Our Puppet Musharraf May Turn Pakistan Into Iran

The uncritical support of Musharraf is a slowly unfolding tragedy. It shows the US has not learned the lessons from the Shah in Iran.

There is an insanity in supporting Musharraf. His western backers are Cornelius, pouring a poison called Musharraf into the ear of Pakistani civil society, creating the conditions for the Pakistani public turning into a deranged Hamlet, brooding menacingly in a dark South Asian corridor, slowly going mad, until one day he ushers in a carnival of blood and murder.

That murder, unless remedial steps are taken now, will be in the form of an Islamic revolution like the one in Iran. Intelligent minds have already started to point out the "eerie similarity" between the state of Musharraf now and the Shah in the 1970s.

In Iran a broad coalition of liberal democrats, lawyers, professionals, students, teachers, leftists and radicals, coalesced - slowly over the span of many years - in the figure of Khomeini. If we continue to insist on backing Musharraf, the same will happen in Pakistan, and a Sunni Khomeini will rise from northern Pakistan. Already, merely 18% of Pakistanis care to fight terrorists; and 49% of them approve of homegrown extremist groups, meaning that fierce radicals are becoming acceptable. There are already people waxing romantic about those resisting Musharraf with guns. These opinions are Musharraf's fault. His ineptitude and mostly his illegitimacy.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali_eteraz/2007/11/pakistan_prince_of_denmark.html

editorial about some university in Pakistan. The writer was dispirited: there wasn't a bookstore on the campus, but there were 3 mosques and a fourth under construction. His point: even if Islamist students weren't the majority, they produced a majority of the activism and decibelage on campus.

Then today, the student-wing of the JI, the IJT (yes, the T stands for tulab, the plural of talib, so it's the Islamic Jami'at Tulab) managed to beat and turn over to the police a speaker from a minor party associated with the JI. Why? Because he wasn't JI. He violated their imposed ban on other groups: In other words, it was a political tribal conflict, one group pitching out the leader from another group. Officially, politicians weren't allowed on campus and that was their excuse. In any even, Khan was wanted by the local folks for calling for pitching out Musharraf via street protests, which allowed them to affix the label "terrorism" to his speech.

My point: Enforcing unity among even just the *Islamist* opposition will be difficult.

In other news, on Monday Musharraf placed the situation in Swat under the control of the Army for the first time (contra every assumption in the WaPo, NYT, Asian Times, etc., which foolishly assumed that it always had been). He waited for the NWFP government to requisition the Army's support. The Pak Army's been in Swat and thereabouts since July (contra rumors that it was just redeployed last week), but unable to do much under the terms of the Constitution. Those provisions are still in place; presumably there's been pressure placed on the NWFP folk to ask for help since those provisions could be unilaterally rewritten. And Wednesday the first real confrontation, in Shangla, took place. Musharraf's opposition apparently wanted him to ignore this particular part of the Constitution, or at least called on him to do so. (edited to finish post, after accidentally hitting "post")