- Nizami tells Financial Times Nawaz Sharif has mended fences with army and country more stable than before
Less than a year ago, the Pakistani government of Nawaz Sharif was on the ropes, pummelled by months of disruptive opposition protests in the capital that most said were tacitly supported by the army. It would only be a matter of time, Pakistanis predicted, before he was ousted in a military coup or forced to step down, Financial Times (FT) has reported.
By winning the 2013 poll, Sharif had triumphed in Pakistan’s first handover of power from one democratically elected government to another. But by late 2014 the economy was struggling and he had hesitated to back the army as it launched an antiterrorist campaign against the Pakistan Taliban, the foreign media outfit believes.
All that changed on December 16 last year, when Taliban gunmen attacked an army-run school in Peshawar and slaughtered more than 140 children and teachers. Pakistanis united in revulsion against the Islamists, politicians Tahirul Qadri and Imran Khan (once labelled “Taliban Khan” for his militant sympathies) quickly abandoned their demonstrations in Islamabad, and the army attacked the Taliban with renewed ferocity, the report elaborates.
“There was a feeling that whatever happens now we’ve got to go after them,” the report quoted Khan as saying. “It was one of those traumatic events in Pakistan that changed the country. The event was so gruesome that you just had to close ranks. People were sick of terrorism.”
Today Sharif, one of whose two previous stints as prime minister ended with a military coup, is probably as secure as he has ever been, the FT believes. With the economy recovering and political violence apparently abating — despite the assassination on Sunday of Punjab Home Minister Shuja Khanzada and 11 others at his residence by two suicide bombers — some say he may even achieve the rare feat of completing his five-year term.
“I think Nawaz Sharif will survive, with a bit of luck and some good politics,” says Pakistan Today Editor Arif Nizami. “In the past one year, he’s mended fences with the army. Pakistan is definitely more stable than a year ago.”
As Nizami’s comments suggest, however, Sharif retains his position only on sufferance from the army, led by the unrelated Gen Raheel Sharif. For decades the generals have either ruled Pakistan or controlled foreign and defence policy under civilian governments, and there is no sign of Gen Sharif loosening the military’s grip.
Ministers talk openly of a civilian-military system of government, with security operations not only in the Taliban-dominated tribal areas bordering Afghanistan but also in Karachi, where the paramilitary Rangers have confronted the private army of the city’s secular Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the report said.
“What we are seeing is a good model of civil-military leadership working together,” says Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal in Islamabad. “Today we have a political consensus in the country at the level of political parties, and at the level of the civil-military leadership.”
Gen Sharif meets foreign leaders and at times seems like the head of government. Per report, Pakistani media even pictured him at Downing Street in January with David Cameron, UK prime minister, although British officials say Cameron merely “dropped in” on a meeting between Gen Sharif and Sir Kim Darroch, then national security adviser, with no intention of being photographed.
Liberals and leftwingers, suspicious of the main political parties as well as the army, are not convinced about the merits of the “civil-military” accord and worry about the erosion of what remains of Pakistani democracy, the report says.
Small leftwing Awami Workers Party (AWP)’s Alia Amirali complains of the lack of space for people to take part in democratic politics, like “this lizard whose tail keeps getting cut off”. She says, “The Rangers and the military are reinventing themselves as these defenders of Pakistan and there’s this applause on all sides about how the military are truly our saviours.”
One of the more controversial parts of the post-Peshawar National Action Plan against terrorism was the establishment of military courts for terrorism cases, supported even by Khan because judges and lawyers have been so intimidated that convictions through the normal justice system have become almost impossible. “The judges were just petrified,” he says.
In the same vein, it is hard to find an educated Pakistani who laments either the killing of Malik Ishaq, the detained leader of banned Sunni militant group Laskhar-e-Jhangvi, or the manner of his death, the report highlights.