Financial Times
COMMENT & ANALYSIS
EditorialBurning Pakistan
Published: March 12 2009 19:06 | Last updated: March 12 2009 19:06
To the victor the spoils. That is the reductive, zero-sum philosophy that underlies politics in Pakistan. It is giving a dangerous new dimension to the crisis in Pakistan, where government and opposition are going at each other as if their country were not fighting for its very survival.
Barely a year after the restoration of civilian rule, and hardly six months after the final exit of General Pervez Musharraf, a new power struggle has erupted between the government of Asif Ali Zardari and the opposition led by Nawaz Sharif.
The issue at stake – the principle of an independent judiciary – is very important. But the way it is being tackled by Pakistan’s political elite – looking for factional advantage while jihadis and insurgents overrun swaths of the country – is breathtakingly irresponsible.
Mr Sharif and his allies are marching on Islamabad to demand the reinstatement of judges sacked by Gen Musharraf, in particular Iftikhar Chaudhry, the chief justice around whom the civic movement that eventually brought down the general first coalesced.
Mr Zardari, elected in a wave of sympathy after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by jihadis, has so far refused. Furthermore, he appears to have used the judges he inherited from Gen Musharraf’s thinly disguised dictatorship to push Mr Sharif and his brother (governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s biggest province) out of politics, and is using the arbitrary powers he inherited to crack down on their protests.
While Pakistan is not about to fall to the Taliban, it is fraying at the edges. Ethnosectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia; insurgency in resource-rich but dirt-poor Baluchistan; an Islamist-tinged Pashtun rebellion in North-West Frontier province that has created an indigenous Taliban as well as a haven for al-Qaeda; and home-grown jihadis licensed to harry Indian forces in Kashmir that have now turned their guns on their erstwhile masters in Pakistan’s army – Pakistan burns while its purported rulers scrabble for scraps of power.
The US and its allies are not in a terribly strong position to influence them. Overinvested in their strongman’s ostensible support for the “war on terror”, they failed fully to register the advance of jihadi extremism under Gen Musharraf’s rule, or to develop real links with any institution except the army.
Yet Pakistan’s plight is so serious there must be a chance its politicians will – out of self-interest – stop playing with fire. Surely they can see that a new failure of civilian government will see the country resume an Islamist course under military tutelage – can’t they?
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
SOFT START!
Dawn Editorial
Friday, 13 Mar, 2009 | 08:54 AM PST |
Lawyers and activists of different political parties shout slogans for restoration of deposed judges and independence of judiciary during protest rally. — PPI
There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip. Heralded as a national long march for the restoration of the deposed judges, Thursday’s showing in Karachi and Quetta has cast doubts on the ‘national’ tag of the movement. In both provincial capitals no more than a few hundred lawyers gathered and support from the opposition parties was noticeably scarce. On the day, the largest gathering of protesters was in Lahore, from where the long march is not scheduled to kick off for another couple of days.
The lopsided turnout has raised some important questions. In recent weeks, the political upheaval in Punjab has given the long march added impetus, but the raison d’être of the long march is the restoration of the deposed judges. Can the movement be judged to reflect the national opinion if it draws its support predominantly from one province? Surely not.
Without downplaying the government’s role in letting the judicial crisis fester, in the build-up to the march we have noted that there are other grave national crises confronting the state. If the lawyers and their supporters wanted to raise the stakes in pressing their demands, they should have paid heed to the need for their movement to demonstrate a national face. Otherwise they ran the risk of appearing to put their narrow interests ahead of the broader national interest.
At the very least, the leaders of the lawyers’ movement and opposition political parties should have led from the front in Karachi and Quetta. But in quasi-farce scenes played out on television yesterday, at times it appeared that the hordes of cameramen and reporters easily outnumbered the protesters they were there to cover.
Now the long march is shaping up to be a struggle that pits Punjab against the centre, with the almost inevitable result it will be seen through the political prism of a straight fight between the PPP and the PML-N. For the apolitical supporters of the principle of an independent judiciary, that will not be the outcome they could have hoped for.
On its part, the government was again guilty of overreaction and an excessive use of force. More sensible hands would have recognised that the protesters in Karachi and Quetta represented little threat and were clearly not pushing for confrontation. Instead, the scenes of scuffles and mass detentions that played out in front of the cameras have added fuel to the perception that the government is nervous and edgy and can easily be goaded into making a catastrophic mistake.
What the government appears to have failed to understand is the nature of power. Electing its candidate as chairman of the Senate or having a secure majority in parliament can become irrelevant if it appears the government doesn’t believe it is in charge outside parliament.