Daily Times

It was Monday, December 30, 2013. On my way to the hospital, I was listening to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme when Mr Musharraf spoke to the show’s host, James Naughtie, from his farm in Chuk Shehzad, Islamabad. He described the military as “the centre of gravity in Pakistan” and remarked, “In the past, the environment forced the army to take over. Now they do not need to take over but they do have a role to play in the dynamics of the country.” He also added, “No politically-elected government has performed socio-economically.” As president from 2001 to 2008, Mr Musharraf was one of Pakistan’s longest-serving rulers and he now faces trials in a series of court cases, including one for treason.

Military interventions are widely seen as a denial of democratic values and institutions, and considerable literary attention has been devoted to explaining why and how military coups occur. Explanations to intervene have been examined and the motives of coup leaders, the structure of the military, and the factors that appeared responsible in predisposing and facilitating socio-economic, political and external conditions have been explored. Mr Musharraf had sought a coup and his reasons for military intervention were: “It was a last resort to prevent any further destabilisation of the country and the fast declining situation from all sides of the political divide.” In his first address to the nation he announced, “Not only have all the institutions been played around with, and systematically destroyed, the economy too is in a state of collapse.” In Pakistan, the military typically has always been more cohesive and better organised. It has surfaced as more ‘national’, and more strongly committed to saving solidarity than the rest of society, including politicians. Not surprising, therefore, that military intervention was a predictable response to inefficient and corrupt administrations, and political fractiousness, which characterised the civil government at the time.

An alternative line of explanation in history sees military establishments as motivated less by a culture of rationality, sound management and modernity than by its corporate interests. Military intervention is especially likely, it is argued, when the military is marginalised or fiscally deprived, or its interests, autonomy or ‘professionalism’ is threatened by democratic politicians in their attempts to gag the institution. In both these approaches, the military is seen essentially as a cohesive entity with a sense of collective identity. Mr Musharraf claims he saw a strong state as a necessary precondition for economic development and enforced military intervention. Such a viewpoint, however, raises some big questions, in particular, if the military intervened because the institutions of civil government were ‘underdeveloped’ or not working well, what chance was there of civil institutions ever developing? Although military coup leaders in the history of Pakistan have frequently presented themselves as intervening temporarily, once out of the barracks they were seldom in a hurry to return. Moreover, the actions of military rulers banning political activity, suspending constitutions, imposing media censorship and so on were frequently inimical to the development of civil politics. And Mr Musharraf did not prove an exception to the rule.

With military or civil-military regimes becoming increasingly the norm in Pakistan, political analysts of military history began to shift the focus of their enquiry from explaining coups to a second enterprise, that of assessing the relative performance of military regimes. Early writings on military intervention in politics tended to regard military intervention as essentially anti-democratic but to see military regimes probably more capable, as Musharraf says, than democratic civilian regimes is contentious. Achieving modernisation and development in a third world country by military regimes at the behest of democracy requires hard measures of political performance.

When legitimisation, no coercive rule, minimisation of violence and responsiveness to popular wishes were applied as measures of political performance, the index of military governments is significantly and almost consistently poorer than that of civilian governments. The Musharraf regime had failed miserably to satisfy the needs of the working and poor people. It had also failed to deal with rising terrorism and sectarianism in the tribal areas and in the Swat district. After eight years of pious claims about democracy, an independent media and judiciary and respect for human rights, he returned to military rule on November 3, 2007 and imposed martial law across Pakistan. Under the guise of a state of emergency, he declared a new Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO) and suspended the existing constitution. All fundamental rights, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and freedom of the press were denied. This was the second time that Musharraf had carried though such measures. The first time was on October 12, 1999 when he removed Nawaz Sharif from government.

The idea that the military is at least potentially fragmented has particular salience in those countries in which the military does not have a specific stereotypical model of military rule. However, as more and more countries came to experience periods of military rule, it also became obvious that stereotypical models of military rule are inadequate. In some countries the military, or factions within the military, had simply made a blatant grab for power; in others, the military intervened to replace an ineffective or corrupt civilian government with the stated intention of handing power back to civilian rule. In still others, the military and civilian authorities established a system of joint participation in government. This relationship in Pakistan has always shifted in favour of the military owing to the divide among the politicians, obsessive pursuit of power and poor governance.

This brings the question of ‘exit’ and challenges analysts with a conundrum: how can the army, once in power, be returned to the barracks? Although some coup-makers did withdraw, in most cases, the military that has intervened in politics remained in a dilemma in that neither they could withdraw from rulership nor could they fully legitimise it. Most military regimes have very short lives but not in our case; here they have lasted for years, longer than expected. Conditions for military withdrawal parallelled, in reverse, those for military intervention and identified two sets of dispositions and societal conditions for withdrawal: abdication and institutionalisation. Successful abdication requires that the personal, corporate and ideological interests of the military be protected, and that the political party or political system to which the military hands over be “organised, not unwise”, and in effective control of the country. Contemporaneously, with the phrase ‘back to the barracks’, the dilemma for military regimes has been to develop a mechanism for succession without jeopardising their own supreme position.

Military intervention should not be glorified but it is indeed naive and subversive of the retired general to insist that it should be considered as having a role. The critical question in a military coup is not whether constitutive instruments have been applied but whether it has resulted in destroying political independence and whether it is unlawful and incongruent with the common man’s goals and minimum order. Mr Musharraf did not attend the court at the time of writing due to medical reasons. The military is wary about the precedent and premier Sharif has to calculate his next move from a vantage point. Judges want the medical report cross examined and, from what appears in the medical reports, Mr Musharraf would need a really good psychiatrist to secure exemption from the court on the grounds of prevailing stress and an increased risk of a coronary attack.

The writer is a member of the Diplomate American Board of Medical Psychotherapists Dip.Soc Studies, member Int’l Association of Forensic Criminologists, associate professor Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at the Huntercombe Group United Kingdom. He can be reached at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com