MicroPakistan

By JANE PERLEZ

Published: November 13, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 12 — Twenty-five years ago, when President Reagan treated Pakistan’s dictator, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, to a White House state dinner, a promising young lawyer out of Cambridge University languished in jail. He had protested too loudly, and too often, about the lack of democracy in his country.

Now grayer and at the peak of his profession, the lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, 63, sits in a Pakistani jail once again, reduced to seeing family visitors for 20 minutes a day, and accepting bags of fruit and bedding for some basic comfort.

His crime is the same: making too much noise about democracy under the nose of a military ruler whom Washington has deemed indispensable to its strategic and security interests in the region, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda thrive.

On Saturday, as President Bush both pushed Pakistan’s current leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to lift his de facto martial law, and praised him as a friend of the United States, Mr. Ahsan was ending his first week in a solitary cell, this time for leading the lawyers’ movement that has become the symbol of resistance against the Musharraf government.

Mr. Ahsan’s detention at once reflects how much has changed in Pakistan in a quarter century, and how much has stayed the same. The lawyers’ movement he leads, which emerged only this year, is part of a budding civil society here, separate and untainted by the military.

At the same time, many of the old ways persist, like the dominance of the Pakistani military in the nation’s politics, encouraged, many here say, by decades of support from the United States.

For Mr. Ahsan’s family in particular, there are eerie and disturbing parallels between the days when the United States armed General Zia with billions of dollars to fight a proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and today, when the Bush administration has bankrolled General Musharraf with an estimated $10 billion to fight terrorism.

On both occasions, they contend, America’s realpolitik interests trumped the interests of democratic rule for Pakistanis. “Both my parents were in jail when Reagan welcomed Zia to the White House with a 21-gun salute,” said Ali Ahsan, the son of Mr. Ahsan, and also a lawyer. “Now Musharraf is the current White House’s blue-eyed boy.”

The younger Mr. Ahsan said he found it hard to believe that “essentially the same play is being re-enacted.”

“I thought by this age we would be beyond it,” he said.

Of course, history never repeats itself in precisely the same way, and in each iteration of military rule here the generals have reigned over a somewhat different Pakistan. Likewise the American policy has varied, too.

The independent television stations with acerbic news coverage, which General Musharraf has now taken off the air with his emergency decree, did not even exist a decade ago. The buoyant stock market and commercial markets of Karachi have likewise changed the statist economy.

While President Reagan made few concessions for American support of right-wing dictators in pursuit of the larger aims of the cold war, Mr. Bush today is in the far more delicate position of having made promotion of democracy, especially in the Islamic world, the announced centerpiece of his foreign policy.

Not least among the historical turnabouts, the mujahedeen that President Reagan supported against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan are the distant echo of the Islamic radicals the United States fights in the region today.

In the view of some here, the grand schemes of the political and military leaders in both nations have played out at great personal cost to Pakistanis like Mr. Ahsan. His wife, Bushra, who was under house arrest during General Zia’s rule for protesting in favor of women’s rights, said she used to remind American diplomats in the 1980s that “your military aid to Pakistan is hostile to the people of Pakistan.”

Similarly, she said, the $10 billion that Washington has given the Pakistani military — much of it spent on weapons systems unrelated to the fight against Al Qaeda — would have been better spent on building up the civilian institutions that have atrophied under eight years of military rule.

General Musharraf’s de facto martial law is doing still deeper damage, she and others say. When the general introduced martial law nine days ago, Mr. Ahsan was the first to be picked up, marched out of his office by the police as he finished a news conference condemning the new emergency decree that dismissed the Supreme Court, scrapped the Constitution and banned independent television stations and protests.

“This country is in a deep, deep crisis; this cannot stand,” were among his last words before disappearing into a police car.

Since Mr. Ahsan’s arrest, thousands of lawyers have been arrested, many of them senior members of the bar who represented the biggest challenge to the government, according to lawyers who are keeping track.

In Punjab alone, 1,374 lawyers were arrested across the province on Nov. 5, according to the provincial home secretary. Many remain in jail, and other lawyers were still being arrested, members of bar associations said.

Pakistani lawyers galvanized opposition to General Musharraf after he suspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in the spring.

An accomplished orator, a bit of a showman and a member of the Pakistan Senate, Mr. Ahsan quickly emerged as the judge’s champion. He drove his four-wheel-drive vehicle around Pakistan’s back country, strategizing with the judge in the passenger seat, as they moved from campaign stop to campaign stop challenging General Musharraf.

Mr. Ahsan has won many court cases, some for clients with less than spectacular reputations, and some for more noble causes, including the reinstatement of Mr. Chaudhry in July.

That victory set him on the path of irreconcilable differences with the Musharraf government, which saw the chief justice as its main enemy, and Mr. Ahsan as his chief promoter.

Mr. Ahsan’s colleagues say they admire his instinct for combat in and out of the court.

When the nominating papers for General Musharraf’s re-election as president were submitted to the Election Commission of Pakistan in September, a melee broke out between police officers and angry lawyers. An officer hit Mr. Ahsan in the chest with a brick, and Mr. Ahsan responded, grabbing his assailant by the neck, said Feisal Naqvi, a lawyer in Lahore and a colleague.

Mr. Naqvi said he wished Mr. Ahsan “were out here with us telling us what to do.”

“He is irreplaceable,” Mr. Naqvi said. “He can fight on every level.”

Even without Mr. Ahsan’s guiding hand, the lawyers have set down basic principles to try to cripple the judiciary as a way of undermining the emergency decree.

One effort is to dissuade judges dismissed from the bench under the emergency decree from taking a new oath under martial law.

Lawyers opposed to the decree are also urging other lawyers not to be flattered by offers from the government to become judges.

For the moment, the Supreme Court and the four provincial High Courts have so many vacancies that they cannot operate.

When Mr. Ahsan’s sister-in-law, Nighat Asad, emerged Monday afternoon from the Central Jail in Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjacent to the capital, she described Mr. Ahsan as “fine.”

“We don’t ask too many questions,” she said.

Then she and her two sisters, dressed in soft silks and scarves that contrasted with the hard iron jail fence and dusty jailyard, drove off to prepare for another visit in the coming days.

During his stints in jail in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Ahsan wrote “The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan,” a book that looked at Pakistan in a different way: not as a state created specifically for Muslims, but as a state with a long specific historical and ethnic tradition.

In the foreword, he wrote: “No one who has not experienced life on the wrong side of prison walls can understand this commitment, indeed a yearning, for a better, more liberal, more tolerant society in Pakistan. My only prayer is that never again in this land should prison seem to be the only honorable option for political activists or for anyone else for that matter.”