The choices facing Pakistan's Musharraf are far from simple

Martin Woollacott Guardian News Service London

When Pervez Musharraf attended the Royal College of Defense Studies in London a few years ago the thesis he submitted ended with the impassioned recommendation that India and Pakistan settle their differences, cut their military forces and devote the resources so released to poverty reduction. The man who reached that conclusion is now in charge of a country daily squandering its assets on confrontation with India, including the new funds that came from western states as a consequence of Musharraf's help over Afghanistan.

The difference between the Musharraf of the thesis and the Musharraf who is now in power is not that he has changed his mind, because he almost certainly has not done so, nor simply that the obstacles to an Indo-Pakistani settlement are substantial. It is also that the distance between aspiration and achievement is much wider in Pakistan than elsewhere. Indeed, the struggle to dominate, coopt or appease the powerful forces that move Pakistani society has sometimes looked less like government than a desperate exercise in damage control.

Today's solutions have turned into tomorrow's problems with dismal regularity. The man who came to power speaking of Ataturk has made important changes, but he has not matched his hero in decisiveness. Thursday's attack on a police post in Kashmir is another indication that Musharraf's capacity for detailed control over militant forces in Pakistan and Kashmir is limited. It surely does not suit his purposes that another provocation be offered to India now.

Western public diplomacy has focused on the danger that there might be a recourse to nuclear weapons. That remains the least likely of developments, although any possibility above infinitesimal must remain a concern. A limited conventional war is somewhat more of a possibility. This is where the anxieties of the U.S. and Europe may really center, for whichever way such a war ended could undermine Musharraf. If India could claim a victory, Musharraf would obviously suffer.

Even if Pakistani forces had the better of it, with Indian forces achieving little, that would not necessarily be good for Musharraf, because it might embolden both the militants and their patrons in the armed forces. Finally, if Musharraf abruptly takes harsh measures against militant groups in order to avoid war, that too could weaken him. The best moment for such moves is when there is limited Indian pressure, not when there are daily demands from New Delhi for action.

At a time when al-Qaeda has transferred its activities to Pakistan and forged new arrangements with Pakistani friends, the U.S. and its allies are faced with the prospect that confrontation with India will destabilize Pakistan. The yet to be consolidated achievements of the campaign against terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan could be undone. Operations like the bomb attack on the bus carrying French engineers have already shown the potential for trouble.

The success of the new Afghan government due to be established soon is by no means assured and it would be further endangered by change in Pakistan, while Pakistan itself could become more of a battlefield than it already is. But Indians, preoccupied with the violence offered to them, are impatient with the notion that they should show understanding to a Musharraf who has not delivered on his promises to curb militant attacks.

"Uncertain rulers need props" writes the Indian journalist MJ Akbar in his new book on the Jihadist tradition in Islam The Shade of Swords, "and the promotion of religious fundamentalism, especially to an external threat, is often the safest bet." But rulers do not only use fundamentalism, they also have to respond to it, as Akbar shows elsewhere in his book, a perceptive account of Islamic history that gives proper weight to South Asia. What can appear to outsiders as inexplicable becomes more understandable when rulers are seen as grappling with immense demographic and class changes.

In the case of Pakistan these included a near doubling of the population in less than a generation, between 1970 and 1990, and rural impoverishment and the swelling of the ranks of the urban poor. These changes had religious consequences, as Muslims, including rulers, moved to accommodate or take advantage of them.

One kind of Islamic assertion expressed the interests of what Gilles Kepel, the French expert on Islamism, calls the "devout middle class", the traditional business class, distinct from the genuinely secularized educated groups. Another kind, represented by the Deobandi movement, came increasingly to enlist and represent the new impoverished masses. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a man who saw himself as a socialist, was on the path of preemptive Islamisation when he was deposed, and later hanged, by General Zia ul Haq. Zia combined the interests of the devout middle class with those of the existing military and civilian elite.

But he inadvertently opened the door to an Islam more socially radical than his own when he brought in an alms tax that set Sunni and Shi'ites against each other and financed a vast expansion of madrassa schools, most of them controlled by the Deobandis. These became, in time, the nurseries of the Taliban.

Kepel's book is a wonderfully panoramic account of political Islam that weaves the story of demographic, class and political change in different Muslim countries together with the story of the international struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran for the future of Islam, a struggle which ended in victory for neither and was followed by the emergence of an internationalized type of zealot, the "free electrons" of Islamism, of whom Osama bin Laden is an example.

Muslim politicians, whether they were themselves Islamists or not, had to cope with this unfolding and constantly surprising drama. Political Islam, he suggests, triumphed only when, as in Iran, it reconciled, if only briefly, the interests of the poor, the devout middle class, the clergy, and even the secular middle class. Where it could not unite the poor and the devout middle class, it failed politically. The resort to violence made things worse.

In Pakistan's case the Islamism of the devout middle class and the impoverished made only a limited connection. The problem was solved by channeling the radical Islamism of the poor "toward objectives which locked them into a culture of antagonism to Shi'ites, Christians, Ahmadis and Indians".

But the folly of projecting "the social tensions of an unstable province. ... on to a foreign enemy" in Afghanistan and Kashmir was clear. What would happen when the fighters return? "Would they transform the jihad they have waged outside Pakistan into a domestic struggle which ... might turn directly against the state?"

This is the question before Musharraf. He moves to face it by a mixture of coercion, appeasement and attempts to enlist Islamist constituencies familiar from the compromises and evasions of his predecessors. It is not clear that he is in control, not clear that he is making the right decisions. But it is clear, whatever some in India may say, that the choices he faces are far from simple, and that Ataturk's path is not his to take.