Business Daily (Nairobi)
Jim Lobe
20 November 2007
opinion
Amid growing polarisation between President Gen Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan's civilian opposition forces, US hopes of salvaging a power-sharing accord that would marry the military dictator to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto are fading fast.
Indeed, Bhutto's public break with the military dictator - enunciated, among other places, in a Washington Post column last Wednesday that called on Musharraf to resign as both president and as army chief - will make it much harder to patch together the deal that Washington had tried so hard to work out over the last several months, according to most analysts here. That deal called for Musharraf to retain his disputed presidency on condition that he first permit Bhutto to return from exile and then hold elections that would give her a third premiership in exchange for his resignation as chief of the army, presumably in favour of his number two, Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a Washington favourite.
Kayani, routinely touted in the press here as a "moderate" and "pro-western" officer, has also been depicted as part of a group of military reformers who, according to the New York Times, "are widely believed to be eager to pull the army out of politics and focus its attention purely on securing the country", presumably from radical, Taliban-related Islamists who have both consolidated and expanded their control of the frontier areas along the Afghan border since Musharraf declared his state of emergency 10 days ago.
But with the recent house arrest of Bhutto in Lahore and thousands of other opposition politicians, activists, lawyers, and human rights defenders in detention around the country, it now appears that the deal is off, and Washington's options have become both narrower and the course of events much more risky.
The stakes could not be higher. Not only is the Pakistani Army's co-operation considered essential to stabilising Afghanistan against the Taliban and defeating al Qaeda, but the prospect that the worsening political crisis could fracture the military along regional lines is now looming as a worrisome possibility. Pakistan is believed to have some 50 nuclear weapons scattered around the country.
In addition, the Bush administration's failure to break with Musharraf and declare unequivocal support for the civilian opposition's demands risks both further alienating the vast majority of the more than 160 million Pakistanis whose image of the US had fallen to unprecedented levels before the current crisis, and exposing Bush's "freedom agenda" for the Muslim world - already a source of understandable scepticism - as a total fraud.
"If anyone in the Muslim world still believed in the Bush administration's historic promise to support democracy over political expedience, those hopes are being shattered with the crisis unfolding in Pakistan," said Mohamad Bazzi, a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
To try to redress the situation, the administration of President George W Bush sent Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, to Islamabad as his special envoy Thursday for talks with Musharraf, as well as meetings with other senior political figures, probably including Bhutto herself.
To that end, Negroponte (was to) point to threats by Congress that would cut off nearly two billion dollars in mostly military aid it has appropriated for Pakistan each year since the "global war on terror" after 9/11, unless Musharraf rescinds the emergency, sheds his uniform, and permits free and fair elections to go forward, among other conditions.
Lobe writes for IPS on global politics.
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