8,000 Pak beneficiaries, but only one Mr NRO
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December 20th, 2009
By Cyril Almeida
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Tags: Asif Ali Zandari, judge, National Reconciliation ordinance (NRO), Supreme court
Don’t look now, the Pakistan President, Mr Asif Ali Zardari, but your Christmas stocking has a lump of coal stuffed in it, courtesy 17 men in black robes instead of red suits. Comeuppance for a record of broken promises and an abject performance in office? The Gods can be the judge of that.
But here in Pakistan, us mere mortals have to figure out what Wednesday’s late-night Supreme Court short order means for politics in the year ahead.
It definitely isn’t looking good for Mr Asif Zardari. All that talk of the Supreme Court ousting him was overblown — a cursory reading of the law and common sense would have told you that it would be difficult for the court to oust the President directly on the basis of the petitions before it. Had the court attempted it, it would have damaged its own reputation as much as Mr Zardari’s legal standing.
But the smart money was on the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) judgment setting the stage for legal headaches the presidency would struggle to cope with down the road. And that’s precisely what has come to pass. If anyone slept soundly in the presidency on Wednesday night, they either drained a bottle of sleeping pills or are too thick to recognise the freight train bearing down on them. With the Zardari presidency, the post-mortem of any event has become a depressingly familiar rite: sift through the rubble and you find mistakes so egregious that you struggle to comprehend. He certainly got the right advice this time, but just as surely he ignored it and trusted his terrible instincts instead.
There was, quite frankly, disbelief in legal circles that Mr Zardari opted to give the petitioners and judges an open court, as it were, during the NRO hearings. A first-year law student could tell you that you never, ever go to court without a strategy, without a game plan, without something to say in your defence no matter how hopeless the cause.
The threat to Mr Zardari was obvious: there may have been 8,000 beneficiaries of the NRO, but there was only one Mr NRO — Mr Asif Zardari. Forget the judges, from the comments of the petitioners and their lawyers inside and outside the court it was obvious that the primary target was the President.
Fact is, he may have been elected by all the provincial and federal Assemblies, he may be the leader of the largest political party in the country, he may even get the occasional policy right in the big picture, but, in the eyes of his detractors and enemies, he is unworthy — a blight on the nation, a historic aberration.
Ignore the merits of those arguments for a minute and put yourself in the President’s shoes. How unfathomably daft would it be to let your opponents march onto one of the grandest stages of them all — Courtroom No. 1 — and dismantle your reputation and dredge up the most unsavoury bits from your past unchallenged in front of 17 judges and a gaping media?
What could Mr Zardari have done instead? For sure, there was no way to save the NRO; it is so obviously unconstitutional that even the flimsiest of arguments in its defence could be summarily rejected. But in legal strategies there is such a thing as damage limitation, a defence which, while headed for inevitable failure, may mitigate harm done on other fronts. One idea: claim that the NRO was valid for the first four months at least, from October 2007 to February 2008. The mood in the court was such that the argument would have been shredded.
But it would have brought some discipline to the proceedings, forcing everyone to focus on case law and legal interpretations and judicial principles instead of veering off into sordid details.
Another idea: accept the illegality of the NRO, urge the court to reopen the cases, but hammer the “politically motivated” and “persecution not prosecution” lines. My lords, the federation urges the court to reopen all these cases and in doing so treat them as subjudice. This is not the right forum to delve into the details. Let the courts seized of the cases probe into each and every allegation and let the defendants have their say in the proper forums.
The point here isn’t the shuddering defeat over the NRO for Mr Zardari. The point is that yet again Mr Zardari has demonstrated that he hasn’t moved up the learning curve of politics and strategy at all. Mr Zardari seems to have two modes: aggression and total surrender. It is a peculiar, self-defeating way of conducting the business of politics.
In his all-out-aggression mode, he swore there would be a Pakistan People’s Party government in Punjab, he did everything to try and prevent the restoration of the Chief Justice, Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry, he tried to ram the NRO through Parliament. In his total-surrender mode, he has told his ministers in Punjab to quietly suffer the indignities heaped on them by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, he has shown no interest in shaping the judiciary through judicial appointments, he let go of the NRO and then acted as though it was irrelevant.
What Mr Zardari hasn’t seemed to have grasped yet is that there are different degrees of defeat. If you lose on your central position and then just up and walk away, you lose the opportunity to salvage anything — and worse, you let your opponents shape events thereafter. What’s next for Mr Zardari? Pundits have already rushed to judgment and are pontificating about the minutiae. Mr Zardari may or may not salvage his presidency, from the jaws of the law or his political or uniformed opponents.
But the key to a brighter political future is not about tactics right now for Mr Zardari. It is about understanding that his basic approach needs to change: between all-out aggression and total surrender lies a supple approach that prizes the small wins in big losses and accepts the small losses in big wins.
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