|
|
|
|
From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 47, Dated 24 Nov 2012 |
|
| |
PAKISTAN PERISCOPE
Honour intact at all costs
The SC has delivered a damning verdict against the former army and ISI chiefs in the poll rigging case, but has it really belled the military cat?
Ayesha Siddiqa, Independent Social Scientist
 |
|
Legal eagle CJ Iftikhar Chaudhry has put the Pakistan Army in a bind
Photo: AFP |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
THE RECENT rumblings of Pakistan Army chief Ashfaq Kayani and Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry seem to have created an impression as if the centre of power is shifting away from the military. Some of the pro-judiciary Twitterati were even challenging the country’s ‘liberals’ to admit that the chief justice had looked at the army chief “eyeball-to-eyeball” and questioned the power of the armed forces to intervene in politics. Watching the entire debate, I was reminded of a joke I had heard during my school years about a mouse falling into a whiskey bottle. As it came out, it looked around with bloodshot eyes, thumped its two-inch chest and shouted, “Where is the cat?”
Having delivered a judgment on the 16-year-old Asghar Khan case, the Supreme Court and the chief justice’s fan club seem to be thumping their chests for definitively closing down the window for the military to come into power. The said case pertained to extortion of money by the then army chief Mirza Aslam Beg (1988-91) from a private entrepreneur, Yunus Habib, and its distribution through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to various politicians. The purpose was to rig the 1991 polls against Pakistan People’s Party leader Benazir Bhutto.
The judgment is that the election was rigged, for which the Supreme Court held two retired senior generals responsible: Beg and ISI chief Lt Gen Asad Durrani. Apparently, Durrani — one of the favourites on the India-Pakistan track-II diplomacy circuit — didn’t even wait to hear the judgment and left the court.
There is defiance in the voices of both the accused, with a general understanding that nothing substantial will happen in terms of an inquiry. Other issues such as the Pakistan Railways land scam, in which another former ISI chief, Lt Gen Javed Ashraf Qazi, and two other generals are accused, surfaced following this decision. The land had been leased to a private company to build a golf course.
The series of events gave the impression that the genie of military power was being slowly squeezed into a bottle. However, soon there was the usual excitement in the air with Gen Kayani warning the stakeholders to keep well within their constitutional limits. He talked about the army making mistakes in the past, but also reminded the people of being thoughtful at a time when the army was facing tough conditions vis-àvis national security. Gen Kayani’s statement to his rank and file was followed by the chief justice’s statement to his own officers. While many tend to see the two statements as a sequence, these were technically unrelated as the chief justice made his comments before the media reported the general’s statement.
With 2014 well in sight and the decision for his own extension or choice of a new army chief pending, Gen Kayani is certainly in no mood to impose martial law. There is even less likelihood of an army feeling threatened by a judiciary, which has a huge skeleton in the cupboard in the form of the corruption case against the chief justice’s son, Arsalan Iftikhar, which surfaced a few months ago. Although the case is still under investigation, it has established a perception that nobody is clean. Furthermore, by its intrusive behaviour in the Arsalan case, the Supreme Court seems to be in contravention of an earlier judgment of 1971, which established that the highest court should not influence an inquiry.
|
Many political actors are using the military-judiciary clash to their own advantage |
|
In any case, the court has not even scraped the surface in any of the cases involving the military. For instance, in the Balochistan missing persons’ case, the judges never found the strength for summoning the army or the ISI chiefs to the court as they tend to drag an elected prime minister to the court frequently. Even in the Asghar Khan case, it saved the army by affixing responsibility on two individuals rather than the institution, which is actually the one responsible for political intervention. In fact, the judges very smartly wriggled out of a situation where they had to go deeper by ordering the government to hold an inquiry through the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) against the recipients of the ISI’s money, which in this case are mostly the politicians. Interestingly, FIA is an agency that the chief justice was not willing to trust in his son’s case.
But something did agitate Gen Kayani, which is possibly an impression within his own service that he may be allowing civilians, who are considered corrupt by his men, more space in challenging the army’s authority and raising questions regarding the accountability of several generals. The Pakistan Army is in the habit of not only defending the serving generals, but also the retired ones and all those who are part of the military fraternity.
There is a concern that the Asghar Khan case was part of the entire set of cases in which some questions were being posed to the military. It was, hence, necessary for Gen Kayani to appear tough at a time when his own credibility may be on the line within his own institution. His name is popularly linked with the Indo-Pakistan peace process at a time when the mindset of his boys regarding the concept of an enemy remains the same as before. Then, there are several other issues on which there is unease within his service.
It is also a fact that many political actors may be using the argument regarding the military-judiciary clash to their own advantage in strengthening their position versus their political opponents. If anything at all, the Asghar Khan case has sown the seeds of discontent among the politicians. For instance, Pakistan Muslim League (N) leader Nawaz Sharif is worried that the government may use the opportunity to open up a case against him right before the next election, or otherwise harm his reputation as he was one of the key politicians accused of taking a bribe from the spy agency.
There are others who believe that the court gave such a judgment in which it left critical issues such as affixing responsibility on the politicians by the serving government to save itself from the trouble of holding Sharif responsible, a man with the reputation of having been very close to the lawyer’s movement when Gen Pervez Musharraf was in power.
AT THIS juncture, there is little possibility of the government or the court implementing the decision to get the extortion money in the Asghar Khan case from Beg and Durrani. The two old boys may have gone underground as a result and not giving too many public statements, but they are definitely in no mood to be forced to pay up. In their minds, creating a political party in 1990 and rigging elections against Benazir Bhutto was an institutional act in the interest of an organisation, which felt that she was harmful for national security as defined by the army General Headquarters. These two generals would expect the current army chief to protect them in the same manner as he seems to have done in other corruption cases, by taking the inquiry from the hands of civilians and pretending to conduct it within the army’s judicial system. In this regard, Gen Kayani’s roar was just a move to reassure his old and young boys that nothing had changed as far as the military’s power was concerned. The fact is, nothing could be closer to the truth as the defence services in Pakistan remain above board and above all suspicion.
Siddiqa is an Islamabad-based columnist and the author of Military Inc
letters@tehelka.com
|
