A Delicate Balance of Rule for Pakistan’s Musharraf

President Pervez Musharraf, a decorated paratrooper, has already survived fierce battles in war and politics. He is now waging the fight of his life.

In the last two years, he has forsaken Pakistan’s former Taliban allies, promised to end Islamic militancy, restarted delicate peace talks with India and acknowledged that a national hero ran a global black market in nuclear arms technology.

Each risky step has won praise from Washington but drawn criticism from a volatile mix of constituencies at home, including members of the military that is crucial to his hold on power.

Nationalists accuse him of selling out Pakistan’s prestige and territorial claims. Mainstream politicians say that despite his promise to crack down on Islamic militants, he has protected those he finds useful.

Yet many of the militants accuse him of betrayal, and some have even tried to kill him: In December, he survived two assassination attempts within 11 days.

Musharraf once enjoyed wide support here for leading a coup against thieving politicians. He says he is winning the fight to transform Pakistan into a stable democracy that rejects any form of extremism, and he may yet bring many disparate strands together to save the country from itself.

But he might also turn out to be another failed military ruler who digs his country into a bigger hole. Critics charge that the president is turning into an angry strongman who will do anything to stay in power. His actions often contradict his words, and his policies sometimes push him into deeper trouble. At the heart of his strategy, critics maintain, is a Faustian bargain that aids the very extremists he publicly opposes.

Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, said Musharraf has turned his back on millions of worldly, middle-class Pakistanis who practice moderate Islam, and is destroying the democracy he claims to be defending.

“His attention is focused on ensuring that he retains the support of the West, particularly the U.S., and the support of the religious right to neutralize his secular political opposition,” Ahmed said. “It is this fault line that characterizes his rule.”

Washington regards the 60-year-old Musharraf, who seized power in 1999, as the best hope for stability here and in the broader region. Two recent decisions illustrate Musharraf’s importance to the United States -- and the dangers he faces.

Under U.S. pressure, Musharraf last month exposed Abdul Qadeer Khan, the widely popular father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, as a nuclear arms peddler. That angered many Pakistanis and fed suspicions here and abroad that senior military officers approved the nuclear proliferation. So Musharraf also praised Khan as a national hero and quickly pardoned him.

Musharraf faces similar pressures over Kashmir. India claims the rights to all of Jammu and Kashmir, but Pakistan says Kashmiris ought to be able to vote on independence or union with either country. Peace talks between the rival nuclear powers are scheduled to start as early as May and aim to show progress by August.

If Musharraf compromises too much, Pakistanis will conclude that he is a failed pawn of the United States and it might break him, said Hamid Gul, a former head of the Pakistani military’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, who thinks Washington isn’t pressing India hard enough.

“There should be no impression that America is trying to put Pakistan in a corner and bash it with a big stick,” Gul said. “I think that impression is getting more firm in Pakistanis’ collective mind: That Americans are no friends of ours, and if they are trying to support Pervez Musharraf, it is because they have a vested interest in him at this particular time.”

Many Pakistanis -- from ordinary citizens to top military commanders and the Islamic militants who send fighters to the disputed Himalayan territory -- are hawks on Kashmir.

Last fall, a 54-member U.S. task force of South Asia experts sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society concluded that Musharraf and key military officers “favor a hard-line policy on Kashmir and believe that they need the militants to maintain pressure on India.”

A senior State Department official described Pakistan’s behavior under Musharraf as “more cooperation than not” with U.S. objectives.

“You have to look at this in all its complexity,” the official said. “There are good things going on. There are other things that should be happening that maybe aren’t ... but it’s an ongoing effort.”

Musharraf faces difficult choices. “He’s riding several tigers at the same time, occasionally hopping from one to the other,” said Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Despite Musharraf’s claims, human rights campaigners in Pakistan regard him as an enemy of democracy rather than its savior. They complain that police and military intelligence agents harass or arrest them. Judges allow the government to detain people for long periods without charging them. One of the leading pro-democracy campaigners, former Cabinet minister Javed Hashmi, is fighting charges in a closed trial.

“Stability comes from institution-building, and if anything, Musharraf and his people have eroded every institution that was there,” Asma Jehangir, a top human rights lawyer who is also the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, said from Geneva. Political analysts say Musharraf undercut his popular support with a referendum in April 2002 aimed at legitimizing his rule. His name was the only one on the ballot, and the vote was widely dismissed as a fraud.

Later that year, he held parliamentary elections. Musharraf had already forced two popular civilian politicians, former Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, into exile. There was little public opposition because of rampant corruption in their administrations.

Musharraf disqualified many of their parties’ candidates in 2002 because of alleged corruption or on other grounds, such as the lack of a university degree. But Islamic clerics were allowed to run even though their education was based mainly on the Koran. As a result, the elections strengthened the religious right, giving its members their strongest electoral showing ever.

“Never before has Pakistan had such a strong presence in the parliament of religious extremist groups,” Jehangir said. “And more than that, there is a political vacuum. Who is going to fill that vacuum?”

The mullahs hope they will.

If Musharraf were overthrown or killed, a pro-Western military officer would most probably be his successor. But Muslim hard-liners appear to be in a stronger position to mount a succession challenge than they were before he seized power.

The military has had close ties with Islamic militants since Gen. Zia ul-Haq seized power in 1977. Two decades later, the ISI was a prime backer of the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., Musharraf had to choose between Washington and continued patronage of the Taliban, and made his strategic shift toward the United States.

The religious right denounced Musharraf and claims that its popular support started to grow after he made that decision. But when the general tried to consolidate his power, he ended up in a marriage of political convenience with those same Islamic parties.

In December, after a year of negotiations that paralyzed parliament, the religious parties provided the votes Musharraf needed to rewrite parts of the constitution and legally cement his hold on power until at least the end of 2007. In exchange, they want Musharraf to make concessions that advance their agenda, such as dropping a reform plan for madrasas, or religious schools, that foster Islamic extremism.

Critics of his cooperation with the religious parties say it is not too late for Musharraf to salvage Pakistan’s democracy by restoring the old constitution and lifting the bans on Bhutto and Sharif.

“If the democratic transition is resumed, then the mullahs stand to lose,” said Ahmed of the Brussels think tank. “In any free and fair election, absent state patronage, the religious right is politically marginalized -- just as Pakistani moderates are marginalized by military governments.”

The general seems determined to hold his ground. In interviews and speeches over the last two years, he has insisted that he has a vision of Pakistan, and the entire Islamic world, following a course of “enlightened moderation.”

“I am firmly convinced that extremist forces do not -- will not -- rise in Pakistan and do not have a future in Pakistan,” Musharraf told an international call-in show in September.

Musharraf argues that the West must do its part by helping Muslims alleviate poverty and improve education, and by resolving long disputes such as the Israeli-Palestinian and Kashmir conflicts.

Pakistani authorities have worked closely with the Americans to capture foreign-born terrorist suspects such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is suspected of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. But Musharraf has made little progress in rooting out home-grown extremists.

His government has banned several Islamic militant groups, but most of them still raise funds, publish newspapers and magazines, and draw new followers from several thousand madrasas. Authorities have not prosecuted the most powerful militant leaders and have brought only a small minority of their supporters before anti-terrorism courts.

Musharraf told about 2,000 pro-government religious scholars here last month that he needed their help to find Islamic extremists in mosques and madrasas because intelligence agents didn’t “have a magic wand.”

“Whatever strategy or laws that we have made do not empower the government to take over these madrasas,” Musharraf said. “But I know for a fact that there are some madrasas that preach curses against the world, and me, and the government. To expose them, we need your support.” Members of the audience, many of whom receive government stipends, chanted, “God is great!” and “Long live Musharraf!” but told the president that it was up to his government to find the extremists.

Pakistani authorities have released most of the militants rounded up since the Sept. 11 attacks.

One of them, Mohammed Jameel, tried to kill Musharraf by ramming an explosives-packed van into the president’s motorcade on Dec. 25. More than a year earlier, in April 2002, Pakistani intelligence agents had cleared Jameel -- a former guerrilla fighter in Afghanistan and Kashmir -- of involvement in “anti-state activities.”

Several people labeled “enemies of the state” by Musharraf and top officials haven’t escaped punishment so easily.

Hashmi, the acting head of Sharif’s party who also heads the 15-party Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, was arrested in October after he read out an anonymous letter critical of Musharraf’s coup and close alliance with the United States. It was typed on stationery of the army’s general headquarters.

Hashmi was hit with charges that included defaming the army and government, inciting mutiny and preparing forged documents. His trial, which began last month, is being held inside a jail in Islamabad, the capital.

As the investigation into nuclear proliferation deepened in January, Musharraf promised to punish “with an iron hand” anyone involved. Ten days after he declared them “anti-state elements,” Musharraf pardoned Khan while condemning the scientist’s black-market nuclear weapons network. Seven others have been accused of helping pass components and plans to Iran, Libya and North Korea and are still in detention.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said Musharraf reportedly singled out journalist Amir Mir of the Herald, a popular newsmagazine, as “anti-army” during a Nov. 20 reception for editors and columnists. The general said it was time the Herald and Mir were “dealt with,” the group said, adding that the journalist’s car was set ablaze outside his home two days later.

“Mir later received a message purporting to be from the Pakistani intelligence services claiming responsibility for the attack and warning that this was ‘just the beginning,’ ” it said.

Another journalist, Khawar Mehdi Rizvi, was arrested in December and accused of producing a fake video of Taliban activity on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Authorities charged that he sold the video to two French journalists, who had gone with him to the border city of Quetta without a permit. The French were fined and deported.

Musharraf told a television interviewer that Rizvi was “a most unpatriotic man and doesn’t deserve any sympathy whatsoever because he is trying to bring harm to my country.” The journalist was soon charged with sedition and harming Pakistan’s international reputation, which can bring a sentence of life in prison. Human rights activists accuse the government of torturing him in custody.

Pakistan’s government is considering new restrictions on foreign journalists. Foreign reporters already need permission to visit the one-third of Kashmir under Pakistani control, the western cities of Quetta and Peshawar, and the vast tribal areas of North-West Frontier Province that U.S. and Afghan officials say are sanctuaries for the Taliban, the Al Qaeda terrorist network and their supporters.

According to confidential Information Ministry recommendations viewed by The Times, foreign journalists could be barred from more territory, including scientific installations, religious premises and other “sensitive areas.”

The proposed new rules “are aimed at both preventing any risk to the visitor and damage to the image of Pakistan,” according to the draft. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, who is considered Musharraf’s closest ally in the Cabinet, denies that any new regulations are in the works.

Western diplomats say the government’s internal debate over reining in foreign media reflects Musharraf’s concern that pressure is growing in Washington for limits on aid to Pakistan and on its nuclear weapons.

Jehangir, the human rights lawyer, thinks that the general is simply losing his balance: “For him, anyone who doesn’t agree with his point of view is ‘anti-state.’ ”

Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Washington contributed to this report.