The unspooling of General Musharraf

Pakistan’s military ruler and president has found his forte: the press conference. By Dawn columnist Ayaz Amir

After the confusion which marked the early stages of his rule, Pakistan’s soldier-president has finally discovered his forte: the extended press conference. It is a sign of the confidence he has acquired that he prefers his press conference live. He’s a natural, speaking easily and handling questions, even difficult ones, with aplomb. Nor is he a boring speaker. The tedium comes when he stops looking at his watch.

Musharraf’s foremost achievement so far is the consolidation of his rule — not too difficult a task given the army’s backing and the opposition of such fearsome luminaries as the Sharifs, Benazir Bhutto and the unshaven monks of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy. He would have to be spectacularly inept to get it wrong

In his chosen medium of the press conference, Musharraf is the best speaker Pakistan has had since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He is also a more down-to-earth speaker than the Pride of Asia (one of the many titles bestowed on Bhutto by a grateful populace) who was inclined to rely on generous amounts of fiction to embellish his public utterances. Not that he is a Quaker who speaks always on oath. But he gives the fiction treatment only to a few chosen subjects, those the closest to his heart: his government’s achievements and the wonderful things likely to accrue from devolution.

Make-believe in such small doses is pardonable in a leader. The larger question is altogether different. Backward countries like Pakistan face problems of development, not eloquence. When they get leaders who start liking the sound of their own voices, the danger is real of the medium becoming the message, of words filling in for action. The circus function of government then becomes more important than the prosaic task of solving everyday problems.

Who in the post-colonial era have been the great exponents of Third World righteousness? To name a random few: Nkrumah, Sukarno, Nasser, Ben Bella, Nehru and, a bit later, our own Bhutto. All of them dashing and romantic figures abroad, failures at home. Eloquent leaders who have also been men of action constitute a thinner list. Castro comes to mind and, at an altogether different level, Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohammad.

General Musharraf’s foremost achievement so far is the consolidation of his rule — not too difficult a task given the army’s backing and the opposition of such fearsome luminaries as the Sharifs, Benazir Bhutto and the unshaven monks of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy. Musharraf would have to be spectacularly inept to get it wrong.

For the rest, what has he to show for himself? Alas, very little. Army monitoring — of the country, the economy, the districts — may not have been a disaster but it’s been a limp affair. While being quick at taking up different initiatives like ending smuggling, recovering bad loans and documenting the economy, the military government has been equally quick in abandoning them in the face of resistance or after realising that things simple on paper were more complicated on the ground.The cost of living is on the rise, investment has all but dried up and no jobs are available.

What are we left with then? Merely the echo of the hackneyed phrase that General Musharraf has become increasingly ‘‘media-savvy’’ of late. Good for him, but of what consolation to the people of Pakistan is his increasingly effective handling of the media? How does it affect their cost of living? How does it improve the local police station?

Or take Agra. The General argued Pakistan’s case on Kashmir effectively, perhaps better than most before him. hit. Despite the lack of a declaration, Kashmir was placed firmly on the centre table, exactly what Pakistan wanted. However, statesmanship is not only about mounting the rooftops and beating one’s drum. Ultimately, it is about realisable solutions. After Agra, is Pakistan any nearer getting India to accept its stand on Kashmir?

Foreign policy is the last, and quite often the first, refuge of Third World despots, demagogues or military figures. When domestic problems — debt, crumbling infra-structure, corruption, mal-administration — are found to be intractable, the lure of playing international statesman proves irresistible. There is no shortage of monarchs and presidents in the Arab and Muslim world who play this role to the full, none more so than the most ineffectual of them all, Yasser Arafat, who, in Edward Said’s words, flits from capital to capital on one pointless state visit after another to prove his supposed standing as Palestinian president.

Pakistani leaders have also been assiduous globe-trotters, the more keen on foreign travel the more ineffectual they have proved at home. Benazir Bhutto made a record number of trips abroad. So did Nawaz Sharif. In the short time he has been around General Musharraf has also done his fair share of foreign sight-seeing. But his India visit, under whose cover he made himself president, has been his most important and most fruitful.

It was a visit during which the general was not patronised by his hosts nor read lectures in democracy or stability as was the case with some of his earlier forays on to the international stage. He went to India as an equal and in pursuit of a worthwhile objective: getting Indo-Pak relations moving again. For providing him this opportunity he has reason to be thankful to Mr Vajpayee.

For Pakistan, General Musharraf’s new-found confidence means the obvious: an extended presidential term and a new system whose foundations — in the form of local elections and election of army-approved nazims and naib nazims — are already being laid. Take your pick out of what is on offer.

The good thing about Musharraf is that he is a liberal. But as his record thus far proves, he is no radical reformer, his socio-political instincts being those of the institution which is the source of his power. Furthermore, the political system whose scaffolding he is erecting is a throwback, minus the suppression of the press, to the Ayubian model. Pakistan could have done without this regression.