Whatever happens, there is no doubt that within the army there will be growing discontent with the present situation. In this sense, the choices facing the state in Pakistan are very limited. Either they have some form of representative democratic government or there will be a return to martial law. What I cannot conceive of as lasting indefinitely is the present Zia-Junejo setup which satisfies neither the army nor the overwhelming majority of people in Pakistan. Pakistan is not Philippines THE AMERICAN press coverage CLAUDIA WRIGHT
By any standard, the official consensus in Washington towards Pakistan has never looked more solid or more generous. The votes on July 24 and 30 by the House Appropriations Committees to earmark United States military aid for Pakistan for the next year at 340 million US dollars and economic aid at 250 million US dollars elevates Pakistan into the big league of US aid recipients who are, in congressional terms, safe from cuts. Pakistan joins Israel and Egypt, and steps ahead of Turkey, the Philippines, and the Central American allies in the war against Nicaragua, each of whom face cuts of up to 50 per cent. The appropriations votes are the tangible,
Q. Although it is quite small, has the left in Pakistan been able to play any role in this situation?
A. The bulk of the left today is working inside other political parties of a nationalist type. There are small groups of communists and other leftists in some of the main towns, but these by no means add up to a major force.
The real danger in the situation is that the people of Sind, who have been in the forefront of the struggle, might be isolated and defeated, as they were in 1983. Were this to happen then the national question in Pakistan would become uncontrollable, and there would be massive pressure for Sindhi independence which would have repercussions in other regions, most notably in Baluchistan. : the of US policy towards Pakistan real policy-making. The criticism that has appeared in the US press is a token display, a safety-valve for those officials and congressmen who have had far tougher things to say about the "Islamic bomb" in the past.
There is one question, however, that hasn't been settled in Washington: is there any reason to believe that the Reagan administration, or its successor, will view the democratic opposition in Pakistan in the same light as it has regarded the Philippines opposition that brought down the Marcos dictatorship early this year? More specifically, is the co-chair of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), Benazir Bhutto, likely to attract the kind of
PAKISTAN official US support Corazon Aquino achieved before she became president of the Philippines?
There are several similarities between Bhutto and Aquino, and in a profile of Bhutto's views which the New York Times published last month - at the start of Prime Minister Junejo's trip to the United States -the newspaper reported that "many politicians say that Miss Bhutto hopes that Washington may see her as a credible alternative to President Zia and encourage him to yield power to her, such as the way President Ferdinand E Marcos was pressed to withdraw in favour of Corazon C Aquino." For the American media, whose attention span on Pakistani and Filipino politics does not stretch beyond the dramatic images of street rallies, both Bhutto and Aquino have been projected to the US audience as courageous women battling an unpopular dictatorship.
There are other obvious and dramatic parallels. Both women have suffered terrible, personal ordeals at the hands of the dictatorshipthrough the imprisonment and judicial murder of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and the assassination of Benigno Aquino. Both women have themselves been threatened with injury, imprisonment and death. Both are from the landed elite of their societies, and draw on substantial political support of a traditional kind from their home areas. Both have also shown they can mobilize enormous shows of public support of a decidedly nontraditional kind. Similarities between Benazir and Cory
Less obvious in the press coverage, but equally important in the official calculations, is the similarity between the two women in their approach towards the US government. When Benigno Aquino flew back to Manila on his ill-fated return from exile in 1983, he thought he had State Department and CIA backing to run against Marcos for the presidency without threatening the tenure of US military bases at Clark Airfield and Subic Bay. Last November, classified documents from the US embassy in Manila confirm, when Cory Aquino was contemplating her election campaign against Marcos, US officials told her their support for an honest election was contingent on her agreement to accept as her vice-presidential candidate Salvador Laurel (now the vice-president), and her pledge to keep US bases out of contention. In the final showdown with Marcos last February, it was Aquino's alliance with Laurel, with the defence minister
5 has been raising far more doubts than genuinely exist in the minds of officials, either in Islamabad or Washington, to the questions that have been raised about Pakistan's nuclear programme, negotiations over the war in Afghanistan and control of narcotics. The Reagan administration and US Congress quietly agree on the same set of answers. These amount to a calculated wink in the direction of Islamabad, intended to minimize frictions and keep the Pakistan government and armed forces happy. [This article first appeared in the August 14, 1986 issue of the Pakistan weekly, Viewpoint.] has been raising far more doubts than genuinely exist in the minds of officials, either in Islamabad or Washington, to the questions that have been raised about Pakistan's nuclear programme, negotiations over the war in Afghanistan and control of narcotics. The Reagan administration and US Congress quietly agree on the same set of answers. These amount to a calculated wink in the direction of Islamabad, intended to minimize frictions and keep the Pakistan government and armed forces happy. [This article first appeared in the August 14, 1986 issue of the Pakistan weekly, Viewpoint.]
Juan Enrile, and with the vice-chief of staff, General Fidel Ramos, that reassured Washington, and overcame White House reluctance to give Marcos the shove.
US officials believe that Benazir Bhutto is trying to follow this script by elevating General Tikka Khan in the PPP, by making overtures to other military officers and by giving a variety of State Department and congressional visitors the assurance that she would not be hostile towards the US, that she would "keep the door open" to US aid and that she would not oppose the current US and Pakistani negotiating posture toward Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.
These issues were discussed when Bhutto met on May 26 with Representative Stephen Solarz, chair of the House Sub-Committee on Asian and Pacific Affairs. The significance of this meeting is threefold. Solarz was one of the most vocal congressional critics of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, and a strong advocate of free elections to replace Marcos. If congress is to be persuaded to regard Bhutto as Aquino, Solarz is invaluable.
He is also Jewish and the principal advocate of Israel in the House of Representatives. In that role, Solarz has been a consistent critic of Pakistan's nuclear programme in the past. Yet now, following US press reports of Pakistani breakthroughs in achieving weapons grade enrichment of uranium and in testing a lead-core nuclear device, Solarz has quietly dropped threats of US sanctions. Although publicly and for media consumption Solarz is still committed to holding Pakistan's aid hostage to the nuclear programme, in practice he believes that preserving the US position in Pakistan is more important now than confrontation over the nuclear issue. In that respect Solarz has moved rightward to embrace the administration's policy.
Finally, Solarz is the self-appointed candidate to be secretary of state if a Democrat is elected president in 1988. To that end, the Brooklyn congressman has shifted ground, endorsing administration-sponsored "freedom-fighters" in Afghanistan and Cambodia, and seeking headlines as the Democrat who stands up for General Zia with
Prime Minister Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto in 1977 (DR) 6 democracy in the third world. That is the pose Solarz struck in a widely reported BBC interview of June 14, following his meeting with Bhutto. In calling for "mid-term" parliamentary elections on a "party basis" in Pakistan, he deliberately appeared to be endorsing Bhutto's call and throwing the weight of the US Congress against Prime Minister Junejo.
In the weeks that have followed the controversy in Pakistan over this statement, Solarz has tried to preserve the image of the defender of democracy, while emptying his call of its practical political significance. He now says he did not mean elections in Pakistan this year - perhaps, in 1987 or 1988 instead. "Sooner than the government intends but later than Miss Bhutto hopes" he wrote in the New York Times on July 13. After Prime Minister Junejo refused his request for a meeting in Washington, Solarz claims he was too busy, and the prime minister's schedule too crowded, to make a private meeting possible. He defends Bhutto but refuses to mention Asghar Khan, who, Solarz's aides say, declined their request for a meeting in Pakistan last May.
"Now that democracy has been restored in the Philippines," Solarz claimed in his Times article, "the United States needs to consider how best to promote political pluralism in Pakistan if we are going to protect our strategic interests on the subcontinent as effectively as we protected them in south-east Asia." The "we" in this statement is the royal plural. Solarz is setting himself up as the candidate who appears just as tough as the Republicans but more intelligent and sympathetic in dealing with the third world. While Solarz's rhetoric is vague enough to satisfy almost anyone, his pose as the advocate, counsellor and defender of Aquino in the Philippines, and now Bhutto in Pakistan, is calculated to make him look more potent than the White House or the State Department. It is interventionism with a human face - for US electoral purposes.
Solarz's ambitions are no secret in Washington, and his manoeuvring is clearly understood by his Republican opponents, as well as by Ambassador Deane Hinton. In their view, the question of political pluralism has already been settled in Pakistan, and Junejo is the democratic choice to head the government, not Bhutto.
The Reagan administration does not regard General Zia ul-Haq in the same way as it regarded Marcos. They believe he is a much more modest man, with a far more humble wife, less given to grandiose illusions, less corrupt, and more willing to rule by the consensus of his generals. According to US officials, the Pakistani officer corps is "reformist" in the way they have sought to encourage in the Philippines under General Ramos - that is, with professional motivation and morale, and loyalty to the regular hierarchy of command, not to personal cliques and patrons like Marcos and his General Fabian Ver. The US embassy in Islamabad and the administration in Washington also like Junejo, and believe that he - in alliance with Zia and the military - can be trusted to preserve US strategic interests. Stable understanding
Personal trust is the key here. The administration is confident it knows exactly how far the Pakistan nuclear programme has gone, and the point beyond which Islamabad will not go, so long as US aid continues to grow, as anticipated between now and 1993. US officials believe they have a stable understanding with Islamabad, and see no reason to upset that. They do not trust Benazir Bhutto to maintain the aid relationship, and if that were to be disturbed, Washington fears Bhutto would make, her own decisions on the nuclear programme.
But there is an even deeper reason for the distrust. According to a senior administration appointee, "it is the Russians. Benazir's brothers went to the Russians. We would never support her because of that. We would never support Cory Aquino if she or her family went to the Russians." According to another official, the Pentagon is "torn between an absolute preference for dictators and a dislike of Muslims with the bomb." As an alternative to Zia's martial law administration, Junejo can be trusted with the bomb, but if he fails to counteract Bhutto, martial law would once again be the American preference. Accordingly, the Washington consensus is that the present political arrangements in Pakistan are the optimum ones, and they will resist any deal Bhutto may offer them.
Unions targetted THE RISE of the Black unions clearly represents a major advance in the organization of the Black masses, and they have been a special target of the repression unleashed by the state of emergency.