ABU DHABI (Airport, just passing through on the way back to Toronto) – I was in Islamabad for the 100-day mark of the elected government. It had fractured over the inability to make any clear move to deal with the situation on the border with Afghanistan, the inability to address the economic problem, and the indecisiveness over whether to reinstate the supreme court judges sacked by Musharraf.
ABU DHABI (Airport, just passing through on the way back to Toronto) – I was in Islamabad for the 100-day mark of the elected government. It had fractured over the inability to make any clear move to deal with the situation on the border with Afghanistan, the inability to address the economic problem, and the indecisiveness over whether to reinstate the supreme court judges sacked by Musharraf.
A couple of days ago, the elected government’s coalition leaders, Asif Ali Zardari of the PPP and Nawaz Sharif of the PML-N, took action together to impeach President Musharraf, and said that the reinstatement of the judges would follow. They seem to have arrived at a plan of action, at least: to move against Musharraf, using the prestige the electoral government still has left rather than let it all drain away, and to reinstate the judges despite the dangers that poses to both leaders who are at risk of corruption and illegality when they had previous turns in government (or in Zardari’s case, behind the scenes in government). They still have no plan for dealing with the US occupation of Afghanistan or the resistance against it as well as other forces operating from the Afghan border area of Pakistan, nor do they have a plan for the economic problem: their strategy would be to blame Musharraf for these, to buy time.
I suspect they gave the Americans and the military establishment, including Musharraf himself, plenty of warning before taking this action. I don’t know if the Americans will allow another coup. I was expecting Musharraf to resign and am surprised he has not done so yet, and it may actually come down to a confidence vote in Parliament, which, perhaps like the recent vote in India, might see people mysteriously defying their party line – bribery and blackmail of politicians has been known to occur in Pakistan politics as elsewhere. Even still, I think Musharraf will have to accept that the time is up, and as much as the structure of Pakistan won’t change and as much as many of the problems (of class hierarchy, militarism and military business, religious supremacy, external imperial influence, and so on) will remain, if an elected government can use parliamentary procedure to legally oust a dictator from power, it will set a good precedent.
