Now that the coalition government is seeking to impeach President Musharraf many people are calling on him to save everyone a headache and just step aside. I am not one of these people. I would like to see all the sewage and rhetoric of a bitter impeachment flow in public view. It would be good for health of the Pakistani democracy.
Over the last sixty years Pakistan’s military has turned itself into a form of royalty. It exists above the law and the tax man. It trades in land and nepotism. It interferes with parliament and politics with whimsical regularity. It has a long legacy of inculcating and incorporating militants (otherwise called mujahideen) into its schizophrenic plans. It makes all these mistakes and then cocoons itself in the rhetoric of privilege.
It is time that the military realized that just as in the rest of the Muslim world, the days of royal privilege are coming to a close. In Kuwait, where the royalty is far more royal and has been royal far longer than our military, a member of the royal family is going to be executed for drug smuggling. If the Kuwaitis can hang an Al Sabah for something like drugs, surely the Pakistanis can push their version of royal out of his — usurped — office by way of a constitutional impeachment.
Retired general Musharraf, though, doesn’t quite get that. When people ask him what he plans on doing now he says that he will defend himself by showing that the PPP’s Asif Ali Zardari and PML’s Nawaz Sharif are crooked and corrupt. Musharraf is telling his loyalists that he has ‘sufficient official records’ to expose the four month old coalition government. This is nothing less than royal privilege in action. To Musharraf, even when a prosecution is about his crimes, its really about the crimes of his enemies, because after all he is Musharraf, the royal, who through the miracles of nature became Pakistan in human form, while the people in the rest of the country remained a pack of na-shukray donkeys.
As far as the international arena is concerned there is no reason to dither. Pakistan’s primary international benefactor – the US – has abandoned the ‘friendly tyrant’ option. There is near bipartisan consensus in Washington that as long as Pakistan remains a democracy it will receive non-military aid to the tune of $15 billion over the next ten years. While some – and only some – Republicans feel a little sentimental affection for Musharraf, the State Department and most of the Democrats (the ones in power) now accept the narrative that Gilani sets forth. As long as he is able to articulate clear reasons about the importance of removing Musharraf, that support is not going away.
Pakistan needs this impeachment. The primary one is that the judges have no chance of reinstatement if Musharraf is sitting on this side opposing them. But it is in the realm of long term democratic stability where this impeachment matters most. The vast majority of Pakistan’s problems have to do with there being no stable mechanism for resolving political disputes. Further, no mechanism has ever been devised because any time things get hoary the royals go beyond their assigned duty of protecting the borders and become politicians. Then they unilaterally change the constitution and call it ‘amendment’.
This impeachment, with all that manipulation, backstabbing and Machiavellianism that has led up to it, will perhaps make the military realize that politics sullies their good name; that it degrades the commando’s station in the eyes of the people; that it blackens brass. The military needs to see how disgusting is the muck in Islamabad for them to become permanently allergic of it. There are no two men better for that inglorious job than Zardari and Sharif.
Let there be impeachment.