The army ruled the roost in 2006, and it will be the same in 2007, predicts Graham Usher in Islamabad There are two things that can be said with some certainty about Pakistan's next election, due in 2007. The first is that General Pervez Musharraf will be returned as president. The second is that the suffrage will probably be rigged, adding one more fracture to a nation already disabled by several others. Pakistan's supreme leader entered the new year with an insurgency simmering in one province, the spread of a "Pakistani" Taliban in another and a political society united in opposition to him and his "military-guided democracy". If, seven years on from the coup that brought him to power, Musharraf remains unassailable, it is because of the support of the army and the backing of the US, still Pakistan's indispensable patron. But he is steadily losing whatever popular legitimacy he once had. Discontent in Balochistan is as old as partition, and 60 years of centralised, authoritarian rule has only deepened the wound. Balochistan is the richest of Pakistan's four provinces in minerals like gas, yet the poorest in state provision, registering an incidence of poverty (48 per cent) twice the national average. For the last three years it has also hosted a low- intensity war, waged by tribal lords wary of Islamabad's neo-colonial designs on their estates but backed by a Baloch middle-class hungry for greater political autonomy. It is a call supported by every major political party in Pakistan, including Musharraf's ruling Muslim League. But not by the army. It went after the most charismatic of the tribal rebels, Nawab Akbar Bugti, in January in an assault on his tribal heartland and then, in August, killed him via a fleet of missiles pummelled into a mountain cave. The murder sparked protests throughout Balochistan, with hundreds arrested, dozens "disappeared" and a few assassinated. But the colonial-like repression has not staunched the insurgency. Nor has it weakened the call for autonomy. On the contrary, it is hardening into a demand for secession. The army's strong-arm tactics stood in contrast to its actions in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Unlike Balochistan -- where the resistance was nationalist -- here it was faced by young Islamist tribesmen, allied to the Afghan Taliban, leavened by a smattering of Al-Qaeda fighters, but Pakistani in origin and citizenship. Like Balochistan, however, the cause of the resistance was the army. In 2002, under extreme American duress, Musharraf sent troops into the tribal areas to take out Taliban and Al-Qaeda fugitives. In so doing he disturbed an old, British brokered dispensation in which tribes had been given autonomy in exchange for fealty to the crown. The result was disastrous. Seven-hundred soldiers were killed and the tribes were radicalised, with pro- government tribal leaders being removed (politically and physically) by young, Taliban-inspired mullahs. Ominously for Musharraf there was friction in the army's ranks at the new anti-Taliban line. Six officers were court-marshalled for refusing to serve in the tribal areas and six enlisted men were charged with plotting to assassinate Musharraf in December 2003. The mood was summed up by a young army recruit. "I am a soldier. I must and will do my duty but I didn't join the army to kill my own people." Musharraf climbed down, swapping confrontation for appeasement. In September his army ended hostilities in the tribal areas by signing a "peace agreement" with the Taliban. The accord was received with relief in Pakistan and outrage in Afghanistan and Washington. It was easy to see why. In exchange for solely verbal pledges to end attacks on the army and prevent infiltration into Afghanistan, Pakistan agreed to release prisoners, return confiscated arms and retire its troops to barracks. Four months on tribal areas like Waziristan have become enthralled by the Taliban while NATO monitors have registered a 300 per cent increase in cross-border infiltration. It is a peace the US and NATO are never going to accept. In October 1980 seminary students were killed when missiles hit a madrassa in the Bajaur tribal area. The Pakistani army claimed responsibility but locals insisted that the rockets were fired by a US-Predator drone flying in from Afghanistan. US media reports said the cause was a reported sighting of Al-Qaeda second- in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahri. Unofficially -- say observers -- the message of the missiles was to deter any more peace deals with the Taliban. In reprisal, a Taliban suicide bomber killed 42 soldiers at an army base in November. Is there a political alternative to this cycle of repression and accommodation, whether to Washington or the Taliban? In May Pakistan's two self-exiled former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sherif, signed a Charter of Democracy. It pledged their respective parties to a united front aimed at removing the army from politics and restoring Pakistan to a parliamentary democracy (as against as its present drift toward presidential dictatorship). The charter has the blessing of Pakistan's smaller nationalist parties as well as, tacitly, the Islamist alliance, the MMA. But unity is a delicate thread in Pakistan. No sooner had the charter been initialled than a fog of rumours blew that a "power-sharing" deal was being negotiated between Musharraf and Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP). Mediated by British and American diplomats, the trade appears to be one where the General will keep the presidency and "transitionally" his army uniform for relatively free elections and the return of Bhutto sometime in the post-election future. It is clear why Washington and London would be so zealous for such a rapprochement: it would keep the army as the seat of power in Pakistan while recasting the regime as a "transitional" democracy rather than an Islamist rogue. It would also wean Musharraf and the army from any lingering dependency on the MMA. It is less clear how Bhutto would gain, save perhaps the dropping of corruption charges still pending against herself and her husband. After all, she knows the army from old, says Director of the International Crisis Group in Pakistan Samina Ahmed. "In 1988 Benazir accepted a deal where she was prime minister but important decision-making processes to do with foreign policy, defence and the economy stayed in the military's hands. One year later the army showed her the door. I think she'll be more cautious this time." Whatever the colour of the next Pakistani government its people know the army will remain in power. And so does Musharraf. In his first electoral moves he has addressed neither his own party nor the PPP, but rather his "main constituency". And his subliminal message to the barracks, parade grounds and mess halls is that to preserve the army's pre-eminence in Pakistan's political and economic life it will have to toe the line in the US "war on terror", pursue the peace process with India and perhaps share office (though not power) with the PPP. These are necessary compromises because "difficult times require strong leaders," he says. He forgets to add the consequence that more often than not strong leaders produce weak nations.
