When President Asif Ali Zardari alludes to "other sources" (identified in court as the US and the Army by his counsel) in reference to his NRO problems, he is partially correct because these were the key players in bringing this Ordinance to life. Zardari may never have made it to the Presidency if these powerful interlocutors had initially objected to his nomination.
But the President and his supporters are wide of the mark in believing these interlocutors have influenced the Supreme Court's NRO decision. They are inter-connecting two separate issues confronting him, these being (i) legal vulnerabilities to the voiding of the NRO and (ii) political troubles related to the promulgation of the NRO and may, in fact, be surprised that the named links have not intervened in his behalf.
Therefore, the President's camp chooses to link his legal troubles with the problems he has with extra-constitutional powers, hinting that his removal will result in the end of this Parliament at best and civil disorder at worst. The legal problems are politicized in the expectation that all political forces will rally behind him to avert "derailment" of democracy.
By doing so they may be closing exit routes for him, because it is easy to see that on the NRO the President is where he is only due to lack of support from his own party, while his political troubles originate from bad advice, possibly also from contenders for his job who have pushed him, on the pretext of promoting supremacy of civilian dispensation, into institutional confrontations that he cannot win, given Pakistan's power realities.
To understand why this NRO has become the crucible for yet another domestic powerplay and why it was not stifled at birth, but left to linger as a cancer on the body politic for more than two years, it is necessary to rewind back to 2007.
In October of that year, shortly after the Supreme Court re-established institutional equilibrium with the country's main power centre, it was faced with two inter-linked cases where conventional wisdom indicated the decisions could not favour the Army-backed government. Surprisingly, the court opted to remain non-committal.
It let stand the controversial NRO, suspending a few clauses; and on the Chief of Army Staff's nomination for election to the Presidency, it allowed the election to proceed, subject to withholding of the result.
We need to recall that the court at the time could not have been unmindful of the prevailing ground realities. The NRO, with its quid pro quo for occupation of the Presidency by the Army or its nominee, was already known to have been the key instrument for orderly transfer of power to a new elected government.
Striking it down may not have given a chance for the transition from military rule that everyone desired; refusal by General Musharraf's government to obey adverse court orders could have ignited another deadly confrontation with the executive at a time when the country was still recovering from the trauma of the lawyers movement. Letting the political and armed forces work out their problems by mutual consent appeared to be the prudent way forward.
With hind sight, it can be seen that this latitude from the court turned out to be a bonus for the establishment. It was preferable to keep the NRO on a slow burner during the Dogar Court, to be heated up whenever needed. Why was the US involved in brokering an agreement between the PPP and the Army High Command?
It is no secret that this Super Power, since 1954, has been dealing with the military as the centre of gravity of power in Pakistan and has long desired for this institution to have a legitimized role in governance, in the manner of the Turkish constitution.
Rationale for this arises from the fact that in both Turkey and Pakistan, the finances and internal governance of the Armed Forces remain outside civilian control. Also, key elements of foreign policy remain the preserve of the military (Greece, Cyprus, the Kurdish question for Turkey; Kashmir, Strategic Defence, India, Afghanistan, China and the USA for Pakistan).
These aspects result in the Parliaments of both the countries operating within restricted financial and diplomatic spheres (Pakistan's parliament has oversight of less than 20% of the annual budget), giving their militaries greater capability in matters of governance.
The election in November 2002 of the then one-year old "Islamist" AK Party rocked the 70 year-old edifice of Turkish secularism, ringing alarm bells in the West in case this resulted in policy changes in a country that has military capability and geographical proximity to change the power balance in the Mid-East; but the status quo was restored when the AKP liberalised its manifesto to include both "pious" and "secular" elements within its fold and agreed both to work with the Army and not upset the established foreign policy fundamentals of this key Nato ally.
Pakistan, a nuclear power with collapsing state structures unable to combat rising pockets of extremism and militancy, invited even greater international concern and such a synthesis of the "pious" and "secular" was attempted between 2003-2007, via power-sharing involving the "pious" JUI-JUF and the "secular" PML-Q/MQM.
That arrangement fell apart when the Lal Masjid episode exposed the ruling PML-Q as leaning too heavily in favour of the "pious;" and the JUI-JUF, despite providing unstinting support to General Musharraf, had earlier lost the confidence of their US backers by the "Hasba" Bill, which demonstrated that Pakistan's religious parties, given half the chance, would change the basic nature of the Constitution and the course of national affairs, irrespective of the consequences.
It is in this backdrop that the NRO was conceived, to bring back the PPP, an avowedly secular Party with a nation-wide electoral base, which had already confirmed its acceptance (as had the PML-N) of the Turkish model by inclusion of a "Constitutional Court" in the Charter of Democracy, its acceptance of power-sharing with the Army by not opposing General Musharraf's election as President in October 2007 and commitment not to repeal the 17th Amendment, which provides the constitutional link with the permanent establishment.
In the past year, for reasons not understandable, President Zardari is seen to have intervened in areas supposedly within the purview of the defence establishment, thereby over-stepping the perimeters of the power-sharing formula that gave life to the NRO.
First, his offer of "no first use" of nuclear weapons countered Pakistan's deliberately ambiguous stance on this issue as a deterrent to conventional hostilities. The President's yielding of the Nuclear Command Authority chair to the Prime Minister is a result of this, but the very fact of the announcement probably encouraged India to develop and publicize its "cold start" strategy for conventional warfare, recently endorsed by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.
Second, the plan to bring the ISI under civilian control could not be expected to pass muster since this agency, like its international counterparts, is an important part of deniable actions taken in pursuit of foreign policy objectives and placing it under the Interior Ministry would have entailed exposing its budget and actions to public scrutiny.
Third are the ostensibly PPP-introduced clauses in the Kerry-Lugar Bill stipulating civilian oversight of senior promotions in the Pakistan Army, with certification to that effect by the US government as a condition for renewing the funds to be given under this Bill.
Fourth, although the President is correct in advocating normalcy of ties with India, his oft-stated view that "India is not an enemy" runs counter to the basic principles of Pakistan's defence and foreign policy planning and tends to gloss over India's continued malevolence, since independence, towards this country. It may be entirely coincidental that none of these proposals is antithetical to the US policy and indeed they may have been put forward naively as well-meaning ideas for balancing civil-military governance and reducing regional tensions.
But floating any one of them is enough to lose the total confidence of Pakistan's army establishment; letting loose all four in indecent haste indicates there is little scope for power-sharing.
This chain of events has no nexus with the Supreme Court, which in any case provided the PPP ample time to legalise the already-lapsed NRO in Parliament, even as its Co-Chairman was on a collision course with the Army. Unfortunately for the President, his party did not back him in Parliament and now he finds himself, for separate reasons, at the receiving end of the NRO as well as the agreement behind it.
Indeed, the President might reflect that had he been on the same page as the Army, the NRO would probably have been ratified in Parliament, leaving the ordinance's opponents with a long-drawn legal battle in the Supreme Court, one that may have stretched beyond the President's current term.
Does the President have a trump card? No doubt, the US is supportive of his courageous stand, as are we all, in taking the fight to the terrorists and it would also back the secular PPP against other political forces in the country. But the President's political problems are with the Army, not other political forces and the US has not been known to back civilians who do not enjoy the confidence of the GHQ.
Whether the PPP government will choose to go along with its President and Co-Chairman is not at all certain; Prime Minister Gilani has endeavoured successfully, on issues within his powers, to be at one with actors across the political and institutional spectrum.
Indeed, there is a strong chance that the party may give up its Co-Chairman as a sacrifice in order to maintain its hold on power and it would be well, even now, for the President to reconsider his options and to take the path of reconciliation rather than confrontation.
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