Musharraf's fatal dalliance

His rule contributed to Indo-Pak tensions

The relatively benign obituaries of Pervez Musharraf may have been influenced by the grave economic crisis in the country he ruled as military chief and president for nine years (1999-2008). Unemployment and inflation are at record highs, forex reserves are sufficient to cover three weeks’ worth of imports and a bailout from the International Monetary Fund — Pakistan’s 22nd in over 60 years — is stalled on unfulfilled conditions. Musharraf’s death in Dubai on February 5 offers a reminder that he presided over a period of relatively rapid economic growth, an improvement in Pakistan’s human development indicators, and a near rapprochement with India. These achievements, such as they are, must be set against the fact that his rule had contributed in no small measure to the political and economic turmoil confronting both Pakistan and India-Pakistan relations.

Musharraf rose to power on the back of the disastrous Kargil conflict with India in 1999, when he was army chief. This conflict was triggered soon after Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had visited Lahore by bus at Nawaz Sharif’s invitation and signed a declaration that was meant to normalise relations. The low-intensity war ended embarrassingly for Pakistan with American President Bill Clinton prevailing on Mr Sharif to withdraw his forces. That loss of face prompted Mr Sharif to dismiss Musharraf some months later, triggering a dramatic military coup that brought Musharraf to power for the next nine years. In 2001, Musharraf scuttled a chance for another breakthrough in India-Pakistan relations when, accepting an invitation from Vajpayee, he chose to adopt a maximalist position on Kashmir.

It was the US War on Terror against Al Qaeda later that year that served to amplify his position as a reliable ally of the West as vast sums of aid flowed in to buoy the Pakistani economy and modernise its military. The flip side of this US alignment was that it ended up unleashing the forces of terrorism in the region and contributed to the resurgence of the Taliban not just in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan. Jammu & Kashmir was, of course, at the receiving end of the activities of freelance and well-financed jihadi groups but Pakistan also suffered — the attack on a mosque in Peshawar last week being the most recent example. This attack marked a continuum in the rising power of the Pakistani Taliban that began in the week-long siege of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad, which resulted in a military operation that killed some 100 people in 2007. That operation weakened Musharraf’s grip on power and sapped the credibility of his four-point formula, arrived at via back-channels with the Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh governments, to settle the Kashmir issue.

This radical formula implied making the Line of Control irrelevant by demilitarising both parts of Kashmir, allowing free movement of people without change of borders, permitting self-governance without independence, and a joint mechanism for the management of Jammu & Kashmir. It is unclear how far this initiative would have gone had Musharraf not chosen to challenge the Supreme Court and double down on his dictatorial powers by declaring an emergency and cracking down on dissidence. Either way, three months after he resigned, Pakistan-sponsored terrorists attacked Mumbai, put India-Pakistan relations in the deep freeze, and left the country to reap the whirlwind of his dalliance with jihad.