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Pakistan Ditching China?
The new Pakistani government is not thrilled about the country’s longtime ally, China. Prime Minister Gilani has decided to downgrade Pakistani representation in this week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. And our ambassador in Washington, a known ‘American enthusiast’, has given verbal instructions to Pakistani Foreign Office to lessen its fixation on China and focus more on India. His government undermined Pakistani participation in Beijing Olympics twice in the last four months. And we are still without a Pakistani ambassador in Beijing while our London and Washington embassies are run by strong supporters of Washington and London.
By AHMED QURAISHI
Tuesday, 26 August 2008.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—This is the first time that Pakistan does not have an ambassador in Beijing for several months now, which is an oddity. Washington and London were the first capitals where the Gilani government appointed ambassadors. That is supposedly understandable. The current government in Pakistan was possible only because of a political understanding – widely referred to in Islamabad as a ‘deal – which both capitals brokered with a weak and fading Mr. Musharraf.
But how China has slipped from the list of priorities of the Gilani government can be gauged from our expected participation this week in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit on Aug. 28. This is a Chinese and Russian dominated organization seen as a counterweight to U.S. influence in our region. In this first major foreign policy engagement for this government involving China, no senior politician from the Gilani administration will be representing Pakistan. Prime Minister Gilani has decided that, due to our pressing internal political situation, the advisor to the prime minister for national security – a former ambassador to Washington – will instead represent Islamabad. This will be the lowest Pakistani participation in SCO since its formation in 2001. It is true that Pakistan is still not a full member of the SCO. But Beijing is strongly advocating full membership for Islamabad and Moscow is more favorably inclined to go along than at any other time, putting aside Indian sensitivities.
Given how we are suffering from Washington’s destabilizing influence in our neighborhood, you would think we would have shown more enthusiasm for this week’s SCO summit. But this is not the case. What is interesting is that this attitude comes at the heel of several events in the past four months that have generated some concern among Pakistani Sinologists. This is a concern that has not turned to panic, not yet at least.
A couple of months ago, Dr. Shireen Mazari, a former head of a think tank funded by our Foreign Office, reported that our top diplomats received verbal ‘guidance’ from a well known Washington-based figure in the Gilani government to stop focusing too much on China and start a new policy of engagement with countries such as India and the United States. This could be a personal opinion or a general policy observation, and all elected governments have the right to review policies. But in China’s case, we have accumulated several bad examples recently that the subject merits a special discussion.
In April, a fresh Prime Minister Gilani refused to attend the Olympic Torch Relay ceremony as the torch passed through Islamabad on the pretext that President Musharraf was also attending.
Considering how western members of the International Olympic Committee refused to include Pakistan in the torch route and how Beijing stuck to Islamabad, the Apr. 16 incident in the Pakistani capital was certainly a ghastly show of lopsided priorities.
And then on Aug. 8, Pakistan’s participation at the level of President in China’s most important event of the century was scuttled because of Pakistani politics. You can be certain that our Chinese friends were not very impressed when we sent to Beijing a prime minister widely seen as ‘remote-controlled’ – as opposed to a ‘puppet’ – along with the teenage chairman of the ruling party. It didn’t quite give the impression that we attached a lot of importance to an important event for China. Overall, it would be an understatement to say that this has not been a good year so far for Sino-Pakistani ties.
The principals of the Gilani government must excuse the skeptics when things like this happen. After all, the government has shown a lot of enthusiasm in focusing on ties with the United States. Washington was the first real foreign engagement for Prime Minister Gilani. You can discount the Saudi visit. That was limited to a one-point agenda: Cheap oil. Certainly the government has shown a lot of interest in hiring the services of an ‘American enthusiast’ to be our ambassador in Washington, followed by appointing the last serving ambassador there as the new national security advisor to the prime minister.
This is a government tinged with a heavy American dose. That is fine since this is an important relationship for Islamabad. But in the process, China should not be sidelined.
Courtesy and thanks: Washington Post
Beyond Musharraf
By Ahmed Rashid
Tuesday, August 19, 2008; Page A13
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The resignation of President Pervez Musharraf yesterday after nine years in office is a major victory for Pakistan’s long-battered and still fragile democratic forces. But particularly given the meltdown the country has endured in recent weeks, there are still many obstacles to effective civilian governance. Although the United States will expect things to change in a hurry, they are unlikely to do so right away.
Three of Pakistan’s past four military rulers have been driven from power by popular movements, but the politicians who followed the military all failed to take advantage of the people’s desire for democracy and economic development and were eventually forced out by the military on charges of corruption and incompetence.
The most pressing issues today involve the long-standing tension of Pakistan’s politics and the relationship between the civilian government and the military. The government is led by the Pakistan People’s Party, now run by Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, but his party governs through a complex coalition of parties.
The PPP’s main antagonist is former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, who never misses an opportunity to try to pull down the PPP, his longtime rival, rather than working with it to consolidate the few democratic gains the country has made.
Overthrown by Musharraf in a 1999 coup and humiliated by the army, Sharif rejects concessions to the army and offers no support to the war against Taliban extremists. Busy pandering to his right-wing supporters, he has little time for American demands.
Sharif believes that his popularity and the parliamentary seats he controls in the majority province of Punjab will eventually regain him the prime minister ship.
In the next few days, internal coalition battles will continue as key questions arise, including where Musharraf should live, whether impeachment should proceed, how the senior judges Musharraf dismissed last November should be restored to their offices and who should become president.
Sharif is taking a hard line, while Zardari wants to move slowly and not confront the army by further humiliating Musharraf, a former army chief.These power struggles within the coalition are magnified by the enormous mistrust that exists between the army and both parties. The army’s mistrust of the PPP has a nearly 40-year history, and the military dislikes Sharif.
In the past six months, the army and the coalition government have failed to work out a joint strategy to combat the Pakistani Taliban, which is swarming across northwestern Pakistan, or to prevent Taliban fighters from crossing the border and fighting in Afghanistan.
The army, which is not popular, wants the civilian government to take political responsibility for going after the extremists. Sharif has no intention of doing the army’s bidding, and Zardari has yet to hammer out a position that can garner coalition agreement. Meanwhile, the economy is in meltdown, with inflation running at 25 percent, but the government has not been able to lift investor confidence.
The mess that Musharraf leaves behind will haunt Pakistan and the world in the months ahead. The international community is likely to grow even more nervous about Pakistan as extremists become stronger and more audacious.
The government and the army are besieged by escalating U.S. and NATO threats that Pakistan must either help catch Osama bin Laden and do more to stop the Taliban’s offensives or face stepped-up U.S. bombing against the Taliban inside Pakistan.
Much of the fault for this situation lies with Musharraf’s aversion to democracy and his failure to capitalize on the opportunities offered by joining the Western alliance in the war against terrorism after Sept. 11. After the 2001 attacks, Musharraf received massive financial aid ($11.8 billion from Washington alone) and unstinting international political support — yet failed to use it for the common good.
He rigged his own reelection in 2002 and long disrupted attempts at a transition to a democracy. After millions of Pakistanis took to the streets last year, demanding the rule of law, Musharraf imposed a state of emergency. Under extreme public pressure, he was forced to rescind his measures and agreed to hold free and fair elections in February, in which his political supporters were trounced.
Meanwhile, Musharraf’s relationship with the West disintegrated as the Taliban gained ground in Afghanistan, using its bases in Pakistan. There was a Taliban blowback inside Pakistan as the Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen who protected bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban when they retreated to Pakistan in 2001 were themselves radicalized. They formed their own militias with their own agenda: to turn Pakistan into an Islamic Taliban-style state. In December, they assassinated the one person who could have pulled the country together — PPP leader Benazir Bhutto.
Most Pakistanis see the coalition government as the country’s last chance for democracy, and they want it to work. The army, the government and the international community have to work together so that Pakistan can start tackling its real problems.
Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, is the author of “Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.”
The Filth of Pakistani Politics
by
Asif Nawaz
The face of Pakistani politics today became more deformed than ever. Musharraf’s resignation comes as a prime example of a country that has, in its ONLY recent history focused on more on the past than the present or the future, and that shows in the country’s economic status, political climate, and global alliances.
A country of many failures, the present government has once again shown that blaming the predecessor is the way to go; rather than making the most of an opportunity to repair a nation full of civil, political, financial, class and ethnic differences, the government of the Pakistan People’s Party, coupled with the childish attitude of Nawaz Sharif, has today shown how any good of one’s past can be overshadowed by policial enemity.
The Fall of Musharraf
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
President Pervez Musharraf has departed, having resigned to escape the humiliation of impeachment. Yet another painful chapter of Pakistan’s political history has been closed, ending the political uncertainty the country has been facing for the past five months.
Why painful? It may be considered a polite expression for an era when the General-President overthrew an elected government to save his position as the Chief of Army Staff. At least in previous military interventions there was a political crisis and some kind of government breakdown. That was not the case on October 12, 1999.
The ruling party had a comfortable two-thirds majority in the National Assembly and all political parties with remarkable consensus had passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Pakistan was on the road to democratic recovery but with the usual traits of autocracy that are embedded in the country’s political culture.
Musharraf came to power and ruled the country only as COAS, like his three predecessors. His uniform was his first line of defence and the army an instrument of self-empowerment and control. The day he doffed his uniform, he was no longer the master of his or the country’s fate.
Musharraf exits the Pakistani stage as storm clouds gather
By
Rich Bowdenon August 20, 2008 7:40 AM
Pakistan’s former leader Pervez Musharraf resigned yesterday in an emotional address to the nation ahead of impeachment proceedings brought by the country’s newly-resurgent Parliament. Musharraf dominated Pakistani politics for almost a decade and strode the world stage as one of the U.S.’s chief regional allies in the war against terrorism. However the euphoria expressed at the ousting of the one time strongman was tempered with the knowledge that Islamabad is likely to face a protracted power struggle to fill the vacuum.
Musharraf’s ascendancy was the catalyst that brought together the two main parties; the Pakistan Peoples Party and Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), though the two have traditionally been rivals throughout the country’s history. With the chief reason for the parties’ awkward and fragile coalition now gone, the country could face an uncertain, if not violent, political future.
The record of the two parties coalition since obtaining office in February is mixed and there have been squabbles over key issues such as immunity for Musharraf and the vexing question of whether to reinstate the judges ousted by Musharraf, an act which proved to be the tipping point for Musharraf in the eyes of the Pakistani public.
The Destabilization of Pakistan
The debate is heating up between those who favor and oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan. Put me in the latter camp – I cannot support escalation without first hearing a clear explanation of the strategic changes that would accompany the escalation, along with an explanation of how we’ll address issues of government and development sector corruption. In other words, I think that pumping in more troops without addressing the structural flaws of our approach will yield no results.And since we’re a long way away from solving those problems, I think we should hold off on troop increases.
Building an argument for or against more troops involves answering a number of questions. I’m only going to deal with one sub-point here,but it’s an important one: we need to define more carefully what political and social consequences escalation in Afghanistan might have for Pakistan.
One point that everyone on all sides of the debate loves to make is that x, y, or z maneuver by the US might ‘destabilize Pakistan.’ I think we’re reaching a point where we can talk more precisely about what that means. It’s easy to talk about ‘destabilization’ – it’s a nice buzzword that makes you sound authoritative, and an intimidating prospect to scare your audience or your opponents with. It’s a bogeyman. I myself have used it that way in the past. Admittedly,’destabilization‘ can be shorthand for a range of phenomena that are understood by the parties involved in a debate, but I think in this case we need to bring our use of the word back to more concrete details. The debate about Afghanistan/Pakistan needs to be accessible to as many Americans as possible.
What Everybody Has Done With Pakistan
Quaid-E-Azam :
Islamic Republic Of Pakistan
Ayob Khan:
Army Republic Of Pakistan
Bhutto :
Peoples Party Of Pakistan
Yahya Khan:
What So Ever Divided By 2 Pakistan
Zia-Ul-Haq:
Jihad Republic Of Pakistan
Ghulam Ishaq Khan:
ISI Republic Of Pakistan
Moeen Qureshi :
Taxation Republic Of Pakistan
Benazir Bhutto :
Zardari Republic Of Pakistan
Nawaz Sharif:
Abba Jee & Sons Republic Of Pakistan
Gen. Pervez Musharraf :
Pakistan (Pvt). Ltd.
People of Pakistan :
Immigration From Pakistan
Shakir Mumtaz
April 23, 2008
Political Cartel Active Again in Pakistan.
The difference this time, however, is that it is under the guise of Democracy, borrowed from the West; historically tested, foolproof system of power and plunder, where the population becomes unwittingly sacrificial goat daydreaming of emancipation from all ills and miseries. The cartel has upgraded itself by becoming the member of the league of the democratic nations ushering the support of its founding members; based on the principle of power, plunder and designs sharing. The major player in this league, undoubtedly as always, are the Western imperialist masters, who are dictating the rules of the game.
The governments in Center and Provinces have been formed, after extensive bargaining for power and plunder under the supervision and sanction of the Grand Master, and now it is the time for share in the loot and perpetuation thereof. The dominant players, in succession, seem to be Asif Zardari, Nawaz Sharif, APN and Mulana Fazlur Rehman. Altaf Hussain is trying to be part of the cartel, as he reportedly has the exclusive backing of the Ex-Colonial-Masters.
Fazalur Rehman has adapted and settled quietly for chimp-change, whereas Altaf is seeking a bigger chunk of the pie. Hurdle is the oddest and most awkward, undesirable member of the cartel, Nawaz, who is at odds not only with Altaf Hussain but also with Musharraf and PML (Q).
Zardari for the time has been able to muster a consensus but it is very fragile and would start showing cracks, in this Coalition of Convenience, very soon. Two incidents involving Dr Arbab Rahim and Dr Sher Afghan Niazi and the fallout in Karachi is just the beginning. The show of disruptive power is a signal to the members of the cartel, by those who have not yet been included in the scheme, that they cannot be ignored. On the other hand, for public consumption, the hand of friendship is being extended; playing all good and Comradery. Read the rest of this entry »
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