Pakistan turns 60 this year, yet there are few signs of the kind of maturity one would expect of a polity of such age. Its political elites continue to behave like juvenile delinquents and the military, in power for more than seven years in its latest turn at the helm of affairs, has clearly failed in the one area that should have been its strongest point: law and order.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is to visit Pakistan this month, ostensibly to help increasing tensions between the two countries. He has his work cut out for him. Last month, Karzai had rubbished such “high profile” visits while Pakistani prime minister Shaukat Aziz was in Kabul for talks on January 6. Despite Karzai’s outburst, Aziz announced that Islamabad would increase its development aid to Afghanistan to US$350 million. He politely sidestepped Karzai’s tantrum by pointing out that both Pakistanand Afghanistan need to address their own internal problems.
Pakistan appears headed for more turbulent times as General Pervez Musharraf runs out of policy options in his desperate attempts to appease his foreign masters. Internally, bush fires are burning in three of the four provinces; in the fourth—the Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province—Musharraf is fighting a rearguard action to outflank supporters of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whom he replaced in a coup in October 1999. At the international level, foreign leaders are no longer as polite as they were immediately after September 2001, when Musharraf hitched his fortunes to America’s “war on terrorism”
The killing on August 26 of Nawab Akbar Bugti (pic, right) by the Pakistan army has sunk the already troublesome Balochistan province into chaos, with violence among Balochis in neighbouring Sind province as well as in the commercial city of Karachi.
While ignoring Palestine and Lebanon reeling under the barbaric onslaught of the zionists, the UN Security Council still found the time to talk about Afghanistan. Tom Koenigs, the UN envoy for Afghanistan, warned on July 27 that the Taliban were rediscovering their strength and that the fighting in Afghanistan now had to be called an insurgency, rather than just “isolated acts of terrorism”.
According to official pronouncements from Islamabad, Pakistan has never had it so good economically under the present dispensation. Officials point to the booming real estate and stock markets as well as rising sale of commodities such as cars, particularly the number of Mercedes Benzes on the road, to support their case.
All is not well in the "land of the pure": the "stans"—Baluchistan and Waziristan (both North and South)—are on fire; the dams' controversy has subsided somewhat, but has been replacedby the fury surrounding Europe's cartoons. The anger of the protests is also fuelled by the exorbitant prices of essential commodities, and Pakistan's opposition parties, sensing blood, are going for the jugular.
The subservience of Pakistan’s rulers was again displayed on January 13: the US bombed a border village in Pakistan's Bajaur Agency, killing 18 civilians, six of them children. Far from confronting America's state terrorism, Pakistani officials from general Pervez Musharraf down proffered lame excuses: "foreign terrorists" were the intended target, for instance. In particular, they claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri was a guest at one of the houses for an Eid al-Adha celebration in Damadola village.
The donors' conference in Islamabad on November 19 might as well have been held on Mars, as far as the victims of Pakistan's devastating earthquake are concerned. Donors pledged US$5.8 billion ($0.6 billion more than what Pakistan had asked for), but the sting is in the detail.
Disasters, whether natural or manmade, bring out both the best and worst in people. The earthquake that rocked Northern Pakistan and Azad Kashmir on October 8 has brought out the generous spirit of Pakistan's people and exposed the ineptitude of Pakistan's government.
Even the elaborate Independence Day celebrations on August 14 could not conceal the panic that has gripped Pakistan’s ruling elites since America’s military and nuclear agreements withIndia in June and July respectively.
Shockwaves from the bomb blasts in London's underground system on July 7 were felt thousands of miles away in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan, as well. No sooner was it discovered that three of the four bombers were of Pakistani origin, than all the accusing fingers were pointing at Pakistan.
General Pervez Musharraf's insistence on calling his surrender to India a "peace process" has left not only the people of Kashmir but also some of his closest advisors completely bewildered. His U-turn on Afghanistan, and his abandonment of Pakistan's principled stand on Kashmir, as well as the nuclear programme to appease the US, have left Pakistandangerously exposed.
Pakistan's deep social divisions are on display yet again in the case of two women, Mukhtar Mai and Dr Shazia Khalid, who have been raped but are finding it difficult to secure justice. The feudal system demands that they commit suicide so that the crimes can be hushed up and the criminals let off the hook.
Despite his rhetorical claim that he is “not scared of anyone”, general Pervez Musharraf is a worried man. The “not scared” boast flies in the face of the facts: he is in effect a prisoner in the presidential compound. Meetings and conferences are organized inside the compound so that he does not have to go out, for fear of being assassinated.
To gauge the true depth of moral and intellectual decline of the ruling elites in the Ummah, one has only to see their reactions to the plight of the Muslims in Iraq and Palestine under their occupiers. With the exception of the Rahbar of Islamic Iran, Imam Seyyed Ali Khamenei, not one Muslim ruler has uttered a word against the brutalities being inflicted on these hapless peoples, much less done anything to help them.
What fate awaits a government that wages war on its own people as the regime of general Pervez Musharraf is doing in Pakistan? Having experienced the tragedy of East Pakistan, most Pakistanis know the answer, but appear not to have grasped the gravity of the current crisis...
Throughout its tortuous history, Pakistan has staggered from one crisis to another; but general Pervez Musharraf has brought it to the brink of unprecedented disaster...
Last March US secretary of state Colin Powell designated Pakistan a "major non-NATO ally", while refraining from publicly criticizing general Pervez Musharraf’s handling of the controversy over nuclear physicist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan...
Production of this issue of Crescent International has been considerably hampered by the fact that it has coincided with the series of one-day cricket matches between Pakistan and India at the beginning of the Indian team’s first tour of Pakistan since 1989...
