Just two days after a suicide bomb attack on the Marriott killed 53 people in the heart of Islamabad, there were reports of trouble both on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and on the Line of Control with India.  

On the Afghan border, Pakistani troops fired on two U.S. helicopters that intruded into Pakistani airspace on Sunday night, forcing them to turn back to Afghanistan, according to a senior Pakistani security official.  On the Indian side, Pakistani and Indian troops exchanged fire across the Line of Control dividing Kashmir, in the latest breach of a ceasefire agreed in 2003. And as if that was not enough, Afghanistan’s top diplomat was kidnapped in Peshawar.

None of this is new in the sense that we have known about the tension on Pakistan’s borders, and its fragile internal security situation, for a long time. What is new is the scale of it. And how everything seems to be happening at once. And also the number of players involved — not only the United States (in mid presidential election), Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, but also the Pakistan Army and Pakistan’s new civilian government, along with the other powers on the sidelines, Saudi Arabia, China, and U.S. allies in NATO.

So which of these many players do you track most closely to assess what is happening in Pakistan? My hunch is to watch the Pakistan Army, and Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

In a posting on the Pakistan Policy Blog, Arif Rafiq wrote about how army chief General Ashfaq Kayani had gone twice to the frontlines with India, each time after the civilian government had talked of making peace over Kashmir (small quibble - the photo in his blog looks like it was taken at the brigade headquarters at Yuching, rather than on the Siachen glacier, which is in Indian hands).

The Pakistan Army, and by extension the ISI, rightly or wrongly, sees itself as the ultimate defender of Pakistan. It would seem obvious that the Pakistan Army would not tolerate its authority being challenged on both fronts – by U.S. raids over the border with Afghanistan on one side, and by peace moves with India on the other. I realise too that there are many who argue that only democracy can save Pakistan.

The point of this posting is not to say who to judge. Simply who to watch. And who do you watch when a country’s borders are fragile and its capital city attacked?
 

Both the United States and Osama bin Laden are losing support in Pakistan, according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes report released this week (download the full PDF report to see details on Pakistan).

The poll, conducted before the resignation of former President Pervez Musharraf, showed faith in U.S. intentions towards democracy  was weaker than ever - only 20 percent believed the United States favoured democracy in Pakistan, down from 39 percent in 2005.

Confidence in Osama bin Laden to do the right thing regarding world affairs had also dropped, from 51 percent in 2005 to 34 percent. “On balance, more Pakistanis express a negative than a positive view of the Taliban and al Qaeda,” the report said. ”One third of Pakistanis hold an unfavourable view of the Taliban (33 percent) and al Qaeda (34 percent). Roughly one quarter hold a favourable view of both groups while many Pakistanis do not express an opinion about either.”

Unsurprisingly for a country that has been hit by a series of bomb attacks, the report showed a steady decline in the numbers saying that suicide bombings can often or sometimes be justified — 81 percent of Pakistani respondents said that suicide violence can never be justified. Seventy-two percent said they were concerned about Islamic extremism in Pakistan.

These results were probably to be expected, but I thought they were worth highlighting given the intensity of the debate over U.S. strikes on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.  

Among the other nuggets in the report was evidence of an enormous level of support for Saudi Arabia.  Among Pakistani respondents, 97 percent held positive views about Saudi Arabia, up from 87 percent a year ago — quite interesting given that Pakistan has traditionally looked at China as its most loyal ally. The finding may reflect hopes that Saudi oil money will help bail out the country’s struggling economy; or there may also be a siege mentality creeping in that has driven Pakistanis to turn more and more to the homeland of Islam — the report says that 56 percent of Indians, and 55 percent of the Chinese, said they had a negative impression of Muslims.

Among Muslim countries surveyed, Pakistan scored high in those who said Shiite-Sunni tensions were a growing problem for the Muslim world — 69 percent saw it as a problem that reached well beyond Iraq.

It would probably be unwise to draw any major conclusions from the report, beyond the obvious picture of a complex and volatile country. But it will be interesting to see how support for the United States, al Qaeda and the Taliban changes over time, after the tensions over the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have been played out.

The resignation of President Pervez Musharraf has, as expected, unleashed a new power struggle within Pakistan’s fractious coalition. Asif Ali Zardari, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and widower of Benazir Bhutto, has staked a claim to the presidency, setting him on a collision course with former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) sees Zardari’s candidacy as an attempt to garner more power and delay the restoration of judges sacked by Musharraf last November. PML (N) officials are already saying the row could break up the six-month-old coalition cobbled together after elections in February.

So will there be a fight to the finish between Zardari and Sharif that will drag Pakistan deeper into the mire? Or are the two men simply manoeuvring themselves into the best position they can find in the post-Musharraf era?

Indian writer M.J. Akbar says Zardari and Sharif, having set aside Musharraf, ”have begun the far more vicious process of trying to eliminate each other. This is a power-play in which there can be only one victor. Musharraf was the semi-finals. Islamabad is not a big enough town to find space for both Zardari and Sharif.

“The final resolution of this conflict will only come after another general election,” he writes. “In the meantime, the two will try to maximise their control over the instruments and institutions of state. Sharif has his sights on the Supreme Court, which has become the only reserve bank of credibility in a nation where the Constitution has been amenable to the doctrine of necessity — in simpler words, where the judiciary has legalised events rather than law being the determinant of fact. Zardari is more audacious, seeking the supreme office in the land, that of the President, since he is surely convinced that he will not get office through a popular vote.”

In an op-ed in the Daily Times, U.S.-based lawyer Rafia Zakaria bemoans the lack of leadership in Pakistan, creating what she calls a stagnant and elitist political system which is driving young talented Pakistanis abroad to join the thriving Pakistani diaspora. ”Politics in Pakistan, plagued as it is by political opportunism and expedience, has devolved to a level of absurdity where even Ms (Paris) Hilton would be a viable candidate for president,” she writes.

But is the current row the beginning of the end for Pakistan’s latest experiment in civilian democracy or its opposite — ie. evidence of a new and perhaps chaotic vigour in Pakistani politics as the country re-emerges from years of military rule?

Juan Cole in Informed Comment writes that “although the wrangling over who will be president is being reported in the U.S. press as a crisis, I don’t see it that way. It is, rather, an ordinary political process in which eventually there will be a winner who will garner enough votes to be elected. No one is brandishing a gun over all this to my knowledge. You might as well call the current presidential campaign in the U.S. to determine who will succeed George W. Bush a crisis.”

And leaving ideological debate aside, would Pakistan’s closest allies — China, Saudi Arabia and the United States — really be prepared to stand back and let the country descend into chaos?

Saudi Arabia, facing a challenge of its own from al Qaeda, has no interest in seeing it growing stronger in Pakistan, and may demand stability in return for its pledge to defer oil payments, as I wrote in a previous post. China has always called for a stable Pakistan, although like Saudi Arabia, it has been careful not to be seen to be interfering in its domestic politics. 

And the United States so badly needs Pakistan’s help in tackling the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan that it is likely to work hard to build a good relationship with whoever emerges as the strongest leader in Pakistan, including Zardari. According to the New York Times, doubts are growing among American officials over the level of cooperation they can expect from Pakistan Army chief Pervez Kayani “who has appeared less interested in how to deal with the Taliban than with the sagging morale of his undertrained, underequipped troops”. Sharif, the newspaper says, is seen as too close to conservative Islamic forces in Pakistan. ”To the surprise of many here, the civilian with the trump card, then, may be Mr. Zardari,” it says.

Winston Churchill famously noted: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Cause for optimism in Pakistan’s new civilian democracy? Or have the hopes raised by February’s elections been dashed?

UPDATE - President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation has been greeted with jubilation from supporters of the ruling PML-N and PPP parties (see picture right), and sparked a rally in the stock market. But reading through the comments on this and other blogs, I can’t see any clear theme emerging, with some praising and others condemning Musharraf’s legacy, some regretting and others welcoming his departure, and many fretting about the future.

I rather liked this comment on All Things Pakistan which seemed to sum up the many contradictions of people struggling to work out how to rally around a common cause:

“We celebrate on arrival and departure of the same person.
We praise those who left the scene.
Dead become heroes and living and serving are being accused.”

India, meanwhile, has been muted in its response. But Indian analysts who once derided Musharraf as the architect of the 1999 Kargil war are now fretting that his departure could unleash fresh tensions from Kashmir to Kabul if it is allowed to create a vacuum which can be exploited by Islamist militants.

There is much speculation too about what Musharraf will do next, and where he will go.  Some have read his feisty resignation speech — a long defence of his legacy — as evidence that he might eventually try to re-enter politics; others see in his final “Goodbye Pakistan” remarks , a sign he is preparing to leave the country. The United States, Saudi Arabia, Britain and Turkey have all been touted as possible destinations. (You can see some of the stories on his likely next home here, here and here.)

In the end, Musharraf has turned out to be as unpredictable in his departure as he was throughout his career both in the army and in politics. Looking through his memoirs, “In the Line of Fire”, for clues to his next move, I was struck by the following quote from another former general which Musharraf cites as a maxim in his own life:

“Napoleon said that two-thirds of decision making is based on study, analysis, calculations, facts, and figures, but the other third is always a leap in the dark, based on one’s gut.”

                                 ***********************************************

President Pervez Musharraf announced his resignation, ending months of speculation about the fate of the former army general after his political allies were trounced in an election in February.

But even before he said he would step down, analysts were already beginning to look to the challenges of a post-Musharraf era — spiralling inflation, food and fuel shortages; al Qaeda and Taliban militants on its border with Afghanistan; political in-fighting among the civilian politicians who took power in February. (You can see my last post on this here.)

So will Musharraf’s resignation help bring stability to Pakistan? Or are the problems faced by Pakistan — sandwiched between a turbulent Afghanistan and a resurgent India, both of which blame it for failing to curb Islamist militancy — too great?

How much will the three countries with the closest ties to Pakistan — China, Saudi Arabia and the United States — help or interfere? And what of the main domestic players in the unfolding drama: the judiciary, the civilian government and the Pakistan Army?

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.

This is an idea that looks crazy at first glance — Pakistan, struggling with its own food shortages and rising prices, rents out its farmland to grow grains for the rich Gulf states instead. 

But the idea appears to be gaining momentum. Saudi Arabia is holding talks with officials in Pakistan, among other countries, to set up projects to grow wheat and other grains to protect itself from crises in world food supplies. Dubai-based private equity firm Abraaj Capital has already said it is looking at investing in agriculture in Pakistan  and other Gulf countries are also showing an interest.

So is this good or bad news for Pakistan?

U.S. News & World Report says there may be ”potential for large and enduring benefits on both sides. The reported sellers of under-developed farmland, Pakistan and Sudan, for example, are poor and lack the resources to make their own land productive,” it says. “Foreign investment is meant to help the investor, but in these cases it might also help the host countries by improving roads and irrigation and, of course, providing cash.”

The Financial Times last month quoted a senior Pakistani official  as saying of the talks to sell farmland to the United Arab Emirates: “Our aim is not to do away with precious farmland but in fact to raise the productivity of our farms and turn barren land in to fertile farmland.”

On the positive side is the potential for big investments in Pakistan from wealthy Gulf economies looking to use windfall oil profits to diversify away from oil.  According to one expert, the cumulative sovereign wealth fund wealth in the Middle East is now about 1.5 trillion dollars, mostly in the United Arab Emirates; and their assets could triple or quadruple in five to 10 years time.

Pakistan also has an interest in keeping relations sweet with Saudi Arabia as it seeks a deal on deferred oil payments  to ease its own financial crisis. Is this the beginning of a new version of oil for food deals?

On the negative side are all the issues about sovereignty and economic control. And of course the perennial question in emerging markets. What will it mean for the poor man who is already struggling to feed his family.