Walking a slack tightrope
India’s unfriendly neighbourhood dictator’s coup has turned sour. General Pervez Musharraf is currently in the position of a man who is having to pick up the broken pieces of his shattered dream. Having been forced to take a U-turn over his Afghanistan policy, he is now having to tread a path without much idea where it may lead.
Nothing denotes his predicament more graphically than the decision to remove the ISI chief and supersede some of the army officers who had helped him to usurp power in 1999. The ISI chief’s ouster is a highly significant development because this shadowy organisation has been the Taliban’s friend, philosopher and guide for many years and played a crucial role in fomenting terrorism in this part of the world.
Of course, General Musharraf himself was very much a part of this unholy conglomerate till September 11 shattered his cosy world of a dictatorship in cahoots with the mad mullahs of Afghanistan. It is worth recalling that one of his first acts after grabbing power was to shoot down a plan to capture Osama bin Laden prepared by the Nawaz Sharif regime along with the Americans.
Now all that lies in ruins as he tries to retrace his steps. But like all opportunists who have to disown their former friends, he must be aware of the dangers involved in such backtracking. This is all the more so because his painful retreat harks back to the halcyon days of Kargil when he formulated the twin objective of a direct military assault on India along with an intensification of the jehadi enterprise in the name of a ‘freedom struggle’ in Kashmir.
In the process, General Musharraf had roused a lot of hopes among the religious extremists. Now they are up in arms against him, for they suspect that his betrayal is not only of the Taliban but also of the holy cause of jehad, whether in Kashmir or elsewhere. At the moment, his position at the helm may have enabled him to put the Jamaat-e-Islami chief under house arrest and bring the ISI under control. But, as a Pakistani commentator has said, he is walking a tightrope, but the rope is rather slack.
His unenviable position is highlighted by his latest habit of blowing hot and cold against India. After telling New Delhi to “lay off”, he makes Abdul Sattar ring up Jaswant Singh, and after telling a press conference that Pakistan is well prepared to face any possible attack by India, he phones Atal Bihari Vajpayee and promises to “inquire” about those responsible for the fidayeen attack on the legislative building in Srinagar. Such are the wages of those who play the politics of jehad. |
