Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [39]
Two Pakistani military governments tried to change and develop Pakistan in the general spirit of the Westernizing traditions of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. I therefore have grouped the administrations of General Ayub Khan (1958 – 69) and General Pervez Musharraf (1999 – 2008) in one section. Ayub Khan came from a background that to some extent exemplifies the ethnic complexity of Pakistan: born in the NWFP, from a Pathan tribe but a Hindko-speaking Hazara family of small landowners. In a way, however, this was irrelevant. Coming from a military family (his father had been a Rissaldar-Major in the British Indian army), and having spent almost his whole adult life in the British Indian and then the Pakistani military, like Musharraf and a great many Pakistani officers his personal identity was completely bound up with his professional one as a soldier.
While Ayub’s family had been in the British military service, Musharraf’s had served the British as administrators. Like Musharraf’s father, Ayub had studied briefly at Aligarh University, which Sir Syed founded. Both men derived from this tradition a strong dislike of Islamist politics, and from their military backgrounds a loathing of politicians in general; yet both found that, in order to maintain their power, they had to rely on parliamentary coalitions made up of some of the most opportunist politicians in the country. In contrast to other military and civilian rulers of Pakistan, both men were personally kindly and tolerant, yet both headed increasingly repressive regimes.
In striking contrast to most successful civilian politicians in Pakistan and throughout South Asia, neither they nor Zia-ul-Haq founded political dynasties or tried to do so. This was in fact impossible, above all because, although they ran what were in certain respects personal dictatorships, they were none of them personal leaders of what has been called the ‘sultanistic’ kind, and did not personally control the institution that brought them to power.
Rather, they came to power as the CEOs of that great meritocratic corporation, the Pakistan army; and the board of directors of that corporation – in other words the senior generals – retained the ultimate say over their administration’s fate. This marks the degree of the army’s ‘modernity’ compared to the political parties. Both Ayub and Musharraf left office when the other generals decided it was time for them to go. As to Zia, no one knows who was responsible for his assassination.
Both Ayub and Musharraf were committed secular reformers. Ayub in particular was bitterly hostile to the Islamists, and removed the ‘Islamic’ label from the official name of the Republic of Pakistan. He promoted women’s education and rights, and was the only ruler in Pakistan’s history to have made a really serious attempt to promote birth control, correctly identifying runaway population growth as one of the biggest threats to the country’s long-term progress. Like his reformist successors, however, Ayub was forced to retreat from much of his reformist programme in the face of the Islamists’ ability to mobilize much of the population in protest at interference with their values and traditions, and the traditional landed elite’s ability to block any moves that threatened their local dominance.
Like Musharraf and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayub Khan expressed great admiration for the reformist secular policies of Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish republic; but all three of them failed to implement anything like Atatürk’s programme, for all the reasons that have made Pakistan