Islamabad: When Nawaz Sharif won the general election last summer, it was widely expected that he was the man to finally tame the mighty army. Taming the army was a tall order in a country that generals have ruled for almost half its history. But Sharif had advantages which no previous civilian leader had enjoyed: an outright parliamentary majority; an independent-minded media; and an opposition that was unlikely to be beguiled by military plots, having suffered from them itself.
Yet a year on, his attempt to make Pakistan into a country where civilians are supreme is foundering. The government has just lost a battle with the army over Geo, the country’s most popular private news broadcaster. The army took offence at the station and got its licence suspended. The army has won a legal victory in the case against Pervez Musharraf, the general who toppled Sharif in 1999 and is on trial for treason. And it is pushing back against the prime minister’s attempt to hold peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban and his year-long refusal to endorse military demands for a campaign against the group in north Waziristan, on the border with Afghanistan.
Relations between Sharif and the army chief (General Raheel Sharif) were not cordial. The prime minister was causing bad blood without achieving much as a result.
Last June he took the momentous decision to charge a former army chief with treason. If the general is found guilty it would be a huge step towards ending the army’s culture of impunity. Partly because of that, many people thought Musharraf would be allowed to skip the country on one pretext or another after he had been indicted by the special court on March 31st. At first, this did not happen. The government banned the general from foreign travel. But on June 6th, a high court in Karachi ordered Musharraf’s name to be struck off the so-called exit-control list, paving the way for him to leave. The verdict clearly helped the army in its struggle with the government over Musharraf’s fate.
Sharif's dilemma is that if fails in his fight with the general, he would end up little better than Asif Ali Zardari, his rival whose Pakistan Peoples Party government survived a full term in power largely by doing very little. Sharif’s political problems have been compounded by the generals’ efforts to undermine his policy of dealing softly with the Pakistani Taliban. General Sharif has been gradually escalating what the army describes as “retaliatory strikes” in North Waziristan. The upshot of all this has been to weaken the prime minister and poison relations between the government and the army just when Pakistan faces some big strategic decisions.
