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Pak It Up

Saturday snak-Pak of news and opinion:  

WSJ: State of Emergency to be lifted in a month.

For now, there aren’t any concrete signs that Pakistan’s military is edging away from Gen. Musharraf. In moves likely to shore up his support, the president has tapped loyal aides for the armed forces’ top jobs if and when he leaves his post as commander. Gen. Musharraf has nominated intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani to take over his job, and there are no indications that Lt. Gen. Kiyani is about to shove aside his boss and patron. Gen. Musharraf also has seeded scores of former servicemen into Pakistan’s government, winning loyalty and buttressing his control over civil institutions.

For her part, Ms. Bhutto has consistently called for the restoration of democracy, since her role as leader of the Pakistan People’s Party likely would catapult her back into power. At the same time, she’s been careful about putting too much pressure on Gen. Musharraf, perhaps fearing that his abrupt exit could create a leadership void that militants might exploit.

Indeed, a breakdown of Gen. Musharraf’s tentative alliance with Ms. Bhutto, a pro-Western secular leader who served two terms as Pakistan’s premier in the late 1980s and 1990s, would mark another setback in his fitful campaign to combat Islamist militants. In recent weeks, pro-Taliban fighters have taken control of several towns, police stations and former Pakistani army outposts along the country’s northwestern border with Afghanistan.

CNN: Bhutto released from house arrest, rejoins protests. Earlier: 

She said that she did not want Pakistan to suffer the extremism that had affected both Afghanistan and Iraq and urged Muslims and non-Muslims to work together. “We as a nation must save Pakistan from these extremists,” she said, adding: “The message of Islam is peace.”

Good luck with that.

NYT analysis: Bush strategy stumbles …  

Hoagland at WaPo: and Musharraf goes splat.

Krauthammer on the historic practice of democratization, laments Musharraf’s missteps and the crisis in Pakistan, and states: 

Is it time to revisit the 1980s and help push him over the edge?

That depends on whether we think Benazir Bhutto is Corazon Aquino, and whether Bhutto and her allies can successfully take power, which means keeping both the army and the country intact. Heightening the risk of dumping Musharraf is that external conditions today are not like the relatively benign conditions of the 1980s. The Taliban and their allies are gaining in strength, and waiting to pick up the pieces from the civil war developing between the two most Westernized, most modernizing elements of Pakistani society — the army, one of the few functioning institutions of the state, and the elite of civil society, including lawyers, jurists, journalists and students.

…

Our influence should not be overestimated. But we need to make clear our choices. The best among the awful ones Musharraf has presented us is to try to broker a truce between the two forces before the blood starts to flow, keep Musharraf to his promise of holding early parliamentary elections — which Bhutto will win — and then guarantee him a dignified and gradual exit that assures his protection while Bhutto and her allies claim legitimate authority and try to reach accommodation with Musharraf’s successor as military chief.

Mark Steyn has a laugh at the expense of striking screenwriters and actors who read their words, and moves on to another group of people who think their storylines reflect reality:

Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything: Gen. Musharraf should do this; he shouldn’t have done that; the State Department should lean on him to do the other.

… 

Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad.

Gen. Musharraf is – as George S. Kaufman remarked when the Germans invaded Russia – shooting without a script. But that’s because he presides over a country that defies the neatness of scripted narratives.

Somali journo-blogger Bashir Goth at Newsweek/WaPo: US out of Pakistan. 

In the Muslim world, it is history that shapes people’s perceptions of political situations. Unlike people in the West, who view emerging political scenarios through prisms of economics and of self-interest, Muslims and Arabs turn to history for explanations of western conspiracy in every situation they face.

The West thinks many of these events lie in the dust of history: the crusades, the loss of Andalusia, European colonial rule, the destruction of the Ottoman Caliphate, the debacle of Palestine, and the willy-nilly interference and changing of Muslim leaders. But these wounds are very much open and hurting in the Muslim world.

This is why when America goes east, Muslims go west. Recent U.S. military ventures into Afghanistan, Iraq, and indirectly into Somalia, and the larger war against terror, are all seen by the majority of the Muslim populace as the continuation of a war to dominate and subjugate the Muslim world.

…

The best scenario Washington can adopt in Pakistan is to let things sort themselves out. The less the U.S. interferes, the more comfortable Pakistanis will feel about their future.

Yeah, well it’s all good feel-bad history fun until someone gets a skyscraper out.

Pak activist under house arrest at Newsweek/WaPo globlog: don’t let us be the next Burma.

Topics: Pakistan

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:23 am on Saturday, November 10, 2007

One Response to “Pak It Up”

1. theospark Says:
   November 11th, 2007 at 8:20 am

   And Theo Spark got gagged!!

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