Has a deal been clinched between Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf? What are their compulsions to do a deal at this juncture? What sort of deal might this be? Why do both sides insist that no deal is in the offing? Is this pre-election deal a confidence-building precursor to a more enduring post-election deal? Can Ms Bhutto and Mr Musharraf live and let live, given their strong personalities and a legacy of mutual distrust? Both Mr Musharraf and Ms Bhutto “need” each other. For many reasons – the rising cost of living, anti-Americanism, incumbency, a string of broken promises, political retreats and gross mishandling of the CJP and Jamia Hafsa case – Mr Musharraf has lost considerable popularity in the last two years. Unfortunately, this has happened precisely when his liberal reform agenda needs to be buttressed by a greater national consensus than the one he currently enjoys. On top of that, the forthcoming elections pose a serious challenge for him. If they are free and fair, he could lose them with disastrous consequences. If they are rigged, he could win them at the cost of a combined opposition boycott and onslaught against him. Therefore he needs to “manage” the elections so that they give him legitimacy. The only way to do that is to get Ms Bhutto’s PPP on board for the whole exercise unequivocally because she is a “natural” – same broad agenda and current set of values – political partner in every other way. This means conceding a say to her in determining a neutral interim administration as well as allowing her to lead her party at the polls without the hassle of defending the corruption cases against her.
Ms Bhutto “needs” Mr Musharraf too in her bid to rehabilitate herself in the power establishment. She has been out in the cold for eleven years, most of them in self-imposed exile. Her ill-fortune in 1996 had to do with her hand-picked civilian president, Farooq Leghari, rather than any principled or strategic tiff with the army establishment. Indeed, she welcomed the ouster of Nawaz Sharif, her nemesis, in the belief that Mr Musharraf would offer her a raft back to shore. But he didn’t do that. In fact, in his new found anti-politician reformist zeal, he pressed the cases drummed up by Mr Sharif against her and her husband. Her thinking is that if she misses this opportunity to get cosy with the military establishment, she would be reinforcing the trust deficit built into the army-PPP equation which has hurt her cause badly in the past. Indeed, her fear is that if Mr Musharraf were to be ousted from power by any means before she has wormed her way back into the fold of the establishment, the chances are that the military would retreat to the barracks, revert to form and start rebuilding a secret coalition with a unified Muslim League led by Mr Nawaz Sharif as it did from 1981 to 1999. That would condemn her to another long exile from power. This means that she will clutch at any reasonable deal with Mr Musharraf if it enables her to get a toehold in Islamabad.
The pegs of this rationally unavoidable deal look like this. First, for Mr Musharraf, it will not be at the expense of the PMLQ. Indeed, he will try and strengthen his current PMLQ-led grand national alliance by all means so that Ms Bhutto doesnÂ’t sweep the elections and turn the tables on him. Second, the cases against her will neither be pressed nor withdrawn. They would be shelved as an insurance policy lest Ms Bhutto try and get ahead of herself. Third, Ms Bhutto will not derail the elections by joining with the opposition on the issue of the re-election of Mr Musharraf as president by the current assemblies prior to the general elections or in the event of the final sacking of the Chief Justice of Pakistan by the Supreme Judicial Council in the next two months or so. If she canÂ’t vote for Mr Musharraf as president before the elections, she wonÂ’t aggressively stand in his way or destablise him either. Fourth, once the general election results are in, she and Mr Musharraf will sit down to hammer out a working power-sharing arrangement much like Mr Musharrf and Maulana Fazlur Rehman did in 2002. So the issue of his uniform and the issue of her prime ministership will be tackled on the basis of the trust and confidence built in the next six months or so between them as in the case of the MMA in 2003.
Meanwhile, both sides will stoutly deny that any “deal” has been clinched. Such a confession would hurt Mr Musharraf because many good pro-establishment potential PMLQ electoral candidates might perceive a sudden surge in the chances of the PPP coming to power and be tempted to switch sides in the Punjab. Equally, such talk would undermine the popular image of the PPP as an anti-establishment party and persuade many voters to rush into the Nawaz Sharif-Jamaat i Islami camp in the Punjab and Sindh. The deal has been done. It is a precursor to another deal after the elections that will determine Pakistan’s fate in the next five years.