But this is only one squall rocking the government. There are others. One emanates from the country’s powerful lawyers’ movement, whose self-titled ‘Long March’ concluded on June 13 in a cacophony of rage as thousands rallied outside Parliament in Islamabad. Another is growing discontent over US military actions, not only in Afghanistan, but also, increasingly, inside Pakistan. On June 11, US Special Forces killed 11 Pakistani soldiers at their base on the Afghan border, the most lethal instance of ‘friendly fire’ since the Pakistani military became an unwilling convert to the US war on radical Islam in October 2001.

The lawyers’ demands have been consistent since Pakistan’s parliamentary elections on February 18: reinstatement of the 63 judges Musharraf sacked in 2007 during a bout of martial rule, and impeachment of a president most Pakistanis believe lost his mandate with the drubbing ‘his’ party received in the suffrage. Yet if the Long Marchers’ anger was expressed against Musharraf, their true target — symbolized by the destination of Parliament — was the government, particularly its main component, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of the slain ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto and her widower and political heir Asif Ali Zardari.

For eleven weeks the PPP has dithered over the fate of Musharraf and the judges, creating the spectacle of a government adrift and in crisis. In a sign of the times, the PML-N was the largest contingent on the march, protesting its own coalition partner. PPP lawyers and cadre had slunk away from the capital.

Contradiction is also the source of the US-Pakistani imbroglio. Cajoled and rented by Washington, the Pakistani army since 2003 has engaged in a low-intensity war against its own people in a futile attempt to dislodge Taliban fighters and al-Qaeda fugitives ensconced on the Pakistani-Afghan border. These military operations have swelled the ranks of the Taliban, transforming it from an insurgency in Afghanistan into an indigenous Pakistani movement that now rules not only much of the tribal borderlands but also large parts of the ‘settled’ Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).

Since the elections, the government — led by the army — has tried to wrest back some of this lost territory via peacemaking and negotiation rather than war and incursion. Alarmed at the impact these policies could have on NATO’s counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, US forces have responded by increasing the number of cross-border strikes into Pakistan. For many Pakistanis the killing of the soldiers was thus an ‘accidental’ death foretold. And Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s warning on June 15 that his troops may also be forced to invade Pakistan in ‘self-defense’ — an alarm bell few in Pakistan believe could have been rung without some American tugging — is a harbinger of battles to come.

Interminable judicial crisis

The Long March, actually a ragged motorcade, took six days to reach Islamabad from the capital cities of Pakistan’s four provinces. The crawl was an apt metaphor for the judicial impasse that inspired it. Most Pakistanis believed the crisis had been resolved on March 24, when their new prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, freed from house arrest the ousted judges, including Pakistan’s chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. In fact, the crisis only deepened.

The recent career of this stocky jurist with hooded eyes had become a symbol of the change most Pakistanis want for their country. In March 2007 Musharraf tried to fire him, ostensibly for ‘misconduct,’ but actually because he had called to account the army’s illegal use of state power. The lawyers’ movement flowered in Chaudhry’s defense, forcing his reappointment and, eventually, Musharraf’s resignation as army chief of staff.

During martial rule in November, Musharraf sacked Chaudhry again, together with 62 other judges. Five thousand lawyers were interned, including leaders like the head of the Supreme Court Bar Association, Aitzaz Ahsan. Musharraf charged all of the attorneys with ‘conspiracy.’ But the real crime was clear: The Supreme Court had been about to rule invalid his presidential ‘election’ in October. The incarceration of the judges cast a pall over the February elections — darker, in fact, than the cloud formed by Bhutto’s murder in December 2007. Although the PPP emerged as the largest force in the new assembly — the only party with a base in all four provinces — it polled no more votes than it had in the 2002 elections.

The PML-N was the real wildcard. It swept aside all comers in Punjab, the richest and most populous province, and did so on the back of one uncompromising demand: full reinstatement of the judges. ‘Sharif made the judges’ issue his own and defeated the blood of Bhutto. That is the power of the chief justice,’ said Ahsan, a PPP leader in Punjab. He is also the major strategist behind the chief justice’s various campaigns for reinstatement, including the Long March.

Since 1999 — when Musharraf deposed Sharif’s second government — the PPP has been allied with the PML-N in opposition to military rule. But in government, in the 1990s, the two parties were adversaries. That they came together in a coalition in 2008 was thus seen as a new dawn, and one that most Pakistanis welcomed. Again, Sharif had only one condition for the alliance: reinstatement of judges. ‘The ouster of Musharraf can wait,’ said Ahsan Iqbal, a PML-N minister.

Reinstatement did not happen, despite negotiations, two missed deadlines and ‘crisis’ meetings between Sharif and Zardari in London and Dubai. On May 12, nine PML-N ministers resigned over the impasse. ‘We will not be part of any conspiracy to strengthen the dictatorship,’ said Sharif.

On the surface, the difference between the two coalition parties is not about whether the judges will be restored but how. The PML-N believes it can be done through an executive order. The PPP believes reinstatement requires an act of Parliament since there are legal issues — like Musharraf’s appointment of 17 new judges — that have to be accommodated.

But there is another reason for the PPP’s tardiness. Reinstatement could rend the delicate understandings stitched together between Musharraf and Bhutto in 2007. She had agreed to back him as a civilian president if he agreed to grant amnesty to her, Zardari and her party on a raft of corruption cases pending from their periods in government. Zardari fears that a reinstated independent judiciary would annul the amnesty. And Musharraf insists he has delivered on his side of the pact: He let Bhutto return from exile, withdrew the government’s cases against her family, resigned as army chief and allowed free elections on February 18 — so free that his own ‘king’s party,’ the PML-Q, was routed. He now expects the PPP to reciprocate. So does Washington.

But Zardari cannot reciprocate — not without tearing his coalition, and perhaps his party, apart. On May 4, Musharraf proffered a ‘historic compromise,’ mediated by the United States. He would give up certain executive powers in return for indemnity for his actions under martial law, especially the sacking of the judges. But he would keep the president’s right to appoint chiefs of the armed forces and preside over the extra-parliamentary National Security Council, two powers that essentially formalize the army’s role in governance.

The PPP wants him to give up all powers save those of a figurehead. Musharraf has refused. The PPP’s latest compromise is a convoluted ‘constitutional amendment’ whereby the president is indemnified, the judges are reinstated and power to appoint the heads of the armed forces is shared with the prime minister, but all other executive powers are surrendered. Musharraf said he would resist all attempts to reduce him to a ‘useless vegetable.’ The PML-N has said it will resist all ruses to indemnify him. So will the lawyers. ‘President Musharraf will not be given safe passage,’ Sharif thundered before the Long Marchers in Islamabad. ‘He will be impeached and held accountable for his deeds.’

The script seems written for confrontation between the three arms of the state. In the past such paralysis was the trigger for military intervention. Will Pakistan’s 600,000-strong army intervene again?

The message from army headquarters is that it will not accept Musharraf’s ‘humiliation,’ and that includes impeachment. Washington has intimated the same. But the army will not bring down an elected government at Musharraf’s bidding, says a source: ‘The army paid its dues to Musharraf in 2007: when he sacked the chief justice, imposed martial law and tarried over stepping down as army chief. Its message now is, ‘You’re on your own.” Under its new head, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the army seems serious about disengaging from its historical role as political arbiter. But that does not mean it is removing its hand from politics entirely. On the contrary, it is the army that is taking the lead in the peace process with the Pakistan Taliban.

Peace and America

Preaching peace, the new government inherited war. In February, the army was reconquering cities from the Taliban in Swat in the NWFP and South Waziristan, a tribal agency on the Afghan border. In reprisal, the Taliban and its allies were striking throughout Pakistan. In 2007′s first three months there were 17 suicide attacks leaving 274 civilians, police and soldiers dead, including blasts in major cities like Islamabad, Lahore and Rawalpindi. Pakistan felt like Iraq.

Two actions brought the violence to heel. One was a choking siege in South Waziristan on the tribes belonging to Baitullah Mehsud — leader of the Pakistan Taliban and the man Musharraf (though not the PPP) says killed Bhutto. In collective punishment, the army also evicted 150,000 tribesmen and their families from their homes. The siege and expulsion ‘bankrupted Mehsud and forced him to negotiate,’ says Khalid Aziz, a former first secretary in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and now an analyst.

The other move was the government’s commitment to political rather than just military solutions to the revolt, including the repeal of British-era colonial laws in FATA that permitted abuses like mass expulsion and the razing of villages. The Taliban wanted their replacement with Islamic law, and for the FATA to become a separate province. ‘We did not want to fight the government,’ said Taliban commander Maulvi Faqir Mohammed in March. But, he warned, ‘The country would suffer as long as Pakistan remained an ally of the US.’ Peace talks began in South Waziristan and Swat.

Pakistan’s insurgents are not one group, but at least four, loosely allied. There is the Pakistan Taliban and the Afghan Taliban. There are the ‘Kashmiri mujahideen,’ native jihadist groups once nurtured by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to fight a proxy war with India in the disputed Kashmir province but which have now cut loose from their handlers. And there is al-Qaeda and its affiliates: between 150 and 500 Arab, Uzbek and other foreign fighters who have found refuge in the FATA and use the remote tribal enclave for planning, training, rearmament and recruitment.

There are differences between the factions. The Pakistan and Afghan Taliban are still overwhelmingly ethnic Pashtun movements with a focus on Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda and the jihadists have a more global reach, including targets within Pakistan, such as the bombing on June 2 of the Danish Embassy in Islamabad. But all are united in the war against the US and NATO in Afghanistan. And all are committed to extending the Taliban’s territorial reach beyond the FATA to the NWFP as a whole, including Peshawar, the provincial capital. Such Talibanization ‘gives the Taliban more security, territory, recruits and bargaining power,’ says a source. ‘It allows them to talk peace in Swat while waging war in Waziristan.’

The government’s response to Talibanization has been to temporize. In 2007, before her return, Bhutto spoke of devolving democratic power to the tribes while integrating the FATA into Pakistan proper, in effect doing away with its special ‘tribal’ status. The focus of the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party, which heads the NWFP Provincial Government, is economic: It has drawn up plans for a crash program of schools, colleges, rehabilitation centers and jobs to wean young tribesmen from an emerging Taliban polity that is well ‘on the way to primitive state formation with its own tax system, paid bureaucracy and dispute resolution,’ says Aziz. For him — and many in the NWFP government — the Taliban represents less an Islamist movement than a ‘class revolt expressed in a religious idiom. The closest analogy is the Maoists in Nepal,’ he says. It can only be addressed by the ‘transformation and integration’ of a derelict tribal system.

Such a project ‘will take years,’ says Aziz. It is also understood that no peace will hold in the NWFP without a resolution of the conflict with the Taliban in the FATA, which is under the remit of the federal government. And the PPP and Awami Nationalist Party have passed that buck to the army: an abdication frankly admitted by the government’s decision on June 25 to entrust the use of force in FATA entirely to Kayani. The army’s strategy for now is to secure localized peace deals that will keep the territorial advantage it obtained in February while playing divide-and-rule with the Taliban’s different tribal leaderships. It is ‘the policy of the breathing space,’ says Afghanistan expert Ahmad Rashid.

In South Waziristan, this means extracting a pledge from the Taliban to end attacks on the army and government-sponsored development projects. In return, the army will release prisoners and ‘reposition’ its units outside the cities. In Swat in the NWFP, the tradeoff is that the Taliban end attacks on government institutions, including girls’ schools, in return for implementation of Islamic law, seen principally as a means to coopt hundreds of jobless seminary students who may otherwise join the militants. ‘It’s an agreement,’ says Aziz, ‘but not in the Western sense. In the FATA an agreement is an arrangement to coexist. It means shutting your eyes to many things.’

The Taliban have closed their eyes to the army camps that now nestle permanently in the mountains above them. And the army is looking away from a steady flow of guerrillas across the border, or at least is not acting overtly to intercept them. Peace in Pakistan, in other words, may translate into intensified warfare in Afghanistan.

Or so the Americans allege. In January, just prior to the elections, US commanders seconded to NATO met with Musharraf in Islamabad. They sought permission to increase overflights of the FATA by pilotless drone aircraft to kill al-Qaeda fugitives. The aim was to ‘shake down’ the al-Qaeda command to get a better steer on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, preferably before the end of Bush’s tenure in January 2009. Musharraf agreed, on the condition that the quarries were al-Qaeda, not Taliban. He feared blowback.

Since then, there have been several drone sorties into Pakistani airspace, leaving more than 50 people dead. According to US and British intelligence, the slain have included ‘high-value’ senior al-Qaeda commanders, like the Libyan Layth al-Libi and Algerian Sulayman al-Jaza’iri, the latter allegedly responsible for planning attacks in Europe. According to locals, the majority of those killed were tribesmen, women and children. But the drones are also being flown to punish the Pakistani government for a policy Washington opposes.

The last deadly attack was on May 15 in Damadola, a village in the Bajaur tribal agency. At least 15 were killed, including perhaps al-Jaza’iri and an 11-year old child. They were reportedly in a house owned by Mullah Obaidallah Akhund, the former Afghan Taliban defense minister captured in 2007 by the Pakistani army at the behest of Washington. There are rumors that Akhund has or will be freed as part of the South Waziristan prisoner exchange. Unusually, the army condemned the strike as ‘completely counterproductive.’ So did Gilani and the NWFP governor.

The killing of the 11 Pakistani soldiers on June 11 comes from this well of distrust. The day before Afghan soldiers, backed by US Special Forces, had tried to set up a post near the Afghan border but inside Pakistani territory. The army ordered them out. As the Afghan and American soldiers retreated, the Taliban ambushed them. Artillery and air-to-surface missiles were fired at or near the army base in Pakistan. US commanders knew the risk of ‘collateral damage’ was high: They fired in any case. That was why the Pakistan army — in a ferocious communiqué — called the US missile strike an ‘act of aggression.’ In the eyes of most of Pakistan, it was.

Subsequent incursions by US helicopters and drones into Pakistani airspace — as well as very public statements by US NATO Commanders that a recent hike in Taliban activity in eastern Afghanistan is ‘directly attributable to the lack of pressure on the [Pakistani] side of the border’ — has convinced many in Pakistan that Washington is about to shift strategy: away from relying on the Pakistani army to ‘do more’ against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in FATA and toward a preemptive policy whereby the US and/or NATO go into Pakistan alone.

Centrism cannot hold

Why has the dawn broken by the February elections dimmed so rapidly? The short answer is that the political aspiration voiced by those elections has been gagged by extra-parliamentary agreements that preceded them.

When Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, she did so as part of a deal underwritten by Washington and the army. If elected prime minister, she promised, her party would ensure continuity, not change, in policy, whether in terms of the army’s mercenary role in the ‘war on terror’ or Musharraf’s continuation as a ‘civilian’ president for another five years. This vow was why Washington prevailed on Musharraf to allow her back, especially as the lawyers’ protest had stripped away the last vestiges of his ‘civilian’ legitimacy.

But, on February 18, the Pakistani electorate voted for change — and against Musharraf, Islamabad’s participation in what most Pakistanis see as an American war and the army’s involvement in governance. Prior to her murder, Bhutto had confected the idea of a ‘moderate middle’ to obscure the contradiction at the heart of her return. With her party in government, the contradiction stands naked. Whether on Afghan borderlands or in the federal capital, the centrism of the PPP’s politics — appealing to the masses while trying to toe the US line — cannot hold. Very simply, there is no center in Pakistani politics, no ‘moderate middle’: There is policy decreed by Washington and an electorate, including now large parts of the army, that rejects it.

Storms lie in wait for Pakistan — aside from the fallout of a judicial crisis that may yet bring the coalition government to an early shipwreck. By the end of June, the government will almost certainly pass a budget that aims to narrow yawning deficits by withdrawing subsidies from basic commodities, including wheat, gas and electricity. This move will deeply hurt the poor: Nearly 50 percent of Pakistanis — 77 million people — are already ‘food insecure,’ according to UN surveys. With Pakistan suffering from the same pressures on food prices that have depressed living standards worldwide, such austerity measures could end in food riots.

And the summer thaw in the Hindu Kush, with the attendant rise in Taliban attacks, could prove the final tripwire for a full-fledged US incursion into the FATA. Aziz is mordant about the consequence of that collision. ‘If there is a peace agreement [with the Taliban] followed by a major NATO attack inside Pakistan, it would stretch the US-Pakistani alliance to the breaking point. It would destroy everything.’

Is there shelter from the gathering storms? The government could return to its election pledges. It could reinstate the judges and, concurrent with dialogue with the Taliban, commit to a mass investment for ‘empowerment, education, employment’ for the poor in all of the smaller provinces, but especially the FATA and the NWFP. But for all this to transpire, Musharraf would need to stand down, the army would need to stand back and Washington would need to exhibit a ‘strategic patience’ unseen since September 11, 2001. None of these eventualities is likely.

For her followers Bhutto offered the hope of deliverance from military rule, religious bigotry and pauperisation. On her return to Pakistan on 18 October – met with the slaughter of 137 people in dual suicide attacks – she said ‘education, employment and empowerment’ were the arms to defeat Pakistan’s evil axis of military dictatorship and Islamic militancy.

To the Bush administration and Britain she was a saviour of a different kind. They had engineered her return to deliver President Pervez’s Musharraf’s military regime the civilian legitimacy it so palpably lacked. In the caustic description of Pakistan historian Ahmed Rashid a ‘loveless marriage’ had been arranged so that ‘the General can combat terrorists and the Lady play democracy’.

Washington also assumed that Bhutto would endorse augmented US military operations in Pakistan, especially on the border areas with Afghanistan where the Taliban and, according to US intelligence, Al Qaeda are entrenched.
Which will be her legacy? The American surrogate who, in return for office, was prepared to rent Pakistan as a forward Nato base for the war in Afghanistan? Or the martyr who was killed because she alone could mobilise the nation’s poor against the military’s stranglehold on the state?

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) her father established and she led embodies the contradiction. For it is a mass party, aspiring to modernity, whose leadership are feudal landlords – Pakistan’s most reactionary social class.

Done deal

Washington and London orchestrated her return but she owed it to a man – Pakistan’s chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. On 9 March 2007, Musharraf sacked him, ostensibly for ‘misconduct’.
The real reason was judicial rulings that thwarted the army’s illegal acquisition of state power. These concerned dodgy privatisation deals that sold off state assets cheap to cohorts in Pakistan’s capitalist class; the illegal ‘disappearance’ of hundreds of regime dissidents, especially from the subject provinces of the Frontier, Sindh and Balochistan; and, perhaps most importantly, Chaudhry’s ‘legal opinion’ that it would be unconstitutional for Musharraf to be president for another term.

The sacking turned out to be the biggest blunder of the general’s political life.

Lawyers took to the streets in protest, buoyed by a resurgent civil society, assertive judiciary and committed media. Following a snowballing campaign, on 20 July the supreme court restored Chaudhry to his post. For younger generations his cause was their first taste of political activism. For the older it was the first time a strategy of collective action had taken on the regime and won.

‘The lawyers’ movement was a remarkable event,’ says political scientist Rasul Baksh Rais. ‘It was nonviolent, it was popular and it echoed the sentiments of the middle classes and other new classes forged by modernisation: that we need the rule of law.’

Bhutto viewed the lawyers’ campaign through the prism of her own redemption. She had been in self-exile since 1999, fleeing a raft of corruption cases from her two periods as prime minister. She understood the protests had exposed how small was the civilian base of the Musharraf regime, including among Pakistan’s westernised elite, once the general’s core constituency. But she was fearful mass agitation would trigger martial law, destroying all prospects for her return.

She told cadres in the PPP – the largest party in Pakistan and the strongest amongst the lawyers – to tail the protests, not lead them. She also shunned PPP leader Aitzaz Ahsan, Chaudhry’s defence counsel and the brain behind the mass, nonviolent campaign that saw him restored. She viewed him as a threat, and not only for his profile in leading the lawyers’ movement. He was from the Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, and the leader of the PPP’s urban, middle class and modernist wing. Bhutto was from Sindh, drawing strength from the rural masses, but a scion of the landed aristocracy.

She offered Washington a deal. In return for an amnesty on the corruption cases and a third stab at the premiership, she would withdraw the PPP from a cross-party alliance predicated on ending the army’s role in governance. She also pledged her party to back a civilian Musharraf presidency. She was to deliver on both counts.

Washington had other reasons to give her time. CIA intelligence reported that the Taliban and Al Qaeda had regrouped in North Waziristan, a remote tribal area on the Afghan border. From this redoubt the Taliban was powering the Afghanistan insurgency and, said the Americans, Al Qaeda was training cadre to launch attacks in America, Europe and North Africa.

The resurgence was the spawn of a peace deal struck between the army and the ‘Pakistan’ Taliban in September 2006. Musharraf had sold it as a ‘holistic’ solution to the menace of ‘extremism’. In fact it was a treaty of surrender, brought on by US-driven campaigns in the tribal areas that served to demoralise the army and strengthen the militants. Ten months after it was signed, Bush wanted Musharraf to scrap the deal and go back to military might.

The advice wasn’t only verbal. In June and July US/Nato special forces launched several raids into Pakistan’s borderlands that left dozens dead and one clear message: if the Pakistan army did not go after the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the US army would. Bush signed a law predicating $1 billion in annual US military aid on the army acting against the Taliban. And Democrat presidential hopeful Barak Obama said he would send in the marines if he had ‘actionable intelligence’ that Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan.

Weakened at home, Musharraf buckled. After six months of dithering he authorised a commando assault on Islamabad’s Red Mosque, long a sanctuary for pro-Taliban clerics and jihadist militia. More than one hundred were killed, mostly seminary students. He sent two divisions to north Waziristan, inflaming a Taliban-led insurgency that so far has cost 1,600 lives, including 345 soldiers.

Bush lionised both moves. So did Bhutto, the only Pakistani politician to do so.

In July the Americans invited her to Dubai, where she met Musharraf. They agreed the logistics of her return and a post-election power sharing deal. The tryst confirmed the experience she learned as prime minister: that the road to even partial power in Pakistan lies less through the people than Washington and the army. Both said they would not forget the risks she had taken for the ‘war on terror’. Neither would her enemies.

Deal undone?

Did her return change her fealty to the deal? Like so much with Bhutto it depends who you ask. Tanvir Ahmad Khan was foreign secretary in her first government. He says the tumultuous reception in Karachi – as well as the savagery of the attempt to kill her – ‘re-radicalised’ her.

‘She knew under the American plan she was to play second fiddle – that as far as Washington was concerned it was Musharraf and the army who were indispensable to Pakistan, not she and the PPP,’ he says. ‘But she believed the dynamics set off by her return would enlarge the political space available to her and her policies. This is when the barrier between her and Musharraf came up. He and the army had suspicions she would go beyond her allotted role.’

Bhutto’s rhetoric certainly became shriller on home turf. Following the regime’s imposition of martial law on 3 November – ostensibly to tame the Taliban, actually to purge the judiciary, including, again, the chief justice – she declared famously, ‘It’s over with Musharraf!’

She also threatened to pull the PPP’s ranks onto streets of Lahore and Rawalpindi, both heartlands of Musharraf’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q). It took a phone call from US assistant secretary of state John Negroponte to douse the ire.

But on the crucial issues of Musharraf’s presidency, the centrality of the army in political life and a restoration of the pre-emergency judiciary, she kept to the script set by Washington. She called for none of them.

A PML-Q leader explains: ‘Prior to her return she promised the Americans that Musharraf would keep control of the national security issues, especially the war on terror and Pakistan’s nuclear arms. Benazir wanted to be prime minister and travel to Davos as the democratic face of Pakistan.’

Where she differed with the regime was on the contours of the post-election share. Musharraf and the PML-Q wanted her to be a junior coalition partner and were rigging the polls to make it happen. But Bhutto was reinvigorating the PPP as the most powerful party political machine in the land.

In any halfway straight contest it was clear who would win, says a former PPP man who is now an ally of Musharraf: ‘She harried the PPP to so enlarge its base that by the elections she would be able to form the largest political bloc. She was convinced that would have been the moment the political centre of gravity would return to her. She may have been right. When it came to pure political skills she could outmatch Musharraf and ten other generals. In that regard she was a giant.’

The choice

If there is to be a halfway straight contest in the elections on February 18, the PPP will be the largest political party. It will then face the choice Bhutto evaded ever since she returned.

It could form a national government with Pakistan’s other parties based on Musharraf’s resignation, the removal of the army from governance and a political consensus on policies to do with democracy, provincial autonomy and Pakistan’s stance towards the US/Nato war in Afghanistan. Such a government would command the support of the larger part of the Pakistani people. ‘It could seal an alliance with those parts of civil society mobilised by the lawyers’ movement and resolve tensions within the PPP,’ says the lawyer and analyst, Babar Sattar. It may even help re-found the PPP as modern, social democratic movement that could address – as well as air – promises of education, employment and empowerment.

Alternatively the PPP could keep to the deal brokered in Dubai. This would win it the blessings of Bush, Brown, Musharraf and the army. It would grant it access to state resources, vital to rent the loyalty of its core and impoverished constituencies in Sindh.

But ‘it would cause the break-up of the PPP’, says Sattar. It is unimaginable that cadres like Ahsan could remain in a party that not only shored up Musharraf but did nothing to restore Chaudhry to his position. Sooner or later the PPP would become what many in the military establishment have long wanted it to be: a rump provincial party that represents Sindh, but no more.

The auguries are not good. Many had hoped Bhutto’s death would mean elections throughout the PPP to determine a new national organisation, a new leadership, policies and ethos. In fact policy, resources and power were passed to Bhutto’s widower, courtesy of her will, a feudal rite of passage that belonged more to the 16th century than the 21st.

As for the inheritor, Asif Zardari, the least that can be said of him is that he too is a feudal scion. ‘And a basic feature of feudalism is that power is important. Principles are not,’ says Rais.

Already there are some in Pakistan’s ruling circles who see him as a more pliable interlocutor than his wife, ‘who could be difficult’, says one.

They are living a fool’s vision. The PPP’s national base and espousal of democracy are potentially threats to the army’s hegemony of the state. They are not threats to the existence of Pakistan, except for those, like Musharraf and Washington, who equate the nation with the state and the state with the army.

The real subversives are rather Pakistan’s sub-nationalist movements, which are themselves responses to a failed state and years of military rule. And these will be bolstered by the PPP’s collapse. That can be seen Bhutto’s native Sindh province, where violent protestors blamed Pakistan’s ‘Punjabi’ army for Bhutto’s murder. It is well developed in Balochistan, where for the last three years a separatist insurgency has been in armed struggle with the state. And it is there in the Talibanisation of the tribal areas and Frontier province, for the Taliban is a Pashtun nationalist movement almost as much as it is an Islamist one.

Sindhi and Baloch nationalists view the Pakistani army as a colonial power. The Taliban sees it as mercenary force acting on US orders. Both views have popular resonance. And all three movements in different ways are challenging the decrepit, feudal orders of their societies. But none can redress the immense problems of poverty, illiteracy, deprivation, backwardness and de-institutionalisation that are the real blights of their people. What they actually prefigure is Pakistan’s dismemberment and a regional implosion that would make Afghanistan seem a summer squall.

For, unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan has 160 million people, 600,000 soldiers and 50 nuclear warheads. It cannot implode.

* The Islamist and pro-American dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq hanged Bhutto’s father, prime minister Zulfiker Ali Bhutto, in 1979. Her brother, Shahnawaz, was posioned in France in 1985, probably by Pakistan’s intelligence services. Her other brother, Muntazer, was shot dead in a police ambush in Karachi in 1996.

The delegates were launching the ‘referendum campaign’. Over the next 12 months the APNA hopes to ask Pakistan Kashmir’s 3. 2 million residents one simple question: do they want freedom from or accession to Pakistan? ‘I believe there will be a thumping majority in favour of freedom,’ says Arif Shahid, APNA chairperson and brain behind the campaign. ‘The time for a real referendum on Kashmir has come.’

There is nothing unusual about the aspiration. Kashmiri nationalists have been fighting for the reunification of their state ever since it was partitioned between India and Pakistan in 1948. What is unusual is the brazenness. Nationalist parties are banned in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Neelum View is the glitziest hotel in Muzaffarabad, hosting Pakistani politicians and army generals alike. From where did the APNA get its temerity? The answer is as simple as it is tragic, says Shahid: the earthquake that last year destroyed large swathes of his country.

‘We lost thousands of our people and scores of our villages. But there’s no doubt the earthquake helped our cause. There is now an international presence and media in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. They see the political realities. And they are favourable to us.’

The call for an independent Kashmir has long been muffled by India and Pakistan’s rival claims on the territory, which have caused two of their three wars. Pakistan’s argument is that as a Muslim majority state Kashmir should be ‘free’ to accede to the Islamic Republic. India says Kashmir is an ‘integral’ part of its secular nation and will remain so in war or peace. Both sides are ready to fight ‘to the very last Kashmiri’, says Shahid.

The latest fight – an insurgency against army rule in India-controlled Kashmir – has been the bloodiest. Although it began as a nationalist uprising in 1989, it rapidly degenerated into a proxy war between Pakistan and India, scarred by sectarian killings, brutal army oppression and, so far, the death of at least 45,000 people, many of them civilians. Pakistani (or ‘Azad’) Kashmir has supplied the hinterland to the conflict, hosting 30,000 refugees and bases to a dozen or so pro-accession jihadist groups fighting the war on Islamabad’s behalf.

It was the presence of these ‘banned’ groups that explained Pakistan’s reluctance to open its side of Kashmir following the earthquake, says Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch (HRW). ‘For 48 hours the Pakistan army dithered,’ he says. ‘In the end the scale of the disaster overwhelmed them and the army was forced to open up Azad Kashmir to international relief organisations. But there were real misgivings. First, the army knew it would expose to public view militant jihadist camps whose existence had officially been denied. And second, it understood that with such a massive international operation in place the military would lose its grip on one of the most closed areas in Pakistan.’

That is what happened. Prior to the earthquake, all land and mobile telephone links were controlled by the army, proving a major obstruction to postearthquake rescue efforts. The government was thus compelled to open lines to private mobile companies and, through them, greater telecommunications and internet access. Similarly there are now for the first time nonstate radio stations, as well as several international media networks, operating out of Muzaffarabad.

This freeing up of Kashmiri society has redounded to nationalists’ benefit more than to the jihadists or the army, says Mohammed Khaleeque, APNA spokesperson. The reason, he says, is the Islamists’ sectarian role in the anti-Indian insurgency and the army’s failure to meet people’s expectations in the aftermath of the earthquake.

‘There is a lot of anger and it has translated into political protest,’ says Khaleeque. ‘In the last 12 months we’ve seen meetings, demonstrations and showdowns with the Pakistan authorities. Sometimes the protests are over government inefficiency and corruption. But increasingly there are demands that the army withdraw from Kashmir and that our sham “autonomous” local government stand down. People want real control of their lives. All of this has strengthened the nationalists.’ Brad Adams agrees.

‘Everyone we spoke to in Indian Kashmir – activist, official and neutral – said that the growing sentiment was for independence rather than accession to India or Pakistan. I’d be amazed if that wasn’t also the case in Azad Kashmir. Kashmiris on both sides of the divide know Pakistan is not the Muslim paradise it was made out to be. My hunch is that were Kashmiris free to choose they would prefer to go their own way.’

But the fear is there will be reversion to the old ways once the emergency caused by the earthquake is over and the international agencies start to pack up and leave. Diplomats and donors say that Pakistan is already quietly urging that the aid agencies quit Kashmir sooner rather than later. It is a request the world must resist, says Adams.

‘With the earthquake, the international community has a golden opportunity to open up Azad Kashmir permanently,’ he says. ‘And $6. 5 billion in aid is a lot of leverage. I am not saying emergency humanitarian relief should be made conditional.

But development aid can be. There are a lot of demands on the world’s resources. If they are to be spent on Kashmir’s reconstruction, then it should be on condition that Pakistan respects the basic civil and political rights of the Kashmiri people.’

As the body count started to mount, so did the outrage, and not only in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Over the next week mass funerals evolved into mass protests, with demonstrators denouncing President-General Pervez Musharraf, his military regime and, above all, their ‘strategic alliance’ in the US-led ‘war on terror’ – a war that translates easily here as a western crusade against Islam.

Addressing a mass rally in Peshawar on 3 November, the Islamist opposition leader, Fazlur Rahman, gave voice to the aspiration of thousands. ‘American and Nato forces cannot prolong the occupation and will leave Afghanistan soon,’ he said. He was also clear about who was behind the carnage at the madrassa.

‘Both the United States and the Musharraf government are responsible for what happened at Bajaur. Even if the operation had been carried out by the local (Pakistani) forces, the order would have been given by the US. That is why both are culprits in the case.’

But the culprits were unapologetic. The White House praised Musharraf’s ‘determination’ in fighting ‘terrorism’. And Pakistan’s supreme leader averred that all the slain were Taliban militants. ‘They were doing military training. Anyone who says these were innocent religious students is telling lies,’ he told a security seminar on 31 October.

To give weight to his words security men invited journalists in Islamabad to view a grainy, infrared video of ‘militants training in the planting of explosives or suicide bombings’, allegedly at the very madrassa. One official said the seminary had been frequented by Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command to Osama bin Laden. The statement was amplified loudly on US media.

To Pakistanis it was so much wind and piss, and not only because sightings of al Zawahiri are ‘a dime a dozen’ in tribal areas, admit American military analysts. Rather the conviction here is that the attack on the madrassa was either directly executed by unmanned US Predator drones that monitor the Pakistan-Afghan border or indirectly by Pakistani helicopters at Washington’s command. There is also near consensus over US motives: to prevent a peace agreement being signed between the Pakistan army and pro-Taliban tribesmen in Bajaur.

Talibanisation

Bajaur is one of many thorns in Pakistan-Nato relations. Adjacent to Afghanistan’s restive Kunar province, it is an entry point and haven for Taliban and al-Qaeda guerrillas fighting Nato forces. The head of the madrassa was a young cleric, Maulana Liaquat Ali, who, in October 2001, raised 10,000 volunteers to fight alongside Taliban resisting the USled invasion of Afghanistan. Liaquat Ali was killed in the missile strike.

But he was also increasingly marginal to Bajaur politics, and had been ever since the disastrous expedition into Afghanistan in 2001, say locals. In fact, at the time of the missile attack he was negotiating his amnesty with the Pakistan army in exchange for pledges not to give succour or sanctuary to foreign fighters, including the Taliban.

‘The evening before the attack Liaquat had been preparing a jirga (tribal council) for the signing ceremony with the government,’ says Pakistan analyst Rahimullah Yousefzai. ‘Why would the Pakistan army authorise an operation that destroys the Pakistan government’s main political strategy in the tribal areas?’ The answer, he suggests, is because the US had called time on the strategy.

The Bajaur agreement was modelled on one signed on 5 September between the government and pro-Taliban tribesmen in North Waziristan, another tribal agency on the Pakistan-Afghan border. During his recent trips to the US and London, Musharraf had sold this deal as a ‘holistic solution’ to the threat posed to his regime and Afghanistan by a resurgent Taliban and Talibanisation. These could only be defeated by ‘dialogue and development’ in addition to military force, he said.

George Bush and Tony Blair lauded the ‘courage’ of the Pakistani leader. Wiser diplomats kept their counsel. They knew ‘holism’ was not born of new political thinking but of defeat.

In 2002, US and Nato forces in Afghanistan presented the Pakistan leader with irrefutable proof that Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters were finding refuge in the tribal areas. With extreme reluctance – and for the first time in Pakistan’s history – Musharraf sent 80,000 soldiers into ‘autonomous’ agencies such as Bajaur and Waziristan. Four years on, 700 soldiers had been killed, many had deserted and at least six senior officers had been court martialled for refusing to wage war on their own tribesmen. The numbers of civilians killed and displaced in the conflict was even greater.

And the tribes had become radicalised. Power and leadership shifted from the traditional, progovernment elders or maliks to younger clerics or mullahs forged by successive jihads in Afghanistan, bonded in ethnic solidarity with the Taliban and inspired by the debased ‘Islamist’ visions of al-Qaeda.

These clerics and the madrassa students that follow them became the defenders of the tribal areas against the army incursions and acquired the political legitimacy born of resistance. They called themselves the Pakistan Taliban because that is precisely who they are, says Rahimullah Yousefzai.

‘They are Taliban in the sense that they share the same ideology as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and see them as their allies. If you ask them “Who is your leader?” they would say the Afghan Taliban emir Mullah Mohammed Omar. They also fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan’. Nor are their political visions different from their Afghan cousins, he adds. ‘They are Islamist, anti-western and want an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. They believe the system of government and justice that operated under the Taliban in Afghanistan is the purest form of Islamic rule’.

The 5 September agreement reflects their political power, Yousefzai says. In return for verbal pledges by the Pakistan Taliban to end attacks on pro-government tribesmen and prevent infiltration into Afghanistan, the government agreed to free Taliban prisoners, remove checkpoints and return confiscated weaponry. And while the army has fulfilled every one of its commitments, the Pakistan Taliban has observed theirs mostly in the breach. Since the agreement was initialled, at least four tribesmen have been killed by the Taliban, supposedly as ‘American spies’. And Nato monitors have registered a 300 per cent hike in cross-border infiltration into Afghanistan. There is only one area where the agreement appears to be holding, says Pakistani analyst Ismail Khan. ‘It’s the clause which says you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Since 5 September, there have been no (Taliban) attacks on government installations and the security forces have not carried out any ground and air offensives [against the militants].’

Always today, never tomorrow

It was that détente the attack in Bajaur was intended to destroy, say observers, regardless of whether it was undertaken first hand by Nato forces or second hand by its Pakistani proxies. For if there is one sure consequence of the strike, it is that there will be no more peace agreements signed between the government and pro-Taliban tribesmen. A second consequence – one that Nato and its allies seem unable to grasp – is that it will certainly rally more tribesmen behind the Taliban, and especially the poor, the young and the disenfranchised. The third consequence is that there will be revenge, against Nato in Afghanistan and the army in Pakistan.

There is another way to deal with Talibanisation, say civil NGOs and Pakistan’s main secular parties. This calls for education, re-construction and massive investment in areas where over 60 per cent of families live in poverty, 75 per cent have no access to clean drinking water and just 17 per cent of men and one per cent of women are literate. Pakistan’s military regime, like its British precursor, has preferred historically to keep the tribal areas ‘separate’ from rather than integrated into the rest of the country. As for Nato and other western powers that have the resources for such a transformation, ‘they lack the patience,’ says Khan. ‘They want results immediately – always today, never tomorrow’.

The legacy of that approach can be seen in the tribal areas and, beyond their porous borders, in Afghanistan. Its fruit includes the ruins of Bajaur on the one side and the retrograde emirates of the Taliban on the other.

Not only this: in so voting Palestinians defied a US-led campaign (including the illicit funding of Fatah candidates), which warned that a Hamas-led PA would suffer diplomatic ostracism as well as financial sanctions. They also blew to smithereens the premise on which the US ‘democracy project’ in the Middle East is based. Far from returning secular ‘moderate’ governments more amenable to Israel’s hegemony in the region, democracy has so far strengthened the Islamist opposition in Egypt and Lebanon and brought Islamist governments to power in Iraq and the PA. It also contributed to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rise to power in Iran. For better or worse political Islam is seen as the most authentic opposition to Israeli and US neo-colonial ambitions in the Middle East and, whenever they can, Arabs and Muslims are voting for it in droves.

Finally, Hamas’ victory has exposed how frail is the coalition behind the US’s ambitions. Within barely a week of the election Russia announced it would not observe the US ban on Hamas and invited an Islamist delegation to Moscow. France, Turkey, Spain and China could easily follow suit. The ‘coalition’ against Hamas is thus actually quite small: Israel, the US and European lackeys like Britain. The political question raised by Hamas’s victory, however, is large. Is Hamas (as its detractors allege) a thoroughly reactionary movement bent on the destruction of Israel? Or it is (as its supporters claim) simply trying to restore the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to its ‘proper character’, away from mystifications of the ‘war on terror’ and Israel’s security and back to focusing on an illegal, belligerent occupation and the Palestinians’ unqualified right to resist it?

There were three reasons for Hamas’s triumph. Disillusionment that peace or even meaningful political negotiations with Israel were anywhere on the horizon; appreciation of Hamas’ civil activity as service provider during the intifada as well as its vanguard role in the armed Palestinian resistance, seen among Palestinians as the cause behind Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last summer; and revulsion at a decade of Fatah’s misrule of the PA, capped by its failure to bring law, order, economic recovery or political progress in the wake of the withdrawal. It is also clear (from pre-and post-election surveys) what Palestinians were not voting for. They were not voting for an Islamic state or the destruction of Israel. Although Hamas won an absolute majority of seats, 55 per cent of Palestinians voted for Fatah and other secular parties. 75 per cent of Palestinians still support reconciliation with Israel based on a genuine two-state solution, including 60 per cent of those who voted Hamas. 68 per cent support a return to negotiations. Three per cent support the establishment of an Islamic state.

Given these realities, how to explain Hamas’ overwhelming mandate? Simple, says Ghazi Hamad, editor of the Islamist al Risala newspaper and a Hamas candidate in Gaza. ‘Hamas presented an alternative. We said negotiations alone are not enough to achieve our rights. What is needed is a Palestinian-led strategy, based on a genuine national consensus over aims and a proper balance between political and military struggle.’ No sooner had Hamas won the elections than Israel laid down the terms for its entry into the comity of ‘legitimate’ governments. To enjoy recognition from Israel, Hamas must a) rescind its charter which calls for the ‘obliteration’ of Israel; b) disarm its own armed resistance as well as that of every other Palestinian faction; and c) adhere to all previous PLO-Israeli agreements, including Oslo and the roadmap.

There is not a chance that Hamas will comply with any of these demands, says former PA culture minister and now a Hamas-backed ‘independent’ MP, Ziad Abu Amr. ‘Hamas has already said it recognises the de facto reality of the Oslo agreements and is prepared to continue its ceasefire with Israel. But it is not going to make political concessions on its programme, not at least until Israel commits itself to ending the occupation.’

But what is Hamas’s programme? The charter was drawn up in 1988 during the first Palestinian intifada. It remains a deeply offensive document, mixing a puritanical form of Islam, Palestinian nationalism and a rehash of Eurocentric anti-semitism. But it has long since ceased being an operational charter (if it ever was). On the contrary, Hamas has been distancing itself from it almost from the moment it was conceived. The most important revision came in 1994, in response to Oslo and the PA’s establishment in Gaza and the West Bank. In an official statement from its political bureau, Hamas distinguished between ‘historical’ and ‘interim’ solutions to the conflict. Historically the goal was still the recovery of Palestine as a whole (including present-day Israel). But as an interim solution Hamas was prepared to offer a long-term truce, or hudna, in return for Israel’s withdrawal from the territories it occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

This is Hamas’s programme today, but with one difference. During the second intifada – and even more so during the elections – Hamas’ spokesmen have been mooting the possibility of recognising Israel on condition that it withdraws from the 1967 occupied territories and recognises the Palestinian refugees’ UN-sanctioned right to return to their homes in what was Mandate Palestine but is now Israel. In other words, says Hamad: ‘If Hamas is to recognise Israel, will Israel recognise Palestine? If Hamas is to honour previous agreements signed by the PA, will Israel honour its agreements? And if Hamas is to end the armed resistance, will Israel end its belligerent military occupation of Palestinian areas? Without any answer to these three questions, the position of Hamas is clear and has been voiced already: there is nothing to talk about.’

Is this apparent prospect of peace real or illusory? Hamas is not simply a Palestinian organisation. It is the Palestinian wing of the regional Muslim Brotherhood, whose policy is ultimately determined by a pan-Arab, pan-Islamic Shura council. And within Hamas itself, there are four crucial constituencies: the ‘inside’ leadership based in the occupied territories; the ‘outside’ leadership based in the Palestinian diaspora; the prisoners in Israeli jails; and the military wing. There are tensions between them, with historically the outside and military leaderships seen as more radical than the inside and prisoner leaderships. But Hamas is ruled by consensus and, once agreed, the consensus is usually adhered to by all parts of the movement.

There is not a chance that Hamas will comply with any of the Israeli demands

For example, the decision to participate in the parliamentary elections and thereby become an integral part of the PA and PLO was the result of years of discussions in Hamas, finally decided by a vote. According to Hamas sources, there was stiff opposition, with some members warning that ‘politics’ would diminish Hamas’ radical élan. But since the decision was taken there have been no discernible dissensions. On the contrary, says Hamad: ‘The movement fell in behind it 100 per cent.’ And through the turn to politics Hamas ‘is signalling that it wants to be cut in on a peace deal, or even that it can deliver a better deal than the PLO,’ says Palestinian analyst Yezid Sayigh. ‘It is doing what the PLO did 30 years ago. All the rest – ceasefire, discourse, use of guns – doesn’t obscure the political trajectory.’

But the trajectory will not be smooth. To get there Hamas will have to renegotiate its historically adversarial relationship with Fatah; navigate Israeli and US demands without conceding its basic political goals and principles; and appeal to the Arab and Islamic world to provide sustenance to the struggle as well as doctrinal cover for any accommodation. Of the three, it will probably be the last that will be crucial vis-à-vis Hamas’s relationship with Israel. In 2002, the 22-member Arab League ratified its ‘initiative’ for resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict. The Arab states offered a ‘full normalisation’ of relations with Israel in exchange for Israel’s full withdrawal from the occupied territories and a ‘just and agreed’ resolution of the refugee question. Israel rejected the initiative, and so did Hamas. It is less categorical now.

We will not oppose the Arab position,’ said Hamas’s political leader Khaled Meshal after the elections. ‘And recognising Israel is possible in the future – but only if Israel recognises the rights of the Palestinian people.’ Until then, Hamas will likely keep its old weapons of non-recognition and armed resistance as well as its newer ones of electoral politics, diplomacy and governance. The question of accepting the Arab initiative should be ‘posed to Israel and not only Hamas’, says Amr Mousa, Arab League secretary-general.

January 1996 marked the high tide of the Oslo peace process. The Israeli army had just withdrawn from seven West Bank Palestinian cities. Yasser Arafat ruled supreme, with his Fatah movement winning 75 per cent of parliamentary seats.

The vast majority of Palestinians voted in the poll, convinced that peace and an independent Palestinian state, if not imminent, were at least on the horizon. The Islamist Hamas movement boycotted the election, convinced that its message of rejection would go unheeded.

Today the elections occur in the shadow of Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Palestinian turnout is expected to be high. But Arafat is dead, Fatah is in turmoil and Hamas is contesting the vote, with polls predicting it will win a third of all seats and half in its Gaza stronghold.

Nor is there any illusion on the Palestinian side that the Gaza withdrawal heralds a return to an Oslo-like peace process. On the contrary, it marks its burial under the new dispensation of Israel’s ‘unilateral separation’ from the Palestinians – though not from their occupied lands. The fundamental question posed in these elections is not how best the Palestinians can build their own state, but rather what they can do to prevent a crushing defeat.

As such, the elections are a crucial test for the new Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen), elected as Arafat’s heir in January 2005. Through them he seeks endorsement of his core policies: a permanent Palestinian ceasefire to end five years of the armed Palestinian intifada; domestic reform; and a return to final status negotiations that will end Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He faces three challenges: concerning Hamas, Fatah and Ariel Sharon.

Hamas

Hamas has been signalling its readiness to take part in new Palestinian elections since December 2003, when Sharon first announced his Gaza withdrawal plan. But what forced the decision to participate was the death of Arafat in November 2004.

‘With Arafat’s passing, Hamas understood there was a chance to genuinely open up the Palestinian political system,’ says Palestinian analyst Khalil Shikaki. ‘It knew that after four years of the intifada it had tremendous public power and the possibility of translating it into parliamentary seats. Elections thus became a golden opportunity.’

If Hamas wins, it will legislate a conservative social agenda and freeze all movement toward peace with Israel

In March 2005, Hamas agreed a seven-month ceasefire on condition that the parliamentary elections would be held. Unlike the smaller Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (AMB), Hamas has held to the truce (its last suicide bombing inside Israel was in September 2004).

But the parliamentary elections were postponed from their original date of July 2005. And Hamas leaders have made it clear the truce will not endure beyond 2005 unless they are held, as rescheduled, in January 2006. ‘We won’t be fooled again,’ says the Hamas West Bank spokesman, Mohammed Ghazzal.

So what does Hamas want from the elections? Shikaki’s answer is limpid: ‘to rule’, he says. If Hamas wins the majority of seats, it ‘will legislate a conservative social agenda and freeze all movement toward peace with Israel’. If it is a minority, it will act to veto any secular legislation or concessions toward Israel.

But in either event Hamas will moderate its policies, according to Shikaki. ‘It has already agreed to a Palestinian state in the occupied territories and to the admissibility of negotiations with Israel. Its commitment to end violence will likewise depend on the extent of its integration within Palestinian politics – the greater its stake in the system, the more Hamas will disarm,’ he predicts.

This is Abbas’s view. His problem is that Israel sees no such moderation. On the contrary, it has vowed to withdraw all ‘cooperation’ with the parliamentary elections unless Hamas disarms and explicitly recognises the Jewish state. Abbas’s aim has been to convince the US to restrain Israel from wrecking the elections with the pledge that disarmament by Hamas will come thereafter. So far he appears to have succeeded.

Fatah

A more pressing challenge for Abbas is the ongoing disarray in his Fatah movement, the dominant force in Palestinian nationalism for the past 40 years. The schisms are many, aggravated by the absence of the unifying figure of Arafat. Palestinian analyst George Giacaman describes Fatah today as ‘less a coherent movement than an amalgam of groups tied to this or that local warlord’.

If there is a political divide, it is between those younger leaders, born and bred in the occupied territories, who seek to turn Fatah from an amorphous movement into a modern political party, and those older leaders who spent most of their political lives in exile and seek to preserve Fatah’s archaic, top-down ‘revolutionary’ structure – the so-called ‘old guard’.

The most recent rupture occurred in November in the contest to choose Fatah’s candidates for parliament. In the West Bank primaries, ‘young guard’ representatives won massive support. These included Fatah’s West Bank general secretary, Marwan Barghouti, currently serving life in an Israeli jail on five counts of murder.

Barghouti won 90 per cent of all votes in Ramallah district. Polls suggest that were he to head its list for parliament, Fatah would win 50 per cent of all seats. By contrast, a Fatah list headed by an old guard figure like the present Palestinian Authority prime minister, Ahmed Quriea (aka Abu Ala), would win barely 30 per cent.

But while the West Bank primaries heralded the new generation, the Gaza primaries saw the revenge of the old. On 30 November, rival Fatah factions stormed polling stations, torched ballot boxes and faced off in armed brawls. One day later, Abbas suspended all further polls, prompting AMB militias in Gaza to attack his presidential compound in Gaza.

Where does Abbas stand on these wrenching divisions in Fatah? ‘[He] is caught between two fires,’ says Palestinian analyst Haidar Awadallah. ‘Given his commitment to reform, he cannot reject opposition within Fatah to officials widely seen as corrupt. But neither can he risk an irreparable split within Fatah. So he is acting as a bridge between the generations. But in the end he will have
to put himself at the head of the democratic stream within Fatah – the young guard.’

The problem is that the more Abbas tarries, the less there will be a movement to hold together, raising the prospect of ‘official’ versus ‘independent’ Fatah lists in the January elections. This will not only ensure significant gains for Hamas; it will massively undermine the authority of his leadership, the keystone on which his political strategy rests.

Ariel Sharon

His authority as leader is critical if Abbas is to face down the most critical challenge, not only to him but the entire Palestinian cause – Ariel Sharon’s separation plan.

One plank of the plan has already been accomplished, with Israel’s withdrawal in August from Gaza and four miniscule Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The other plank is in the process of realisation, courtesy of Israel’s construction of the West Bank wall, expanding settlements in and around Palestinian East Jerusalem and a security zone thrown across the Jordan Valley (see page 31).

Taken together, these policies will impose a truncated Palestinian state ‘with provisional borders’ on between 50-70 per cent of the West Bank. They will also postpone indefinitely resolution of the core issues at the heart of conflict: Jerusalem, settlements, permanent borders, water rights and the fate of five million Palestinian refugees. It would amount to a colossal defeat for the Palestinian struggle.

Abbas’s strategy so far has been to appeal to the world. It has drawn partial success in Gaza. Last month, US secretary of state Condeleezza Rice all but strong-armed Israel into agreeing to allow some free Palestinian movement through Gaza’s border crossing with Egypt.

But Abbas’s calls to end Israel’s rampant colonisation of the West Bank has elicited only minimal rebukes against Israel from the EU, and none whatsoever from the US. The international consensus is rather that Abbas must first deliver governance in Gaza before there can be any action against Israel’s policies in the West Bank. But Abbas cannot ask the Palestinian resistance to disarm as long as Jewish settlement continues, ‘especially given the widespread Palestinian perception that it was armed struggle that forced Israel to withdraw from Gaza,’ says Khalil Shikaki.

This is the Palestinians’ dilemma. On the one hand, there is the absolute urgency – given the colonial reach, ambition and consequence of Sharon’s separation plan – to confront Israel on the strategic issues of Jerusalem, settlements and the wall. On the other hand, to wage any struggle that can be effective the Palestinians ‘must agree a common policy and a common resistance strategy, with a greater emphasis on popular rather than armed resistance,’ according to the analyst, Hani al Masri.

Elections are the only forum through which these policy debates can take place and where a new, authentic Palestinian leadership can be chosen to adhere to them. They could mark the beginning of a new national strategy and a new national movement. But such a reform will take time, and time is massively in Israel’s favour.

I last spoke with him in September, three weeks before he was taken ill. It was, said his aides, a lunch, not an interview, though questions were permitted. He sat down at the head of a long table covered in paper. The room was bathed in an olive green light. There were no windows, only shadows.

How did he feel?

“Well”, he said, biting into a chicken.

He looked ill. Denied sunlight, his skin had the pallor of parchment. His lips trembled. What were alive were his eyes, magnified by glasses like the orbs of a jellyfish.

The same contrast was in his conversation. He answered questions about today and tomorrow perfunctorily, as though it was impossible to see beyond the horizon of his room. But he was stirred by the past, drawing sustenance from the vast pools behind the eyes.

“It is like a prison. I’ve been here 41 months,” he continued, spooning corn from his plate onto mine. “I hope I will be able to leave soon”.

Did he exercise?

“I can’t exercise. There are Israeli snipers on the three buildings opposite. If I were to go to Ramallah, an Israeli helicopter would assassinate me. Silvan Shalom [Israel's Foreign Minister] said only today that Israel would like to kill me”.

Did he think Sharon’s decision to withdraw from Gaza offered some kind of opportunity?

“It’s not a withdrawal. It’s a military redeployment. Israel will still control the borders. It won’t allow the airport and port to be reopened”.

Did he think things might move after the US elections?

“Maybe, but I doubt whether Kerry will make any difference”.

Did he think there was any hope for a peace process?

“Yes, but only if the Quartet [the US, Europe, UN and Russia] acts to ensure implementation of the roadmap [peace plan]. The roadmap is not dead,” he said, with a roll of the eyes.

For much of that world Arafat blew his chance at the Camp David summit in July 2000. There – so the argument goes – Ehud Barak offered the most generous deal any Israeli leader will make the Palestinians. Arafat said no. Worse, he made no counter offer. He dismisses the charge with a shaky hand.

“Barak never made an offer at Camp David. It was Clinton – in December – who offered me 96/97 percent of the West Bank, plus land swaps of equal quantity and quality. And we were discussing that at Taba [in January, when Barak called off negotiations]“.

So what happened at Camp David?

“Barak wanted 89 percent of the land, minus military areas Israel wanted to keep in the West Bank. He wanted Israeli control over our borders, coastline and airspace. But Barak’s most explosive mistake was to demand Israeli sovereignty under the Harem al Sharif [Temple Mount] in Jerusalem. I took the proposal to the Islamic Conference’s Jerusalem Committee. I said, ‘If you accept this offer, I will accept it’. Every single one of the 16 countries refused”.

What about the right of return?

“Israel didn’t talk about the refugees at Camp David. It was Clinton. I told him, ‘What about the 320,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon?’ Clinton said there were only 180,000. I said, ‘Let there be 100,000!’ They must be allowed to return. There lives are miserable”.

He uncoiled a little. He drank his soup from the lip of the bowl.

Did he make any mistakes?

“No”.

Did he make any tactical mistakes?

He peered through the steam of his soup.

“No”.

What did he achieve?

“We have made the Palestinian case the biggest problem in the world,” he said. “Look at the Hague [International Court] ruling on the [West Bank] wall. One hundred and thirty countries supported us at the General Assembly. One hundred and seven years after the [founding Zionist] Basel conference, 90 years after the Sykes-Picot agreement, Israel has failed to wipe us out. We are here, in Palestine, facing them. We are not red Indians”.

It is unclear who most wanted this fight – the Americans or Muqtada Sadr. It is clear who started it.

On 28 March 2004, American soldiers closed Sadr’s al-Howza newspaper (circulation just 10,000) for “incitement to violence”, specifically for an article that likened the US proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, to Saddam Hussein. Five days later they arrested Sadr’s main man in Najaf, Mustafa Yaqoubi, for the killing a year ago of Abdul Majid Khoei, a rival Shia cleric who had returned from exile after the war. They also laid siege to several of Sadr’s offices.

Sadr viewed these actions -and their timing – as preludes to elimination. Bremer, who was bereft of any military plan, according to US military sources, assumed Sadr would meekly back down, as he did during a stand off last year. Instead, Sadr mobilized his black-suited Mahdi Army to march in martial but non-violent demonstrations.

On 4 April, defiance became urban warfare, after Sadr militiamen tried to storm a garrison of Spanish troops near Najaf. In the ensuing week, similar battles raged over the institutions and symbols of political power in the southern cities of Kufa, Amara, Kut, Nasariyah, Karbala, Basra and the Shia-dominated Baghdad districts of Sadr City, Kadamiya and al Shoala, leaving hundreds dead, the majority of them Iraqis.

Did Sadr light the fire? Once begun – and sensing the accumulated sense of frustration among his people -he did nothing to douse it. “There is no use for demonstrations, as your enemy loves to terrify and suppress opinions, and despises peoples,” he said. “Intimidate your enemy, as we cannot remain silent over his violations.”

“We have a group under Muqtada Sadr that has basically placed itself outside the legal authorities, the coalition and Iraqi officials,” Bremer answered. “Effectively he is attempting to establish his authority in the place of the legitimate authority. We will not tolerate this”.

Within hours, an Iraqi judge had issued an arrest warrant for Sadr for the murder of Khoei, though Iraq’s current interim Justice Minister questioned its legality. Sadr shrugged off the attempt to criminalize him and his revolt. The uprising would continue, he vowed on 6 April, “until our cities are free of the occupiers and our prisoners are released”.

Sadr then moved from his mosque in Kofa to his Najaf offices, while his militia drove out Ukrainian soldiers from Kut, negotiated an uneasy détente with the Italians in Nasariyah and skirmished with Poles in Karbala. US soldiers re-took some parts of Kut on 9 April after rocketing its abandoned police stations, the first shots of a “sustained campaign until Muqtada Sadr turns himself in or his militia is destroyed,” promised General Ricardo Sanchez, the chief US military commander in Iraq. He also dispatched massive US troop reinforcements to the south.

He will need more than force in Najaf, Kufa and Karbala, which are home to the Shia’s holiest shrines. These cities are also the heart of a Shia religious establishment whose authority Sadr disdains but whose protection he seeks and whose quiescent attitude to the occupation, he seeks to challenge. Sadr’s militia now guard the Najaf offices of Grand Ayotallah Ali al Sistani (and just about every other religious and political institution in the city), vanquishing not only the Iraqi police and occupation soldiers but also the other Shia militias. Sistani has expressed sympathy with the Sadr revolt, though not always with its means.

“In one week,” observed Iraqi political analyst Gailan Ramis, “the Americans have turned Muqtada Sadr from one Shia cleric among others into the most significant political force in the land”.

Why did they do it? There is little doubt that Sadr and his supporters have engaged in a conscious, confrontational struggle for political power with American-appointed authorities in his urban strongholds in Baghdad and southern Iraq. He has swelled the Mahdi Army from a force mustering barely 500 last August to one now commanding 10,000 men, armed with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and light weapons.

But he is hardly alone. Take a trip through any of the Shia dominated southern cities and you will find militias belonging to one or other of the main Shia clerics and religious political parties in an open power struggle between themselves and the Iraqi police and occupation soldiers. In the central regions of Falluja and Ramadi (as the resistance testifies) it is armed Sunni groups, nationalist, Islamist and tribal, which rule. Go to the north and it is the Kurdish parties and their peshmergar guerrillas that hold sway, though they sometimes wear Iraqi police uniforms.

The charge that Sadr is attempting to “establish his authority in place of the legitimate authority” cuts little slack with most Iraqis, if only because in larges swathes of Iraq there is no one legitimate national authority to replace. Rather the decision to crush Sadr seems driven less by the threat he poses to the new Iraqi order than by his opposition to American power.

It is a force already wounded in Iraq by its abject failure to curb the Sunni insurgency and outraged by a visceral anti-Americanism exhibited in the lynching of four private US security contractors on 31 March. Bremer apparently viewed Sadr as a soft target, a lesson that could be taught to all Iraqis. It was a “colossal blunder”, says Iraqi political analyst Wamid al Nithmi.

“I think the Americans decided to act against Sadr as a kind of pre-emptive strike. It was done not only to ensure a smooth passage to Iraqi sovereignty but also – and far more importantly, as far as the Americans were concerned – to ensure quiet in Iraq ahead of the US presidential elections in November. What Mr Bremer clearly did not see was that the Shias were a dry wood waiting to ignite. The move against Sadr – combined with anger at the assault on Falluja – provided the spark for the first widespread Shia rejection of the occupation”.

The cost of this political miscalculation has already been enormous – not least to the American plan for Iraq. Fundamentally it has undermined the implicit contract on which that whole project depended. Underwritten by Sistani and maintained by the Shia religious parties (including, in practice, Sadr’s), this held that in return for democratic elections, protest among Iraq’s Shia majority would be confined to what Hamid Bayati, spokesperson for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shia religious movement, called “negotiation and peaceful means.”

That deal was already under strain after the March massacres in Karbala and Baghdad, when 170 Iraqi Shias lost their lives and the Iraqi police and occupation soldiers were exposed as unable (and unwilling) to defend them – a breach of trust Sadr and the other Shia militias were swift to exploit. It was compounded by the wrangles over the interim Fundamental Law, which many Shia saw (via the so-called “Kurdish veto”, where ten percent of Iraq’s electorate can reject a constitution approved by 90 percent) as depriving them of the political power their history and numerical supremacy demands.

Both events highlighted the powerlessness of Shia religious and secular parties vis-à-vis the Americans. The US ferocious attack on Sadr – a decision taken without consulting the IGC which killed at a rate of 50 a day the very people the Americans claimed they had come to liberate – risked casting them as collaborators.

“We may get to a position where we can no longer defend our attitude in the eyes of our people,” admitted Bayati. “The Shia has become progressively disappointed about the coalition’s policies. We have tried our best to keep them calm. But if at the end of the day we can no longer convince our people, they will slip from our control. The Shias are the majority in Iraq. There are tribes with arms. They resisted the Baathist regime for decades. They cannot be controlled by force”.

By taking the war to Sadr, the Americans have exposed the Iraqi face of their rule as the frailest of masks. In the Shia urban sprawl of Baghdad’s Sadr City on 4 April, Mahdi fighters took over three of six Iraqi police stations to resist the incoming American tanks. The Iraqi police melted away. It was a flight repeated across the south. “What do you expect? The police have brothers in the Sadr movement – how could they fight them?” asks Habib Karim, a community worker in Sadr City.

By issuing a warrant for Sadr’s arrest, the Americans closed the door on any political exit. The Mahdi swore to resist the move by all means. The Khoei family apparently dropped all charges against Sadr to avoid “bloodshed among the Shia and as an expression of Shia solidarity,” Nithmi said. Three days after the warrant was issued the Americans – via the offices of Sadr’s Dawa party -were in negotiation with the radical cleric to defuse a revolt they had created. The result was a sentence that could not be executed and another display of American weakness: unless the Americans decide to risk the bloodiest of contests in the Shias holiest of cities.

Will the two anti-occupation fronts evolve into one, united Iraqi resistance? Prior to the crisis, Sadr had reached out to Sunni Muslim movements, linking forces with groups like the Muslim Scholars Union (MSU) in demonstrations against the sectarian carnages in Karbala and Baghdad and the “divisive” Fundamental law.

That unity has deepened qualitatively in the current confrontation. There have been genuine displays of Sunni and Shia solidarity with the people of Falluja and reports of Sunni and Shia guerrillas traveling to each other’s front lines.

There is also a nascent sense of a post-Baathist Iraqi identity, written in freshly daubed graffiti and embodied by the mass food and medicine collections stacked outside Sunni and Shia mosques. This plays down sectarian and historical divides in favour of a common Arab nationalism, Islam and anti-Americanism, all woven in the national-religious imagery of the Palestinian intifada. It is expressed by Mohammed Odeh, an 18-year old Mahdi fighter attending “common prayers” outside the main Sunni mosque in Baghdad: “I came to strengthen our religion and prove to the Americans we are one people”.

But none of this amounts to a new Iraqi national movement or an anti-colonial revolt, according to Nithmi.

“Neither Sadr nor the resistance in Falluja will come under one leadership. He remains an individualist and they are fragmented into 20 different groups – and none have a discernable political program. But there is the possibility of an alliance between them, mediated by political bodies like the MSU and secular nationalist parties with Sunni and Shia cadre. This would not be a national movement but rather a national united front based on two demands: independence and an end to the occupation.”

For now one thing is clear: whether through stupidity or ill thought out design, the Americans have provoked a reality their entire project in Iraq was designed to suppress: a revolt that expresses Iraqis’ common Arab and Muslim identity.