Bin Laden, the West and allegations of assassination and treason: Elspeth Carruthers talks to the ex President of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf.
General Pervez Musharraf is a man with a plan – of sorts. Since the launch of his new political party last year and his repeatedly stated intention to return to political life in Pakistan, the former president of Pakistan has received an arrest warrant for involvement in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto from one court, charges of treason from another, and has witnessed a fresh deterioration in Pakistan's relations with the West. A far cry from the days when Musharraf stood
beside George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and announced his wholehearted support for the war on terror.Yet to hear him talk about a post-Bin Laden Pakistan, there is the sense that nothing is irreparable.
The recent news that Pakistani intelligence have detained five men alleged to be CIA informants who helped spy on the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad is the latest sign of the growing strain between the two countries. Musharraf is quick to echo the near-universal assessment that relations have worn thin: “They are at their lowest, I think...it's very harmful to our common goal of fighting the global war on terror. Therefore they must improve.”
The growing mistrust over intelligence cooperation becomes particularly crucial in the approach to the planned US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014. Yet Musharraf is optimistic about the future. “One thing I am sure of, the controversy, the tension, is because of misunderstanding...and trust deficit. So therefore they can be repaired, the relationship can be repaired, and it must be repaired in the interests of our fight against terrorism.”
In a recent BBC interview, Musharraf said that it was 'very difficult to prove non-complicity' on the part of the ISI with regards to Bin Laden's presence in Pakistan. When asked about the suspicions cast on Pakistani intelligence, he replied: “It's very odd that he was in Abbottabad. I would go to the extent of saying it's an intelligence failure to a shameful degree. Therefore it's very difficult to prove, nobody would believe anyone who says we didn't know, especially if he was there for five years.” As Pakistan rapidly becomes a byword in the US for [untrustworthiness], Musharraf agrees that Bin Laden's five-year undetected presence doesn't appeal to “common sense”, but maintains: “I know there was no complicity, but it's very difficult to prove it.”
The bigger issue in Pakistan, he argues, was the unilateral and undisclosed US raid. “[Bin Laden's presence] was a slip-up, a slip-up of a very large magnitude all right...but the real issue in Pakistan was the violation of our sovereignty, because the United States crossed the border and attacked him without informing anyone. That drew more criticism than his being there for five years.”
It is not the first time, however, that Pakistan's military and intelligence elite have been accused of support for jihadi groups; writer Mohammed Hanif recently argued in an article for India' OPEN magazine that Pakistan's generals have turned the country into an 'international jihadi tourist resort'. I asked General Musharraf if he thought this was a reasonable accusation. “Lashkar-e Taiba or any of the mujahideen groups within Pakistan, they came up when the Kashmir freedom struggle started in 1989, and they are there since then. There was great public sympathy in Pakistan...they have tremendous public support, many people volunteering to join them and to go into Kashmir and fight the Indian army. This is the background, and that is how they came up.” What started as a Pakistani issue, he argues, has taken on an international dimension due to foreign groups: “But now with the emergence of Taliban, al-Qaida, and what is happening in Afghanistan...they have started developing a nexus between the two. Previously these people were only interested in Kashmir, now they have developed a nexus and that is the danger.”
Pakistan has always had a military government, whereas India never has, despite their recent development from the same post-colonial paradigm. I ask him how he would account for this. “No two countries are alike...Pakistan's political elite were all feudal, and that feudal elite still continue, whereas India had the culture of the Congress Party which was well-groomed from a century back. So democracy was deeply seated in India whereas in our part of the subcontinent Pakistan, people had a feudalistic, tribal environment, which didn't really suit democracy.” Almost as an afterthought, he goes on: “And may I also add, the people in government couldn't run government as well as the politicians of India...the military body had to intervene. In fact it is the politicians themselves who used to come and ask the military to help with changing government.”
A predictable answer, perhaps, from a general who took power in a military coup d'etat and who, in his talk to the Cambridge Union later that evening, expounded on the need to balance 'the state and democracy'. Yet the language of juntas and coups, of countries 'suited' to democracy, is beginning to sound more and more dated. Musharraf will have to face some powerful enemies if he wants to return to public life in Pakistan – but he will also have to face a new era.
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