Which Way the Wind is Beginning to Blow?
By Saleem Akhtar
Chicago, Illinois

It was stated in a recent press release issued by the Pakistan American Democratic Forum (PADF) that every dictatorship in Pakistan has gone through four phases: 1) honeymoon, 2) disappointment and alienation, 3) resentment, agitation and resistance, and 4) removal from power.
In the sixth year of his rule, General Musharraf is straddling between the second and third phases: widespread disenchantment in Punjab and Sindh, increasingly violent resistance in NWFP and Baluchistan. His decline may be as anomalous as his rise. A number of reasons for such eventuality suggest themselves:
Today, Pakistan is one of the most isolated countries in the region. Its relationship with Afghanistan has deteriorated to a new low. Today, India is far more influential in Afghanistan than Pakistan, not only among the Tajiks and Hazaras in the North but among the Pushtoon majority as well.
Pakistan-Iran relations are on the verge of collapse. Again, India enjoys better relations with Tehran than Islamabad. Iran may even be supporting some Baluch tribes in retaliation against Pakistan’s help to the US in planning an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities as detailed by Seymour Hirsch is his widely debated piece “The Coming Wars” published in the New Yorker magazine.
The situation in Baluchistan is packed with explosive possibilities. Ayesha Siddiqa, an area specialist at Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, points out that a “recent poll conducted by Balochi Voice found that 65 percent believed that armed struggle would bring national rights to the province while only 20 percent supported negotiation, and another 13 percent thought to work through the Parliament.”
Yet, Iran may not be the only one stoking the fires of discontentment in Baluchistan. Pakistani journalist Shahid Afzal writes: “India has set up Consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat. The number of Indian nationals living in Afghanistan is insignificant. The necessity of setting up 4 Consulates besides a functional embassy in Kabul remains puzzling. After all, such a huge investment must be paying dividends for the project to be viable. It is common knowledge that the Consulates have become a conduit for the activities of RAW (Research and Analysis Wing), India’s foreign intelligence agency.”
Gen. Musharraf’s government has failed to convince India to move on the issue of Kashmir on any of the three related fronts: people, land and water.
Look at a recent statement by Pakistan’s foreign minister published on Feb 18, 2005: “Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri said that he has impressed upon the Indian Government for an early and final settlement of the Kashmir issue in accordance with the aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.”
After two years of drawn out negotiations - during which Gen. Musharraf has been begging everyone from Colin Powell and Tony Blair to Sonia Gandhi and the Tata family to help resolve the Kashmir dispute - the only thing his foreign minister is able to report is having told the Indian side that they must find “an early and final settlement to the Kashmir issue”. Isn’t this exactly what Pakistan has been telling India for the last two years (as a matter of fact for more than half a century)?
India provides the clearest measure of Gen. Musharraf’s failure: While India has forced Pakistan to stop supporting the Kashmiri militants, Pakistan is unable even to name India as one of the instigators of trouble in parts of Baluchistan and the NWFP. Similarly, while India, violating the Indus Basin Treaty, has nearly completed the Baghlihar Dam to divert even more water, Pakistan has been left to sheepishly agree with Om Prakash Chotala, the visiting Chief Minister of Indian state of Haryana that “ the construction of Baglihar Dam will not affect relations between India and Pakistan”.
Though the oil pipeline should have been Pakistan’s strongest card in negotiating with India because, after all, it is India that desperately needs oil and gas, yet Pakistan is the one howling for accommodation. In an exclusive interview with the Financial Times, titled “Pakistan to offer India Kashmir-free project deals”, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has proposed “that Islamabad and Delhi [should] agree to a series of confidence-building projects that need not be held hostage to resolution of their central dispute over Kashmir.”
What is included among these “Kashmir-Free” project deals? “First among the proposed projects” reports the Financial Times, “is a mooted gas pipeline to connect India with Iran via Pakistan. Mr Aziz will urge Mr Singh to back the project.” Wasn’t this supposed to work the other way around? Shouldn’t it be Mr. Singh urging Mr. Aziz to back the project?
But that’s not all. Recently, Afghan President Hamid Karzai urged the visiting Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh “to consider an oil pipe line from Central Asia through impoverished Afghanistan to meet India’s pressing energy needs.” Reportedly, India is weighing “whether to meet its expanding energy needs with pipelines from Turkmenistan or Iran, both of which would pass through the territory of archrival Pakistan, or from Myanmar in the East.”
While the Western powers are playing Afghanistan against Iran, India is playing both Afghanistan and Iran against Pakistan to squeeze maximum concessions from all three. Musharraf-ruled Pakistan has been put on a slippery slope of having to meet an endless list of Indian and Western demands. Concessions from Pakistan include acceptance of LoC as the international boundary and no opposition to India’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council as the minimum price of improved relations with India.
Still the absolute worst - the unkindest cut of all - is the negative judgment of Pakistan by the United States expressed in two recent reports, one by the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of the US Congress, and the other by the NIC/CIA.
According to K. Alan Kronstadt, who is in charge of analyzing Asian affairs for the Congressional Research Service, “Notwithstanding its cooperation with the US in the war against terrorism, Pakistan is probably the ‘most anti-American country’ in the world right now.”
Though the British-led Commonwealth and the US State Department have endorsed Gen. Musharraf’s continued undemocratic and unconstitutional hold on power by stipulating “Musharraf must quit his military post in 2007 at the latest” and have thus extended his autocratic rule by another three years, the overall assessment of Musharraf-controlled Pakistan remains bleak. The National Intelligence Council (NIC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have forecast “Yugoslavia-like fate” for Pakistan.
Their joint report titled “Global Future Assessment Report” contains the following prediction for Pakistan: “By year 2015 Pakistan would be a failed state, ripe with civil war, bloodshed, inter-provincial rivalries, and a struggle for control of its nuclear weapons and complete Talibanization.”
Some neocons have started talking of a two-step process to ease-out the increasingly unpopular and chronically ineffective dictator: power sharing with the PPP and PML (N) within a US-supplied framework in 2005 and “retirement” in 2007, if not earlier. It is worth noting that Parade, a mainstream media entity (www.parade.com) had not included Gen Musharraf among the “Top 10 Worst of the Worst” dictators of the world in 2003 and 2004 but has done so this year.
The Western “shareholders” are getting ready to fire the CEO who cannot turn a “failing” business” into a “successful” enterprise, but only after having moved other actors to the front row.
Three notoriously pro-Musharraf Pakistani-American groups have quietly started reviving their contacts with Bhutto and Sharif families - another indication of which way the wind is beginning to blow.


 

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