Musharraf Shaken!

Zahoor's Cartoon from Daily Times

Crisis shakes Musharraf’s aura: CSIS
Commentary says attack on Geo TV embarrassing for Musharraf
By Khalid Hasan
Daily Times, March 22, 2007

WASHINGTON: The judicial crisis in Pakistan has “shaken the aura of invincibility that (President Pervez) Musharraf has enjoyed until now,” according to a commentary released by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Ambassador Teresita Schaffer, head of the CSIS South Asia programme, and a well-recognised expert on the region, who authored the commentary wondered how “dangerous” Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry could have been to Gen Musharraf, considering that he was willing to validate the October 1999 coup, unlike several other judges who resigned rather than doing so. However, more recently, he had ruled against the government on a couple of cases. This may have led Gen Musharraf to worry about how he might deal with potential future cases involving his eligibility to remain both president and army chief, plus the sequence of the presidential and parliamentary elections. “These issues are central to Musharraf’s calculations for remaining in power. He and his government are determined to control issues of this nature; Chaudhry’s perceived unpredictability might have been seen as a real threat,” CSIS added.

According to the analysis, “Technically, what Musharraf did was to refer alleged improprieties in the chief justice’s conduct to the country’s top judicial council. The accusations are said to involve abuse of authority. Chaudhry apparently had a reputation for highhandedness, a characteristic that may have made Musharraf confident that sidelining him would win plaudits from Chaudhry’s legal confreres. It didn’t work out that way. The heart of the protests against Chaudhry’s suspension came from the bar associations. No surprise here: the bar is almost always at odds with the Pakistani government. This time, however, the lawyers didn’t just vent their spleen in print. They went into the streets, and they did so all over the country - including normally placid Islamabad and Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir. The police responded with heavy-handed arrests and baton-charges. Both major secular opposition parties and the religious party conglomerate have intermittently joined the protests, a significant escalation. But the major secular leaders are outside of Pakistan.”

The commentary said street protests are a sensitive issue for the army. They challenge its control, and if they get out of hand, they can put the army in the position of attacking its own people. The protests over the Chaudhry affair generated a media crackdown extending beyond the print media to Pakistan’s vibrant private TV stations, CSIS noted. One programme taken off the air featured Kamran Khan, “a well-known security affairs correspondent, whose excellent sources in the security establishment have normally kept him safe from such intrusions”. His TV channel, Geo, had its offices broken into and its windows smashed. This might have passed without a murmur at other times in Pakistan’s history, but for Gen Musharraf, who has publicly taken credit for Pakistan’s free press, it was embarrassing enough to lead to police arrests and a public apology - in an interview with Geo.

CSIS noted that when the political trends shift in Pakistan, they generally go down by sharp and unexpected steps rather than a smoothly sloping line. The removal from office of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto grew out of suddenly escalating protests over his fixing the results of the 1977 election. Inside a month, he had moved from being invincible to being on the ropes, and in another two months he was gone. “The thing to watch now is whether someone emerges as the leader of the protests, and whether they expand beyond the status of the chief justice to the political and electoral issues Musharraf is facing, or to other emotive issues such as his policy in Afghanistan. If this does not happen, Musharraf is likely to weather this storm. Even so, it will leave a mark on his government, and will add to the baggage he is carrying as he governs one of the world’s most difficult countries,” the commentary concluded.

For complete text of CSIS report, click here (pdf document)