By declaring a state of emergency, President Pervez Musharraf has arguably turned Pakistan into the world’s most dangerous country, says The Daily Telegraph. Pakistan is now a failed state, hosting both nuclear weapons and Al Qaeda’s core leadership. The country has lurched from “familiar chaos” to “pure, pending chaos”, agreed Peter Preston in The Guardian. Here is a huge Islamic nation, with a population of nearly 200 million under “full monty martial law”. The President has just sacked his supreme court and switched off TV stations; Islamic extremists are launching ever more vicious and brazen attacks; there is “scant prospect” of any elections, and no alternative to Musharraf.
The US plan to return Pakistan to civilian government, a declared goal since Musharraf seized power in a bloodless military coup in 1999, is foundering, says the New York Times. President Bush says he cannot win the anti-terrorism war without Musharraf and has pumped more than $10bn into Pakistan’s coffers since September 2001 to finance it. Yet Musharraf has proved less committed to the anti-terrorism fight than hoped and, having repeatedly broken promises of a shift to democracy, has now “abandoned any pretence” of doing so. But the US doesn’t have many options. Cutting off aid would weaken Pakistan’s military in the anti-extremist fight and cast doubts on America’s reliability as an ally.
So what now? Unpleasant as it is to prop up a “panicked autocracy”, America should “quietly continue financial support”, says The Chicago Tribune. Al Qaeda would like nothing more than to take control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and behind-the-scenes diplomacy is essential to prevent this from happening. Musharraf needs to be pressurised to stabilise the country by rolling back the emergency powers and releasing the hundreds of lawyers, human rights activists and opposition leaders imprisoned over the weekend. Elections must then be insisted upon: polls have shown that Pakistanis don’t want radical Islamist rule. But by silencing people, Musharraf risks radicalising them.
There’s precious little Washington can do, says The Daily Telegraph, and Musharraf could be forgiven for thinking he has “outwitted his American paymasters”. Even if the national elections scheduled for January do take place, there’s scant evidence to suggest stability will follow. Both Benazir Bhutto and the other exiled opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, “had their respective terms of office as prime minister curtailed amid allegations of corruption and unbecoming constitutional conduct”.
Quite, says The Independent. Even if the power-sharing scenario between Musharraf and Bhutto materialises, it is “far from clear” that Bhutto has much more popular credibility than the General. But if the West loses Pakistan as an ally, we have largely ourselves to blame for “insisting that Pakistan’s rulers treat the West’s strategic whims as their only priority”. Almost the only thing Pakistanis agree on is that they won’t spill their army’s blood “tackling problems – especially in Afghanistan – of the West’s own making”.
Western “meddling” has certainly played a part in the mess, says Peter Preston. But it is not fair to blame the West entirely for Pakistan’s failure, “almost from day one, to establish a democratic tradition”, or for its personal feuds, corruption and “crippling” birth rate. And there is hope. Pakistan is a populous country but it isn’t an endemically extremist one. Better, the major democratic parties are all there is to build on. “Somehow, the majority has to make its voice heard.”