KARACHI, 12 October — Though developments in Pakistan in the wake of attacks on Afghanistan launched on Sunday evening have confirmed fears of a backlash from the militant, pro-Taleban elements — and there have been casualties when violent demonstrators clashed with police — the real dilemma for President Pervez Musharraf is to redesign his administration and make it capable of pursuing policies that had suddenly been overturned when Pakistan decided to provide unstinted support to international coalition against terrorism after the events of Sept. 11. As for the threat of the religious extremists in the country, the government seems in control of the situation.
A heavy burden that Musharraf carries is the involvement of the establishment in creating and sustaining the Taleban on the one hand and supporting the armed struggle for freedom in the Indian-held Kashmir on the other. Hence, difficult questions are bound to arise on the direction that Pakistan’s policies on Kashmir and relations with archrival India will now take.
India, an enthusiastic member of the international coalition, has forcefully sought to bring into focus what it alleges as Pakistan’s involvement in cross-border terrorism in the disputed region of Kashmir and the recent bomb blast in Srinagar in which 38 persons died certainly raised a lot of dust.
Against this backdrop, two very significant developments during the past few days should have long-term implications for the future polity of Pakistan. More important and meaningful is the bold initiative of Musharraf, who remains the chief of the army staff, to change the image of the Pakistan Army from one which many in the West saw as potentially fundamentalist to an outfit with a liberal and moderate face. A major shake-up in the high command on Sunday has brought forward officers one commentator described as normal, dynamic and level-headed.
Simultaneously, Pakistan has softened its stance toward India and Musharraf had a telephonic conversation with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on Monday, their first direct contact since the failure of the India-Pakistan summit in Agra in July. Musharraf renewed the invitation to the Indian leader to visit Pakistan and carry forward the Arga process. That this step may have been prompted by the United States is substantiated by the forthcoming short visit to the two countries by US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Observers say that it was designed to address worries about how the Afghanistan crisis can impinge on the always uneasy Indo-Pakistan relationship.
Changes in Pakistan’s military hierarchy have generated a lot of comment and speculation, though Musharraf has tried to understate their significance by calling them a routine process. It has been argued that an attempt has been made to reverse Pakistan’s support for the Taleban movement and to ensure a fuller implementation of the policy shift in the context of the present support to America’s war against terrorism.
In an investigative report, The News daily newspaper said on Tuesday: If Gen. Zia-ul Haq is remembered for altering Pakistan Army’s moderate character by dousing its rank and file with fundamentalist values and culture, Gen. Pervez Musharraf has taken a quantum jump to bring its character back and in the process, make it friendlier for the big powers and their defense forces.
In Sunday’s shake-up, the chief of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad was deposed in spite of the fact that he was known to be very close to Musharraf and had played a leading role in the military takeover on Oct. 12, 1999. The new ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ehsan-ul Haq is known to have balanced views and brings with him fresh ideas to make Pakistan’s policy shift on Afghanistan successful.
A shift in the Afghan policy may have been formalized but what would the new situation mean for Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is causing considerable ambivalence because it is located at the very heart of Pakistan’s strategic thinking. American anxiety about the basic distrust that exists between the two South Asian nuclear neighbors is very understandable. On Tuesday, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington that the US certainly had an interest in seeing that the Afghanistan crisis did not become a subject of dispute between India and Pakistan. He said that any effort at mediation between Islamabad and New Delhi was not what Colin Powell’s visit was about, but he did stress that it was important to work with both the countries to reduce tensions in the region.
Reports from New Delhi have indicated that the telephonic conversation between the two leaders had helped ease the environment of mistrust to an extent that it was agreed that India would send relief material to Pakistan by the land corridor as an expression of its solidarity with the anti-terrorist coalition of which Pakistan is a key member.
