I wonder if there's another middle eastern civil war brewing?
Some of the experts I read don't think so because fundamentalist have much less popular support in Pakistan than elsewhere. But on the other hand, there is a lot of unrest in Pakistan. This particular story is about the breakdown of a deal to allow the area of Waziristan to govern itself (translation: allow al Qaeda back in to train):
The peace deal in North Waziristan was supposed to give tribal leaders the autonomy to fight off extremist groups but, instead, many believe, as U.S. intelligence officers outlined last week, that it has created a safe haven for terrorist groups. Although the Pakistani government isn't saying that the deal is over, it has deployed troops to the area and local militants declared it to be dead, which, as the LAT says, "indicated they wanted no impediment to an all-out fight with government forces." The LAT and WSJ point out there is increasing talk that President Pervez Musharraf might use the threat posed by the militants to declare a state of emergency and postpone elections that are supposed to take place this year.
A little itty bitty civil war certainly would serve Musharraf's purposes, so long as it doesn't get out of control.
Update: Interestingly, just after writing this I came across this terrific background article on the complexities of Pakistan's political situation. It's a very good backgrounder for those interested in the dangers in Pakistan. Here's an excerpt:
Pakistan today in many ways resembles pre-revolutionary Iran. A cosmopolitan middle class is prospering, yet for the great majority of poorer Pakistanis life remains intolerably hard and access to justice or education is a distant hope: just 1.8 per cent of Pakistan’s G.N.P. is spent on education. The published literacy rate is forty-nine per cent, and in some areas the rate is estimated to be as low as fourteen per cent. Instead of investing adequately in education, Musharraf’s government is spending money on a fleet of American F-16s for the Air Force. Health care and other social services for the poor have also been neglected, in contrast to the public services that benefit the wealthy, such as highways and airports—many of which are world-class.
It is this disparity perhaps as much as anything else that has fuelled the growth of the Islamist religious parties. Ayesha Siddiqa told me, “There is a breakdown of effective government. The political parties have all failed to create an environment where the poor can get what they need from the state. The laws are always twisted for the rich; in fact, there are effectively no laws for them. So the poor have begun to look to alternatives for justice.” She went on to point out, “The religious parties and Sharia are increasingly seen as the one source of justice for them. In the long term, flaws in the system will create more room for the fundamentalists.”
Paralleling the rise of the religious parties as the only effective opposition to the entrenched Pakistani élite—widely perceived as corrupt, Westernized, and decadent—there has been a growing number of Taliban-style Islamist vigilantes, particularly in the M.M.A.-ruled North-West Frontier Province. In the past few months, a rash of suicide bombings—something previously almost unknown in Pakistan—have left scores of people dead in the frontier region.
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Dependent on the support of the mullahs as well as on that of the Americans, Musharraf is in an almost impossible position. He has replaced many of the more pro-Islamist I.S.I. generals, and he appears in many ways to be coöperating with the United States in the hunt for Al Qaeda suspects. But the Army continues to use jihadis in Kashmir, and the extent to which Taliban units are openly operating out of Pakistan’s tribal areas implies that the I.S.I. is not doing all it can to prevent the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan. Musharraf cannot have the blessings of both the Americans and the Islamists, and he cannot continue to dismantle democratic organizations while claiming to be the savior of democracy.
Few people are predicting a happy resolution to this increasingly dangerous situation, yet Jahangir remains optimistic. “Musharraf is rapidly losing the minimum respect that gives you the moral authority to rule a country,” she said. “We have the resilience to create new institutions and new systems. We have enough people of integrity. Given an opportunity, political parties can make a difference and new political leaders can emerge. But we civilians have to run the government ourselves. At the moment, it is not that the country has a garrison; it is that the garrison has a country.
“However flawed democracy here is, it is still the only answer,” she continued. “Once there is a proper political movement, the religious parties will become marginalized. I am not at all gloomy. These protests have been a wake-up call.”
Let's hope the prognosticators about Pakistan being OK are correct. The article certainly paints a picture of Pakistan as being very similar to Iran under the Shah ... a staunch American ally dependent on American weapons with a populace of haves and have-nots. We all know how well that turned out.
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