious extremists to dilute the power of the country’s political parties.

But on the same day that Americans and foreigners were attacked as they prayed at a church in Islamabad, Musharraf released from house arrest religious extremists he had cracked down on in his landmark January anti-terrorism speech. As worrisome, the decision revealed the hidden role that Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) continues to play in domestic politics and provided further evidence of why the agency needs to be overhauled thoroughly if Pakistan is to become a more viable state.

The decision to release the mullahs appeared to be part of a larger strategy to appease hard-line Islamist elements, whose followers constitute an important and potentially large voter bloc in the proposed May referendum. An alarmingly low voter turnout in last year’s local district elections, whose candidates were vetted by Pakistani intelligence, probably forced Musharraf’s political operatives to settle on the referendum option as the best way to legitimize the general’s stay in power beyond the October vote.

The need to call for a referendum organized by ISI political operatives in which Musharraf is the sole choice suggests just how weak the general’s internal grip on power may be: Rather than achieve his stated goal of continuity by retaining the presidency through a majority vote of the newly elected national assembly this fall, Musharraf seems prepared to opt instead for the lesser--indeed, questionable--legitimacy bestowed on him by an ISI-run referendum.

With the war on terrorism bogging down in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous northwestern tribal areas and religious extremists regrouping, Musharraf’s global travels to wrest economic concessions from U.S. allies is not keeping his friends where he needs them most--at army general headquarters in Rawalpindi and on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. During the internal debate over whether or not to hold a referendum, Musharraf’s fellow army lieutenants are said to have questioned the Pakistani leader about the value of his being both president and army chief. The implication was that Musharraf had to choose one or the other.

Therein lies Musharraf’s dilemma. Without command over military personnel and assets, Musharraf’s powers as a self-anointed president who lacks a broad public mandate would not be of much use to U.S. military planners and the war on terrorism. On the other hand, a successful referendum vote turning on the support of ISI-backed religious fanatics desperate for a way back into Islamabad’s power circles would send Washington an equally troubling message--the extremists may be back.

It wouldn’t be the first time. By October 1990, then-ISI chief and Islamic fundamentalist Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul had cobbled together a coalition of anti-Bhutto political parties, called the Islamic Democratic Alliance, to block her reelection. Sharif, the victor of the ISI-rigged election, morphed into an Islamist sympathizer to maintain his gravitas with the intelligence community.

At a time when clarity and composure are needed in Islamabad, Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex has exhibited remarkably conflicting agendas for the country’s future. Pakistan remains a breeding ground for rogue intelligence operatives intent on executing a jihadi agenda of disrupting Pakistan and its neighbors. Reformed at the top though it may be, the ISI remains a deeply politicized institution full of radical Islamists at the middle-management level. It spies on Pakistani citizens who aspire to power, and crafts and finances radical Islamic policies abroad.

When its agenda is served, the ISI targets foreigners at home as well. That Sunday attack on churchgoers in broad daylight, in which its perpetrators got away without so much as a police siren going off inside Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave--heavily guarded by elite police squads--may prove that.

In not owning up to the serious management problem created by the deep divide between reformists and extremists inside the ISI, Musharraf is fueling the duality--and duplicity--of Islamabad’s anti-terrorism policies. By letting Pakistan’s mullahs and fundamentalists back up for air, he has made himself an easier target of their wrath for signing up Pakistan in the U.S. war on terrorism. The religious fanatics may be quiet now, and they may secure Musharraf’s short-term future. But the revenge they seek for Musharraf’s secularism will surely come, and Pakistan as a state will be the ultimate casualty.

Rather than stumping for extremist votes, Musharraf needs to end the ISI’s dubious mandate by dismantling the heart of its Islamist operations. He needs to reassign its national-security responsibilities to the more secular military intelligence directorate within the army, the same group on which U.S. military forces have relied since Sept. 11. He needs to reallocate ISI’s resources to the recruitment, training and deployment of secular anti-terrorism squads throughout Pakistan.

And Musharraf should stop playing electoral games with his people. Pakistan’s chief military man should stay out of politics and concentrate on destroying terrorists. To do otherwise is to set the stage for his own self-destruction, and for America’s withdrawal from the region once again.