Pakistan is an important country and a key US partner, and so it is bad news that it is lurching from political crisis to political crisis. There is a crisis between the military and the civilian government. There is a crisis between the military and the US government. There is a crisis between the Supreme Court and the other two branches of government. There was a big Taliban bombing in Pakistan the day before yesterday. And, the Zardari government may fall at any time, either to clear a path to new elections or because of yet another military coup.
Pakistan is the world’s sixth most populous country, just after Brazil. It has only the 46th largest gross domestic product (in nominal terms). But it has a stockpile of nuclear warheads, and has perhaps the seventh largest army in the world, after the US, Russia, China, India and the two Koreas. It is a major recipient of US foreign aid, though some of that has been put on hold by an angry US Congress.
Pakistan’s elites are allied with the United States against some insurgent Afghan groups, and it is central to transporting goods for the NATO war effort in Afghanistan. On the other hand, it is allied with some Pashtun groups (especially the Haqqani network) against the US and against the Afghanistan government.
It has been facing serial crises of poor governance and bad politics. There are continual electricity outages (very bad for the industrial sector). There have been strikes over poor or late pay, including by the railway workers. Security is collapsing, even in Lahore, which used to be well run, but which is becoming seedy and dangerous.
The Pakistani government was embarrassed by the presence of Usamah Bin Laden in Abbotabad, not far from its equivalent of West Point. The revelation appears to have provoked a determination on the part of the civilian government of Yousuf Raza Gilani and President Asaf Ali Zardari to get more control of the Inter-Services Intelligence and the officer corps, who had in the past often ordered the civilian government around or made coups.
Then it was alleged that the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Hussein Haqqani, passed over to the US National Security Council and the Pentagon a request for them to help the civilian government get power over the military bureaucracy. An intermediary was said to be Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz, whom the Pakistani Supreme Court and other authorities now want to depose.
Ambassador Haqqani had to resign when the existence of the memo became public.
This “memogate” deeply angered Pakistan’s powerful military, provoking rumors of a possible coup by chief of army staff Ashfaq Kayani.
The Pakistani Supreme Court is also interested in the memos, to see if the Pakistani government had violated any laws or perhaps even committed treason.
President Asaf Ali Zardari keeps going off to Dubai for medical treatment, causing many to wonder if he was trying to slip out of the country (he went back to the the Emirates again on Thursday.)
Then US aircraft killed some 24 Pakistani troops at a checkpoint near the Afghan border, creating severe tensions between the Pakistani military, which was already angry about the Bin Laden assassination mission on Pakistani soil and about Memogate and the possibility of US intervention in Pakistan’s civilian-military balance.
Then Pakistan threw the US air force off one of its bases. For several weeks, there were no drone strikes in the tribal belt by the US, probably because Pakistan was still sore about the killing of 24 troops by friendly fire. And for a long time Pakistan idled the NATO supply trucks coming up from Karachi to the Khyber Pass.
Then President Zardari flew to Dubai for medical treatment, which some speculated would lead to a soft coup by the military.
But it did not. Zardari returned. But now the Supreme Court is getting interested in him and in investigating Memogate itself.
Then a famous cricketer turned politician and philantropist, Imran Khan, started holding mega rallies in Lahore and Karachi, having gained sudden popularity. Imran Khan started to call for Zardari to resign. The government anyway could not go past February 2013, and Zardari’s political rivals want early elections.
On Monday Prime Minister Gilani gave an interview with the Chinese press in which he criticized the Chief of Staff and the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for submitting documents on Memogate indepedently to the Supreme Court, insisting they should have gone through him as head of state.
Then the military made dark noises, and Gilani responded by firing the minister of defense, who was close to the officer corps.
On Thursday, Zardari went to Dubai again, possibly for follow-up tests for whatever condition he has. That trip provoked more coup rumors.
So, Pakistan’s civilian and military wings of government are furious with each other and with the US military. There are suspicions that the US deliberately hit the soldiers at the checkpoint. There are suspicions that the US is trying behind the scenes to weaken the political power of the military in favor of the civilian government.
But Pakistanis are convinced by the lack of electricity that Zardari and Gilani could not govern themselves out of a paper bag, and that new elections for parliament should be held. Imran Khan is waiting in the wings as a new broom. Assuming that there are elections rather than a coup.
And, what will be the effect of these changes on the final years of the US and NATO war in Afghanistan? How badly did the interruption of the supply train hurt? What sorts of lack of Pakistani cooperation have been imposed with regard to Afghanistan?
A key allegation in the IAEA report on Iranian nuclear activities has fallen apart. Gareth Porter has been able to use interviews and other material to demonstrate that Vyacheslav Danilenko, a Russian scientist referred to without being identified in the report, is not a nuclear weapons expert. His field is nanotechnology (making tiny machines), and Iran has been looking into making diamonds with nanotechnology, bypassing the middle man.
Russia has already signaled that it does not intend to allow further security council sanctions to be placed on Iran, despite the new report.
The Danilenko mistake reminds me of an incident in Iraq. In 2000 and after, US surveillance satellites picked up renewed activity at an old biological weapons lab. The hawks in the administration took the information as proof that Saddam Hussein had started back up his quest for biological weapons.
After the US invasion, inspectors were sent to this site and they found it that it had been looted. All the metal pipes, etc., were gone.
So what the US had interpreted as a sign of a revived weapons laboratory was no such thing.
Military officers focused on the big picture hate stories like this one, because, they say, ‘if it bleeds, it leads,’ without reference to whether it tells us anything about who is winning the war. In that regard, the bombing seems to me significant because it had to be based on an insider’s information. How many supposed Aghanistan National Army troops are actually sympathetic to the Taliban? The incident raises these questions of who is actually in control.
To get a sense of how the event was covered locally, consider this translation by the USG Open Source from a Pashto newspaper:
‘ Some 16 foreign troops killed in separate incidents in Afghan capital, south
Afghan Islamic Press
Saturday, October 29, 2011…
Text of report by private Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency
Kabul, 29 October: Sixteen soldiers of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) have been killed in two separate incidents. Sixteen soldiers of the ISAF were killed in separate attacks in southern Kandahar Province and in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Saturday (29 October). According to reports, a car bomb attack was carried out on a foreign military convoy in the Dar-ul Aman area of capital Kabul today.
The ISAF in a statement said that a car bomb attack was carried out in Kabul and preliminary information indicates that 13 ISAF soldiers were killed. The statement said that civilians also sustained casualties in the incident. The interior ministry in a statement said that a suicide attack was carried out through a Corolla vehicle on a coalition military convoy in the Dar-ul Aman area of Kabul at around 1130 hours (0700 gmt) today, killing three civilians and a policeman.
Spokesman for the Taleban Zabihollah Mojahed claimed responsibility for the attack and told AIP that the attack was carried out by a Taleb named Abdol Rahman Hazarboz through a Land Cruiser vehicle in which 700 kg of explosives were placed. Mojahed added that 25 senior foreign (military) officers were killed and many others were wounded in the attack. Many ISAF soldiers have been killed from time to time over the past some years. Thirty-one US special forces members were killed when a Chinook helicopter was shot down by the Taleban on 6 August in Wardag Province. But, it is the first time that so many soldiers have lost their lives in a suicide attack.
Also, an Afghan soldier killed three coalition soldiers in the southern Kandahar Province of Afghanistan today. A statement issued by the ISAF said that a person, wearing the national army uniform, fired shots at Afghan and coalition soldiers today, killing two coalition soldiers, and another ISAF soldier later succumbed to injuries. The commander of Military Corps No 205 in the south, Gen Abdol Hamid, also said that three ISAF soldiers were killed in the incident and told AIP that an Afghan soldier opened fire on internal and foreign soldiers today, killing two ISAF soldiers and an Afghan interpreter.
He said that eight ISAF and one Afghan soldier were also wounded in the attack and an ISAF soldier later succumbed to injuries. The ISAF and Gen Abdol Hamid said that the soldier who attacked them was also shot dead. Military observers say that foreign military causalities caused on Saturday in Afghanistan are very high. They say that as the US has expressed its willingness for talks with the Taleban, these attacks by the Taleban at such a critical time show that the Taleban are not willing to hold talks and still believe that a military approach can resolve Afghanistan’s issue and they can achieve victory in the battlefield. It is worth pointing out that today’s casualties of NATO in Afghanistan brought the total number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan this month [sic, should be 'year'] to 514.
(Description of Source: Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto — Peshawar-based agency, staffed by Afghans, that describes itself as an independent “news agency” but whose history and reporting pattern reveal a perceptible pro-Taliban bias; the AIP’s founder-director, Mohammad Yaqub Sharafat, has long been associated with a mujahidin faction that merged with the Taliban’s “Islamic Emirate” led by Mullah Omar; subscription required to access content; http://www.afghanislamicpress.com)’
The 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan [pdf], drafted and passed under the rule of George W. Bush in that country, makes Islam the religion of state and forbids any law that contravenes the sharia or Muslim religious law (the official translations on the Web misleadingly render ahkam or religious laws with the word “provisions,” which hides the real intent of the constitution, so I have translated those passages more literally):
“Article One Ch. 1. Art. 1: Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary and indivisible state.
Article Two Ch. 1, Art. 2: The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam.
Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.
Article Three
Ch. 1, Art. 3
In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and laws [ahkam] of the sacred religion of Islam.
“The Afghan Constitution and Islamic Sharia law both support polygamy, allowing men to take up to four wives. Certain conditions apply to polygamous marriages, such as the equal treatment of all wives, but these are not always observed.”
The constitution of Iraq, adopted in 2005 under the rule of George W. Bush over Iraq, says:
Article 2:
First: Islam is the official religion of the State and is the primary basis for legislation:
A. No legislation may be enacted that contradicts the established laws of Islam
B. No law may be enacted that contradicts the principles of democracy.
C. No law may be enacted that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this Constitution.
Second: This Constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the
Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights to freedom of religious belief
and practice of all individuals such as Christians, Yazidis, and Mandean Sabeans.
“As a Muslim country, we have adopted the Islamic Sharia as the main source of law. Accordingly, any law that contradicts Islamic principles with the Islamic Sharia is ineffective legally.” Jalil also urged an end to restrictions on taking more than one wife, and wanted to see Islamic banking principles instead of Western-style interest.
The Western press seems unaware that when Muammar Qaddafi came to power in 1969 he pledged to implement Islamic law or sharia and to abolish Italian and British colonial-era laws and regulations. He forbade alcohol, e.g. When in 1977 he declared Libya to be a “masses-ocracy” (Jamahiriya), he proclaimed that the holy Qur’an was the source of law or sharia for Libya.
So far, Jalil has said nothing that was not said repeatedly by his predecessor, Qaddafi. He has said nothing that is not in the constitutions and/or legal practice of Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq. But there is no hand-wringing about those two “liberated” countries and Islamic law or sharia. I guess if secular, communist Afghanistan was made fundamentalist by Reagan and Bush, or if the relatively secular Baath Party of Iraq was overthrown by W. in favor of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Islamic Call Party and the Bloc of Ayatollah Sadr II, that is unobjectionable and not even reported on. But if there’s a Democratic president in the White House, all of a sudden it is a scandal if Muslims practice Muslim law.
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