Whither Pakistan
News and commentary roundup, includes Bhutto anti-hagiographies, starts with Pakistan says turmoil could delay vote. AFP:
ISLAMABAD (AFP) — Pakistan indicated Saturday it would delay January elections because of turmoil caused by the death of Benazir Bhutto, as a bitter dispute erupted over how the opposition leader was killed.
Violent protests and looting which have left at least 38 people dead and 53 injured have rocked the nation of 160 million Muslims since Bhutto was killed at a campaign rally in the northern city of Rawalpindi on Thursday.
The United States and Western powers have urged Pakistan to commit to the democratic process in the aftermath of her death, but leading opposition figure Nawaz Sharif has already said his party would boycott the polls.
…
The crisis-hit country’s election commission said it would hold an urgent meeting on Monday to decide the election’s fate, but it indicated a delay could be on the cards.
“All activities pertaining to pre-poll arrangements, including printing of ballot papers and logistics as well as training of polling personnel, have been adversely affected,” it said in a statement.
In some places, the commission said, the security situation was “not conducive” to holding the elections which Bhutto had come home from exile in October to contest.
It cited the death of an election candidate in a bomb blast and said election commission offices in nine districts had been set on fire and that voter lists had been “reduced to ashes”.
Bush banks on Mush staying the course. AP:
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is counting on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to go ahead with Jan 8. parliamentary elections despite Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in the hope they will cement steps toward restoring democracy in the volatile, nuclear-armed nation.
Bhutto’s death complicates U.S. efforts to reconcile the opposition and an increasingly unpopular Musharraf, an ally in the war on terrorism, but it is unlikely to prompt any major strategy shift or cuts in billions of dollars in U.S. aid, U.S. officials said.
In Crawford, Texas, President Bush “told his senior national security team that the United States needs to support democracy in Pakistan and help Pakistan in its struggle against extremism and terrorism,” a spokesman said.
Signing a condolence book at the Pakistani Embassy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: “The way to honor her memory is to continue the democratic process in Pakistan, so that the democracy that she so hoped for will be completed.”
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported Rice helped engineer Bhutto’s return and her bid for the prime minister’s post to stabilize Pakistan under Musharraf’s presidency. Officials say their main concerns now are how Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party will fare in the election and in parliament without its charismatic leader.
VOA: Mush orders firm action vs. rioters.
UK Telegraph: Pakistan offers to exhume Bhutto amid questions on how she died.
ChiTrib: Pak, US face the Void.
As rioting and protests spread after Bhutto’s assassination Thursday, most of the power brokers in the country—from President Pervez Musharraf to the army generals to the demoralized opposition to the Bush administration—were busy considering their options, eyeing each other in what will be a game of wills playing out in the coming days and weeks.
…
If Pakistan becomes more chaotic and “there’s a feeling nobody is providing any kind of leadership, those who are really well-organized could begin to fill the void,” said Rick Barton, a Pakistan expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, “and that could be some of the religious groups.”
…
For Musharraf, “things will become worse,” said Husain Haqqani, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University and a former Bhutto adviser. “His support base is eroded, his credibility is minimal, and now the West will start questioning whether he can deliver what we want him to deliver.”
Haqqani said he believes the former general would act as he always has, trying to defuse the immediate crisis without a long-range plan for improving the situation in Pakistan.
Musharraf “is trained as a commando, only to survive and blow up anything or anybody he considers to be a problem in his path,” Haqqani said. “He will think tactically—’What can I do to get out of the present crisis?’—which is why under him Pakistan has moved from crisis to crisis.”
“I don’t think he can recover from this, but he is not necessarily on the way out,” Haqqani added.
…
In the eyes of other analysts, the group in the best position to unite the opposition is Pakistan’s lawyers, who led protests earlier this year against Musharraf’s attempted ouster of the then-Supreme Court justice. The leader of the Pakistani Supreme Court bar, Aitzaz Ahsan, “has a certain national legitimacy and profile that would make him a potential leader,” said Daniel Markey, a Pakistan expert with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. But Ahsan has been under house arrests for eight weeks, and his viability as leader in the short term is doubtful.
Another possible scenario is that Musharraf takes advantage of the opposition’s disarray to hold on to power, while persuading Washington yet again that he is its best bet to stanch a slide into chaos in the region.
“I think, if anything, this latest tragedy is likely to reinforce beliefs within those [Washington] offices that Pakistan is a dangerous, messy place, potentially very unstable and fragile,” Markey said, “and that they need to cling to Musharraf more even than they did in the past.”
There’s the short version. The whole thing is worth a read.
Ralph Peters at NYPost: Bhutto not all she appeared to be.
Her country’s better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.
We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.
She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and “hardheaded” journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.
In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency.
…
Military regimes are never appealing to Western sensibilities. Yet, there are desperate hours when they provide the only, slim hope for a country nearing collapse. Democracy is certainly preferable - but, unfortunately, it’s not always immediately possible. Like spoiled children, we have to have it now - and damn the consequences.
In Pakistan, the military has its own forms of graft; nonetheless, it remains the least corrupt institution in the country and the only force holding an unnatural state together. In Pakistan back in the ’90s, the only people I met who cared a whit about the common man were military officers.
Americans don’t like to hear that. But it’s the truth.
Ouch. Meanwhile, check this out. Swiss close multi-million-$$$-laundering case vs Bhutto, keep it open vs. the hubby.
Bronwen Maddox at Times of London: Enough with the Bhutto reverence. Courageous and liberal, yes, but an unreliable partner for the West.
As a potential saviour of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was an uncomfortable candidate: dogged by corruption charges that might have resurfaced with new seriousness in Swiss courts in the new year and by a record of calamitous ineffectiveness during her two terms as Prime Minister.
Britain and the United States were not wrong to back her as their preference for the next prime minister, working in tandem with President Musharraf.
She was the best of an unattractive lineup; Pakistan has never been blessed in its politicians, who represent the worst of its society – feudal and fonder of patronage than principle. Western-educated and female, Ms Bhutto appeared to stand for the liberal values that the West wants to encourage in Pakistan.
But Britain and the US may have been too pragmatic by half in putting such weight on so imperfect a figure, and in hoping that her strengths would outweigh her enormous weaknesses: grandiosity, a sense of destiny that she interpreted as licence to do what she wanted and an indifference to the distinction between the interests of Pakistan and her own. They made light of the unpredictability of her policies; in office, she let public spending and debt rise to unmanageable proportions, and she was ambivalent towards the US and India.
This one’s a little odd, appears to be missing something. TIME: Pakistan after Bhutto.
“It has released bottled-up national energies,” says Lieutenant General Hameed Gul, the former director general of Pakistan’s intelligence organization, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). “[The assassination] is going to really excite the people, bring them out. Which direction this energy takes, that’s the question.”
Gul could be a good guy to ask. Who did kill Bhutto?
Many leading Pakistanis believe that the only way to head off further civil unrest is to form a broad-based coalition government — what Gul calls “a national government of consensus” — to tackle the extremist forces suspected in yesterday’s attack. I.A. Rehman, the director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan agrees: “Pakistan’s survival depends on the earliest possible transition to democracy and the formation of an all-party national government.” Elections are scheduled for Jan. 8, although so far there has been no official word on the vote’s status in the wake of Bhutto’s assassination, and some speculate they are likely to be delayed. Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif announced Thursday that his party would boycott the elections, threatening the vote’s legitimacy if it were to go forward. But if the vote is delayed and unrest continues, Rehman fears there is a real chance that regional divisions could lead to the breakup of the country. Karachi, the site of some of the worst violence, is Pakistan’s biggest city, the capital of the southern province of Sindh and the traditional power base for Bhutto’s family. (Her father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali, also died in Rawalpindi, executed by Pakistan’s then-leader General Zia Ul-Haq). Many in Sindh resent the government in Islamabad. “The provinces are pulling in different directions already and if all these forces are not kept in check then there is a serious threat to the integrity of Pakistan,” says Rehman.
Even if elections go ahead, there’s still the problem of whether a new parliament could work with embattled President Pervez Musharraf.
Oh, turns out they did ask Gul.
Although there is no evidence linking Pakistan’s security forces to Bhutto’s assassination, Gul, like Sharif and many other Pakistanis, says Musharraf is to blame for her death. He argues that the government should have provided better security to Bhutto, who had been targeted by a suicide bomber the day she returned to Pakistan from self-imposed exile two months ago. That blast killed some 140 people. “Why didn’t the security forces have jamming devices [to stop the bomb exploding]?” asks Gul of Thursday’s attack. “How is it possible that a man with a weapon could enter the arena and get so close to her? It’s a comprehensive failure of the government.”
Fascinating. Ex-ISI blames Mush. Pakistan is a complicated place. Maybe Gul’s a boy scout interested in a democratic, monkey business-free Pakistan. This ISI backgrounder claims Gul has history of engineering anti-Bhutto moves, however. Here’s a site that links to reports Mush gave Gul the hairy eyeball re Bhutto bombings. Meanwhile, this conspiracy-enthused site cites a 2001 UPI article that says Gul figured that rogue UAF and Israeli agents, not bin Laden, did 9/11. TIME, playing up Gul’s views, apparently isn’t concerned about those. Then again, TIME thinks Putin is a stabilizing world-changer engaged in high-spirited hijinks.
Prior:
Pak It Up, prior election/emergency background and context re Bhutto, Musharraf etal.
Topics: Pakistan
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:50 am on Saturday, December 29, 2007
2 Responses to “Whither Pakistan”
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December 29th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
I could say something relevant but it would get lost in the shuffle.
This is like watching a nation of lemmings simultaneously jump into an ever widening credibility gap.
Although speculating on these events is more fun that noodling for fish.
The newspapers are asking Hameed Gul for his opinions. E-gads! That’s like asking Frankenstein for commentary about the monster he created.
December 29th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
I would like to see what kind of jamming equipment they use for manual switches.
If I were going to be a component of a smart bomb, I’d hate for someone else to be the smart part with a cell phone. The latent feeling of mission accomplishment would be replaced by apprehension and uncertainty. A very stupid way to go.
Omar: Achmed pull the trigger!
Achmed: What? There’s too much noise! Say it again.
Omar: The trigger, pull the trigger!
Achmed: I still can’t hear you!
Omar: Blow the damned thing up!
Achmed: Boy, it sure is quiet in here.