Most Dangerous Trouble Spot In The World Update

The Vice President gave a speech to NATO yesterday, basically urging the membership to get involved in Afghanistan. I don't think it will be very successful, though he is 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 predominate, and leave the leadership up for grabs. It's basically an old-fashioned political squabble

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."

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.

It's not that Biden and the Administration aren't doing some things right in the region - they are realistically looking at folding certain Taliban elements into the state, which may or may not be successful but it at least inventive, and they are halting some raids, mindful of the deleterious effect of civilian casualties on the battle for hearts and minds.

But Pakistan is a far more dire situation, one that requires immediate attention.

Tragedies In Asia

These natural disasters in nearby nations in Asia continue to have worse and worse effects. In Burma the death toll has risen to over 125,000 and the fear is that aid is trickling in so slowly, thanks to the paranoid military government, that a "second wave" of deaths from disease and starvation is imminent. In China, earthquake victims continue to be found, the death toll is approaching 15,000, and Chinese troops are desperately attempting to fill a crack in a large dam that, if breached, would overwhelm yet another city.

Amazingly enough, the quietest disaster happening in Asia could be the most far-reaching, as the second most-powerful party in the Pakistani government, Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League, has vowed to quit the cabinet, which could lead to instability in the most dangerous trouble spot in the world. Sharif's issue is that the Pakistan People's Party has not yet moved to reinstate the judges fired by Pervez Musharraf, and that the ruling party is making poor use of their power. This could blow up in a hurry. And right now, it has to be on the back burner due to the mass loss of life to its north.

Color Me Surprised

Either we had a fair election in Pakistan, or Dictator Musharraf is so reviled that the results couldn't be countermanded:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistanis dealt a crushing defeat to President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections on Monday, in what government and opposition politicians said was a firm rejection of his policies since 2001 and those of his close ally, the United States.

Almost all the leading figures in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, the party that has governed for the last five years under Mr. Musharraf, lost their seats, including the leader of the party, the former speaker of Parliament and six ministers.

Official results are expected Tuesday, but early returns indicated that the vote would usher in a prime minister from one of the opposition parties, and opened the prospect of a Parliament that would move to undo many of Mr. Musharraf’s policies and that may even try to remove him [...]

The results were interpreted here as a repudiation of Mr. Musharraf as well as the Bush administration, which has staunchly backed Mr. Musharraf for more than six years as its best bet in the campaign against the Islamic militants in Pakistan. American officials will have little choice now but to seek alternative allies from among the new political forces emerging from the vote.

It's amazing how you impose martial law and remove the independent judiciary and all of a sudden people get their back up.

Based on unofficial results, the Pakistan Peoples Party (the party of the late Benazir Bhutto) would have 110 seats in the National Assembly (out of 272), the Pakistan Muslim League-N (the party of Nawaz Sharif) would have 100, and Musharraf's party (the Pakistan Muslim League-Q) would have just 20 or 30 seats. Turnout was low, as voters feared violence, but the violence was also mercifully low.

The question of course is whether or not the opposition parties will attempt to remove Musharraf, and if so what resistance they will get from the military, and how the Bush Administration will react. Of course, with Musharraf losing badly the Administration looks even sillier for hitching their wagons to his star. In fact, it was likely that the main effect of that hitching was this crushing electoral defeat. If Musharraf leaves the country, as appears possible, the possibility exists for a leader in Pakistan hostile to American interests. All because, as Joe Biden is fond of saying, we don't have a Pakistan policy, we have a Musharraf policy.

Meanwhile, the Islamist parties lost in the areas around the tribal region where the Taliban and Al Qaeda are prominent. This, of course, is probably because they don't need the validation of the vote to rule when they have the machine gun.

Still, this is quite hopeful, that a dictator was so fully rejected that he could not even hold back the challenge to his own power. Between this and Kosovo's independence being recognized by the US and other leading European countries, I'm almost hopeful about democracy.

A Couple Horrible South Asian Bombings You Should Know About

The looming Pakistani election (it'll start in a matter of hours) has provoked renewed violence, with 37 dead as a suicide bomber ran his car into a Pakistan People's Party (Bhutto's party) rally and blew himself up. This is part of the parallel conflicts in Pakistan; the Islamists hate the PPP, but the PPP's main rival is really Musharraf, who is desperate to hold on to power, even though we've deluded ourselves into thinking that Musharraf is going after the Islamists. It's extremely complicated.

Meanwhile, today saw the worst suicide bombing in Afghanistan since 2001:

A suicide bomber blew himself up in a large crowd gathered at a dogfighting festival just outside this city in southern Afghanistan, killing some 80 people and wounding nearly 100 more in the country’s worst single bombing since 2001.

According to witnesses and officials, the bomber killed a local police chief, Abdul Hakim Jan, a number of his guards and scores of villagers attending the event in the district of Argandab, just north of Kandahar city.

The governor of Kandahar, Asadullah Khaled, said the dead numbered 80 and the wounded over 90. A spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Kabul, Dr. Abdullah Fahim, said the Kandahar hospital had received 67 bodies. But some families had taken bodies straight home for burial from the scene of the blast, he said.

The Taliban is claiming that they didn't even do this, and the implications of that are staggering. Could there be other insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan with this kind of capacity.

Very sad.

Pakistan Update

The crisis in Pakistan has practically shut down the country. Internal unrest has resulted in upwards of 40 deaths, and the government appears to be closing ranks. They have rejected international help in the probe into Benazir Bhutto's assassination, instead going with their official story that her death was the work of Al Qaeda. They declined to do an autopsy on Bhutto's body, yet changed their story on how she died, from a gunshot wound to shrapnel to hitting her head on the sunroof of her vehicle. But on the scene reports tell a different story (including the fact that the police abandoned their posts protecting Bhutto shortly before the attack), new video images have resulted in even more questions:

The new images of the men who appear to have been Ms. Bhutto’s assassins showed one dressed in a sleeveless black waistcoat and rimless sunglasses, and holding aloft what appeared to be a gun. He had a short haircut and wore the kind of attire reminiscent of plainclothes intelligence officials, though Al Qaeda and other militants have also been known to dress attackers in Western-style clothing in order to disguise them.

That man is seen standing in front of another whose head is covered in a shawl in the style of Pashtun men from the Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Al Qaeda has regrouped in the past year. He is described in the newspaper Dawn as the suicide bomber.

Mr. Minallah, the hospital board member, said Ms. Bhutto’s doctors raised the likelihood of a bullet killing her in their report, when they wrote, “Two to three tiny radio-densities underneath fracture segment are observed on both projections.”

The report said the doctors tried for 41 minutes to revive her. It said “the patient was pulseless and was not breathing,” when she arrived at the hospital. “A wound was present on the right temporoparietal region, through which blood was trickling down and whitish material which looked like brain matter was visible in the wound,” it said.

Ms. Bhutto’s colleagues who were in the vehicle with her said the interior was covered in blood, and the doctors wrote that “her clothes were soaked with blood.”

I don't know how you get that bloodied by hitting a sunroof.

The questions of the circumstances of her death are mirrored by questions over the fate of Parliamentary elections. After initially calling for a boycott, opposition parties have vowed to contest them. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party will be led by Bhutto's husband and her Oxford-matriculating 19 year-old son, which sounds almost like a feudal line of succession. But the real question is when these elections will actually be scheduled.

Parliamentary elections seen as key to restoring democracy are set to be postponed for weeks in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Pakistani officials said Monday.

A senior government official said that he expected a six-week delay in the elections now slated for Jan. 8, despite calls from Bhutto's party, other opposition politicians and world leaders for the polls to be held on time. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the information.

Election Commission Secretary Kanwar Dilashad told reporters that a decision on the timing would be announced on Tuesday, but a recommendation "has been sent to the government for a delay." The opposition has accused the commission of favoring President Pervez Musharraf's backers.

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the country's most prominent opposition leader, threatened street protests if the vote was delayed.

"We will agitate," he told The Associated Press in an interview. "We will not accept this postponement."

Holding elections in a week during a time of turmoil is probably unsound, but there are larger questions here. Pakistan does not have an independent judiciary right now. It does not have a free media. Pervez Musharraf is hated within his own country and the suspicions of his complicity in Bhutto's death are growing. Juan Cole is right on here.

6. The US must keep the pressure on Pervez Musharraf to hold free and fair, early elections in Pakistan. The elections probably cannot be held on Jan. 8, as planned, because of the extensive turmoil and destruction of polling stations and ballots during the past few days. But they should not be postponed past March 1. Musharraf's own legitimacy has collapsed, and he is in danger of becoming a Shah of Iran figure, hated by his own people and driven from office. Such a scenario could be very bad for the United States. That is why Joe Biden is right and John McCain is wrong when the latter warns against dumping Musharraf. Why cannot the American Right learn that backing the wrong horse is often worse than not having a horse in the first place?

It's important that we don't posthumously laud Benazir Bhutto as the savior of her country. She stole billions from the Pakistani treasury when she was Prime Minister, and on her watch Pakistani links to the Taliban grew, and A.Q. Khan sold nuclear technology all over the world. And her family is still in control of this political party which is supposedly the last best hope for democracy.

Poor Pakistan. Poor People's Party supporters. Both deserve better than this disgusting, medieval charade.

Benazir's last decision was in the same autocratic mode as its predecessors, an approach that would cost her – tragically – her own life. Had she heeded the advice of some party leaders and not agreed to the Washington-brokered deal with Pervez Musharraf or, even later, decided to boycott his parliamentary election she might still have been alive. Her last gift to the country does not augur well for its future.

How can Western-backed politicians be taken seriously if they treat their party as a fiefdom and their supporters as serfs, while their courtiers abroad mouth sycophantic niceties concerning the young prince and his future.

That most of the PPP inner circle consists of spineless timeservers leading frustrated and melancholy lives is no excuse. All this could be transformed if inner-party democracy was implemented. There is a tiny layer of incorruptible and principled politicians inside the party, but they have been sidelined. Dynastic politics is a sign of weakness, not strength. Benazir was fond of comparing her family to the Kennedys, but chose to ignore that the Democratic Party, despite an addiction to big money, was not the instrument of any one family.

(Dynastic politics as a sign of weakness... Hmm, who were our last three Presidents, and who might be the next one...)

However, blind acceptance of a despot like Musharraf is certainly not the answer. Immediate reinstatement of the Supreme Court and a unity caretaker government to prepare for actual elections that are fair and free ought to be demanded, as well as a legitimate investigation into Bhutto's death. A Musharraf who is weakened or overthrown would have negative consequences for the region. We should probably stay the hell out of this and not try to install some other kingly figure without the consent of the Pakistani people. But the encouragement should be toward an end to despotism. If that happens with Musharraf or without ought to be of no consequence.