Husain Haqqani

All Politics is Local.”

He has worn many hats, among them that of a diplomat, a journalist, a PR expert and has worked with both ex-Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and the late Benazir Bhutto. Today he is Director Center for International Relations and Associate Professor of International Relations at Boston University.

In a candid interview Husain Haqqani shares thoughts on the happenings in Pakistan and memories of Benazir Bhutto.

You have worked both with Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto and have seen Musharraf in action since the 1990s. So lets start with them.

When I worked with Nawaz Sharif, it was in 1988, right after the assassination of General Zia-ul-Haq.

I was a young man. I worked with Mr. Sharif into trying and building his image as a politician. He had not been a politician-he was a protégé of the Military. So the phase of Nawaz Sharif that I saw was the phase when he was just learning the ropes of politics. What people are seeing now is a Nawaz Sharif who has gone through the mill and who has understood that in Pakistan there is a principal divide between politics and the Pakistani establishment’s desire to rule the country as if it was a company that just needs to be run.

I have been in limited contact with Nawaz Sharif since I stopped working with him but I do understand that a lot of people think he has grown and that he has understood the dynamics of politics and he has also understood that the establishment is not necessarily Pakistan’s redeemer. That said he does have certain beliefs and those core beliefs include religious conservatism, and a very strong commitment to capitalism and I don’t think those could have changed although his views on democracy and working with other political leaders probably may have undergone change.

Benazir Bhutto I came to know as somebody of course who had been an opponent and I absolutely grew to adore the woman. She had the remarkable ability of reaching out to people. An enormous capacity to forgive. Consider her life-her father was executed, her two brothers killed under mysterious circumstances and she was absolutely convinced as I am that the security services of Pakistan had something to do with it. She was constantly slammed by the Pakistani establishment. The rich and the famous of Pakistan were always trashing her and her husband.

Her husband was in prison on two occasions-once for 3 years and on another occasion for 8 and a half years. That’s a combined total of eleven and a half years without being convicted of any offence and now that General Musharraf is making similar charges of corruption against the Chief Justice of Pakistan and is looking really ridiculous, maybe it is time for a lot of Pakistanis and Americans to take a deep breath and say if the Chief Justice of Pakistan can be slammed for corruption just because he opposes military rule and Musharraf’s dictatorship, maybe we need to re-evaluate all the charges that were floated around about Benazir and her husband.

Benazir Bhutto was always committed to certain things. She was an unqualified democrat. She had an absolute commitment to democracy in Pakistan. She was somebody who really cared about the poor. You could see that in her demeanor. For example if we were on a tour in some small village and somebody had given her an application, she would say by the way that kid who gave me the application-who has that application and she would turn to her staff to find out. She always maintained somebody in her staff who would deal with the poor and their applications and that to me showed something of her personality.

She was also a very courageous woman. She was not easily cowed down and it was her courage that led to her return to Pakistan and her martyrdom.

Musharraf – I have been a consistent critic of Gen Musharraf. Soon after the coup I said, I understand what has prompted the coup. My article was titled – “What’s Next?’ and it was within two days actually of the coup. I said I understand the argument that Nawaz Sharif was over stepping his bounds, he was really putting the Supreme Court in a corner, and the President in a corner-he was really being very harsh with the opposition. You must remember all the cases against Benazir Bhutto and many of his opponents, including myself-we were all subjected to some kind of harassment, were, under Nawaz Sharif. He did go berserk in his last few months.

The entire period of Kargil I spent in prison but I was one of those who said (of Musharraf) that this sense of relief will only last a few days. In the end the question is what system suits Pakistan and if we are clear that democracy is the system that suits Pakistan then we have to understand how democracy works.

I do not share Pakistan’s middle class obsession with corruption. India has corruption. I have studied the evolution of American democracy. The US has corruption. There were certain Americans who were larger than life. I live in Boston now and Boston had a Mayor called Mayor Curly and Mayor Curly was elected as Mayor for a second term from prison where he was serving a sentence on graft and he was re-elected and he came back and continued to be Mayor. One has to understand why people vote for people whom others describe as corrupt and the only explanation is people want to be included in the process of governance.

Same is the case with Pakistan.

Let us face the reality of Pakistan. The intellectual elite of Pakistan, the bankers, the world bank employees, the civil servants, the guys you run into the New York Stock market-most of them come from only one ethnic group, from which I also come by the way, which is the immigrant ethnic group of the Mohajjirs, the highly educated people who moved from India to Pakistan. But the natives of Pakistan-the Baluchis, the Sindhis, the Pashtoon, the Saraikis, the Punjabis, they have a different view of what leadership should be like. They are not looking at it as meritocracy-they are looking at it as Biharis looked at Laloo Prasad Yadav. They look at leaders as-who speaks for us? – and so Pakistan will have politicians who will be flawed for sometime but I have been consistent in saying that the democratic system is better.

Musharraf is an egotistical man-he has proven that. Any man who praises his own muscles and talks about how women really looked at him and thought of him as good looking, anybody who basically points a finger when he loses it, starts screaming at people –he did it about me, not to me because I didn’t go to the occasion in New York and just started talking about me and saying this man writes this and that-we all know what he is like. So anybody who criticizes him and disagrees with him is horrible.

He never changes his understanding of things though he changes his statements a lot. Basically his world view is “I, Me and Myself”-and that’s all it is. He thinks he is the savior of Pakistan and does he have some capability of good? Maybe he did but he has exhausted it. He doesn’t know history. When he went to India to the Gandhi Samadhi, he turned to Dig Vijay Singh and asked how did Gandhi die? His knowledge of political science is sketchy at best. Look at the dossier he’s giving against the Chief Justice. In one place it talks about how the Chief Justice, did not let, while he was staying at the Governor’s home at someplace- another guest to use the same bathroom as him. Now to him that is a firing offence for the Chief Justice? That shows the pettiness of the man. He just mixes the apples and the oranges and the watermelons and the pumpkins all into the same basket and thinks its all fruit. His understanding of systems of politics is dismally flawed.

There is a big discussion in the US among most intellectuals and thinkers that US will continue to support Musharraf because a known devil is better than unknown one and the consensus is that there is no viable leader who can keep the country together. Many people don’t like US interference and blame Benazir’s death on the US for not twisting Musharraf’s arm enough to provide her better security.

I don’t think it is fair to blame the United Sates for Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination should be blamed on those people who failed to provide her security and those people who actually killed her about whom we need a UN investigation to find out who did it.

But lets go back to this notion of he (Musharraf) is the best of the worse lot. Who defines this? Let’s try and understand and I hope there are your readers and listeners who will listen to this argument. In a society that is extremely polarized, culturally and ethnically divided, the people who define the issues need to be understood. Those who say well he is the only choice etc both in the US and among the Pakistanis come from a certain category-Pakistani Bankers, Pakistani World Bank employees, Pakistani international civil servants, bureaucrats and generals. They then shape the views of Britain’s generals, civil servants and Britain’s bankers and America’s as well- that is how it works.

If you looked at public opinion, Peoples Party got more votes in 2002 than Musharraf’s party. Nawaz Sharif’s party got more votes than the MMA. So as a whole the public did not vote for Musharraf and Musharraf knows that. That’s why he has never faced free and fair elections for himself. A man who is confident that he is considered as lesser evil would have gone into the elections soon after the coup.

My argument will be that the whole notion that people think that Musharraf is the best bet is actually a very elitist notion both in and out of Pakistan. Now that is cracking. Look at The Economist; look at the Guardian who used to say -lesser evil-now they are saying-evil. Now the American media is also changing it tune as is the American Congress and as far as the State department and the Department of defense is concerned, I’ve always thought of something called the Brotherhood of Bureaucrats. Bureaucrats find it easiest talk to other bureaucrats and they always think of how to move the file forward. They don’t think about people. That’s how America got Iran wrong because all the elite of Iran were with the Shah. When the people pounced on the Shah the elite didn’t understand it and the people who were talking to the elite didn’t understand it. Now of course the elite lives in Los Angeles so my worst case scenario for Pakistan which I don’t think will happen in the next few years-is that the Pakistani elite keeps going off on its tangent and keeps talking about issues that don’t really matter to the ordinary guy on the street. The Pakistani peasant is more concerned about bread and butter issues and may say okay if he is making a million dollars let him but can I get 3 meals as a result and that’s something that the elite of Pakistan and the western elite that backs the elite of Pakistan doesn’t understand.

Pakistan in now polarized in different ways. Ethnic polarity-the Sindhis are not happy, the Baluchis, Pashtoons, the poor Mohajjirs are not happy. Ideological polarization-is Pakistan meant to be an Islamic society, is it meant to be a secular state of Muslims. That debate has not been resolved. If there was democracy, it would be resolved by votes but since it is not a democracy, it’s a debate that keeps going on in a circular way.

Third polarization-civil military. The military thought or has thought in the past that it has absolute right to continue to rule the country but on the other hand the civilians are now beginning to question that.

Another level of polarization-the rich and the poor, and every ethnic group in Pakistan overlaps with another ethnic group across the border and the tendency of at least some people to think maybe we need to restructure the state completely is very much there so all these polarities are very serious polarities.

There has been a lot of discussion about possible candidates. Aitzaz Ahsan has taken his papers back. Maqdoom Amin Fahim is well respected but not considered charismatic enough. I personally feel Asif Zardari will be the surprise package in this whole scenario. Many have however called the Zaradari-Sharif combination “a lethal mixture.” What are your thoughts?

Aitzaz Ahsan is a brilliant lawyer and he is a very brilliant and smart communicator. Maqdoom Amin Fahim is a very good consensus politician. Everybody has a place. But most people get carried away with their personal preferences. It took me many years to understand that you know what? I’m just a political thinker and perhaps I belong to University writing about things. Maybe I’m not suited for on ground politics because this is not who I am. People have different roles. In India’s history, Lal Bahadur Shastri after Nehru, Deve Gowda-these are non charismatic personalities but they played a role in history, they made politics move forward. The nature of politics is sometimes not understood. Politics is the process of winning hearts and minds and bringing people together.

Asif Ali Zardari will end up showing that he has more charisma than people give him credit for. He will show his ability to make compromises and bring groups and factions together.

Aitzaz Ahsan will surprise people by being and remaining a part of the PPP. The people who are saying things should change are not the people who are engaged in politics. Many are just observers. It’s like, while I don’t like crocket much but watching a cricket match with my family members who are enthusiastic-they always say why didn’t he hit the ball in that direction or do that or something like that? It is so much easier for observers to comment. I think the People’s Party will remain united and will remain pretty strong. I think that the PML and the PPP are the two major parties. They will emerge from the elections as the significant parties. I think that Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari, Amin Fahim and Aitzaz Ahsan understand that the first step is to keep the momentum of pushing Musharraf back, pushing the military out of politics and restoring normal politics to Pakistan.

What is normal politics? People sit together, negotiate, bargain, do deals, stab each other in the back occasionally, but that’s what politics is and Pakistan needs to walk back to normal politics with its weaknesses and with its flaws. You can’t run a train on a highway, a car on a train track. Politics has its own track. If Pakistan comes back to politics then I think the two parties will at some point of course compete with each other too but right now I don’t see Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari getting into some kind of a battle that will undermine the bigger battle between the political forces and what I call the establishment forces of Pakistan.

Tell me a little more about Asif Ali Zardari because you knew both husband and wife closely. He comes across as intelligent, composed and surprisingly politically savvy. Still his detractors whine about his lack of experience and his past. He has conducted himself with a lot of composure and dignity since Benazir’s death and made all the right moves.

He is a courageous man. He understood that he was paying the price for his wife’s politics and his wife understood that and those of us who grew to be close to both of them figured that one instantaneously. All these stories people talk about-I have yet to meet some body who said-I was asked for 10 percent by him. These are labels, these are PR things and the Pakistani intelligence services do that with everybody. For example there was a time when I was labeled as this “very slimy PR guy.” Just because I do PR for somebody makes me slimy? Now that I’m in a different milieu they can’t touch me. In the United States, my standing is based on what I write and what I say, not what people whisper about me.

Why is it that a banker who becomes Prime Minister by default has more scandals related to him but these scandals are not debated the same way as these so called scandals about Mr. Zardari and none of them were ever proven. Some of the cases are bizarre and they basically don’t add up. You say okay find me the witnesses and they can’t find the witnesses. So I think Mr. Zardari’s character assassination was a major PR success for the Pakistani establishment.

Now that he is going to come out, more and more people will come into contact with him. People will realize he’s been painted in horrendous colors with a purpose. Look, if he was a wheeler dealer, the first time they arrested him and said to him-If you divorce your wife -because they thought that would embarrass her and would cause problems for her-you’ll be freed. He doesn’t take that. The second time they said to him-Okay we’ll make YOU the Prime Minister, dump her politically and he didn’t take that either. Now here is a man who has the strength to sit in prison and stay committed.

The rumors they were spreading. There is this particular person in Pakistan who wrote this story in an Indian magazine and I don’t know why that magazine allowed the story to be published without asking any body who was close to her(Benazir), saying things like they don’t stay together etc. My wife and I spent many days, many evenings, and many dinners with them while he was under treatment in the US and she was visiting him. You can feel when a couple is not getting along. Here was a couple that was very close but the very fact these rumors were floated shows that they are essentially a part of an effort to undermine what is seen as a major political challenge by one particular set of people who think they own Pakistan.

Let me says he (Asif Ali Zardari) has more knowledge than General Pervez Musharraf who didn’t know how Gandhi died. Here is a man who has done a tremendous study of history. If you go to their little apartment in New York you will find his room particularly littered with books and magazines. I sent him by email articles and I’d get comments back so obviously he’s read them.

Of course he doesn’t have the same kind of academic background that comes from going to a major University and studying Political science or international relations and economics-he studied business and did well in it. He is a knowledgeable person who reads the papers, who understands things. Its very interesting-recently I went to Washington D.C. and one of the famous think tanks on India and Pakistan, an elderly gentleman told me how Asif Zardari dropped in on him and said-I’ve just come to learn. What do you want to tell me?” So this gentleman says-“For an hour and a half Asif Zardari just sat listening to me and asking me questions”. Now how many people of that political stature do you know who would be willing to go to someone and say I’m here to learn. You know the South Asian culture. Once you made it then you don’t need to learn, but tell every body how it is like. It is a particular personality that has the capacity to learn so I think Asif Zardari is going to surprise everyone both with his depth of knowledge and his ability to work together with people.

And what about Nawaz Sharif?

I think Nawaz Sharif has been sketchy on details. Those who say he has changed-he has changed in personality. How much he has changed in his views we have to figure out. For the moment I think what we are looking at is a grand coalition for restoring constitutional and democratic rule. That is the first step. After that whenever you have these big transcendental issues you always attend to them first, then you come to the specifics.

I think the PPP and PML represent two different worlds. The PPP is a social democratic party. It’s going to be more pro-capital than ever before but it’ll be more concerned about investing in health care, in education. Nawaz Sharif is a big capital person. His support base is the urban areas of the Punjab. He gets a lot of money from the Pakistani industrialists of whom he is one. Yes there is skepticism about him in the overseas Pakistani community but at some point once the basic issue, the basic contradiction between the Military dictator and democracy is resolved then you will find the same people you are talking to who have a suspicion about him (Nawaz Sharif)-they will then choose. If they are real dyed in the wool capitalists, they will go with Nawaz Sharif. If they are like me with more social kind of concerns they will end up with the PPP, and then we will come to a more normal polity. But for the moment I see them(Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif) working together and not only them the ANP, even some elements of the MQM and all those who understand that the first issue in Pakistan is rolling back the frontiers of the meddlesome military intelligence state. Once the rolling back has been completed then there will be many other new political views and decisions. People will disagree; Nawaz Sharif being from Punjab is less likely to be supportive. In principal he would like good relations with other provinces but will he be able to give up Punjab’s domination and if he will, then will he retain the support of the Punjab? These are the questions he will have to face.

The PPP- can it try and support a greater influx of capital into the country at the same time standing for the right of the poor which is what the party was formed to do. All these issues will come up later on. That’s where the paths will start diverging but where the convergence is in my opinion is over the restoration of the constitution and democratic rule.

So what role do you see the military playing?

I think a lot of people have reached the conclusion that military intervention doesn’t work and any good that a dictator does lasts very briefly. If you look at history, countries with interventionist military always face a major struggle when the military starts to recede from the political arena. We saw that in Chile, we saw that in all Latin American countries. Even in Spain after Franco was gone, two years later some colonel actually thought that everything was going wrong and tried to take over the Parliament. So there will be people who are intellectually convinced that Pakistan can only be kept together by the Military and its intervention in politics. These guys are not going to give up and they will contrive to push for their point of view. On the other hand I think the momentum of history is against them now. I think the number of military regimes in the world is shrinking. I mean its down to Myanmar and Pakistan for God’s sake.

A lot of these Pakistanis and Wall Street types in New York that until two years ago had no time for my democratic argument are inviting me to come over and give talks to them and that basically means they are saying-you know may be the man has something to offer. Maybe this argument of unbridled democracy, of Pakistan not looking upon Egypt or Iran but India as a model of democracy building may have something in it. India has 23 official languages-why can’t Pakistan have five? Creating a nation through diversity and pluralism and democratic change is an opinion that is becoming more widely accepted. I think whatever Musharraf tries to do he is in a twilight phase. He can try to hang on to power for a very long time but he would have to do it with a lot of repression and Pakistanis do not like repression like any other nation. So he will be embattled for too long and at some point the military will have to decide-do we want to pay the price of being identified with him. They are already trying to distance themselves.

The common consensus is that the US doesn’t understand Pakistani politics and by backing Musharraf is alienating the Pakistanis. Where do you see US-Pakistan relations heading now that we will have a new US President this year?

I think US needs a stable Pakistan- and Pakistan needs US as a major partner because Pakistan has a lot of eggs in the American basket. America is the biggest provider of international investment, the biggest supplier of aid and also the biggest consumer of Pakistan goods. It’s the single biggest trading partner, so I hope the Pakistani leadership can work with any American leader.

As far as the war on terror is concerned-anybody who has strange views and thinks that they can send troops to Pakistan and thereby settle the issue in a few days, those candidates are off my list. Others who say they want engagement that establishes close relations between Pakistan and US, nudges Pakistan towards democracy, urges Pakistan to take care f its own terrorist monsters that kind of candidate I think would do well. At the moment from Pakistan’s point of view I don’t think there is a good candidate because none of the candidates have spoken enough on Pakistan.

If not the President, at least his advisors should have a good understanding. This is a big picture problem, not only about Pakistan but many countries. US intellectuals and foreign policy wizards recognize the value of the maxim that all politics is local when it comes to the US. When it comes to other countries, they forget the local nature of politics. They start thinking some big picture paradigm that needs to be implemented there and they end up talking to half a dozen people who speak their own language. For example during the Vietnam war there was a Catholic called Ngo Dinh Diem. Because he was Catholic, all Catholic Senators started liking him and they said let’s make him President. Well guess what? When they arrived there all the Buddhists didn’t like it. Ahmed Chalabi-a good man in certain ways but how many people supported him in Iraq?

So sometimes that is where the mistakes take place, and they happen because the people who are dealing with the policy issues are not immersed in the culture, the understanding at the local level. It would be nice if at least some policy makers understood the country and its local situation and did not totally depend on a handful of people from that country who often promote themselves. So I can visualize a Citibank executive who is Pakistani telling everybody what is in the interest of Pakistan is that a Citibank executive should be made Prime Minister and people end up falling for that in Washington D.C because they don’t know any better. I think what is needed is a greater understanding of the maxim that ALL politics is local, as America is learning to its detriment and with great difficulty in Iraq.

Let the democratic process in the United States play out and then when they are in the final phase that’s when they’ll have foreign policy experts and probably have good advice available to them that will form the basis of their policies. In the present situation I think people are more focused in the US on issues such as social security and health care than what to do about Pakistan.

Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Beena Sarwar for connecting Kavita to Husain Haqqani.