General Pervez Musharraf Wiki – General Pervez Musharraf Biography
Musharraf’s military colleagues in Pakistan often praised him for his daring, outspokenness and courage; however, the main legacy that he leaves will have none of those adjectives. Pakistan’s 10th president since independence will instead be remembered as a divisive military dictator who tore apart the constitution and set Pakistan back decades.
When Musharraf took office after a military coup in October 1999, Pakistan was not much different from its neighbors China and India, countries with large populations but little economic vitality at the time. China and India, however, soon enjoyed massive growth as their economies opened up to the world and investment poured in and exports flowed.
General Pervez Musharraf Age
General Pervez Musharraf was 79 years old.
General Pervez Musharraf Cause of Death
Pakistan also grew, but not because of any change in the way Musharraf ran the economy. Instead, cash injections from the United States to help finance the so-called global war on terror boosted strong (though not spectacular) macroeconomic numbers.
At the end of Musharraf’s term in 2008, Pakistan was a regional economic laggard. The country took another massive loan from the International Monetary Fund just weeks after he resigned. More importantly, however, insurgencies and violent political crises had gripped three of Pakistan’s four provinces.
Democratic-minded Pakistanis often blame the United States for supporting the country’s military dictators, and for good reason. Throughout the three extended periods that the generals have run Pakistan (the 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s), they have done so with vital political and financial support from Washington. That is what helped prop up all the military dictators Pakistan has had to put up with.
But Musharraf’s assistance to US President George W. Bush’s war efforts reached a whole new level and made him something of a celebrity in the United States. In 2006, he became the first foreign head of state to appear on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
He was somewhat awkward looking. Asked how he balanced the wishes of the United States and Pakistan, Musharraf said: “I had to learn the art of walking a tightrope many times, and I think I have become an expert at it.”
He got some laughs. But there was nothing funny about the mess he was trying to hide back home while he sought to further secure his grip on power by promoting himself as the only Pakistani counterterrorism partner the Americans could count on.
Born in 1943 into a middle-class household who immigrated to Pakistan from India just four years later, Musharraf benefited from being in a well-educated and socially prominent family. His father worked for the government and eventually became a diplomat posted to Ankara, Turkey, where Musharraf spent seven years learning Turkish and becoming fond of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of a sovereign and secular Turkey. At 18, Musharraf joined the Pakistan Military Academy, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1964.
He saw his first combat in Pakistan’s 1965 war with India, and also took part in combat operations in the 1971 war that led to the breakup of Pakistan (and the founding of Bangladesh). Musharraf came to be seen as a star officer and became a member of the elite Special Services Commando Group in the Pakistan Army. He later taught at the Command and General Staff College in Quetta and at the War Wing of the National Defense College.
In 1998, Musharraf was appointed head of the armed forces, but he was sacked in October 1999 when he was on a trip abroad. The armed forces, never willing to obey even the most benign orders of elected civilian leaders, refused to carry out the decision. In scenes more befitting of a cheap thriller one might buy in an airport bookstore, the military seized control of Karachi airport, helped land Musharraf’s plane as he returned from his trip abroad, and carried out a coup. . Musharraf later appointed himself head of another military government.
As president, his straight-talking, unvarnished style was welcomed by Pakistanis unaccustomed to that kind of candor from a public official. For Pakistan’s rising urban middle class, he became a patron of music, television, film, and fashion. But for the rest of the country—the vast majority—Musharraf’s rule was a time of violence, diminished control over their own lives, and the absence of democratic representation.
Musharraf’s most memorable reform effort was Local Government Ordinance 2001, which aimed to transfer many local services from higher tiers of government to more local authorities. The idea was to empower ordinary citizens and make the authorities overseeing municipal water, sanitation, and education services more responsive to the people using those services.
For the first few years after it was enacted, the ordinance and the new systems it created seemed to be improving those services across the country. As with so many of Musharraf’s promises, though, there was no follow-through. Musharraf never delivered the necessary fiscal and political freedoms that would have ensured his reforms would last.
He deliberately kept the four provincial governments weak and fiscally dependent on the largesse of the federal government. This ended up embittering ethnic minorities and deepening the suspicions of democrats already wary of Musharraf’s intentions. Both at the provincial and the national levels, Pakistan’s democratic institutions remained weak
And in 2006, Musharraf helped dismantle some of his own reforms to prolong his time as president—conceding changes to Local Government Ordinance 2001 as part of a deal with “elected” civilians who were actually installed to do his bidding. Despite Musharraf’s many protestations to the contrary, he never really favored democracy.
Nor did he respect the rights and multiple identities of his diverse citizenry. In Balochistan—the sparsely populated, poor, yet mineral-rich province that is now the site of some of China’s key investments in Pakistan’s infrastructure—Musharraf laid the foundation for a raging separatist insurgency. He responded to long-standing Baloch demands for greater access to the natural resources extracted from the province with contemptuous rejections.
Key political leaders who articulated those demands were branded as traitors. The tipping point probably came in 2006 when Nawab Akbar Bugti, a onetime government minister in Islamabad and former chief minister of the province, was killed in a standoff with the military. Bugti’s family accused Musharraf of having him assassinated.
A 2016 court judgment cleared Musharraf of the charge, but many continue to believe that he was responsible. Even those with a tendency to align themselves with Musharraf blamed him for plunging the entire province into violence. Meanwhile, the cost of fighting al Qaeda was not borne by Musharraf but by the thousands of Pakistani citizens, police officers, spies, and soldiers who were killed in reprisal attacks that metastasized into a full-blown terrorist insurgency in the north and northwest of the country.
Bush understandably praised Musharraf for helping to fight his war, calling Musharraf “a leader with great courage and vision.” But for Pakistan, the fruits of that relationship were ruinous. From the home district of Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan’s northwest to the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, full-scale military operations displaced and dislocated millions of Pakistani citizens throughout the decade that followed the Musharraf era—operations that were a response to restive and violent conditions that Musharraf, in trying to please Washington, had fostered or created.
Musharraf and his many supporters often cite the absence of better options—suggesting it would have been impossible to support U.S. counterterrorism campaigns in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks without fueling a terrorist insurgency. And, yes, the challenge of being squeezed between U.S. pressure to conduct a war on terror and the domestic complexities of managing that war without igniting internal conflicts and tensions would have been difficult for any leader.
Still, Pakistan never had a chance to debate or contemplate how to find a proper balance—Musharraf decided for the whole country. In the nearly decade and a half between his resignation in 2008 and his death, Musharraf showed little capacity for reflection or remorse. When he did show glimpses of regret, they were transparently self-serving.
At the launch of his own political party in October 2010, when questioned about what he did to counter corruption during his time in power, he apologized for having made a 2007 deal to enable former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to return to Pakistan.
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