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”.

A report in the Financial Times that Saudi Arabia has agreed in principle to defer payments for crude oil sales to Pakistan worth $5.9 billion has raised speculation about what it is looking for in return.

The Daily Times suggests that the Saudis are buying political stability in Pakistan, which may include throwing a lifeline to President Pervez Musharraf.  “Apparently, the immediate impact will be on PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif’s politics of confrontation with Musharraf, which will have to be diluted significantly in line with ground realities,” it says. ”The Saudis, like the Americans, want a stable transition to civilian rule and no confrontation between the politicians and the military, including Musharraf.”

The Saudis have no interest in seeing Pakistan descend into chaos, not least because this would further strengthen al Qaeda which has set its own sights on the kingdom’s rulers. It may also see Sunni-dominated Pakistan as a potential counterweight to Shi’ite Iran. So it would make sense for it to buy stability in Pakistan.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia is looking to use Pakistani farmland to grow grains  to protect itself from food shortages and rising prices, as indeed are other Gulf states.  So there may be an element of oil-for-food as well as oil-for-stability in the deal.

The  Daily Times adds a note of warning however in a subsequent editorial. It says Islamabad must also look to alternative sources of energy so that the Saudi bailout does not become “politically suspect”.

One to watch, with no doubt far more to come before this deal is fully played out.

“There can be few countries where the art of the coup is so finely honed as in Turkey…” So starts this Reuters blog by Ralph Boulton about the Turkish Army.

It’s well worth a read for anyone interested in comparing Pakistan and Turkey, two Muslim countries which have both struggled to reconcile secularism, democracy, Islam and domination by the military — and all the more so given President Pervez Musharraf’s own admiration for Turkey.

The armies of Turkey and Pakistan are very different — the former considering itself as a champion of secularism and the latter promoting Islam, particularly under President Zia.

But there are similarities too. The Turkish Army does not relish being in power, preferring to exercise control from behind the scenes. But the same argument can be heard in Pakistan, where many would say that getting involved in politics undermines the fighting strength of the Pakistan Army.

In all their interventions and coups, writes Ralph, Turkey’s generals have never acted flagrantly against popular will, but rather stepped in to restore order.  Sounds familiar? The difference is that they then stepped down again to make way for an elected government. Are there lessons in Turkey for Pakistan? Or is Turkey itself sliding into choppier waters, as Ralph’s blog suggests?

Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi used an interesting choice of words when he talked to reporters in Paris about the new government’s relationship with President Pervez Musharraf.

Reuters Paris chief correspondent Crispian Balmer tells me that he said the ruling Pakistan People’s Party had established a working relationship with Musharraf after February elections in which the president’s political allies were defeated.

“The reason we have established that working relationship with him is to give stability,” he said. “We realise that this transition from dictatorship to democracy is a delicate transition and let’s not unnecessarily rock the boat.”

Those did not seem to be the words of a government that expects the embattled former army general to step down any time soon, despite a mass rally in Pakistan by lawyers fighting for the reinstatement of judges fired by Musharraf last year.

The Asia Times even suggests that the tide may be turning in favour of Musharraf after this week’s American air strike that killed 11 Pakistani soldiers near the border with Afghanistan. “… the US air strike has severely unsettled the country,” it says. “Musharraf, with his excellent rapport with Washington, is the man many see as the only person capable of preventing it from happening again.”

But even if he survives as president for now, many say his situation will become almost untenable when President George W. Bush, who prided himself on his personal relationship with Musharraf, leaves office next January. 

According to one comment on a blog I posted last month on Musharraf: “Given Pakistan’s history,  no ruler has survived more than a decade,  give or take a year or two. As Musharraf approaches the 10th anniversary of his coup against Nawaz Sharif next year, I think he is going to leave. But he’ll leave on his on own terms, not let the Sharif brothers hound him out.”

The future of President Pervez Musharraf grows more opaque by the day. At its simplest level, it seems that while many people think he should step down, few want to see him forced out in a way that would divide and damage the country.

In the latest stories highlighting the currents and counter-currents swirling around the former army general, Musharraf lashed out at “rumour-mongers” for suggesting he planned to quit, while President George W. Bush telephoned him to pledge his continued backing.  Meanwhile disgraced scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, has begun speaking out against Musharraf by complaining he was unfairly made to take the rap for selling nuclear secrets.  That A.Q. Khan now feels safe to speak after four years under house arrest is seen as one of the most telling indications of the times turning against Musharraf.

Reading comments on an earlier blog about Musharraf’s future got me wondering whether one could predict his next move from his past. As an Urdu-speaking ”mohajir” whose family fled Delhi at partition, an outsider in Punjabi-dominated Pakistan, and also as a former commando, how would he respond to the pressure on him to quit?

There are simplistic responses to this question — my bet would be that the usual response of an outsider and a commando would be to fight it out, if needs be by adopting the riskiest course of action. But since that question seemed too simplistic, I decided to reread what Musharraf had said about himself in his autobiography “In the Line of Fire”.

My favourite lines were in the prologue: “I have confronted death and defied it several times in the past because destiny and fate have always smiled upon me,” he writes. “I first avoided death as a teenager in 1961, when I was hanging upside down from the branch of a mango tree and it broke. When I hit the ground, my friends thought I was dead.”

Musharraf doesn’t elaborate on the mango tree episode but he does paint a picture of a man who sees himself has having always defied the odds through luck or daring. The helicopter that crashed and which he missed because he was playing bridge. Two assassination attempts. The childhood memory of his mother’s tension when as a four-year-old boy he and his family fled by train from India to Pakistan.

This is a man who sees himself as a survivor, with fond memories of boys’ gangs in his childhood in Ankara. “Even at that age I was very good at making strategies and planning tactics to ambush and trap other gangs,” he writes — a line that carries extra resonance as he tries to outmanoeuvre opposition politicians who want to oust him.

I personally rather liked the story about how the outbreak of the 1965 war with India allowed him to escape a looming court-martial in the army for going absent without leave. He says he rescued his reputation by fighting in the war, and winning an award for gallantry for pulling shells away from a fire before they exploded.

Whatever critics have said about this autobiography, it certainly makes you think Musharraf’s next move will be far from predictable. A man who writes of his punishments in the army for ”fighting, insubordination and lack of discipline” is not one to toe the line easily. And yet again, he also writes of his fondness for Turkey which must, among other places, be a possible refuge were he to step down.

With Senator Barack Obama looking increasingly confident about winning the Democratic nomination, there have been a new spate of articles on what it would mean for Pakistan if he becomes president.

The most eye-catching, perhaps, was a story in The News  about how President Pervez Musharraf’s family in the United States have been giving donations to Obama’s campaign.  ”President Pervez Musharraf’s family members here are supporting and giving donations to a US presidential candidate who strongly opposes the Bush administration policy of supporting and keeping the retired general in the presidency,” it says.

The Daily Times, in an analysis by former Pakistani foreign secretary Najmuddin A Shaikh, says there would be little difference between Obama and the Bush administration on the need to hunt out al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan — if needs be through unilateral U.S. action – and on keeping its nuclear weapons safe. What the writer sees is a difference in tone,  which would be welcomed in Pakistan:

“What one can expect, however, is that Obama will be less averse - as the candidate for change - to recognising that extremism in the Muslim world flows from causes other than religious injunctions, no matter how this may be portrayed by so-called spokesmen for Islam or misguided scholars in the West,” he says. “He certainly will not be talking about crusades nor will he oppose direct talks with adversaries.”

But what strikes me is how this optimism about Obama may be offset by the United States in general taking a harder line against Pakistan, regardless of who wins the presidential elections.  A couple of months ago,  in a blog on Obama’s policies on Pakistan, I wrote about how he supports unilateral strikes on al Qaeda targets in the country.

Since then, the background noise in the United States about the need to attack al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan has increased —  to the point where you wonder whether any difference in style and substance Obama might bring would be drowned out by a hardening shift in public opinion towards taking a more aggressive stance.

One blog I came across, calling itself the Danger Room on Wired.com, argues that Pakistan is in fact al Qaeda’s best base for planning attacks on the United States and Europe, since unlike more unstable places like Iraq where the United States is free to use force, the group flourishes in countries where there is a reasonable amount of state control.

“Pakistan’s better infrastructure, weak counterterrorism capacity, ambivalent counterterrorism policy, and increasingly prickly sovereignty issues gives al Qaeda a more stable platform to train, shield and export personnel-everything a terrorist group needs to organize an attack against targets in the West, as a string of plots now seem to show,” it says.

There are arguments against this — the most obvious being that al Qaeda developed first of all in the chaos of Afghanistan — but it’s worth reading to see where the tide of public opinion might be headed.
 
 

This is definitely a case of “the more you know, the less you understand”. 

There has been much talk in the media about whether PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari is heading for a showdown with President Pervez Musharraf to force him out of office.

But it is not clear whether Zardari is really looking for a showdown, or instead a climbdown that would allow Musharraf to stay on with reduced powers, while also accommodating former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whose antipathy to the former army general dates back to the 1999 coup.

For an outsiders’ view, The Australian boiled it down into a story headlined “Leaders duel in battle for Pakistan. 

“Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, enraged over a tirade against him by Asif Ali Zardari, last night cut off longstanding secret contacts with the dominant Pakistan People’s Party as speculation mounted he would launch a counter-strike to shore up his hold on power,” it wrote.

But there is also an interesting insiders’ view from Ikram Sehgal, a defence analyst close to the Pakistan army, who says that Musharraf might replace army head General Ashfaq Kayani with another man to counter any attack by his political opponents. 

“Offence being the best defence, there are signs that the Empire is now preparing to strike back. The perception of continuing absolute authority in the public mind is quite a virtuoso performance by Musharraf, given that this avid bridge player’s only remaining power base is the ISI controlled by talented cousin Lt Gen Nadim Taj,” he writes. 

“The distancing of the Army from politics is a myth as long as uniformed officers in the ISI manipulate political power. For the populace the Army and ISI are synonymous, the perception of their meddling in Pakistani politics is very much alive and well, and will probably remain so. All principal political federal and administrative appointments are presently subject to “clearance” by Nadim Taj.  So let’s not fool ourselves!

 ”"Unsubstantiated rumours are afloat that Musharraf will replace Kayani with Nadim Taj as COAS of the Pakistan Army, sooner rather than later–i.e., before the constitutional amendment to be tabled by the PPP takes away his powers to appoint the Service Chiefs. Even when trial balloons do not fly, the desperate will gamble, throwing caution and calculated risks to the wind. ”

All I might add is that officers in the Pakistan army are rather good at playing bridge (just like the officers in the Indian army).  So what will Musharraf go for? Will he declare No Trumps and try to win with a three of clubs? Or is he still holding the Ace of Hearts?
 

The split in Pakistan’s ruling coalition could provide a lifeline for President Pervez Musharraf that the Pakistani people believed they’d yanked away in an election three months ago. 

After the Feb.18 poll demolished Musharraf’s parliamentary support, predictions abounded that the politically isolated U.S. ally would be forced from power within weeks or months. Politicians had even talked about impeaching him.   

 But first, they decided, the priority was to reinstate the judges Musharraf dismissed during a brief period of emergency
rule late last year in order to stop the Supreme Court ruling unlawful his re-election by the outgoing parliament. 

Critics poured scorn on Musharraf for not taking the honourable way out by resigning, having delivered an election
that was fairer and less violent than feared.  

Instead, Musharraf sat tight, and the calculation made by the president’s camp could well be working out. Musharraf’s aides always reckoned an alliance between the Pakistan People’s Party of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and the party led by her old rival Nawaz Sharif would be a short-lived affair.   

They felt the PPP, now under the leadership of Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari, had more to fear from Sharif’s resurgent Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), than it did from Musharraf. 

Sharif went some way to fulfilling these predictions by pulling the PML-N’s nine ministers out of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s 24-member cabinet, because the PPP failed to meet a deadline on Monday to restore the judges.  

For now the PPP-led government is leaving the ministries vacant, apparently in the hope that Zardari can talk Sharif round, or a compromise is reached over how and when to reinstate the judges.  

The PPP wants to link the reinstatement of the judges to constitutional amendments that could also include steps to strip Musharraf of presidential rights to dismiss a government.  

So there is a common sense of purpose, even if the coalition partners disagree on strategy, and the PML-N has promised carry on supporting Gilani’s government without being part of it.  

Yet, so long as the judges issue remains unresolved the government will be at risk of the PML-N pulling out entirely. 

If a lawyers’ movement, that championed the judiciary in its face-off with Musharraf last year, resumes street agitation,  Sharif must choose whether to back the lawyers and risk destabilising Gilani’s government further.  

The Pakistani people, as they showed in the February poll, had wished for better things from the civilian politicians after nine years under a military-backed government.  

A growing sense of disillusion hasn’t been helped by the United States energetic diplomacy in Pakistan.  Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher met Zardari and  Sharif in London last week as negotiations between the coalition  partners were about to fail.  

There was already a suspicion that Washington is somehow engineering Pakistan’s future by propping up Musharraf, and wants Sharif kept out of government because of doubts about his commitment to the war on terrorism.   

Western governments had encouraged Bhutto to work with Musharraf last year, though it was unclear what Bhutto would have ulitmately done if she’d lived.  

Many Pakistanis now suspect that Zardari could be planning to turn to Musharraf’s camp for support after shedding Sharif, but it is premature to jump to conclusions.  

The best that can be said of the split in the coalition at the moment, is that it has been relatively amicable, with the PML-N continuing to support the government.  

Both sides have refrained from getting into a blame game, and have instead issued statements expressing understanding for the position taken by the other.  

Pakistanis fear however this is the beginning of the end of the coalition and their dream team will give way to one that has little to do with last February’s election.  

When former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the late Benazir Bhutto, agreed in March to form a coalition government in Pakistan, the words of the 19th century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli seemed apt:

“Coalitions, though successful, have always found this, that their triumph has been brief,” I quoted him as saying, in a posting which asked whether the coalition between Sharif’s PML (N) and Zardari’s PPP would survive.

It turns out the triumph has been even briefer than many expected.  Sharif pulled his party out of the government on Monday,  though he said his PML (N) party would continue to support the PPP-led government in parliament,  rather than sit in outright opposition.  At issue were differences over the restoration of judges sacked by President Pervez Musharraf when he declared a state of emergency in November, and over the future of the former army general who ousted Sharif in a 1999 coup. 

(The judiciary issue is fiendishly complex, but to simplify, Sharif wanted a complete restoration of the judges, who then in turn might have posed legal challenges to Musharraf.  Zardari wanted the judges restored, but with their wings clipped.  Zardari is also seen as less hostile to Musharraf than Sharif.)

Interestingly, the collapse of the coalition government came when many were calling on Sharif and Zardari to reach a consensus in order to concentrate on tackling Pakistan’s economic problems, and the challenges of reining in Islamist militants.

“The return to democracy in 2008 may be about to push the country to the brink of disaster simply because our politicians and media are not capable of taking the long view,” the Daily Times said in an editorial on Monday before Sharif announced he was pulling his party out of the government. ”The two parties must accommodate each other’s positions and move on from the present deadlock and deal with the bigger problems whose solution is overdue,” it said.

According to a poll by the blog All Things Pakistan, only 22 percent of respondents believed the row over the judges would kill off the coalition by the end of May.

So will this latest political crisis push Pakistan to what the Daily Times called “the brink of disaster”?  Or is there a new resilience in the political system following the February elections that will see the country through?

And what does this mean for Musharraf, who as this blog said at the time must have been hoping after the February elections that the political parties would squabble too much among themselves to form an effective coalition against him? 

Update - Since filing this blog,  Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has said he is pulling out of the peace deal with the government after it refused to withdraw the army from tribal lands on the Afghan border. So were the sceptics right all along? And what does this mean for the government’s new strategy?

On the same subject, here is an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor comparing Pakistan’s policy to that of the United States in Iraq. “Americans can hardly complain that Pakistan is on the verge of a deal with jihadists,” it says. “The US has already done a similar deal with Iraqi Sunni terrorists. In both cases, a prime goal is simply to isolate Al Qaeda.”

No doubt many more twists and turns are yet to come before the picture becomes clearer.

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Pakistan’s impending deal with the Mehsud tribes to end hostilities in South Waziristan could either turn out to be the door to a wider peace along the troubled corridor with Afghanistan or a strategic blunder with consequences not just for Pakistan, but for Afghanistan and beyond including the West.

Is Pakistan ready for it ? How far have the country’s new civilian leaders — who had pledged a radically different approach to the northwest region considered the haven of the Taliban and al Qaeda — thought it through?

Newspaper editorials, military experts and blogs are debating those questions both in Pakistan and a world away in the United States, Britain and even Canada, which worries whether its troops in Afghanistan will end up paying a price.

The 15-point agreement, according to a draft that has appeared in the media, essentially calls for an end to militant activity and an exchange of prisoners in return for the gradual withdrawal of the Pakistani military from parts of South Waziristan. There would be no more attacks or kidnapping of military and government officials, roads will be opened and the Frontier Corps, the local security force, will be allowed free movement.

More importantly, the Mehsud elders have also promised to expel all foreign militants from their territory starting within a month and the Pakistani government hopes to replicate the agreement in other parts of the region as well, aiming to drive the wedge deeper between the home grown elements and al Qaeda.

Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the umbrella group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan) has already announced a ceasefire and threatened to string anyone violating it upside down in a bazaar. So far so good although there was a car bombing on Friday near a police station in North West Frontier Province. The Taliban said it was in retaliation for a police shootout and the ceasefire remained in place.

The government justifies the policy change saying it believes negotiations, significantly increased development aid for the tribal region and legislation designed to eventually integrate it with the rest of Pakistan offer the most effective strategy for turning the population there against al Qaeda.

In any case the military option has been tried, and it hasn’t produced results ; the military has lost hundreds of soldiers in the fighting, it has brought forth a spate of suicide bombings, and the operations have been deeply unpopular across the country.

Indeed, even the U.S. Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a report this month accused the Bush administration of failing to develop a comprehensive strategy to prevent — let alone decisively defeat — the al Qaeda leadership that fled to Pakistan after U.S.-led forces chased it out of Afghanistan more than six years ago.

The report, which was based on intelligence reports and interviews with U.S. diplomats and military and intelligence officers, found that Washington had relied too heavily on President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani army to deal with al Qaeda and that virtually all of the nearly six billion dollars in aid Washington had provided to help Pakistan fight al Qaeda and the Taliban in the tribal areas had gone to the military, while only a tiny fraction was earmarked for economic and other forms assistance for the largely Pashtun population there.

So then where is the rub ? The main criticism is that Pakistan might be buying peace for itself, while letting the militants devote their energy to the fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan which they say is the “mother of all the problems there.”
There is no mention in the draft agreement of ending cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

Secondly, deals with militants in both North and South Waziristan have been tried before, with disastrous consequences. A report by the International Crisis Group said Musharraf’s 2006 North Waziristan agreement was directly responsible for creating a safe haven for al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

And finally there is an issue of principle. Pakistani defence specialist Ikram Sehgal argues that while “all militants are not terrorists”, he says “one cannot (and should not) negotiate with terrorists. Baitullah Mehsud is a terrorist.”

In a posting this week, the blog fiverupees says Pakistan must pause and consider if it is ready to face the consequences of another 9/11 or 7/7 , but this time originating directly from the areas it is supposed to control.