As I mentioned Thursday, things are not going well in Pakistan;
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan on Saturday ahead of a crucial Supreme Court decision on whether to overturn his recent election win and amid rising Islamic militant violence.
Eight Supreme Court judges immediately rejected the emergency, which suspended the current constitution. The government blocked transmissions of private news channels in several cities and telephone services in the capital, Islamabad, were cut.
“The chief of army staff has proclaimed a state of emergency and issued a provisional constitutional order,” a newscaster on state Pakistan TV said, adding that Musharraf, who took power in 1999 coup, would address the nation later Saturday.
Dozens of police blocked the road in front of the Supreme Court building, with the judges believed inside.
A large roundup of news links and analysis at Pajamas Media. This is a situation with grave implications for the region and beyond, (and needless to say, the campaign in Afghanistan). Musharraf’s military rule or a democratically elected Taliban – how’s that for a choice?
Update – Jonthan Foreman on the under-reported facts:
In the Punjab, far from the frontier there was a major suicide bomb attack against the Pakistani Air Force, killing eight officers and cadets (probably a reprisal for air strikes in Waziristan in October). There was intense fighting in the Swat valley, a popular vacation area on the edge of the tribal area, with Pakistani helicopter gunships striking militants of the TNSM, a.k.a. the Pakistani Taliban. Another suicide bomber exploded himself and seven other people in a high security area of Rawalpindi near General Musharaf’s official residence (on the anniversary of a Pakistani missile attack on an extremist TNSM madrassa last year). Whatever Musharraf’s actual motives, I can think of lots of countries where this level of violence might prompt a state of emergency….
The State Department response — calling for immediate free elections — is idiotic. Break down Pakistan’s instability into just some of its component parts — Islamist militancy, tribal unrest, deep-seated ethnic separatism, feudal oppression, sectarian hatred, an incompetent and corrupt ruling elite, an ill-educated population, a paranoid and conspiratorial culture — and it’s far from clear that dictatorship is the disease or elections the cure.
It’s interesting that the official Indian reaction has been so careful. Said a Foreign Ministry spokesman: “We regret the difficult times that Pakistan is passing through…We trust that conditions of normalcy will soon return, permitting Pakistan’s transition to stability and democracy to continue.” New Delhi clearly realizes that Musharraf for all his faults may be preferable to any alternative. …
And:
It would be hard to think of a bigger mess than Pakistan: nuclear; half the population radically Islamic; vast sanctuaries for the architects of 9/11; a virulent anti-Americanism in which aid and military credits are demanded but never appreciated; dictatorship at odds with America’s professed support for Middle-East constitutional government-all the while doing little to hunt down al Qaeda while assuring us that the possible radical alternative, with some reason,
is far worse.
That about sums it up, I’m afraid.
“What’s the alternative? That you support the idea of democracy only when it elects governments you like?”
Only in the sense that I like governments built on the actual foundations of a practicing democracy – not just an ‘election’, which is only the first step.
Democracy requires rule of law, an independent judiciary, a free and independent press, equality before the law. Democracies also eschew the subjugation of women, homosexuals and all those living within said ‘democracy’.
People who make a (often temporary, political) choice to live in subjugation, does not then make a democracy.
No guff: “Democracy requires rule of law, an independent judiciary, a free and independent press, equality before the law.”
All of which Musharraf has swept aside in this “second coup.” And yet he sells all this as necessary because he is the sole proverbial “finger in the dyke” that’s holding back a far worse alternative. And living in our current climate of fear, we in the West will wristslap Musharraf but in the end continue to prop up the dictator, even as we also continue to state that our primary rationale for being in Afghanistan (and the US’s in Iraq) is to plant the seeds of democracy.
You’re right ‘enemy’. It is hypocritical. But justified – it is better the enemy we know than the taliban with nuclear bombs.
Even you, I suppose, would have to agree.
BTW, thanks for the support, David. But as it turned out, my observation was clearly demonstrated.