:: Inder Malhotra

Between covers, the story of Pakistan

Back to forward / By Inder Malhotra

TWO must-read books that throw a flood of light on Pakistan, its recently slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, its all-powerful Army that has ruled the country for 38 of its 60 years, and its nuclear and missile programmes deserve the most serious attention. Of the two and the first to come out was Shyam Bhatia’s Goodbye Shahzadi (Roli), a slim political biography of Benazir that dwells on her various personae and contains some startling disclosures by her, some of them untenable. The second, Shuja Nawaz’s Crossed Swords (Oxford) is, as its sub-title indicates, a 655-page comprehensive and masterly history of "Pakistan, its Army and the wars within". It is also a lifetime’s work. Washington-based Nawaz had researched for it assiduously for 30 years. A younger brother of General Asif Nawaz, a former Chief of the Pakistan Army, the only one to die in harness, he has also had enviable access to almost all the major actors in Pakistan’s crisis-ridden drama and to the archives of the GHQ in Rawalpindi. Bhatia, a London-based journalist and tireless researcher on the nuclear issue in the subcontinent as well as West Asia, has had the invaluable advantage of having known Benazir, since the early seventies when both were students at Oxford, and had enjoyed her confidence for three decades.

From the foregoing it should be clear that the two books require analysis and assessment far more detailed than available space can permit. It is my intention, therefore, to concentrate, for the present, on the more outstanding or intriguing points arising from the two volumes. To deal with Benazir’s biography is simpler because the broad course of her chequered life and career are well known. What startles is a series of disclosures in one of her many interviews with Bhatia that she did not allow to be taped and the publication of which she forbade "during my lifetime." For instance, she insisted in this interview at Dubai, that her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in his death cell was convinced that Zia would hang him and simultaneously conduct a nuclear test to "divert attention from the execution."

"Zulfi," a man of dazzling brilliance who also had an ego of cosmic proportion, could be delusional, especially under the shadow of the gallows. But Benazir not only believed him but also asserted to Bhatia — emphatically denying that her memory was "playing tricks" — that Pakistan was in a position to detonate a nuclear bomb in 1977." This claim is absurd and is emphatically contradicted, among others, by Khalid Hasan, Zulfi Bhutto’s one-time press secretary and a friend of Benazir’s. She should have known that her father had concluded the supremely important nuclear-cooperation agreement with China only in 1976 and the construction of Kahuta laboratory for uranium enrichment had also begun just then. Pakistan had no fissile material and direct supply of Chinese nuclear technology and material began only after 1980.

Ironically, on first becoming Prime Minister in 1988, Benazir demanded a "full briefing" on the nuclear quest, including the "scuttled" December 1977 test. The then Army Chief, General Aslam Beg, referred her to President Ghulam Ishaq Khan who, in her own words, told her, "There is no need for you to know."

Wholly credible, however, is Benazir’s second claim, in the same interview, that while her father was also the "Father of the Pakistani Bomb," she was the "mother of its missile programme." She then confided to Bhatia that before her visit to North Korea, she had bought an overcoat and carried "in its deep pockets" CDs containing Pakistan’s secrets of nuclear enrichment that she had bartered for North Korean missiles. But, true to type, a few months later in London she snapped at Bhatia that she had never said anything about CDs, and that Pakistan had paid for North Korean missiles in cash!

Shuja Nawaz’s succinct account of Pakistan’s successful nuclear quest also lends no credence to Benazir’s outlandish claim. Nor does the famous SSK article — authored by three best informed Pakistanis, Agha Shahi, Abdul Sattar and Air Chief Marshal Zulfiqar Ali Khan, and published a week before the Musharraf coup — that mentions four occasions when the Pakistani Bomb "deterred" India. The first is dated 1984.

The very first paragraph of Nawaz’s book sums up Pakistan’s unending dilemmas and difficulties: "Pakistan was created as a separate state on 14 August 1947, in the name of the Muslims of British-India. Today, more the 60 years after independence it is struggling to become a nation. Its political reins have been in the hands of the Pakistan Army, which continued to exercise control even while civilians were titular rulers of the land.

"The country is now wracked by internal divisions between provinces and between the modernist forces and the forces of militant and radical Islam."

His account of the "wars within" the Army’s highest echelons and between the Army and civilian hierarchies, especially the manipulation and intrigues that precede the appointment of an Army Chief, is vivid and eye-opening.

Nawaz is by no means unsympathetic to the Pakistan Army or unappreciative of its performance in "three major and some minor wars with India." But he sensibly concludes his book by declaring: "While the Army remains a conservative institution at heart, it is not yet a breeding ground for a large number of radical Islamists that many fear. Islam, however, remains a visible force in Pakistani society and in the Army today. Keeping the militant Islamists at bay remains a daunting task given the dominant role of the Army in Pakistan’s polity, if Pakistan is to mature, thrive and survive as a successful state and a nation, the Army needs to take a back seat and allow politicians and civil society to make their mistakes and allow other critically important elements of society to function unfettered."

This is far from being the case at present, notwithstanding, the manifestly free and fair elections last February. Interestingly, General Jehangir Karamat, the only Army Chief of Pakistan to allow himself to be eased out by a civilian Prime Minister, in his endorsement of the book describes the Army as his country’s "centre of gravity." The author has some suggestions for making the Pakistani system "coup-proof." But these and much else will have to be discussed later.