While much of Pakistan’s civil society celebrated a famous victory in the restoration of the judges it continued to display suicidal indifference to the existential threat to itself.President Zardari’s misjudgment and Mian Nawaz Sharif’s ambition brought welcome relief to the jihadi apparatus at the precise moment when the international noose around it appeared to be tightening. The road map to democratic transition was obscured, and the contours of the abyss became a little clearer. Extraordinary acts of leadership are needed. Unfortunately, it is not clear if they will be forthcoming or sufficient.Despite claims of national mobilisation, the long march was a PML-N show and mostly confined to north-central Punjab, a region accounting for a third of the population. Southern Punjab, the NWFP, Balochistan and Sindh were virtually absent and for parties representing voters in these regions the finer distinction between ‘reappointment’ and ‘restoration’ was not a priority in the face of worries such as state collapse and economic survival.The richer segment of the most powerful region had spoken and claimed to speak for the nation. Battle-hardened activists elsewhere were left wondering how long their own mass protests would have lasted before the hard state made an appearance. A minority, no matter how right, had bent the will of the majority’s representatives and jubilant cries of ‘national triumph’ simply rubbed salt in the wounds.This was no people’s revolution. Revolutions are about challenging power and they face real power – not policemen who melt away. Pakistan’s centre of de facto power – the military – was not mentioned except in admiring terms for its help. An elected civilian government reportedly at loggerheads with a recalcitrant military was the main target.In the meanwhile, the real revolution of the jihad variety kept up its march. PPP obituaries are premature, but the battering of the largest secular party with representation across the region cannot be good news. Some saw Sharif’s emergence as grounds for hope. His past connections with extremists and relations with Saudi Arabia and rightwing groups might be assets which could be used to tame the jihadi threat – if taming were possible.The bottom line is that political society collectively lost ground to other forces. The rise of Sharif at the expense of Zardari barely conceals the fact that Pakistan’s de facto centre of power had regained lost ground. The lawyers and the ‘restored’ judges too might feel that they have emerged as an autonomous power centre. But courts by their very nature are loath to challenging de facto power – their resistance to Musharraf was to his abuse of de jure authority.The ‘independent’ electronic media which earned worldwide fame for its post-Mumbai denial chorus emerged as another power centre. Whether the rightwing domination of the media is manufactured or genuine, the effect is the same. A minority opinion, if measured in terms of electoral arithmetic, is projected as the national view. This view is defensive about jihadi militancy, hostile to good relations with Afghanistan and India, and prickly about any discussion of nuclear proliferation – all the elements that led Pakistan to be labelled ‘the world’s migraine’.The long march changed the balance of power precisely at the moment when international focus on jihadi militancy sharpened. US officials said that segments of our military were still connected with the jihadis. This is what many Pakistanis suspected privately all along. Benazir Bhutto was among the few who broke the public silence when in her last book, ignored by many in her own party, she wrote about a jihadi virus infecting the top echelons of our establishment. For all his follies, Zardari, unlike many of his counterparts, is clear about the source of the threat. Meanwhile, unnoticed at home, the federal police won international accolades. The head of Interpol called the police work following Mumbai ‘no less than extraordinary’. He had special praise for Rehman Malik for pursuing leads against jihadi networks. Right or wrong, the same Malik was singled out for attack during the long march and its aftermath. His departure would signal a victory for those threatened by the antivirus – efforts at reforming our intelligence agencies and upgrading civilian-led ones.Despite statements of goodwill, it is unlikely that hostilities between Sharif and Zardari have ended. Sharif may persist with his prime ministerial ambitions – though he cannot prevail without the military’s tacit help. Zardari might continue to nurture his political insecurity, and get trapped into yet another defeat – this time on the issue of reducing presidential powers in the constitution. In a re-run of the 1990s the judges and the media will corner Zardari first before going after Sharif. Most importantly, the apparatus will succeed in stalling the re-orientation of security priority from India to jihadi militancy. Denial will get its own regime.But some things have changed since the 1990s. Political society has become further disarticulated, and as the long march itself proved, fragmentation along regional and ethnic lines is a harsh reality. Moreover, strategic theories that are used to justify keeping alive the jihad option have underestimated the determination of foreign powers this time round.
Retreat from the struggle against jihadi militancy will be fatal for civil and political society, but not without cost for the military either. Unwillingness to act will draw further intrusive responses from foreign powers. In the meanwhile, the social base of the ‘world’s migraine’ is now restricted to a specific region. As the state comes under pressure from external powers others will challenge this region’s claim to speak for ‘the nation’ and cut their own deals. This is what the abyss looks like.Stepping back from the brink will require extraordinary leadership on the part of political society – which unlike other power centres has at least some will and chance of succeeding. Zardari will have to trust his party more, and learn to live with the fact that Benazir’s unquestioned authority died with her. Sharif must understand that he cannot become prime minister without an ultimately suicidal Faustian bargain with the military. He could try to be really brave now and lead the right and north-central Punjab out of denial and into a consensus against jihadi militancy.This would be Plan A, and it is slipping away fast. For their own reasons foreign powers will pressure our leaders as well as the military to rethink their priorities. But foreigners will respond to their own domestic expediencies first and our needs second, which means that even if Plan A is still on, the time needed to see it through will run out sooner than we think.
PAKISTAN:Journey to the brink
Pakistanis fear resurgence of violence in Swat Valley
By Betsy Hiel
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The Swat Valley's beleaguered people hoped a deal with extremists would restore peace to their mountainous region, once legendary with tourists as "the Switzerland of the East."Pakistani officials hoped that restoring Islamic law in the once-independent province would steal an issue from the Islamist insurgency, despite condemnation by U.S. officials.Yet the hard-line cleric who brokered the deal, Sufi Mohammed, has packed up and left the valley -- accusing the government of reneging on its promise -- and fear of warfare has returned.A "wave of apprehension has befallen Swat ... people see it as the first step towards the collapse of the deal and back to violence," says Adnan Aurangzeb, a former parliamentarian and grandson of Swat's last ruler when it remained a separate princely state in the 1960s.Swat, some 60 miles from this Pakistani capital, is just one of many burning issues in this nation of 170 million.The world's only Muslim nuclear power is a key U.S. ally against Islamist extremists. It suffers near-daily terrorist attacks in major cities; its army is battling al-Qaida and other Islamist militants along the border with Afghanistan.
A LEGACY OF BRUTALITY
Swat's deal with terrorists, like others before it, has been hotly debated here and in Washington.Sufi Mohammed negotiated it on behalf of militants led by his son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, whose Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws has brutalized Swat since 2007.Mohammed has his own extremist legacy: In 2001 he led 10,000 fighters against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Most of his followers were killed, and he was imprisoned when he returned to Pakistan; he was released in 2008.
Fazlullah's 2,000-strong insurgency attacked military convoys, killed local police, torched girls' schools and seized a highly profitable emerald mine. It beheaded many of its foes in village after village, to enforce "Islamic" rule.The militants initially played on public desire for the "swift justice" of Islamic law that ruled Swat as an independent state, Aurangzeb explains."Two months ago, they announced a list of 47 people," a Swat businessman says, declining to give his name for fear of retaliation. "They said, 'Wherever we find them, we will behead them and their relatives.' Today, one person on that list is alive."People are very scared. They are afraid to speak."When Pakistan's army counter-attacked and cleared Fazlullah's force from the valley in 2007, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a commander in the military-garrison city of Rawalpindi, says, "The public was overwhelmingly supporting us."A truce and Pakistan's parliamentary elections in 2008 allowed the militants to regroup."The first thing they did was target all those who had supported the military," Abbas recalls. A third of the region's 1.5 million residents fled.
'BATTLEGROUND FOR JIHADISTS'
"Swat has become the new battleground for the jihadists from all over the country," says Zahid Hussain, author of "Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam." Foreign fighters and militants from Beitullah Mehsud's insurgency in Waziristan, another Pakistani tribal area, joined Fazlullah.Local people who cooperated with Pakistani troops "were killed ... nobody came to protect their lives," says Hussain. "That is basically the reason why the militants have been able to control the area -- it is the failure of the state."Pakistani officials say they agreed to the latest deal in order to end the bloodshed and to wean the populace from the militants.Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, in an exclusive interview with the Tribune-Review, said the agreement recognized Swat's historic independence and tradition of Islamic law, and was predicated on the insurgency ending."If peace is restored, we have no objections," he said from his Islamabad home. "... This should not be taken as a surrender."Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari had not yet signed the provision on Islamic law -- which Sufi Mohammed condemned as a bad-faith sign. But Islamic judges had set up courts in Swat and an uneasy semblance of normal life had returned, according to locals.But a recent video of Pakistani Taliban flogging a screaming young woman for being in the company of a man caused an outcry in Islamabad; the country's Supreme Court called for an investigation, and newspapers condemned the flogging as barbaric.
'WE ARE IN A BLACK HOLE NOW'
Analysts such as Hussain think any agreement with militants is a government surrender."They virtually have now an area where they have established Taliban rule," the investigative author says. "And it is going to have far-reaching effect, because that has emboldened the militants operating in other parts of Northwestern Pakistan."
Former interior minister Lt. Gen. Hamid Nawaz Khan told Pakistani reporters he fears more extremists will shift from the Afghan-Pakistan border to Swat, making it "the biggest safe haven for al-Qaida and the Taliban."Aurangzeb, whose grandfather once ruled Swat, suspects U.S. pressure stopped President Zardari from signing the Islamic-law regulation, which he describes as "basically toothless" and unlike the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan.But "Zardari is expected to head a progressive, liberal and secular party," he contends, and Islamic law "is a negation of the manifesto of (his) Pakistan Peoples Party, and he cannot become a party to it."So he will back out (of the deal), and the Taliban will say, 'Look -- we told you so.' And they will (enforce) their brand of shariah" -- Islamic law -- "by ... the barrel of a gun."
The region's people are bracing for the worst.
"We are in a black hole now and do know which direction we will come out of it," Aurangzeb says. "But the signs don't look good, and then what credibility does the government have left?"
After Karl Marx, another view of history
After Karl Marx, another view of history
07.04.2009 Source: Pravda.Ru URL: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107365-After_Karl_Marx-0
By Cage Innoye
Two peoples are at war today in a very interesting and symbolic conflict -- Afghanistan and America, a very tribal culture vs. the most advanced culture on the planet, one culture near the beginning, one very far away. This raises some interesting questions about history.
Karl Marx gave us a perspective on history focusing on class struggle. It was called ‘historical materialism’. Here is offered another thesis that is based on the principle of ‘differentiation’. In the cosmos all things differentiate over time, they become more diverse, more individual, more particular over time. This is a long-term process in the world too, call it ‘historical differentiation’.
In this view, class struggle is incorporated as one type of ‘differentiation’ though it is modified here. The general notion addresses not only classes but all forms of inequality – gender, race and more. The thesis also appends the class issue with problems in the formation of individuality. It addresses the rise of social institutions, the rise of complexity in society, and the war of institutions. It addresses the consequent war of minds within the brain. It addresses the appearance of false ideologies and delusions like consumerism and more.
What is the fundamental theme of history? It is the same as the whole cosmos! It is differentiation -- the creation of difference, individuality, particularity, complexity. Humans are no different than over living organisms or inanimate things. This force produces galaxies, planets, living things, humans, human minds and human society.
This differentiation must begin somewhere. For the cosmos it begins, at least as far we can trace it now, in the Subsume of a singularity and then the ‘big bang’. A Subsume is an origin point where all things are fused and confused, and all future things exist in potential. At some point, there was an earth Subsume for nascent life, though we don’t know yet what it was and when, but it ‘elaborated’ outward into many species and an ecosystem. Then human Subsumes appeared in evolution too. For the purposes here concerning modern history, we begin in another Subsume -- that of the tribal village long before the rise of ‘civilization’.
The village splits into parts, differentiation causes this. Class groups arise at a certain point, classes of all sorts, inequality appears. Institutions arise -- church, economy, government, science and technology, education, art, theatre etc. Affluence, specialization and organization propel this process.
Individuality arises as people become more aware of their unique identity and inner powers. In addition, they are disconnected from the new state; they are now alienated and alone. They either accept the new situation or they band together into new religions of connection or they rebel.
The mind also differentiates; where all was once fused, now a split begins, then comes minds of logic-science vs. spirit vs. subconscious vs. the mind of doing vs. emotions vs. wisdom vs. creativity. All once mixed in a whole mind, all interconnected, now it is shattered; people choose which house to live in and champion it.
Old tribal perspectives are gone. Economics that was supposed to help the whole tribe has vanished, classes get rich. Education that was supposed to be about life has been replaced by new curriculums. A priest replaces the old shaman; religion is removed from community and daily issues of life. Feelings of tribal brotherhood are gone. Intimate connection to Nature is gone. Ancestor religion is gone; no more connection to your family, immortality is redefined. The dreamtime is gone.
New ideologies arise, new religions, emperor worship; in modern times comes consumerism and philosophies of self absorption.
After the tribe, war is everywhere. The war of individuals, war of social classes, institutional war, mental war, and ideologies justifying this war all appear together.
All this happens because of differentiation. But this is a very bad kind of differentiation, not a good kind. This process leads to break up, alienation, conflict, exploitation, manipulation and elitism.
This then leads to some groups abusing other groups or the majority, the ‘people’. Or it leads to neglect of some groups or most groups by elite and controlling people.
This process began thousands of years ago. It first produced city states all over the planet. In the West, this process has been most extreme and most advanced. But by ‘advanced’ it is not meant ‘healthy’.
This break up of the original tribal subsume did not have to happen, it did so because we were ignorant of the process and its consequences. This ‘negative differentiation’ or ‘negative elaboration’ has dominated for some time. Yes, good things have happened too within all of this. Discoveries, inventions, industry and sciences, but much of this came as a super-focus or even obsession -- because some ideology, class or institution ruled and promoted its biased view of the world and one human need against all other.
The ancient Greeks were not like us at all though we like to pretend they were. In China and the East the negative differentiation did not go so far. One can argue that other cultures went in the extreme direction of the religious or imperial. And this is true but the West has outdone them in shear excess.
In Europe there was rise of science, technology and capitalism. England was most advanced in this process however its cousin, America, outdid it. The USA is the most advanced in this kind of destructive elaboration about money, extreme individuality, alienation, consumerism, culture and mind wars, technology obsession and blindness to the environment. America has pioneered its unique form of negative differentiation. At the same time, in the USA are seeds of an escape from this law of history, from this negative process into a healthy differentiation.
The USA beat its competitor the Soviet Union and won. And we must note something about Russia: The socialist revolution in Russia took place precisely because of a proximity to the tribe. Russia was not Western Europe, workers came from communal villages; they spontaneously created the Soviets, the worker’s councils, for self-administration.
Eventually, communism of course undermined the Soviets but the point is that communism was a reaction to history, not history itself. Communism arose as an antidote, partly seeing the process, partly ignorant of so much more of the process. It did not recognize the whole process about evolving individuality, all realms of the mind, all forms of elitism and inequality, the diversity of all institutions.
Terrible abuse and neglect happened in communism too, though its original intentions were to escape this horrible historical progression. It fell. America was able to push further recklessly down its road; in 17 years America accomplished in 2008 a breakdown. The locomotive of the great train of history is off the tracks now.
Offered here is another way of looking at history -- a history of differentiation and elaboration that did not have to be, but occurred because of ignorance, power and wealth.
Where are we then in this long human evolution? In the USA, the program should be to accept individuality as a historical process but promote healthy individuality and limit alienation and selfishness. Individuality should be appended with social activism, caring and building new institutions. Principles and ideals are key -- when your new world does not exist, you need ideas first to drive you to create it. The tribal person did not need ideals of community because the connection was there, they lived it everyday.
Social institutions, principally, business and the economy should not be allowed to control or destroy other institutions like education, government, healthcare and more. Democracy should include a diversity of institutions that should work together. We should promote equality and help the victims of poverty. Negative psychologies and ideologies that come from consumerism and entertainment should be abandoned. And we should change the way we use our brains, we must use all our brains, and learn how to manage our complex minds and emotions.
The general themes here are balance, connection and the whole. Complexity is good, individualization is good, creative development of new things is good, technological advance is good. As long as we stay connected, in balance, and as wholes, this is all very good. We cannot stop evolution and creativity, and we should not try. These are fundamental forces in the cosmos, in Nature, in humans, in society, in our minds. But there are consequences and vigilance is needed.
These are the lessons of the history of differentiation. For human beings the process must be conscious. From a tribal subsume comes elaboration. In our minds we often return to tribal subsumes, we mourn the loss of the days when we were all one, for the current world vexes us. We seek the ‘ideal’ time or ‘dreamtime’.
People right behind the USA in evolution should take pause, make a course correction.
Those further back are closer to the tribal subsume; they may be in the best position. They can avoid the suffering that we know as daily life. They may be in the most creative situation.
Cage Innoye is an American writer. You can contact him at his blog, or at his email. His is working on his upcoming book, “The Axxiad”.
TEEN AGE GIRL FLOGGED....STATE OF DENIAL
M Waqar
Today I congratulate everyone because Gen Zia’a dream has been fulfilled as a teenaged girl was flogged in Swat. Also let me congratulate, Imran Khan, the Jama’at-e-Islami leadership, Lt-Gen Hameed Gul, the ANP government in the NWFP, the majority of Urdu-language columnists, some English ones too as they support making deals with Taliban. Video of a young girl being flogged as ‘punishment’ by the Taliban in Swat has shocked everyone in the civilized World. It is shameful that religious parties appeared reluctant to openly condemn the case of lashing of a 17-year-old girl in Swat while not giving any clear statement regarding the unfortunate incident. What a shameful act these so-called Taliban did. I am also proud of those men who were watching this innocent helpless victim of atrocity, watching the spectacle mutely either in approval or dumbfounded and afraid of uttering a word against it lest it be termed as anti-Islam and they themselves were meted out the same treatment. Hearing that poor girl's cries grown up men stood and watched her being beaten just makes me sick to the stomach. What a message we are sending to the civilized World. Zardari "condemns" (words are cheap); PM "demands" punishment (OK, lets wait and see); CJ uses suo moto to demand girl be produced before court. (OK, lets wait and see). Jamaat-e-Islami says this is a "minor matter" and people should focus on drone attacks by the US (thus demonstrating their hypocrisy and savagery). This was one of the barbaric acts of Taliban, so far we knew that they hang dead bodies to tress but now we have learned that in the past women were punished like this inside rooms. The videotape shown on television and displayed on websites wasn't the only time that a woman was publicly canned by the Taliban. However, no videotape of the other incident, which took place on Oct 20, 2008, is available in which a woman and her father-in-law were flogged in Ser-Taligram village near Manglawar in Charbagh tehsil. It is also sad to read some people's comments who are living in denial. Those who have a serious doubt as immediately after the whipping the "victim" got up and walked away without a limp." Any sane person would laugh at this nonsense if the situation weren’t so dire. If the video was fake, then why did the Taliban accept responsibility and claim they had done the right thing? Everything is a conspiracy to those who are in state of denial. They have lost ability to think, reason and to be logical. Speaking from psychological point of view that innocent girl must be so embarrassed that she did not want to be there, that’s why she got up fast. Those who are living in denial expect from this girl to say thanks to those Taliban and had offered them flowers, that’s what anyone who is denying this incident expects from that girl. That poor girl must have been in agony and I wonder what happened to her once they took her away. Those who are living in denial, those who think this incident was fake, remember Taliban would publicly whip your sisters, mothers, daughters and wives and when you will get out of your state of denial, it will be too late. It is also unfortunate that ANP leadership has abandoned its own people to the Taliban by making deals with them. No one can give justification for such an act. These handful of people have taken the population hostage, and the government is trying to patronize them. If the state surrenders, what will happen next? Those who are thinking that this video is fake should read writing on the wall. It was indeed like a lash on the faces of the chief minister of NWFP, the prime minister, the president, the legislators and most importantly, on the faces of every civilized Pakistani and Pukhtun . Its also true that the monster of terrorism is indeed on the prowl, unhindered and unchecked, targeting at will whatever and whoever it wants. It is obvious that the state has been unable and unwilling to address the threat posed by Al Qaeda and the Taliban. For the most part, the religious lot of the country has quietly and not so quietly supported the terrorists. The people of Pukhtunkhwa have been held hostage by Taliban, Pukhtuns' land is burning. What Taliban are doing is plain barbarism. When a religion is taken over by militants and zealots this is what you get.
Rehman Malik must quit..........
The Frontier Post
Editorial
Interior security czar Rehman Malik says money and arms are coming to extremists from across the border. This indeed he has said again and again over the time. But every time he shies away religiously from being specific. He dodges telling who is or who are funneling these deadly supplies to terrorist to kill and main our people and terrorise them. Is it because the fact is too difficult for him to tell? After all, if murderous stuff is coming to them from Afghan Taliban, Rehman would be the first to cry out and shrilly. Haven't he been accusing Baitullah Mehsud of almost every terrorist act and suicide bombing, horrifically taking place in one part or the other of the country almost every day, exacting a huge toll on our hapless people. And he may be right. That thug has himself owned up many such bloody strikes in the past as also in these times. But the question is who is keeping him supplied intermittently with bundles of cash and mounds of sophisticated weapons. The thug is running no mint mills and no arms factory; nor does he own a diamond mine to bankroll his terrorist activities. Years ago, Taliban leader Mullah Omar had expelled him from his Shura council for fighting the Pakistan army instead of the coalition forces in Afghanistan. Then who has been shipping him wades of dollars to buy recruits and suicide bombers, and truckloads of sophisticated weapons to fight pitched battles with Pakistan security forces? Rehman says suicide bombers are from one to all Pakistani nationals. He may be right. He may also be right that suicide bombers are now free lancers, ready to kill themselves and kill others for a price, with the going rate running between Rs. 500,000 and 1,500,000. But who are the buyers of their "services" and wherefrom do those customers themselves get the money? After all, Baitullahs, Fazlullahs and the thugs of their ilk are no billionaires; nor are all those vile lashkars, jaishes and siphas self-financing murder shops. Yet, they demonstrate no stringency of money or arms. They appear richly flush with both, indeed brandishing even weapons and equipment not in possession of even the state security forces. Being the internal security boss, Rehman must be privy to the sources of their generous funding and lethal arms supplies. Yet, he keeps unbrokenly mum on it. Why? And why so intriguingly has he long stopped identifying foreign hand he alludes to even now so often of involvement in militancy here? Hadn't he spoken more than once of the Indians instigating and fueling insurgency in Balochistan? But that was long time ago. He now talks no more of it. Have the Indians terminated their wickedness or has he been ticked off by some powerful ghost not to talk of it? Rehman indeed is a big mystery, hard to crack. Not that he alone is a jigsaw puzzle to comprehend; so is his many a colleague in the federal cabinet, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, as for one. Since ages, this Pakistani top diplomat has been saying that the Americans and the NATO have understood Pakistan's position that foreign operations in its territory are unacceptable and that they have accepted its stance. Yet, there has been no decline in American drone attacks in our tribal areas. Rather, there has been an evident surge in these assaults under the Obama administration, which is threatening to extend them to our settled areas and Balochistan too. Even the military establishment seems having fallen in love for being demonised. Uncontested, it has let go the Americans with public charge that elements of the ISI and the military are hand in glove with Taliban. And unchallenged it is letting them pass around their ruse that our tribal areas have become al-Qaeda's and Taliban's safe havens, even as huge areas, almost 70 percent, of Afghanistan are palpably under Taliban's sway, with district after district in their administrative control. But, all said and done, combating extremism and terrorism at home is Rehman's charge. And he has demonstrated conclusively he is not up to the job. He may be unfit for inherent ineptitude. And if it is for some institutional constraints, it is all the more imperative that he must go. Quit he must at any rate, making way for someone with proven acumen and commanding trust all around. Rehman Malik is not the man to face up to upcoming storm, predictably to be leashed in raging fury for Pakistan by Obama's new strategy for fighting terrorism.
Saved from: http://www.thefrontierpost.com/News.aspx?ncat=ed&nid=3&ad=07-04-200
Dated: Tuesday, April 07, 2009, Rabi-us-Sani 10, 1430 A.H.
flogging of girl in Swat......STATE OF DENIAL !!!
Today I congratulate everyone because Gen Zia’a dream has been fulfilled as teen aged girl flogged in Swat. Also let me congratulate, Imran Khan, the Jama’at-e Islami leadership, Lt-Gen Hameed Napoleon Gul, the ANP government in the NWFP, the majority of Urdu-language columnists, some English ones too as they support Taliban and are in favor of making deals with them. Video of a young girl being flogged as ‘punishment’ by the Taliban in Swat has shocked everyone in civilized World., it is shameful that Religious parties appeared reluctant to openly condemn the case of lashing a 17-year-old girl in Swat while not giving any clear statement regarding the unfortunate incident. What a shameful act these so called Taliban did .THIS IS REALLY INHUMAN ACT AND CRIME,IGNORANT TALIBAN HAVE NO RIGHT TO TREAT ANYONE LIKE THIS I am also proud of those men who were watching this innocent helpless victim of atrocity ,watching the spectacle mutely either in approval or dumbfounded and afraid of uttering a word against it lest it be termed as anti-Islamic and they themselves meted out the same treatment. Well Done the Ghayur Pukhtoons of Swat. Well Done to your chivalry and manliness. Hearing that poor girl's cries whilst grown men stand and watch her being beaten just makes me sick to the stomach.
What a message we are sending to civilized World. Zardari "condemns" (words are cheap, particularly zardaris); PM "demands" punishment (OK, lets wait and see); CJ uses suo moto to demand girl be produced before court.. (OK, lets wait and see). Jamaat-i-Islami says this is a "minor matter" and people should focus on drone attacks by the US (thus demonstrating their hypocrisy and savagery!!).
This was one of barbaric acts of Taliban, so far we knew that they hang dead bodies to tress but now we have learned that in the past women were punished like this inside rooms. The videotape shown on television and displayed on websites wasn't the only time that a woman was publicly canned by the Taliban. However, no videotape of the other incident, which took place on October 20, 2008, is available in which a woman and her father-in-law were flogged in Ser-Taligram village near Manglawar in Charbagh tehsil. The video exposes the barbarity that lies at the heart of the Taliban movement.
Do these Taliban know anything about Islamic Law? Where are the ayatollahs, mullahs, sheiks and assorted holy men with their fatwas to correct these hijackers and distorters of the noble religion? It is also sad to read some people comments on this forum who are living in denial, I was reading one letter on your web site, writer says ,‘’I have a serious doubt as immediately after the whipping the "victim" got up and walked away without a limp.’’ Any sane person would laugh at this nonsense if the situation weren’t so dire. If the video was fake, then why did the Taliban accept responsibility and claim they had done the right thing? . Everything is a conspiracy to those who are in state of denial. They have lost ability to think, reason and to be logical. Speaking from psychological point of view that innocent girl must be so embarrassed that she did not want to be there, that’s why she got up fast , those who are living in denial expect from this girl to say thanks to those ignorant fanatic Taliban and had offered them flowers, that’s what anyone who is denying this incident expects from that girl??? That poor girl must have been in agony and I wonder what happened to her once they took her away.
This incident shows the Taliban version of Sharia law in action, and it is coming to you in the foreseeable future, it is eye opener for those who are acting dumb, deaf, blind and living in state of denial. Those who are living in denial, those who think this incident was fake, remember Taliban would publicly whip your sisters, mothers, daughters and wives and when you will get out of your state of denial, it will be too late.
It is also unfortunate that ANP leadership has abandoned its own people to the Taliban by making deals with them. No one can give justification for such an act. These handful of people have taken the population hostage, and the government is trying to patronize them. If the state surrenders, what will happen next?” those who are thinking that this video is fake should read writing on the wall. It was indeed like a lash on the faces of the chief minister of NWFP, the prime minister, the president, the legislators and most importantly, on the faces of every civilized Pakistani and Pukhtun as another writer mentioned on this forum, its also true that The monster of terrorism is indeed on the prowl, unhindered and unchecked, targeting at will whatever and whoever it wants. Nothing is invulnerable to its thuggery as printed in your editorial of April 6th . It is obvious that the state has been unable and unwilling to address the threat posed by Al Qaeda and the Taliban. For the most part, the religious lot of the country has quietly and not so quietly supported the terrorists. The people of NWFP have been held hostage by Taliban ,Pukhtun’s land is burning. What Taliban are doing is plain barbarism. When a religion is taken over by militants and zealots this is what you get .
Z.A.BHUTTO !!!!!
Mwaqar
ON this spring day, when flowers bloom and sparrows sing, all of nature joins in celebrating creation. For the multitudes of this stricken nation, though, April 4 is a sad reminder of the day when the shadows lengthened and darkness set in forever. Z.A Bhutto was hanged by a military dictator General Zia-Ul Haq by orchestrating a judicial trial to get rid of a popular leader. When the light was put off in one of the most brilliant shining stars in the galaxy in that dark night of April 4, 1979 Bhutto had already made indelible imprints on the sand of time, which no dictator could erase. When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took the reins of a truncated Pakistan in December 1971, a new state was taking shape, not through gaining liberty , it had come into being because it had been decapitated and dismembered. Unlike 1947, there was no hope, no anticipation, no dreams, only distress and dejection. In 1947, Pakistan had to be built from the physical building blocks. In 1971, it had to be rebuilt psychologically. If Jinnah got a moth-eaten Pakistan, Bhutto got a truncated and traumatized Pakistan. He had to carry his charge forward through its first steps in a mocking world. He bore the pain and the passion of a new Pakistan. It was like the first chapter of Genesis. Myriad problems and challenges confronted Pakistan, both at home and abroad. Over 5,000 square miles of territory lay under enemy occupation and 90,000 prisoners of war, 20,000 of them civilians, were languishing in Indian jails. Not a day passed without the anguished cry of thousands of sisters, mothers and relatives reverberating across the country. The humiliating vision of Pakistani soldiers surrendering to General Aurora at the Dhaka Race Course haunted our people. An empty treasury, a tottering economy, an all-pervading sense of gloom - it seemed we were set to collapse in a slow dance of death. Globally, Pakistan had become a pariah. Indira Ghandi threatened and taunted us from across the border while Mujibur Rehman ranted and raved about war trials and demanded a share from our empty coffers. There was a mountain to climb and soon the mountain would become an Everest. But ZAB moved with amazing alacrity in all directions. "We have to pick up the pieces, very small pieces," he declared in his opening address to the nation.
Brick by brick, the edifice of a shattered Pakistan was rebuilt from the debris of defeat and dismemberment. An ailing economy was nursed back to health. In line with the PPP manifesto, agricultural reforms were introduced and land distributed amongst the landless peasants. Labour unions were allowed and the minimum wage for labour was fixed. He gave Pakistan its first constitution, nuclear programme, held peace talks with India and brought 90,000 POW who were in Indian prison and were going to face war crimes.
ZAB opened the doors for Pakistani labour to work in the Arab Gulf states, thus alleviating unemployment and providing the base for foreign remittances. The honor and morale of the demoralized armed forces was restored and they were equipped with some of the most sophisticated weapons the world had to offer. From the ashes of defeat was emerging a new Pakistan. In no time at all, the engines of government were rolling. "If you think FDR had an amazing first 100 days, watch us," he prophetically declared. ZAB possessed a vital magnetism which he transmitted to the people. He could touch the raw nerve of their emotion. He could tap the emotional wellsprings of the nation. He knew the pulse of the people, their heartbeat. They would laugh with him and cry with him. There was a compelling chemistry, an electrical charge that has not dulled with time. It was, in is own words, his greatest romance. He gave to the poor a future and he gave them a voice. He gave them consciousness and dignity which no tank, no dictator can take away. That bond has been frozen into doctrine. He liberated the small farmers and peasants from the repression and cruelty of big landlords and banished the jagirdari and sardari system declaring that all citizens are born equal and must live with equal rights. Z.A Bhutto was a Legend, who lived and died like a hero with courage, determination and devotion to his principles, when cruel dictator Zia was going to kill him, Z.A Bhutto could sign few papers and could live in exile but he was a real man, he was not a coward. He too could have made a deal and lived to fight another day; but only great men with principles sacrifice their life for their cause. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto earned everlasting fame in the pantheon of leaders from the Third World in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism. He had the privilege of interacting with many of those leaders who played a great role in the epic struggle for national independence in the 20th Century including Mao Tse Tung, Soekarno, Chou-en Lai, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. He belonged to a category of anti-imperialist leaders who included Jamal Nasir of Egypt and Jawahir Lal Nehru of India. Life in Pakistan has never been the same again following the judicial murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by General Ziaul Haq in April 1979. Bhutto had crash-landed in Pakistan’s politics in 1958 as the youngest minister in the government of Ayub Khan. He was all together a different person in a cabinet that had generals and senior bureaucrats who had been in cahoots with each other to put their claim to power as the legal heirs to the British Raj. As opposed to them Bhutto was driven by his romance with democracy and freedom for the people as envisaged by his leader Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Having found a place for himself on a platform that was not favorable to politicians, Bhutto chartered himself on a course that would give a new sense of direction to the country and a fresh meaning to politics.
In no time Bhutto had made a tremendous impact all around. As Minister for Fuel and Power, he had diverse explorers tapping into Pakistan’s underground hidden energy resources. For the first time Russians were involved in oil and gas exploration. His time as Minister for Science and Technology was well spent. He could measure the advancements made by India in the atomic field. He gave a proper sense of direction to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, set it on the mission to have a sound infrastructure and to educate and train a whole army of nuclear scientists and engineers. It was he who had convinced Ayub to seek enriched uranium course for acquiring nuclear wherewithal. From his death cell he wrote to his "dearest daughter" Benazir Bhutto, "There is personal bitterness no doubt [against Zia regime] but the impersonal hurt predominates over my personal feelings. These [ruling] individuals have taken Pakistan back to 1947. In the process they have robbed the nation of the high ideals and spirit of fraternity the people shared and demonstrated in 1947". He reflects further in the letter: "It is worst than saying we are back to square one or that we are right back to where we started from. Nations do not fall back to square one, nations progress or they deteriorate explosively or decompose silently". Bhutto had believed that the country's sound defense was dependent on a solid industrial base. Pakistan owes not only its nuclear arsenal - now inching towards a fold up - to Bhutto but to him goes the credit of establishing Pakistan Steel Mills, aeronautical and heavy machine tool complexes, shipyard, Karachi Nuclear Power Plant and its automobile industry. His daughter Benazir Bhutto picked up from where her father had left and the combined efforts of the two made Pakistan cover a long way in becoming self-sufficient in missile technology and arms manufacturing including exports. For Pakistan Bhutto was the harbinger of colossal changes. He harnessed socio-economic forces for challenging the status quo, unshackling the masses and their empowerment. His sense of direction not only gave him the strength but also a popular support to consolidate the edifice of the state on an egalitarian program seeking for his people roti, kapra and makkan. Besides, he awakened the masses, making them realized they were the legitimate fountainhead of political power. He deeply cherished democracy and viewed military rule as a negation of the very genesis of the country that came into being as a result of a democratic process and a vote. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had the courage of his conviction to decide to lay down his life rather than compromise or seek appeasement. The last chapter of his life is a glorious example of martyrdom for the cause of resurrection of democracy. At the time of his over throw, Bhutto was emerging as a spokesman of the World of Islam and the leader of the Third World. The age of Bhutto was an Age of Revolution. Although his life and career were cruelly terminated, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto will forever shine in history as one of the Great leaders who took part in the liberation of the Third World from the yoke of Imperialism and Neo Colonialism during the Twentieth Century. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto used to say that, "courage is in our blood, we are the children of a rich heritage. We shall succeed in our dream of an Islamic association since destiny demands it, political reality justifies it, posterity awaits it".
He laid the foundation for his dream fortress of Islam in Lahore's Islamic Summit in 1974. The rest is then a chapter of blood in history--the blood shed of the Quaid and of his young followers. He was hanged by his own general who once said that the amount of attention Pakistan army received from Prime Minister Bhutto had "no parallel in the history of Pakistan army prior to 1971."
Bhutto pushed politics out of the posh drawing rooms into real Pakistan-into the muddy lanes and villages of the poor. ZAB was a principled friend to the poor, downtrodden and oppressed. He was fearless in his beliefs and refused to bow before any man or power other than the Almighty. ZAB’S contributions to an impregnable Pakistan are seen in the Kamra Aeronautical factory, Heavy Mechanical Complex at Taxila, modernisation of Karachi Shipyard, creation of precision engineering works, Pakistan Steel Mills, Port Qasim, Pakistan Automobile Corporation to name a few. By signing the Simla Accord of 1972 he negotiated longest peace between India and Pakistan. His social reforms laid the foundation of an egalitarian society, his non-aligned foreign policy earned Pakistan respect in the comity of nations. He lifted the nation drowning in a sea of despair to Himalayan heights.
Bhutto's inspiring leadership filled Pakistanis with hope, energy and strength. There was a sense of purpose and direction in the country in pursuit of peace and prosperity. The economic growth rate increased and money poured in from expatriates who got the universal right to passport. The Muslim countries donated roughly $500 million annually to Pakistan, freeing it of international financial institutions. The people got jobs and opportunities. Women of the country were emancipated entering the police force, Foreign, Civil Service and subordinate judiciary for the first time in the country's history. He was a modernizer and saw nationalism as the key to unity. He rejected fanaticism. He gave pride to the poor. As leader of the Third World he spoke boldly against racism, colonialism and imperialism. He fearlessly defended the right of nations to independence. He was true to his values. When the time came he sacrificed his life but refused to compromise on his lofty ideals. He was fond of saying; "It is better to live like a lion for one day than to live like a jackal for a thousand." He lived with the courage of a lion, defying death in embracing martyrdom. He said he would show "how a leader of the people lives and dies," and he did. The world pleaded for his life wanting to save a man whose intellect and contribution to peace and progress was vital to the world community. But a frightened dictator, ignoring the unanimous call of the Supreme Court of Pakistan to spare the Quaid's life, ordered the execution in the middle of the night. He was true to his values. Prime Minister Bhutto went bravely to the gallows as the world learnt in shock that it had lost its most beloved son. There was widespread national and international condemnation. Bhutto left his world to enter the pantheon of history where he stands today with other towering personalities who shaped the course of history. His martyrdom sparked freedom movements in many countries as people gathered in capitals across the world to condemn his murder. As a student of history, he knew that eternal life remains in sacrificing oneself for a cause that is larger than an individual. And the noblest of all causes is the cause of the liberation of humanity from tyranny and oppression.. Z A BHUTTO was indeed a great leader, a leader we must salute today. Education was nationalized and made available to every child. Scores of Universities were built to turn the children of the discriminated and downtrodden into lawyers, doctors and engineers liberating them from a destiny of backwardness. Quaid-i-Awam was born in 1928. He was martyred in 1979. Yet he lives in the hearts and minds of the people still shining like a star that brightens the sky motivating those caught in the prisons of oppression. He was the one who converted that static and decayed dictatorial polity into a vibrant and dynamic democratic society; the cost of which he paid with his own life. He who gave his blood, and the blood of his sons and daughter, Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto, knew that there can be no sacrifice greater than the sacrifice for the people whose respect, honor and dignity is the respect and dignity of the Nation. Quaid e Awam made the people proud of themselves and of their Nation. The 20th century has seen many great leaders, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is one of them. Due to his glorious achievements, Mr. Bhutto rules the hearts of the Pakistani people from his grave. He was not only the leader of Pakistan, he was the leader of an Islamic world, the leader of Third World. He will forever be remembered by his countrymen as Quaid-e-Awam. ZAB's detractors have distorted history and tampered with the written word. They killed Plato's philosopher-king and filled the space with charlatans. But he has written his own history in blood and the legend has been nourished by the tears and the sweat of those who work in the fields and the factories. Bhutto belonged to the sweat and sorrow of this soil. His soul has mingled with the soul of the multitudes who cry out in their sorrow and in their pain, ZAB gave the people of Pakistan the foundation on which to build an inspired dream palace of their national thoughts. Today, we have surrendered ourselves to the momentum of mediocrity. In Plato's words, "what is honored in a country will be cultivated there." But we are not a nation given to honoring our heroes. Today, let us rise above narrow considerations and interests and acknowledge a man who was a brilliant beacon on the highway of history. As his followers say, "Zinda Hai Bhutto, Zinda Hai"--Bhutto lives, he lives. Indeed he does, in the hearts of all those who dream of a better tomorrow. Long Live Bhuttoism….
Can Pakistan Be Governed?
TO ENTER the office where Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, conducts his business, you head down a long corridor toward two wax statues of exceptionally tall soldiers, each in a long, white tunic with a glittering column of buttons. On closer inspection, these turn out to be actual humans who have been trained in the arts of immobility. The office they guard, though large, is not especially opulent or stupefying by the standards of such places. President Zardari met me just inside the doorway, then seated himself facing a widescreen TV displaying an image of fish swimming in a deep blue sea. His party spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, and his presidential spokesman, Farahnaz Ispahani, sat facing him, almost as rigid as the soldiers. Zardari is famous for straying off message and saying odd things or jumbling facts and figures. He is also famous for blaming his aides when things go wrong — and things have been going wrong quite a lot lately. Zardari’s aides didn’t want him to talk to me. Now they were tensely waiting for a mishap.
The president himself, natty in a navy suit, his black hair brilliantined to a sheen, was the very picture of ease. Zardari beamed when we talked about New York, where he often lived between 2004, when he was released from prison after eight years, and late 2007, when he returned to Pakistan not long after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by terrorists. For all that painful recent history, Zardari is a suave and charming man with a sly grin, and he gives the impression of thoroughly enjoying what must be among the world’s least desirable jobs. Zardari had just been through the most dangerous weeks of his six months in office. He dissolved the government in Punjab, Pakistan’s dominant state, and called out the police to stop the country’s lawyers and leading opposition party from holding a “long march” to demand the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had been sacked, along with most of the high judiciary, by Zardari’s predecessor, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Zardari defused the situation only by allowing Chaudhry’s return to office and giving in to other demands that he had previously and repeatedly rejected.
Yet, despite this spectacular reversal, the president was not in a remotely penitent state of mind over his handling of the protests against him. “Whoever killed my wife was seeking the Balkanization of Pakistan,” he told me. “There is a view that I saved Pakistan then” — by calling for calm at a perilous moment — “and there is a view that by making this decision I saved Pakistan again.” There had been, he said, a very real threat of a terrorist attack on the marchers on their way to Islamabad. That is why his government invoked a statute dating back to the British raj in order to authorize the police to arrest protesters and prevent the march from forming. I pointed out that Benazir Bhutto faced a far more specific threat and was outraged when General Musharraf kept her from speaking on the pretext of protecting her. The president didn’t miss a beat. “And therefore,” he rejoined, “we moved to the other side”: that is, he reversed his order to the police, and permitted the protesters’ march, just before giving in to their demands altogether.
Zardari has a special talent for maneuvering himself out of the tight spots he gets himself into. But the Pakistani people have grown weary of his artful dodging. Zardari’s poll numbers are dreadful. More important, he has given little sustained attention to the country’s overwhelming problems — including, of course, the Islamist extremism that, for the Obama administration, has made Pakistan quite possibly the most important, and worrisome, country in the world. Zardari has bought himself more time, but for Pakistan itself, the clock is ticking louder and louder.
When I arrived in Islamabad on March 10, the long march was set to begin in two days and had come to feel like a storm gathering force at sea — one that might peter out before it hit land or turn into a Category 4 hurricane. In a country where democracy feels as flimsy as a wooden shack, the foreboding was very real. “Our condition is much more fragile than it was in the 1990s,” Samina Ahmed, the International Crisis Group’s longtime Pakistan analyst, told me. (The I.C.G. is a sponsor of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, where I am the policy director.) The Taliban and other extremists had, she estimated, placed half the country beyond the control of security forces. The government had recently ceded control over the Swat Valley, 100 miles from the nation’s capital, to the extremists.
Pakistan feels as if it’s falling apart. Last fall the country barely avoided bankruptcy. The tribal areas, which border on Afghanistan, remain a vast Taliban sanctuary and redoubt. The giant province of Baluchistan, though far more accessible, is racked by a Baluchi separatist rebellion, while American officials view Quetta, Baluchistan’s capital, as Taliban HQ. American policy has arguably made the situation even worse, for the Predator-drone attacks along the border, though effective, drive the Taliban eastward, deeper into Pakistan. And the strategy has been only reinforcing hostility to the United States among ordinary Pakistanis.
Pakistan has made itself the supreme conundrum of American foreign policy. During the campaign, Obama often said that the heart of the terrorist threat was not Iraq but Afghanistan and Pakistan, and once in office he had senior policy makers undertake an array of reviews designed to coordinate policy in the region. They seem to have narrowed the target area even further, to the Pakistani frontier. “For the American people,” Obama announced on March 27, “this border region has become the most dangerous place in the world.” Some officials see Pakistan as a volcano that, should it blow, would send an inconceivable amount of poisonous ash raining down on the world around it. David Kilcullen, a key adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the Centcom commander, recently asserted that “within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state,” a calamity that, given the country’s size, strategic location and nuclear stockpile, would “dwarf” all other current crises.
And amid all that, Pakistan’s president appeared to be playing with fire. Zardari was setting his security forces on peaceful demonstrators, just as his authoritarian predecessor, General Musharraf, did — against members of Zardari’s own political party — several years earlier. The government crackdown, designed to prevent the marchers from reaching the capital, began on March 11. The police swept through the homes of opposition-party leaders, lawmakers, activists, “miscreants” and ordinary party workers. Many leading officials were already underground, but hundreds of arrests were made. By the 12th, the first day of the march, much of the country was glued to the television, where swarms of heavily armed policemen could be seen knocking down protesters and dragging them off to the paddy wagons. Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the main opposition party, saw the protests as the “prelude to a revolution,” while Rehman Malik, a key Zardari adviser, accused Sharif of “sedition.”
The posturing and hyperbole would have been comical if the stakes weren’t so high. Although in Pakistan, it’s true, the stakes always feel high.
FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS, Pakistan has been living through a dangerous and thrilling era of popular agitation and spasmodic crackdown. In March 2007, General Musharraf made the colossal miscalculation of insisting that Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, whose activism on the bench had threatened the military’s invulnerability to legal prosecution, step down. In decades past, judges quietly acceded under such duress, and Musharraf may be excused for calculating that Chaudhry, an unassuming figure, would do likewise. Instead, the chief justice stood up to the president, who then fired him, creating a national hero of resistance. Tens of thousands of people lined the roads and cheered as Chaudhry barnstormed across the country — an astonishing sign of Pakistanis’ craving, after years of repression, for democracy and the liberal principles established in Pakistan’s Constitution.
That October, under intense domestic and American pressure, Mu sharraf agreed to permit Benazir Bhutto, who had been living in Dubai, to return. Bhutto and her chief rival, Nawaz Sharif, had been exiled from Pakistan since their respective terms as prime minister. But their political parties — Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) — continued to operate under Musharraf, and their partisans waited for the return of their leaders to revive the nation’s democratic politics.
TWO MONTHS AFTER HER ARRIVAL, Bhutto was killed in an attack in Rawalpindi. Her death was experienced as a national calamity — both a terrifying proof of the growing reach of terrorism inside Pakistan and a grave blow to the country’s democratic hopes. Three days later, the PPP — an arm of the Bhutto family since its founding by her father 40 years earlier — chose her widower, Zardari, and their 19-year-old son as co-chairmen, the elder acting in effect as regent for the younger. In elections seven weeks later, the PPP, buoyed by sympathy over Bhutto’s death and vowing to take up the cause of the deposed judges, won. It formed a coalition government that included regional allies and Sharif’s PML-N. Here, at last, was a chance for a new beginning.
In May 2006, Bhutto and Sharif met in London to sign a document known as the Charter of Democracy. The two vowed to rescind a raft of amendments that military rulers had added to the Constitution, including several that empowered the president at the expense of the prime minister, and to establish a merit-based system for picking judges (a practice neither Bhutto nor Sharif even remotely favored while in office). But Zardari seemed much less interested in these constitutional questions than Sharif, who made the restitution of judges a centerpiece of his campaign. (He compelled all of his party’s parliamentary candidates to swear an oath before him demanding that the judges be restored.)
In May 2008, less than three months after the government was formed, Sharif pulled his ministers from the cabinet. But he continued pressing Zardari to abide by the spirit of the Charter of Democracy. On Aug. 7, Zardari signed a document pledging that a “nonpartisan” figure would assume the presidency and that this person would restore the judges shortly after taking office. When it became clear, in late August, that Zardari himself would become president, an irate Sharif withdrew from the coalition altogether.
On Sept. 9, Zardari became president of Pakistan and proceeded to ignore his promise to restore the judges. I asked Zardari how he could have done so. He explained that since General Musharraf had agreed to resign rather than face impeachment proceedings, “everybody goes back to start fresh.” Apparently this was, in Zardari’s mind, a special kind of pact that ceased to be binding when one party concluded that the circumstances under which it had been accepted had changed. Zar dari kept nibbling away at this perplexing concept. The document he had signed was “an agreement by consent,” not “an agreement by law.” It was like a marriage. It was like a merger. I said that I wondered if Sharif would agree; he may well have thought that Zardari had, in fact, bound himself to act with dispatch. “Maybe that might be the interpretation assumed by him,” the president conceded.
Zardari did win a partial victory: he persuaded 57 of the remaining 63 High Court judges to take a new oath in order to be restored to office. But the other six, including Chaudhry, refused to do so, on the grounds that, as they had been unconstitutionally deprived of office, the oaths they swore earlier remained in force. Early this year, the lawyers began planning their march, which was to terminate with a sit-in in Islamabad. The government would be able to dismiss a sit-in among lawyers as a nuisance; only with the active involvement of the PML-N, with its vast rank and file and its control over the Punjab state apparatus, would the protest truly pose a threat to Zardari. In mid-February, the PML-N agreed to join the lawyers not only for the planned march but also for the sit-in, which held far greater potential for confrontation.
Ten days later, on Feb. 25, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar — whom Musharraf had elevated to replace Chaudhry, and whom Zardari had consistently supported (rumors abound of late-night conversations between them in the president’s house) — abruptly issued a decision on a case that had been pending for eight months, finding that Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz, the chief minister of Punjab, could not hold elective office because they had previously been convicted of crimes. It was widely assumed that Zardari engineered this outcome to end PML-N control over Punjab. That very evening he gave substance to these suspicions by suspending Punjab’s elected government in favor of rule by the governor, a federal appointee. This combination of moves had the appearance of a coup. It caused outrage in the Punjab, in the ranks of the PML-N and throughout the country.
When I asked Zardari why he had imposed governor’s rule, he embarked on another adventure in logic. “No democratic party would like to do governor’s rule,” he said. “It’s in the Constitution; it’s part of necessity. The government advised me to put governor’s rule, and I took their advice, as I am bound by the Constitution to accept the advice from the government.” The official line is that, with the local government dissolved and no single party in the majority and thus able to form a new government, Islamabad had to step in. In fact, in such situations the Constitution requires the governor to ask the largest party to seek to form a majority — as the PML-N surely would have done — although the president does have the right to impose governor’s rule if he judges the province to be unstable.
Zardari is, as all acknowledge, a very shrewd operator, but he seems to have little feel for public opinion: by overturning the Punjab government, he had sown a whirlwind. One leader of the planned march pointed out to me that the government could have completely taken the breeze out of the lawyers’ sails by pushing the Supreme Court to decide in favor of the Sharifs rather than against them; such an act might well have made Chaudhry’s restoration seem unnecessary. But Zardari, who traffics heavily in metaphors of combat, seems to prefer either guile or trials of strength.
Zardari’s critics were divided over the wisdom of the planned march and sit-in. “Zardari is not the issue,” Samina Ahmed told me. “It’s the institutions and processes that matter a lot. If the government is to be replaced, it has to be replaced by the people, who vote for a new government.” No democratic government in the history of Pakistan has been replaced by an orderly transition through a regularly scheduled election; Ahmed said she believed that democracy would never truly take hold until such transitions became the norm.
But others said that Zardari was very much the problem — that he was himself the chief obstacle to democratic change. Nasim Zehra, a journalist who runs the current-affairs bureau of Dunya News, a new, private Urdu-language TV station, viewed Zardari as every bit as willing to manipulate the Constitution as Musharraf had been. The real problem, she said, “is the culture of the exercise of power.” The only way to change this culture was from the outside. In her view, a new “Pakistani narrative” arose with the lawyers movement of 2007 — the narrative of “movement politics” rather than party politics, a grass-roots movement of the street, buoyed by the growth of new media, which demands systemic change rather than yet another partisan shift.
THE QUESTION, AT BOTTOM, is not, Why is Pakistan such a mess? but, Why is Pakistan still such a mess? After all, in the 1960s, Ayub Khan, the country’s generalissimo-philosopher, was celebrated, along with Park Chung-hee of South Korea and Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan, as the very type of the market-oriented autocrat third-world nations were said to need if they were to pull themselves out of poverty. Pakistan was favorably contrasted with India: a socialist democracy with a carnivalesque political scene, an asphyxiating bureaucracy and a “Hindu rate of growth” apparently fixed at 3 percent of G.D.P. Of course, that was then. Only more recently has it become clear that India’s democracy allowed the country’s innumerable religious, ethnic, caste and language groups to find places for themselves through the ballot and to build an economy as freewheeling as its politics. Pakistan, meanwhile, has stagnated.
Histories of Pakistan often point to the original sin of its founding in 1947. The very word “Pakistan” was an artifice, coined mainly from the first letters of the provinces that Muslim leaders in India had dreamed of forging into a separate Muslim state. “India’s Muslims demanded Pakistan without really knowing the results of that demand,” wrote Husain Haqqani in “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military.” (Haqqani is now Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States.) And when Pakistan’s hero-founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, died one year after independence, and his chief lieutenant, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated three years later, Pakistan’s leadership fell to bureaucrats and soldiers. Neither held democracy in high regard. This new establishment did have a clear idea of Pakistan’s identity: it was a refuge for South Asian Muslims from an India bent on subsuming the new country back into the “Hindu raj.” Pakistan understood itself, and organized itself, as a national-security state with strong cold-war ties to the United States. Ayub Khan put an end to civilian government with a military coup in 1958. Pakistan’s identity and ideology were to be dictated from the top down, without the bother of elections.
The army remained firmly in control of Pakistan’s destinies for 30 years, with an interval for the turbulent era of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who inherited power from an army discredited by its inept handling of the 1971 war with the breakaway province of East Pakistan (which then became Bangladesh). Several years earlier, Bhutto founded the PPP, whose slogan was simplicity itself — “Roti, Kapra aur Makan” — “Bread, Clothing and Shelter.” The mere act of speaking directly to the aspirations of ordinary citizens constituted a radical challenge to Pakistan’s model of “guided development.” The fact that this worldly, witty scion of an old, wealthy Sindhi landowning family was himself a charter member of Pakistan’s establishment made his challenge to the system all the more electrifying, and dangerous. The military, and indeed much of official Washington, viewed Bhutto as a dangerous rabble-rouser; he was overthrown in 1977.
Bhutto’s army chief of staff, Zia ul-Haq, not only deposed the prime minister but had him tried and executed two years later on a trumped-up charge. Zia crushed all opposition and introduced into the country’s public life, especially into the military, a quite new element of austere and evangelical piety. Previous rulers, themselves religiously moderate, found Islam convenient, in much the same way that they found India convenient. Zia, a true believer, empowered religious societies and political parties in a bid to foster a new national ideology. His tenure coincided with the C.I.A.’s war on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; Zia’s military and intelligence officials were the ones who controlled the Afghan mujahedeen, doled out their American funds and sometimes came to share their worldview.
By the time of Zia’s death in a plane crash in 1988, his harsh reign was coming unglued in the face of a democratic challenge led by Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir. A new era began in which all the forces born over the previous four decades contended for supremacy: the military sense of right and obligation to rule; populist and democratic politics; Islamic mobilization; and, increasingly, blatant, rampant corruption. Bhutto was twice elected prime minister, and she was twice removed by the country’s president, acting at the behest of the military, “for corruption and incompetence.” The chief source of corruption, according to many analysts, was her husband. Zardari was jailed on a series of charges — none of which he was ultimately convicted of — from 1990 until Bhutto returned to power in 1993.
Each time Bhutto fell, a new election was held, and she was replaced by Nawaz Sharif, a protégé of General Zia and a voice for the citizens of Punjab, as well as for those uncomfortable with the “liberalism” — or secularism — of the PPP. Like Benazir Bhutto, Sharif ruled with the sufferance of the military and the intelligence apparatus. And like her, he ultimately fell afoul of his overseers. The era of democratic rule came to a crashing end in 1999, when General Musharraf led yet another coup.
THE GENERALS HAD CREATED a self-fulfilling prophecy: by infantilizing Pakistan’s democracy, they proved that civilians were unfit to rule. Indeed, as Zardari sagely observed in our conversation: “If you look at your own history, American history, and then you see, How does democracy become the best formula of the world to govern? Democracy becomes the best formula of the world because it learns from its mistakes.” The generals had never given civilian rule the chance. Of course, that was precisely the precious opportunity that Zardari’s critics said he was so recklessly putting at risk.
As a young man in Karachi, Asif Ali Zardari had a distinctly raffish reputation. A contemporary of Zardari’s from those days told me that his family had warned him away from Zardari, who was said to run in a bad crowd. His father had been a middling landowner — a feudal, in Pakistani terms — who had urbanized and owned the Bambina Cinema, which showed American movies. As a kid, Zardari hung around the theater and got into scrapes. He went to London, where, according to his wife — in her autobiography, “Daughter of the East” — he attended the “London Centre of Economic and Political Studies.” Zardari now says he studied at something called the London School of Business Studies. Young Zardari seemed much more interested in spending money than in making it. He had a disco in his house — very much the rage in Karachi at the time — and he drank and chased women. He was an ardent polo player with his own squad, known as the Zardari Four. He was handsome, trim in his polo outfit, with a flourishing mustache.
Zardari pretends — but just barely — to be stumped by accounts of his former exploits. When I asked about the fabulous jewelry he bought and the great wine he drank once he came into real money, he waggled his eyebrows, Groucho-wise, in mute acknowledgment of past delights. “I will not comment on those things,” he said gravely, “because Islam forbids drinking.” What’s more, he added, with a show of indignation, “this description you give — who is fun-loving, who is easygoing, who is consumption of Scotching and wining and dining and dancing — why would that kind of man opt for a life that he knows for sure that he will have to go through a lot of trouble and tribulation?” Why, in short, would he marry Benazir Bhutto — besides the fact that she was the most dazzling woman in Pakistan, beautiful, rich and famous? Zardari says that he wooed Bhutto because “she was the ultimate hope for Pakistan.” O.K. He also said, rather mysteriously, “Benazir and myself are related.” This, if true, was news to even very knowledgeable observers. Whatever the case, Zardari pursued Bhutto tirelessly, while his stepmother worked on Bhutto’s female relatives, in the time-honored fashion. Bhutto writes that she found him gallant, gracious and charming. In December 1987, they married. One year later, she won a resounding electoral victory and became prime minister.
Over the course of the next seven years, while his wife was in and out of power, he appears to have spent his time making himself immensely wealthy. He bought a 355-acre estate south of London and an apartment in London, among other properties. Investigators once found an account at Citibank with more than $40 million in it. The revenue for all this is widely believed to have come from bribes; Zardari became known as “Mr. 10 Percent.” He came to be seen as well as something of a thug: among the notorious tales from that time that Pakistanis love repeating to one another was one from 1990, when Zardari supposedly strapped a bomb to a man’s leg and forced him to withdraw millions of rupees from his bank account. Saeed Minhas, the Islamabad editor of Daily Aajkal, first met Zardari at this time and was shocked to discover, upon being hugged by him, that Zardari had a pistol tucked into his salwar kameez.
Among the many court cases mounted against Zardari and his wife were one in Switzerland claiming that he had received illegal commissions in exchange for awarding contracts to two Swiss companies and another for supposedly taking bribes from a Dubai-based gold-bullion dealership. Pakistani investigative officials claimed that the Bhutto family and associates took in more than $1.5 billion through various questionable schemes during this period. Nevertheless, Zardari can rightly assert that he has never been convicted, though in large part because Musharraf passed an ordinance wiping out pending cases against senior officials (himself included).
Zardari was imprisoned once again after Bhutto’s second tenure ended in 1996, and he remained in jail until 2004. He was an “A Class” prisoner, enjoying fine meals delivered from the Bhutto mansion, but he also says he was tortured, including having his tongue ripped open. The injustice and the suffering he endured — and endured with excellent humor and composure — provided him with a moral currency, which he otherwise altogether lacked, in the culture of the PPP. Indeed, when I asked Farhatullah Babar, the party spokesman, why the PPP chose Zardari to lead it, he said, “One factor was this” — and pulled down from the wall a framed copy of a letter Bhutto wrote out by hand. Babar read aloud the crucial passage: “I would like my husband Asif Ali Zar dari to lead you in the interim period until you and he decide what is best. I say this because he is a man of courage and honor. He spent more than 11 1/2 years in prison without bending despite torture.” This document is dismissed as a transparent forgery by the many people who loathe Zardari. As with practically everything else about him, the truth is very difficult to determine.
Zardari does seem to have exhausted much of the deep well of loyalty from which Benazir Bhutto and her father drew. I met any number of people who told me that they had been party members practically since birth, that the Bhuttos had stayed at their parents’ homes — and that while they would never, ever abandon the party, they had given up on Zardari. Safdar Abbasi, who had worked with Benazir since 1983 and was with her when she died, said to me: “Mr. Zardari had the opportunity of continuing with the legacy of both the Bhuttos and going on with the populist line. Instead, he opted for power politics.”
The issue that comes up again and again is Zardari’s supplanting of competent figures in favor of a tight, and isolating, circle of loyalists, friends from prison days and family members. Rehmat Shah Afridi, the publisher of The Frontier Post, a former boon companion of Zardari and still, he says, a confidant, speaks much more fondly of Pakistan’s president than do many others. “He is a very good friend,” Afridi says. “He never thinks, You are a small man, or a poor man, and I am a big man.” But even Afridi says that Zardari’s fatal weakness is his habit of trusting his friends — or the wrong friends. He recalls visiting Zardari last spring and saying: “Please, Asif, who is on your left and right? If they did some good for you when you were in prison, give them some portfolio, but don’t put them in your kitchen cabinet.” Zardari, he says, “is surrounded by the most corrupt people, from Karachi and Khyber.” I asked Afridi why Zardari consorts with these characters. “Because,” he said, “they know how to butter him.”
Government-by-crony is scarcely unheard-of in Pakistan — or elsewhere. But the urgency of Pakistan’s problems make clubhouse rule seem like a dangerous anachronism. One morning I met with Ahmad Mukhtar, the minister of defense. I asked an aide why we were meeting in the office of Pakistan International Airlines. “Oh,” he said, “Mr. Mukhtar is also chairman of P.I.A.” — another government post. Mukhtar offered a series of extremely stilted explanations for his party’s behavior in the current political crisis as well as for the president’s accumulation of wealth — “Anyone who has land will become very rich in this country” — and spoke of military matters with surprising vagueness. I asked if he had a background in either the military or aviation. “No,” he said, “I’m a businessman. We’re into shoes.” His family had 400 shoe stores. More important, he was a PPP veteran and a Zardari loyalist who spent time with him in jail.
BY MARCH 12, THE FIRST DAY of the long march, Pakistanis were watching the narrative of “movement politics” unfold — live, on television — as policemen in riot gear lobbed tear-gas canisters at lawyers in black suits, ladies in high heels, PML-N workers and the more battle-hardened rank and file of the Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami. By the following day, the “AA,” as the Pakistanis say — the army and the Americans, the twin bogeys of civilian government — had swung into action. The army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, had met several times with Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and with Zardari. He was said to be urging compromise with the marchers, though the meetings themselves awakened fears from Pakistan’s not-very-distant past. Anne Patterson, the American ambassador, met with both Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy for the region, spoke with Zardari; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a 25-minute conversation with Zardari and spoke with Sharif as well.
For perhaps the first time in the history of Pakistan, these feared forces, the AA, were trying to protect democracy rather than curtail it — though you could argue that all this meddling only confirmed, and perpetuated, the country’s political immaturity. In any case, neither side was prepared to buckle under outside pressure: Zardari offered to reopen the Supreme Court case against the Sharifs, but not to restore the judges; Sharif refused to call off the march. The confrontation moved toward its climax.
It was very easy to forget, amid all the hullabaloo, exactly why it was that Pakistan, the world’s sixth most populous nation, with 170 million people, so desperately needs effective governance. It’s the threat of extremism, of course, that accounts for all those phone calls from high-ranking American officials. But the exigencies of daily life come first for most Pakistani citizens. I received a sobering account of economic failure from Shaukat Tarin, the minister of finance. A former Citibank executive with an old-fashioned banker’s girth, Tarin is one of the very few technocrats in a cabinet consisting largely of loyalists. It was Tarin who steered Pakistan away from the shoals of bankruptcy last fall by negotiating a $7.6 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. Now he is trying to make long-term plans — which, he added, the president had given him a free hand to do. Tarin ticked off Pakistan’s dismal current indicators: the growth rate of agricultural production has dropped every decade, and the country is now importing wheat; real income growth has been concentrated among the urban middle class, while rural poverty has increased; manufacturing is in decline; the information- technology sector booming in India barely exists. Only remittances from Pakistanis working abroad have staved off disaster.
Everybody’s favorite front-line state, Pakistan has suffered the “foreign-aid curse” as other nations suffer “the resource curse.” As Tarin put it, “We have avoided the tough decisions, and we just keep hoping that something will happen, and we will get this infusion of foreign aid.” Tax-collection rates are dismal, and the country spends paltry sums on education and health. Little serious planning has been done on either agriculture or manufacturing. Infrastructure remains primitive. And the bureaucratic culture sedates the entrepreneurial spirit. “There’s no performance management,” Tarin said, “no merit, a lot of nepotism.”
I asked Tarin if he worried that Pakistan’s political melodrama would diffuse the intense focus the country’s problems require. He laughed uneasily. The country’s chaotic politics “could have wrecked the very democracy we were talking about,” he said. “You cannot achieve economic stability without political stability.” But when I asked Tarin if any of his cabinet colleagues shared his sense of urgency and of the need for systemic change, he maintained a prudent silence. “This is the long-term history of Pakistan,” he said. “This is not one government.”
Zardari maintains that while Pakistan imported grain last year — when he wasn’t in office — it had a bumper crop this year. He seemed to share Tarin’s view of the dangers of aid dependence. “The world philosophers,” he asserted, “have come to the conclusion that aid has never been one of the best ways of developing countries.” But then he scrambled his talking points and said that when he first spoke with Bush administration officials, he called for a “Marshall Plan” for Pakistan.
The civilian government does at least exercise control over the economy, but national security and defense remain the domain of the military. Early in his tenure, Zardari made several bold efforts to assert civilian authority over the military. He sought to transfer control over the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the feared military-intelligence service, from the army to the Ministry of the Interior; the military simply refused. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, carried out by Pakistanis apparently operating from a Pakistani base, Prime Minister Gilani said that Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of the ISI, would go to India to coordinate the investigation; instead, a lower-level official was dispatched. After these episodes, Zardari backed off.
The relationship between the military and the civilian government is thoroughly opaque, and you can hear wildly different views about the ambitions of the military from Pakistani analysts. Rifaat Hussain, a military analyst at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, says flatly, “I can assure you that General Kayani has absolutely no political ambitions.” I heard the same view from retired military officials and diplomats. Others are not nearly so persuaded. Samina Ahmed of the International Crisis Group worries that American military officials are far too inclined to accept Kayani’s insistence that he wishes to return the military to the barracks. She points out that he previously served as director-general of the ISI, which is notorious for playing by its own rules — and elements of which, according to American officials cited in a recent New York Times account, continue to work with terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, which appears to have planned the November attack in Mumbai. During the crisis of the long march, Ahmed said, the military “would have been given a pretext to intervene,” if only by forcing the antagonists to settle on terms of its own devising. No one I spoke with said he believed that the military wanted to seize power, but many argued that it seeks to expand its own space at the expense of civilian government.
There is, of course, a reciprocal relationship between weak civilian governance and military supremacy. Lt. Gen. Talat Masood, a retired officer and a leading military analyst, pointed out that so long as party hacks serve in the most sensitive positions, the military will feel justified in preserving its position. Another example of weak governance, according to Masood, was Zardari’s statement in a speech that Pakistan would not be the first to use nuclear weapons against India — a break with Pakistani doctrine hailed by many as a significant breakthrough. Not Masood: “I would have been very happy if he had seriously said, ‘No first use.’ But the way he did it was irrelevant. It wasn’t part of a larger strategic rethinking. He didn’t discuss it with the military” — which controls nuclear policy. “He doesn’t even understand the vocabulary.”
Zardari actually seems less encumbered by the obsession with India, and less equivocal about the need to take on terrorists, than most of his predecessors, including his wife. Precisely because he is an outsider, he was not immersed in the culture of Pakistan’s security services. And yet the widespread perception that he has tacitly approved the Americans’ drone strikes, as well as occasional hot-pursuit violation of Pakistan’s border, has damaged him politically. And in any case, his failure to formulate a coherent security policy, much less to articulate it in public, has reduced his views almost to a curiosity. Masood, an avowed foe of military supremacy, is biting on the subject. “The only way to counter the rising force of extremism in Pakistan today is through the strengthening of civil society,” he told me. “Zardari is doing just the opposite.”
Underneath all of Pakistan’s problems is the failure to provide decent governance. Extremism flourishes in the absence of legitimate state authority. This is patent in the self-governing tribal areas along the Afghan border, but the most striking current example is the Swat Valley, once a honeymooners’ paradise and now a militant statelet within Pakistan’s formal jurisdiction. The army actually succeeded in pushing militants out of the area in 2006 and 2007. But the government of the North-West Frontier Province, which Musharraf had given as a sort of prize to his more moderate Islamist allies, made little attempt to field a police presence, or to provide the services, above all functioning courts, that residents of the area demanded. These are the same demands Pakistanis elsewhere have made; the difference was that in Swat the extremists offered themselves as an alternative.
The new provincial government elected in 2008 promised to negotiate with the extremists rather than fight them. And that is precisely what has happened. The forces of Sufi Muhammad, the militant leader, have laid down their arms in exchange for a pledge to create Shariah courts. But other militants have an agenda of their own, including closing down girls’ schools. Most analysts were appalled by the deal. “It was an act of capitulation,” says Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States. “And there’s no assurance that this will be the final domino.” Zardari, to his credit, has so far refused to sign off on the deal. But there’s little he can do to affect the outcome.
Meanwhile, American policy is coming down the road like a monster truck. With the strategic reviews now complete, the Obama administration is planning an enormous increase in development aid to Pakistan, reaching $1.5 billion a year over five years, as well as an increase in military aid, to be directed to counterinsurgency warfare. The administration’s increasing receptivity to negotiating with some elements of the Taliban and fighting others puts it far more in line with Pakistani thinking than the Bush administration ever was. But as President Obama said on March 27, “after years of mixed results” from military aid to Pakistan, “we will not provide a blank check.” Obama emphasized that extremists “are a grave and urgent danger to the people of Pakistan.” Someone in Pakistan must make that case, and it can’t be the army chief of staff. As Ambassador Lodhi told me: “Pakistan needs strong leaders who can stand up and say, ‘Here is the extremist threat that Pakistan faces, and this is what we must do.’ We have a democratic government, but they haven’t used that status to go to the people and articulate a policy.”
SUNDAY, MARCH 15, turned out to be one of the most extraordinary, and exciting, days in the recent history of Pakistan. That morning, a spokesman for the PML-N reported that more than 3,000 party workers had been arrested. Hundreds of police officers surrounded the home of Nawaz Sharif, and officials announced that he would be detained there for the next 72 hours. The lawyers’ leader, Aitzaz Ahsan, was detained and then escaped. In Lahore, cadres of the Jamaat-e-Islami Party threw rocks at advancing officers; the officers flung the rocks back and fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets. The roads to Islamabad were sealed off with trucks, containers and steel barriers. The Zardari government appeared to have successfully squelched the long march, even if at real cost to its standing.
And then it hadn’t. Around 4:30 that afternoon, the Lahore police district coordinating officer announced his resignation from the force — live, on television. Other officers followed. Sharif left his home in a caravan of cars — and as the caravan inched forward, the police fell back and then melted away. The government continued to take a hard line, but plainly, something had happened. Around midnight, reports began to circulate that Prime Minister Gilani would speak. The cabinet was meeting; General Kayani was once again on the scene. Pakistanis, a late-night people in any case, waited hour by hour in front of the television. Finally, at 5 in the morning, Gilani delivered a brief address in which he announced that the government had agreed to reinstate Chief Justice Chaudhry the following Saturday, when Chief Justice Dogar was scheduled to retire from the bench. Sharif and the lawyers agreed to call off the long march.
THE NEXT DAY, EVERYONE was jubilant, save PPP officials. The whole nail-biting drama had provided a tremendous boon to Sharif, to the lawyers and to the judiciary, to General Kayani and perhaps to the prime minister — to everyone, in short, save Asif Ali Zardari. Sheik Mansour Ahmed, a PPP loyalist who earlier solemnly explained to me that the march was a ploy by Islamists to pressure President Zardari into easing up on the militants, now said Gilani was “not playing a positive role.” The official line, implausible though it sounded, was that Zar dari had orchestrated the whole affair. Waqar Khan, a recently minted Zardari insider now serving as minister of investments, told me: “I think the president has done a phenomenal job by returning the chief justice, and they’ve done it at the right time. They’ve accepted the wishes of the people.”
It’s not clear what in fact happened that afternoon. Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times and one of Pakistan’s leading political analysts, says he believes that General Kayani played the decisive role behind the scenes, and that the army thus not only “re-established its credibility in the eyes of the people” but also managed to “cut the president down to size.” That is not, of course, the way Zardari recounts the events of that day. He says that his government ordered the police to fall back out of concern that “aggressive parties” associated with the Sharif brothers might use a confrontation to commit acts of violence. In any case, he said, his law minister had advised him that he could not have two sitting chief justices and so would have to wait for Dogar’s retirement to restore Chaudhry. I asked him, frankly incredulous, if he was saying that he had always intended to reinstate Chaudhry but had held off saying so until that moment.
“No,” Zardari said. “I’m not saying that. I’m saying that different positions existed given by the law.” And he apparently had to wait for a clear ruling among his advisers.
But there’s no getting around the damage the president did to his own standing. He tried to strike a blow at Nawaz Sharif, his chief adversary, and it was Sharif who emerged the stronger. American officials, increasingly convinced both that Zardari is not the interlocutor they had hoped for and that his days in power may be numbered, have begun to pay more attention to Sharif, long considered dangerously close to Islamist forces. Leading PML-N officials say they have learned from past mistakes. They have learned, for example, to accept an independent media and an independent judiciary. It’s not clear if Sharif himself has profited from experience. In the course of a phone conversation last week, he passed up all opportunities for self-scrutiny and advocated a response to terrorism that combined dialogue with tribal elders and economic and social development; military force was apparently not part of the equation.
And what about President Zardari? I asked him if he had learned any lessons from the previous week. He pondered. “Every day,” he said, “man is growing and learning. What you were yesterday, you are probably not today, because today’s you is yesterday’s experience. One is always learning.” Indeed, one is.
