Dr Abdul Wahid Soomro (MNA Pakistan Peoples Party)

When the country’s first military dictator, Field Martial Ayub Khan (1958-69), resigned following a concentrated protest campaign and agitation by left-wing student organizations, and parties like the PPP, he decided to become a recluse and just fade away (he died in 1974).
The country’s second military dictator, General Yahya Khan (who replaced Ayub and functioned as the head of state between 1969 and 1971), was first put under house arrest by the Z.A. Bhutto regime and then allowed to live a life in obscurity until his quiet death in 1980.
Yahya was remembered as the man who led Pakistan into a disastrous civil war in former East Pakistan and the consequent defeat of the country’s armed forces at the hands of the Indians. A defeat that eventually facilitated the ‘liberation’ of East Pakistan that (in 1972) became the sovereign nation of Bangladesh.
Pakistan’s next military strong man, General Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88), never got the chance to live out his end days in quiet retirement. While facing his toughest test against his nemesis, Benazir Bhutto (in 1986-87), Zia seemed to have prevailed over Benazir’s remarkable street power, when his plane blew up in mid-air over Bahawalpur in August 1988.
A victim of a perfectly clandestine assassination plan (there was a bomb placed inside the plane), he was celebrated as a ‘martyred mujahid’ by some sections of the Afghan/Pakistani jihad groups operating in the country, as well as among some conservative segments of the society (especially in the Punjab).
And even though Mian Nawaz Sharif did take thousands of their supporters to Zia’s grave site in Islamabad, claiming that he would ‘complete Zia’s mission’ (oh, my), he soon realised that his survival depended more on the votes of the living than on the ghostly blessings of a dead dictator.
By the mid-1990s Zia seemed to have lost whatever little fan following his memories had managed to collect after his assassination. Today, some twenty-two years after his explosive demise, his name rings the loudest whenever there is a discussion anywhere in the country about the proliferation of extremist thought and jihadi groups in the country. He is seen as the main culprit in this respect and this has been his most enduring legacy.


Compared to all these military dictators, the post-dictatorship status of the country’s last gringo in uniform, General Pervez Musharraf, is threatening to take a distinctive turn.
The man who resigned as chief of army and ‘President’ following the formation of an antagonist coalition government and opposition (after the February 2008 elections), was all set to spend the rest of his days playing golf (in London), and basking in the fact that a billion freckled teen-aged Pakistanis followed him of Facebook. That is, until he suddenly reappeared during a ‘telethon’ conducted by a local news channel to raise funds for the victims of the recent floods in Pakistan.
The TV channel, not to be outdone by a competing TV channel’s love affair in this respect with another favourite of freckled teen-aged Pakistanis, Imran Khan, this channel went a step further by floating Musharraf as their man to ‘save Pakistan.’
But why is there still an air of suspicion regarding all this?
Though Imran, no matter how rhetorically daft, reactive and naive he may sound as a politician, he is an established charity worker and philanthropist. This can, however, not be said about Musharraf.
That’s why there are many people who are now actually accusing Musharraf and the TV channel he appeared on, for using the floods as a way to jump on the flood-drenched political bandwagon.
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I would not like to question anyone who (for whatever reasons) is trying to aid the flood victims; but how can one explain the fact that right after the ‘terrific success of the telethon,’ the ol’ gringo at once declared that he would be launching a political party on October 1?
The question is, was Musharraf really as bad as the PPP and PML-N and some TV anchors would have us believe?
Well, if truth be told, compared to a gruesome and ruthless character like Zia-ul-Haq, I would say Musharraf was quite a softy. But then how did a society of relatively ‘moderate’ Muslims turn into a citadel of all sorts of extremist antics during his soft dictatorship?
Yes, Zia is correctly pointed at to be at the root of whatever that has gone wrong in this country regarding politics and faith, but wasn’t a soft military dictator like Musarraf who publicly idealised giant secular Muslim nationalists such as Mustapha Kamal (of Turkey), and loved his dogs, cigars and drink, supposed to have rectified this?
Maybe he was right to intervene and bring to a close the country’s highly chequered ‘decade of democracy’ in the 1990s, but that troublesome decade pales in comparison to what followed Musharraf’s take-over.
Musharraf made all the right noises. He wanted to eradicate corruption (oh, well, so did all the other dictators – and failed!); he wanted to bring ‘real democracy’ (for which, he chose to throw out the country’s most prominent democrats and ironically replace them with a gang of dysfunctional disgruntles from the top two parties); he wanted to bring the country’s economy back on track (for which he imported a banker as finance minister and then prime minister who was good at providing wonderful eye-washes and face lifts to the economy but had no idea as to how these eyes and face may look once the artificial wash dried out – and which it eventually did, leaving behind an ugly, empty edifice).
Nevertheless, his insistence to push out various discriminatory clauses from the Zia-era’s anti-women Hudood Ordinances was quite an achievement. But perhaps, that was about it?
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I think Musharraf’s biggest success was in the cultural realm. Both, Benazir and Nawaz during the decade of democracy in the 1990s were too busy playing politics of bare survivalism, and thus had little time to invest in the sort of cultural policies that actually affect mindsets.
To his credit, Musharraf aggressively addressed the deepening trend of negative conservatism that had gripped the Pakistani frame of mind, putting an impressive amount of personal effort to revive Pakistan’s evaporating cultural polity.
In an environment in which the reactionary mindset had hit a peak (especially after the tragic 9/11 episode), Musharraf led the charge in giving state patronage to various modern art forms, going a step further by adding to his agenda, the proliferation of private TV channels who were allowed to interpret politics, society and entertainment on their own terms.
Again, if so, then what went wrong?
Well, there is nothing hidden anymore about a pretty well-known revelation that sees a general who wasn’t quite as sincere about rooting out extremist thought and action from society as he claimed he was.
Crudely put, while he went all out to eliminate certain groups of extremists, he was okay in keeping intact some other such groups and individuals. The enlightened and liberated general, I’m afraid, was quite stuck (willingly) in the old Pakistan Army thought process which, many experts believe, was/is mostly about retaining certain groups of trained extremists that can be used to look after Pakistan’s ‘strategic depth’ in places like Afghanistan and Kashmir(?).
It seems the dictator and his army simply refused to notice (or swallow) the fact that even those extremist groups that were being nurtured were gradually breaking away from the orbit of the Pakistani state.
Many of the same groups are now running wild, creating unparalleled havoc across the country.
Secondly, Musharraf’s ‘liberal’ doctrine that he lovingly dubbed as ‘enlightened moderation,’ of course, was a farce. It simply meant nothing, and yet one kept hearing about it over and over again.
One can deduce that it was something about taking an informed middle road between two extremes – religious and liberal.
This is rather silly, especially in a country where, though, religious extremism can be found in a number of political and social areas, ‘liberal extremism’ (whatever that means), is almost non-existent.
Was Musharraf suggesting that we should not only be weary of extremist religious thought that was fast penetrating the Pakistani society, but also be aware of ‘liberal extremists’ who perhaps constituted (at most) .1 percent of the population? Silly man.
The irony is that much of the religious extremism that today plagues this country has had its roots in Zia’s wily ways and reactionary ego, but it exploded during Musharraf’s reign of ‘enlightened moderation.’
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Though Musharraf’s policies may not have engaged the common man the way Z.A. Bhutto’s did, however, it did have a deep impact on urban, middle-class Pakistan.
This happened in two stages. The first was the proliferation of a new-found sense of creative freedom among the urban middle-class youth, and the next stage was when this astute sensibility eventually evolved into a new political awakening of sorts.
Or was it, really?
If one scans the writings that still appear in newspapers and internet sites of certain pro-Musharraf punters, or listen to certain men and women who appear as hosts and ‘analysts’ on TV (and make no bones about being the general’s fans); and their youthful followers who love taking part in whip lashing cyber discussions, one can clearly detect in their tirades a constant stream of some of the most outlandish reactionary and nationalistic claptrap this side of Joseph Goebbels!
Most of these ladies and gentlemen come from well-to-do, upper-middle and middle-class backgrounds. Many of them are young. And ‘educated.’ But I am afraid on most occasions than not, their rhetoric has very little to do with anything either enlightening or moderate.
Educated they may be, the twist comes in when most of them suddenly morph into desperate nut cases spouting utter hatred.
Hatred towards democracy, towards politicians, and towards the stupid and ‘illiterate’ masses that actually exercise their right to vote and elect these politicians; hatred towards minority sects in Pakistan, Hindus, Jews and even fellow Muslims who commit ‘shirk’ (blasphemy) by going to Sufi shrines. Funniest, however, remains to be their hatred of ‘liberal extremists!’
Now remember this is coming from men and women who might be drinking, smoking and grooving on the latest Indian and Western tunes on their iPods. Or who may be associated with giant western multinationals, foreign funded NGOs, fashion and pop industries, elitist schools and colleges, and major money making concerns and private TV channels.
Is this what Musharraf’s enlightened moderation create?
Apart from a country infested with psychotic monsters jumping about in suicide belts, this enlightened moderation also created perfumed little pompous rats proving that yes, extreme patriotism can most certainly mutate into a plague infected with a warped understanding of politics and nationalism – mostly constructed on an unending series of diabolic conspiracy theories, and feel-good lectures constituting sheer lies and delusions about one’s country and religion.
Thus, I think instead of calling his doctrine ‘enlightened moderation,’ he should have called it ‘frightened frustration’ instead. Because the kind of hairy barbarians conducting suicide attacks on the one hand, and the pompous patriots dripping with chauvinistic drool and anti-democracy bile that his rule eventually generated, is really about frustrated cowards running amok.
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