Why Pakistan's Zardari Will Not Fall to a Military Coup

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Aqil Shah

An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Pakistani politics.

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Pakistan's three pillars of state -- the army, the government, and the judiciary -- are locked in a draw. You know the kind: three gunmen, all with guns in both hands, aim fearfully at one another, each unwilling to make the first move. As any good connoisseur of Westerns knows, he who fires first is at a tactical disadvantage. The second to discharge his weapon usually wins. That is why Pakistan has seen plenty of political machinations in recent weeks, but, as yet, no fatal shot.

The current crisis started in October, when an American businessman of Pakistani origin, Mansoor Ijaz, claimed that he was asked to deliver a secret letter to U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen on behalf of Pakistan's civilian government. The anonymous memo requested U.S. protection from a military coup that the government feared was in the offing. In return, Islamabad offered to dismantle part of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's powerful spy agency. Ijaz later claimed that the author of the memo was none other than Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, who, Ijaz said, had written the letter at the request of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. 

After the revelations, Pakistan's military, egged on by an outraged media and opposition, demanded an investigation. Happy to oblige, the Supreme Court set up a three-judge bench to look into "Memogate." Islamabad recalled Haqqani from Washington. He resigned and then holed himself up in Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's residence, fearing for his life. 

Meanwhile, Gilani and the military are fighting a war of words; he called the army a "state within a state" and decried its independent submission of affidavits for the Memogate case to the Supreme Court as "unconstitutional and illegal." In turn, the army warned Zardari and Gilani of "very serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences" if the government did not back off. That menacing response, coupled with Gilani's sudden sacking last week of a senior bureaucrat in the Defense Ministry (who is also a retired three-star general), bolstered rumors of an impending coup.

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court took the opportunity this week to initiate contempt of court proceedings against Gilani. The case relates to a long-standing corruption dispute over Zardari's Swiss bank accounts. In 2009, the court directed Islamabad to request that Switzerland open an investigation into Zardari's finances. Unsurprisingly, Gilani came out in opposition, defending his boss. The government's foot-dragging on the case since has now landed Gilani himself in court. 

So what does this all mean? Essentially, a complex power struggle is playing out between the governing Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the military. A braying judiciary further compounds the situation. Each is looking to control Pakistan's national security policy and, specifically, its relationship with the country's most important ally, the United States. In times past, the outcome of such a struggle would have been almost preordained -- as in 1958, 1977, and 1999, when the military easily kicked the civilians to the curb. 

But today, there are limits to each branch's power. The once all-powerful military is increasingly insecure. 

For one, some political commentators believe that the anonymous letter at the core of Memogate is a fake -- a useful stick the military created for beating up the PPP. In fact, there is much to this argument. The memo itself reads like the paranoid ramblings of an extreme military nationalist. In addition to calling for the disbanding of parts of the ISI, the memo gives the U.S. military a green light to conduct operations against al Qaeda on Pakistani soil. It also urges the United States to help Pakistani civilians to take more control of the armed forces, to improve the safety and security of the nuclear program and assets, and to rein in nonstate actors threatening India and the United States.  

All that might sound well and good to American ears, but it does not to Pakistani ones. Zardari and his government are incompetent, but they are not fools. They know that it would be impossible for any Pakistani civilian government to fulfill the memo's demands. Not only that, attempting to do so would be political suicide -- especially if such aims are written down and made public. The ambiguity over the authorship of the unsigned memo is the only thing keeping the government in power. It still retains the benefit of the doubt, but only just.  

Of course, the national media is frothing at the mouth with faux hysteria, and a conveniently nationalistic narrative against the government has taken hold, spurred on by the military and opposition parties. The irony is that many of the memo's demands -- such as that to allow the United States to fight al Qaeda within Pakistan -- have, in the past, been fulfilled by the military itself, often in return for U.S. military aid. That is why the authorship of the memo is so important. If the government wrote it, it would be deemed treasonous. If the military wrote it, it would in one sense be business as usual. But in another, its creation would suggest the military's insecurity and weakness.