That said, Musharraf’s resort to emergency rule constitutes a major debacle for the Bush administration.
Recognizing that the Musharraf regime was unraveling in the face of mounting popular opposition, Washington had long been trying to broker a rapprochement between Musharraf’s military-dominated regime and Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party.
As the New York Times noted Sunday, in an article titled “Straying Partner Leaves White House in the Lurch,” “For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world.
“On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly.”
And it is not only that Musharraf’s imposition of martial has once again put the lie to the democratic verbiage that the Bush administration and the US political and financial elite have used in justifying their criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Washington and London recognize that Musharraf’s coup is a desperate gamble, which could well backfire, precipitating a popular explosion that would redound against the interests of the Pakistani generals, the Pakistani bourgeoisie as a whole, and US imperialism.
To forestall precisely such a development the Bush administration and the British government have been seeking to broker a deal between Musharraf and the populist PPP, which, on two previous occasions when US-backed military dictatorships collapsed, rescued the military from the wrath of the people and thereby preserved the principal bulwark of bourgeois rule.
Just before the October 6 sham presidential election, the US engineered a shaky understanding between the PPP and Musharraf, under which the PPP broke ranks with the rest of the opposition thereby lending legitimacy to the general’s latest perversion of the constitution. Twelve days later Bhutto returned from exile, but within hours of her arriving in Karachi, she was the target of an assassination attempt in which 139 people died. Bhutto has charged elements in the military-dominated regime, but not Musharraf himself, of being the authors of the assassination attempt.
Mimicking her sponsors in London and Washington Bhutto’s response to Musharraf’s coup has been muted to say the least. While the military parades its contempt for the democratic rights of the Pakistani people, Bhutto has said that she does not want confrontation. Speaking on CNN Sunday, she refused to rule out holding further power-sharing negotiations with the General-President.
Mounting popular opposition
Musharraf and his cronies have for months been threatening to impose emergency rule, in the face of mounting opposition amongst all layers of society—opposition that has been fueled by the lack of democracy, spiraling food prices and increasing social inequality, rampant corruption and the crony capitalism practiced by the military regime and, last but not least, Musharraf’s support for Washington’s wars.
The trigger for last Saturday’s coup was Musharraf’s apparent failure to bully the Supreme Court into giving a judicial-constitutional imprimatur to last month’s sham presidential election.
Pakistan’s judiciary has a long and notorious record of sanctioning the illegal acts of military dictators. But, reflecting elite fears that military rule is fuelling mass popular discontent and elite complaints that the military has monopolized the benefits of capitalist growth, the Supreme Court under Justice Chaudhry issued a number of judgments that cut across the agenda of the military and its political cronies. Last March when Musharraf fired Chaudhry, because he feared the chief justice couldn’t be relied on to do his bidding in fixing the forthcoming elections, it became the occasion for mass protests and ultimately a humiliating defeat for Musharraf, when an emboldened Supreme Court ordered Chaudhry restored to his seat on the court.
For weeks this fall, a panel of the Supreme Court had been hearing petitions challenging the legality of the presidential election and Musharraf’s candidacy. From a legal standpoint, it was an open and shut case: the Pakistani constitution bars a member of the military, let alone the Chief of Armed Services from running for elected office. It also clearly forbids Musharraf’s ploy of having a national parliament and provincial assemblies that were elected in 2002, in a poll manipulated the military, choose a president for a five year term beginning in November 2007.
But Musharraf still hoped that by combining threats of a resort to emergency rule if his presidential election was deemed unconstitutional with participation in the US-sponsored rapprochement with Benazir Bhutto, he could coerce the court into endorsing his election.
Ultimately, however, Musharraf came to the conclusion that the court was about to rule against him. In the middle of last week, the court announced that it was suspending its deliberations on the case until November 13, that is just two days before Musharraf’s current presidential term is to expire; then it reversed itself and indicated it could issue a ruling as early as yesterday. Hence Musharraf’s sudden decision to impose martial rule.
