Zardari Out, Benazir In, Mullahs Out

To Pakistan's ex-Prime-Minister, Benazir Bhutto, her husband Asif Zardari's release from eight years of a punishing imprisonment-never, ironically, sanctioned by a court of law--may well seem a 'victory of justice.' But is it really a judicial coup, or a political gambit by the Musharraf regime wrapped in judicial trappings?

From the day he was nabbed, on November 4, 1996, by a political rival of Benazir, it was clear as day-light that Zardari was a political pawn. Corruption charges and criminal cases were subsequently instituted against him to give the powers-that-be an alibi to keep him in the slammer. In other words, the basis of his incarceration was not juridical but political. The intent of the Nawaz government, and of its successor military regime, had always been to use his incarceration as a bargaining counter in a game of political wills, and wits.

The impression that the end of Zardari's prison nightmare is a political act of the government of the day was given out by Shaikh Rashid, the Information Minister, who has been the regime's mouth piece on all matters political. He is reported to have said, as soon as the apex court granted bail to Zardari, that the catalyst for it was an earlier high- level official meeting in Islamabad that decided to let Zardari go. Which, paraphrased, amounts to saying that the government gave the green light to the Supreme Court to accept Zardari's bail request. This, if true, would be a terrible indictment of the supposed independence of our judiciary and expose it to the charge of taking dictation from the executive.

Or is it that the government, faced with a supreme court decision taken independent of it, is now putting its own spin on the outcome to make it look like an initiative of the government, and not a coup by the country's top judiciary?

It is an interesting fact that the judiciary, time and again, challenged and crossed the will of the government during Zardari's internment. The country's higher courts granted him bail in a large number of cases; threw out several spurious cases against him; and quashed the accountability court's verdict that robbed him of opportunity to run for election from his prison.

It would be no exaggeration to argue that all through Zardari's battle of wits with the government, the courts came out strongly in his favor. Which translates in common language as courts battling to establish their oft-usurped independence in the cover of the country's most celebrated politician rattling sabers with the political masters of the land.

What Shaikh Rashid was saying, in fact, was that the government had done a favor to Zardari. This is also what a spokesman of the National Accountability Bureau said in so many words that, for the moment, no new cases would be brought up against Zardari. 

Reading between the lines of both Rashid's and NAB spokesman's remarks one gets the sense that the powers-that-be have opted, for the moment, to treat Zardari with the kid gloves.

But governments don't do favors to arch political rivals for nothing, or without a deal. And implicit in the government partisans' trite comments is the leitmotif that the favor to Zardari is precisely the quid for his quo, or that of his wife.

But Zardari, for the moment, is robustly in denial of cutting any deal with the government. He has a point in insisting that if he wanted to cut a deal with the power brokers he could have done so years ago and wouldn't have languished in jail for so long.

But what Zardari is not saying, and would be understandably reluctant to admit at this stage, is that a deal is like a nuclear fission that doesn't occur until the critical mass is reached. Previously putative deals fell through because the ingredients then on offer were not attractive enough for the parties concerned. The deals in the past, invariably, required Benazir Bhutto to quit politics in return for her husband's release. That, it seems clearly, is no longer the case. The 'ground realities', by now a thoroughly hackneyed phrase of Pakistani politics, have changed, and changed drastically.

What has never been a conundrum in all 8 years of Zardari's excoriating detention is that he was never the party his tormentors wanted eclipsed from Pakistan's political horizon. They were after Benazir and Benazir only; Zardari just happened to have the right neck to put the noose around in order to squeeze her. Zardari was the proverbial fall guy made to take the plunge into the abyss for the sake of the lead character in the drama.

So Zardari was kept in the slammer, despite periodical attempts by courts of law to set him free. It was hide-and-seek that the government and the courts played with Zardari in the middle. Zardari's gaolers had hoped that the prison would break his nerves and the will of his better half. But both of them soldiered on, to their abiding credit. In the end their grit and resilience not to buckle under enormous pressure paid off.

However, both of them are astute enough not to kid themselves into believing that it was the steel in their souls that melted the glacier-deep ice in Islamabad against them. General Musharraf, for yet unexplained and hard to decipher reasons, had consistently marked a congenital antipathy to both BB and his other nemesis, Nawaz Sharif.

9/11 and its aftermath gave Musharraf the broom to sweep the political arena of Pakistani politics clean entirely for himself, and the stick to keep both his political foes out of it. Zardari, caught in the middle, found the room for his release constricted and the walls closing in on him. Musharraf had powerful friends and mentors at the epicenter of global politics condoning each and every of his moves to chill out BB, as of course Nawaz too.

But three years down the road from 9/11 the ground realities have changed for both Musharraf and his powerful patrons. Mired in both Iraq and Afghanistan the neo cons, rightly or wrongly, think the situation in the latter could still be salvaged if Pakistan's political landscape were redrawn. In their analysis of the obtaining reality, the groundswell of right wing political leadership in the Pakistani areas contiguous to Afghanistan has been sustaining the ongoing Al Qaeda and Taliban resistance to U.S. military presence. That spring-well of support will have to be dried up for the U.S. offensive to stand any realistic chance of success. 

That is where BB's return to the rough and tumble of Pakistani politics, at its hard core, becomes unavoidable and a foregone conclusion, now that Bush is in for a good four more years in Washington and hubby Zardari is out of the woods.

BBs return to Pakistan is now as good as written in the sand. Only she, at the head of a rejuvenated PPP, has the charisma and loyal political following to dislodge the mullahs of MMA from the terrain they managed to occupy in her forced absence from the scene. Those, inside and outside of Pakistan, paving the way for her return know this too, as does BB herself.

The only imponderable at this early stage, when Zardari has barely had time to catch his breath in the fresh air outside the prison, is what kind of a 'deal' has been struck between Musharraf and Zardari to enable BB to come back home in dignity, if not in triumph. A deal has been struck, that's for sure, no matter how vehemently Zardari or BB may deny it. The subdued tone of Zardari's press statements and interviews to media speaks volumes of a deal. It isn't that prison has mellowed the man-it might actually have. But the shrewd tactician in him must be telling him that discretion, at this stage, is the better part of valour.

The question mark, as of now, hangs on where would she fit into the present power arrangement in Pakistan? What would be her place on the chess- board?

Chairmanship of the Senate has been touted, in some media projections, for her. But that can be ruled out as a damp squib as far as BB's own estimation of her place in Pakistani politics is concerned. The powers-that-be, inside and outside of Pakistan, is also conscious of it.

Nothing short of her becoming prime minister, third time around-and hopefully third time lucky, too-would be acceptable to her. 

To make that possible, the answer lies in holding fresh general elections. That would be the most feasible, convincing and clean option to see BB rehabilitated. That's what she had wanted all those years of forced exile abroad. 

Fresh general elections, the talk of which has been in the corridors around Washington for some time, would also be the face saving for Musharraf to see his arch nemesis installed in the office of the prime minister in her own right and with the blessings of the people of Pakistan. It would also save Musharraf the embarrassment of, otherwise, getting rid of MMA through non-constitutional or questionable means. He shouldn't repeat the mistake of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto by giving the boot to the Assemblies of Balochistan and N.W.F.P. A transparent and universally acceptable method of fresh elections would, automatically, sweep the decks clean of them.

That bodes ill for our 'short-cut' Aziz, the recently installed PM. But that's where the chimera of a 'deal' takes on the shades of savvy pragmatism. Much as Musharraf may hate to see an abrupt and early end to the just-starting-to-bloom political career of his whiz-kid prime minister, that's a price he will have to pay. No wonder Aziz, conscious of it, is embarking on overseas journeys with zest. Common sense may tell him, bask in glory for as long as the sun is out there for you.

The author is a retired Pakistani ambassador who served 35 years in active diplomacy (Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, China and Macedonia).