Reply #46: With Bhutto Gone, Does Bush Have a Plan B?

[Octafish]

Professor Cole gets it, too:

With Bhutto Gone, Does Bush Have a Plan B?

Bush’s failed policies in Pakistan, a nuclear power that al-Qaida still uses to plot against the West, threatens U.S. security more than Iraq ever did.

by Juan Cole
Published on Friday, December 28, 2007 by Salon.com

EXCERPT...

Bhutto’s assassination was a profound blow to Bush administration policy in South Asia. Washington looked the other way when Musharraf had himself elected “president” in a referendum in spring of 2002, wherein he had no competition. It accepted Musharraf’s interference in the fall 2002 elections, which was aimed at handicapping the two major parties, the Pakistan People’s Party and the Muslim League. All Musharraf managed to do was to throw the key northwest frontier province and Baluchistan into the hands of the Muslim fundamentalist parties, which had never before done so well in those regions, but which were left without much competition when their rivals were hobbled by the military. These Muslim fundamentalist local governments in turn ran interference for Muslim radicals, denying that there was any such thing as al-Qaida.

The combination of political ineptitude whereby Musharraf helped put the fundamentalists in power in the Pushtun regions of Pakistan and the heavy-handedness of his military interventions in the fiercely independent tribal north, helped set the stage for the greater political violence. The government’s neglect of the hardscrabble farming regions of the north also fueled discontent.

At the same time it was coddling the dictator, the United States has been attempting to do nation building in Afghanistan and to strengthen the government of Hamid Karzai, while trying to face down a resurgent Pushtun insurgency in the south of that country. In the frontier badlands of the tribal areas straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan, remnants of the Taliban and the “Arab Afghans” of al-Qaida have been hiding out and regrouping. There is some evidence that they continue to have contacts with, and even to train, Muslim militants based in Europe. The Pakistani military dislikes the Karzai government and sees the “Northern Alliance” that came to power with American help as overly friendly to India and Iran. It is suspected that some elements in the Pakistani army and its military intelligence branch, the Inter-Services Intelligence, are secretly stirring up Pushtun tribesmen against the Karzai regime in hopes that a government more friendly to Pakistan will come to power.

Paradoxically, the Pakistani military has cracked down hard on Taliban-like groups inside Pakistan itself. Troops have fought several major engagements in the rugged tribal territories of the north, and over time have captured some 700 al-Qaida operatives. But the fiercely independent tribespeople of Waziristan and its neighboring areas have fought back. Starting in September 2006 the military even attempted a truce with the tribal leaders in hopes that they would deal with the Muslim militants themselves. That truce began to break down when the military stormed the Red Mosque in the capital, Islamabad, where Pushtun and Baluch tribesmen belonging to a neo-Deobandi cult and advocating strict puritanism had established themselves and begun acting like vigilantes. Musharraf ordered his military to close the mosque, where the cultists had stored arms, resulting in a sanguinary conflict. In the aftermath, Muslim militants in Pakistan’s northeast carried out a record number of suicide bombings.

If he faced a rural crisis deriving from the fundamentalism of neglected northern farming communities, Musharraf faced an urban crisis as well. Pakistan’s good economic growth for the past six years has helped create a new middle class, numbering in the tens of millions, who are educated and connected to the world by cable television and the Internet. They depend on the rule of law to pursue their white-collar occupations, and when Musharraf attempted to fire the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the urban middle classes staged large rallies and resisted the packing of the courts. They won the first round when Musharraf, weakened by the Red Mosque fiasco, was forced to reinstate the chief justice.

Benazir Bhutto served as prime minister twice, from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996, and was dismissed on charges of corruption both times. She has been in political exile since 1999, the year of Musharraf’s military coup. After the Red Mosque debacle and his conflict with the country’s Supreme Court, Musharraf was so weakened that he accepted a new American plan. It provided for Bhutto to return and contest elections, such that she would likely be the next prime minister, and for Musharraf to resign from the military and become a civilian president. This plan was in danger of being derailed when the Supreme Court seemed likely to decide that Musharraf was ineligible to serve as president, and the dictator reacted by dismissing the court, packing it with his own supporters, and declaring a state of emergency. Bhutto expressed outrage at those high-handed actions and clearly feared that they would taint her own legitimacy. Under severe American pressure, Musharraf lifted the state of emergency and agreed to new elections on Jan. 8.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/28/6042/

Thank you, Joanne98! Much obliged for the link, the fact you give a damn and that you know what we are up against and are doing something about it.