clothing, and shelter for all. From 1966 to 1970, he built the PPP from scratch,
assiduously cultivating a range of constituencies. He honed his skills at mass
politics, something that had not been part of his repertoire in the Ayub gov-
ernment. On the campaign trail, he never missed an opportunity to blast the
Ayub regime for its ignominious acceptance of Tashkent.27 When this charge
was lashed to Bhutto’s fiery rhetoric about American imperialism, it was quite
clear that the charismatic politician had found a devastatingly effective way to
tar Ayub and Washington with the same brush.
With speed that surprised even the extraordinarily ambitious Bhutto, the PPP
grew into a mass movement and catapulted him to victory in West Pakistan’s
1970 elections, even though the PPP had no appeal in East Pakistan. After
Pakistan’s agonizing loss to India in the 1971 war, in which East Pakistan
declared its independence as Bangladesh, Bhutto assumed power over the rump
state in the west. The defeated military lay in shambles. Almost 80,000 of its
troops were held by India as prisoners of war. Pakistan’s top general had
resigned, handing uncontested power to Bhutto.28
24 See George J. Lerski, “The Pakistan-American Alliance: A Reevaluation of the Past Decade,”
Asian Survey, 8, no. 5 (May 1968), p. 414.
25 See J. Henry Korson, “Contemporary Problems of Pakistan,” International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology, 15 (1974), p. 58; Salmaan Taseer, Bhutto: A Political Biography (1980) reproduced by Sani Hussain Panhwar, pp. 69–73, www.bhutto.org.
26 Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000, p. 171.
27 Taseer, Bhutto: A Political Biography, p. 67, www.bhutto.org.
28 The long list of senior officers forced out after the war by Bhutto demonstrated his supremacy.
See Hasan-Askari Rizvi, Military, State and Society in Pakistan (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2003), p. 144.
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Why Do They Hate Us?
79
Bhutto’s total dominance over his traumatized nation is still viewed by many
Pakistanis as the apotheosis of civilian control over the military. In liberal circles there is a nostalgic sense that he might have used that authority to cement the
primacy of civilian rule and representative democracy once and for all. Bhutto
instead attempted to rebuild the military, believing he could control it and use
it to suppress opposition in the provinces of Baluchistan and the northwest
frontier. Similarly, Bhutto’s socialist-tinged economic schemes, including his
selective nationalization of companies held by some of Pakistan’s wealthiest
families, paid no real dividends.29
Moreover, Bhutto’s credentials as a democrat must be scrutinized closely.
Bhutto’s creation of the PPP as a party in civilian opposition to the military
is only one piece of the story. Often less well remembered is that his ascent
to power was enabled, or at least accelerated, by the breakup of East and
West Pakistan in 1971. Bhutto’s intransigence in negotiations with the Awami
League (AL) – the majority party of East Pakistan, later Bangladesh – con-
tributed to the breakup of the state.30
Of course, the pairing of East and West Pakistan in a single political unit
separated by a hostile India was an odd one from the start. Underlying dif-
ferences between the Punjabi-dominated west and the Bengali-dominated east
were only exacerbated in the decades after independence. At the core of the
AL’s 1970 appeal to East Pakistanis was the sense that West Pakistan treated
them more like a colony than an equal part of the nation. The AL campaigned
for greater autonomy from Islamabad. When the AL swept the balloting in East
Pakistan to score a surprising majority in the parliamentary elections of 1970,
it presented West Pakistanis with the uncomfortable specter of Bengali rule.
Had Pakistan remained united, Bhutto’s PPP would have had to play sec-
ond fiddle to the AL. This did not sit well with the ambitious Bhutto, who
argued repeatedly during the post-election period that “a majority alone doesn’t
count in national politics,” thus revealing at least some discomfort with one of
democracy’s core principles.31 Bhutto’s intransigence on this point – coupled,
of course, with the army’s genocidal mishandling of opposition in East Pak-
istan, the AL’s own political aspirations, and India’s intervention in the civil
war that ensued – ultimately cut Pakistan in two and created an independent
Bangladesh.
Bhutto’s discomfort with the principles of democratic majority rule did not
dissipate after the war. For him, the purpose of the PPP was to serve as a
29 This is the conclusion reached by historian Ian Talbot in his excellent review of Bhutto’s legacy in Pakistan: A Modern History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 215–44.
30 For an even-handed historical review of the 1970 elections and Bhutto’s involvement in the events that led to Bangladeshi independence, see Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History, pp. 194–213.
31 Bhutto’s broader point was that the PPP’s special place as a voice of opposition to the military warranted it a special role in any future government, but of course the AL’s leader, Sheikh Mujib, argued that his party was entitled to rule as it had won a majority of Pakistan’s national assembly seats. See Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History, p. 205.
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80
No Exit from Pakistan
vehicle to advance his own power. Bhutto ran the PPP like the Sindhi feudal he
was, with no regard for building an institution that was internally democratic.
That the party has become a dynastic inheritance, passed from Bhutto to his
daughter Benazir, then to her husband Asif Ali Zardari, and almost certainly
to their son, Bilawal, after that, bears testament to its compromised democratic
foundations.
Bhutto’s Legacy
In spite of all the weaknesses of the PPP, the aspiration of civilian democratic
rule that Bhutto symbolized in the early 1970s also left an imprint that persists
to this day. In the first week of May 2011, the shocking revelation that the
United States had found and killed bin Laden right under the army’s nose
raised a chorus of Pakistani criticism about the army’s ineptitude. For at least
a few days after the Abbottabad raid, there was a lively debate over whether
Pakistan might again have reached a “1971 moment” in which the civilian
government could firmly impose its will over the army. It was quickly apparent
that Pakistan had not. Had there been a politician of Bhutto’s ambition and
caliber poised to seize power, perhaps the situation would have been different.32
There is a sad irony to the fact that Bhutto eventually met his end at the
hands of the army, an institution he had failed to cut down to size when he had
the chance. Army Chief Zia-ul-Haq unseated him in 1977 and had him hanged
in 1979
. The proximate cause of Bhutto’s downfall was the PPP’s heavy-handed
rigging of national elections in 1977. The manipulation was so blatant that
opposition groups came out to protest en masse, and Bhutto could only restore
order by calling the army into the streets. In the midst of the crisis, Bhutto’s
anti-Americanism was on display once more. On the floor of the National
Assembly, he charged, without any serious basis, that the United States was
financing a “vast, colossal, huge international conspiracy” against him. He
sought to do so in an effort to rally his own supporters and deflect attention
from the domestic crisis of his own making.33 Bhutto’s desperate ploy failed.
Bhutto’s political legacy, inherited by a range of influential intellectuals and
politicians, informs a leftist and liberal anti-Americanism that is today a tiny
minority view. It is important, however, because it deprives the United States
of vocal, articulate friends in elite Pakistani circles. In April 2008, at a high-end hotel restaurant in Islamabad, I sat down to lunch with one such individual,
32 Some Pakistanis have argued that members of the Zardari government actually attempted a similar sort of power play in the days after the Abbottabad raid, ultimately leading to the “memogate” scandal in fall 2011. For more on this highly contested episode, see “Memo Offered to Revamp Pakistan’s Security Policy,” Dawn, November 18, 2011, http://dawn.com/2011/11/
19/memo-offered-to-revamp-pakistans-security-policy/; Mansoor Ijaz, “An Insider Analysis of Pakistan’s ‘Memogate’” The Daily Beast, December 5, 2011, http://www.thedailybeast.com/
newsweek/2011/12/04/an-insider-analysis-of-pakistan-s-memogate.html.
33 For the backstory to these allegations, see Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000, p. 230. See also, Rizvi, Military, State and Society in Pakistan, p. 164.
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Why Do They Hate Us?
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Aitzaz Ahsan. The trim, graying sixty-three-year-old president of Pakistan’s
Supreme Court Bar Association offered me a nod and then, gazing somewhere
over my right shoulder, stated in a matter-of-fact tone, “I hope you realize the
extreme discomfort I feel dining with an American these days.” Ahsan, born
just two years before Pakistan’s birth, is the quintessential Pakistani liberal
anti-American.
Ahsan’s testy mood at our lunch meeting was not a surprise. A gifted politi-
cian and activist, he was stopped on the way to our table by several other
well-heeled patrons hoping to shake his hand and offer thanks to the man
who had stood at the center of the latest bout of Pakistan’s national civil-
military drama. The previous year, Ahsan had won fame for being the driving
force of the epic lawyers’ movement that had defied Musharraf and forced
him to reinstate Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.
Ahsan was the chief justice’s attorney and, at times, his “chauffeur.” The two
cruised at a snail’s pace in Ahsan’s Mitsubishi SUV as they led massive street
protests through a number of Pakistan’s largest cities, surrounded by boister-
ous, black-suited lawyers and their rose-petal throwing supporters. The chief
justice episode presaged the downfall of Musharraf’s army-led regime. Given
that Pakistan’s history is littered with cases of the courts caving to the military
and political powers that be, Aitzaz Ahsan’s feat was entirely unexpected. For
a country that so craved some semblance of blind justice and had grown weary
of army rule, Ahsan was a hero.
The chief justice episode was but the latest chapter in Ahsan’s long career.
A member of Bhutto’s PPP, Ahsan has been elected to the Punjab Provincial
Assembly and the National Assembly. In 1988, he served in Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto’s cabinet in the first civilian government after General Zia’s
death. As an attorney, Ahsan is distinguished in having represented two prime
ministers from his own party (Benazir Bhutto and Yousuf Raza Gilani) and
their chief political opponent and former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. And
as an activist, he has lent his articulate voice and fiery passion to a wide range
of progressive causes.
It is not hard to see that Ahsan’s opposition to American “imperialism” and
to Washington’s support for Musharraf’s military rule has drawn inspiration
from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s example. The anthem of the lawyers’ movement,
“Kal Aaj Aur Kal” (“Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow”) is an Urdu poem
that Ahsan penned himself. He chanted the poem to fervent protestors in a
defiant call-and-response style at their rallies. In its historical allusions to anti-imperialist heroes of the Cold War, it reveals Ahsan’s leftist roots in ways that
would have been familiar to Bhutto:
And then when Che [Guevara] leapt forward
We all marched with him
And when Cho [En Lai] raised his voice
Hand in hand we followed
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No Exit from Pakistan
Subsequently, the poem wheels on Musharraf and fires a barrage at the general’s
American patrons:
Justice has been trampled
It seems that one force straddles the earth [the United States]
Roaming the entire world
It seems like every power falls at its feet
Its bombardment has resulted in rivers of blood
It has made religion extreme, and suicide bombers have grown34
The message Ahsan delivered from 2004 to 2008 was always the same:
the United States was on the wrong side of history in Pakistan. By backing
President Musharraf, Washington was committing the same error that it had
during the period of army rule by Generals Ayub and Zia. When Musharraf
came crashing down, so too would the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Better to
back a new horse before that final crisis, or at least to deftly pull back from
Musharraf before it was too late. I will never forget his belligerent mood on the
eve of the lawyer’s historic twenty-four-hour march from Islamabad to Lahore
in early May 2007, when he harangued the United States up and down during
a long, late dinner at the home of a mutual friend.35 Even in the car on my ride
home my ears rang with Ahsan’s message that time was up for Washington
and its army puppet.
Ahsan had a point. As described in the next chapter, the Bush administration
did not manage the twilight of the Musharraf era in ways that best served U.S.
or Pakistani interests. But the problem with Ahsan, and with other like-minded
Pakistani critics, is that they can only offer risky, uncertain alternatives to U.S.
partnership with Pakistan’s military. Ahsan and other Pakistani liberals have
correctly diagnosed one problem: by bolstering the army, the United States
contributes to Pakistan’s dysfunction.36 They have failed, however,
to appreci-
ate the second problem: the United States has been forced by circumstances to
deal with whatever government it finds in power. Moreover, Pakistan’s civilian
political class has not – from the 1950s to the present – offered compelling evi-
dence of its ability or desire to stabilize Pakistan itself, let alone meet America’s needs. The promise of Pakistan’s civilian politicians, and its democracy as a
whole, is more aspiration than reality.
34 “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” MR Zine, Monthly Review Foundation, November 11, 2008, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/ahsan111108.html.
35 On the march, see Salman Masood, “Throngs Attend Speech by Pakistan’s Suspended Justice,”
New York Times, May 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/world/asia/07pakistan
.html. Thanks go to Dr. Abdullah Riar for playing host that memorable night in Islamabad.
36 For a similar American argument, see George Perkovich, “Stop Enabling Pakistan’s Dangerous Dysfunction,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, September 6, 2011.
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Why Do They Hate Us?
83
Be that as it may, American support to the army has cost it the admiration
of natural partners in Pakistan. In many ways Aitzaz Ahsan represents the
American liberal ideal. He was awarded the American Bar Association Rule of
Law Award in 2008. And yet at his acceptance reception, he observed:
The U.S. administration takes pride in advancing the cause of democracy in Pakistan.
We do not accept this claim. It is well known that before the lawyers began to march, there was no challenge to General Musharraf. Before the Chief Justice refused to resign on demand, no one had said no to the General. A dictator, weakened by the Denial
and the Lawyers’ Movement, turned to Washington. That is when the US did some
stitch-work and pitched in with the demand for elections. But in the process its ally had destroyed the judicial edifice.37
In Pakistan, as in many other states around the world, liberal ideals that are so
thoroughly embedded in American society have been trumped by U.S. interests,