The dancing in the streets of Pakistan after the latest political crisis ended may have been overdone, but the relief was genuine. Americans should be dancing in the streets too, because what has happened in Pakistan will probably force the United States to abandon its foolish anti-Pashtun war in Afghanistan before we get much older. But since the Barack Obama administration doesn’t yet realize that it should stop that war, there were no celebrations in Washington.
{sidebar}A very quick rundown of who’s who in Pakistan.
Pervez Musharraf
President of Pakistan from 2001 to 2008. Took power in a coup as chief of the army. Resigned from post of president under threat of impeachment.
[Read more].
Benazir Bhutto
Prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996. Was set to win the 2008 general election for the Pakistan Peoples Party when she was assassinated–allegedly by Muslim extremists–in December 2007.
[Read more].
Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry
Chief justice of Pakistan from 2005 to 2007, when he was suspended by Musharraf for a variety failing to oblige the president. Chaudhry’s suspension sparked Pakistan’s so-called Lawyers’ Movement, which eventually saw him reinstated in March 2009.
[Read more].
Asif Ali Zardari
President of Pakistan for the Pakistan Peoples Party and formerly married to Bhutto. Notoriously corrupt and relatively pro-American. Campaigning for the presidency, Zardari promised to reinstate Chaudhry. He later stalled on the commitment, only to bow to pressure in March 2009.
[Read more].
Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif
Leader of the Pakistan Muslim League and the greatest threat to Zardani’s hold on power. Intrinsic in Chaudhry’s reinstatement via the application of pressure on the government. Relatively anti-American.
[Read more].
Yousaf Raza Gillani
Prime minister of Pakistan for the Pakistan Peoples Party. It was Gillani who announced Chaudhry’s reinstatement on March 16, 2009, speaking on behalf of the government.
[Read more].
Sources: Reports in the Los Angeles Times and al-Jazeera English and Wikipedia.org.
{/sidebar}It was pressure from Washington, as well as from the Pakistani army, that forced President Asif Ali Zardari to back down. Washington did that to save Zardari from his own folly, for it still wants his loyal support in its war in Afghanistan, but he hasn’t been saved for long.
Zardari’s sole claim to fame is that he married Benazir Bhutto, twice prime minister of Pakistan and hereditary leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). After she was assassinated in December 2007, he inherited the party leadership, became prime minister on a sympathy vote in the ensuing election, and promoted himself to president in September.
Zardari’s reputation for corruption is unparallelled, and his political skills are minimal. Both those aspects of his character featured prominently in the recent crisis, which centred on Zardari’s refusal to reappoint former Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, dismissed by former military dictator Pervez Musharraf, to Pakistan’s Supreme Court.
Chaudhry’s determination to enforce the law despite the Musharraf regime’s corruption and contempt for the constitution became a rallying point for civilians demanding a return to democracy. His return to the Supreme Court was one of the founding principles of the coalition between Zardari’s PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML–N) that took control when Musharraf finally surrendered power—but it didn’t happen.
Zardari simply couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was afraid that once Chaudhry was back at the Supreme Court, he would cancel the amnesty that had let Benazir Bhutto and him return from exile in 2007. He may have been right, since the amnesty (on various corruption charges) was part of a deal in which the United States was trying to prop up its favourite Pakistani general, Musharraf, with a pro-American civilian government led by Benazir.
It might have worked if she had lived, but she didn’t. Zardari took over the PPP, Musharraf was finally forced out—and then the coalition between the PPP and Sharif’s PML–N foundered last May over Zardari’s refusal to reappoint Chaudhry.
Just business as usual in Pakistani politics, but then the country’s lawyers started staging daily demonstrations on Chaudhry’s behalf. Zardari really overstepped the bounds last month when he got the tame Supreme Court to rule that neither Sharif nor his brother Shahbaz, the chief minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s biggest province, could hold elective office. He placed Punjab under central government rule, briefly closed down two independent TV stations, and alienated just about everybody.
The protests got bigger and bigger, the army and the United States told Zardari to back down, and eventually he did. Chaudhry is back as the head of the Supreme Court, and the reins of government will probably pass to Sharif within a year. So what?
It’s good that Pakistanis have chosen democracy and the rule of law, even knowing how badly they have been deceived and disappointed by their politicians in the past. But there is something bigger going on here. A conservative, nationalist consensus is emerging that promises to transform Pakistani politics—and to reject the country’s role as America’s obedient ally in the “war on terror”.
Almost nobody in Washington understands that the United States is at war with the Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan. The Taliban are an almost exclusively Pashtun organisation, and all the Pashtun-majority provinces in Afghanistan are in revolt against the foreign occupation, while all of the Tajik-, Uzbek-, and Hazara-majority provinces are at peace. The U.S. allied itself with the other minorities in order to drive the Taliban from power in 2001, but that meant driving the Pashtuns from power, and they are fighting to regain their share.
Every Pakistani understands this, because most of the world’s Pashtuns live on the Pakistani side of the border. Pakistan’s Pashtuns have been radicalized by the war against their brothers in Afghanistan to the point where Taliban values now dominate in the western fifth of Pakistan as well. Music has been silenced, barbers no longer dare to shave men’s beards, and 140 girls’ schools have been blown up or burned down.
Taliban-style terrorist attacks in the rest of Pakistan are now an almost daily event, and lurking somewhere just below the horizon is the possibility of a unified, Islamist-ruled Pashtun state that would destroy the unity of both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Pakistanis will not let that happen, so the country’s acquiescence in the U.S. “war on terror” under both Musharraf and Zardari—which has even extended in the past two years to tacit permission for American Predator drones to kill people in the Pashtun parts of Pakistan—is coming to an end. Without Pakistan’s support, the western war in Afghanistan will have to stop—and high time, too.