Sunday, November 04, 2007

re: Pakistan Emergency    [Jonthan Foreman]

Things were certainly heating up a lot last week in Pakistan though the various jihadi attacks didn't get much coverage in the West.

In the Punjab, far from the frontier there was a major suicide bomb attack against the Pakistani Air Force, killing eight officers and cadets (probably a reprisal for air strikes in Waziristan in October). There was intense fighting in the Swat valley, a popular vacation area on the edge of the tribal area, with Pakistani helicopter gunships striking militants of the TNSM, a.k.a. the Pakistani Taliban. Another suicide bomber exploded himself and seven other people in a high security area of Rawalpindi near General Musharaf's official residence (on the anniversary of a Pakistani missile attack on an extremist TNSM madrassa last year). Whatever Musharraf's actual motives, I can think of lots of countries where this level of violence might prompt a state of emergency....

The State Department  response — calling for immediate free elections — is idiotic. Break down Pakistan's instability into just some of its component parts — Islamist militancy, tribal unrest, deep-seated ethnic separatism, feudal oppression, sectarian hatred, an incompetent and corrupt ruling elite, an ill-educated population, a paranoid and conspiratorial culture  — and it's far from clear that dictatorship is the disease or elections the cure.

It's interesting that the official Indian reaction has been so careful. Said a Foreign Ministry spokesman: "We regret the difficult times that Pakistan is passing through...We trust that conditions of normalcy will soon return, permitting Pakistan's transition to stability and democracy to continue." New Delhi clearly realizes that Musharraf for all his faults may be preferable to any alternative. ...

This does look like a second coup by the general, given the arrests of senior judicial figures and the shutting down of private TV and radio stations (though the newspapers are as free and critical as ever).  It makes it clearer than ever that the war between Musharraf and the legal community has been a disaster for Pakistan (Musharraf may well have launched his coup to pre-empt a Supreme Court ruling forbidding him to run in the election scheduled early next year).

11/04 09:00 AMShare