David Miliband's MIT speech on Afghanistan yesterday spent a good deal of time on two issues: reconciling the Taliban with the central government in Kabul, and integrating Afghanistan into the region.
On the first point, as expected, Miliband urged Afghan president Hamid Karzai to accelerate his Taliban reintegration and reconciliation programs.
Over the weekend, Pakistan's Supreme Court blocked two judicial nominees proposed by President Asif Ali Zardari after Zardari passed over the man who had been favored by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. At issue in the dispute is whether the president must confer with the chief justice before making judicial nominations, an area in which there is some legal disagreement, according to the Washington Post.
And yet here's Pakistani political analyst Hasan Askari, talking to the AFP (via Dawn): "If the Supreme Court goes ahead and tries to pull [Zardari] down, then perhaps the system will collapse ... and perhaps there will not be constitutional government in Pakistan."
Is it me, or does every seemingly technical bureaucratic maneuver in Pakistan now come loaded with tons of questionable baggage?
There was another drone strike in North Waziristan early this morning, according to Dawn -- on top of the two reported yesterday. No word yet on casualties.
Journalists have written a lot this week about tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan. The New York Times reported on Pakistani harassment of American diplomats; embattled Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari said he wouldn't follow an American timeline for fighting the Afghan Taliban.
Heading into Wednesday, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari already had problems. The husband of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Zardari took office in September 2008 and by this past August owned a disapproval rating of 42 percent. A Pew survey found that only 11 percent of the population thought he was doing a "good" job.
Zardari, known as "Mr. Ten Percent" for his crooked reputation, was imprisoned between 1994 and 2004 on various charges of corruption and murder, though he has never been convicted of any crime. When former President Pervez Musharraf issued the National Reconciliation Ordinance in 2007, barring the prosecution of public officials for crimes including corruption and murder, it paved the way both for Bhutto's return to Pakistan and, after her assassination, for Zardari's assumption of the presidency.
But on Wednesday, Pakistan's Supreme Court, led by independent-minded Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, declared the Ordinance unconstitutional, opening the door to a raft of cases against hundreds of government officials, including Zardari.
Regular readers -- even occasional readers! -- probably know that we are not fans of David Ignatius, the Washington Post's foreign affairs columnist. We rarely agree with the man, whether he's endorsing discredited ideas about tribal warfare or eulogizing a Jordanian intelligence chief with a long history of brutally torturing prisoners.
Today he advises the U.S. government on "How to win in Pakistan," and his winning strategy is quite a muddle.
Finally finished reading Sy Hersh's latest New Yorker piece about the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. I'm working on a longer post about it, but I had to highlight this quote, from Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari (emphasis mine):
His long-term solution, Zardari said, was to provide new business opportunities in Swat and turn the Taliban into entrepreneurs. "Money is the best incentive," he said.
If anyone would know that, it's Zardari!
Asif Ali Zardari, the famously (allegedly) corrupt President of Pakistan, took $4.3 million worth of bribes for helping the French sell three submarines to his country in the mid-1990s, according to a report in the Pakistani press.
The three Agosta 90 submarines were worth roughly $1.24 billion (€825 million), according to the Nation, which cites the Pakistani French daily newspaper Liberation (Français).
It's a little hard to make out the details of how this bit of news surfaced, but it appears that there is an ongoing legal investigation by a French magistrate into a 2002 terrorist attack that killed 11 employees of the French defense company DCN, who were in Karachi working on the subs.
The Pakistani government refuses to target Taliban leaders on its soil who are killing American soldiers in Afghanistan, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson said, according to an account published Friday.
In an article published by McClatchy Newspapers, Patterson, the ambassador to Pakistan, said that Pakistani leaders have "different priorities" than America and are "certainly reluctant to take action."
Saba Imtiaz over at Zeitgeist Politics has a good run-down of the latest Pew survey on Pakistani public opinion. It's far more detailed than the Gallup poll we blogged on earlier this month, and it contains some interesting findings about the Taliban, suicide bombings, and Pakistani views of the U.S. (Both polls agree that Asif Ali Zardari is deeply unpopular.)
The poll also found that 77 percent of Pakistanis think the media are a "very good" or "somewhat good" influence on the country. I obviously need to move to Karachi.
Al-Jazeera and Gallup conducted an interesting poll of the Pakistani public; they did a total of 2,500 interviews across Pakistan's four provinces. The results break down by age, gender, political affiliation and native language (Punjabi, Urdu, Pashto etc.).
Most of the results are expected. Pakistanis are split on the question of whether to use diplomacy or military force to deal with the Taliban: 43% support diplomacy and 41% support military action.
President Asif Ali Zardari is deeply unpopular: 11% say he's a "good leader," 42% a "bad leader," and the rest are indifferent or undecided. His Pakistan Peoples Party also gets negative reviews.
The poll also asks about U.S. drone strikes, and here the numbers are even clearer. Just 9 percent of Pakistanis support them; 62 percent oppose them. Something to keep in mind as the U.S. considers stepping up those attacks.
... and we can't tell you the punch line, sorry:
Pakistanis who send jokes about Asif Zardari by text message, email or blog risk being arrested and given a 14-year prison sentence.
The country's interior minister, Rehman Malik, announced the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) had been asked to trace electronically transmitted jokes that "slander the political leadership of the country" under the new Cyber Crimes Act.
Obviously Zardari is very confident about his administration. I'm not quite clear on how you enforce this law; if the joke isn't funny, does it still count?
Let's hope this doesn't catch on in the Arab world, because its citizens are usually pretty adept at skewering their leaders. As a Cairo cab driver once joked to me, "What is Egypt's greatest export? Jokes about Mubarak."
As Obama prepares to give a major address in Cairo this week, Pakistan is quietly suppressing a security crisis: Taliban forces have recently come within 60 miles of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
