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There are two great articles in the Guardian today. The first is Ayesha Ijaz Khan’s request the the west should not give up on Pakistan, where she summarizes the past 2 years and where Pakistan is heading.

Much like Musharraf, Zardari offers words of concern for places like Swat but few actions. Actions are reserved for political opponents like the Sharif brothers and their PML, which was doing an administratively decent job of ruling the Punjab until it was derailed a few days ago, and for civil society activists like those involved in the lawyers’ movement, who are once again threatening a long march if the real chief justice is not restored. The mere thought of this has led Zardari to topple the democratically elected government in Punjab, from where the long march would have commenced.

He has not learned from Musharraf’s experience. He cannot suppress an idea whose time has come. He will either have to restore Chaudhry, who most Pakistanis look upon as a symbol of justice, or risk Musharraf’s fate. There is also a lesson here for the western powers. It is time to let go of partnerships with individuals such as Musharraf and Zardari, who cannot deliver on the fight against extremism, and look instead to partner with the Pakistani nation, civil society activists and professionals, who have a far greater stake in the system and want their country to progress and function democratically.

In his inaugural address, President Obama, in addressing the Muslim world, said, “we will extend a hand if you are willing to un-clench your fist”. It may be too much to ask those who are accustomed to corruption and deceit to un-clench their fists, but how about extending a hand to those who are on the right side of history and who are not willing to back down from their democratic ideals?

Tariq Ali’s “Pakistan’s drift into the hands of extremists” lays out a very similiar picture, bringing the US decision to send more troops to Afghanistan into the equation. He closes with:

Domestically, the country is a mess. The People’s party has learnt and forgotten nothing. Corruption is rife and stories circulate linking the money being paid by bankers directly to the president’s house. Add to this Zardari’s refusal to honour an election pledge restoring an independent judiciary, and his decision to manipulate tame judges to disqualify his opponents has not gone down well. The controversy was aggravated by Zardari’s move to dismiss the elected government in the country’s most populous and strategically important province, the Punjab (capital: Lahore), and impose direct rule, after its chief minister apparently refused to accept a bribe in the shape of a lucrative business deal in return for abandoning the fight to restore the chief justice fired by the military leader over a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »

The mood in Pakistan is cheerful – Barack Obama has just been elected president of the world’s most powerful country. Although many Pakistanis have voiced misgivings about some of his comments on terrorism, the general belief seems to be that he will pursue a more enlightened American foreign policy than his predecessor.

Then again, Pakistanis’ optimism has been dashed before.

Three months ago, after all, the mood in Pakistan was also cheerful. Pakistanis were hopeful – this time in regards to their own leadership rather than America’s. The pressures on Pervez Musharraf to step down were intensifying, and it was believed that his resignation was imminent. So, on Aug. 18, when the embattled leader resigned, jubilant crowds took to the streets of Islamabad, thinking that they had paved the way for Pakistan’s transition to democracy. Where most Pakistanis have greeted Obama’s win with cautious hope, they reacted to the initial coalition between Asif Ali Zardari’s party and Nawaz Sharif’s party with great joy.

One week later, that coalition collapsed – understandably. Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party and Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (N) shared little but opportunistic opposition to Musharraf – opportunistic because they only began to criticize him in earnest when they sensed that he would soon be driven from power.

Almost any substantial charge against Musharraf – that his disrespect for human rights undermined democracy in Pakistan, that his policies allowed Islamic fundamentalism to flourish, and so forth – can be leveled as powerfully, if not more, against his predecessors. Sharif is a former prime minister, and Zardari is the widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. It should have been clear that Musharraf’s removal would empower the very individuals who did little to improve Pakistan when they had the chance. Read the rest of this entry »

Juan Cole is one of my favorite writers on Islam and the Western world. On his blog today, he provides an alternative look at the recently issued National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan that paints us as a country “on the edge, with no money, no energy and no government.” It expresses a fear that an unstable Pakistan will become the center for al-Qaeda operations.

I leave it to Juan to explain (emphasis is my addition):

The situation in Pakistan for ordinary people is indeed tough. Fuel and wheat prices have skyrocketed.

But all along, a third of the population has had to live on less than a dollar a day and the NIE wasn’t so worried about them a few years ago.

But I’m suspicious that all the talk about instability and ‘no government’ is really a way of saying that US intelligence agencies liked having a military dictatorship there much better than they like having an elected parliamentary regime.

Actually, the Pakistani bureaucracy does a fairly good job for a third world country, and the employees of the bureaucracy at the non-political level don’t change with the change of governments. I don’t know what they mean by ‘no government.’ The elected government headed by the Pakistan People’s Party has a majority and is not in danger of falling. The new president, Asaf Ali Zardari, is widely thought to be corrupt, but then the impeachment charges prepared against ousted military dictator Pervez Musharraf alleged the same thing of him, so it is hard to see how things have gotten worse in that regard.

The campaign of bombings and attacks by the Tehrik-i Taliban guerrillas of the Pushtun tribal agencies are worrisome, but life goes on in big cities such as Lahore, which are distant from the tribal areas, despite occasional attacks there.

Moreover, the Pushtuns of the North-West Frontier Province voted in a secular party in the last elections, and even a lot of people in the tribal areas oppose the neo-Taliban.

American reports about Pakistan are schizophrenic, because they say the Pakistani army is not fighting the Taliban. But the Pakistani military has chased 300,000 from their homes in Bajaur, one of 7 tribal agencies, and has engaged in firefights with dissident Muslim groups there. I mean, what do the authors of the NIE want?

The Pakistani military admittedly does not attack the Pushtun tribes it is paying to make trouble in southern Afghanistan, but then their activity is abroad and directed from Islamabad. The Mohmands and other tribes in Bajaur have been fighting the Pakistani military, which has hit them hard in retaliation.

The idea that the 3.5 million Pushtuns of the tribal areas could take over a country of 165 million with one of the most professional armies in Asia is just silly.

The most worrisome thing that has happened in the past year from my point of view was the 3-day orgy of destruction engaged in by Sindhis after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last December, suggesting that Sindhi subnationalism was extremely strong. But the PPP is a party rooted in Sindh, though it has supporters in the other provinces, and its ascendancy should assuage Sindhi feelings. Sindhis make up about 25% of the Pakistani population.

If Pakistan can whether the ethnic tensions in the rest of the country, surviving the terrorist attacks emanating from the tribal areas will be easy.

People who know Pakistan well are more afraid of the right wing elements in the Pakistani military (whom the CIA has long funded and coddled) than they are about an elected civilian government being weak or corrupt.

This month’s Economist announces the Terrorism Index for 2008, in which Pakistan is mentioned a few times. According to the report results, Pakistan is considered one the top nations to potential engage in the nuclear trade with terrorists, tied with North Korea, and the hands down winner on where the next al Qaeda stronghold will be.

Interesting when looking at it in the light of the Asia Times Online headline, Bush had no plan to catch Osama. Gareth Porter, an investigative journalists specializing in US national security policy, provides a very deep and disturbing look into the decision making process of the Bush administration and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

According to the Asia Times Online story:

Top administration officials instead gave priority to planning for war with Iraq, leaving the United States with not nearly enough troops or strategic airlift capacity to close the large number of possible exit routes through the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area where Bin Laden escaped in late 2001.

Because it had not been directed to plan for that contingency, the US military was also forced to turn down an offer from then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in late November 2001 to send 60,000 troops to intercept the al-Qaeda leaders. As Northern Alliance troops marched on Kabul with little resistance in November 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency had intelligence that Bin Laden was headed for a cave complex in the Tora Bora Mountains close to the Pakistani border.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a National Security Council meeting that Franks “wants the [Pakistanis] to close the transit points between Afghanistan and Pakistan to seal what’s going in and out”, according to the National Security Council meeting transcript in Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War.

Bush responded that they would need to “press Musharraf to do that”.

Then after realizing that the US military wasn’t up to the task of stopping bin Laden from getting into Pakistan, General Franks ended up in Islamabad: Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled on this video from The Real News which gives a very interesting analysis of the powers that Zardari inherited from Musharraf. It’s an interesting interview about how the international powers that be have turned a blind eye to make sure that the War on Terror can continue at the US’s pace.

Your comments?

Hours after a truck bomber slew 53 people last weekend at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, the country’s interior minister laid responsibility for the attack on Taliban militants holed up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, the remote, wild region that straddles the border with Afghanistan.

“All roads lead to FATA,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said.

If the past is any guide, Mr. Malik’s statement is almost certainly correct.

But what Mr. Malik did not say was that those same roads, if he chose to follow them, would very likely loop back to Islamabad itself.

The chaos that is engulfing Pakistan appears to represent an especially frightening case of strategic blowback, one that has now begun to seriously undermine the American effort in Afghanistan. Tensions over Washington’s demands that the militants be brought under control have been rising, and last week an exchange of fire erupted between American and Pakistani troops along the Afghan border. So it seems a good moment to take a look back at how the chaos has developed.

It was more than a decade ago that Pakistan’s leaders began nurturing the Taliban and their brethren to help advance the country’s regional interests. Now they are finding that their home-schooled militants have grown too strong to control. No longer content to just cross into Afghanistan to kill American soldiers, the militants have begun to challenge the government itself. “The Pakistanis are truly concerned about their whole country unraveling,” said a Western military official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is sensitive.

That is a horrifying prospect, especially for Pakistan’s fledgling civilian government, its first since 1999. The country has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons. The tribal areas, which harbor thousands of Taliban militants, are also believed to contain Al Qaeda’s senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri.

It’s all the greater a paradox, then, that the Taliban militias now threatening the stability of Pakistan owe their survival — and much of their present strength — to a succession of Pakistani governments that continues to the present day. Read the rest of this entry »