Throw Out A Good Man, Installed A Crook

Hantu Laut

This could, if it happens, be the most dangerous failed state ever.The clock is ticking waiting for the day the extremists and religious fanatics to take over the state and throw the world into utter chaos and possible nuclear holocaust.

Pakistan is now moving much faster than before into becoming a failed state and a nightmare for the rest of the world. The Talibans, the most extreme of all Islamists, had taken over the Swat valley in the north just 100 miles from the capital Islamabad.The government is powerless and have surrendered the territory to this hordes of mad men.

Throw out a good man and installed a known crook, this is what you get.

Can Pakistan Be Governed?

TO ENTER the office where Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, conducts his business, you head down a long corridor toward two wax statues of exceptionally tall soldiers, each in a long, white tunic with a glittering column of buttons. On closer inspection, these turn out to be actual humans who have been trained in the arts of immobility. The office they guard, though large, is not especially opulent or stupefying by the standards of such places. President Zardari met me just inside the doorway, then seated himself facing a widescreen TV displaying an image of fish swimming in a deep blue sea. His party spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, and his presidential spokesman, Farahnaz Ispahani, sat facing him, almost as rigid as the soldiers. Zardari is famous for straying off message and saying odd things or jumbling facts and figures. He is also famous for blaming his aides when things go wrong — and things have been going wrong quite a lot lately. Zardari’s aides didn’t want him to talk to me. Now they were tensely waiting for a mishap.

The president himself, natty in a navy suit, his black hair brilliantined to a sheen, was the very picture of ease. Zardari beamed when we talked about New York, where he often lived between 2004, when he was released from prison after eight years, and late 2007, when he returned to Pakistan not long after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by terrorists. For all that painful recent history, Zardari is a suave and charming man with a sly grin, and he gives the impression of thoroughly enjoying what must be among the world’s least desirable jobs. Zardari had just been through the most dangerous weeks of his six months in office. He dissolved the government in Punjab, Pakistan’s dominant state, and called out the police to stop the country’s lawyers and leading opposition party from holding a “long march” to demand the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had been sacked, along with most of the high judiciary, by Zardari’s predecessor, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Zardari defused the situation only by allowing Chaudhry’s return to office and giving in to other demands that he had previously and repeatedly rejected.

Yet, despite this spectacular reversal, the president was not in a remotely penitent state of mind over his handling of the protests against him. “Whoever killed my wife was seeking the Balkanization of Pakistan,” he told me. “There is a view that I saved Pakistan then” — by calling for calm at a perilous moment — “and there is a view that by making this decision I saved Pakistan again.” There had been, he said, a very real threat of a terrorist attack on the marchers on their way to Islamabad. That is why his government invoked a statute dating back to the British raj in order to authorize the police to arrest protesters and prevent the march from forming. I pointed out that Benazir Bhutto faced a far more specific threat and was outraged when General Musharraf kept her from speaking on the pretext of protecting her. The president didn’t miss a beat. “And therefore,” he rejoined, “we moved to the other side”: that is, he reversed his order to the police, and permitted the protesters’ march, just before giving in to their demands altogether. Read more....