Book Shelf

Between Dreams And Realities of Pakistan

Between Dreams and Realities: Some Milestones in Pakistan’s History;
By Sartaj Aziz
Oxford University Press 2009
Pp408; Price (Pak)Rs 595.
 
How should one explain the theme of Sartaj Aziz’s memoir under one organising principle? At the risk of being selective, one can say: the principle of suiting the state’s economic resource to its diplomatic and military strategy. Since the country’s diplomacy is notoriously subordinated to its military strategy, one can also say that Pakistan’s military strategy has let the country down. Can this be easily mounted as a defining aphorism only the reader will decide.

First glimpse of policy mismatch: Sitting in the Planning Commission of Pakistan in 1964, economist Sartaj Aziz was made uncomfortably aware of the policy-economy mismatch. Bhutto, the dashing foreign minister of Ayub Khan, had gone on a populist anti-India and anti-US binge, spellbinding the ruling general into thinking he was becoming a world statesman fawned upon by the enemies of the US, when Saeed Hasan, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission told the old dictator, ‘Sir, I hope you realise that our foreign policy and our economic requirements are not fully consistent, in fact, they are rapidly falling out of line’. (p.38) Pakistan lost the half a billion dollars it had coming from the Consortium for Pakistan.

Consider the economic fall-out of the 1965 war when two days before India’s full-scale attack on Lahore, Bhutto made a categorical statement in the cabinet that Pakistan’s incursion into Indian- Kashmir, at Akhnoor, would not provide India with the justification for attacking Pakistan across the international boundary ‘because Kashmir was a disputed territory’. (p.39) After that Pakistan floundered, losing East Pakistan six years later, with the economy in great jeopardy without US assistance. Bhutto’s nationalisation failed to make up for the ‘mismatch’ between economic reality and policy formulation.

Hubris of heavy mandate: There is hubris in both quarters, civil and military, a kind of over-reaching and ‘excess’ that is punished by the gods since the Greeks tried to understand it. “Nawaz Sharif’s unprecedented victory in general elections or ‘the heavy mandate’, as the media repeatedly emphasised in 1997, had probably changed his political mindset forever.” (p.161) That was followed by many acts of excess, the firing of the army chief, the firing of the president and the assault on the Supreme Court. It began soon enough: President Leghari’s address to the joint session of parliament on March 26, 2007 aroused undue misgivings because his text was not the one sent to him by the government. (p.176)

In July 1997, Sharif thought he would have his own special courts to unrealistically get justice to the poor man’s doorstep. Even loyal members like Syed Ghous Ali Shah warned that this proposal could lead to confrontation with the judiciary. (p.174) But Mian Sahib had his heavy mandate and his disposition of excess. Soon Justice Sajjad Ali Shah was similarly aroused, through a kind of judicial hubris that is still around. He admitted a petition challenging Mian Sahib’s 14th Amendment against floor-crossing and suspended it.

Political and judicial overkill: Within nine months, Mian Sahib was facing contempt at the Supreme Court, and the parliament which he dominated hurriedly amended the Contempt of Court Act to save him from going under. The book is terse on the ‘assault’: “Some [PML workers] were apprehensive that if the Supreme Court was allowed to conduct its business, the prime minister would be convicted. As a result he would also lose the political battle. They therefore resorted to violence to disrupt the court proceedings. The chief justice and other members of the Bench left the court and went to their chamber to mark one of the most disgraceful episodes in the judicial history of Pakistan.” (p.178)

Sartaj examined the case later with his PML colleagues and came to the conclusion that ‘the decision of Nawaz Sharif to set up a separate judicial system for trying cases involving terrorism’ was the mistake that triggered the judicial crisis.

Nuclear test and economic bomb: It is the nuclear test of 1998 where perhaps Sartaj Aziz briefly abandons his theory of matching economic requirements with national strategy. He approved of the test because Pakistan’s “deepening economic imbalance will bring about a decisive shift in the balance of power between India and Pakistan” and the idea was to recreate balance through deterrence. (p.191) He was upset about what happened to the economy after the test, but was consoled that in 2002, India mobilised half a million troops on the border after an attack on its parliament in 2001, but was finally forced to withdraw the ‘due to the danger of a nuclear retaliation by Pakistan’. (p.196)

Was Sartaj Aziz unaware that the Indian Parliament had been attacked by ‘non-state actors’ from Pakistan? Was deterrence to mean also the freedom to attack with non-state actors below the nuclear threshold? As will become clear later when Sartaj Aziz confronts the Kargil crisis as foreign minister, he may not have been ‘in the loop’ on the non-state actors and was therefore looking at the Indian mobilisation of 2001 the way he did. True to mettle, in 1999, as foreign minister, he presented to the cabinet his final articulation of the theory of the ‘disconnect’ between military strategy and civilian policy.

Blunder of firing General Karamat: He was intensely aware of the continuous hubris of Mian Sahib’s actions as they unfolded. He says: “Others will blame Nawaz Sharif for many mistakes he made. But in my view, the most serious of these mistakes was Nawaz Sharif’s decision to remove General Jehangir Karamat as chief of army staff in October 1998.” (p.200) Then he says: “I was almost certain the position [of army chief] would go to General Ali Kuli Khan the chief of general staff and a very competent officer, next in seniority to General Jehangir Karamat. But Nawaz Sharif decided, in consultation with Shahbaz Sharif and Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, to appoint General Pervez Musharraf as the next army chief.” (p.201)

Then comes the murky stuff that Mian Sahib’s darbar was subject to. Sartaj Aziz says: “The day after General Pervez Musharraf was appointed as army chief I suggested to Nawaz Sharif that he might appoint General Ali Kuli Khan as CJCSC to redress the injustice done to him. He seemed quite receptive and said, he would think about it.” Then came the bolt from the blue: his advice was not heeded because as Shahbaz Sharif told him, General Karamat had revealed that he was “under great pressure from colleagues like General Ali Kuli Khan to take over rather than resign.” (p.201) Later, Karamat denied to Sartaj Aziz that he had ever said it.

Security trumps economic reality: Sartaj concludes: “As I reflected on this unfortunate chain of events after the military takeover in October 1999, I came to the conclusion that in removing General Jehangir Karamat, Nawaz Sharif had committed a blunder. He also failed to recognise that despite his heavy mandate, it was not advisable for him to dismiss two army chiefs in less than a year. In doing so he had overplayed his hands and effectively derailed the democratic process for nine long years.” (p.202)

Sartaj Aziz was removed as finance minister and made foreign minister in 1998. He mused: “Operation Gibraltar and the subsequent war in 1965 were the first major foreign policy disasters brought about by a military government in Pakistan.” The US had already withdrawn economic assistance. ‘It is unthinkable that any group of competent military strategists would launch such an unrealistic operation in the face of these realities and on the assumption that India could not attack the international boundary.” Then he presents the thesis of the book: “I wondered if we were facing a similar disconnect in our security needs and economic realities once again in the late 1990s.”’ (p.207)

Out of the loop on non-state actors: When the Taliban attacked Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998 the second time around, killing and raping at a grand scale, non-state actors of Sipah-e Sahaba also killed eleven Iranian diplomats in the city. Sartaj Aziz as foreign minister must have been privy to the fact that Pakistan Afghan policy was run by the army through the ISI, but he gives the impression that he was not in the loop about the Sipah-e Sahaba boys killing the Iranians. (p.208) Even so he hints at this ‘flaw’ in his ‘proposals’ about how to coordinate army and civilian thinking through an ‘interactive’ system, on page 241. But the Foreign Office is still a Post Office in 2009.

Vajpayee was in Lahore and Mian Sahib had normalisation on his mind with a schizoid state in the background attacking India across Kargil. Sartaj proposed Shaharyar Mohammed Khan for back-channel diplomacy, but Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad persuaded Nawaz Sharif to nominate Niaz A Naik instead. (p.225) Every time Mian Sahib rebuffs Sartaj, he is proved wrong by events. Why does he do it? The answer may be his distrust of the rational mind and preference for loyalty rather than sincerity.

Living with a tactical army: In May 1999, General Musharraf briefed the prime minister on Kargil. This may not have been the first briefing but for Sartaj it was. The PM was accompanied by him, Abdul Majid Malik (minister for Kashmir affairs), Raja Zafarul Haq (minister for religious affairs), Shamshad Ahmad (foreign secretary), and Tariq Fatemi (additional secretary in the PM secretariat). Sartaj Aziz was among the dissenters, and what he said must be flagged as the intellectual thesis of the book, that the Pakistan Army is ‘tactical’ rather than ‘strategic’ in its thinking.

He said: “I see that the tactics are brilliant but the strategy does not seem viable. And the objectives of the operation are even less clear.” (p.258) Other Foreign Office diplomats were perhaps in the loop, unlike Sartaj. In the RAW telephone intercept of General Musharraf — and there have been many since — General Aziz in Islamabad is heard telling the chief in Beijing in Appendix III of the book that while Mian Sahib was okay, ‘Shamshad as usual was supporting’.


-By Khaled Ahmed in the Daily Times, Aug 9

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