by David Steven | Oct 22, 2007 | South Asia
How many other developing country opposition leaders can take to the FT when they need to rally support?
I did not come this far in life to be intimidated by suicide bombers. There is a battle raging in Pakistan for the hearts and minds of a new generation. It is a battle for the future of Pakistan as a democratic nation.
The new generation will choose moderation or extremism; it will choose education or illiteracy; it will choose dictatorship or democracy; it will choose tolerance or bigotry; and it will choose peace or war. I returned to Pakistan this week to lead the fight for democracy. With the blood of my supporters on the streets and on our clothes, I reaffirm my commitment to these values.
by Alex Evans | Oct 22, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
Amid the blizzard of coverage following the bombing on Benazir Bhutto’s convoy in Karachi last week, two pieces that are worth a look:
First, for a big picture view of worries in the Beltway about Pakistan, see this excellent news analysis article from yesterday’s New York Times. While David Sanger and David Rohde found the usual expressions of confidence in Musharraf from White House officials, other “current and former officials” warned that US leverage over Pakistan is now limited – and Musharraf himself weakened, following failed attempts at conciliation in tribal areas, ineffectual military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda
Almost every major terror attack since 9/11 has been traced back to Pakistani territory, leading many who work in intelligence to believe that Pakistan, not Iraq, is the place Mr. Bush should consider the “central front” in the battle against terrorism. It was also the source of the greatest leakage of nuclear arms technology in modern times.
After years of compromises and trade-offs, there are questions inside and outside the administration about whether Mr. Bush has invested too heavily in a single Pakistani leader, an over-reliance that may have prevented the United States from examining other long-term strategies. “It never stitched together,” said Daniel Markey, a State Department official who dealt with Pakistan until he left government earlier this year. “At every step, there was more risk aversion — because of the risk of rocking the boat seemed so high — than there was a real strategic vision.”
[snip]
“We have to remember that the U.S. doesn’t have very much capability to affect internal developments” in Pakistan, said Robert D. Blackwill, the former American ambassador to India and a senior official in the National Security Council during Mr. Bush’s first term.
“What I am struck by are the trends we see today: the North-West Province is ungovernable and a sanctuary for terrorists,” he said. “The politics are fractured and deeply unstable, Musharraf is weaker, and the army is uncertain which way it will go.”
Second, see this Sunday Times article by Christina Lamb, who was on Bhutto’s bus when the bomb went off (she knows Bhutto and various of her aides from way back when, and they invited her on board for the procession after spotting her in the crowd of journos at the airport). Her account of the bomb blast is predictably harrowing, but what’s especially noteworth here is her access to Bhutto’s team, and Bhutto herself, both before and immediately after the blast. For instance:
…this was a US-brokered deal that had involved frequent meetings with Richard Boucher, the US assistant secretary of state for south and central Asia, as well as 2am phone calls from Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, to break deadlocks.
Britain had also played its part, and Jack Straw was credited with bringing Bhutto in from the cold when he was foreign secretary.
“As long as Washington and Whitehall are wedded to keeping Musharraf in power for their war on terror, she had no choice but to come back like this,” said [Bhutto’s security adviser] Malik, who led the negotiations on her side.
by David Steven | Oct 19, 2007 | North America, South Asia
130 people reported dead in Pakistan and Scrappleface – the right-wing answer to the Onion – sees an opportunity to use its wit to settle some political scores. Nice.
As the death toll climbed past 130, with nearly 400 injured, in a suicide-bomb assassination attempt on former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi condemned the attack as “symptomatic of fundamentalist Islam’s crusade against equality for women.”
Rep. Pelosi, D-CA, said the fact that a prominent female politician was targeted has shaken her thinking about the war on terror.
“This misogynistic massacre has finally got it through my thick skull what President Bush has been trying to tell us for years,” she said. “These terrorists have no legitimate political grievance, no conscience, and no place in civilized society. We must crush them wherever they are to prevent the spread of their poisonous ideology and brutal tactics.”
Rep. Pelosi said that when news of the attack broke, she held a conference call with Senators Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and Barbara Boxer, D-CA. The three women agreed that “if these evil men are willing to attack a beautiful, charismatic female politician overseas, there’s not much to stop them from trying it on U.S. soil.”
The three lawmakers plan to introduce legislation next week to increase funding for the surge in Iraq, to finish the fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, and to remove barriers to eavesdropping by U.S. spies on suspected terrorist communications at home and abroad.
“These woman-haters need to know that we mean business,” Rep. Pelosi said. “And to those who commit these atrocities against women, I say, we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer negotiate, and we will no longer be afraid. It’s your turn to be afraid.“
by Alex Evans | Oct 3, 2007 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
William Lind is back from his summer holidays:
If [the downward spiral of events in Europe before the First World War] reminds us of the Middle East today, it should. There too we see a series of crises, each holding the potential of kicking off a much larger war. There are almost too many to list: the war in Iraq, the U.S. versus Iran, Israel vs. Syria, the U.S. vs. Syria, Syria vs. Lebanon, Turkey vs. Kurdistan, the war in Afghanistan, the de-stabilization of Pakistan, Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the permanent crisis of Israel vs. the Palestinians. Each is a tick of the bomb, bringing us closer and closer to the explosion no one wants, no one outside the neo-con cabal and Likud, anyway.
A basic rule of history is that the inevitable eventually happens. If you keep on smoking in the powder magazine, you will at some point blow it up. No one can predict the specific event or its timing, but everyone can see the trend and where it is leading.
In the Middle East today, as in Europe in the decade before World War I, the desperate need is for a country or a leader to reverse the trend. Then, the two European leaders most opposed to war, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, were able to do little more than drag their feet, trying to slow the train of events down. That was not enough, and it will not be enough today in the Middle East either.
Where do we see a leader who can turn aside the march toward war? Not in the Middle East itself, nor among American Presidential candidates, only two of whom, Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, represent a real change of direction. Not in Europe, whose heads of government are terrified of breaking with the Americans. Not in Moscow or Beijing, both of which are happy to see America digging its own grave. No matter where we look, the horizon is empty.
by David Steven | Sep 18, 2007 | Conflict and security, Global system, Influence and networks, North America
Over at Foreign Policy, there’s an interesting debate about Pakistan’s army. Sameer Lalwani, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation (and a democracy promotion sceptic) kicks it off with a love letter to President Musharraf and the military:
Despite all the talk of elections and civilian rule, meaningful democracy will not emerge in Pakistan anytime soon, nor will the military abandon its grip on government. Pakistan’s military possesses much greater staying power than most U.S. analysts assume, and it will remain the most potent and important political institution in the country for the foreseeable future.
Lawlani disses Pakistan’s democratic pretenders, Nawaz Sharif (on whose abortive return from exile we blogged from Pakistan last week) and Benazir Bhutto (still manoeuvring towards a deal with Musharraf that could leave him President, her Prime Minister):
Far from building democratic institutions, their governments—bereft of competence and riddled with corruption—consistently undermined them. Bhutto was run out of the country for skimming millions off the top of government contracts; Sharif orchestrated the storming of the Supreme Court by street thugs as he was being tried for contempt. In an effort to efface their legacies, both former prime ministers are hoping to duck the legal charges that await them upon their return.
Lalawani’s piece has provoked an angry response from Benazir’s party – the PPP (the letter comes via their US public relations company):
True that democracy has been weak in Pakistan, largely because it has never been allowed to flourish in the country. The answer lies not in dictatorship but in more democracy. Every democratically elected official has been overthrown by the military, not out of the army’s sense of loyalty to the state, as Mr. Lalwani suggests, but because of the army’s thirst for power… The military regime has destroyed the very fabric of society for its political survival.
(more…)
