Pakistan in Media

Daily Times, Pakistan, Monday, July 06, 2009
The PMLQ could be taking its final difficult breath as its top leadership bifurcates in the days preceding party elections. The Chaudhry clan led by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain is being challenged by Messrs Salim Saifullah and Humayun Akhtar Khan who have a group of important party stalwarts backing them. Both don’t want the Chaudhrys leading the party and want them to step down for the next election which they have already denounced as organised with suspicious haste.
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The News International, Pakistan, Friday, June 19, 2009
PML-N’s Khwaja Asif’s remarks against President Zardari triggered strong protest from the PPP legislators who in turn targeted the PML-N leadership. The speaker had to expunge remarks against the president.

Khwaja Asif accused President Zardari of bringing back politics of confrontation, saying the advocate-general of Sindh has presented the pardon documents in the court on the instructions of President Zardari. “If they continue character assassination of our leadership then we will also tell the people how Farooq H Naek brought the NRO before us to give indemnity to Gen Musharraf,” he added. He said the president lacks credibility and no body trusts him.
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By CHRIS BRUMMITT, Associated Press Writer
Tue, May 26, 2009

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan's top court on Tuesday lifted a ban on popular opposition leader Nawaz Sharif contesting elections, paving the way for his return to parliament and removing the first major barrier to him becoming prime minister for a third time.

Sharif is key to the hopes of Pakistan's Western allies that its moderate political parties will unite to fight the Islamic extremists who are destabilizing the nuclear-armed country as well as threatening the success of the U.S.-led mission in neighboring Afghanistan.

The ruling came as Pakistan's army claimed more gains in a month-long offensive in the northwestern Swat Valley and surrounding districts that has been welcomed by foreign governments but has displaced more than 2 million people from their homes.

Judges at the Supreme Court overturned an earlier ruling banning Sharif from elected office because of a criminal conviction dating to 2000 that he and most analysts say was politically motivated. They said it was a "miscarriage of justice," but gave no reason.

Sharif gave no hint of his political plans in a news conference minutes after the verdict, but he is now free to return to parliament by contesting a by-election when a seat becomes available. To become prime minister in polls in 2013, he would have to lobby lawmakers to overturn a constitutional bar on holding the position three times — something his party has long demanded.

"I would like to salute the people of Pakistan again because they, with great effort and struggle, fought for the independence of the judiciary," said Sharif, whom opinion polls easily show as the country's most popular politician. "I would like to thank God almighty."

Sharif's party came second in parliamentary elections last year, behind the party of President Asif Ali Zardari. The two parties originally formed a government together, but after two months Sharif's grouping became the opposition, accusing Zardari of reneging on a vow to restore judges fired by former President Pervez Musharraf.

Media reports quoting unnamed U.S. officials early this year suggested the United States was trying to encourage the increasingly unpopular Zardari to give more power to Sharif as a way of shoring up the country's moderate center.

Zardari, the widower of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the head of Pakistan's largest party, has cultivated ties with the U.S. and sought to rally Pakistanis behind the fight against Islamic extremists. But his popularity began withering soon after he assumed office a year ago amid a punishing economic crisis and persistent terror attacks.

Critics say Sharif remains close to conservative Muslim factions that are not so vocal in their opposition to the Taliban and see the conflict as "America's War," but his party is secular and supports the government's offensive against the militants in the Swat Valley.

"America's interest is in keeping these two major political parties on the same page in the war on terror," said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, professor of political science at Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Sharif has said he will not destabilize Zardari's government or campaign for early elections, but given the turbulent nature of Pakistani politics, that could change. Since its creation in 1947, only one government in Pakistan has seen through its five-year term.

Rais said he thought Sharif would wait until to 2013 — assuming he won the right — to run for prime minister. He noted that current Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was popular among most parties. Instead, he predicted that Sharif would make a renewed push to roll back some of the powers that Zardari inherited from Musharraf.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled Sharif was not eligible for office, a decision it said was final.

But in response Sharif led nationwide protests against the government, which backed down and allowed him to appeal the decision — a move praised by the United States and Britain.

It also agreed to reinstate the chief justice, another key demand of Sharif.

Sharif returned from exile in 2007 seeking to contest elections, but was disqualified by a court because of a prior criminal conviction on terrorism and hijacking charges stemming from the 1999 coup against Sharif's government by then-Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

The army meanwhile said government troops had reclaimed control of more than half of the biggest town in the Swat Valley, Mingora, and had scared off local recruits who had initially joined with the Taliban.

"The information we have so far from intelligence and other sources is that militants' morale is down, they are panicked and they are trying to flee from different parts" of the valley, said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.

The military account of the campaign is impossible to verify because the battle zone is largely sealed off to reporters. The military says it has killed about 1,100 suspected insurgents and kept civilian casualties to a minimum. Witnesses have described widespread civilian casualties.

Elsewhere in the northwest, intelligence officials said Pakistani troops backed by helicopter gunships attacked suspected militant hide-outs in two villages in South Waziristan, killing at least six insurgents and wounding 12 others. The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

Syed Mohsin Shah, the top government official in nearby Dera Ismail Khan district, said some 1,500 families have fled from South Waziristan in the past few weeks because of fighting between the two sides.

Aid officials fear a second refugee crisis could emerge in the fighting worsens in Waziristan.

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By Sartaj Aziz
Wednesday, 27 May, 2009

AN intense debate is currently under way between the federal and provincial governments about the future of devolution in Pakistan.

A federal, inter-provincial committee is exploring the option of continuing with the devolution plan introduced by Gen Musharraf in 2001, with substantial modifications, but the provinces seem reluctant to follow this course. They would like to introduce their own respective devolution plans according to their varying needs and priorities on the basis of the 1979 model.

Apparently they are waiting till the end of December 2009 when the constitutional protection given to the four provincial Local Government Ordinances of 2001 will expire. Under the LFO 2002, this protection was for an indefinite period but the compromise reached on the 17th Amendment 2003, reduced this protection to six years. After Jan 1, 2010, provinces will be free to legislate on this subject through their respective assemblies.

It is really unfortunate that despite extensive experimentation over the past 50 years, Pakistan has not been able to evolve a sustainable system of local government. Every time, there is a change of government, a new experiment is launched without building on the strengths and weaknesses of the previous model.

In my view, the basic cause of this failure to establish a durable system springs from the civil-military relationship in the governing structure of Pakistan. Whenever a military regime takes power in Pakistan, local government institutions start flourishing because local institutions are the only representative institutions and create a democratic façade in the country. But with the revival of national and provincial assemblies, the local government institutions set up by a military regime lose their importance and some new experiment is initiated to shift the focus of local political support to the parties in power. This should be clear from the following historical account of local bodies in Pakistan.

The first experiment in decentralisation was the Village Agricultural and Industrial Development Programme (Village Aid) launched in 1954 as a self-help project through an administrative mechanism rather than as a legally established system of local government.

The first legally established local government institutions were Ayub Khan’s Basic Democracies created through the Basic Democracies Order of 1959 under which local councillors were elected to undertake community development projects. In addition, 120,000 councillors elected in both wings of the country also served as the electoral college for the election of the president in 1964.

The PPP government elected in 1971 abolished the Basic Democracies system and passed the Peoples’ Local Government Ordinance of 1972 but no elections were held under this Ordinance. Instead an Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) was launched in 1972.

Gen Ziaul Haq’s martial law regime revived the local government institutions in 1979 through the Local Government Ordinance of 1979, under which elections were held in 1979 and 1983 for district, tehsil and union councils. The chairman of the district council was elected by the members of the council, but the district was effectively managed by the deputy commissioner.

The civilian governments from 1985 to 1999 continued the system of local government established by Gen Ziaul Haq, but channelled most of the resources for community development through special programmes. These included Prime Minister Junejo’s Five-Point Programme (1986-88), the Peoples Works’ Programme of Benazir Bhutto’s government in 1988-90 and 1994-96 and the Tameer-i-Watan Programme of Nawaz Sharif’s government in 1990-93 and 1997-99.

The martial law government of Pervez Musharraf, which took over in October 1999, introduced a more ambitious devolution plan through the Local Government’s Ordinances of 2001 significantly enhancing the functions and resources as well as the political role of local bodies elected

in 2002 and 2005.

Under Article 140-A, added through LFO 2002 and ratified by the 17th Amendment in 2003, “each province shall by law establish a local government system and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to elected representatives of local government. Before this provision was added in 2001, there were only two brief references in the constitution to devolution in Article 32 “the state shall encourage local government institutions composed of elected representatives” and Article 37(1) “decentralise government administration so as to facilitate the expeditious disposal of business”.

It will thus be seen that all three major pieces of legislation on the subject, namely the Basic Democracies Order of 1959, the Local Government Ordinance of 1979 and the Devolution Plan of 2001, were introduced by military governments to create inter alia, their own base of political support. That is why every civilian government that followed launched their own initiatives to give greater responsibilities to newly elected MNAs and MPAs in determining development priorities at the local level and to curtail the role of local bodies elected during military rule.

Another major difficulty has arisen from the sequencing of these reforms. Ideally, greater decentralisation of functions and resources from the central government to the provinces should have preceded the devolution of power from the provinces to local bodies. In Pakistan local institutions were strengthened at a time when due to prolonged military rule, provincial autonomy was effectively curtailed. Under martial law, the executive invariably becomes stronger at the cost of the other two pillars of the state, namely parliament and the judiciary. This is a serious structural weakness in our system and has to be addressed by strengthening parliament and the judiciary before a viable and sustainable system of local governance can be established in Pakistan.

There is hardly any politician or policymaker who will not endorse the paramount importance of decentralisation for achieving economic growth and for providing good governance. But there are wide differences on the pattern and scope of decentralisation. That is why it is important to spell out the main objectives of devolution as essential criteria on which any devolution plan should be based:

–– The basic philosophy of devolution is based on the golden concept of subsidiary i.e. whatever can be done at the local level should not be taken up at the higher tier. But decentralisation also requires coordination between different levels of government and adequate regulations to ensure transparency, accountability and representation.

Decentralisation increases popular participation in decision-making because it brings government closer to the people making it more accessible and knowledgeable about local conditions and more responsive to people’s demands. Central and provincial governments located at some distance and preoccupied mostly with national and international issues cannot adequately reflect local priorities and provide the services needed at the local level.

To ensure that the decentralisation effort is not hijacked by the local elites and there is broad-based participation of the people, a strong judiciary and a well-organised civil society is required.

Finally, the state has to transfer adequate fiscal resources to support decentralisation. For these resources to be utilised effectively, local administrative and institutional capacity has to be created and performance judged on the basis of well-defined benchmarks. — To be concluded

The writer is a former finance, agriculture and foreign minister of Pakistan.

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Daily Times, Pakistan
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
view, William B Milam

The question remains whether the PPP-PMLN solidarity on this can hold beyond the army’s campaign in Swat. There is much more territory to regain and hold. Remember, one of the principal tenets of counter-insurgency military strategy is to take and hold territory

A couple of weeks ago while I was in the United Kingdom to promote my recently-published book, I found myself facing an audience at one of England’s ancient and most prestigious universities. The questions were intelligent and well-informed. One very bright student challenged my assertion (better explained in the book than in my presentation, perhaps) that one of Pakistan’s fundamental problems is that it has not yet, 62 years after its creation, settled on a national identity.

My contention is that two mutually exclusive competing visions of the Pakistani state/nation are still vying for dominance. The one we in the West know best is that of the state’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who outlined on August 11, 1947, a vision of a secular, tolerant, progressive state/nation.

The one we know less well, but which may even predate at least the articulation of Jinnah’s liberal version, is the much more restrictive vision of an Islamic state which had been the objective of the Islamists and Islamist Parties who were part of the Pakistan Movement even before Partition. Possibly because Jinnah died so soon after Pakistan’s creation, the identity of the state/nation was never agreed and remains up for grabs to this day.

Bits and pieces of Jinnah’s vision have been, for sixty years, consistently traded away for political gain by both civilian and military leaders of the country in what I call “Faustian Bargains”. I have written in this column several times about these deals, including that the “Swat peace deal” was simply the latest version. It has been many years, I suspect, since the secular aspect of Jinnah’s vision was a remotely possible element of a Pakistani national identity. Some, perhaps even that British student, may think the fight is over and the Islamist vision has won.

The current violent military struggle against Islamist extremists in Swat, and perhaps beyond, is probably only indirectly related to the question of Pakistan’s unsettled national identity. It is not clear that, even if Jinnah’s vision had been adopted and had guided the state’s civilian and military political leaders from the beginning, there would be no such struggle in Pakistan given the history of the last thirty years — the creation and arming of the mujahideen to fight in Afghanistan, and the jihadists in Kashmir (unless one argues that leaders guided by Jinnah’s vision would not have followed such policies).

The Taliban and their allies appear to have a strategic aim of carving out a sanctuary in Pakistan, to make it easier and safer to plan and launch operations in the region and against the West rather than any overall political strategy relating to Pakistan’s national identity. That the Taliban who overreached in Swat and Buner represent such an extreme and repugnant version of the Islamic state is, perhaps, a major reason that public opinion seems to have swung to favour military action to push them back and eliminate their threat to the state.

The view put forward by the British student was that the real problem of Pakistan’s national identity is that the country is a patchwork of different and often competing nationalities, ethnic and language groups, and cultures. Very little has been done to try to incorporate these disparate elements into a national framework, and there remains great tension among them, and between them and the central government. This view is, of course, fully consistent with Pakistani history, as well as current reality; we need only refer to the long-running insurgency in Balochistan as evidence. And there is plenty more if we need it.

There is much to argue for this view. Certainly most historians have pointed out that this heterogeneity is a critical problem that has inhibited building a Pakistani nation. “Nationalities in search of a nation” is one of the first headlines in the book I was talking about. In fact, provincial, ethnic, or language identifications seem increasingly to be elements of disunity in Pakistan. There are, of course, religious differences among nationalities, ethnic and linguistic groups that figure in this disunity, but there are equally — perhaps even greater — elements of provincial, ethnic, and linguistic pride and prerogative involved. These may be exacerbated by economic and social disparities.

But the question of national unity is not necessarily the same as the question of national identity. Bangladesh, with a common language and homogeneous culture, the hallmarks national unity, also has no commonly agreed national identity — although it did not start that way as did Pakistan.

The two versions are, in fact the basis of the two major political parties — the BNP version, a geographic and religious identity, was invented by the first military government to counteract the original Awami League primordial version based on the common language and culture. In reality, these two versions have come much closer together over the past twenty years.

It seems clear to me that the struggle over Pakistan’s national identity fundamentally involves religion. After all, Pakistan was created as a religious sanctuary, and the kind of sanctuary it would be is at the core of the identity problem. That must be why Jinnah, perhaps a little late, endeavoured to set Pakistan on a secular course at the beginning. He may also have been trying to make up for his earlier ambiguity on the nature of the Pakistani state he was creating during the period when he was seeking to hold the Muslim League together for the 1946 election.

When I think back on my days in Pakistan, and beyond the sheer pleasure of the many great friendships I made (many of which I still maintain from afar), the words that ring loudest in my memory are those of a senior Pakistani diplomat who I admired but did not get to know well enough. In what I suspect was an unguarded moment, he said to me once, Pakistan is in a desperate “struggle for its soul”. Almost ten years later, I have heard similar words from others, but, until the last few days, almost never from political or military leaders.

Now, the government and the army have taken up the fight against the Taliban in Swat with intensity and, as far as I can tell, intelligence. The question in my mind is whether they suddenly believe that this really is a struggle for Pakistan’s soul. If so, what led them to change their minds from just a few months ago when they were willing to try one more Faustian Bargain at the expense of the people of Swat?

And what about the rest of the political class? The news out of the all-parties conference was not reassuring. An indirect backing of the government’s policy, we are told. In order to get consensus, all reference to the Taliban and to the military operation in Swat was removed. On the other hand, the PMLN appears to back the PPP government, at least for now, and that is good. Reading further, I find that if there had been a vote in the Assembly on a resolution backing the operation, it would have won by a large majority.

The question remains whether the PPP-PMLN solidarity on this can hold beyond the army’s campaign in Swat. There is much more territory to regain and hold. Remember, one of the principal tenets of counter-insurgency military strategy is to take and hold territory. It took the US Army quite a while to re-learn that in Iraq, having forgotten it once it left Vietnam almost forty years ago.

The Pakistan army certainly has the manpower to undertake that strategy; but does it have the will, and the public backing? And will it have such backing as well as the will to reduce its forces along the eastern border in order to hold the state’s reacquired territory? Or will Pakistan have to go through all this once again in six months or so?

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