Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [46]
Zia would have allowed Bhutto to take the same path into exile; but when the deposed leader made it clear that he was determined to return to power, and when mass rallies made it clear that he had a real chance of being re-elected, both Zia himself and all the leading figures who had helped bring Bhutto down knew very well what would happen to them, and more importantly their families, if he did in fact return to office. Bhutto’s execution removed that threat, and by its very uniqueness stands as a reminder to Pakistani leaders of Machiavelli’s lesson that in many societies men will far more easily forget an injury to their interests and even their persons than an assault on their honour.
ZIA-UL-HAQ
It was easy for Bhutto’s executioner and successor Zia-ul-Haq to portray his administration as the antithesis of Bhutto’s, since he himself was Bhutto’s personal antithesis. Zia was Pakistan’s first ruler from the middle class, born into the family of a junior British civil servant from east Punjab. Zia himself entered the officer corps of the British Indian army in the Second World War. In 1947 his family became refugees from India, something that strongly marked his world view. In sharp contrast not only to Bhutto but to Pakistan’s other military rulers to date, he was a deeply pious Muslim.
Unlike both Bhutto and his military predecessor Ayub and successor Musharraf, Zia attempted to change Pakistan along Islamist lines. This reflected not only Zia’s own profound personal religious convictions, but also a nationalist belief (which has been shared by some more secular figures within the military and civilian establishment) that religion is the only force which can strengthen Pakistani nationalism and national identity, keep Pakistan from disintegrating, and motivate its people to give honest and dedicated service to the nation and society.
In most of his goals, however, Zia failed as completely as Bhutto and Musharraf, despite the harshly authoritarian character of much of his rule. He thereby demonstrated once more the underlying and perennial weakness of the Pakistani state, even at its most dictatorial. Pakistani political and social culture was not transformed along official Islamic lines; in fact, Zia’s Islamizing measures proved generally superficial (though intermittently very ugly, especially as far as women were concerned) and were eventually largely reversed by Musharraf.
Soon after Zia’s death in 1988, a woman lawyer in Lahore, Shireen Masoud, told me that, though she had loathed Zia’s regime, most of the Western coverage, reflecting in turn Pakistani liberal opinion, had greatly overestimated its impact on Pakistani society.
Zia changed a lot less than people think. After all, as far as ordinary people are concerned, this was already a very conservative society, and he didn’t make it more so. Feminists complain about the Hadood Ordinances, and rightly, but most people have always imposed such rules in their own families and villages. As to the elites, they have gone on living just as they always did, drinking whisky and going around unveiled. This isn’t Iran – Zia was a very religious man himself and also not from the elites so he probably would have liked to crack down on this kind of thing, but in the end he had to keep enough of the elites happy. The one area where he really did change things and force religion down our throats night and day was on state TV and radio – but that’s because it was the only place that he really could control.16
No new dedicated and religiously minded elite emerged. Instead, Zia, like his predecessors and successors, found himself making deals with the same old elites. Pakistani nationalism was not strengthened, and the state did not grow stronger.
Like the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which was responsible for distributing arms, money and training to the Mujahidin, the Islamist parties in Pakistan also profited enormously from the money directed to helping the Afghan