Full term in Pak, but achievement?

The People’s Party-led coalition government in Pakistan completed an uninterrupted five years on Saturday, the first time a civilian regime has run its full term in that country. The milestone, achieved for the first time since its birth in 1947, is likely to give Pakistani citizens a sense of accomplishment accompanied by anxiety that on all fronts, especially economic and security, the barometer is way down rather than up. Not that circumstances are particularly happy when there is direct military rule, but as an institution there is none in the country to match the Pakistan Army. Indeed, no other institution worth the name exists. The political parties are frequently regarded as a plaything of a branch of the Army, the ISI.

With elections due in a few weeks, many may wonder if the Pakistan military will seek to devise ways to indefinitely extend the tenure of the interim government which is to oversee the polls. In effect, this will be a soft coup with non-elected civilians being in power nominally and doing the bidding of those in uniform.

Hopefully this will not happen and elections may go through on schedule. This is primarily because a civilian government, which can be made the fall guy for any serious ills in the system, has worked quite well in the past five years. The Army has been able to avoid the ignominy of being an usurper without losing any of its monopoly on issues that matter most, namely relations with India, the US, China, the situation in Afghanistan, and the nuclear question. This is the sort of civilian rule that has existed for five years.

The image of the military dictatorship led by General Musharrraf (who rigged the system to get himself elected the country’s President) was in tatters by December 2007. To top it all came the assassination of former PM Benazir Bhutto as she returned from forced self-exile to commence the election campaign. Ms Bhutto’s martyrdom assured her party’s climb to power under the leadership of her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. This time around, it would be interesting to see how the election plays out.

There is no obvious trigger issue to rally voters, but there is a political party in a new avatar, former cricketer Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehriq-eInsaaf, which many believe is close to the Army. Can the Army have its way by relying on such forces? The Army would want to be in full control to shape events in Afghanistan when the Americans are withdrawing, and to keep a watch on India by diminishing the peace card.