Pakistan is not a failed state! Corruption is not failed in Pakistan either!

Fareed,

I just wrote that I agree with David 105%. I disagree with you 110%.

You are right in your analysis -- Washington has to have a Pakistan policy. But DO NOTHING, after having brokered the Benazir-Musharraf rapprochement, is now the best policy. Yes, they are pinstripe lawyers striking; yes human rights activists for whom I have the highest respect (including Asma Jahangir) are under house arrest; yes, maybe if the march tomorrow is allowed to go ahead, the cross-section of civil society participants could indicate an overwhelming popular sentiment that Musharraf should go (THAT would be a wisdom of the multitude with which I would not disagree).

However, there has been an insurgency going on which EVERYBODY, most vocally of all Benazir, has been pushing Musharraf to counter at the risk of at least three attempts on his life.

I ask: where were these people when the predicament that Pakistan finds itself in today was building up? Benazir, Nawaz Sharif had been Prime Ministers. The lawyers were advancing on their secure career paths, but they could also have made their voice heard about the training camps in Afghanistan, about the monstrous use of gullible Pakistani youths as cannon fodder in the jihaad against godless communism, about the deadly standoff between central government development priorities and parochial interests, about the right balance between religious values and secular moderation?

On all these counts, Musharraf's record is commendable. Yes, he blundered very badly in his heavy-handed treatment of Chief Justice Chaudhry and his subsequent abuse of military powers.

But, Benazir cannot say that she is totally lonely in the responsibilities she is expected to shoulder after the successful rapprichement, so far, with Musharraf. General Kiani had been a loyal collaborator. More than one of the high-profile religious leaders are sympathetic to her. At the same time, during her eight year in exile, THEY (Kiani, the religious leaders, civil society) have faced the unrest, the economic difficulties, the tensions, and have so far avoidedan uncontrollable falre-up.

They are the ones best-placed to resolve the current standoff as well.

I remember protesting very vocally in IHT when the US was perversely supporting Jonas Savimbi in Angola while Cuba was helping in health care, etc. Even today in Southern Africa, the evocation of what Cuba and Castro did for South Africa, Namibia, Angola wets eyes -- it wets MY own eyes. But the insistence of the US to intervene has ended up corrupting even Dos Santos after the US wisened up and switched support.

Allah Subhaana-Wata'ala forbid, no such outcome should happen in Pakistan.

If it is not a failed state then what it is?A country since its creation has not any independent foreign policy and serving for the security of foreign interests and deprived of civil society support for rigging in the elections whether under the military or civilian rule to the interest of U.S. and other money lenders.United States is not interested in the betterment of the mass pakistani population as it assisted 10 billion dollers to Musharraf and his army team to do the White House job, while the Pakistanis are suffering under the debt of 38 billion dollers of the world bank and other donors which they are paying 4 billion dollers as annual installment to the Paris club and others.And about the nuclear issue,not any Islamists have the intention to run over the nuclear arsenal,but the real fact is that the Military rulers of this country since the last 15 years are cooperating in nuclear with the Iranians to get the cheap oil and a promise for the gas pipeline and flow of the gas on Islamabad conditions, as an evidence the 260 Pakistani nuclear technicians are already serving in the Iranian nuclear sites.It is not strange that the American secret services do have the concret proof of this Pak-Iran nuclear issue as a matter a Pakistani government spokesman disclosed to day that the country's nuclear installations can not be detected not even by any satellite.

The above "Taliban client state theory is very interesting...however, Pakistan needs a strong military, it needs a strong economy and its needs a strong civilian government...It could be that what is happening is healthy. i.e.,part of the process of Pakistan going from being a state in name only… to being a nation. The Top General (Kayani) came out of intel,and no doubt has strong US ties to US intel. Stratfor asserts that he helped broker the Musharraf-Bhutto deal (probably due to US pressure /Influnece) It has not worked. Musharraf is toast, I doubt he will be able to hang on much longer. The political parties will not particpate in elections under emergency rule, the protests will not end under emergency rule. Moreover pursuant to Pakistan press, Sharif and Bhutto are in communication. Students at Punjab University’s New Campus will lead a protest on Nov 14. US should have lines of communication to military command, but also, if we have learned anything from Iraq, we better have communication lines to political Islamist parties too. Bhutto is highly compromised, due to her past, and due to this sweetheart deal with Musharraf, and now charges that she is a tool of the US… It’s difficult to see Sharif and Bhutto in an alliance but if you think about it … no more difficult than if you had said 6 months ago Bhutto would agree to serve with Musharraf!…The US should get ready for Pakistan post-Musharraf, a political outcome that we will be unable to determine or perhaps even influence…it’s impossible to predict what is going to happen here…watch for an “outlier” to influence the outcome.

What America needs to do is pipe down, talk less and do more. There has been far too much media melodrama and vaudeville about Musharraf personally and the state of the Pakistani state which he has taken full advantage of, to obscure the hard truth on the ground.

The hard truth on the ground is that Musharraf is continuing the Pakistan military's decades old policy of preserving the military's strategic depth option in Afghanistan even at the cost of dismissing elected governments and sub-letting Pakistani Islam to Saudi Wahabis.

Musharraf has been wrongly projected as a martyr to the US cause standing on the burning deck fighting extremists. This projection allows him to ruthlessly shut out his domestic challengers and ties the continuance of raining dollars and arms, to keeping the extremist threat alive in the Western media. To his domestic audience which hopelessly lacks any consensus about the role of military, religion, provincial rights, democracy, he appears as their only anchor in the international storm about Pakistan being a failed state.

His image of a moderate at heart also allows him to quietly keep the Taliban client state option alive for Pakistan, to be pursued with increasing openness once the US media circus moves on(as the US media did once before to Iraq). With Musharraf's "moderate under siege" image as cover, Pakistani state and political entities who are stakeholders in the Taliban client state option get to incite rebellion by their former mujahideen clients like the Ghazi brothers and Sufi Mohammed of the Swat region and thereby expand their influence over the Pakistani state.

Militaristically viewed, this is a win-win situation for all supporters of the Taliban client state option, from the Pakistani liberal to Pakistani moderates to Pakistani extremists.

If the Pakistani Army is forced by the US to fight the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban in NW Pakistan with full military force, these regions will become permanently estranged from the Pakistani state beside precipitating an inter-ethnic crisis. So whether fought or supported, the Taliban is thus evolving from being a de facto to de jure part of the Pakistani state. Afghanistan and the NATO forces will be forced to deal this reality for years to come. All the US media hype about silent moderate majority of the Pakistani nation only creates a smoke screen for this evolving reality.

The militants in the tribal areas cannot be made to play their parts of being naughty boys sent to stand in corner by the morally outraged scolding US media, a part which Musharraf is currently being made to play. What good is the moral outrage and scolding doing anyway? Musharraf is being set up as a proxy to fight US wars, and is being scolded for not doing what the US administration itself refuses to do, which is, acknowledge and deal with the ground reality in that region.

The reality is that the tribal areas militants are totally committed to expanding Taliban military, economic and ideological influence, period, and that makes them increasingly indispensible to the Pakistani Army, if only the US media got off its back. That is where elections, Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf's uniform come in. As long as the US media obsesses over these being the cure for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the Taliban can be quietly supported, as evidenced by the big fuss made about the judiciary and corrupt politicians and no fuss at all made about Mullah Omar's defense minister Mullah Obaidullah Akhund being released by Musharraf this week(as reported in the Newsweek).

Let us admit it - the US and its media are being played. While the media leads the world in debating in abstract on the psychology of Musharraf, the military and about how best Pakistanis can rule 160 million people and eliminate extremism, Musharraf is having no such debate either in his mind or in his inner circles. He is simply using the media circus as cover to consolidate his personal power and preserve the Taliban client state option.

What can anyone do? Firstly stop writing misleading opeds on how Musharraf or his military colleagues are moderates at heart who can be weaned from the Taliban client state policy by judicious application of carrot and stick. He can't be weaned and neither can the Pakistani Army.

Using Musharraf and his Army as US proxies for the war on Taliban is only reinforcing their Taliban client state policy not weakening it. It doesn't matter whom the US installs as Prime Minister to moderate the Pakistani military policy, such a person however popular and freely elected will be helpless to change course while the Army goes from strength to strength being armed by US, China and Saudi patronage.

Once you admit that neither Musharraf nor the Army can be weaned from the Taliban client state policy, the media circus can end and people can begin to talk of dealing with the reality not the abstract. Some may then examine with a clear sight who and what are enablers of Taliban fighters, their funds, arms, supplies, drugs, their ideology.

Only then can the Taliban and Al Qaeda be fought directly by those forces genuinely interested in doing so. Fighting the real war on terror(as opposed to GW Bush's half hearted masquerade of one) through the media-created strawmen of "moderate" Pakistani military or civilian leaders is a failed policy for the region and the world.

Of course it is not a failed state!...it will look like Turkey down the line ...strong cohesive military binding the various sectors ...with pro West/political Islamist party dominating politics, yet respectful of democracy...it is moving from being a state into nationhood...hence, this eruption has the potential to be a healthy development in its history...HOWEVER, if US interferes in the political outcome then there is a potential for Pakistan to be a failed state...