Pakistan: Now or Never?
Perspectives on Pakistan
Army, Allah and America: on Pakistani pitfalls and the future of Egypt
All countries are unique and comparing two of the world’s most populous Muslim countries, Egypt and Pakistan, is as risky as comparing Britain to France at the time of the French Revolution. But many of the challenges likely to confront Egypt as it emerges from the mass protests against the 30-year-rule of President Hosni Mubarak are similar to those Pakistan has faced in the past, and provide at least a guide on what questions need to be addressed. In Pakistan, they are often summarised as the three A’s — Army, Allah and America.
Both have powerful armies which are seen as the backbone of the country; both have to work out how to accommodate political Islam with democracy, both are allies of America, yet with people who resent American power in propping up unpopular elites.
As my Reuters colleague Alastair Lyon writes, Egypt’s sprawling armed forces — the world’s 10th biggest and more than 468,000-strong — have been at the heart of power since army officers staged the 1952 overthrow of the monarchy. Mubarak’s announcement that he was naming his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as vice-president was seen as a move towards an eventual, military-approved handover of power. And Egyptian protesters have sometimes tried to see the army as their ally — an institution that puts country first before personal gain.
Yet armies, as Pakistan has discovered over its many years of on-again off-again military rule, are not designed for democracy. They are designed to be efficient, and with that comes the hierarchy and obedience to authority that would seem alien to many of those out on the streets of Cairo.
In his book about the Pakistan Army, defence expert Brian Cloughley writes about how the British general, the Duke of Wellington, responded to democracy in his first cabinet meeting as prime minister: ”An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.” The story is told as part of an argument about why the Pakistan Army has never been particularly successful at running the country.
“All Pakistan’s army coups have been bloodless, successful and popular – but popular only for a while,” he writes. “The trouble is that military people are usually quite good at running large organisations, even civilian ones, but generally fail to understand politics and government, and the give-and-take so necessary in that esoteric world.”
It is a lesson that may yet need to be learned in Egypt. As Amil Khan wrote from Islamabad in his Twitter feed, “Love the way Pakistani twitterers puzzled by Egyptians’ trust in army. Guys, you’re kinda similar, but kinda different.”
Pakistan, blasphemy, and a tale of two women
For all the bad news coming out of Pakistan, you can’t help but admire the courage of two very different women who did what their political leaders failed to do — stood up to the religious right after the killing of Punjab governor Salman Taseer over his call for changes to the country’s blasphemy laws.
One is Sherry Rehman, a politician from the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, who first proposed amendments to the laws. The other is actress Veena Malik, who challenged the clerical establishment for criticising her for appearing on Indian reality show Big Boss. I’m slightly uncomfortable about grouping the two together — the fact that both are Pakistani women does not make them any more similar than say, for example, two Pakistani men living in Rawalpindi or London. Yet at the same time, the idea that Pakistan can produce such different and outspoken women says a lot about the diversity and energy of a country which can be too easily written off as a failing state or bastion of the Islamist religious right.
Sherry Rehman is living as a virtual prisoner in her home in Karachi after being threatened over her support for amendments to the blasphemy laws. She has refused to leave the country for her own safety, nor indeed to accept the position adopted by her party leaders — that now is not the time to amend the laws. Their argument appears to be that trying to amend the laws now would just add more fuel to the fire after religious leaders defended Taseer’s killing and organised huge protests in favour of the current legal provisions.
“There’s never a right time,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper quoted her as saying. “Blasphemy cases are continually popping up, more horror stories from the ground. How do you ignore them?”
“We know from history that appeasement doesn’t pay. It only emboldens them,” said Rehman.
For background, here is the text of the original law introduced into the Indian Penal Code by British colonial rulers in 1860:
Section 295: Injuring or defiling place of worship, with intent to insult the religion of any class:
Pakistan: “Poor kashmiris!”
Now you understand. That’s good. They will be crushed by the waiting Pakistan if they decide to go on their own.
“On a serious note, have you ever considered writing a book?”
Yep. I am going to write a comedy book with you as the main character in it. am still deciding on the title.
Rex Minor
Pakistan and Mullah Omar: who knows where he is?
The New York Times has an intriguing story about the sourcing for a report that did the rounds last week saying that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) rushed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar to Karachi last week after he suffered a heart attack. (h/t Five Rupees)
To recap, the Washington Post said last week that a private intelligence network, the Eclipse Group, had reported that Mullah Omar had a heart attack on Jan. 7 and was treated for several days in a Karachi hospital with the help of the ISI.
It quoted the Eclipse Group as saying its source was a physician in the Karachi hospital, which was not identified in the report, who said he saw Mullah Omar struggling to recover from an operation to put a stent in his heart. “While I was not personally in the operating theater,” the physician reported, “my evaluation based on what I have heard and seeing the patient in the hospital is that Mullah Omar had a cardiac catheter complication resulting in either bleeding or a small cerebral vascular incident, or both.”
As is the way of these things, the story did the rounds of the Internet, blogosphere and Twitter until the original source of the report — an unnamed doctor in an unnamed Karachi hospital quoted by a private intelligence network — was obscured under the weight of repetition.
Mark Mazzetti at the New York Times, in an article titled “Former Spy with Agenda Operates a Private C.I.A”, has now profiled the man who runs the Eclipse Group, former CIA officer Duane R. Clarridge.
“Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies,” Mazzetti writes.
“His dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.”
Forget Headley, forget Wikkileaks, forget the US court summons, forget all the telephone transcripts provided to Pakistan. Forget Afghan accusations. Indians of course will always lie about the ISI, so don’t even think about them.
Nothing is confirmed. No one has confessed. Everything is overstated. ISI influence is limited. No one has spotted a one eyed man in Quetta or Karachi, so he is not there.
ISI is pure as the driven snow.
QED
Musharraf’s Kashmir deal, mirage or oasis?
The foreign secretaries, or top diplomats, of India and Pakistan are expected to meet on the sidelines of a South Asian summit in Thimpu, Bhutan on Feb 6/7 to try to find a way back into talks which have been stalled since the attack on Mumbai in November 2008. Progress is expected to be limited, perhaps paving the way to a meeting of the foreign ministers, or to deciding how future talks should be structured.
Expectations are running low, all the more so after a meeting between the foreign ministers descended into acrimony last July. And leaders in neither country have the political space to take the kind of risks needed for real peace talks right now. Pakistan is struggling with the fall-out of the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer among many other things, while Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been weakened by a corruption scandal at home.
However, in the interests of establishing a baseline, I asked former president Pervez Musharraf in an interview earlier this week about a roadmap for peace he had agreed with Prime Minister Singh in 2007 before political turmoil forced him out of office. The roadmap brought the two countries to their nearest in years to a peace deal, and during Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign, there was a great deal of hope it could be revived in order to ease tensions between India and Pakistan in turn helping to stabilise Afghanistan. Even after the Mumbai attacks ended chances of an early “Kashmir to Kabul” peace settlement, the idea has lingered on as one of the more promising models. Yet since the agreement was reached in secret, its details have never been officially released.
Diplomats say the agreement hinged on an acceptance by India and Pakistan that there would be no exchange of territory in disputed Kashmir but they would work to make irrelevant the Line of Control which divides the region. There was also supposed to be a “joint mechanism” under which Indians, Pakistanis and Kashmiris would oversee areas of common interest. No one can agree, however, on far advanced the talks were. Some say the deal was ready for signing; others that there was still a long way to go. In particular, the two countries had yet to agree the nature of the “joint mechanism”, and bring on board their own people and domestic constituencies in accepting the agreement. Here is what Musharraf had to say when I asked him about the sceptics’ view of the draft agreement:
“You are probably concentrating only on Kashmir. But there were two other issues, Sir Creek and Siachen. On Sir Creek and Siachen we reached a stage that they can be signed yesterday. There is no doubt in my mind.” The disputed territory in Sir Creek had been surveyed and was just awaiting a leadership decision, he said. ”Then Siachen, we had decided on the relocation of troops beyond certain lines, so everything is done.”
“Yes, Kashmir is not that easy. We had found basic parameters; it was my idea actually … the parameters were first of all demilitarising, which meant really demilitarising on the Line of Control; graduated demilitarisation from the Line of Control and also from the cities in the Indian part of Kashmir; that is what is bothering and troubling the civilians there; so therefore in first case leave the cities and go into the outskirts and then further getting to garrisons. The second element was maximum self-governance, and the third was an overwatch of those areas not given for self-governance, and also (to) see how the self-governance is functioning. This body we had proposed, I had proposed, (was to) be of Kashmiris, Pakistanis and Indians.
”So these were the parameters and then the issue was of the Line of Control, making the Line of Control irrelevant … The Indians thought we should make this as a permanent border. My view was that this has been the cause of wars. How can we have the cause of conflict as the permanent solution? So my idea was that we could look into making the Line of Control irrelevant.
@777
There is only one soul which could tell you whether you are a moron r plain born dumb, and that is you and only you. And if the answer is in negative then we have nothing more to exchange.
Rex Minor
Anyone here been to Pakistan and speaks English?
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden made a rather odd comment during his visit to Pakistan this week. “We want what you want: a strong, stable, democratic Pakistan,” he told a news conference, according to the Washington Post. “We wish your success because it’s in our own interest.”
It was not that he was wrong to deny accusations that the United States is out to destabilise Pakistan – a conspiracy theory fuelled by confusion over U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, which to many Pakistanis seems so irrational that they assume there must be a darker plan behind it. Nor that he was wrong to promote democracy — although the United States has had a track record of backing military rulers in Pakistan when it suits them.
It was more in the choice of language — not necessarily Biden’s strong point. It left you wondering which audience he was appealing to when he said, “we want what you want”.
To popular sentiment, which at the moment is running high? But it is not about the need for democracy, but about defending the honour of the prophet Mohammed against perceived western-driven attempts to amend provisions in the Pakistan Penal Code imposing the death penalty for anyone believed to have insulted him. Religious parties have been able to bring thousands out into the streets to defend Pakistan’s so-called blasphemy laws, after the murder of Punjab governor Salman Taseer by his own security guard over his opposition to these legal provisions.
And while many have rightly pointed out that the religious parties are rarely able to garner more than a few percent of the votes in elections, journalist Mosharraf Zaidi notes that this should not be taken to mean that their views do not enjoy much deeper support in a society which has been becoming increasingly conservative.
“Though the Pakistani right wing is simply instrumentalising Islam, it is tapping into and channelling a political and social force whose appeal and power is unquestionable. Sure, it is unable to translate this appeal into electoral outcomes – but that is because this appeal is not located in the disbursement of patronage, or in administrative prowess. Pakistanis vote for the PPP, the PMLs, the MQM and ANPs because of the certainty that these groups can disburse resources as patronage,” Zaidi wrote. “In total contrast, it is clear that the religious right wing in Pakistan, while electorally impotent, has tremendous appeal.”
In Pakistan, people are not out demonstrating for democracy — it is too easy for them to blame their democratically elected government for all the ills facing the country from war in Afghanistan to a collapsing economy to devastation wreaked by last summer’s floods. A speech by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, condemning Taseer’s killing and delivered to a packed memorial ceremony in London, caused barely a ripple in Pakistan.
Myra
” “We want what you want: a strong, stable, democratic Pakistan,” he told a news conference, according to the Washington Post. “We wish your success because it’s in our own interest.”
“It was more in the choice of language — not necessarily Biden’s strong point. It left you wondering which audience he was appealing to when he said, “we want what you want”.
***I think Biden’s handle on language has come handy. I can imagine his big grin after your his analysis of his single sentence. If the guy was serious, he meant USA wants a strong, stable BUT democratic Pakistan. Even if he was clearer, no one would trust him given US support to dictators/PA historically and currently they Kayani gets more respect than a PM or President.
Pakistan and the taboo of secularism
For everyone trying to understand the implications of Salman Taseer’s assassination, this essay from 2007 is good place to start (h/t Abu Muqawama). “The Politics of God” is about why Europe decided, after years of warfare over the correct interpretation of Christianity, to separate church and state. But it is also relevant to Pakistan, where the killing of the Punjab governor over his opposition to the country’s blasphemy laws has shown that what was left of Pakistani secularism, is, if not dead, at least in intensive care.
Read the opening paragraph to understand why it resonates:
“For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.”
The point of highlighting this essay is not to argue that Pakistan should emulate the west, nor indeed that secularism is necessarily the answer, but rather to suggest that there is still a debate to be had in a country where even using the word secular is becoming taboo. (And before anyone accuses me of orientalism, the advantage of looking at it through the lens of European history is that it also strips out some of the other factors which contribute to the nature of Pakistani society today — the war in Afghanistan, America’s response to 9/11, the role of the army, its past use of militant proxies, the weakness of its civilian governments, the fragility of the economy etc, etc).
As the blogger kala kawa put it, ”too much space has been ceded. Too much PUBLIC space has been ceded. This debate cannot go underground. It must not be behind closed doors. We don’t have guns, and we don’t have bombs, and we don’t even want to kill anyone. We just want to talk it out. Unfortunately, that’s enough for them to want to kill us.”
Or to quote Pakistan’s ideological father, Ellama Mohammad Iqbal, himself not a secularist, in one of his early letters: “Let the many-headed monster of public (opinion) give their dross of respect to others who act and live in accordance with their false ideals of religion and morality. I cannot stoop to respect their conventions which suppress the innate freedom of man’s mind.”
So back to Europe and “The Politics of God”. Author Mark Lilla traces the separation of church and state to the 17th century, at a time when Christians had wearied themselves with killing other Christians — just as much of today’s violence is a battle within Islam. In his treatise “Leviathan”, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes laid down the idea that men would only be free of fear and war if they created political institutions without grounding them in religion.
They tried to build a secular society using Islam as a foundation. Using a religion as a basis for founding a secular state is a contradiction in terms….particularly so when it’s an Islamic state that pretends to have secular aspirations. The founders of Pakistan saw what they wanted to see. They saw the secular values that they so cherished in their idealistic view of Islam. Secular moderation was to be found in a supposed moderate faith that always chooses the “middle path”. How wrong they were.
This leaves the Pakistanis confused. They keep trying to find a middle path. They don’t want to be Saudi Arabia. But they don’t want to be the West either. But I really do wonder if compromise is possible at all. I don’t think it is. Pakistan will slowly become another Saudi Arabia (and if the treatment of minorities is an indication, the pretense of even moderate secularism is slipping away). There’s very little chance it will go the way of Turkey and become a secular state with a large Muslim majority.
I know Pakistanis aspire to be Turkey. But the difference is that while there is debate in Turkey about secularism, most Turks understand and accept the necessity of separating mosque and state. In Pakistan, increasingly this is not the case. When the starting point of debate is that you are an Islamic Republic, that leaves very little room for debate.
Moreover, the situation of Pakistanis, ignores context. Pakistan was founded in direct contrast to the view that India would be a Hindu state. As such, Islam is a part of Pakistan’s identity. Even more than that, it’s Pakistan raison d’etre. Pretty hard to turn secular if the founding image of the country is based on the idea that Islam in South Asia was under threat from the Hindu hordes.
I do wonder what the founders of the Pakistani idea would think of the state of affairs today: an increasingly secular India (not perfect but constantly progressing away from sectarianism), sitting next door to a Pakistan that’s breeding more and more religious intolerance and fanaticism. Too bad. Pakistan could have been the Switzerland of South Asia.
In Pakistan, a death foretold
In one of the more anguished posts about the murder of provincial governor Salman Taseer, Pakistani blogger Huma Imtiaz wrote that his assassination ”is not the beginning of the end. This is the end. There is no going back from here, there is no miracle cure, there is no magic wand that will one day make everything better. Saying ‘enough is enough’ does not cut it anymore …”
It was a sense that permeated much of the English-language commentary about Taseer’s killing in Islamabad by one of his own security guards. Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Taseer, governor of Punjab province and a leading politician in the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), was killed because of his opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. A sense that the forces of religious intolerance are becoming all but unstoppable; and that those who oppose them by promoting a more liberal vision of Pakistan occupy an ever diminishing space.
“Salmaan Taseer was many things, but most recently, he was a champion of a particular strand of liberal, secular discourse in a country where such voices are dwindling down to nothing. He was a minority because he chose to stand next to the Christian and Hindu minorities who are denied basic protection in their own nation. This is a great loss,” wrote historian Manan Ahmed at Chapati Mystery.
Taseer had championed the case of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman who had been sentenced to death under the blasphemy laws, which have been criticised in particular for their misuse against minorities, often to settle local scores.
In his own words, from one of his last interviews, Taseer said of Aasia Bibi: “She is a woman who has been incarcerated for a year-and-a half on a charge trumped up against her five days after an incident where people who gave evidence against her were not even present. So this is a blatant violation against a member of a minority community. I, like a lot of right-minded people, was outraged, and all I did was to show my solidarity. It is the first time in the history of the Punjab that a governor has gone inside a district jail, held a press conference and stated clearly that this is a blatant miscarriage of justice and that the sentence that has been passed is cruel and inhumane. I wanted to take a mercy petition to the president, and he agreed, saying he would pardon Aasiya Bibi if there had indeed been a miscarriage of justice.”
For that he had suffered death threats from the religious right who present any challenge to the blasphemy laws, introduced under former military ruler President Zia-ul-Haq, as an insult to Islam. In response he had promised on his Twitter feed to resist the pressure from the religious right “even if I am the last man standing”.
But the despair over Taseer’s killing was not only over the death of one man. It was because the warning signs had been there for so long and been ignored. And because so many others had died already, and nothing had been done. The killing of more than 80 members of the minority Ahmadi sect in two mosques in Lahore last year might have served as a wake-up call. It didn’t. Nor for that matter did the killing of eight Christians in the town of Gojra in Punjab in 2009 following unsubstantiated allegations that a Christian had desecrated the Koran.
In India-Iran oil spat, nuclear row trumps Afghan war
Not too long ago, you could have predicted relatively easily how regional rivalries would play out in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia would line up alongside Pakistan while Iran and India would coordinate their policies to curb the influence of their main regional rivals.
But that pattern has been shifting for a while — the row over Indian oil payments to Iran is if anything a continuation of that shift rather than a dramatic new departure in global diplomacy. And as two foreign policy crises converge, over Iran’s nuclear programme and the war in Afghanistan, the chances are that those traditional alliances will be dented further. It is no longer a safe bet to assume that rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite Iran will fit neatly into Pakistan-India hostility so that the four countries fall easily into two opposing camps come any final showdown over Afghanistan.
India, which has been working to improve its relationship with the United States for much of the last decade, already earned Iran’s wrath by voting against it at the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) over its nuclear programme, first in 2005 and then again in 2009. Though India has since been trying to repair the damage, comments by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei late last year criticising India over Kashmir soured the mood further between the two former allies.
The decision by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last week to suspend payments for oil imports made by Indian companies from Iran that use the Asian Clearing Union (ACU), a clearing house used to process multilateral payments between South Asian countries and Iran, was pretty much in line with that trajectory of slowly deteriorating relations.
As a caveat, it would probably be unwise to read too much into the oil payments row — Indian media have complained that the RBI decision was not coordinated across government departments and reported that the timing of its announcement came as a surprise even to the foreign ministry. But extend the trajectory further and the outlook for coordination between India and Iran on Afghanistan does not look too promising.
India, Iran and Russia all supported the then Northern Alliance which opposed the Taliban when they were in power from 1996 to 2001. But Washington and others have since accused Iran of covertly backing the Taliban — an allegation Tehran denies — in order to maintain pressure on the United States. In the event of an escalation of the nuclear row, it could ratchet up support for the Taliban to make life even harder for the United States. That is anathema to India, which sees the Taliban as a Pakistan-backed movement used by Islamabad to try to maintain its influence in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile India has been cultivating ties with Saudi Arabia, which was one of only three countries along with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates to recognise the Taliban government when it was in power. In February last year, Prime Minister Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made the first visit to Saudi Arabia by an Indian leader since 1982, seeking to build economic ties and to enlist the kingdom’s help in improving regional security.
@KINGFISHER
Well said, though I take the liberty to deviate from your closing sentence. History tells us about the great civilisation which came from the Persians or Iran it is now called, to India also brought destruction for the so called Indian Gods and its worshippers, many of whom are today’s muslims in India and Pakistan. India today is a hindu majority country with a sizable muslim and sikh minority but its psyche has never come to terms to live in peace and harmony with its mulim neighbour or even its own muslim citizens. This is not a healthy factor for any power to be in partnership with the muslim world for control of Arabian waters in the 21st century. Indian leadership has not been able to make a nation of their country similar to Pakistan and this falls short of sharing its power with any muslim country. India is more aligned with Israel strategy to use and the drop its mentor when things are rough. Indians like the chinese were always best in trade and commerce in the Asian continent and now on their way to become the super economies and this should benefit the world as a whole.
Rex Minor
Pakistan’s political crisis
Never in the history of Pakistan has a democratically elected civilian government served out its full term and then been replaced by another one, also through democratic elections. It is that context that makes the latest political crisis in Pakistan so important.
Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani is scrambling to save his PPP-led government after it lost its parliamentary majority when its coalition partner, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), announced it would go into opposition. A smaller religious party, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F), already quit the coalition last month. If the government falls and elections are held ahead of schedule in 2013, the opportunity for Pakistan to have a government which serves its full term will be lost.
The prevailing view among political analysts appears to be that the government is now less likely to last until 2013, even if it manages to survive in the short term. But given the peculiar nature of Pakistani politics, where the military exerts a powerful role behind the scenes, no one is predicting anything with any certainty.
The main opposition leader, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, has shown little enthusiasm for forcing an early election which could propel his Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) into power at a time when the country faces huge economic and security problems. Better to wait it out until an election in 2013 that his PML-N is seen as likely to win. Having been ousted in a coup in 1999, Sharif also remains deeply suspicious of the army, and he has ruled out supporting any moves against the government that might be orchestrated by the military. Giving democracy time to bed down, by allowing the government led by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to serve its full term, could set a useful precedent for a future PML-N administration.
The army itself has shown no inclination to run the country directly, and it already controls the issues that matter most to it – foreign and security policy. It has barely disguised its frustration with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari — who also leads the PPP — particularly after he travelled to France and Britain last summer while the country suffered from devastating floods. But that does not translate into wanting to see Sharif back in power. According to a U.S. embassy cable released by WikiLeaks, army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani made it clear to U.S. officials that “regardless of how much he disliked Zardari, he distrusted Nawaz (Sharif) even more”.
Another option, possibly more palatable to the army, would be an alternative coalition of smaller political parties which might be able to challenge both Zardari and Sharif in the next election. But that will take time to fall into place, possibly right up to 2013, if at all. Don’t rule anybody out, however unlikely they seem now, as part of an alternative coalition. That includes former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who set his sights very firmly on 2013 when he launched his political party in London in October.
A couple of final points. We don’t actually know for sure whether there is a groundswell of popular support in favour of ditching the current government, though there is, as Nadeem Paracha argued in Dawn, a great deal of populist sloganeering on television channels about the state of the country. “Akin to a black comedy is the fact that most TV anchors and hosts that go on spouting all these concerns – unemployment, inflation, drone attacks, ‘good governance’, Aafia ki wapsi (jailed Pakistani scientist Aafia Siddiqui) etc. – are sitting pretty with hefty salaries and perks, and, what some would suggest, an agenda to safeguard the interests of some of the most anti-democracy classes in this country i.e., the military, the mullah and large sections of the upper and middle-classes.”
Having studied the article and the available comments on the article and the knowledge of the Pakistan’s Politics it is not fair to make a sweeping remark. I would suggest that the best would be to find out what is wrong with Army and the Political Leaders of Pakistan that they both failed to run the government and establish democracy in real meaning of the term.
Pakistan is in trouble no doubt but for whom the entire situation has deteriorated, the army or the politicians are the questions. Democracy is not the fruit that grows on tree.
In West, all say their country are democratic, but is that notion true in all respect. No, it is not true. Sorry to say it they too are not fully democratic as the definition of democracy: “For the People, By the People, and of the people”. How could one adjust the wrong doings of the government looting of government treasury fund by the politicians and government officials in collusion and claims it to be democratic act. So also discriminatory Justice System, racism, Religious intolerance are not democratic acts but these are until now prevalent in the country.
Are these democratic if not what is democratic and what is democracy Killing people and declaring war against sovereign state on false pretext could be the acts of a democratic country or to pursue a double standard for Christian, Muslims and Jews covertly most of the time and openly sometimes can not be the acts of a democratic country. Finally, supporting Political, military, civil forces and civilians committing crime against human rights are not fit for a democratic country, which advocates democracy.
Therefore, before pointing finger on others is it not wise to search self. Now coming to the question of nuclear arsenal safety of Pakistan because of the political instability in the country has no basis to think of that because of the assurance given by the government repeatedly. It is not enough to say this may happen, that may happen, because of the fact that many can hypothetically happen but it does not in reality.
Which country is safe having nuclear arsenals? I would say none. Do any of my friends know how many nuclear bombs Israel possess? No none knows not even US Government know, where as US finances, supplies food, gives American’s taxed paid money with which it buys latest sophisticated armaments to commit genocide recently. Is it safe to have nuclear bombs in the hands of a genocide committal country?
It is strongly believed that because J. F. Kennedy refused to allow Israel to have nuclear establishment was assassinated, leave aside the killing of Indira Ghandi, Bhutto and others.
Think of the safety of nuclear arms in the hand of the most dangerous terrorist nation. Why worry about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenals falling in the hands of the terrorists. The nuclear arsenals are already in the hands of the terrorist nation. First, My friend Steve Coll should write about all countries possessing nuclear Bomb to be disarmed irrespective of countries big or small and help the US President’s endeavor to make the world totally free of nuclear arsenals instead of pin pricking a particular country without any cogent hard fact except on hypothesis of “Ifs” and “Buts”
Mortal1: “It’s quite clear that this character, deliberately goes out of his way to ignore the facts which refute his ill-informed preconceived notions & expose his “stomach based” nonsense. He simply does not have the moral courage & integrity to challenge his ignorance & bigotry”
This guy is not alone. Most Pakistanis seem to be of the same mentality – deny, negate anything that does not agree with their vision. Facts or not, what they believe is only correct. The rest can be recited into deaf ears. This is the sign of a society getting walls closed around it. Ignorance will at some point blind them and they will be pushed into doing the wrong thing because of their own built in paranoia and could justify their actions based on it.