Among the more daring recommendations in a new report by the Pakistan Policy Working Group, a bipartisan group of American experts on U.S.-Pakistan relations, is that the United States should eventually reconsider its opposition to a proposed Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project.

The suggestion, aimed at building peace between India and Pakistan, is well hedged. The report says it does not expect the long-delayed project to happen any time soon because of instability in Pakistan and U.S. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme. But it is one that could ultimately be very significant not just for Pakistan, but also for Iran and India. As this Reuters story says, Iran sees energy-hungry India as one of the most promising markets for its huge natural gas reserves.

The report argues that U.S. pressure on Pakistan to end support for the Taliban in Afghanistan must be combined with diplomatic efforts to build peace and economic ties across the region so that Pakistan stops feeling its security is threatened. The long-term aim, it says, would be to ensure that Pakistan no longer sees a need to use Islamist militants as proxies against its much bigger neighbour, India.

India has long accused Pakistan of sponsoring militants fighting in Kashmir and of backing the Taliban to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan. Although Pakistan denies this, the view is gaining currency in the United States, but with the caveat that only by reducing tensions between Pakistan and India can Pakistan be persuaded to drop its dependence on militants. ”The U.S. should seek to adjust Pakistan’s cost-benefit calculus of using militants in its foreign policy,” the report says.

“To encourage better ties and more robust economic linkages between India and Pakistan, the U.S. should eventually reconsider its opposition to the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline project,” it says. ”Assuming that the situation in Pakistan stabilises, and the U.S. determines that the IPI would not undermine international efforts to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons programme, the pipeline could help to stabilise the region over the longer term by providing Pakistan and India with a mutual economic interest.”

Do read the whole report (The Council on Foreign Relations provides a link to the PDF document here). It is remarkable for its candour about Pakistan’s complex relationship with Islamist militants. But it is also impressive in its reach in the way it ties Pakistan’s fate to the policies of other players in the region — for example it calls for a National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistani support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and an “in-depth assessment of the activities of other regional actors in Afghanistan such as Russia, Iran and India”.

Is this a sign of things to come, heralding a much more sophisticated approach to U.S. foreign policy? And after years of oil and gas being seen as a cause for war, can they also become a reason for peace?

The United States has decided to halt cross-border ground raids by Special Ops forces into Pakistan, according to the U.S. Army Times. It quotes a Pentagon official as saying U.S. leaders had decided to hold off on permitting ground raids to allow Pakistani forces to press home their own attacks on militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

“We are now working with the Pakistanis to make sure that those type of ground-type insertions do not happen, at least for a period of time to give them an opportunity to do what they claim they are desiring to do,” it quotes the Pentagon official as saying. This did not apply to air strikes launched from Predator drones.

The article is well worth a read for its explanation of why the United States backed off after making a controversial cross-border ground raid on the village of Angor Adda earlier this month. The raid represented “a strategic miscalculation”, it quoted a U.S. government official as saying. “We did not fully appreciate the vehemence of the Pakistani response,” which included a threat to cut supply lines through Pakistan to Afghanistan. “I don’t think we really believed it was going to go to that level,” the official said.

I’d also recommend the lower part of the article as it gives a wealth of detail about who it thinks is being targeted in Pakistan right now, including the networks of Islamist leaders Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, both veterans of the campaign against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Interestingly, it says there has been no U.S. Special Ops activity in areas around the sanctuary of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, believed to be hiding in or near the Pakistani city of Quetta in Balochistan. ”It’s all happening in the tribal areas,” it quotes a civilian expert on Afghanistan as saying. “The target has not been the Omar Taliban.”

That’s probably just a coincidence of geography - targeting Quetta would involve striking much more deeply into Pakistan. But it does make you wonder whether it could have an impact on any attempt to draw parts of the Taliban into peace talks, an idea most recently explored by The Observer newspaper in Britain.  The logic for peace talks, as I have mentioned in previous posts, is that the Taliban, or parts of it, are essentially an ethnic nationalist Pashtun movement which could be won over, and separated from its allies in al Qaeda, by offering it a share of power in Kabul.  Food for thought.

I finally got around to reading Charlie Wilson’s War (much better than the film and considerably longer) about the U.S. Congressman who managed to drum up huge amounts of money to fund the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

George Crile’s book - about how the CIA channelled money and weapons through Pakistan to defeat the Red Army in Afghanistan and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union - was first published in 2002.  But it’s even more relevant today as the United States struggles to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and realises it will never succeed as long as ”the enemy” has sanctuary in Pakistan. It is the only war that the United States has fought on both sides.

This is a tale of how ill-equipped Afghan tribesmen were turned into “technoguerrillas” with American money and a romantic notion of defeating the “Evil Empire”.  I realise this story has been told many times since 9/11. And I acknowledge the obvious perils of judging history with hindsight - back then U.S. policy was seen through the prism of the Cold War, whereas now it is defined by ”the War on Terror”. But there are still lines in “Charlie Wilson’s War” that are worth repeating here:

“The basic law of modern guerrilla warfare,” writes Crile, “is that no insurgent movement can survive without a sanctuary for its fighters. The Vietcong depended on Cambodia and North Vietnam … Without Pakistan, there could not have been a sustained resistance (to the Soviet Union).”

In short, exactly the same problem the United States is facing today.

Then there are the weapons supplied to the mujahideen, that the CIA at first bought expensively and unreliably on the black market - ”like trying to get laid in a city you don’t know” - until a secret web of government arms suppliers eventually allowed the Americans to get “out of the world’s black-market whorehouses and into contractual relationships with governments that could provide the Agency with sound, reliable killing devices at a fixed price.”

Which countries are supplying the Taliban now?

Reading some of the lines in the book about how the aim was to sow fear into the hearts of the occupying Soviets, makes you wonder, especially so soon after the Marriott bombing, whether the author might have described them differently had he been writing with the perspective of recent history.

He writes for example about how the mujahideen in Pakistani camps were trained to wage a war of urban terror, with instructions in car bombings, bicycle bombings, camel bombings and assassination. According to Charlie Wilson, this was the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time. “This is the one chance to send the Soviet young men home in body bags,” he is quoted as saying, “like they sent our boys back in body bags.  Let’s make this a Vietnam for the Soviets.”

Pakistan of course denied all involvement in supporting the mujahideen, afraid that the Soviet Union might become so angered by the difficulties of taming Afghanistan that it would invade Pakistan as well. According to Crile, when then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev threatened to destroy Pakistan if it did not halt support for the mujahideen, President Zia “looked Gorbachev straight in the eye and insisted his country was not involved”. 

What’s interesting is how little the U.S. media and politicians questioned the CIA campaign in Afghanistan, distracted as they were by covert CIA operations to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America.

“It remains one of the great mysteries of this entire history,” writes Crile, “that virtually no one in the press - or Congress for that matter - seemed to care that the CIA was running the biggest operation in its history: that it was supporting efforts to kill thousands of Soviets, that it was fighting a very dirty war, that it was arming tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists.”

If we missed that story - one with such enormous consequences for the 21st century - what are we failing to notice now?

The weekend bomb which tore through the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing 53 people, was a reminder that Pakistan is entering the eye of the storm of Islamist militancy. But for me, it was also a more personal reminder of a childhood friend who went from a suburban upbringing in London to become one of Pakistan’s most notorious militants.

Omar Sheikh, a member of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of the Prophet) organisation which has been linked to the bombing, is currently on death row in Pakistan for organising the kidnapping and beheading of the brilliant Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in February, 2002.
 
I had long since lost contact with Omar since we both graduated from Forest School in north London in 1992 and the sight of a heavily bearded Sheikh flanked by Pakistani police during the Pearl trial came as a shock. My jumbled memories of Omar were of a tall, lantern-jawed adolescent with dark-rimmed glasses, a serious but polite demeanour, a childish sense of humour but an unblinking, fearless appetite for a fight. Even as a boy, he spoke feverishly and often of “My Country” and praised the authoritarian and strictly Islamic regime of General Zia — who ousted and killed Benazir Bhutto’s father and helped the mujahedin throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

A tangle of contradictions, Omar’s other great love aside from patriotism was arm-wrestling and the would-be Islamist would often be found in smoky pubs — drinking only milk — competing with his team.

We had both started at Forest School at the age of 11 and I remember he never cried at anything - unless he was angry with himself. He loved chess and often spent his lunch breaks pouring over a chess board with a group of friends who were mainly from Sri Lankan, Indian or Bengali families.

The son of a clothes merchant in Wanstead, north London, Omar lived in a nondescript house in a cul-de-sac, where he invited me for lunch after he returned from three years of schooling in Pakistan at the age of 16. Wary of England’s influence, Omar’s father sent him to study at Lahore’s exclusive and disciplinarian Aitchison school — he returned a junior boxing champion and full of stories of contacts with organised crime, gun battles in the ghettos of Lahore, visits to brothels. At the time I thought they were all tall stories - as the chess-lover that he was, Omar’s conversation was full of bluffs and feints — but now I’m not so sure. What I remember of our long lunch were Omar’s fascination with girls and his shock at the liberal relations between young girls and boys in England.

In the sixth form, he became interested in economics, dreamed of going to study in the United States at Harvard, and even sat the SAT exams, and he went everywhere with a sturdy black plastic suitcase which weighed a ton (I think he carried weights around to pump up his muscles for arm-wrestling). He seldom had fights at school after he returned from Pakistan and had trained as a boxer, but he would often joke around by letting his fists fly within inches of your face as if he were shadow boxing.
 
Looking back, Omar’s years in Pakistan were the first step in a transformation which was completed when he went to the London School of Economics and threw himself into the cause of persecuted Muslims in Bosnia. After a mysterious trip there at the end of his first year in 1993, Omar dropped out of his studies and his conversion to militancy began.
 
By the time of the Pearl kidnapping, Sheikh was already a high-profile militant: he had been detained in India in 1994 for the kidnapping of three Britons and an American in the volatile Kashmir region. Via our school, his lawyer asked if I would be willing to testify as a character witness at his trial, a request I turned down. In any case, I couldn’t see what my testimony as a character witness could achieve, given that Omar appeared to have undergone an ideological transformation by that stage.

Finally, Omar walked free in 1999 when Islamist militants hijacked an Indian Airlines flight with 155 people on board from Kathmandu, forcing it to land in Kandahar in Afghanistan. The Indian government exchanged Omar and two other prisoners in return for the release of the passengers and crew.
 
In many ways, Omar’s Westernised identity made him a precious commodity in the militant world. In his book “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?”, left-wing French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy cites evidence Sheikh had spent time with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and the al Qaeda founder referred to the genteel and well-educated economist as “my favourite son”.
 
Levi also cites evidence Sheikh was a conduit for funds from the head of Pakistan’s fractious but powerful military intelligence agency ISI to the pilots of the 9/11 planes in the United States. The Wall Street Journal’s Pearl was investigating the embarrassing allegations that one of the U.S. government’s most important allies in fighting terrorism was actually linked to the New York attacks at the time he was kidnapped — a charge Pakistan has denied.
 
Sheikh appears to have spent a week in the hands of the ISI before being turned over for trial for Pearl’s killing, and Pakistan has steadfastly refused to hand him over to US authorities. Sheikh remains a mysterious figure: Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf alleged he was actually working for British intelligence and downplayed his significance.
 
Even before the July 7, 2005 bomb attacks on London, Omar was an early reminder of the fragmented and conflicted identity of some young Muslims in England. Indeed, the Jaish-e-Mohammed group, linked to Pearl’s beheading and the Islamabad bombing, is alleged to receive much of its funding from Pakistanis living in Britain. While Omar had a reckless longing for adventure which propelled him along his path to radicalism, he also shared with many second-generation immigrants to Britain a longing to belong and he struggled to find anything in British society with which he could strongly identify.

Can Britain be called a functioning multi-cultural society? Has the appeal of armed Islamist groups been heightened by Britain’s military intervention in Muslim states like Iraq and Afghanistan? And as the United States frets about the risks of young men with western passports being trained up by militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas to carry out suicide bombings at home, what can be done to prevent them from being drawn into militant circles?
 

While Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari is in the United States discussing U.S. military strikes across Pakistan’s border, army chief General Ashfaq Kayani is on a far less publicised trip to China to talk about defence cooperation. The timing may be coincidental, but the potential implications of the United States and China playing competing roles in Pakistan are huge.

Pakistan has always seen China as a much more reliable friend, while support from Washington has waxed and waned in line with U.S. interests (Islamabad has never quite forgiven the United States for using it to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then dropping it when the Russians were driven out in 1989.) 

And nowadays the difference in the approaches of Pakistan’s two giant allies is even more striking.  While the United States and Pakistan argue about U.S. cross-border strikes, China has quietly reaffirmed its commitment to keeping Pakistan stable.

In a condolence message sent after this weekend’s Marriott Hotel bombing, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said, “As a good neighbour and all-time friend of Pakistan, China will always support the unremitting efforts made by the government and people of Pakistan to safeguard the country’s stability.”

Of course there is no reason to jump to the conclusion the United States and China will become outright rivals over Pakistan — both have a stake in Pakistan’s stability, and in the past both have managed to maintain close ties with Islamabad without tripping over each other. But the current scenario certainly increases the chances of friction.

Add to that the fact that the strategic picture in South Asia has changed dramatically under the Bush administration. The United States has rewritten its relationship with India — which was still seen as in the Soviet camp back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan –turning it into a crucial ally in Asia and potential bulwark against Chinese influence. It sealed that transformation by reaching a deal with India effectively recognising it as a nuclear power, ignoring any misgivings in China (India’s nuclear weapons programme was developed as much, if not more, as a defence against China as against Pakistan.)

So it will be interesting to see what Kayani brings back from China and Zardari from the United States in the way of promises of support.  Will the United States and China be able to work together to pull Pakistan out of its current crisis? Or are they drifting into a situation where they end up opposing each other?

Is New Delhi sending a signal to Pakistan by deploying its top strike warplanes in the Kashmir region?

It could just be a routine move to help pilots operate the nuclear-capable Su-30 aircraft  , codenamed Flanker by NATO, in another environment, but the timing is intriguing.

Ties between India and Pakistan have been fraught in recent months beginning with the breach of a five-year ceasefire on the Line of Control in Kashmir, the Indian embassy attack in Kabul in July and then bombs in Indian cities including New Delhi last weekend.

There is also trouble inside Kashmir with huge protests against Indian rule, further testing ties.

So why would New Delhi chose this moment to move a few of Su-30s forward from their base in Pune in western India ?

Indian analyst  Major General Ashok Mehta says this was a message to Pakistan to keep its hands off Kashmir.

Some people are reading an even deeper meaning. Stratfor says that besides reminding Pakistan of its superior air power, the Indians are sending Islamabad a message that continued Islamist support to Islamist militant proxies in India will not go unanswered. The Association of Intelligence Professionals says New Delhi may have run out of patience.

Does that sound familiar? Almost echoing what the United States is telling the Pakistans on the western border that any more support for militants operating in Afghanistan would be severely dealt with, which in any case they have begun to do.

So is this the pincer movement that some in Pakistan have long feared ? A strategic encirclement with a restless America on its western border and India flexing its muscles in the east?

“By sending half a dozen Sukhois to the Pakistani border, India may be hinting that it can choose to launch cross-border raids across the Line of Control in Kashmir while the United States is busy pounding jihadist targets inside Pakistani territory in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, thereby putting Pakistan in a most uncomfortable spot,” says Stratfor.

There has been much hesitation in the world’s media about how to label U.S. military action inside Pakistan’s borders, including a reported ground raid and a series of missile strikes. Do you call it an “invasion”? Or use the more innocuous-sounding “intervention”? In an editorial, the Washington Post gives it a name which is rather striking in its directness. It calls it quite simply, The War in Pakistan.

President George W. Bush’s reported decision in July to step up attacks by U.S. forces in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the newspaper says, was both necessary and long overdue. It acknowledges there is a risk the strikes might prompt a breach between the U.S. and Pakistani armies, or destabilize the new civilian government in Pakistan. But, it says, ”no risk to Pakistan’s political system or its U.S. relations is greater than that of a second 9/11 staged from the tribal territories. U.S. missile and commando attacks must be backed by the best intelligence and must minimize civilian casualties. But they must continue.”

Others are lining up to condemn the new U.S. strategy in Pakistan.

“The Americans are probably right in claiming that Al-Qaeda and the Taleban have regrouped and using bases in Pakistan to launch cross-border raids into Afghanistan,” says Saudi-based Arab News. “They are certainly right in thinking that there will be no peace in Afghanistan while that remains the case. But they have to let the Pakistanis deal with this. If they continue the raids, they risk not merely losing what dwindling support they have in Pakistan but, far worse, alienating the country so thoroughly than no government even vaguely sympathetic to the US and the West can survive there.”

Pakistan’s Daily Times takes this argument further by suggesting that if public opinion turns even more against the United States, “the country will become more vulnerable to Al Qaeda and we will face unpredictable odds. According to nuclear theory, Pakistan is a nuclear power and cannot be attacked. If the US attacks Pakistani territory, battles with the Pakistan army, stops military assistance to Pakistan, and thus ends up making Al Qaeda supreme in Pakistan, the nuclear theory might then apply to Al Qaeda.”

In the Huffington Post, Shuja Nawaz writes that “the next time the US physically invades Pakistani territory to take out suspected militants, it may meet the Pakistan army head on. Or it may face a complete cut-off of war supplies and fuel in Afghanistan via Pakistan. With only two weeks supply of fuel available to its forces inside Afghanistan and no alternative route currently available, the war in Afghanistan may come to a screeching halt.”

Nawaz adds that both Pakistan and the United States need to rethink their actions. ”Otherwise, the US will not only lose an ally in Pakistan but ignite a conflagration inside that huge and nuclear-armed country that will make the war in Afghanistan seem like a Sunday hike in the Hindu Kush.”

Scary stuff then, with lots of massive risks being talked about on both sides of the argument, from another 9/11 to al Qaeda taking charge of Pakistan.

So here is a completely different view from Juan Cole in Informed Comment. “The original al Qaeda is defeated,” he says.  Do read his post before leaping to judgment on this assertion, as he makes some interesting points, including arguing that the Taliban are driven more by Pashtun nationalism than by a desire to spread terrorism around the world.

“Although the US is worried about the Arab volunteers who take refuge among the resurgent Taliban, they are a tiny element and cannot easily launch international terrorist operations from FATA (Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas),” he writes. Based on an analysis of al Qaeda’s capabilities around the world, including in Iraq, he concludes; “For now, our war is over. Time to come home, and train and fund locals to do the clean-up work.”

Just suppose for a minute that his argument were to turn out to be correct. Then is the United States opening up a third front after Iraq and Afghanistan, but this time on the territory of a nuclear-armed country, for the wrong reasons?

Following up on yesterday’s post about U.S. military action in Pakistan, I see the New York Times is reporting that President George W. Bush secretly approved orders in July allowing American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government.

The new orders, it says, relax firm restrictions on conducting raids on the soil of an important ally without permission.

The paper also quotes two American officials as saying that last week’s raid by U.S. troops involved more than two dozen members of the Navy Seals who spent several hours on the ground and killed about two dozen suspected al Qaeda fighters. ”Supported by an AC-130 gunship, the Special Operations forces were whisked away by helicopters after completing the mission.”

This is big stuff, with enormous potential for escalation, should the raids continue. What happens if a ground assault goes wrong and some U.S. troops are kidnapped and handed over to al Qaeda? An enormous publicity coup for al Qaeda, which would no doubt provoke more raids, in turn requiring air support to cover the U.S. troops on the ground.

According to a comment posted earlier on this blog by Pakistan military expert Brian Cloughley: “If they (U.S. troops) tried to walk in from Afghanistan it would be the duty of the Frontier Corps or the Pakistan Army to repel them. And U.S. ground forces, these days, are incapable of fighting without massive air support. So if they called in airstrikes within Pakistan the PAF would have no alternative but to support their own kin, and use their American-supplied F-16s to counter violations of Pakistan’s airspace by US aircraft.”

So is the United States walking into a quagmire in Pakistan’s border areas? Or will a series of “surgical” raids be enough to destroy the leadership of al Qaeda and the Taliban and turn the war in Afghanistan back in Washington’s favour?

Much will depend on how Pakistan itself — both the new civilian government and the Pakistan Army –  respond to the American actions. The Pakistan Army is already carrying out its own military offensive in the border areas. But Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani has warned the United States to keep out, promising that “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country will be defended at all cost.”

And here’s a scary thought. Will the consequences of the U.S. operations in Pakistan depend on one of the more common variables in war, especially in rough hostile terrain: luck?

Are the Taliban and al Qaeda finally under serious pressure in their hideouts along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border?

Pakistani officials say U.S.-led helicopter-borne troops launched a ground assault on a Pakistani village near the Afghan border on Wednesday, killing 20 people.  The raid, in the South Waziristan tribal area, was the first known incursion into Pakistan by U.S.-led troops since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The raid has been condemned by Pakistan as a violation of its sovereignty. But the timing is puzzling.

Under intense U.S. pressure, the Pakistani army had launched major offensives against Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds in Bajaur,  another border area, and in Swat in the North-West Frontier Province, although Pakistan has since called a ceasefire for Ramadan.  Details of the offensives were sketchy, but their scale was implied by the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting.  It began to look as though Pakistan was finally taking determined action to drive out the Taliban and al Qaeda.

According to French journalist Marie-France Calle,  writing of a week spent travelling between Karachi, Peshawar and Islamabad, “everyone I have spoken to have told me that … the new people in charge have decided to go all the way in the tribal areas. They all said the only solution was to continue military operations until the Taliban and other militants were wiped out”.

So if Pakistan had begun its own campaign — as Washington has long asked it to do — why did the United States take the risk of enraging Islamabad by sending in ground troops? Did the U.S. troops believe they had a major target in their sights, a high-profile al Qaeda leader, and decide it was worth the risk? Or was the attack evidence of mounting pressure from both the United States and Pakistan on the Islamist militants  hiding out on the Pakistani-Afghan border? (The reported ground assault was followed up on Thursday by what Pakistan security officials said was a missile attack by a suspected U.S. drone in North Waziristan.)

It is too early to draw any real conclusions. However, let us just suppose the tide is turning against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan’s border areas and they are being forced out. Where will they go?

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?