Pakistan’s fractious coalition has agreed to begin impeachment proceedings against President Pervez Musharraf but can it really pull it off ?  Do they have the numbers — the two-thirds majority required from the National Assembly and  Senate combined? Impeachement is like a trial, so what charges will they bring against him?

And then there is the army, still arguably the most powerful institution in a country of 160 million people battling Islamist extremism, tension on its borders with India and Afghanistan where U.S. led coalition forces are hunkered down, and facing an economic meltdown.

Do Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif have the consent of the army to go after one of its own in such humiliating fashion?

The questions are jumping off the pages as Pakistanis debate the latest twist in a political drama playing out against the backdrop of a country increasingly restless with the heavy weight of its ally the United States on the one hand, and the rising power of Islamist forces on the other.

Is this for real, asks Adi Najam at All Things Pakistan, wondering if the impeachment proposal was more an attempt to keep the four-month-old coalition going, given that the numbers don’t seem to add up.

Then there is the external factor.  Are Washington, Beijing and Riyadh — three of Pakistan’s closest allies — in favour of the impeachment decision, a post on the Pakistan Policy Blog asks.

Musharraf, though, is not taking the threat lightly, and is lining up his supporters to fight the impeachment bill, according to the Daily Times.  The opposition has warned that the president might invoke Article 58(2b), the law that gives him power to dissolve the National Assembly.

When all is done, however, Pakistan must face the crises that dog the country and these will not disappear with Musharraf’s departure, if it comes to pass, as the Dawn notes. It listed the three main ones as the economic downturn, an unstable transition to democracy and an “explosive cocktail of militants rampaging across the country”.

One of the questions that repeatedly came up during Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s rather eventful trip to the U.S. last month was who was in charge of the Inter-Services Intelligence , especially after the botched attempt to bring the powerful spy agency - that critics see as a state within a state - under the interior ministry.

But at home, Pakistanis are asking an even more fundamental question: Who really is in control of  their country ? A very rough poll conducted by All Things Pakistan among people who visit the blog found that nearly 40 percent thought nobody was in control of the nuclear-armed Muslim nation of 160 million and from where at least the Americans are convinced the next major militant attack is coming.

About 28 percent said Pakistan People’s Party chairman Asif Ali Zardari was in control while 18  percent saw President Pervez Musharraf still calling the shots. But nobody, not one person, thought Gilani who, by all accounts was given a rather blunt message by his American hosts about his government’s failure to fight militants and their allies within, was in charge.

For Pakistan’s transition to democracy after nine years of military rule this is hardly inspiring. “The image of a prime minister who noone thinks has any power is sad and disturbing,” ATP notes in a later post and asks whether he is on his way out. Or, it asks, is the poll a broader warning of a country sliding further into chaos?

Gilani’s government is faced with Islamist militancy across Pakistan’s northwest and an America that is breathing hard down its neck asking for action. On top of that tensions with India on the eastern borders have suddenly and inexplicably risen, which doubtless increases the pressure on an army already overstretched on the Afghan frontier

 Gilani’s four-month-old coalition is fractured following the withdrawal of ministers belonging to Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League over the issue of reinstatement of judges fired by Musharraf. On Tuesday, the two sides were meeting to break the stalemate.

Adding to the sense of crisis, is an economy at risk of meltdown with acute power shortages, and higher fuel and food prices that have hit hard the poor majority.

Time magazine called Gilani an “accidental” prime minister leading a government too weak to act on any front including the faltering campaign against militancy or even the economy. Pakistan’s respected Dawn newspaper has gone to the extent of questioning Gilani’s authority in promising Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh an investigation into allegations that the ISI helped plan the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul last month. How could he have done that without taking the country  into his confidence, the newspaper asked.

Not surprising then, that the Daily Times reports that Gilani may quit if he is not allowed to function as a chief executive with a definite say in government.

The leaders of India and Pakistan have a chance this weekend to stop things from spinning out of control when they gather in Colombo for a summit of South Asian nations.

The mood has decidedly turned sour in India, especially after the bombing of its embassy in Kabul which the Indians, the Afghans and now the Americans - according to a report in the New York Times- have blamed on Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence. Attacks in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, a day apart, and then the most serious eruption of gunfire across the Line of Control in Kashmir since a 2003 truce have further increased concern that a four-year peace process is rapidly coming apart.

Pakistan, hemmed in by an increasingly restive American force on its doorstep over the border in Afghanistan, and militant groups chafing within, has its own and perhaps even more serious set of problems. On Thursday a bomb went off outside its consulate in the western Afghan city of Herat,  and you begin to wonder if the foes have turned Afghanistan into a full-blown proxy battleground 
like it was during the Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the United States.

In a sign of the chill that has crept back into the relationship, the two sides even delayed an announcement of a meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousaf Raza Gilani in Colombo, which is the custom at the annual summits of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and which invariably overshadows the conference.
 
But meet they will, say most analysts and editorialists,  if nothing else to stop a further slide in ties. For all the outrage in India over the bombing in Kabul followed by the impersonal, indiscriminate and savage attacks in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, there isn’t an appetite for ratcheting of tensions with Pakistan.

There should be even less so in Pakistan, as it grapples with even bigger threats on its western borders with the Americans threatening to go after al Qaeda and Taliban, if its fails to do so, with or without permission from Islamabad.

Some people have begun to voice what has been for some time an unspoken fear in Pakistan - that of a U.S. attack.

What would happen if there were to be another big attack  on the United States that is traced back to militants holed up in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the Afghan border?

“Such an attack would immediately trigger massive bombing and an invasion of Pakistan by the U.S. and NATO,” says Riaz Haq in his blog Haq’s musings. “It could also result in the removal of the democratically elected government and installation of a new military regime in Pakistan,” he writes. “In addition to unparalleled death and destruction, such a scenario could turn Pakistan into a failed state with widespread unrest, homelessness, poverty, hunger and disease.”

Within the United States, he says, it would mean the election of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

A top adviser to McCain appeared to corroborate that bit at least when he was quoted as telling Fortune magazine that a Sept.11-type attack before the November election would benefit McCain. Charlie Black has since apologised for his remarks following widespread criticism.

Haq is the not the only one worrying about the months ahead. Pakistani blogger Farrukh Khan Pitafi  goes as far as to say : “Accept it or not, Pakistan is the next target of the U.S. invasion.” Over-reaction ?  Paranoia ?

You could argue both, but four months after Pakistan voted a civilian government into office there is a leadership void in  Islamabad, argues the New York Times, and perhaps that is feeding some of the insecurities. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in charge, and there is even less coherence on dealing with al Qaeda and the Taliban. The confusion is allowing the militants to consolidate their sanctuaries while spreading their tentacles all along the border area.

U.S. air strikes earlier this month in Pakistan’s Mohmand agency that killed 11 soldiers of the Frontier Corps,  followed up by a threat by Afghanistan’s Washington-backed President Hamid Karzai to chase down militants inside Pakistan, have heightened the anxiety.

But it isn’t just Pakistan. Descent into Chaos  is the title of reputed Pakistani journalist and author Ahmad Rashid’s latest book and it, according to the reviews, chronicles how the war against Islamist extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
 

A New York Times report about Pakistan threatening to postpone or cancel an American programme to train a paramilitary force because of last week’s U.S. air strikes has been widely picked up in the Pakistani media.

Eleven soldiers from the Frontier Corps died in those air strikes in the Mohmand agency in circumstances that remain unclear. But the U..S.-Pakistan alliance forged after the September 11 attacks has been deeply scarred as a result, says the report. It quotes former Pakistan Army chief General Jehangir Karamat as saying that the United States deliberately targeted Pakistani forces and that there had not been a statement from the United States that this was friendly fire and that the intention was not to attack Pakistani forces.

The Frontier Corps is the very paramilitary force that Washington had begun spending $400 million to train in counter-insurgency techniques.

Such is the anger in Pakistan, inflamed further by Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s
threat to send troops in to Pakistan to stop cross border attacks, that defence expert Shireen M Mazari questioned whether America was a “dubious ally or an outright enemy.”

Air strikes are blunt instruments and rarely win hearts and minds, says writer Eric Margolis. Attacks by U.S. aircraft, Predator hunter-killer drones, U.S. special forces and CIA teams have been rising steadily inside Pakistan’s FATA, and instead of intimidating the Taliban, they have ignited a firestorm of anti-western fury among the tribesmen, he writes.

But the United States says cross border attacks into Afghanistan have been increasing - there were 50 percent more in April than the year before- attributing it to lack of pressure on the militants on the other side of the border.
 

So which troops is Afghan President Hamid Karzai going to send to Pakistan to make good his threat to  hunt Baitullah Mehsud and his men, and stop cross-border attacks? The Afghan National Army, the Afghan national police ? Aren’t they already too stretched trying to cope with the Taliban inside Afghanistan to worry about them across the border ?

Indeed Karzai spoke barely a  couple of days after 1,150 prisoners, an estimated 400 of them militants, escaped Kandahar jail after it was stormed by the Taliban in what must be one of biggest jailbreaks, even by Afghan standards

It is hard to see how Karzai can extend his reach into Pakistan’s rugged frontier region when his writ barely runs in his country. Or was he speaking on behalf of someone else, the United States, for example, as journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai asks in this piece.

“One is sure President Karzai doesn’t mean to carry out his threat to send Afghan troops across the border to Pakistan,” he writes. “The only manner in which he can hope to do so is to convince the U.S. and its Nato allies to undertake such a mission in Pakistan and then order some of his Afghan soldiers to accompany the Western forces.”

At a time when America has increased the  pressure on Pakistan by opposing its peace accords with Taliban militants and launching airstrikes in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan,  such a gameplan, however dangerous,  may not be impossible.
 
 

Pakistan’s Frontier Corps soldiers and U.S. led coalition-led troops just over the ill-defined border in Afghanistan must have been barely a few hundred yards apart on Tuesday night when 11 Pakistani soldiers were killed in an air strike that has touched off a new row between the two allies.

But their accounts of what really happened  in the frontier region of Mohmand are very different and sketchy, and to add to the confusion,  there is a third version from the Pakistan Taliban.

The Americans are saying they retaliated after coalition troops came under small arms fire and rocket propelled grenade fire about 200 yards inside Afghanistan’s Kunar province during an operation that had been previously coordinated with Pakistan.

The coalition fired artillery, and then used drones to locate more “anti-Afghan forces”, launched air strikes until the “threat was eliminated”.  The coalition also said that they informed the Pakistan Army that troops were being attacked from a wooded area near the Pakistani border checkpoint where the Pakistani Frontier Corps troops were killed.

Wrong, the Pakistan Army is saying. The trouble, according to Pakistani officials, began on Tuesday after Afghan troops tried to set up a post on a mountain ridge in a contested part of the frontier and Pakistani security forces told them to withdraw.

The Afghan forces were attacked inside Afghanistan by insurgents as they were withdrawing, the Pakistan Army said. And so they called in air strikes which hit the Pakistani Frontier Corps troops across the border.

A spokesman for the Pakistan Taliban said U.S. and Afghan forces were  setting up a position on the Pakistani side of the border,  and so its fighters launched an attack on coalition forces. Eight Taliban were killed in the U.S. bombing, it said.

So what happens now? Trust between the two allies has been broken as Reuters correspondent Zeeshan Haider says in this piece.  The role of the Frontier Corps, drawn from the Pashtun tribes in the Federally Administered Territories, has come under focus. Think tanks in Washington have raised doubts about their resolve and questioned the loyalties of these troops.

And then there is the larger political fallout of the deadliest air strikes in recent days. The lawyers’ ”long march” to Islamabad for the reinstatement of judges fired by President Pervez Musharraf may turn into an anti-American rally following the air strike.

Passions are already running high against Musharraf his main supporter, America,  and it won’t be long before it gets focused into an anti-American rally with demands for justice for the deaths of the soldiers.
 

Pakistan has just moved to daylight saving time, the first country in South Asia to try this to stave off a crippling energy shortage. But will it work ? Or will it make life a bit more difficult for people travelling across South Asia where most countries have their own national clocks, sometimes minutes apart, largely as a mark of national sovereignty more than anything else?

 Opinion in the media and on the blogs is divided over Pakistan’s decision to move clocks by one hour until August, with some pointing out that this had been tried
out in the past and it didn’t really work.

“People were  confused and were always referring to dual timings, saying Musharraf time is 4 p.m. but actually it is 3 p.m,” wrote Shahid Sohail in a comment on All Things Pakistan. Prayer times were affected and there was chaos until the authorities withdrew the measure.

Another reader on the same blog wasn’t sure what difference it would make in a city like Karachi where businesses don’t start until 12 p.m, itself a problem.

Pakistanis must cooperate in the national interest, the government said, perhaps mindful of the past experience. The power shortage is indeed so serious that there have been riots in recent months.  There is a shortage of 4,500 mw at the moment, forcing recurrent power cuts across the country.

Still, the idea of Pakistan now half an hour ahead of India - when it actually should be behind given its location to the west - adds to the chronological confusion. 

The Los Angeles Times said it’s like saying California is ahead of Utah. But then scientific logic hasn’t traditionally set times in South Asia. Nepal wanted to be on its own time zone, rather than live in Big Brother India’s lengthening shadows, so it chose to move its clock by 15 minutes.

Sri Lanka, which was on the same clock as India, moved half an hour ahead, which was again seen as asserting its identity, But the Tamil Tigers fighting for an independent homeland refused to make the switch, emphasising, in turn, their distinctiveness.

So the tiny island which has been tearing itself apart in a 25-year civil war ended up with two different sets of times. They used to call it  Jaffna time in the north as different from the clock in the rest of the island. Ultimately the government moved back the clock and today they are on the same time zone as India.

And if your head isn’t spinning by now, try Bangladesh  which sits in a geographical location such that it has India on both its western and eastern borders. But that hasn’t stopped it from having its Bangladesh Standard Time half an hour ahead of the Indian clock. So you have a situation where if you travelled east from Bangladesh to India’s northeast you would have to turn your watch back by 30 minutes,  so you actually end up gaining time while travelling east.

Mental calisthenics ?   

With the world’s attention focused on the hunt for al Qaeda and the Taliban along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, the 19-year conflict in Kashmir to its east has slipped off the radar.
 
But Kashmir, which former U.S. President Bill Clinton once said was one of the most dangerous places on earth, has just crossed a milestone with the number of people dying in the fighting falling below 1,000 a year.

Seen purely in terms of fatalities, Kashmir is now classed as a “low-intensity conflict” says the New Delhi-based Institute for  Conflict Management which tracks deaths due to militant-related violence across South Asia.
 
Last year was a watershed for Kashmir when the number of civilians, securitymen and militants killed in the conflict fell to 777, down from a high of 4,507 in 2001. The decreasing  trend continues this year with 192 people killed until May.
 
Just to put things in perspective, the comparable figure for Iraq was 13,600 according to the latest U.S. State Department’s annual terrorism report released last month, about 6,000 for Afghanistan and 4,000 in Sri Lanka’s civil war according to Reuters reporters in the two countries.
 
So is peace at hand in Kashmir and has the  stage been set for a “grand reconciliation” that Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi spoke about after talks with his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee in Islamabad last week ?
 
Not quite. The talks, resuming after a year because of political crises in Pakistan, themselves did not throw up any new ideas, much less suggest a resolution of the Kashmir dispute. Indeed if anything Pakistan’s new leaders are calling a set of “out-of-the box” proposals that President Pervez Musharraf made as ‘half-baked.”"

And in the Kashmir valley itself, for the all  improved statistics, the mood is hardly upbeat.

Yasin Malik, chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, says the violence can get worse,  as it did in the 1990s, if India and Pakistan don’t find a solution soon.  He spoke of a mood of  “despondency” as Kashmiris watch leaders from India and Pakistan meeting every now and then, without moving an inch forward on the 60-year-old dispute.

Even Omar Abdullah, the head of Kashmir’s  main political party, the National Conference, says the talks are simply going nowhere. “We have had enough gestures over the years, and are surely not looking for more gestures. We need substantive progress aimed at finding a lasting solution to the problem of Kashmir,” he told the Khaleej Times.

An article in the Pakistan Observer this week said the India-Pakistan talks were more about conflict management than conflict resolution, warning that patience was running thin.
 
(For a guest contribution from Kashmir posted in March please see here.) 
 

Despite the reservations of its principal ally, the United States, Pakistan’s new civilian leaders have gone ahead and sued for peace with militants in the Swat valley this week, and by all indications are about to cut another deal, and this with the head of the Taliban in the country.

While the politicians have repeatedly emphasised their independence of action with regard to militants and vowed to pursue a different course from President Pervez Musharraf, can they really see these deals through without the Americans on board?

Unlikely, if you listen to the comments/analyses not just in the United States but within Pakistan itself, which while more welcoming of attempts to try a different tack, sees dangers ahead.

Rahimullah Yousafzai, the Peshawar-based executive editor of The News, writes that the peace accords are not going  to be easy to implement in the face of U.S. opposition. He points to the U.S. missile strike in the village of Damadola in the Bajaur tribal agency earlier this month as an indicator of American displeasure over Pakistan’s policy of making deals with militants. 

Eighteen people were killed in that strike aimed at a senior al Qaeda leader, but among the dead were women and children, drawing condemnation from Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza  Gilani.
And within days, the militants struck back, carrying out a suicide bombing at an army base in Mardan in which 13 people were killed. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying it was to avenge Damadola.

It showed how quickly things could go wrong if the Pakistanis pulled in one direction and the Americans and NATO just over the porous border in Afghanistan pulled in  another.

Pakistan’s peace deal with the militants in the Federally Administered Territorial Areas is actually meaningless if Islamabad cannot ensure the security of FATA against U.S. aerial attacks, Zeenia Satti, a Washington-based consultant and energy geopolitics analyst writes in The News.

Removing its forces from the area, as Pakistan has promised to do in the case of Swat, means nothing if a much larger force (U.S.) is going to strike with far more lethal weapons, she says.

Indeed, Zeenia argues that the peace deal may actually unleash the war on the Pakistan-Afghan border that America, in an election year, is  increasingly under pressure to fight.

“There is an approaching danger on Pakistan’s western front in the form of extensive U.S. bombardment which could unleash social-politico upheaval,” she writes, citing a series of statements from U.S. leaders including President George W. Bush and CIA director Michael Hayden on the threat to America from the tribal belt straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“Capturing Al Qaeda through an attack on Pakistan could be viewed by the neocons as a good strategy to gain public applause during an election campaign,” Zeenia writes.

The remote frontier area is doubtless well on the U.S. radar now. Foreign Policy magazine  has a photo-essay entitled Spring Time for the Taliban to show just how brazen the militants have become in the area, and are virtually the governing authority in many parts, enforcing their own brand of frontier justice.