It used to be said Pakistan could not exist without the army -- it may not be able to exist with it, writes Graham Usher in Islamabad A year ago General-President Pervez Musharraf commanded a rising economy, international approval and a docile opposition. Today Pakistan enters 2008 reeling from its fifth bout of martial law in as many decades and a convulsion of violence caused by the assassination on 27 December of former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. What tripped this nation of Muslim "enlightened moderation" into a pit of almost Iraqi depths? There were two overlapping crises that, over the course of 2007, became one. The first was the clash between eight years of military rule and a restive civil society, spearheaded by an invigorated judiciary. The second was a native, Taliban-led insurgency, arching from the tribal borderlands with Afghanistan to the capital Islamabad. But the spur was the institution that has ruled Pakistan directly for most of its 60 years and indirectly for the rest. Very simply, most Pakistanis -- be they secular, "moderate", Islamist or "extremist" -- want the army to return to barracks, consistent with its constitutional role. No longer simply hegemonic in Pakistan's political institutions but a vast stakeholder in the economy, the army is not willing and perhaps unable to do so. That is why Pakistan hovers near the edge. Civil rejection of military rule has a clear date. On 9 March Musharraf sacked Pakistan's Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohamed Chaudhry, ostensibly for "misconduct". The real reason was that Chaudhry had challenged the army's illegal acquisition of state power -- ruling against dodgy "privatisation" sales, demanding an end to the intelligence agencies' "disappearance" of dissidents and questioning Musharraf's unconstitutional ambition to be "elected" president for another term. The sacking turned out to be the mistake of his political life. Chaudhry refused to go and lawyers took to the streets, buoyed by a resurgent civil society and assertive media. Raised by this tide, an empowered Supreme Court restored the chief justice on 20 July. For most Pakistanis it was the first time in their history a judge had looked a General in the eye and not blinked. Musharraf retreated. The chief justice campaign showed the vibrancy of what had been a quiescent civil society. But it also exposed the venality of Pakistan's mainstream political parties, especially the most popular, Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP). She had been in self-exile since 1999, fleeing a raft of corruption cases from her two stints as prime minister. She viewed the lawyers' protests through the prism of her own rehabilitation. Aware they had exposed the unpopularity of the military she offered to save Musharraf on behalf of the army and Washington, its principal backer. In return for an amnesty on the cases and a third shot at the premiership, she broke an all-party alliance against the army's role in politics and pledged the PPP to support another Musharraf presidency. The US had written the script, convinced that Bhutto and the PPP could deliver the army the domestic legitimacy it lacked. The tryst suffered a near mortal blow when it became clear the Supreme Court would rule unconstitutional Musharraf's presidential "election" on 6 October. For the second time in eight years, he purged the judiciary through martial law, destroying even the pretence of Bhutto's "transition" to democracy. Her assassination has annulled all talk of "power sharing". There was another reason Washington had looked to Bhutto. US intelligence reported not only had the Taliban regrouped in the Afghan borderlands but so had Al-Qaeda, allegedly training recruits for operations in Europe, America and North Africa. The revival was the spawn of a peace deal between the army and the Pakistan Taliban in 2006. Musharraf had peddled it abroad as a "holistic" solution to the menace of "extremism". In fact, it was a treaty of defeat brought on by US- driven campaigns in the borderlands that weakened the army and strengthened the Taliban. In the first six months of 2007 the Pakistan Taliban and Al-Qaeda cells not only reconstituted certain of the border areas as a base for insurgency in Afghanistan but also as a hub for territorialising "Islamic rule" inside Pakistan. Washington exerted enormous pressure on Musharraf to scrap the deal -- threatening cuts in military aid, authorising US-NATO raids across the Afghan border and warning that an invasion could happen should the US have "actionable intelligence" that Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. Islamabad protested these affronts to its sovereignty. But its case was weakened by what was happening on its doorstep. In July the army laid siege to Islamabad's Red Mosque, taken over six months before by radical, pro-Taliban clerics. The redoubt fell after an assault that left 100 dead. On 15 July the Pakistan Taliban ended the peace deal and Musharraf sent two more army divisions to the borderlands. Washington applauded the move. So did Bhutto -- the only Pakistani politician to do so. In the months since more than 700 have been killed, including 200 soldiers, mostly in the border regions, often through Iraq-like suicide, roadside and rocket ambushes. The government says the Pakistan Taliban and Al-Qaeda were behind the assassination of Bhutto. PPP leaders say the more likely suspect is the "establishment" -- the term they use for a nexus of military officers, Islamic militants and feudal lords who were behind the murder of her father, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and probably her brothers, Shahnawaz and Muntazer. It's not yet clear whether elections will occur on their scheduled date of 8 January 2008, as the opposition demands, or be delayed, as the regime prefers. Given the rigged arrangements in place, elections -- sooner or later -- are unlikely to dent Musharraf's ambition to establish a presidential system in Pakistan. The model is the authoritarian Arab regimes to Pakistan's west rather than India's chaotic but functioning democracy to the east. Musharraf calls his dispensation "real democracy". But it's a military dictatorship. Can it be resisted? Some believe that the movement around the chief justice can be rekindled to mount an "orange revolution" towards civilian supremacy and the rule of law. But short of mass agitation -- and international sanctions -- it is difficult to see the army loosening its hold on power or stepping down in favour of a genuinely civilian government. And, as Bhutto's fling with Musharraf showed, Pakistan's main political leaders remain more interested in power than principles. "Their culture is feudal -- not democratic," says analyst Rasul Baksh Rais. In the absence of change at the top the immense mass of Pakistan's poor may accept change from below. In November Islamic militants briefly took over the Swat district in Pakistan's Frontier Province, hoisting black-and-white Taliban flags above government buildings. Thousands of locals fled and those who stayed were hardly enamoured of the debased "Islamic rule" they were about to endure. But the police had gone, local government had collapsed and state officers had run to Islamabad. The militants brought with them cash, protection and a rough kind of justice. This is how Talibanisation spreads, as it did in Afghanistan: not in contest with the state but through the state's failure. Pakistan, circa 2008, is a state failure.
