The news from Pakistan is not good — both because the terrorist networks seem to have deeper roots there than we’d like and because the new president seems willing to widen the war along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. This is a dangerous gambit that should remind liberals that Barack Obama was never the peace candidate, only the anti-Iraq War candidate.
Tag: Pakistan
Considering Bhutto
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan yesterday was disturbing, tossing a nation with nuclear weapons into further turmoil. I’m struck by the coverage of the attack on most of the mainstream television and cable outlets, its shallowness and parochialism.
But there are some good posts that remember who Bhutto was and take a dispassionate view of the crisis and its impact on the Middle East, the United States and the war on terror. An interesting post from Harper’s on Bhutto is worth reading as the news media turns her into something she apparently wasn’t. And Robert Fish, in The Independent, gets passionate.
In The Nation, two stories (here and here) consider the role Bhutto has played in raising hope among democrats in Pakistan and how she always seemed to disappoint — and how her assassination makes permanent the disappointment and sets back the cause of a secular, democratic nation.
“Despite her failings,” writes Mona Mohsin, “she will be sorely missed at a time when Pakistan needs unifying, far-sighted national leaders.”
She was a woman of great courage and political shrewdness, with a firm grasp of geopolitical realities and global economic imperatives. Alone among the entire democratic leadership of Pakistan, she understood the grave threat the country faced from religious extremists. And in an atmosphere of extreme hostility and suspicion towards America, she was brave enough to articulate that it was not just America’s war on terror but ours as well. She knew the risks and had already survived one bloody attack on her life. But in continuing to campaign openly, she refused to be cowed by extremists. Despite repeated warnings from military intelligence and her own oft-stated fears of assassination by Islamists, she was determined to confront this genie. In this final confrontation, there was a neat coincidence between her feudal patrimony (“It is my land”) and her democratic values. Flawed, she still represented the best secular option for breaching Pakistan’s multiple provincial, linguistic, ethnic, and social fissures. We will miss her.
Then there is this Salon column from Juan Cole, which sums up the combined failures of General Musharaf and President Bush (“backed military dictator Musharraf to the hilt as a way of dealing with U.S. security and al-Qaida on the cheap while it poured hundreds of billions into Baghdad”):
Pakistan’s future is now murky, and to the extent that this nation of 160 million buttresses the eastern flank of American security in the greater Middle East, its fate is profoundly intertwined with America’s own. The money for the Sept. 11 attacks was wired to Florida from banks in Pakistan, and al-Qaida used the country for transit to Afghanistan. Instability in Pakistan may well spill over into Afghanistan, as well, endangering the some 26,000 U.S. troops and a similar number of NATO troops in that country. And it is not as if Afghanistan were stable to begin with. If Pakistani politics finds its footing, if a successor to Benazir Bhutto is elected in short order by the PPP and the party can remain united, and if elections are held soon, the crisis could pass. If there is substantial and ongoing turmoil, however, Muslim radicals will certainly take advantage of it.
In order to get through this crisis, Bush must insist that the Pakistani Supreme Court, summarily dismissed and placed under house arrest by Musharraf, be reinstated. The PPP must be allowed to elect a successor to Ms. Bhutto without the interference of the military. Early elections must be held, and the country must return to civilian rule. Pakistan’s population is, contrary to the impression of many pundits in the United States, mostly moderate and uninterested in the Taliban form of Islam. But if the United States and “democracy” become associated in their minds with military dictatorship, arbitrary dismissal of judges, and political instability, they may turn to other kinds of politics, far less favorable to the United States. Musharraf may hope that the Pakistani military will stand with him even if the vast majority of people turn against him. It is a forlorn hope, and a dangerous one, as the shah of Iran discovered in 1978-79.
The question is where we go from here and what this assassination will mean for Pakistan and the world. I wish I knew.
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Fighting for democracy?
We are in Iraq to promote democracy, right? Isn’t that what President Bush has been saying?
So, what about this maneuver from an erstwhile ally?
Authorities rounded up opposition leaders Sunday after military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf suspended Pakistan’s constitution, replaced the chief judge and blacked out independent TV outlets, saying the country must fight rising Islamic extremism.
Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup but had given a conditional pledge to step down as military chief and become a civilian president this year, declared a state of emergency Saturday night, dashing recent hopes of a smooth transition to democracy for the nuclear-armed nation.
“Gen. Musharraf’s second coup,” said the headline in the Dawn daily. “It is martial law,” said the Daily Times.
Across Pakistan, police arrested political activists and lawyers at the forefront of a campaign against military rule.
Among those detained were Javed Hashmi, the acting president of the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif; Asma Jehangir, chairman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan; and Hamid Gul, former chief of the country’s main intelligence agency and a staunch critic of Musharraf’s support of the U.S.-led war on terror.
“It’s a big blow to the country,” said Gul, as a dozen officers took him away in a police van near the parliament in the capital, Islamabad. Hashmi said the army general would not “not survive the people’s outrage.”
Up to 40 activists were hauled in when police raided the office of the Human Right Commission of Pakistan, including its director, I.A. Rahman, a harsh Musharraf critic, said Mohammed Yousaf, a guard at the office in the eastern city of Lahore.
Musharraf’s leadership is threatened by an Islamic militant movement that has spread from border regions to the capital, the reemergence of political rival and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and an increasingly defiant Supreme Court, which was expected to rule soon on the validity of his recent presidential election win. Hearings scheduled for next week were postponed, with no new date set.
Juan Cole, the Middle East expert who writes the Informed Comment blog, refers to this as Musharraf’s “coup-within-a-coup.”
Over his eight years of military dictatorship, he had dressed his government up in the outward trappings of ‘democracy.’ He allowed (stage-managed) parliamentary elections in 2002. The same year, he ran for president in a referendum with no opponent, such that he could not lose.
The Supreme Court ruled against him in his attempt to dismiss the uncooperative chief justice, and the same court had been set to rule on whether he could remain as president (he was just reelected to the post by the stage-managed parliament he had helped install).
Musharraf appears to have concluded that the Supreme Court would rule against him, thus his coup-within-a-coup, which at last throws off the tattered facade of democratic institutions and reveals the naked military tyranny underneath. Pitifully, Musharraf explained that he had to make the coup in order to ensure the transition to democracy he says he began 8 years ago. Apparently the “transition” (i.e. Musharraf’s dictatorship) will last for the rest of his life.
As Josh Marshall says in Talking Points Memo, “this is starting to sound a bit more like military dictatorship …”
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Sabre-rattlers get you nowhere
Barack Obama did it. The Bush folks did it. Several members of Congress have done it.
They all have essentially threatened to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty to go after al Qaeda — regardless of whether the Pakistani government wants them to.
I know this is what you say during an election year, that you need to look tough — blah, blah, blah.
But if anyone wants to understand the folly of this approach, they only need to read this story from the L.A. Times on what Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has to say about all this sabre-rattling:
The president pointed out that certain recent U.S. statements were counterproductive to the close cooperation and coordination between the two countries in combating the threat of terrorism,” said a statement released by the Foreign Office.
The Pakistani leader, it said, “emphasized that only Pakistan’s security forces, which were fully capable of dealing with any situation, would take counter-terrorism action inside Pakistani territory.”
Musharraf also called new legislation tying U.S. aid to Pakistan to his government’s fight against militants an “irritant” to the two countries’ relations.
I am no fan of the Pakistani president, but it seems pretty arrogant of us to assume we can just waltz into a sovereign nation and take care of our own business without their being repercussions.
Oh, wait. I think I’ve seen that movie before.
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Hank Kalet 