Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

Since December, when the secular political leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, the people of Pakistan have shown their growing revulsion at both their U.S.-backed military rulers and the fundamentalists. In the February elections, a landslide victory went to the two main secular parties, which have been marginalized under military rule.

These parties have now formed a parliamentary coalition and are moving to oust General Pervez Musharraf from the presidency. Upon his election as prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) ordered the Supreme Court judges released from house arrest where Musharraf had put them. Among them was former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Both Musharraf’s party and the fundamentalist parties suffered crushing defeats, even in the religiously more conservative Northwest. This gave the lie to the notion, common abroad, that Islamic fundamentalism enjoys mass support in Pakistan, the world’s second-largest predominantly Muslim country. The biggest winner was Bhutto’s PPP, followed by the Pakistan Muslim League-N of Nawaz Sharif.

Part of the PPP’s support resulted from sympathy for Benazir Bhutto, who had been killed in a terrorist attack as she campaigned before large crowds against the military and the fundamentalists. Many believe that Bhutto was set up by the military, or at least a wing of it. The fundamentalists loathed her, not least because she defended women’s rights, even though when in power she had done little for women.

But the large vote for the PPP was more than a sympathy vote for the martyred Benazir Bhutto. It also reflected deep anger against the corrupt economic oligarchy and the military. Among the large mainstream parties, the PPP has always hewn toward populism, even adopting some leftist slogans, and its base includes the rural and urban poor, especially in Sind.

The military has dominated Pakistan ever since independence in 1948. During the 1970s, General Zia ul-Haq executed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father. Zia was the first military ruler to appeal to Islamist sentiment to prop up his rule. It was under Zia that the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan worked together to support the Afghan mujahideen, the source of Al Qaeda.

Pakistan’s sinister military intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), helped bring the Taliban to power in Afghanistan and has supported similar groups in the struggle against Indian rule in Kashmir. In recent years, some of the religious extremists the ISI has supported in the past have joined with Al Qaeda in a war against the Pakistani military and the U.S. Meanwhile, some elements of the military, especially in the ISI, continue to work with and to manipulate the Islamist militants, including those fighting alongside the Taliban inside Afghanistan.

Even during periods of civilian rule, the Pakistani military has operated as a state within a state, not least because it has direct relations with the U.S. military, from which it receives lavish support. It controls $20 billion in domestic economic assets, including a third of manufacturing, and has always dominated foreign policy. Today the military is stepping back a bit, and the new army commander, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has given indications that he may allow Musharraf to be pushed from power. But Kayani is a former head of the ISI and no friend of democracy.

While Pakistan has a vibrant women’s movement, an active labor movement, and most recently, a lawyer’s movement for civil and constitutional rights that has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets, these movements face strong obstacles. Even if civilian rule is successfully restored, the military will continue to work from behind the scenes.

Moreover, if the coalition of the two big secular parties, the PPP and the Muslim League, actually comes to power, these parties are unlikely to avoid the corruption and authoritarianism that has marked their earlier periods of rule. At the same time, however, the people of Pakistan have pushed back against the military, their U.S. backers, and the fundamentalists over the past year, creating the country’s first real political opening in a long time.