Ataturk II?: Pakistan's Musharraf has a chance to be a great man.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf is every inch a professional soldier. On October 12, 1999, he was army chief of staff in Pakistan and flying home from a visit to Sri Lanka. He had recently fired a senior officer for meeting the Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif without permission. Musharraf was pleased with himself; but Sharif felt insulted. A power struggle was underway.

Calculating that Musharraf couldn't do much about it in mid-air, Sharif fired him. Wrong. Landing at Karachi airport, Musharraf arranged a coup, put Sharif on trial, and sent him into exile in Saudi Arabia. Musharraf installed himself in Sharif's place. That's the way politics are conducted pretty much throughout the Muslim world. Personalities in this context are real, while principles are nebulous.

The military is the one and only institution in Pakistan that can be said to function. It is unwise to tamper with it. Military coups occur at regular intervals, and the country has had long spells under martial law -- without which it would have disintegrated into anarchy. An assortment of different peoples and languages are engaged in permanent jostling, without benefit of democracy or the rule of law. Government writ does not hold in the northwest frontier where al-Qaeda and maybe Osama bin Laden could be sheltering. In major cities like Lahore and Karachi, people die regularly in obscure shootings, whether committed by political extremists or criminals. Civil society does not exist. What has brought these people together is only the chance that they are all Muslims.

In the words of a famous clerihew, that peculiar but pointed verse form, "George the Third / Ought never to have occurred. / One can only wonder / At so grotesque a blunder." Pakistan ought never to have occurred either, and one can only wonder at the way the British manufactured it without regard to what they themselves believed, and ignoring the experience of two centuries of empire.

Governing the Indian subcontinent, the British were careful to keep the balance between Hindus and Muslims. Although predisposed by temperament to favor the Muslims -- who seemed to them livelier and more capable than the Hindus -- they administered the law impartially, and laid the basis for the democracy that India itself is now perpetuating. Responsible Muslim leaders were on equal terms with their Hindu counterparts, and Muslim extremism appeared to be a thing of the past.

At the start of the 20th century, the British honored a promise to initiate a public debate about the coming of self-rule for the peoples of the empire. In a reaction that surprised them, this provoked an identity crisis everywhere. From India to Egypt to Ireland, the resulting wave of nationalism is still working itself out. Hindus had their National Congress, and Muslims should have been encouraged to join it in a power-sharing spirit. Instead, one of the viceroy's advisers, a man with the resonant name of William Shakespear, suggested that Muslims should form a counterpart, known as the Muslim League.

Out of such seeds were to grow the division of the subcontinent into two religious and national communities contending for supremacy in fear of each other; then three countries (with Bangladesh splitting away from Pakistan -- probably one day there will be a fourth country, Kashmir); and so incessant warfare; and now finally a nuclear standoff. In 1947, the British agreed to partition and immediately scuttled home ashamed of themselves, to allow all on the ground to do their worst and finalize the horrors to come. Millions of people were left at one another's throat.

Why independent India succeeded while independent Pakistan failed is a question inviting many answers, having to do with religion and culture, expectation, circumstances, bad government, and various imponderables. In one of his penetrating phrases, V. S. Naipaul has written that to most Muslims the state that had been won out of the subcontinent came "as a kind of religious ecstasy, something beyond reason, beyond quibbles about borders and constitutions." Nothing to do with democracy, the Muslim League and other political parties have been so many religious or ethnic mass movements whereby ambitious individuals lever themselves into absolute power.

The ruling elite has mercilessly exploited the religious ecstasy that came with the birth of the state. Pakistan today is second only to Saudi Arabia as a source of Islamic militancy. Islam provides an identity above ethnicity, tribe, or clan. Some 7,000 madrassahs, or religious seminaries, fanaticize otherwise uneducated boys by teaching them to memorize the Koran in Arabic (which is not their language, and which they do not understand), and no other subjects at all. Thousands of mullahs preach incendiary sermons in order to mobilize the mob against unbelievers. In the supposed cause of Islam, successive rulers have sponsored and exploited a variety of militant groups, notably the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba to terrorize Kashmir. The military and its most powerful agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence force, the ISI, exploited Islamic extremism by means of a doctrine of "strategic depth" whose purpose was to spread Pakistani influence in Kashmir and throughout Central Asia.

Reckless adventure of this sort has generated corruption and a foreign policy based on terror, carrying the recurrent risk of war with India and other neighbors. Every method, including assassination, has been used to silence intellectual opponents and dissidents, and to cow the population at large. An undeclared civil war rages between Islamic militants and secular-minded moderates. Equally caught up in its vision of religious ecstasy and equally indifferent to the fate of the masses, the ruling elite in Saudi Arabia has oil wealth at its disposal, while in Pakistan debt servicing already accounts for over half the budget. The country is on the edge of bankruptcy. Two emotional foreign policies fused when Saudi Arabia financed Pakistan to build the "Islamic nuclear bomb" that destabilizes the region far and wide.

Musharraf's coup was bloodless, and widely welcomed in long-suffering and lawless Pakistan. To brake the descent of his country into the abyss, he would need all the powers at his disposal, however arbitrary and undemocratic these might be. The Clinton administration's reaction, however, was to "seek the earliest possible restoration of democracy in Pakistan." The State Department spokesman said that "Pakistan's constitution must be respected, not only in the letter but in its spirit." This was fantasy, as though the Pakistani constitution were like the American. In Pakistan, the constitution is what the ruler, the army, and the ISI decide it is. The British were equally comical and ignorant in their response. Robin Cook, the foreign secretary at the time, deplored the coup, and Peter Hain, a reliably wrong-headed junior minister, gave the empty boast that "Britain will act very firmly to ensure Pakistan receives no international support and is penalized as strongly as possible diplomatically."

For Islamic militants in Pakistan, the events of September 11 signified that their hour of triumph had come. In a spasm of religious ecstasy, thousands rushed to join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and many tens of thousands mobilized in the cities for demonstrations that were almost uprisings. Musharraf at once understood that he was between a rock and a hard place: He had to decide which side he was on in the undeclared civil war between Islamic extremists and secular moderates. This was nothing less than an existential choice over the future of Pakistan.

All other leaders in Muslim countries have confronted this same choice about the ultimate role of Islam and Islamic militants. They have made sure to assert full control by such means as setting up an official ministry responsible for the appointment of mullahs and preachers, and nationalizing religious property. Should skillful maneuvers of this kind fail, they have not hesitated to suppress and eliminate their Islamists with whatever violent means available, including massacres, judicial executions, and life sentences in prison. What they cannot tolerate is the threat posed to their dictatorship by Islamic extremists.

Mustapha Kemal, otherwise known as Ataturk, or "father of the Turks," set the first and most striking precedent. The Ottoman Empire had been the foremost Muslim power in the world until its defeat in the First War. The one and only successful Ottoman general in that war, Ataturk afterwards staged a bloodless coup to seize power for himself and to use it in order to constitute modern Turkey out of the wreckage. Islam, in his view, was a total obstacle to modernization and had to be reformed out of all recognition. Andrew Mango, his authoritative biographer, calls him a freethinker, and quotes him saying to a reporter, "I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his people . . . My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth, and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience."

The aim was to disestablish Islam. A new Ministry of Religious Affairs allowed Ataturk to administer Islam and the mullahs for his purposes. Using strong-arm methods where necessary, he closed the madrassahs and suppressed the extremist orders of dervishes. He is said personally to have punched recalcitrant mullahs and to have ordered the destruction of a mosque that spoiled his view. His fondness for alcohol and womanizing was no secret. Traditional Islamic dress, including the veil for women, was outlawed. After he had finished, Islam was no longer the official state religion, and the foundations of secularism were well and truly laid. Turkey has since changed its government through democratic election, as Ataturk intended. True, in recent times there have been military coups and interludes of martial law. True too, Islamic extremists have made a comeback, and even formed a government, and the secular parties have resorted to undemocratic stratagems to keep them out of politics. Even with these imperfections, Turkey today may claim to be the one and only Muslim country with any democratic credentials.

Musharraf is now in the Ataturk position, a dictator deploying absolute power for the apparently paradoxical ends of modernizing and democratizing. Like Ataturk, he has to work in chaotic conditions to create a nation-state capable of dealing with the difficulties it faces. He made his existential choice when he broke with the Taliban, joined the American coalition, and opened local air bases to American aircraft. He has also purged senior generals in the army and the ISI who were Islamists and promoters of the "strategic depth" doctrine that has wreaked such havoc. He has banned Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e- Taiba and several other terror groups as well, closing 500 of their offices and ordering the tracking of their funds with the aim of freezing them. In the most fraught part of this U-turn, he has had arrested an estimated 2,000 militants who until now were secretly subsidized and encouraged by the ISI. He describes madrassahs correctly as places that "propagate hatred and violence," and in the future they will have to register with the authorities and teach modern courses. Rival politicians and influential opinion-makers who hitherto have criticized Musharraf for usurping democratic rule are now coming around to him because Pakistan has changed course and will not become an extremist Islamist state. Democracy, he told the nation in a televised broadcast, is the long-term objective.

Islam and democracy, as Ataturk discovered, prove to be incompatible ideals. Musharraf looks set to become the second dictator to break political and militant Islam for the sake of democracy. This requires personal courage, and the successful outcome of the American war on terror. Democratizing Pakistan, he would also be in a position to abate the grotesque blunder of partitioning British India on religious lines. It is a tall order, but he has a chance to go down in history as a great man.