Musharraf ’s legacy: A conflicted Pakistan
In the nine years that he led Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf sometimes called himself a tightrope walker — someone who could balance opposing forces, or straddle Pakistan’s dizzying political and ideological divides.
Contradictions abounded. Musharraf was the darling of the West who played footsie with the Taliban. He was the whiskeyswilling liberal who made concessions to extremists or the swaggering army commando who tried to make peace with India.
But the tragedy for Musharraf, who died Sunday in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, at the age of 79, is that he is now mostly seen as the leader who couldn’t keep his footing and ultimately fell off the tightrope: the last military general who overtly held power in Pakistan.
As plans were being made Monday to fly Musharraf ’s remains home from exile — a journey he could not make in life — historians and others in Pakistan began to grapple with his conflicted legacy as a central figure in the post-sept. 11 world who ultimately lost his grasp on any Pakistani constituency.
“Today’s Pakistan is the product of Musharraf,” said Adil Najam, a professor of international affairs at Boston University. “The forces that shape the country today were unleashed during his time in power. But I don’t think he intended it that way.”
It’s been more than four decades since Pakistanis mourned a leader who died in bed. The last two funerals were for former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007; and military dictator Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-haq, who died in a mysterious plane crash in 1988 — both unforgettable emblems of the country’s perilous politics.
Even so, there has been little hesitation to pass judgment on Musharraf in recent days. Some squarely blame him for the precarious state of the country — a nuclear-armed nation of 220 million with tottering institutions, fractious politics, a crumbling economy and empowered religious extremism. “Much of the ills of today can be traced back to the Musharraf era,” Cyril Almeida, a political commentator, wrote on Twitter.
His legacy is most uncomfortable for the military he once led.
Since his ouster in 2008, the army had sought to shield Musharraf from the full wrath of Pakistan’s justice system. As angry Pakistanis pursued him through the courts with accusations of abuses during his time in power, including murder and treason, he never spent a night in jail. That was largely because the military made sure he was allowed to slip into exile several times, most recently in 2016.
Yet the army has also seemed happy to have Musharraf fade into obscurity in Dubai. Many within the country’s security sector blame him for troubles that battered the army’s reputation and, ultimately, caused the military leadership to radically change the way it exerts power in Pakistan.
Some point to his alliance with the United States and President George W. Bush after the alqaida terrorist attacks of 2001 that brought in billions of dollars in military aid but also triggered a militant uprising within Pakistan that led to vicious fighting, suicide bombings and tens of thousands of deaths.
Others were resentful of the cooperation that Musharraf gave the Americans, allowing the CIA to set up a secret drone base for several years — only to be humiliated, in 2011, when a Navy SEAL team swooped into a house in Abbottabad and killed the founder of al-qaida, Osama bin Laden, barely a few hundred yards from a major Pakistani military base.
Still others have condemned what they see as Musharraf ’s “double game” — with his intelligence services hunting some militants to earn American favor and money, while they quietly coddled others who were deemed to serve Pakistan’s strategic interests in Afghanistan or Kashmir.
Harsh public criticism of the military became louder and more frequent, altering a relationship with a Pakistani public that had previously been characterized by deference — or at least silence.
“The military in Pakistan has gone through a major change in the past two decades,” Najam said.
“It has gone from being an institution that most people respected, or kept quiet about, to one that is now very publicly under attack — and that shift started with Pervez Musharraf.”
That era changed the calculus of power for the Pakistani military, which has dominated the country since the country’s independence in 1947.
No longer bent on seizing power directly after Musharraf ’s tenure, it allows civilians to be elected in democratic polls, while retaining a hold on the levers that count: control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons; steering the country’s policy toward Afghanistan and India; and directing the relationship with the U.S. and, increasingly, China.