Musharraf, like Zia and other khakis who ruled Pakistan; is no better than any other tin pot dictator. He has perfecetd the art of attire according to the occassion. His military dress with all those "tamgas" when talking to Pkaistani public, and hand crafted suits -when abroad, makes for a topic in itself. This man can never be trusted.Our friends at The Acorn put the matter a bit more elegantly in commenting on Dan Darling's recent Winds of Change.NET report on a conference he attended on Al Qaeda .
Dan does not cover Musharraf’s dealings with Pakistan’s jihadi outfits in detail — if he did, he would have found out that the jihadi groups are just one of the variables Musharraf controls to stay in power. In this context, Musharraf is not actually trying to distinguish between good and bad jihadis (for that distinction is invalid) but manoeuvering to do the barest minimum to keep that other variable (United States) from knocking him down. Pakistan’s military establishment has effective control over all al-Qaeda related jihadi groups as well as on their spiritual leaders, patrons and mentors.And then there's the Pakistani domestic opposition to Musarraf. The circus of Benazir Bhutto's husband's release, rearrest and re-release over the past two days has underlined how tricky the "reconciliation process" may be. The rearrest followed Musharraf's announcement about going back on his promise to relinquish his military leadership post on December 31, which flies in the face of the position Bhutto's group has vigorously supported.
The Waziristan operation was a wild-goose chase — the tribesmen did support al-Qaeda and bin Laden, but only slightly more passionately than millions of their compatriots. The most dangerous jihadi leaders, those who can shed the most light on al-Qaeda and its global operations, remain in Pakistan, free to go about their business as long as they keep their head down.
Osama bin Laden is Musharraf’s golden egg laying gander (to invoke the avian reference again), and the General knows all about that fable. As for those jihadi groups, they cannot even hope to subvert the Pakistani state. Musharraf is far more secure and is in far greater control of the situation that he would like the United States to believe.
Zardari's re-arrest appeared to dim hopes of reconciliation between former Prime Minister Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party and Musharraf, a key ally of Washington in the war on terror.Bhutto herself appears to have taken a rather low-key and non-confrontational approach to the goings-on regarding her husband and re-emphasized the need for dialogue with Musharraf to achieve sustainable reconciliation.
However, some analysts said it might have been orchestrated by figures in the military government worried about losing influence should the reconciliation process move forward, rather than by Musharraf himself.
"It's to do with local ambitions and local politics," said newspaper editor and political commentator Najam Sethi. "I don't think Musharraf had a hand in that."
Islamist opposition leaders, on the other hand, have called for nation-wide protests on January 1. From the FT and Reuters:
“Musharraf has become a security risk for the country,” said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, leader of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal ( MMA), the coalition of Islamic parties, speaking before a crowd of about 5,000 supporters who braved heavy rain to attend a protest gathering in Rawalpindi, a suburb of Islamabad. “The military dictatorship is the root of all our evils.”A focus on Musharraf's presidential role, however, while certainly merited, fails to look at the other side of Musharraf's equation. Syed Saleem Shahzad, bureau chief for AsiaTimesOnline, looks at what's going on within the Pakistani army. His report suggests why Musharraf believes he must retain titular as well as de facto control of the "only organized institution" in Pakistan -- and it's not just to ensure his personal safety from further assassination attempts. Shahzad may share The Acorn's view that Musharraf has more control over things than is conventional wisdom, but it's a control that remains vulnerable and will take quite a bit more time and initiatives by Musharraf to consolidate.
Mr Ahmed announced a nationwide “black day” on January 1, when a series of protest meetings would be held in different cities. MMA officials said the coalition then planned to hold more frequent protests. Opinion was divided over how big a threat yesterday's announcement was to Gen Musharraf[...]
Musharraf has forced Pakistan's military into an abrupt and wrenching U-turn. If Pakistan is to modernize and moderate its internal politics, and become less of a disruptive force externally, remaking Pakistian's military certainly must be at the top of the list of critical tasks. And let's be realistic about the process. It's going to be difficult and often violent. If the military in Turkey was the, frequently brutal, force for secularization and internal modernization, Pakistan's military has been built for leadership in "Muslim renaissance and pan-Islamism" as part of a strategy of "political hegemony" in South-Central Asia.
Shahzad sees it as a matter of "Purging Pakistan's jihadi legacy:"
The silent tug of war being fought between the Pakistani army's Islamists and its liberal army leadership appears to have reached a boiling point, with well-placed sources telling Asia Times Online that the army, for the first time in its history, has taken on a different - and much more harsh - strategy to deal with its internal struggles, one that includes the death penalty. In the 1980s, for the sake of maintaining its "strategic depth" against India, the Pakistani army modified the structure of its jihadi outfits, with the aim of boosting its leverage in Central Asia and Afghanistan before forging a strategic alliance to establish Pakistan's political hegemony on South Asia. Since September 11, 2001, however, under immense US pressure, Pakistan was forced to take a U-turn and undo this policy, which resulted in many internal divisions within the army - the only organized institution in the country. Over the past year, several pictures have emerged to support this connection, but the latest discovery by Asia Times Online points to an obvious change already in place.
Behind the iron curtains of Pakistan's military bases, an army that for two decades was oriented in Muslim renaissance and pan-Islamism dwells. Whatever little news that spills out from the closed doors of the army's cells is enough to determine that a serious problem has indeed been simmering since September 11; President General Pervez Musharraf himself admitted after the two failed attempts on his life in Rawalpindi late last year that army officials were involved in the conspiracy.
Musharraf reacted to the situation in a number of ways, including by court-martialing the renegade officials and sending officials who were not ready to go along with government's U-turn policy into early retirement. But this was not enough. Well-placed sources maintain that cases of indiscipline and defiance were so rampant after the South Waziristan operation on the Afghanistan border this year that the government decided to deal with the situation with an iron fist, and has adopted a new modus operandi to deal with problem.
Under the new strategy, all those who were officially assigned to government-sponsored military training camps in the past, in Afghanistan and Pakistani Azad (Free) Kashmir, are now viewed as a threat to the government, and the process of "cleansing" them from the army has already begun. This includes both commissioned and non-commissioned army officials.
The basis of this new assumption is a study on all those who officially interacted with militants in training camps. Instead of cultivating the militants, the camps imbibed their radical influences and in many instances were found to be taking part in activities geared against Musharraf, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and other national targets. As a way to deal with these dissenters, for the first time in the history of Pakistan, defiant commissioned and non-commissioned army officials can be given the death penalty.
[..]
It is interesting to note that in Azad Kashmir, sources say all jihadi camps have been closed by the Pakistani army and all past training operations that were part of the Inter-Services Intelligence's (ISI's) forward section operation, and those who were trained in the camps - whether operated by Jaish-e-Mohammed or any other organization - were subject to prior approval by ISI cell officials. Having said that, ... [e]ven the banned Jaish-e-Mohammed (renamed as Khuddamul Islam) is still part of the 13-member United Jihad Council, supported by the government of Pakistan.
[...]
It is important to note, however, that conspiracies and defiance in the Pakistani army are not a new phenomenon; they have been occurring on a much broader scale, but a review on the handling of those cases indicates they were dealt with in a much less harsh manner.
[...]
So has the army truly opened the "pandora's box" with this new, harsher, crack-down to remake the military? Or is this simply cleaning out some of Musharraf's most implacable internal opponents so he can reinforce his control of the political system from a stronger position atop the military?
The first afoe European weblog awards