A perfect storm in Pakistan

For the first time, the Pakistan army has come under attack from an Opposition political coalition

‘Go Niazi, Go Niazi’! ‘Vote ko izzat do!’ It’s a war cry that has resonated across Pakistan since September after a new 11 (now 12)-party Opposition alliance, the Pakistan Democratic Movement, brought city after city to a halt, with one mega rally after another.

Niazi, incidentally, is Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s rarely used last name.

Behind the theatrics and biting rhetoric is an extraordinarily bold and, some say, naïve, attempt by a surcharged Opposition to whip up street power as a means of dislodging the ‘State above the State’ – as former PM Nawaz Sharif, addressing the rallies from exile in London, described the Pakistan Army, targeting army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Gen Faiz Hameed in a blistering, no-holds-barred attack.

This is the first time in over 70 years that any Opposition party, let alone 12 of them, have called out the unholy trinity -- the Pakistan Army, the ISI, and their puppet civilian regime – for who and what they really are.

But as the PDM prepares for its fourth anti-government rally, this time in politically sensitive Peshawar, Imran Khan’s home ground, on November 22, whether people power can end the ‘Deep State’s crushing hold over Pakistan’s polity is a matter of debate.

There’s no denying this is a seminal moment in Pakistan’s history, a turning point of sorts. Especially, for the Pakistan Muslim League’s ailing leader Nawaz who, together with members of his own family, and former president Asif Ali Zardari of the PPP, repeatedly jailed since 2018, are primary targets in Imran’s clean-up drive against corrupt politicians.

This is as much a pushback against the military’s move to cut a Punjab strongman like him down to size, as it is a last roll of the dice. For the 71-year-old, it’s an attempt, perhaps for the last time, to restrict the army’s meddling in politics, transform the very nature of the Pakistani State, and restore primacy to civilian rule. It’s a “legacy issue”, Nawaz confided to his inner circle. He wants to be remembered not so much for being one of its early protégés, groomed by Gen Zia ul Haq to counter PPP leader Benazir Bhutto, but as the man who defied the army’s diktat.

It consumes him. At a one-on-one meeting in Delhi with this writer in 2014, when as prime minister he was a special invitee to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swearing in, it wasn’t so much a Lahore 2.0, such as he had forged with former premier Atal Behari Vajpayee in 1998, that he talked about, but his plans to prosecute Gen Pervez Musharraf, who had removed him in a coup in 1999 and thrown him into jail.

Apart from Benazir’s son Bilawal Bhutto, self-described third-generation antagonist against the army, who reached out to Nawaz and set the PDM in motion, the game-changer here is Maulana Fazlur Rehman of Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam (Fazl). Once the darling of the army until they picked Imran over him, this cleric-politician’s ability to mobilise the street in his home state of Khyber Pakhtunkwa and capital Islamabad was amply demonstrated in 2019 when he laid siege to the capital with a ‘Long March’ aimed at forcing Imran from office; called off, some say, at the ISI’s behest. But Peshawar on November 22, a Lahore rally in December, and the march on Islamabad in January is the Maulana’s attempt to leave his own imprint on history.

Baluchis, Pashtuns, too

Giving the PDM a wider all-Pakistan impress is the inclusion of influential Baloch leaders like Sardar Akhtar Mengal of the Balochistan National Party and Manzoor Pashteen of the Pakistan Tahafuz Movement. The PTM’s Mohsin Dawar’s searing speech on the extra-judicial killings of Pashtuns at the Karachi rally was the first time any Pashtun leader has spoken out at a multi-party gathering of this nature. Like Nawaz’s salvo, Dawar’s too was blacked out by local media. But there was no blocking it on social media platforms which virtually all politicians, young and old, now use as a political tool.

The PDM’s rainbow coalition drives home another key point -- normally divisive Opposition leaders no longer see any benefit in playing along with the ‘Deep State’, which has backed Imran’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) to their detriment. And in putting an end to old rivalries, they too have deprived the Army-ISI cabal of one of its key stratagems -- playing one party off against the other.

Politics of intimidation

That said, the politics of intimidation by ‘the boys’ -- another moniker for the ISI – still remains as much in play today as in years past, as demonstrated by the ISI’s antics on the night of October 18. Soon after the PDM concluded their mammoth rally in Karachi -- partly commemorating the failed 2007 assassination bid against former premier Benazir Bhutto – Nawaz Sharif’s daughter and his party PML(N)’s fiery new face Maryam Nawaz and her husband Capt (retd) Safdar Awan were settling in for the night at a Karachi hotel when the paramilitary Pakistan Rangers broke down the door to their hotel room and dragged Safdar off to jail.

Watching his arrest was a chilling reminder of how, exactly 13 years ago to the day, slap bang in the ISI’s crosshairs, I came very close to meeting a similar fate. And how little Pakistan has changed since.

That day…13 years ago

On the night of October 18, 2007, hours after the failed assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto when she landed in Karachi, her circle of close friends and advisers crowded into her living room. I was among those who had been invited to travel back with the former Pakistan PM as she ended eight years of exile in the United Arab Emirates. We were all shaken by the twin suicide bomb attacks, unleashed minutes before midnight as her 100-car convoy snaked its way through the port city.

But that night in President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan, where the ‘Deep State’ had pulled out all stops to silence a political foe who refused to be cowed, it didn’t stop with the attack on big fish Benazir herself or the PPP jiyalas, her army of loyalists. We, the minnows, too, faced the wrath as the ISI’s vast network of operatives went into top gear.

As I checked into a Karachi hotel in the early hours of the next day, I faced the kind of intimidation and harassment that is par for the course in Pakistan, detailed to perfection in a provocative new book The Nine Lives of Pakistan by the former Guardian and New York Times correspondent Declan Walsh, who was shunted out of the country in 2013 for crossing an unexplained red line. He was lucky. Daniel Pearl, Saleem Shahzad and countless other journalists and young politicians who speak for the rising anger among the Pashtuns, Balochis, Sindhis and Mohajirs -- and increasingly, the Punjab in today’s Pakistan -- were not.

That night in Karachi, I thought I had shaken off my tail. I had challenged him for taking pictures of me as I exited the airport, and spotted him again, hanging around the Bhutto home, 70 Clifton, watching my every move. He solicitously, escorted me to my car when I was leaving, and I thought I had nothing to worry about. I was wrong.

When someone began banging on the door to my hotel room at 4 am, I quietly alerted the hotel’s general manager, who, at some risk to his own safety, got the goons to leave and then shepherded me to another room without listing me as its occupant.

But there was no let up. Over the next few days, as I navigated Karachi’s bustling streets, and in February the next year, when I travelled back to Pakistan to cover the elections, I was tailed, my car routinely blocked, the driver pressured to tell them where I was going. Some of the drivers, like many who befriend you in the real Pakistan and quietly push back against the intrusive ISI, revelled in giving them wrong information.

The army-ISI’s continuing “disproportionate sensitivity” over Balochistan and the “irredeemable interests in the parts of Pakistan the ISI wanted to hide,” as Walsh terms it, was in part, the reason that he – and I -- were marked out for special treatment.

The Karachi assassination attempt came a cropper, but two months later, on December 27, another clutch of suicide bombers in Rawalpindi would, tragically, claim their grisly prize – Benazir Bhutto.

Cut to October 18, 2020

If Capt (retd) Safdar Awan’s arrest was an attempt to frighten Maryam into submission, or pit Bilawal Bhutto’s PPP which rules Sindh, against the PML-N, it had the opposite effect. Instead, with army chief Gen Bajwa reaching out directly to Bilawal as well as the police chief, who was forced by the ISI to sign Safdar’s detention orders at midnight, there is a sense that the Generals themselves may no longer, all, be on the same page.

Bajwa, whose extension as army chief upset officers set for promotion, is playing with a weaker hand, as is Gen Faiz Hameed, who engineered the street protests that created the staging ground for Imran to be installed as prime minister. Farmers in Punjab joining protests, adding their voice to the growing outrage at the ISI’s open meddling, shows the changing dynamics in the critical frontier province, which the army has long taken for granted.

As journalist Declan Walsh writes in a potent new book The Nine Lives of Pakistan, it’s not just the Baloch but the Pashtuns who are reclaiming their space. Lionised as heroes when fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but “caricatured as terrorists, demonised” when they demand their rights at home, the unrest in Khyber Pakhtunkwa, just as Pakistan is poised to step into the vacuum left by US forces as they exit Afghanistan, couldn’t have come at a more inopportune moment for the army.

Army running out of its nine lives?

Today, there’s no denying the Naya Pakistan, the tabdeeli (change) Imran promised, rings false. No longer in a perfect two-step with the army, Imran’s delusions of wanting to be a part of a Turkey-Malaysia-led mythic Valhalla, backed by China against arch enemy India, does not have the Pakistan people’s backing. This vocal new generation, despite stringent controls over a largely captive media, airs its angst in potent podcasts over rising food prices and ‘disappearances’, and the blatant misuse of power and privilege by the ‘khakis’, pointedly naming Bajwa and Faiz, former ISI chief Gen Zaheer ul Islam, former officer in charge of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor and Imran’s former media adviser, Gen Asim Bajwa, and Interior Minister, Brig (retd) Ijaz Shah.

Imran, unwilling to acknowledge the growing threat posed by the PDM, could find the ground cut from under his feet if he remains blind to his allies’ unhappiness with his style of leadership. Whether the Opposition gathers the momentum needed to force Imran from office or not, few believe the increasingly shaky PTI government can ride out the coming storm. While the khakis have found that whether they play puppeteer to a popular face or a military strongman, this is yet another failed experiment in political engineering, the chronic weakness of the ‘Deep State’ has been once again been underscored as it plays out what could be the last of its nine lives.

(Neena Gopal worked in the Middle East as Foreign Editor for the Dubai based Gulf News, covering the first Gulf War in 1990, war-torn Iraq and its neighbours through the Second Gulf War, as well as India and its immediate neighbourhood. She has reported from various hotspots, including the LTTE-held areas in northern Sri Lanka as well as from within Afghanistan soon after the ouster of the Taliban. Until recently the Resident Editor of Deccan Chronicle, Bengaluru, she is also the author of The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, a re-telling of the last interview that the late prime minister gave her, moments before his death)