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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