If the country doesn't crack down harder on Islamic radicals, analysts suggest, Pakistan could crumble into chaos. LA Times The following is my commentary published in the Register Guard today:
On Aug. 12 a year ago, I wrote that an unstable Pakistan has the potential to cause geopolitical crises beyond our wildest imagination. I wondered whether it would be better if Pervez Musharraf continued as the president of Pakistan, even though he had come to power through a military coup.
Ding, dong, the witch is dead. Musharraf stepped down when the parliamentary majority initiated impeachment proceedings.
Having followed Pakistani politics from a distance ever since I could read a newspaper, I suspected that this would trigger more instability and chaos. While recent developments indicate that I might be correct, being right in this case is, unfortunately, no cause for celebration.
Soon after Musharraf’s exit, the ruling coalition came unglued. The opposition was held together by the focused and singular objective of getting rid of Musharraf. That unifying force no longer exists.
Leading one faction is Nawaz Sharif, whose elected government was the one that was ousted by Musharraf in a military coup in 1999. The other faction is led by Asif Ali Zardari, who inherited the mantle of leadership after his wife, the late Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated. These two leaders and their parties formed the majority in the parliament. But when Zardari became a nominee for president, Sharif took his party out of the coalition.
Zardari won the elections and is the president now. But he may not be well; Britain’s Financial Times reported that he apparently “was diagnosed with a range of serious illnesses including dementia, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.” Who would want this person to be in charge of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?
To make things worse, U.S. forces stationed in Afghanistan apparently had President Bush’s approval to go after the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan — without prior permission from Pakistan’s government. Pakistan’s government, military and media are furious at the unilateral U.S. moves, which seem to undermine the country’s sovereignty.
It was therefore no real surprise when Pakistani military forces recently fired shots to repel American helicopter and ground forces. The only good news here is that the shots were fired in the air as warning. But Pakistani military officials are clear about what could happen: “In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire.”
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda sympathizers and other militant fundamentalists have seized upon the political confusion as an chance to remind everybody of the havoc they can unleash. Take the horrific truck-bomb explosion at the Marriott hotel in Islamabad — just a few hundred yards from the prime minister’s house, where government leaders were dining after the president’s parliamentary address. I shudder to think what might have happened if the truck bombing had happened at the prime minister’s house.
The world has gained nothing from Musharraf’s exit. In addition to triggering geopolitical complications, Musharraf is now completely off the hook and is not bound to answer the question that has dogged us for seven years: “Where’s Osama bin Laden?” Musharraf is the one person who the world suspects has an idea of the whereabouts of bin Laden and his deputies.
Second, with his exit, Musharraf does not have to clarify to anybody how much he was involved in nuclear proliferation.
Recently, in the German publication Spiegel, the wife of the man called the “father of
Pakistan’s nuclear bomb” claimed that Musharraf and his military minions orchestrated the spreading of nuclear know-how to other countries, including
Libya and North Korea. Alas, we will never find out what Musharraf knew and when
he knew it.
It just boggles my mind that the entire world has stood by practically waiting for such events to unfold.
It is more than a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
No comments:
Post a Comment