Crackup In Pakistan
by dday
The Vice President gave a speech to NATO this week, basically urging the membership to get involved in Afghanistan. I don’t think it will be very successful. Though he may be right that there is a shared national security interest to deny a regional safe haven for extremists. The problem, of course, is that there already is one, in Pakistan and in the FATA areas. Pakistan is currently in the throes of a political crisis, that would cause instability and allow extremist forces to operate more freely. The fear is not that the Taliban takes over Pakistan, but that the political wrangling between Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif will leave the leadership completely up for grabs. Here’s some background.
A conflict developed between Nawaz Sharif and PPP leader Asaf Ali Zardari over the deposed chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhury. Dictator Musharraf had dismissed Chaudhury in spring of 2007 for opposing some of his policies. Pakistan’s massive legal establishment began holding rallies and demanding that the chief justice be reinstated, which he was in summer 2007. Musharraf was under pressure from Washington to become a civilian president. But he found out that fall that the supreme court would not allow this transition because the constitution requires that a military man have been out of the service for 2 years before becoming president. So Musharraf just dismissed the whole supreme court, including the recently reinstated Chaudhury, and appointed a new court, which sycophantically recognized him as president.
When he was allowed to come back to Pakistan from exile in Saudi Arabia, Nawaz Sharif, who had been overthrown as prime minister in 1999 by Musharraf, began demanding that Iftikhar Chaudhury and the old, dismissed, supreme court be reinstated.
After the PPP won the parliamentary elections, its leader, Zardari, declined to reinstate Chaudhury. Zardari was afraid that the chief justice might reinstate the corruption charges against him, which had been amnestied by Musharraf […]
But just last week, the supreme court dismissed Shahbaz Sharif as chief minister of Punjab, and barred him and Nawaz Sharif from running for office. Some suspect the court of acting at President Zardari’s behest.
The Sharif brothers say that this court is anyway illegitimate and refuse to recognize its rulings, since it is the fruit of a poisoned tree, i.e. the arbitrary creature of a desperate military dictator 18 months ago.
The attorneys are also still angry over the failure of Zardari to reinstate Chaudhury and the others.
So on March 15, the Muslim League (which is more conservative landlord than religious fundamentalist, despite the name) is organizing a “long march” on parliament to protest the current supreme court and the recent decisions it issued against the Sharifs.
On the hustings, Nawaz Sharif said that the only thing that could save Pakistan now was a revolution, and announced that he had “raised the standard of rebellion.”
Today, the “long march” in Pakistan has begun.
Police in the Pakistani city of Karachi have used sticks to beat up protesters as lawyers and political activists began an anti-government protest march.
Organisers intend the four-day march from cities across Pakistan to culminate in a sit-in at the parliament in the capital, Islamabad, on Monday.
They want President Asif Ali Zardari to fulfil a pledge to reinstate all judges sacked under his predecessor.
The government says the march is aimed at destabilising the country.
Police say they have arrested more than 400 opposition activists in the past few days.
The authorities have also banned political gatherings across the country, saying they could trigger bloodshed.
Right now organizers are describing this as a peaceful march. And I believe them. But mass arrests and violence are not necessarily going to be met with calm. It’s just a very tense situation, and Zardari’s popularity is plummeting. Pervez Musharraf lost his job after fights with the same groups and attempts to crack down on the independent judiciary.
More in The New York Times. The government is saying that they’ve banned the protest march, but it continues. These are very nervous times in Pakistan. Banning the freedom to peaceably assemble is anti-democratic, and I don’t know how the lawyers can possibly achieve their goals without toppling the Zardari government. I fear chaos.
Pakistan is a young nation. These political struggles could easily break the country apart, with secession, a partition between areas, and perhaps a military coup to stop the factional fighting, with a return to dictatorship. And remember, this is a nuclear-armed state. It seems to me that Afghanistan is almost an afterthought compared to the dangers here.
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