Islamabadnews

Ahmed Rashid lays out the scary scenario currently forming in Pakistan, for those of us who had quite enough of this Sanjaya person just from watching him on The Soup:

Since March 9, when Musharraf suspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, public protests have escalated every day -- as has a violent crackdown by the police and intelligence agencies on the media and the nation's legal fraternity.

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Musharraf's desire to replace Chaudhry with a more pliable judge has badly backfired. After just 10 days of protests, lawyers around the country have made it clear to the senior judiciary that they will not tolerate further legal validations for continued military rule or tolerate Musharraf remaining as president. At least seven judges and a deputy attorney general have resigned in protest.

It would be helpful if Rashid would provide some clarity as to whether Chaudhry represents the sharia/Taliloon brand of "law", but he sticks with the power-struggle nature of the feud, that Chaudhry refuses to serve as Musharraf's rubber-stamp, and that the players in the legal system are backing Chaudhry over Musharraf.

Still, the sharia question is important. We have allowed Pakistan a lot of leeway as we conduct our War on Some Terror, because even a military despot like Musharraf is far preferable to the scores of Taliscum sympathizers waiting in the wings.

But Pakistan, given its geopolitical importance and steadily increasing population, needs to get serious about modernizing outside the cities. This tribal troublemaking in the hinterlands is not going to cut it for much longer, and Musharraf has been about the only outlet for us to exercise even modest (if expensive) amounts of relatively soft power. So, given its developed legal and judicial system, it is critical that it does not get stocked with a bunch of retrograde medievalist sympathizers.

The second element is the country's three intelligence agencies, which are at loggerheads over control of Musharraf, Pakistan's foreign policy, its political process and the media. Military Intelligence and the Inter-Services Intelligence are military agencies, while the largest civilian agency, the Intelligence Bureau, is now run by a military officer. Ironically, Inter-Services Intelligence, the most powerful agency in the country, has been the moderate element urging Musharraf to open up the political system to the opposition parties. The other two agencies are the hard-liners and are urging Musharraf to adopt even tougher measures.

I imagine that characterizing the ISI as the "moderate element" in all this is comparative; the agency has been notorious as a hotbed for extremist sympathizers, some of whom aided the 9/11 attackers directly, and still walk the planet as free men.

The third loss for Musharraf has been the unqualified international support he has received since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Anger in the U.S. Congress and media, and particularly among members of the Republican Party, toward Musharraf's dual-track policy in Afghanistan -- helping to catch al-Qaeda members but backing the Taliban -- is making it difficult for President Bush to continue offering Musharraf his blanket support.

That was the tough-love message that Vice President Cheney delivered to Musharraf in Islamabad last month: Unless Musharraf goes after the Taliban, the Bush administration can no longer protect him.

Any loss of Western support will be critical to the army, which is on an arms-buying spree and depends on annual U.S. military aid of about $300 million. Musharraf has balanced the pro- and anti-American factions in the army's officer corps, but if both sides see him as a lame duck, unable to deliver the goods or stabilize the country, their support will dwindle.

I've picked on Musharraf a bit in the past, but I certainly realize that he's by far the best out of a lot of bad options there. We tend to view Pakistan, like we view every other country, primarily in terms of anti-American sentiment, and what we can do to advance our own interests there. But obviously, given the region, there are a lot of externalities in play. Both Pakistan and India view Afghanistan as a buffer state, and so engage in proxy machinations over it, while that poor country itself continues to drift back toward civil war and barely-controlled chaos. Russia and Iran are constantly maneuvering over commercial and geopolitical interests. And no one in the area seems ready to moderate their sectarian/cultural hostilities.

And if Musharraf goes, and Pakistan and its nukes and madrassas and seething populace fall to the wrong hands, some shit will roll down somewhere along the line, probably sooner rather than later. I don't know what the answer is to this one, but I do think that in the general sense, awareness turns into concern, and thence to some sort of meaningful, comprehensive actions or policies somewhere down the line. Right now the region seems caught in its own peculiar inertia, settling back into old ways and bad habits. We need to provide some positive momentum to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

The trick is that actual democratic elections would likely bring another set of mullah assholes to power. But Musharraf is no longer seen as his own man by his own countrymen, and perhaps allowing real elections to take place, coupled with a plan to immediately start dealing proactively with the winner, engaging rather than further isolating them, is going to be the only meaningful solution beyond the very short term.