How far should the west go in propping up a Musharraf-Bhutto partnership in Pakistan, assuming that it comes to pass in the next few weeks? In Washington and London, there is a new urgency behind this question. Pakistan, with its militant mullahs and prickly, nuclear-backed nationalism, has always had the potential to cause the world a headache. But its domestic situation is now more fragile than at any time since the 1970s.
The army is fighting insurgencies along Pakistan’s northwestern frontier with Afghanistan, where al Qaeda and the Taliban have successfully regrouped. These regions, the “federally administered tribal areas,” have traditionally been governed outside the normal constitutional arrangements through a combination of government representatives and local tribal leaders. That system has broken down, and the Pakistan government can no longer impose its will. When trouble brews, as at present, the army, which has many troops from these regions, will not turn on its own people.
A second factor behind the instability is the rise of militant Islam. Pakistan has a long history of adherence to an Indian Deobandi worldview which derives from purist, Wahhabi thinking. In the past, these literalist positions were confined to pious believers within small cities and fringe political parties. After the restoration of civilian government in 1988, Islamist parties polled no more than about 6 per cent of the vote. But when Musharraf barred Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, leaders of the two main parties, from the 2002 election, the vacuum was filled by the Islamist MMA, which doubled its vote and took control of two of Pakistan’s four provinces. (It was also able to exploit the hostility of Pakistan’s Pashtun minority to western intervention in Afghanistan.) The MMA has used its new clout to stymie Musharraf’s attempts to modernise Pakistani Islam.
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