Pakistan: Now or Never?

Dreams from my father: South Asia’s political dynasties

“Whatever the result, this meeting will be a turning point in Pakistan’s history,” Pakistan President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told his daughter Benazir as he prepared for a summit meeting with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1972 in the Indian hill resort of Simla after his country’s defeat by India in the 1971 war. “I want you to witness it first hand.”

If there is a slightly surreal quality to President Asif Ali Zardari’s controversial state visit to Britain - where he is expected to launch the political career of Oxford graduate Bilawal Bhutto at a rally for British Pakistanis in Birmingham on Saturday - it is perhaps no more surreal than taking your daughter, herself then a student at Harvard, to witness negotiations with India after a crushing military defeat.

Family dynasties are a tradition in South Asia. Indira Gandhi, the victor of the 1971 war which led to the creation of Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, had learned about international relations from her father, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Now her grandson, Rahul Gandhi, is being groomed as a future prime minister while his mother Sonia Gandhi keeps a tight grip from behind-the-scenes on the Congress Party government led by her appointed prime minister Manmohan Singh.

In both countries, the argument has been that the family name is strong enough to win votes, particularly among the millions of rural poor, strong enough to offer a promise of stability, and strong enough to be worth fighting to preserve across generations even in the face of domestic criticism.

One year on, same questions swirl around Bhutto’s murder

The anniversary of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination has reminded everyone just how much we still don’t know about her killing in a suicide gun and bomb attack in Rawalpindi on Dec. 27, 2007.   The same questions that transfixed the shocked country in the days after her death, such as why was the crime scene hosed down so quickly, was she killed when the blast smashed her head into the lever on her vehicle’s escape hatch or by a bullet, why was no autopsy performed, are again being raised.   Investigations by the previous government and the U.S. CIA accused an al Qaeda-linked militant, Baitullah Mehsud, of killing Bhutto, a staunch supporter of the U.S.-led campaign against Islamist militancy.   That would seem logical enough but, as we’ve seen with the Mumbai attacks, any militant attack on or linked to Pakistan seems to raise questions about possible links to old allies in the powerful intelligence services.   (more…)

Nudging India and Pakistan towards peace

One of the more recurrent themes in U.S. political punditry these days is the need to nudge India and Pakistan towards peace. The theory is that this would bolster the new civilian government in Islamabad by encouraging trade and economic development, reduce a rivalry that threatens regional stability, including in Afghanistan, and limit the role of the Pakistan Army, whose traditional dominance has been fuelled by a perceived threat from India.

So what are the chances of progress? (assuming the latest bombings just being reported in Delhi do not trigger a new downwards spiral)

President Asif Ali Zardari has got everyone talking by promising that there will soon be “good news” on Kashmir. An expected meeting  between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Zardari on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York later this month would also give the two leaders the chance to repair relations soured by the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in July.  

It seems unlikely however, that India and Pakistan can make any real concessions on Kashmir, at a time when the people of the Kashmir Valley at the heart of the dispute have renewed their protests against Indian rule. In Pakistan this would be seen as a betrayal of the people of Kashmir, while in India the government would be accused of caving in to the protests.

Guest contribution: Presidential elections in Pakistan

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone.  The writer is Pakistan’s High Commissioner to London and a former advisor to the late Benazir Bhutto.

                                                  By Wajid Shamsul Hasan

Ever since the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party announced its decision to field the widower of the former Prime Minister, Senator Asif Ali Zardari, as its Presidential candidate, he has become the target of a well-calculated media blitzkrieg especially when he is emerging as a sure winner. Besides an attempt to resurrect the dead horse of alleged corruption, he is also being accused of being unhealthy, of having unsound mind.

Skies had fallen on me when Ms Benazir Bhutto was martyred. It seemed the end of the world. My profound apprehensions were regarding the future of Pakistan – destined to be a failing or a failed state – long before her cold-blooded murder.

Showdown or climbdown in Pakistan?

This is definitely a case of “the more you know, the less you understand”. 

There has been much talk in the media about whether PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari is heading for a showdown with President Pervez Musharraf to force him out of office.

But it is not clear whether Zardari is really looking for a showdown, or instead a climbdown that would allow Musharraf to stay on with reduced powers, while also accommodating former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whose antipathy to the former army general dates back to the 1999 coup.

For an outsiders’ view, The Australian boiled it down into a story headlined “Leaders duel in battle for Pakistan. 

Pakistan coalition split, not yet estranged

The split in Pakistan’s ruling coalition could provide a lifeline for President Pervez Musharraf that the Pakistani people believed they’d yanked away in an election three months ago. 

After the Feb.18 poll demolished Musharraf’s parliamentary support, predictions abounded that the politically isolated U.S. ally would be forced from power within weeks or months. Politicians had even talked about impeaching him.   

 But first, they decided, the priority was to reinstate the judges Musharraf dismissed during a brief period of emergency rule late last year in order to stop the Supreme Court ruling unlawful his re-election by the outgoing parliament. 

Critics poured scorn on Musharraf for not taking the honourable way out by resigning, having delivered an election that was fairer and less violent than feared.  

Pakistan’s coalition government founders

When former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the late Benazir Bhutto, agreed in March to form a coalition government in Pakistan, the words of the 19th century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli seemed apt:

“Coalitions, though successful, have always found this, that their triumph has been brief,” I quoted him as saying, in a posting which asked whether the coalition between Sharif’s PML (N) and Zardari’s PPP would survive.

It turns out the triumph has been even briefer than many expected.  Sharif pulled his party out of the government on Monday,  though he said his PML (N) party would continue to support the PPP-led government in parliament,  rather than sit in outright opposition.  At issue were differences over the restoration of judges sacked by President Pervez Musharraf when he declared a state of emergency in November, and over the future of the former army general who ousted Sharif in a 1999 coup. 

(The judiciary issue is fiendishly complex, but to simplify, Sharif wanted a complete restoration of the judges, who then in turn might have posed legal challenges to Musharraf.  Zardari wanted the judges restored, but with their wings clipped.  Zardari is also seen as less hostile to Musharraf than Sharif.)

Anti-Americanism in Pakistan

U.S. ambassador Anne W. Patterson, in a speech reported by the Pakistan press, said last week that the depth of anti-Americanism in Pakistan, especially among the middle-class, had surprised her. Pakistan’s long-term interests were aligned with those of the United States, and those opposing U.S. engagement in the country had a limited understanding of  how the partnership based on economic assistance had changed the lives of Pakistanis, she told a meeting in Karachi. For added measure, she said that the “ïncreasingly prosperous middle class” would be the first to suffer if  hardliners gained ground.

She needn’t have looked further than to events last  week to see why America sits rather uneasily on the Pakistani mind, a heavy hand of friendship that Pakistanis are increasingly chafing against.

The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had cancelled the appointment of Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood as the senior American officer based in Pakistan following weeks of criticism in the Pakistani news media over one of his previous jobs : commander of the U.S.  prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Madrasas catch the cricket bug

A crack has opened in the cast-iron rules surrounding Pakistan’s madrasas, and cricket, South Asia’s favourite sport, has rushed in.

Students from 24 religious schools in Islamabad, including the hardline Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), have been taking part in the past week in a cricket tournament organised by the city authorities as part of measures to regulate and revamp the schools. The students swapped their shalwar kameez for track pants and T-shirts, and sticks for cricket bats.

By all accounts, the games have been successful as enthusiastic crowds of skull-capped and turbaned students thronged the grounds to watch their schoolmates play with teams drawn from other schools, some of them from different sects who have often clashed in the past.

One blogger wrote that the games were a ray of light during a week clouded by a resurgence in political violence. Women students also took a break from their rigid, dawn-to-dusk schedules to take part in a badminton tournament held alongside the cricket contest.

Pakistan: Breaking down the stereotypes

An economy growing at an average of 7 percent for six years now with a construction  and consumer boom, a rising middle-class that has just voted out a government, a free  press, a thriving fashion scene. Another emerging market star?

Yes, but this is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, better known these days for its  suicide bombings, a nuclear arsenal and labelled as  the epicentre of Islamist extremism including perhaps the last  redoubt of Osama bin Laden in the lands straddling the Afghan border. “Jihadistan” as one reader wrote on this blog.  

What is the reality ? Are there two Pakistans?  Is it really Pakistan: Now or Never ? Or is the image of Pakistan clouded by TV pictures of blood and gore in its  streets, feeding insecurities while shutting out  the important political, economic and social transformations that are underway in a nation of 150 million people.

Author William Dalrymple travels through the harsh scrublands of Sindh, home to  Kalashnikov-wielding landlords and honour killings, and then back up the Punjab and he  doesn’t find a country flirting with state failure or anything even approaching the  “most dangerous country in the world” as it has been so commonly branded in recent  months, right down to a group by that name on Facebook.