More Meddling Plans For Pakistan

May 4, 2009

Though I do not really trust Syed Saleem Shahzad writings at Asia Times Online, he likes to exaggerate the bandit stories he heard about, but this part of today's dispatch sounds plausible:

Well-placed contacts have confirmed to Asia Times Online that as a follow-up of these warning messages from American officials, in the next few days Sharif will accept a power-sharing formula to join the government led by Zardari's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) to fight against the Taliban.

In terms of this, powerful political slots will be offered to the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) group. In principle, former premier Sharif has agreed to the terms and will add his party's weight to the battle against the Taliban. Alternatively, if either the PML-N or the PPP refuses to accept the formula, a technocratic interim government under the auspices of the Pakistani armed forces might take over.

These are probably the two worst possible solutions for Pakistan.

Nawaz alone in the lead would likely be a more capable ruler than Zardari. But Nawaz and Zardari together will be worse than either of them alone. All decisions would be blocked because they will agree only on very few issues at all and the political backroom deals will not hold and the bickering will be endless.

A real democratic political solution would reverse the constitution changes Musharraf made. The Pakistani presidency used to be a simple representative role and the prime minister was the person to run the day to day government business. Musharraf put most power to the presidency before he made himself president. During the last election and in their coalition agreement Nawaz and Zardai both promised to reverse that. Zardari did not adhere to that after he got elected to the presidency.

The right move now would be to twist Zardari's arms by stopping the bribes to him and to get back to the old rules. Prime Minister Gilani seems capable and honest enough to run a good administration. He would also be the one who is able to reconcile the political parties and to find a solid coalition in the parliament to support him. But for the U.S. Gilani is a problem. He does not agree to U.S. drone attacks from and on Pakistani soil and he is obviously not as easy to bribe as Zardari is.

A U.S. supported military coup by General Kyani may well be met with a public uproar and riots in the streets. Would the military really fight its own people in Islamabad and Rawalpindi? Politically it is bad move for Pakistan which needs a smaller army and more money for education and other services. With the army ruling it will again take an outrageous part of the budget. Pakistan is one of the few countries with sinking literacy. Poor people now have to send their children to Saudi financed madrases because there is no alternative. A more conservative and Islamic society is the obvious outcome of that.

The permanent massive interference by the U.S. in Pakistan reminds me of Cambodia during the Vietnam war. The outcome in Pakistan may be just as worse as the one we saw there. Let's hope that Nawaz and Kyani can grow some backbone and resist to both of the alternative U.S. plots. These are not good for their country and may be deadly for both of them too.

Posted by b on May 4, 2009 at 18:14 UTC | Permalink

Comments

It is high time that we considered the possibility that, somewhere in the hierarchy of the State Department, thanks probably to Saudi influence and money, an agent of the Taliban directs US policy towards Pakistan.
Or is there another explanation of the constant pursuit of policy which can have no other end but the expansion of Talib influence in Pakistan?
Joining the Muslim League and the PPP, with the Army and the US, to engage in ham fisted military actions, in which the great majority of casualties will be civilians; while propping up the status quo under which the great majority of Pakistanis are milked by their feudal overlords is guaranteed to produce civil war. And, inevitably, draw the US deep into a massive and bottomless quagmire- the Great Dismal Swamp of geopolitics- on the wrong side of a social revolution married to religious fanaticism.
General Giap will be rubbing his hands somewhere and wishing he were seventy years younger and he had one of those Red Army copies of the Koran to look through.

Posted by: ellis | May 4 2009 22:31 utc | 1

Ellis #1:

Or is there another explanation of the constant pursuit of policy which can have no other end but the expansion of Talib influence in Pakistan?

yes, finance.
Curs of Zenda

Posted by: plushtown | May 5 2009 0:45 utc | 2

After three years of reading AToL I know less about the ME than I did before I started. I respect Bhadrakamur, but the rest seem to be amateur politicos, playing with pieces on a chessboard.
However, that’s not to say that such an idea as Shahzad proposes is beyond the ken of US planners. The only criterion of plausability in US strategy is that it follow the rules of grammar, with nouns interacting with verbs in the way people are used to. The criterion of no weight at all is the actual effects such an action will have on the people at the receiving end. A miilion casualties? Oh dear. . . war is messy!!

Posted by: senecal | May 5 2009 0:48 utc | 3

The Brits, Russians, and Americans have spent the last 100 years or more creating a permanently disposable population of medieval vestigials in Afghanistan-Pakistan, sure.
But the rub is: the “taliban” hosted a lunatic religious madman who shepherded enough resources to topple those bauhaus-prison skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. All the Empire-hating euro-apologetics of mass-murder won’t change these facts.

Posted by: slothrop | May 5 2009 1:44 utc | 4

Has it occurred to anyone here that the US, the Pakistan army, and some Pakistani politicians are in it together? Every year when the US needs to get the congress’s approval for aid to Pakistan and the Pakistani military, a sense of urgency is created. If I remember correctly, last year, the Taliban had surrounded the NWFP capital Peshawar and the sky was about to fall and the US media was screaming mad at the Pakistan army for not doing anything. As soon as the right amount of money was appropriated, the Taliban disappeared, the Pakistan army executed a short lived army action, destroyed a couple of houses, photo-ops were created and pictures splashed over the world and then everything was calm and quiet.
This year it is Swat and the Taliban are 60 miles from Islamabad and the sky is about to fall. The Taliban will get the nukes and what not. Everyone from Hilary to Mike Mullen, from Holbrook to Obama, is in action. The Aid to Pakistan bill is in the congress, it will soon be approved.
Is there any congress member who can ask a simple question: how in the hell three hundred Taliban in Buner can attack and capture Islamabad that has almost 100,000 Pakistan army stationed there besides other para military forces?
The issue is how to keep this war in Afghanistan going. You have to keep paying money to the Pakistan army and its agents in FATA to continue supplying the warrior so that the American public can buy a war that wouldn’t make sense to them at all, if they find out the reality.
The Pakistan army is no slouch; it wants whatever it can get to help the US in continuing this war.

Posted by: Hasho | May 5 2009 3:36 utc | 5

b,
you have spend quite some time on this region to get an accurate read of the situation.
i would go on to say that it is a very rare occasion when the US is able to execute a decided policy to any level of accuracy or success. this has been the case for all these 8 long years in this region.
i dont think the pml-n is going to sit in the cabinet with zardari. the chance of that happening is next to zero. and also the pakistan army is not stupid enough to execute a coup under these circumstances. what is a more likely outcome is the exit of zardari (or his presidential powers), probably, via parliamentary or judicial means. gilani will survive in the shorter run with the backing of the army and (verbal) support by sharif. sharif will bide his time until the next crises.
while pakistan does face some serious issues, they are being blown out of proportion by the western press. they do not even come close to being a doomsday clock ticking over the pakistani state. however the entinty that is running out of time is actually The Empire. they are desperate to get their hooks on to eurasia before the economic meltdown speeds up on the home front.
saleem shahzad, in my openion, plays a double agent. rendering his stories to tunes of the highest bidder.

Posted by: a | May 5 2009 6:02 utc | 6

@Hashbo – the money expectation certainly plays a role in the recent propaganda campaign.
—
Tony Karon: Pakistan and the U.S. Still at Odds over Taliban Threat

Still, the army is reluctant to launch an all-out campaign against the militants, not least because of a widely held perception in Pakistan that the Taliban’s rise is a product of America’s unpopular war in Afghanistan. There’s little support in the public — or within the ranks of the military — for deploying the military in a sustained civil war against the militants. Many in Pakistan were convinced that the Taliban had exceeded their bounds in Buner and Swat and needed to be pushed back — but not necessarily crushed. Whereas U.S. officials warn of the Taliban as an “existential” threat to Pakistan, the country’s own military continues to reserve that status for India, against which the vast bulk of its armed forces remain arrayed.
This week, Obama will follow a path well worn by his predecessor, seeking to convince his Pakistani counterpart to do more against the Taliban. But the smart money says that, like Musharraf before him, Zardari — and the power behind the throne, armed forces chief General Ashfaq Kiyani — will be more inclined to simply do the minimum necessary to ease U.S. pressure, believing that their domestic insurgency will peter out when the U.S. ends its campaign in Afghanistan.

Posted by: b | May 5 2009 11:01 utc | 7

US wants national govt with Nawaz as PM: reportLAHORE: A top Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader from Sindh has revealed that the US wants a national government in Pakistan with Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz chief Nawaz Sharif as prime minister and President Asif Ali Zardari to continue as president, a private TV channel reported on Tuesday.According to the channel, the PPP leader, asking not to be named, said Nawaz had become the ‘blue-eyed boy’ of the US and the rest of the West. The PPP leader, who is considered close to President Zardari, said the issue might come be discussed during President Zardari’s visit to Washington, the channel said. daily times monitor
The worst possible solution …

Posted by: b | May 6 2009 4:33 utc | 8

If the Pakistani people get bulldozed by the failed erstwhile leadership in this fashion. It would really pave the political highway for the army to be back in power. And this time with a major bang.
So, maybe the US is now implicit in the plotting for the return of the army, after China has already displayed its preference in its own fashion.

Posted by: a | May 6 2009 14:00 utc | 9

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