She doesn't have support from the people. Her history of corruption and ineffective governance make her a pretty poor candidate for popular liberal reform in Pakistan. You really should do more research into the current political circumstances in Pakistan, as it is a fairly complicated matter. From what I can tell, the population's poor education is a driving force behind the inability to reach internal consensus. Political affiliation is basically determined by various aspects of cultural identity (and not by rational choice), making it very difficult to find a leader with the qualities necessary to appeal to the nation as a whole. Very similar to Iraq's sectarian issues, but possibly even more complex. The issue of US-Pakistan relations has basically ruled out Obama as a candidate whom I would support. His hawkish comments regarding the Pakistan/Afghanistan border problems remind me way to much of Bush's way of doing things--shoot first, ask questions later.
You are saying Pakistan shouldn't have democracy? But what about India? Shouldn't India have the same problems? I agree Pakistan is messier because at least two thirds of Iraqis are Arabs, so they can identify with each other better. Well, basically all the major candidates are hawkish. Not sure this is a reflection of us or a reflection of how well the military industrial complex influenced our government. So, are you sitting out the election?
Could you explain what India has to do with the issue I raised? Also, I never said that Pakistan isn't deserving of Democracy. I'm just trying to convey the complexity of the situation, which suggests that Pakistan has a long way to go in many areas, like civic education, before it will be in position to implement a stable democracy. I refuse to accept the stupid and anti-democratic mantra that I have to vote for a "major candidate". If they were the only names on the ballot, there's a good chance I would sit out, or at least not vote in that particular election. I will not give even tacit approval to those who promote violence, and you shouldn't either. Oh, and in future responses, I would appreciate it if you would stop putting words in my mouth. Thanks.
Well, from what I know India also has many cultures and languages. The major difference between India and Pakistan seems to be religion. That's why I am asking that question. It does appear that India's government is more stable. I do know that India has a commie problem that can gradually cause big problem also... Sorry if it offended you. The statement "You are saying Pakistan shouldn't have democracy?" ends with a question mark, so I don't think I am trying to put words in your mouth but rather want to understand what you mean. Or is another sentence offended you?
Why would you ask that question if I suggested nothing of the sort? Instead of engaging in the substance of my post, you distracted from it by changing the subject. I don't mean to be rude, but I posted to introduce certain issues to this debate. I wanted to talk about the challenges to establishing a stable democracy in Pakistan. Whether or not I think Pakistan ought to be a democracy is really irrelevant.
The issues you raised gave me a feeling that you think it won't be easy to have functional democracy there as of now. That's why I expressed how I felt. Anyway, I don't think it is fruitful to dwell on this further...
they need martial law to wipe out the extremists....the only loyal organization in pakistan is their armed forces
not when we are giving Pakistan billions of dollars, i would like to know that our tax dollars are not going towards supporting a dictator. Its like the unrest that happened in Myrmal(??sp) when the first thing we did was blame china for not doing anything because they where their biggest ally.
It is hard to know what is happening and what exactly is the US's responsibilty for this or what we should do. A Second Coup in Pakistan By Ahmed Rashid Monday, November 5, 2007; Page A19 President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule this weekend will only encourage further civil strife, nationwide protests and greater territorial gains by the extremist Pakistani Taliban. Never before in Pakistan's sad history of military rule has a general so reviled invoked martial law to ensure his own survival. Musharraf and his coterie of advisers -- which includes military officers; Inter-Services Intelligence; Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz; and the ruling Pakistan Muslim League's doyen, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain -- decided on this plan days ago but waited until the weekend so the Supreme Court would not be in session and Western officials would be out of the office. Musharraf's chief aim was to "cleanse" the Supreme Court. Its judges have been forced to resign, and several, including Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, have been arrested. The court, which had become a major irritant for the regime, had been due to rule on whether Musharraf could remain president for another five-year term. The other prime targets were not the extremists terrorizing major swaths of northern Pakistan but the country's democratic, secular elite. Dozens of judges, lawyers and human rights workers have been arrested. Others have gone into hiding. Asma Jahangir, Pakistan's leading human rights activist, is under house arrest. She appealed yesterday for the Bush administration "to stop all support of the unstable dictator as his lust for power is bringing the country close to a worse form of civil strife." Musharraf has increasingly treated the Supreme Court with contempt -- with devastating implications for relations between the army and the public, which wants an independent judiciary, the rule of law and respect for the constitution. Musharraf has again decided that he is above the law and international obligations, even though his political support collapsed long ago. Lawyers, middle-class professionals and his political opposition have been protesting in the streets for months, demanding that Musharraf hold elections and return the country to civilian rule. Eventually the United States persuaded him to allow former prime minister Benazir Bhutto to return from exile in the hope that Musharraf and Bhutto together could fight extremists by restoring democracy. But Musharraf's heart was never in such a deal. The massive public turnout for Bhutto when she returned last month convinced Musharraf and the army of the need to avoid a handshake with Bhutto if they wanted to remain in power. Bhutto, her credibility in tatters, has been forced to do an about-face and condemn the generals. It seems that Musharraf once again took the Americans for a ride. The government should focus its battle against extremism on northern Pakistan, where a resurgent Pakistani Taliban helped by al-Qaeda, Afghan members of the Taliban and several foreign terrorist groups are conquering territory and expanding the boundaries of their "liberated" sharia state. The army has lost hundreds of soldiers in a wave of frontal and suicide attacks, and at least 400 troops are being held hostage. Despite U.S. expectations it is unlikely that Musharraf will use his new powers to step up a military offensive in the north. His first concern is political survival. More likely are a flurry of truces and shaky peace deals with the Pakistani Taliban that will leave them in place. As a timely sop to the Pentagon, the arrests of a few high-level leaders of the Afghan Taliban and perhaps an al-Qaeda leader are possible. But the extremists know that the Pakistani state has been irretrievably weakened and that this is the moment to push their offensive. The key question Musharraf faces is how long the army will continue to back him. Rank-and-file soldiers are keenly aware of the widening gulf between them and the public they are supposed to protect. The army, already demoralized, is unwilling to fight a never-ending war against its own people. For now, the judges are gone, the media has been censored, the opposition and lawyers jailed and curtailed. But Musharraf's emergency is not sustainable. Ruling by force without any political support will prove impossible. The international community has only belatedly realized that Pakistan is a haven for terrorism, nuclear proliferation and Islamic radicalism. Afghanistan's stability and the fate of 40,000 U.S. and NATO soldiers depend on what happens in Pakistan. The spread of anti-Western feelings and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism have been fostered by a U.S. policy that has sought to prop up Musharraf rather than forcing him to seek political consensus and empower a representative civilian government that would have public support for attacking the extremists. The world cannot afford to let Musharraf's second coup go unchecked. So far, the response from Washington and European capitals has been tepid. Unless the international community acts decisively, Musharraf's emergency will plunge Pakistan even more deeply into chaos. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/04/AR2007110401224.html?hpid=topnews
Let's see... Pakistan imploding A resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan (with the largest Opium crop ever) Turkey threatening to invade northern Iraq Iraq out of control with an inept government Israel bombing Syria Iran getting stronger and laughing at American ineptitude How's that Mid East policy going there Jr?
financial times hit the nail on the head...a couple of times. maybe some day wsj can strive to have a good editorial board too...but probably not. ft
I am surprised that people are considerign Bhutto as an alternatative to Musharraff. Bhutto cut a deal with Musharraff to get back into the country and have corruption charges dropped. She has tacitly agreed to back Musharraff provided she can share some of the power. That doesn't strike me as being a counter force to Musharraff.
All I know if that Bhutto's husband back in the days of her administration was legendarily known as "Mr. 10%", for the standard kickbacks he requested from all business entities wishing to do business in Pakistan. Would I prefer a corrupt democracy run by demagogues who love money? Or a benevolent dictator who loves his people and his country?
i do prefer a corrupt democracy but pray tell where this benevolent dictator who loves his people and his country is in this situation.
I'm just glad we have grown-ups in DC who have the abilities to deal with these sorts of problems. Who could worry when Condi, Dick, and W are working on this?
I think Jr is just pissed because Musharraf had the gall to go ahead and do what Jr's secretly wanted to do for years.
Another article that helps in explaining the mess in Pakistan. Musharraf Plays His Hand Craftily by Haroon Siddiqui It is being said that Gen. Pervez Musharraf, America’s favourite dictator, may have miscalculated American reaction to his declaration of a state of emergency. On the contrary, in calling Washington’s bluff, he has calculated the odds only too well. The United States, Canada and other NATO allies have left themselves little choice but to keep backing him to let him continue his war on terror, however intermittently. Critics may be equally off base in saying that the changed situation in Pakistan may complicate the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Arguably, it could help. The third theme to emerge in the wake of the general’s dismissal of senior Supreme Court judges, suspension of media freedoms and the arrests of key opposition figures has been that democracy has been dealt a death blow. One could say that with a straight face only if one believed that the recent soap operatic return of Benazir Bhutto from exile and her participation in a national election from which she would re-emerge as prime minister were something other than a U.S.-orchestrated plan to give a democratic gloss to the eight-year-old military rule, with Musharraf remaining as president, albeit in civilian clothes. The only thing that did not run according to script was that Condoleezza Rice and some U.S. officials got carried away with their rhetoric on democracy, warning Musharraf against declaring an emergency. He answered them by declaring one. He did so to subvert a pending Supreme Court verdict invalidating his recent re-election as president by the national parliament and the four provincial assemblies. Washington would not have wanted him toppled either, having given him $10 billion, so far, for joining the war on terror. In his midnight televised address over the weekend, he was thoroughly unpersuasive posing as the saviour of the nation from Islamic militants, on the one hand, and, on the other, activist judges who had been freeing suspected terrorists, citing the right to fair trial. But that’s about what U.S. President George W. Bush has been saying, too, in pursuing the politics of fear and suspending the rule of law in dealing with terrorist suspects. Bush is also not well placed to attack Musharraf for imposing emergency rule that’d probably be a lot tamer than the one under which Hosni Mubarak, that other great American ally, has been ruling Egypt with an iron fist since 1981. There are further complications. The peace deal that Musharraf made last year with the pro-Taliban Pakistani tribal leaders in the border areas along Afghanistan was not much different than the deal the Americans have made in Anbar province in Iraq with the Sunnis who were once sympathetic to anti-American insurgents. That the latter arrangement has worked and the former hasn’t doesn’t detract from the logic underlying both: that there is no military solution to Iraq or Afghanistan. Then there’s the other irony that if Musharraf were to do what the American hawks, and their acolytes in Canada, want him to, namely, kill the Taliban and Al Qaeda faster than the U.S. and NATO allies, including Canada, have been doing in Afghanistan, he’d be even more unpopular and face nation-wide street protests. Pakistanis - especially lawyers, journalists and human rights activists - do dislike him for being too slow in delivering on his promises of democratization (he did hold national and municipal elections, ensuring one-third women councillors, by imposing a quota). But Pakistanis dislike him even more as an American puppet, `Bush-arraf,’ in popular parlance. Now that he has freed himself of the constraints of the courts and public opinion and, more important, of the paralysis gripping his government for months trying to hang on to power, Musharraf could retry his hand at a military solution to eliminate the Taliban and Al Qaeda. There’s no guarantee he’d succeed, for the real problem lies in Afghanistan. So long as there’s a war there, there can be no peace in Pakistan’s border region. As for Bhutto, she is not a good ad for democracy. She was dismissed as prime minister, twice, for being both incompetent and corrupt - not by the military but two civilian presidents, one of whom was her former ally. She was in self-imposed exile for nine years, in her mansions in Dubai and London, dodging graft charges that predate Musharraf’s rule. She returned only under an amnesty, orchestrated with the help of a Washington lobbying firm. Bhutto has been angling for yet another deal, to let her serve a third term as prime minister. The Supreme Court judges Musharraf has fired for having had the temerity to question his rule may also have had something to say about altering the rules to accommodate her. So she can’t be unhappy over their dismissals either. The Bhutto name still counts for a lot in Pakistan, especially in her Sindh province, given the legacy of her “martyred” father, Zulfiqar Ali, a feudal lord and a former prime minister, hanged by another dictator, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, for alleged complicity in murder. Bhutto is perhaps the only politician who could galvanize the anti-military, anti-Musharraf mood into a mass movement to force him out of office. But she’s clearly too compromised to try. If she were to, she would be violating her backroom deal with Washington that she can regain office but not power, which shall belong to General, now Mister, Musharraf. Given these conflicting realities, politicians and pundits in Canada and the United States are merely striking poses of their own for their respective constituencies. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/06/5052/
