America Drinks the COIN Kool-aid...

and prepares for a new surge in Afghanistan that may doom Pakistan

American ignorance concerning Pakistani politics and society is profound. And, in the matter of the “surge” scheduled for Afghanistan for year-end 2008, it may be fatal.

U.S. observers, both on the left and right, view Pakistan primarily through the lens of the war on terror, in terms of Pakistan’s role in pumping military forces into its western frontier in order to help George W. Bush burnish his meager presidential legacy by getting Osama bin Laden’s head on a pike before he leaves office in January 2009; and to assist the West in rescuing its tottering political project in Afghanistan, the Karzai government.

As any responsible observer of Pakistan politics would tell you—all the Pakistani media majors all have English-language outlets—the Pakistanis view things completely differently.

They believe that unremitting American pressure on Pakistan is turning a serious but manageable problem—ethnic and Islamist extremism in the border regions—into an existential crisis that is ripping Pakistan apart.

In the days since Musharraf’s departure, Pakistan has been torn by a series of terrorist attacks, including a coordinated assault on Pakistan’s main armory near Islamabad, which left nearly 100 dead.

The attacks represent a highly persuasive demonstration by Taliban extremists that peace inside Pakistan’s central, urbanized core requires accommodation with the Taliban, and not participation in America’s escalating counter-inurgency campaign in Afghanistan’s east and Pakistan’s frontier provinces.

It is a message that Pakistan’s civilian, military, and intelligence leadership are ready to heed.

But it is a warning that America—including both its political and defense establishment and its two presidential candidates—are determined to disregard in the search for geopolitical advantage, multi-national military support, and votes.

Fatally, the supposed success of the troop surge in Iraq –and the desperate optimism and opportunism an apparent military panacea excites in American politics—is fueling calls for applying the same formula to the intractable Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

However, Afghanistan isn’t Iraq. And, more importantly, Pakistan ain’t Iran.

For Americans infatuated with the apparent success of the surge in Iraq—and its implied vindication of the comforting notion that the scientific application of American military might, brains, and money can succeed in even the most profoundly hostile environment—it is anathema to consider that the relative quiet in Iraq is not attributable to our astounding subtlety in paying off Sunni tribal leaders and malcontents who otherwise would be engaged in a doomed insurgency against U.S. rule and Shi’a domination.

Nope.

What’s probably standing between us and the continuation of our bloody debacle in Iraq is the fact that Iran has eschewed a strategy of political violence through its Iraqi proxies. Instead, it has decided to outwait the United State and secure its gains through the political ascendancy of the Shi’a.

The Dawa party, obedient clients of the Iranians, have downplayed their military struggle and instead form the backbone of Prime Minister Maliki’s government.

The normally nationalistic and anti-Iranian Shi’a cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr has, thanks to the threats of legal and personal jeopardy deployed by the American occupation, taken up residence in the Iranian holy city of Qom. Under the influence of Iran’s persuasion and perhaps onerous hospitality, al Sadr has apparently decided to discard armed struggle and endorse the political route to power.

Iranian pressure on Iraqi Shi’a forces to stand down is, in my opinion, why the surge has worked. (And it’s also the reason why, despite martial chest-thumping from the Right, an armed attack on Iran by the U.S. or even scorched earth economic sanctions targeting Teheran are unlikely).

American politicians look at the Iraqi surge and, by a flawed analogy, expect that an escalation of three or so brigades into Afghanistan by years’ end will tip the scales in our favor.

Barack Obama, eager to burnish his CINC qualifications by boosting our “good war” in Afghanistan, talks about pouring in troops. John McCain explictly links a troop increase in Afghanistan with the apparent success of the surge.

The analogies, however, founder, when it comes to the issue of the key western neighbor.

Compare and contrast Pakistan’s attitudes toward Afghanistan with Iran’s desire to stabilize Iraq on its currently favorable terms.

According to the U.S. think tank Terror Free Tomorrow (TFT), favorable opinions of Afghanistan are at an anemic 48% level.

Hamid Karzai and his U.S. backed regime simply aren’t very popular in Pakistan. Pakistani distaste for Karzai is eagerly reciprocated by the Afghan government and relations are pretty much in a deep freeze. The Karzai government will always be closer the United States and India, not Pakistan. The route to increased Pakistani influence in Kabul lies through the violent overthrow of the Afghani government by the Taliban, not by ensuring the Karzai regime’s continued survival and success.

The U.S. is responding to Pakistan’s lack of enthusiasm for saving Karzai’s bacon by unilateral military incursions into western Pakistan in order to root out the Taliban havens (and possible bin Laden hidey-holes) that Pakistan’s army and intelligence services have pursued so unenthusiastically.

However, escalating the violence in Pakistan’s border regions looks like a recipe for disaster.

American planners originally hoped that Musharraf’s armies would be the anvil upon which Western forces crushed the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan.

Pakistan is more like a rotten melon that will fly apart under the hammer blows of a U.S. counter-insurgency campaign in west Pakistan.

The political will inside Pakistan to support the U.S. adventure in Afghanistan is virtually non-existent. According to TFT, opposition to the GWOT clocked in at a thumping 72% in June, with “strongly opposed” at 60.4%. At that time, admittedly before the recent wave of Taliban attacks, over 50% of Pakistanis blamed the US for violence inside Pakistan; the Pakistani Taliban were blamed by only 4.2%--behind India and Pakistan’s own ISI!

The salient development in Pakistani politics in the last three months has not been the democratization of Pakistan and an increased or even sustained determination to combat terrorism; it has been the collapse of the political fortunes of two would-be American clients--Pervez Musharraf and the leader of Benazir Bhutto’s PPP, her widower Asif Zardari—and the political ascendancy of Nawaz Sharif of the opposition PML-N, whose conservative, non-aligned policies have resonated with Pakistani voters since his return from exile last November.

The general elections in Pakistan in February delivered a clear mandate for removal of Musharraf and the restoration of the judiciary that Musharraf had dismissed in a clumsy attempt to secure his illegal re-election as president last November.

Asif Zardari, head of the main opposition force, the PPP, hopelessly bungled the political endgame and squandered his political capital because he was more interested in executing the political deal that Benazir Bhutto had made with Washington—by which the PPP would act as a political fig-leaf for the terminally unpopular Musharraf and make active Pakistan participation in the anti-Taliban campaign more palatable to the general populace—than he was in following the unambiguous mandate to remove Musharraf.

Six months of ignoble gyrations by the PPP with American connivance on behalf of Musharraf followed, leaving the field of principled opposition leader completely clear for Nawaz Sharif, who unequivocally called for Musharraf’s removal and the restoration of the judiciary (and, in a popular move, withdrew his people from the cabinet while continuing to support the PPP government in parliamentary votes).

As a result, Sharif is now by far the most popular political figure in Pakistan, clocking in at a favorability rating of 86%—a fact that is apparently unreported in the West (though not unknown to readers of China Matters) because Sharif also represents the majority strain in Pakistani popular opinion opposed to Pakistan’s participation in the U.S. led War on Terror.

Zardari’s increasingly risible attempts to straddle the roles of U.S. client and popular leader came to head with the disastrous visit to the United States of his hand-picked prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gillani.

In order to demonstrate that Pakistan’s newly-minted civilian government was eager and able to do Washington’s bidding in the War on Terror, Gillani announced that the notoriously independent (and pro-Taliban) Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was now subject to control by the cabinet—an assertion he was forced to retract within hours.

Observing the collapse of the credibility of his government, Zardari apparently decided to get in step with popular opinion and neutralize Sharif’s appeal by jumping on the dump-Musharraf bandwagon. In contrast to his previous dilatory behavior, Zardari was able to orchestrate the departure of Musharraf in little more than a week.

U.S. political meddling has yielded the usual unimpressive results. As planned, the civilian Pakistani government was split and discredited thanks to Zardari’s maneuvering. But instead of insuring Musharraf’s survival by allowing him to score political points off of a weakened civilian government, the policy led to Musharraf’s political demise.

When the PPP decided to recover its lost political ground by ousting Musharraf, it left Washington with the worst of both worlds: Musharraf gone and the civilian government too divided and unpopular to act as an effective client.

Since Musharraf’s departure, the pressures on Zardari have only intensified.

Nawaz Sharif has threatened a de jure withdrawal from the ruling coalition if Zardari does not reinstate the judiciary; and the bloody Taliban attacks have served notice that the survival of Pakistan’s civilian government, indeed its civil society, may depend on decoupling its tribal policy from the military campaign the U.S. is escalating in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan.


According to Taliban-watcher Syed Saleem Shahzad , the PPP-led civilian government is attempting to remain in Washington’s good graces—and establish itself, post-Musharraf, as America’s indispensable man in Islamabad—by declaring all-out war on militants (despite the TFT finding in June that 58% of Pakistanis wanted the government to negotiate with the Pakistan Taliban) and agreeing to a planned NATO center in Peshawar, capital of the North West Frontier Provinces, that will direct Pakistan’s anti-Taliban operations inside Pakistan.

It remains to be seen whether the Pakistan’s government and Pakistani public opinion will support escalated anti-Taliban operations—under US direction!—in the face of unrelenting Taliban attacks against Pakistani assets inside the heartland, the fundamental unpopularity of the U.S.-led GWOT, and Nawaz Sharif standing in the wings ready to assume the mantle of Pakistan’s leader and provide an alternative to the close U.S.-Pakistan relationship that a majority of Pakistanis regard as catastrophic.

As Western forces surge into Afghanistan in an effort to defeat the burgeoning Taliban insurgency by assaulting its havens in Pakistan, expect the Pakistani Taliban to retaliate—against Pakistan, in the Pakistani heartland—in order to demonstrate to Pakistani opinion the unacceptably high costs of providing material support to an unpopular American strategy.

Inside the Pakistan elite, the case for disengaging from the U.S. war on terror will be made forcefully by the ISI, which has never abandoned its support for the Taliban—or its desire for a pro-Pakistan regime in Kabul.

There has been one piece of disturbing news that implies that the ISI might be ready to take matters into its own hands and assist the Taliban in to redirecting Pakistani security policy—the ISI’s alleged complicity in the terror bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 8, 2008.

The U.S. government has been in the forefront in providing intelligence linking the ISI to the attack, no doubt a sobering reminder to Islamabad that the Bush administration has a pronounced pro-Indian tilt that no amount of enthusiastic water-carrying by Pakistan on Afghan security is likely to reverse.

Karzai’s ties to India as a counterweight to Pakistan have been a source of irritation to the ISI. But orchestrating the bombing of India’s embassy might not have been a reckless act of brinksmanship; it may have been a deliberate provocation.

If Karzai indignantly broke off relations with Pakistan, and India responded to the bombing with understandable anger, then Pakistan’s army would be free to abandon the thankless project of cooperating with NATO forces in the bloody, border-straddling counter-insurgency campaign in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Instead, while Karzai floundered to his doom, the Pakistani army could do what it does best: deploying its divisions in a conventional order of battle in Pakistan’s east facing India and engage in the crowd-pleasing ritualized hostility that has secured the army’s place in the center of national esteem—and fattened its budget—for the last sixty years.

So, a surge into Afghanistan, instead of adding an emollient sheen to waters already smoothed by an interested regional power, might instead apply a highly flammable coating of gasoline to all of South Asia—with the Taliban and the ISI both eager to throw a match.

A.Q. Khan Bombshells for Musharraf and U.S.

A.Q. Khan Interviews Indicate Skids Being Greased for Exit of Pakistan’s President and Challenge U.S. Assertions of Pakistan Government Non-Involvement in Nuclear Proliferation Network

ABC News obtained a telephone interview with Pakistan’s Dr. A.Q. Khan. For American viewers, the big news is that Dr. Khan retracted his televised “confession” that his proliferation of nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea had been a rogue operation:

As to his widely publicized confession, Khan said he was told by Musharraf that it would get the United States "off our backs" and that he was promised he would be quickly pardoned. "Those people who were supposed to know knew it," Khan said about his activities.

In another telephone interview with the Pakistan media outlet Dawn, Dr. Khan was more explicit:

When asked if he had been involved in leaking nuclear secrets to any other country, Dr Khan said he was not a part of any illegal or unauthorised deal in any way.“This one sentence covers the whole thing,” he asserted.

Khan tossed a few more anvils Musharraf’s way, offering the observation that Pakistan’s economy had “gone to the dogs” under Musharraf and indicating political support to the civilian government and, implicitly, Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N over Asif Zardari’s PPP.

In the context of Pakistani politics, the A.Q. Khan interviews are big news.

Khan has been under detention—essentially house arrest--with virtually no access to the domestic or international media for four and one-half years.

The fact that he was allowed to emerge and make the explosive allegations that Musharraf had persuaded Khan—a national hero—to take the fall for the nuclear export program and the government reneged on promises to allow him to move around Pakistan freely after his confession is a strong indication that the anti-Musharraf forces are coalescing, impeachment is a real possibility, and the military powers that be inside Pakistan have decided it’s time for Mush to go.

As A.Q. Khan himself stated in yet another interview with The News:

I am not in the custody of the civilian government, and I am in the custody of the Army.

The A.Q. Khan interviews may very well serve as part of an campaign to remove one of Musharraf's key political props--U.S. support--out from under him in order to effectuate a political transition.

After all, the United States is now being forced to decide if it wants to continue to support a president who is not only extremely unpopular, but has also been publicly and convincingly accused of being a nuclear proliferator.

For the time being, it looks like the US government is doing the best it can to stand by Musharraf.

ABC obtained something that looks like a non-denial denial from the United States concerning A.Q. Khan’s story:

A U.S. official said American investigators were also unconvinced of Khan's latest claims. "We have not changed our assessment that A.Q. Khan was a very major and dangerous proliferator. He sold sensitive nuclear equipment and know-how to some genuinely bad actors," the official said.

Turning a blind eye toward apparent Pakistan government involvement in A.Q. Khan’s network has involved some heroic contortions by the United States over the years—including the need to disregard the fact that North Korea paid for its nuclear goodies not with cash in A.Q. Khan’s pocket but No Dong missiles in Pakistan’s military arsenal.

I blogged that story in 2007:

For the Bush administration, executive orders appear to be the preferred
method for making lemonade from the cornucopia of foreign policy lemons it has
on its hands.

Consider this application of executive order power in a nuclear
imbroglio involving North Korea in 2003, as demonstrated by this press release from the State Department (released on April Fools’ Day! somebody at State’s got a
sense of humor):

North Korea-Pakistan: Missile-Related Sanctions and Executive Order
12938 Penalties
There has been some confusion regarding the penalties
that were imposed March 24 on the Pakistani entity Khan Research Laboratories
(KRL) under Executive Order 12938, as amended, and the penalties that were
imposed March 24 on the North Korean entity, Changgwang Sinyong Corporation
under the missile sanctions law. These sanctions were for a specific
missile-related transfer. Changgwang Sinyong Corporation is a North Korean
missile marketing entity and has been sanctioned repeatedly in the past for its
missile-related exporting behavior. Changgwang Sinyong Corporation transferred
missile-related technology to KRL. The United States made a determination to
impose penalties on both Changgwang Sinyong Corporation and KRL as a result of
this specific missile-related transfer. These sanctions do not pertain
to any other activity, including nuclear-related ones. We informed the
Congress on March 12 that the Administration had carefully reviewed the facts
relating to the possible transfer of nuclear technology from Pakistan to North
Korea, and decided that the facts do not warrant the imposition of sanctions
under applicable U.S. laws.
[emphasis added]
Released on April 1, 2003

Mmmm...the sweet smell of ”confusion”.That’s bloody chum to a contrarian
blogger like myself.

Allow me to explain:

The most egregious nuclear proliferator on the face of this planet is
Pakistan, in the person of A.Q. Khan.

Khan’s network provided nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North
Korea.

Much as President Musharraf would like to claim that Mr. Khan’s efforts
were after hours and on his own dime, the North Korean transaction involved
not the payment of cash to Mr. Khan’s private bank account but the delivery of
North Korean No Dong missiles and technology to the Pakistan government.

Awkward.

Makes it look like the Pakistan government was proliferating nuclear
weapons technology—the type of activity that, if Kim Jung Il’s experience was
any guide, would provoke the formation of a worldwide alliance to destabilize
and if possibly destroy the culprit’s regime, at the very least cut off its
supply of cash and cognac, etc. etc. etc.

But since Pakistan is our ally in the war on terror, the nature of the
transaction—and the character of the crime—were neatly reversed.

As the Bush administration saw it, the offense was North Korea’s supply of
the missiles to Pakistan...and the fact that they got paid for them with nuclear
weapons equipment and technology was of secondary importance.

Actually, it was no laughing matter.

The State Department had to step up and pre-emptively define the
transaction as a missile purchase and sanction Khan’s laboratories itself.
Otherwise, Pakistan would have been vulnerable to much more serious, legislative
sanction—a total cutoff of aid under the Solarz Amendment--as a
proliferator.

So the State Department made a valiant if “confusing” effort to present the
sanctions against Khan’s laboratory as an ad hoc punishment for the Pakistani
government’s buying the missiles—because “the end-user of the missile purchase
cannot be sanctioned under the Arms Export Controls Act” (according to Nicholas
Kralev’s report, Pakistan purchases N. Korean missiles, in the March
31, 2003 Washington Times)...and we’ve got to sanction somebody, after
all!

So let’s just sanction this Pakistani nuclear lab over here.

There, that’s all better.

While the World Wasn’t Watching...

Pakistan Went Straight to Hell

Observers in the West, yours truly included, have been distracted by a series of shiny objects—Hillary! Obama! Tibet! Iraq!-- since Pakistan’s elections apparently put that country on the road to democracy by creating a parliamentary majority dominated by a coalition of the two main anti-Musharraf parties, the PPP and the PML-N.

While we were away, however, Benazir Bhutto’s widower and PPP co-chairman Asif Zardari has been working non-stop to remove his political rivals and solidify his place on top of the political heap—and make peace with Musharraf—at the expense of Pakistan’s democracy.

Zardari apparently sees himself as the rightful heir to the deal his wife had made with Washington—that the PPP would form a government after the election that would include Musharraf and his allies, exclude Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, and enjoy US support.

The United States has not been idle, of course. Once again the United States has found itself in the position of ostentatiously calling for democracy overseas, then energetically undermining it when the results don’t yield the outcome it desired.

At the end of March, National Security Advisor John Negroponte and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Boucher rushed to Pakistan on an unscheduled visit, to meet with the key political players and, presumably, insert America’s guiding hand in Pakistan’s politics.

US has assisted and enabled—if not guided—Zardari’s critical move to reach out to the MQM, the gangsterish party that controls Karachi and holds the key to Musharraf’s political survival.

MQM is responsible for the rioting and murder that convulsed the Karachi yesterday—and provided the first sign that Musharraf and the United States see a road out of their dilemma by fomenting a political crisis, probably with the help of Asif Zardari.

Zardari correctly sees virtually every politician and political force more popular than him as an obstacle and threat to his objective of riding a Musharraf/US alliance to political domination of Pakistan.

That puts a great deal on his plate because the removal of Pervez Musharraf is extremely popular—polling at about 70%--and Asif Zardari himself is not very popular man.

As a result, Zardari’s been working overtime to discredit and marginalize more popular figures like the PPP Old Guard and the lawyer’s movement, led by respected barrister—and PPP member--Aitzaz Ahsan,who is the touchstone for courage and integrity in the battle to democratize Pakistan.

At the same time, Zardari has reached out to anybody less popular than he is, a remarkable slate of despised figures including President Pervez Musharraf, the PML-Q party that the PPP and PML-N routed in the parliamentary elections, the murderous MQM—and the United States--to cobble together a ruling bloc.

At first, Zardari’s moves were almost laughably self-serving .

Despite a pledge to restore the pre-November 3 judiciary (that Musharraf had removed in order to get an unconstitutional second term as president while still in uniform), Zardari eagerly availed himself of the existing courts to get the outstanding corruption and murder charges (relating to highly plausible accusations that he had connived at the murder of his brother-in-law—and Benazir Bhutto’s brother!— black sheep radical politician Mir Murtaza Bhutto) against him dismissed.

Wiping the slate clean with the help of the Musharraf judiciary let the media ironically describe Zardari, the man universally known as “Mr. 10%” for his grafting ways, as “the cleanest man in Pakistan”—and removed the last legal obstacle to Zardari running for parliament in a by-election from his wife’s safe constituency, entering parliament, and becoming Prime Minister.

Zardari promoted a cringe-inducing cult of personality surrounding Shaheed (martyr) Benazir Bhutto while presenting himself as the ordained heir to her sacred nation-saving mission.

He presided over a meeting of the newly-elected PPP members of parliament and, instead of briefing them on the party’s platform for the upcoming session, orchestrated a performance in which Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, a senior PPP official who had once disrespected Zardari while the latter was in prison, now allowed himself to be seated in a chair before the puzzled assembly to recant and acknowledge Zardari was now “my leader”.

Zardari then delayed the calling of parliament to give him a chance to sideline Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the respected functionary who, as head of the PPP organization that contested the election, was both the constitutional and logical choice to be Prime Minister.

Instead, Zardari launched a whispering campaign against Fahim, accusing him of disloyally holding secret meetings with Musharraf—an accusation Fahim indignantly denied. The accusations reached a surreal pitch—and revealed Zardari’s anxiety about his legitimacy as Bhutto’s political heir—as Zardari’s creatures spread the allegation that Fahim had rushed off to meet Musharraf after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

Fahim, of course, had been at Benazir Bhutto’s side in the Land Rover when she was assassinated-- while Zardari was out of the country.

Zardari also addressed the threat from the lawyer’s movement led by Aitzaz Ahsan, flying in the face of history to dismiss the significance of the lawyer’s movement—which had stood up to Musharraf’s extra-legal maneuvers since March of 2007, gutted his popularity, and created the political crisis that forced him to allow Bhutto (and Zardari) and Sharif to return to Pakistan from exile to contest the elections.

Instead, Zardari claimed, the victory of democratic forces in Pakistan was the result of the martyrdom of his wife—and he dismissed lawyers as corrupt and self-serving.

Another meeting, this time of the PPP central committee, was transformed into a prolonged exhibition of Zardari’s pathological self-regard and tender pride as he discussed his resistance to reinstating the pre-November 3 judges as he had promised the PML-N and Nawaz Sharif:

Zardari said these were the same judges who had earlier taken oath under the PCO and validated the military rule. Referring to his jail life, a source quoted him as saying that he was let down by these judges, who had even refused to release him on parole to attend the funeral of his nephew. He said he was allowed only a two-hour parole despite Farooq H Naek's pleading before the same judges.

He said the then Justice Wajihuddin Ahmed had also refused him a parole. He termed the same judiciary biased, which he said was responsible for his eight years in jail. Party sources reported that Asif Ali Zardari was quite emotional while speaking on the judges' issue. One source said he talked of the restoration of the judges but linked it to a constitutional package. He said the party was interested in the independence of the judiciary and not in personalities.

A party leader said he was disappointed to hear what he termed the charge-sheet issued by the PPP co-chairperson against the deposed judges. According to him, almost 60 per cent of the co-chairman's speech was on Aitzaz Ahsan and the judges.

Zardari also went out of his way to widen a rift between himself and Aitzaz Ahsan.

Aitzaz Ahsan, who sought the restoration of the deposed judges, told the meeting that it would be in the interest of the party to get the judges restored.

Zardari, according to sources, came hard on the issue of the judges’ restoration. According to one source, Zardari snubbed the widely-respected lawyer leader and said he knew the worth of the judges whose restoration was being sought by the lawyers' community.

Zardari also purportedly claimed he feared a return to legal jeopardy for himself if the pre-November 3 judiciary was restored and perhaps decided to revisit the charges that the Musharraf judiciary had so complaisantly dismissed.

In my opinion, a more likely explanation for Zardari’s widely reported insistence on forgoing automatic restoration of the judiciary, replacing it with parliamentary review and control over judicial re-appointments, and under any and all scenarios implementing a “minus one” arrangement that would at the very least block the return of Supreme Court justice and national hero Iftikhar Chaudhry to his original eminence, is that Zardari desires a cowed and compliant judiciary that will not only decline to take the initiative in challenging the Musharraf presidency--it will also decline to dismiss the criminal cases that continue to hamstring Zardari’s main political rival, Nawaz Sharif.

After Amin Fahim capitulated and a more tractable PPP functionary, Yousaf Raza Gillani---regarded by many as merely a place-holder until Zardari entered parliament and became eligible for the PM slot-- had finally been elevated to the prime ministership, progressive Pakistani opinion was promptly horrified by a series of events.

Without consulting the coalition partners, Gillani called for and obtained a vote of confidence from Musharraf’s PML-Q—an indication that Zardari was engaged in covert dealings with the despised faction.

Zardari also unilaterally reached out to the MQM, a gangsterish political outfit that runs Karachi, has been an indispensable prop of Musharraf, and is despised by the PPP rank-and-file both for as status as the PPP’s bitter rival in Sindh and for its acts of mayhem and murder against PPP members.

Then Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, the very person who had groveled so gratifyingly before Zardari in the meeting of PPP parliamentarians and had been rewarded with the position of Minister of Defense in the new government, reportedly praised Musharraf as “a national asset”, apparently endorsing Musharraf as the indispensable ATM through which American aid must flow.

It became clear Zardari was assembling an alternative coalition of Musharraf allies against the day that Nawaz Sharif pulled the PML-N out of the coalition.

And it also became clear that PML-N withdrawal was inevitable because Zardari was prepared to break the bargain that had sealed the PPP-PML-N coalition: restoration of the pre-November 3 judiciary within thirty days of the formation of the federal government, a move that would almost certainly involve in the removal of Musharraf and a decoupling from the United States on security matters.

If the PML-N withdrew from the coalition, Nawaz Sharif would become the logical focus of the anti-Zardari forces, which would probably include significant elements of the PPP old guard and supporters of the lawyer’s movement as well as his own party—in other words, the three most popular forces in the country.

Sharif—who perhaps had, with an excess of complacency, anticipated that Zardari’s venality and unpopularity would easily redound to the political benefit of the PML-N—is probably now calculating rather anxiously whether Zardari is going to try to neutralize him politically (Gillani’s most salient qualification as prime minister was perhaps that he had defeated Sharif in an election in the 1990s), legally (unlike Zardari, Sharif still has some legal vulnerabilities relating to his previous stint in power) or worse.

I’m not the only one who thinks Nawaz Sharif has to watch his back.

However, the most pressing priority for Musharraf and Zardari is discrediting the lawyers’ movement to restore the judiciary.

The lawyers have promised the embarrassment of renewed nationwide agitation—agitation that would force Zardari to take the profoundly unpopular position of standing with Musharraf against the lawyers--if the judiciary is not restored within thirty days of the formation of the coalition government, as per the Murree Declaration negotiated between Zardari and Sharif in March.

In an interesting illustration of what can happen to a vaguely worded agreement when bad faith is the order of the day, Nawaz Sharif believes that the 30 day clock began ticking when the new National Assembly was sworn in on March 17. Most people date the kickoff to March 25 , when the new prime minister was sworn in. But the PPP’s Rehman Malik, who has jurisdiction over the matter in his role as Adviser to the Prime Minister on Interior,doesn’t even pretend he’s not stalling: he says the clock starts when the cabinet is sworn in—which hasn’t happened yet.

April 16, April 24, whenever, the lawyers are already getting ready to hit the bricks again.

In this unsettled environment, with Musharraf, Zardari, and the PPP digging in to block the lawyers, a truly remarkable event occurred on April 8: Dr. Sher Afgan Niazi, the parliamentary affairs minister in the previous government responsible for some of the more tortured legal justification for Musharraf’s rule, was apparently attacked in Lahore by a gang of...lawyers.

Aitzaz Ahsan went to the scene and tried unsuccessfully to calm the crowd.

Instead, the mob pelted Sher Afgan with tomatoes and worse, invaded the ambulance that was trying to drive him away, threw away the ignition key, and pounded him with shoes and shattered the windows as Good Samaritans tried to push the ambulance down the street.

The old man’s ordeal was captured on TV cameras and broadcast to a horrified nation.

Afgan, previously a figure of amused contempt, attracted widespread pity.

As for the lawyers, it was claimed that they had forfeited their claim on the nation’s sympathy.

A mortified Aitzaz Ahsan announced his resignation as head of the Supreme Court Bar Association—the prestigious pulpit from which he had championed the cause of the pre-November 3 judiciary.

Sher Afghan, who was not seriously hurt, returned to his home town of Mianwali, which showered him with rose petals, burned tires on the main roads, blocked the train tracks, held a general strike, and trashed the law offices of his local opponents, all in his honor.

Sher Afghan proclaimed his undying loyalty to Musharraf as the man who brought democracy back to Pakistan and accused the PML-N and the fundamentalist party Jamaat-e-Islami of orchestrating the attack.

Almost immediately suspicions of a government conspiracy began bubbling up.

The PML-N’s parliamentary leader, Makhdoom Javed Hashmi offered accusations of his own :

What happened with Dr Sher Afgan Niazi,it is condemnable, he said "My servants had recognized those who had mistreated Dr Sher Afgan Niazi. They are intelligence agencies personnel. This is all brain child of agencies, he added.

The pro-government Daily Times obliged conspiracy theorists with a ham-fisted editorial depicting the lawyers as an out-of-control creature of the media now ready to be poked back in its cage, while significantly praising the PPP:

The power that the lawyers’ movement felt was based on the aggression of the bars, but the courage of its leadership to challenge and threaten the court and government came from the profile they had acquired on the TV channels. (The channels tended to ignore the early manifestation of violence among the lawyers as a sop to a growing solidarity between the two.) After the 2008 elections, however unfortunately and incorrectly, most of the channels developed a consensus that the mandate of the people was not in favour of the parties that won but the restoration of the judges and the ouster of President Musharraf. The two mainstream parties registered this with a slight variation of response. The PMLN embraced the new situation completely and began to reap media dividends; the PPP felt that it was being pressured too much by the “countdowns” handed down by the lawyers and sought a middle ground.

Another pro-Musharraf outlet, the Pakistan Observer, eagerly entitled its editorial “Is this the Beginning of the End? “(for the lawyers’ movement, that is), opining:

All this shows that the situation was moving in the wrong direction and it is time that the lawyers’ movement and the issue of restoration of judges is brought to a swift closure. Advisor to Prime Minister on Interior Rehman Malik has already ordered an inquiry, which would fix the responsibility, but it is quite obvious that those behind the unfortunate incident were none else but black-coat wearing lawyers.

Propaganda this crude and arrogantly blatant has all the marks of the Pakistan intelligence services, so I’m inclined to agree with the people who see the attack on Sher Afgan as an initial salvo in the campaign to discredit the lawyers and keep Musharraf in power.

Commenters on Pakistan political comment boards pointed out that it didn’t make sense that the lawyer’s movement, which had showed admirable restraint over the last year in the face of tear gas and baton charges, somehow had lost its discipline at the moment of its greatest triumph.

Also, during this prolonged, agonizing, and televised incident only one policeman showed up, an indication that this incident was allowed to happen. The Punjab government, it was pointed out, is still in the hands of the pro-Musharraf PML-Q.

The drift of the accusations seems to be that the attack was orchestrated by pro-Musharraf elements to discredit the lawyer’s movement and give Musharraf (and, many posited, Zardari as his silent partner) a pretext for not heeding its demand to restore the pre-November 3 judiciary.

Aitzaz Ahsan subsequently decided that the beating of Sher Afgan had actually been a government provocation. He withdrew his resignation and described the chaos in Lahore at a press conference:

"I came to know about Sher Afgan incident on Tuesday evening through media. I rushed there even at the risk of my life. But no government functionary turned up. Police did not stop the demonstrators despite my request. I tried to talk through megaphone from balcony. Only 40 per cent lawyers were found present there and the remaining were some other people. I appealed to lawyers to disperse and they did so. But the other people remained there.

He further said "I asked the police officers present over there to call in more contingent of police but it was not done so. I asked police officers to call police van and bring it close to door so that Sher Afgan could be pulled out from there. But police did not do so. I asked the police officers to remove a plain clothed man but they told he was a policeman. I knew he was not policeman and was some terrorist.

When I brought out Sher Afgan then police disappeared. When I took Afgan inside van, we came to know driver of the van was not there. People in plain clothes were found involved in the acts of sabotage. My friends and I tried to rescue Dr Sher Afgan even at the risk of our lives. But all happened under a planned conspiracy. People in plain clothes subjected Dr Afgan to violence".


Things quickly got worse.

The theatrical roughing up of Sher Afghan by pretend “lawyers” was followed up by the genuine murder of real lawyers in Karachi by the MQM.

Downtown Karachi was brought to a standstill by a bizarre and bloody and much more serious incident—another “lawyers riot”—in this case “lawyers” affiliated with the MQM claiming they were attacked while peacefully but rather inexplicably protesting the insult to Sher Afgan, who hails from a distant town in Punjab, not Sindh.

The MQM “lawyers” retaliated by setting fire to an office building and killing five lawyers within. Subsequent rioting and arson paralyzed the heart of Karachi and claimed several more lives.

Pakistan’s News editorialized:

One is the strange absence of any administrative authority in Karachi...and Lahore, where police and authorities had hours to mobilize themselves and mount a rescue operation to release Dr Afgan and other hostages. Why did it become necessary for Aitzaz Ahsan to intervene? Why did police not use force when no party or group had owned the siege? Why were large parts of Karachi engulfed in flames after a minor clash between lawyers? Whose interests are being served by this chain of tragic events and who is the target? Likewise everyone must see who, if anyone, is benefiting from the turmoil.

The good news is, following the initial dismay of the Sher Afghan incident and Aitzaz Ahsan’s abrupt if temporary resignation, the legal community and educated opinion have closed ranks, repudiated claims that the lawyers’ movement is out of control, and pressed forward with the agenda of complete restoration of the pre-November 3 judiciary.

The bad news is, these are times of extraordinary danger for the more progressive forces in Pakistan politics.

With the entry of the PPP into the government, international attention has turned away from Pakistan.

Musharraf has the opportunity to put paid to the lawyers’ movement to restore the judiciary with the right combination of violence, slander, American support, MQM terrorism, and political cover from Zardari.

After the shock of the Sher Afghan incident, Aitzaz Ahsan must be viewing his future with a combination of determination and deep disquiet.

Again, from The Post’s report on his press conference:

Aitzaz Ahsan said that he will contest by-elections from constituency NA-55, if Pakistan People's Party (PPP) issued him the ticket. He said that PPP and Asif Ali Zardari have taken bold steps but there is a hidden power that is intriguing against the democracy.

Dark, dark days, indeed.

Pakistan 2008 Equals Iran 1978?

The Bush administration is pushing Pakistan into a corner.

It’s not a happy place.
]
It’s called Musharraf = Shah of Iran territory.

And it really doesn’t have to be that way.

After all, the opposition to Musharraf comes from respectable, clean-shaven democratic, dollar-worshiping moderates, not the bearded religious fanatics of our dark fantasies.

On Tuesday, I wrote oooh so presciently:

The deep thinkers of the State Department could look at the election results, decide that we did our honorable best by Musharraf, our loyal but terminally inept strongman, and give our backing to his peaceful departure.

The PPP would be spared the suicidal role of appearing as Musharraf’s protector, and be able to form a governing coalition with the PML-N in a subordinate position inside the government, instead of throwing rocks at it from the outside.

The U.S. has always abhorred a situation in which the PPP and the PML-N formed a coalition.

Washington fears that a PPP coalition under the influence of the PML-N would...adopt policies popular with the Pakistani people i.e. decouple from the U.S. war on the Taleban and al Qaeda just at the time that the prospect of losing Afghanistan has started giving U.S. policymakers some serious heartburn.

[But] No matter who’s in power, we’re not going to unearth some miracle race of Pakistani crusaders ready to kill their own Muslim citizens so NATO can destroy Pakistan’s natural Pashtun allies in Afghanistan.

Better to settle for a popular, stable PPP/PML-N government in Pakistan without Musharraf but with Kiyani (the new, improved army strongman) and hope that all that money we’re throwing at Pakistan buys us some grudgingly-acknowledged leverage for anti-extremist initiatives that suit both U.S. policy and the Pakistani national mood.

Of course, accepting half a loaf is not really what the Bush administration is about. Its usual response to a setback is to blame it on a deficiency of will and vigor, and double down when the facts on the ground are screaming Change Course! instead.

So we’ll see whether Washington casts its vote in favor of the PPP+Musharraf, continued division and drift in Pakistani politics and security doctrine, and eventual dominance by Nawaz Sharif and a PML-N grown more overtly anti-American.

According to Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of McClatchy, the returns are trickling in from Washington, and it doesn’t look promising:

The U.S. is urging the Pakistani political leaders who won the elections to form a new government quickly and not press to reinstate the judges whom Musharraf ousted last year, Western diplomats and U.S. officials said Wednesday. If reinstated, the jurists likely would try to remove Musharraf from office.

Representing the despised minority from the state of sanity is, as usual, the State Department:

Bush's policy of hanging on to Musharraf has caused friction between the White House and the State Department, with some career diplomats and other specialists arguing that the administration is trying to buck the political tides in Pakistan, U.S. officials said.

Officials in the White House and the intelligence community fear that the longer Pakistan remains without a new government, the deeper the gridlock, threatening the progress made in the elections toward greater stability and helping the country's Islamic extremists.

One Western diplomat said, however, that the strategy could backfire if Pakistanis feel betrayed after voting to kick Musharraf from office.

"This is dangerous," said the diplomat.

The officials spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss internal government debates.

The effort to persuade Pakistan's newly elected parliament not to reinstate the judges could be perceived in Pakistan as a U.S. attempt to keep Musharraf in power after voters overwhelmingly rejected his Pakistan Muslim League-Q political party.

"There is going to be an uprising against the people who were elected" should opposition parties agree to the plan, warned Athar Minallah, the lawyer of ousted Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, whom Musharraf has under house arrest.

Frikkin' diplomats. Frikkin' specialists. Frikkin' lawyers. Frikkin' voters. Frikkin' people who love their country, democracy, and the rule of law.

How are we supposed to get anything done over there with all these troublemakers?

In a separate post, Pakistan: It’s Not Over Yet, I write on the impending political crisis, both between the PPP and the PML-N and inside the PPP itself, provoked by the U.S. insistence on working with Musharraf.

The International Republican Institute Takes on Pakistan

There’s heat but very little light surrounding Pakistan’s impending parliamentary elections.

Western journalists are crowding into Pakistan in anticipation of a spectacular blowup following the February 18 parliamentary elections.

Pakistani political blogs are plastered with pie charts reflecting every conceivable bias and depicting every imaginable electoral outcome.

Just in the last week, two U.S. think tanks surveyed Pakistani opinion with remarkably divergent results--results that may be used either set the stage for a smooth transfer of power or plunge Pakistan into an instantaneous post-election crisis.

A U.S. think tank with the absurdly Orwellian name Terror Free Tomorrow (I guess that’s better than today, when we have to pay for our terror) recently attracted attention with a poll showing that al Qaeda and the Taliban have grown markedly less popular inside Pakistan since extremists adopted a policy of Muslim-on-Muslim violence with bombings in the heartland.

In its political findings, the TFT survey of 1157 people showed the PPP, led by Benazir Bhutto's widower, Asif Zardari, as the most popular political party in Pakistan—with 36.7%.

Nawaz Sharif’s opposition PML-N clocked in with a popularity of 25.3%.

These rather unexceptionable results were instantly overshadowed on February 11 when the International Republican Institute came out with its new poll on February 11 of 3,485 people.

In the areas that most concern us, the only thing less popular than Musharraf (16%) is cooperating with the US in the War on Terror (down from 15% to 9%). Heckuva a job, people!

But the IRI poll’s main impact is in the domestic electoral game.

The high profile IRI poll, appearing a week before the election, seems timed to trigger an avalanche of hundreds of articles in the domestic and international media—and expectations by international observers--about the strong position of the PPP just before the nation goes to the polls.

IRI showed the PPP attracting 50% of respondents nationwide--an enormous jump of 20% from the 30% support level IRI reported for the PPP in its previous, pre-assassination poll in November.

The IRI poll found the PML-N sagging at 22% nationwide, and losing in the Punjab to the PPP by 12%.

The IRI results immediately became an issue in the election campaign.

The PPP trumpeted the results:

Pakistan People’s Party Co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari has welcomed the IRI polls survey and termed it a great victory for the PPP and vindication of its position that only massive rigging can stop it from sweeping the elections.

The Pakistani government and the ruling party, the PML-Q, indignantly rebutted the findings. The PML-N has apparently kept silent.

Interestingly, there has been little discussion of the discrepancy between the IRI poll and the TFT poll on PPP popularity.

IRI’s 50% vs.TFT’s 36.7%.

For the identical period—January 19-29.

For poll samples large enough for error rates to be under 3%.

That’s a big enough discrepancy between TFT and IRI to make one wonder how sound somebody’s polling methodology is.

Some things in the IRI polling jump out: 61% male sample? How random is that?

The reliability of the poll is especially important since IRI holds the polling franchise for contesting allegedly rigged elections in the run-up to U.S.-backed color coded revolutions...and the U.S. apparently prefers a Musharraf/PPP government to one in which the PML-N participates and plays a moderating and rather anti-American role.

The IRI poll is key because the PPP is poised to claim rigged elections--and cite the IRI poll as evidence for electoral hanky-panky...and justification for initiating a mass movement against the government.

If the PML-Q comes out on top in the elections again with a plurality, the sizable PPP and PML-N blocks will presumably refuse to join.

This would normally result in a hung parliament, continued crisis and drift, dissolution of parliament, a new election—and a shrinkage of PPP gains in favor of the PML-N as the post-assassination fervor wears off.

But this is no ordinary year.

The PPP would find it intolerable to lose its charismatic leader and get jobbed out of power in the year it was supposed to win it all.

The PPP also realizes its political popularity is at its peak, and can only deteriorate, especially as the PML-N strengthens.

The PPP has clearly signaled that there will be no business as usual if it does not gain the right to form the government.

The PPP has decided it’s worth putting their people out on the streets if they don’t come out on top.

The IRI framing gives an idea of where this is all is really heading.

IRI asked what percentage of respondents would support protests against the government in the case of an apparently rigged election and 53% said they would.

The key qualification, one that may be overlooked, was in the hypothetical situation: “if the PML-Q won the most seats”, i.e. won a plurality.

The PML-Q is the current plurality holder with 126 of the 341 seats won with 25% of the votes, less than the PPP got. The PML-Q got the right to reach out to minority parties and form the ruling coalition with its guy as prime minister. The PPP, in second place with 81 seats, is excluded.

It’s a given that the PML-Q, with its support and Musharraf’s favorability both in the teens, will lose seats and the PPP (and PML-N) will make big gains.

Reading the popular mood, if Musharraf’s vote riggers commit the folly of engineering another PML-Q plurality, Pakistani opinion will probably go along with street demonstrations demanding that the PPP lead the formation of a government.

But, in a potentially significant distinction, there is probably not a national consensus on behalf of a mass movement claiming an exclusive national mandate for the PPP.

I would be interested to see how many people would have endorsed street demonstrations for the PPP pursuing power without a coalition “if the PPP did not win a majority”.

Probably a pretty low number.

Wish IRI had asked that question.

The IRI poll, with its assertion that the PPP enjoys 50% national support, provides Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s unpopular widower who parachuted into the PPP co-chairmanship after the assassination, with useful political leverage if the election turns out badly and the party needs justification for "taking it to the streets" to win a plurality and the right to form a government.

Dangerously, the 50% figure also offers Zardari the temptation to try to go it alone and demand an absolute majority--instead of a coalition-forming plurality--for the PPP, as the U.S. would prefer.

That would put him at odds with Pakistani public opinion, which apparently wants a coalition government instead.

I found it interesting that, according to IRI, while 50% support the PPP, 69% of respondents supported the scenario in which Musharraf resigns, a national unity government is formed, and free and fair elections are held.

That’s not a vote of confidence in the PPP. The PPP’s policy is adamantly opposed to a unity government. It wants to charge ahead, rigged elections be damned, IRI polling in hand, to exploit the surge of post-assassination outrage and act as the power broker in the new government.

The overwhelming preference seems to be for dumping the PML-Q and allowing the PPP to form a PPP/PML-N coalition led by Makhdom Amim Fahmim, the docile and conciliatory apparatchik who, but for Bhutto’s will, would probably have become the PPP’s next leader instead of Zardari.

This Solomonic dispensation would give the post-assassination PPP its due, but not let Zardari and his Sindhi cronies have the run of the place.

It would also bring Nawaz Sharif, currently the opposition politician with the highest national stature and a voice for the powerful Punjab faction, into the government.

Support for a PPP/PML-N coalition polled at 72%. Overall support for Fahmim as prime minister reached 56%.

The PPP will do well in the elections but, under Zardari, a jump in PPP approval from 30% pre assassination to 50% today doesn’t seem very sustainable—or a sound foundation for a post-election push for people power unless the PML-N is given a role as well.

Zardari is keen to keep the PPP juggernaut on track, but his recklessness and ego are a dangerous distraction to the party.

Zardari did not help himself or his party with an interview in Newsweek hinting at his ambition to win Benazir Bhutto’s old seat in an upcoming by-election, enter the national assembly, and shoulder aside Fahmim as prime minister.

“There is not one single personality [in the party], apart from me, who anybody even knows,” said Mr Zardari while explaining why he thought he should be the prime minister.

“No one else has a consensus.”

Not quite.

According to IRI, when asked who they wanted for prime minister for the PPP, 77% named Fahmim.

8% named Zardari.

That popular figure Don’t Know/No Response beat him by 4%.

Ouch.

Nevertheless, after all this IRI chose to describe Zardari as “one of the most popular leaders in the country” even though only 37% viewed him favorably--far behind Fahmim at 66% and Sharif at 55%.

Contrast that with TFT, which found that Nawaz Sharif’s favorable/unfavorable rating among all respondents was 72%/18%; for Asif Zardari, it’s 48%/32%.

Dawn’s profile of Zardari mocked the efforts of PPP flacks to compare Zardari to Sonia Gandhi and openly questioned his judgment:

It’s a topsy-turvy world and so is the new PPP.

It turned out that at first Babar Awan [Benazir Bhutto’s lawyer and PPP functionary] was trying to please Asif. This is the old way in the new PPP to become closer to Caesar Zardari. That’s how he rose in the ranks so fast but now wants to rise higher. Not to be left behind, the overly ‘made-up media maidens’ (MMM) of the PPP[the author is presumably referring to PPP spokesperson Sherry Rehman, whose glamorized, Westernized, and Bhuttoized look apparently doesn’t sit well with him] are, in competition, getting Asif interviewed to anybody they can get hold of. And Asif, who was denied this glamour for eight years in dungeons, is now relishing the spotlight in prestigious magazines like the Newsweek. Therein lies the biggest challenge for Asif Zardari. As the new order replaced the old, the stakes going higher, people are desperate to cross party lines. Asif may have acquired lots of dubious wisdom in jail, but he remains a little extra mortal when it comes to sycophancy.

The PML-Q exploited Zardari’s poor credibility and judgment by jumping on a statement he made that he might be able to work with Musharraf after the elections.

The PML-Q took this as an admission that he would be willing to abandon the opposition parties and principle for the sake of a deal to gain power:

But a senior aide to Pakistan's President claimed the PPP was set to form a "rainbow coalition" with the pro-Musharraf PML-Q and other parties it historically regarded with distaste. "The People's Party is ready to work with Mr Musharraf and the military establishment," said Mushahid Hussain, secretary general of PML-Q. "It has been in the political wilderness for 12 years, eagerly vying for power."

A PPP-PML-Q coalition attracts a dismal level of support: 11%.

Zardari probably came up with this profoundly unpopular gambit as an attempt to personally curry favor with the United States and boost his low status with Washington, which still entertains hope of a Musharraf/PPP coalition.

There is apparent national resistance to giving the PPP and Zardari carte blanche.

If Zardari is smart, he’ll make a conservative reading of the TFT and IRI polls and satisfy himself with a plurality and a ruling coalition with the PML-N--and not try to push for an absolute majority in the National Assembly and a linkup with Musharraf, no matter how much the United States encourages and flatters him.

Something to pay attention to on election night and afterwards.

The Revolt--and the Roast--of the Generals

It’s no fun being a general anymore.

The world press somberly reported another broadside by retired Pakistani army generals against Pres. Pervez Musharraf.

But there was more going on than “grim-faced emeriti of Pakistan’s most powerful institution unload on faltering prez”.

In an undeferential and confrontational press conference, the retired generals flinched and fumed as they took more than a few salvos themselves.

The only detailed report I found was in Pakistan’s The News.

In an article entitled Retired Generals Refuse to Apologize, But Want Musharraf to Go, reporter Umar Cheema highlighted the hypocrisy of these newly-minted champions of Pakistan’s constitution and democracy.

ISLAMABAD: Several hundred retired armed forces men on Thursday urged their colleague, General (retd) Pervez Musharraf, to hand over power to the deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and join their ranks but most of their leaders refused to apologise for their past roles against democracy....

Except for retired Lt-Gen Hamid Gul, none of the leaders showed moral courage by making an admission of guilt or apologising to the nation for their past. They did not even feel any embarrassment on their roles when asked by newsmen at a press conference.

...the other architects and supporters of martial law who were sitting on the stage...included retired Lt-Gen Faiz Ali Chishti, Gen Mirza Aslam Beg, Air Marshal Asghar Khan, Lt-Gen Majid Malik and Lt-Gen Asad Durrani. They showed no remorse for their past conduct.

Air Marshal Asghar Khan, who awas presiding over the meeting, was annoyed when he was asked about his past role and whether he was ready to apologise. “These were individual acts of different individuals,” he responded.

He did not respond when a journalist questioned their moral authority to preach others when they did not feel embarrassed on the wrongdoings of their past.
...
The Thursday’s meeting virtually turned into a comedy programme as it was marred by indiscipline largely by ex-servicemen, who would pick up quarrel with journalists when questions regarding their own accountability were put to the Chair Asghar Khan...

Khan, however, remained uncomfortable while facing critical journalists with his colleagues sitting in the hall, yelling ‘planted question’ whenever a query about their accountability was put to him.

...He refused to take questions on self-accountability and was pressed time and again that he himself was among the strong supporters of General Zia’s martial law and the person sitting next to him, Lt-Gen (retd) Faiz Ali Chishti, was Commander 10 Corps when Zia had taken over and later collaborated with him in all his acts.

Questioners also mentioned Gen (retd) Beg under whose stint as Army chief the Mehran Bank scandal took place and the then president had nominated his successor three months before Beg’s retirement as a pre-emptive measure keeping in view his political ambitions.

But neither Asghar Khan showed the grace to admit any wrongdoing nor did Chishti and Beg.

All hail Umar Cheema. His acrid report on this acrimonious meeting provides the clearest picture possible both of the sagging fortunes of Musharraf and the declining prestige of the army, at least among the educated civilian class.

With the expiration of Benazir Bhutto’s mourning period, Pakistan’s parliamentary election campaign is heating up. Hopefully, we’ll see more reporting like this.

The illustration of the four generals who have ruled Pakistan for 33 years of its short history—Yahya Khan, Ayub Khan, Zia ul Haq, and Pervez Musharraf—is from a website called Understanding Pakistan Project. In a thoughtful analysis entitled A History of Failure exploring why, in every iteration, the army has shown itself no better than the civilians at sorting out the mess in Pakistan’s politics, the author, Althar Osama states:

If military dictatorship was to be the best thing that ever happened to Pakistan since sliced bread, it would have worked by now.

Musharraf Faces Dwindling Options

Musharraf’s window for a graceful exit seems to be closing fast.

For the time being, at least, the attempt to lure Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N into a pre-election government of national unity has failed .

Perhaps the Sharif brothers decided that accepting Musharraf’s offer would have been calamitous for their party’s credibility as an opposition force (for a taste of the indignation that the rumored deal aroused—and the phone numbers of what must be every PML-N bigwig, including Shahbaz Sharif’s in London—check out this post on the Pakistan democracy movement website Emergency Times).

Adding to Musharraf’s woes, McClatchy reports on a letter calling on him to step down, signed by about 100 retired officers:

The letter said the officers voiced "great concern and anguish" during discussions about the "prevailing conditions" in the country.

Some of the officers had signed statements against Musharraf before, but never in such numbers.

The group, calling itself the Pakistan Ex-Servicemen's Society, said in its statement that it had determined that Musharraf must act quickly.

"He should resign his office of the president. This is in the supreme national interest and makes it incumbent on him to step down," it said.

The letter incensed Musharraf, according to the Financial Times :

“They are insignificant personalities,” the president told the Financial Times in an interview on his arrival at the Davos World Economic Forum. “Most of them are ones who served under me and I kicked them out ... They are insignificant. I am not even bothered by them.”

One of the signatories was ex-ISI chief Hameed Gul, maestro of the Afghan muj uprising against the Soviets, one of the four parties Benazir Bhutto pre-emptively accused of possible complicity in her assassination and, in sum, certainly no handwringing liberal cupcake...or “insignificant personality”.

Gul had this to say about Musharraf in an interview with Islam Online :

"Now, he should sincerely think about the country and quit in a peaceful way.

"No one is ready to trust this man or talk to him. If he is not in the scene, things will automatically be in order peacefully."

Forecast: falling temperatures with a good chance of frost in the Rawalpindi officers club.

I think the only thing that could save Musharraf—or, at least, allow him to exit the presidency gracefully and without the cloud of impeachment and indictment over his head—is an internationally and domestically recognized hung parliament i.e. a parliament without a sizable majority openly opposed to his continued rule, in which Musharraf can assert his continued political relevance by orchestrating the bloc of votes controlled by the pro-government PML-Q.

The falling away of Musharraf’s possible allies of necessity and convenience—the PML-N and the military—are perhaps the best indication that the possibility of this outcome is increasingly and dangerously remote.

Imran Khan, leader of a small opposition party, upheld his reputation as the rare voice of honesty and objectivity in Pakistan’s politics, stating that the country—and the president--both need a way out of the Musharraf cul de sac:

Mr Khan, who was briefing the media on his meetings with US lawmakers and officials on Thursday, said after his dispute with the judiciary in March, President Musharraf had taken several unfortunate steps that had blocked all exit routes for him.

“And it will be good for him and for the country, if all the parties get together and find a way out for him,” said Mr Khan.

The army is probably warming to this conclusion, given the disquieting rumbles of a color-coded revolution against Musharraf, threatened by the PPP if it doesn't get the parliamentary seats it believes its electoral standing merits.

The army’s role—and stake—in Pakistan’s affairs are way bigger than Pervez Musharraf.

At this juncture the army might sacrifice Musharraf in order to permit the PML-N—which continues to display intransigent opposition to Musharraf’s presidency but is not talking about short-circuiting the political process with people power—to enter the government prior to the parliamentary elections and delay the poll while reconstituting a non-partisan electoral commission, thereby blunting the electoral challenge of the energized and assertive PPP.

Whatever plans the army has for confronting—or accommodating-- the challenge from the opposition parties and maintaining its hegemony, they are now less likely to include Musharraf.

Endgame for Pakistan?

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Pervez Musharraf’s survival may have been greatly exaggerated.

The same goes for the opposition alliance of Bhutto's PPP and Nawaz Sharif's PML-N.

Musharraf’s government reached out to Nawaz Sharif and his PML-N, hoping to pre-empt the electoral challenge of the PPP with a government of national unity.

Now it looks like Sharif, sensing an opportunity (and weakness), is going for the throat.

But the first victim has been the united front between the PPP and the PML-N, the result that the government was probably hoping for.

Sharif, as in the past, is demanding Musharraf’s resignation.

Now he’s demanding Musharraf’s resignation as a precondition for participating in the formation of the national unity government, and the constitution of a new electoral commission to diminish the threat of massive poll rigging by the government.

From Dawn:

“Musharraf must resign and the Senate chairman should form a consensus government after consulting all the political parties. The new set-up should reconstitute the Election Commission to be headed by Justice Rana Bhagwandas. This is the solution to 95 per cent of the ailments the country is suffering from,” he said.

Sharif would appear to have boxed himself into a corner with his demand that Musharraf go as a precondition for a government of national unity.

Well, maybe not.

Sharif’s display of principled intransigence might be the prelude to some serious and less than edifying wriggling, as well as the collapse of the rickety united front negotiated between Sharif and Benazir Bhutto and even more chaos, division, and acrimony than usual in Pakistan's politics.

Pakistan’s media is abuzz with rumors that Sharif’s brother, Shahbaz—the more conciliatory member of the political partnership-- is involved in negotiations with Musharraf through a mutually trusted and respected intermediary, Brigadier General (ret) Niaz to set up a unity government, including Musharraf.

And that would involve Nawaz Sharif stepping back from his very public and vehement insistence that Musharraf step down.

Apparently the Saudis are, as always, lending a hand:

Sources said the Musharraf camp was simultaneously working on two strategies to deal with Nawaz to bring him in line. First, Nawaz was being put under pressure from the old Arab friends, who had rescued him when he was jailed in the Attock Fort. After return of Nawaz to Pakistan, these Arab sources are in a better position to convince him to show the required flexibility towards Musharraf. On a parallel track, Musharraf is using Brig Niaz, for whom the Sharif brothers have a lot of respect and admiration because of his past favours to the family.

There’s a hint that some deal will come this week, when Musharraf will be in London on an official visit—and by a coincidence Shahbaz Sharif and Brig Gen Niaz will be there too!

Pakistan’s The News apparently has a pipeline to the Sharif camp, and is providing breathless updates on Shahbaz Sharif’s doings in London:

LONDON: PML-N President Mian Shahbaz Sharif has confirmed that during his meeting with the trusted friend of President Pervez Musharraf, Brig (retd) Niaz, shortly before his arrival in Britain, both had discussed “important political matters” of Pakistan, but no secret message was delivered to him from the presidency.

In an exclusive interview with The News after his arrival in London, Shahbaz said he had visited the residence of Brig Niaz...Explaining the nature of his meeting which triggered reports that perhaps once again Brig Niaz was out to bridge the gap between his common friends, the Sharif brothers and Musharraf, Shahbaz said he had visited his house to pay a courtesy call.

There’s also more than a hint from the Sharif camp that these negotiations have received the endorsement of the UK:

LAHORE: PML-N President Mian Shahbaz Sharif is expected to hold important negotiations with senior officials and representatives of Pakistani government in London, The News has learnt.PML-N says Shahbaz is in London for his medical checkup, but sources claim he is there for something more important.

It is learnt that British Foreign Secretary David Miliband is playing a pivotal role in brokering a dialogue between the PML-N and the government for finding some common ground before the general elections....

British premier Gordon Brown is set to be a part of the whole initiative. He, and his aide, David Miliband, are busy making this political rendezvous a success. Sources believe the political aides of Musharraf government would take part in this process. The sources said President Musharraf might also engage in the dialogue aimed at evolving consensus on a national government to allay the apprehensions of all stakeholders.

As for the United States:

The US has taken a back seat after facing open criticism in and outside Pakistan over its direct involvement in supporting specific political forces and has preferred not to engage itself directly in the reconciliatory process, leaving the task to its trusted ally in Europe, the UK.

It would be very interesting—and unlikely—that the United States would be backing a PML-N deal, given President Bush’s publicly voiced doubts back in December about Nawaz Sharif’s fitness to lead Pakistan:

The president spoke cautiously about Nawaz Sharif... "I don't know him well enough," Bush said. Sharif has good relations with Pakistan's religious parties and has raised doubts about his commitment to battling the Taliban and al-Qaida. "I would be very concerned if there was any leader in Pakistan that didn't understand the nature of the world in which we live today," Bush added.

Claims of indirect U.S. support and British enthusiasm are, I think, part wishful thinking and mostly psyops by the Musharraf and the PML-N, meant to finesse the issue of Western non-support of the PML-N by implying it’s not just the PPP that has a channel to the White House and Downing Street--and access to Western diplomatic, financial, and military aid.

Nawaz Sharif is an Islamic conservative hostile to U.S. policies for the region. His patron is Saudi Arabia, not the United States, as the passage above—describing the skid-greasing efforts of the Arab states on behalf of the Musharraf-PML-N deal—implies.

For that matter, America backing the PML-N is, to me, unthinkable. It would be an egregious betrayal of the PPP, which sacrificed its leader, Benazar Bhutto, in a futile attempt to advance America’s unpopular agenda for Pakistani politics.

To give the new unity government time to prepare for the elections, Sharif is willing to postpone the elections for a couple weeks.

This seemingly minor matter opens up a sizable fissure between the PML-N and its opposition associates (allies is now probably too strong a word), the PPP.

Delayed elections are anathema to the PPP, which has been pushing for prompt elections, paradoxically despite the widespread fears of poll-rigging that the PPP itself has energetically retailed to the international media.

As reported in Dawn, PPP number one Asif Ali Zardari is quite up front about his desire for early elections to capitalize on the sympathy vote.

And his pointed repudiation of Sharif’s position on delaying the elections indicates that the honeymoon of cooperation between the PPP and the PML-N is just about over.

SUKKUR, Jan 17: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari has said the demand for formation of a national government after the announcement of the election schedule is unjustified and against ground realities and the Constitution....“People’s sympathy for the PPP has risen after the death of Benazir Bhutto and they will vote for the party on February 18,” he said. He asked party leaders and workers to prepare for the polls so that no one could dare rig it.

A quick election under the auspices of Musharraf’s government means acquiescing to a possibly rigged election, or at least one that’s tainted by aspersions of illegitimacy.

But a delayed and legitimate poll might be even worse. A delay for any reason is probably good for Nawaz Sharif and his allies, as The News points out:

It is believed that any delay in the elections, whether a national government is formed or not, will help the PML-N and other parties to absorb the PPP sympathy wave. It is also significant that Nawaz Sharif is now talking about delaying the elections, under a new election commission, at least until his APDM partners, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Imran Khan and Mahmood Khan Achakzai, who have boycotted the polls, can make their way back into the process.

Zardari and the PPP are working to manage expectations with hypotheticals implying that the PPP might win 2/3 of the seats at issue.

There might be a titanic pro-Bhutto sympathy vote out there, but if it seems more likely to me that an honest poll, timely or not, will not return a PPP majority to parliament. A plurality—and a need to build a ruling coalition excluding the hated PML-Q and the Muslim parties that the US finds objectionable—is probably the best the PPP can hope for. That would involve dealing with Nawaz Sharif and a sizable PML-N presence in parliament.

A leaderless, diminished PPP would find itself in a difficult struggle for power with Nawaz Sharif, the only opposition leader with national stature and clout.

Under these circumstances, the PPP might consider a quick, rigged election preferable to the alternative.

Benazir Bhutto had spoken openly of resorting to the tactics of the color-coded revolution —the same approach that had elevated pro-US factions to power in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan--if the election didn’t go her way:

Bhutto has said her party will participate in the election even under imperfect circumstances. But she wants to retain the ability to challenge the vote's legitimacy if it returns Musharraf's party to power.

"We have always recognized that if elections are rigged, we must be in a position, like the people of Ukraine, to protest those elections," Bhutto said. "We reserve the right to boycott, at a later stage."

That would involve challenging the poll’s fairness with the help of sympathetic Western observers, invoking people power to paralyze the current government, and installing a new regime with the promise of Western support.

If the PPP’s plan for the political endgame includes taking advantage of electoral irregularities to launch a color-coded revolution, then a calculating willingness to participate in early elections under a corrupt regime is understandable.

Such a move would be very risky--and extremely unpopular with the Pakistani military. A people power coup would be a rebuke to the army’s treasured role of political kingmaker; it’s also the kind of political division and turmoil within Pakistan’s secular society that, in my opinion, is the last thing that nation needs as it bleeds daily from suicide attacks by extremists.

Whether the PPP is simply jockeying for political advantage or willing to ignite a mass movement, it looks like its key advantage is early elections—and its key foe is perhaps not Pervez Musharraf but Nawaz Sharif.

Sharif’s willingness to break with the PPP on the issue of election timing implies that he is sure enough of his position to burn that particular bridge to his ally of convenience in the opposition.

Zardari, trying to blunt the impact of the news that the PML-N was inching toward an accommodation with Musharraf and the army, came up with a claim conveyed to the press by the usual “well-informed sources” that I find ludicrous:

ISLAMABAD: PPP Co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari has been indirectly offered to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan for a one-year interim period, heading a government of national reconciliation, but he has summarily dismissed the suggestion.

Well-informed sources have confided that some people close to the establishment approached Zardari recently and suggested that elections could be delayed for one year and a broad-based national government formed as it was the urgent need of the hour, if he agreed to become the prime minister.

PPP co-chairman was not ready to listen to anything about further delay in the elections. He snubbed the messengers and made it clear that he was not interested in any government office for the next five years and he would only look after his party.

Party insiders said he had gained more respect from his close colleagues after turning down the proposal.

Hmmm.

In a more practical and less risible vein, Zardari pointedly promised to carry the PPP’s electoral campaign into Nawaz Sharif’s home turf of Punjab and try to recruit the local elite to the PPP banner (I assume the rather opaque references to "confidence-building measures" is an implied promise that feasting at the public trough will not be a Sindh-only affair in a PPP administration):

[Zardari] is also planning to make Lahore as his future party headquarters because he got a lot of positive response from the Punjab after his first press conference in which he made it clear the PPP would continue the politics of federation. He will soon give some responsibilities to important leaders from the Punjab, including Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan, after consulting the Central Executive Committee.

Zardari is confident that the people of the Punjab will play the same role in the upcoming elections which they had played in 1970 when the PPP emerged as the single largest party in the West Pakistan with the help of the people of the Punjab. He is sure that if the establishment tolerates the majority of the PPP in the Punjab, then he will be in a position to take more confidence-building measures with regard to the powers that matter.

So, game on! between the PPP and the PML-N.

I think we can say that the alliance of convenience established by Bhutto and Sharif last year is finished and things might get pretty ugly on the hustings.

As an alternative to going toe-to-toe with the PPP on February 18 in an acrimonious, illegitimate, and destabilizing electoral dogfight, Sharif might be hoping that the army will respond to his demand by abandoning Musharraf and enabling formation of a national unity government under the PML-N's aegis that would send Sharif's party into the polls with considerable political momentum.

Indeed, according to McClatchy, the army chief of staff is cutting some overt ties between the military and Musharraf’s government.

Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was named to the top military job in late November, took two steps this week. First, he barred all senior military officers from meeting directly with Musharraf without prior approval and prohibited officers from having any direct involvement in politics. Second, he recalled many army officers from civilian job assignments.

So Kiyani could be hanging Musharraf out to dry.

Alternately, however, Kiyani could simply be making cosmetic adjustments as a sop to popular opinion, while the serious work of political manipulation is left to the army intelligence services.

And, with the two main opposition parties clearly bickering among themselves (thanks in no little part to the judiciously spread rumors concerning a government/PML-N deal that excludes the PPP) and the prospect for a political stalemate increasing , pressures to throw Musharraf to the wolves are probably decreasing.

There’s a second scenario that might explain Sharif’s ostentatious aggressiveness. He might simply be playing a game in collusion with Musharraf that could go like this:

• 
  Sharif refuses to enter the government while Musharraf stays in;
• 
  Musharraf doesn’t budge, calls for a unity government go nowhere, the PML-N stays out of the government, and Sharif retains his credibility as an opposition leader;
• 
  delayed elections—and/or some more subtle than usual vote rigging--benefits the PML-N at the PPP’s expense;
• 
  the parliamentary election anoints Sharif and not Zardari as the power broker in the new government;
• 
  the Sharif brothers run the political show with the army’s endorsement;
• 
  here’s a second, more dispassionate look at the outrages Musharraf perpetrated on the judiciary and the constitution in order win his second term;
• 
  things are put right in a non-vindictive spirit of national reconciliation;
• 
  to everyone’s relief—including his own—Musharraf slides safely into retirement;
• 
  and Sharif is left alone on top of the heap.

Is there a Deal 2.0 in the works between Musharraf and the opposition, this time with the PML-N standing in for the PPP?

We might know as soon as next week, after Musharraf completes his visit to the U.K.

Did We Just Lose Pakistan...To Nawaz Sharif and Saudi Arabia?

With Pakistan in the middle of a burgeoning security and political crisis, the report from Islamabad is that Musharraf has finally turned to the opposition to provide his government with stability...and his nation with unity.

But he’s not turning to Benazir Bhutto’s PPP, the supposedly empowering force that the United States has been promoting as the solution to Pakistan’s problems.

He’s turning to the PML-N and Nawaz Sharif, who enjoy the backing of the conservative Islamic government of Saudi Arabia, as I reported in Nawaz Sharif: Saudi Arabia’s Plan B for Pakistan? back in November.

That’s going to cause some heartburn and late nights at Condoleezza Rice’s shop, as well as a round of gormless headscratching by the U.S. papers, who have had a hard time looking beyond the U.S. script—and the PPP.

Dawn, Pakistan’s most authoritative media outlet, reports:

Shahbaz ‘asked to join national govt’

By Amir Wasim

ISLAMABAD, Jan 12: Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) head Shahbaz Sharif dashed to Islamabad on Saturday and returned to Lahore in the evening after holding separate meetings with an aide of President Pervez Musharraf, the Saudi ambassador and a former bureaucrat, sources told Dawn.

The sources said the PML-N president had met Brig (retd) Niaz Ahmad, who passed a message from President Musharraf on to Mr Sharif about the formation of a national government before the general election.Sources in the PML-N said the president had suggested Shahbaz Sharif to become a part of the proposed government. The sources said the president had also proposed a “future role” for Shahbaz Sharif after the elections.

However, they added, Mr Shahbaz had told Mr Niaz that he would not reply to the proposals without consulting Nawaz Sharif....

They said Niaz Ahmad had requested the Sharif brothers to “soften the language” against the president at their public meetings.

Brig (retd) Niaz, a former instructor to President Musharraf, has been negotiating with the PML-N and the PPP leaders for the past several years and had held several meeting with the Sharif brothers in London and Saudi Arabia.

In the past, the PML-N had denied such contacts, but on Saturday a group of reporters caught Mr Sharif outside the Embassy Road residence of the retired brigadier when he was leaving the place after the meeting.

Talking to reporters, the PML-N president said his meeting with Brig Niaz should not be construed as a ‘political move’. He said he had come only to pay a “courtesy call”....Earlier, a senior PML-N leader, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, ruled out at a press conference the possibility of his party becoming a part of a national government under President Musharraf, indicating that the party had officially received “some sort of a proposal along this line”.

...SAUDI AMBASSADOR: Shahbaz Sharif also met the Saudi ambassador in Islamabad, Ali Awadhi Al Asseri, and a former director-general of the Federal Investigation Agency, Wajahat Latif.Party sources said Mr Sharif had met the ambassador to thank him for the hospitality extended to the Sharif family during its stay in Saudi Arabia.

About his meeting with Wajahat Latif, the PML-N leader said that he had come to meet him “only to offer my good wishes”.[emph. added]

Did you notice that the Saudi ambassador was participated in this supersensitive high level meeting? Didja?

It remains to be seen if Sharif responds to Musharraf’s initiative.

It will be hard because Sharif genuinely hates Musharraf—who deposed him—and Sharif has been sedulously cultivating his opposition cred by roasting Musharraf at every opportunity and demanding he step down.

Musharraf is plainly trying to co-opt Sharif. And I hope he does.

Because Pakistan needs to ameliorate its political crisis if it is to confront its security crisis. And until recently the exact opposite was happening.

When Islamist extremists attacked, the opposition used it as a stick to beat Musharraf with, thundering that he couldn’t provide security for the country. And, I believe, Islamist militants saw this and determined that now was an opportune time to further divide and damage Pakistan’s secular society with further attacks.

For Pakistan’s political elite inside and outside the government, the turning point might have been the horrific suicide bombing at the Lahore High Court on January 10.

It apparently targeted policemen assembling in preparation for a protest march by local lawyers, killing over 20.

From Dawn:

Aftab Cheema, SSP Operations, said the bomber had a 14-kg explosive device, with three kilograms of ball bearings, strapped to his body. He said the size of the ball bearings was larger than the ones used in earlier blasts.’’A man rammed into our ranks and soon after there was a huge explosion,” said policeman Syed Imtiaz Hussain, who suffered wounds in his legs and groin.

“I saw the bodies of other policemen burning. It was like hell.’’
...
“I saw about 50 to 60 injured policemen, bleeding, scattered everywhere. They were asking for water.”

They found the bomber’s head 100 feet away.

Noted South Asia watcher Syed Saleem Shahzad reported on a chain of events that indicates to me that Pakistan’s elites has decided that the political paralysis incurred by trying to please the United States, give lip service to its unpopular and wrongheaded policies, and coddle its leaderless client, the PPP—and the growing security crisis feeding off it--is no longer acceptable.

In a recent report in Asia Times subtitled Washington May Lose a Friend, he wrote:

...there is serious consideration for repositioning the country’s foreign policy as neutral in the United States-led “war on terror”.

This would mean non-interference in the restive tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. These are virtually autonomous areas where Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants have established bases and vital supply lines into Afghanistan. Such a move would have devastating effects on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) efforts to control the ever-growing insurgency in Afghanistan.

Following a meeting of the Pakistan corps commanders headed by the new chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, a press release said there would be a review of the situation in the tribal areas and, instead of citing any plans for military operations there against militants, the release said the military’s decisions would be based on “the wishes of the nation”. Islamabad’s rethink has been prompted by the violence and political crisis resulting from the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi last month. [emph. added]

Ishfaq Kiyani is of course, the purportedly pro-Western army boss who was floated as potential coup material by Western neo-conservatives because he was expected to walk hand in hand with Benazir Bhutto through a post-Musharraf field of sunshine and buttercups to smite the Islamist extremists permeating Pakistan’s borderlands.

Guess not.

It seems that the army has decided the ongoing political drift—with Musharraf floundering in the polls with favorability ratings in the 20s and serving as a pinata for the PPP and PML-N as a result of his colossal political ineptitude while the country burns--is unacceptable.

The army’s solution, however, is not to wait for the elections and allow the PPP, emboldened by U.S. support, to claim a mandate to govern and threaten to exacerbate the security crisis by promoting aggressive anti-Islamist, anti-Taleban, and anti-al Qaeda border policies that are anathema to the army, the intelligence services, and the country as a whole.

Instead, in a deal supported by the Saudis and brokered by the army, Musharraf pre-emptively proposes an alliance with Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, a group that is both reasonably popular to the electorate and acceptable to the conservative and increasingly anti-American elite.

In sum: for the time being, Mush doesn’t go.

At least, he’s not going to get pushed out by the PPP alone, and the government has decided to make its move to prevent a genuine alliance between the PPP and PML-N, which could cause serious problems.

It doesn’t hurt that Musharraf has been sounding downright reasonable:

"If that (impeachment) happens, let me assure that I'd be leaving office before they would do anything. If they won with this kind of majority and they formed a government that had the intention of doing this, I wouldn't like to stick around," he said. "I would like to quit the scene."

He’s talking about what would happen in the (unlikely) event that the two opposition parties—Bhutto’s PPP and Sharif’s PML-N—were able to win enough seats in the parliamentary elections to a) form a government and b) amend the constitution without the input of the pro-government PML-Q party.

Of course, that scenario isn’t likely if the PML-N enters the government.

If Nawaz Sharif takes up Musharraf on his offer, it’s the U.S. that is left holding the short end of the stick, of course.

And opinion in Pakistan probably feels that Washington’s embarrassment is richly deserved.

Cheney’s people recently tried to exploit the unrest inside Pakistan to float an irresponsible plan to conduct expanded military operations under CIA direction in Pakistan’s frontierlands.

The Democratic presidential candidates, not to be outdone and led by Hillary Clinton, had an attack of stupids, proposing various ways to inject ourselves further into Pakistan’s security regime in order to protect the world against Pakistan’s nukes.

Clinton’s plan was convincingly debunked by Jeffrey Lewis over at Arms Control Wonk.

Inside Pakistan, of course, these U.S. initiatives caused a firestorm.

Musharraf, undoubtedly with a hearty amen or whatever the Islamic equivalent is from his countrymen, told the U.S.to bug out:

“The United States seems to think that what our army cannot do, they can do, this is a very wrong perception,” he said.“I challenge anybody to come into our mountains. They would regret that day. It’s not easy there.”

As for Hillary:

[Musharraf] also criticised US senator Hillary Clinton's proposal to place Pakistan's nuclear weapons under US and British supervision. According to Musharraf, Clinton's statement was "an intrusion into our privacy, into our sensitivity... She doesn't seem to understand how well-guarded these assets are."

Saleem Shahzad provides a pretty clear idea of the implications of the shift toward a more nuanced and conciliatory Pakistani security policy that puts Islamabad on Washington’s bad side.

Should Pakistan scale down or halt its operations in the tribal areas, where it has thousands of troops, the US might be forced to act. Reports have been swirling for some time of US plans to undertake aggressive covert operations inside Pakistan.

Despite ominous grunts from the Dick Cheney quadrant, it looks like Pakistan might not care anymore what we think: (Saleem Shahzad, again):

[Ex ISI chief] Durrani, who regularly attends international sessions of British and American policy think tanks, said Pakistan’s military operations in the tribal areas as part of the “war on terror” had resulted in problems in Pakistani cities.

When asked about the corps commanders’ conference and the possibility of peace dialogue between the tribals and the government instead of military operations, Durrani said, “I don’t know about the exact agenda of the conference, but you can’t tell me of any disagreement anywhere in the country that Pakistan should shun military operations and initiate dialogue.”

Durrani, who participated in the joint Pakistan-Afghanistan peace efforts in the Pakistani city of Peshawar last year, continued, “Nobody is in favor of operations, not even those who are actually doing the operations. Even people from [the port city of] Karachi, who are considered ultra-liberal [are against operations] and on the Lal Masjid [Red Mosque] operation, I found them calling it irrational.” Durrani was referring to security forces storming the radical mosque in Islamabad last year to root out militants.

It looks like Pakistan’s army, with pressing problems of its own that we seem incapable of understanding or acknowledging, sees no obstacle to distancing themselves from a failed American doctrine and lame-duck administration that they never really cared for

And when an ex-ISI chief who is the smiling face of professional Pakistani security policy on the Western think tank circuit goes on the record to make statements like that, I think that’s the fat lady singing. It’s over for the Bush administration in Pakistan.

And that would mean bad news for the PPP, which can no longer count on Musharraf’s government yielding to U.S. pressure in the matters of eschewing egregious voterigging against the PPP, tolerating PPP posturing and street demonstrations to gain additional political leverage, or accommodating a leading role for the PPP in the post-election government.

If Musharraf bags the PML-N, the government will feel free to drop the hammer on the PPP; and it's already doing plenty, starting with mass detentions of PPP activists in Sindh and illegally parachuting its bespoke hacks into key constituencies, presumably to conduct electoral skullduggery.

I came across a particularly egregious piece of ISI pushback against the PPP--and the US--in the Pakistan News, via Antiwar.com (since I’m quoting at length I’ve highlighted the really striking parts):

The US embassy in Islamabad has termed the reports connecting Washington to an international conspiracy behind Benazir Bhutto’s assassination “completely outrageous and unfounded” amid fresh revelations that the slain leader had established indirect contacts with Dr AQ Khan and Lt-Gen (retd) Hamid Gul shortly before her death. ...

Ms Colton [of the U.S. embassy] was asked to comment on the growing perception in Pakistan that Ms Bhutto’s killing was part of an international conspiracy to which the US was said to be a leading part with the grand design of destabilising and denuclearising Pakistan.

When asked if Washington had “pressurised” Ms Bhutto to strike a deal with President Musharraf, a fact that has been confirmed by sources in her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and also a top presidential aide, Colton said, “our consistent interest is to see Pakistan succeed as a moderate, democratic country, led by the choice of the Pakistani people. We do not endorse particular candidates or parties. We are ready to work with whomever the Pakistani people choose to lead them.”
...
While the US embassy completely distanced itself from the growing perception in Pakistan that Islamabad was facing a serious international conspiracy to denuclearise Pakistan, a source having close relations with the slain chairperson of the PPP told this correspondent that Ms Bhutto had been punished for changing the script of the international conspirators as she wanted to save Pakistan from any damage.

Well, it looks like America has a “growing problem” in Pakistan.

This is a pretty crude piece of nationalistic anti-American agitprop and I’m amazed the embassy responded.

It gets better:

The source, while referring to his meeting with Benazir shortly before her death, revealed that after her return to Pakistan ending her nine-year exile she had changed her policy and started distancing herself from what some leading world capitals wanted her to pursue.

Not only that she had developed indirect contacts with the likes of Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan as reported already to pursue a peaceful negotiated settlement of extremism instead of using force or letting any foreign country intervene, and also sent separate messages to both Dr AQ Khan and Hamid Gul.

The source also shared the names of two of the messengers but requested not to make these public. He said Gul, who was one of the four persons nominated by Ms Bhutto in her October 2007 letter sent to the president in case she was killed, was conveyed that Ms Bhutto was under pressure to include the former ISI chief’s name in the list.

Similarly, Dr AQ Khan, the source claimed, was conveyed to forget about her earlier statement that when in power she would give the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, who is under house arrest for more than four years.

Although, Dr AQ Khan or any of his immediate relation was not accessible to media persons to confirm such an indirect contact, the source said Benazir got back a message from the scientist, who was quoted to have said, “I consider you more than a daughter.”

Gul confirmed that he received Benazir’s message from two different sources associated with the PPP. He said he was told that Benazir did not want to include his name in the list of four, who were after her life.

The last message that he received, Gul disclosed, was delivered to him on December 24, three days before the assassination of Ms Bhutto. “The messenger told me that Benazir stated that Gen Sahib (Gul) would know what pressures she was referring to,” Gul said.

He said according to his information, Ms Bhutto had changed the script of the influential world capitals and for this very crime, she was assassinated.

The former ISI chief, while offering himself for testimony before an independent commission comprising respected retired Supreme Court judges, said he had the conviction that Ms Bhutto was made a scapegoat by the international players conspiring against Pakistan.

Saying that Benazir’s killing was done in an extremely sophisticated and professional manner, he stated that to his reckoning it was a Mossad operation. He said knowing well that a popular leader like Ms Bhutto could not get along with Musharraf in the government, the international powers pressurised both sides to strike a deal.

“It was nothing less than a dream theme but still done to assassinate Ms Bhutto to cause destabilisation in Pakistan.”

Referring to the statements of the US presidential candidates and the latest utterance of ElBaradei, the IAEA chief, Gul said all this was being done under the greater design against Pakistan’s nuclear programme.

This certainly wins points for chutzpah.

Especially the part where Gul, the ex-ISI chief, while claiming that Bhutto was reaching out to him, labors to explain away the fact that Bhutto named him as one of her four most likely assassins in a letter she wrote last year.

Looking for electoral traction, the Musharraf government is trying to wrap itself in the mantle of protector of Pakistan’s sovereignty, its nuclear deterrent, and for good measure, A.Q. Khan.

More than that, it’s trying to blunt the PPP’s appeal by appropriating Bhutto’s legacy, claiming she was abandoning the Bush administration and detaching herself from the confrontational policies demanded by Washington in favor of...the same nationalist rhetoric vis a vis the U.S. and conciliatory policies vis a vis A.Q. Khan and Islamists that the Musharraf government plans to carry out with the PML-N...and died as a direct result!

Gul’s over-the-top allegation that the Mossad did the hit on Bhutto, I think identifies this whole article as bona fide, brazenly ham-fisted ISI “everything including the kitchen sink and we can get away with anything” creative writing product.

The ironic thing is that I think in her relentlessly chameleonlike way, Bhutto probably did all those things.

With power almost in her grasp, she intended to neglect her promise to confront the non-democratic, extremist, and anti-secular forces inside Pakistan that she had made so fulsomely to Washington, and instead was preparing to make peace with them.

Instead, after her death, her daring stratagems, fine calculations, and equivocal actions—and the unrealistic hopes of the United States—may come to naught and ironically be appropriated as the preferred tactics of our successful competitors—Nawaz Sharif and Saudi Arabia.

We’ll soon know if the Musharraf—PML-N alliance bears fruit--and if the Bush administration has fumbled Pakistan out of our sphere of influence and into Saudi Arabia's.