The weather in Karachi on that July day 37 years ago was very wet. Torrential rains over the last few days, an unusually high water level in the Malir and Lyari rivers, combined with especially high tides at sea, had caused massive flooding in the city. There were five feet of water on Chundrigar Road and at Gurumandir. Parts of the Korangi Industrial Area had been simply washed away. The vibrant bustle of vitality that characterises this city had already been stifled by the disorders and repeated Paiya-Jam strikes of the PNA movement against the Bhutto government. The floods now provided a final blow.
Pervez Musharraf in his office in the President's House in Islamabad in a 2002 photograph
The news was that an agreement had been finally reached between the government and the ‘nine stars’ of the PNA leadership. However, at the twelfth moment, as it were, Air Marshall Asghar Khan had suddenly pulled out of the agreement. Everyone now expected the government to go for a nation-wide declaration of Martial Law and a final crackdown on the dissidents. As I rode in the tow-truck transporting my rainwater-stalled car to a workshop, we heard that the long-planned coup d’état, towards which the entire PNA agitation had been engineered, had already taken place.
[quote]The institutions of the land were soon reduced to opportunistic chaos[/quote]
That evening, we saw the comedian’s moustache and hooded executioner’s eyes of the usurper on television. We heard him hiss and snarl about his preference for what he called “an Islamic system”. The eleven-year-long horror story of his rule now began: lies, pain, public floggings, so many executions, people strung up and hanged on public television, kidnappings, blood, murder, drug trafficking and the blood-drenched spread of weapons through society. Intolerance and sectarianism were nurtured and brought to dreadful bloom. Bigotry and violence became national characteristics.
The frightful institutions that Zia promoted and the retrograde educational systems he erected have poisoned the intellectual environment of the land and given birth to today’s bigoted, obscurantist political culture and its polluted fallout of violent insurgency, terrorism and cold-blooded mass murder. The nightmare years of this usurper left our society abysmally degraded and brutalised, our Constitution mangled, our legal and ethical standards perverted, and our country awash with guns, drugs, crime and sectarian and ethnic violence. Also directly relevant to our present plight, the Zia years brought the hypocritical Afghanistan ‘Jihad’ and all that has followed: The longest war in six hundred years of human history and the horrific existential threats we are struggling against even today. Yes, we are still living with the consequences of those years...Or dying of them?
My reader will say, “OK, but not all military governments are so malignant. Some mean well, are enlightened, and seize power only to put things right.” Let me jump ahead to October 1999. The place was Lagos, Nigeria, where I was involved with a major consultancy assignment. The occasion was the fourth seizure of power by the military in Pakistan. “Even the worst kind of democracy is preferable to the best dictatorship,” said my friend Maduka Ezikuseli, expressing his strong disapproval over the event.
A large, intricate diorama featuring scenes from the Afghan Jihad at the Jihad Museum in Herat
“When you Pakistanis restored your Constitution in 1988 and put elected governments back in place,” Meduka argued, “We Nigerians were happy that a Muslim country had renounced military rule. After many long years of watching our Nigeria being ruined by a string of uniformed usurpers, we have finally installed an elected government and parliament here. But you people have slid backwards again.” My African friend’s harsh attitude was in striking contrast to the views I heard from some allegedly ‘educated’ Pakistani professionals and, indeed, from numerous political personalities. Everybody, it seems, had his favourite political or administrative nostrum, which he or she believed the new regime of General-cum-Chief Executive Musharraf was going to dispense to the nation. Such were the vain hopes (or crass opportunism) of our elite...alas, only to be shattered on the rocks of a continually repeating history.
[quote]We heard him hiss and snarl about his preference for what he called an ‘Islamic system’[/quote]
For this particular praetorian ruler was transparently without clothes from day one, greed for power ill-concealed behind the braid and medals of his “second skin”. The institutions of the land, however weak or otherwise, were soon reduced to opportunistic chaos. The economy was drowned in an ocean of consumer debt. Worse, the shelter the Taliban regime in Afghanistan gave to the international Al Qaeda terror syndicate, which led directly to the spectacular 9/11 atrocities, provided General Musharraf with the opportunity of using these radical elements to frighten the Americans into supporting and financing his personal stint in power. In the process, whole swathes of Pakistan’s sovereign territory were effectively signed away to these rag-tag insurgents. This was arguably the most dishonourable, and most dangerous, of the many misdeeds of the military governments in this country. Today, our patriotic forces need to wage war internally to regain sovereignty over our own soil.
[quote]The US equipped our armed forces with the latest weaponry, Harvard Group experts ran the upbeat economy, and American academicians became almost oriental in their eulogies[/quote]
All this began, of course, with the self-proclaimed Field Marshal. Ayub Khan’s regime was noteworthy for its efficiency in governance, when the trains ran on time, for the first and last time in this country’s history. His was the archetypal post-colonial military despotism, which many others in Africa and Asia would rush to emulate. Nehru’s ‘neutral’ India was effectively a Soviet ally; therefore, an anti-communist USA poured its largesse into Ayub’s Pakistan. The US equipped our armed forces with the latest weaponry. Harvard Group experts ran the upbeat economy. American academicians like Gustav Papenak and Samuel Huntington became almost oriental in their eulogies. The former extolled the ‘robber barons’ of Pakistan’s business elite who, in collaboration with an increasingly corrupt bureaucracy, were building a heavily protected industrial base. The latter, more recently notorious for his post-Cold War ‘Clash of Civilisations’ fantasising, acclaimed Ayub Khan as “That Solon, that Lycurgus, that great institution-builder”. In point of fact, few people have been more adept at dismantling institutions than the Field Marshal whose governmental style, although effective, was highly centralised and personal.
The Kennedys with Ayub Khan
[quote]The nightmare years left our society awash with guns, drugs, crime and sectarian and ethnic violence[/quote]
His achievements (like those of other personalised rulers) did not extend beyond his personal reach. Such nation-building institutions as fundamental rights, one-man-one vote, universal suffrage, a sovereign parliament, federalism, judicial independence, etc., were cut down. The collapse of Ayub’s regime in a massive, near-revolutionary series of protests and uprisings could not prevent the final dissolution of the country with the violent cutting away of the former East Pakistan a couple of years later. The calamity approached the scale of 1947.
Is this an adequate recounting of the dreadful consequences of each of Pakistan’s bouts of military rule? It is therefore nothing short of astonishing that, again today, we hear praetorian noises just off stage — throat-clearings, as it were, of what could become a chorus of ‘laddoo’ purveyors, celebrating our nation’s next return to regimental rule. Let us quickly look back at the past, before we descend again onto the path that leads to terminal state failure.
