Musharraf suspends Pakistani constitution, lawyers revolt

[Fash]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21609019/

SLAMABAD, Pakistan - Police fired tear gas and battered thousands of lawyers protesting President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s decision to impose emergency rule, as Western allies threatened to review aid to the troubled Muslim nation. More than 1,500 people have been arrested in 48 hours, and authorities put a stranglehold on independent media.

Musharraf, who took power in a 1999 coup and is also head of Pakistan’s army, suspended the constitution on Saturday ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on whether his re-election as president was legal. He ousted independent-minded judges, stripped media freedoms and granted sweeping powers to authorities to crush dissent.

His prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, said on Monday that Pakistan will hold a national election on schedule. "Our thinking about the election is that it will be held according to schedule," Aziz told a news conference.

But he did not elaborate on whether the schedule is a new one or the previous one, which set January as the election month.

Separately, Attorney General Malik Abdul Qayyum said there would be no delay in the election. "By Nov. 15, these assemblies will be dissolved and the election will be held within the next 60 days," he told Reuters.

Though public anger was mounting in the nation of 160 million people, which has been under military rule for much of its 60-year history, demonstrations so far have been limited largely to activists, rights workers and lawyers. All have been quickly and sometimes brutally stamped out.

U.S. reaction
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Washington was reviewing its assistance to Pakistan, which has received billions in aid since Musharraf threw his support behind the U.S.-led war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

At a news conference in the West Bank on Monday, Rice urged Musharraf to follow through on past promises to “take off his uniform.”

“I want to be very clear,” she said, as a team of U.S. defense officials postponed plans to travel to Islamabad for talks Tuesday because of the crisis. “We believe that the best path for Pakistan is to quickly return to a constitutional path and then to hold elections.”

The White House also weighed in with spokeswoman Dana Perino urging a quick return to civilian rule and the release of people detained under an emergency decree.

Britain also said it was reviewing its aid package to Pakistan, and the Dutch government suspended its aid on Monday.

Musharraf reiterated to foreign ambassadors Monday that he was committed to complete the transition to democracy, though, under a state of emergency, elections scheduled for January could be pushed back by up to a year, according to the government.

He also denied rumors that he had been placed under house arrest by junior officers. "It is a joke of the highest order," Musharraf told Reuters from the presidency building after the meeting with foreign envoys.

Critics say Musharraf imposed emergency rule in a last-ditch attempt to cling to power.

His leadership is threatened by the Islamic militant movement that has spread from border regions to the capital, the re-emergence of political rival and former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and an increasingly defiant Supreme Court, which has been virtually decimated in the last two days.

Hundreds of arrests
Since late Saturday, between 1,500 and 1,800 people have been detained nationwide, an Interior Ministry official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. They include opposition leaders, lawyers and human rights activists who might mobilize protests.

At least 67 workers and supporters of Bhutto — who has held talks in recent months with Musharraf over an alliance to fight extremism — had been arrested, said Pakistan People’s Party spokesman Farhatullah Babar.

Lawyers — who were the driving force behind protests earlier this year when Musharraf tried unsuccessfully to fire independent-minded chief justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry — attempted to stage rallies in major cities on Monday, but were beaten and arrested.

Chaudhry was removed from his post on Saturday, just as the Supreme Court was preparing to rule on whether Musharraf’s Oct. 6 re-election. Opponents say he should be disqualified because he contested the vote as army chief.

In the biggest gathering Monday, about 2,000 lawyers congregated at the High Court in the eastern city of Lahore. As lawyers tried to exit onto a main road, hundreds of police stormed inside, swinging batons and firing tear gas. Lawyers, shouting “Go Musharraf Go!” responded by throwing stones and beating police with tree branches.

Police bundled about 250 lawyers into waiting vans, an Associated Press reporter saw. At least two were bleeding from the head.

In the capital, Islamabad, hundreds of police and paramilitary troops lined roads and rolled out barbed-wire barricades on Monday to seal off the Supreme Court.

Only government employees heading for nearby ministries were allowed through. Two black-suited lawyers whose car was stopped by police argued in vain that they should be granted entry. They were eventually escorted away by two police cars.

It's fucked up what's going on over there... I don't fully understand the situation, but I'm surprised to see lawyers as the 'good guys' in this situation and I wonder if lawyers in the US would ever stand up for anything in such a fashion.

[Ashur]

Despite being a dictator wannabe, I've always tried to give Musharraf the benefit of the doubt as Pakistan is a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism and quite frankly makes me nervous given that they have nuclear weapons. He's always been willing to kow-tow to the West, which (being IN the West) I can dig, from my own self-serving vantage point.

That said, it looks very strongly as if he's pulling a Chavez and rigging the system to stay both President and Army chief. Benizar Bhuto is getting shafted and she knows it. No sooner has she returned to the country for free elections, but she's being left out in the cold for assassination attempts while Martial Law is thrust upon the land to forestall the elections.

That's how it appears in any event. It could be coincidence. Musharraf has some amunition for what's happened in that it's hard to hold free elections if people are blowing up crowds, but it's hard to say whether his government is complicit in the activity that led to the crackdown.

[Fash]

Opinion: Pakistan Gets My Vote for a Black Swan Event
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... refer=home

Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Washington is obsessed with the war in Iraq, the danger of Turkish troops clashing with Kurdish militants and President George W. Bush's possible showdown with Iran over its nuclear weapons ambitions.

Yet the larger threat may be a so-called Black Swan event, something that is both far outside conventional expectations and of such extreme consequence that it might shift not only U.S. electoral dynamics but also the global security calculus.

The odds are rising of such an event growing out of Pakistan, whose status as the most dangerous place on earth was further confirmed by President Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule on Nov. 3. His suspension of the constitution, dismissal of the chief justice, restrictions on free speech, and roundup of some 1,500 lawyers, judges and political activists do little to change the nation's frightening course.

Jihadist and extremist groups sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qaeda have grown in frontier provinces and spread to Pakistan's main cities. Secular leadership is faltering in a nuclear-armed country. As Musharraf put it during an address to the nation: ``Inaction at the moment is the suicide of Pakistan, and I won't allow this country to commit suicide.''

What to watch is whether the emergency measures, which Musharraf's opponents say are aimed more at personal than national preservation, reverse these forces or merely push them underground to explode in the coming days and weeks. For now, what has died is a peaceful evolution toward secular, democratic rule through a power-sharing arrangement between the military- led regime and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Nightmare Scenario

Intact is the nightmare scenario: Musharraf's failure or death allows extremists, some of them certainly in the state security services, or ISI, to gain control of the country and its nuclear arsenal of 50 to 100 weapons.

Bhutto and others have suggested the possible role of ISI officers in the assassination attempt on her in Karachi when she returned from exile last month, a bombing that killed 136.

Short of extremists gaining power, imagine terrorists striking the U.S. in an event far worse than 9/11, but this time the trail leads to Pakistan. Any U.S. president will be forced to respond, but given the sobering lessons of Iraq it's not clear how to do so without making matters worse.

U.S. officials say the odds of an extremist takeover are remote. Islamist forces have never polled much more than 10 percent in elections, and Bhutto's giant reception underscored the appeal of secular leaders.

Avoiding Self-Deception

Yet the point of a Black Swan exercise is to avoid the self-deception of conventional wisdom and remember the world's most dramatic changes have come from unanticipated quarters: Iran's Islamic Revolution, Fidel's takeover of Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11, to name just a few.

The term Black Swan grew out of an old idea that all swans were white, a notion that was turned on its head once black swans were discovered in Australia. Since then, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb used the phrase as the title of a book published earlier this year that describes hard-to-predict, potentially disastrous events beyond the realm of normal expectations.

Pakistan has been breeding Black Swan possibilities for years, but the situation has worsened.

Militants have spread from Pakistan's tribal areas, precipitating the Red Mosque assault in July and the Bhutto bombing. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, compared the situation to Iraq and Afghanistan ``where people who have negative agendas are increasingly in positions to assert them.''

Gone Too Far

U.S. officials have long suspected that Musharraf's military hasn't wanted much to go after insurgents. He recently escalated his attacks amid U.S. pressure and fearful that he has let extremism go too far. The question now is whether Pakistan's military has the training and equipment to succeed in an insurgent fight.

Finally, Western intelligence agencies can't easily account for all Pakistan's nuclear weapons or where they might be found should Pakistan spin out of control.

The picture is so ugly that senior officials avoid discussing it in public.

So what to do?

For starters, the U.S. must encourage Pakistan to expand small, but effective programs to bring young people out of the radical madrassas, the Islamic religious schools that can be breeding grounds for anti-Western views and jihadism.

The U.S. also must deepen and intensify the military ties that were restored following September 2001 after they were cut in the previous decade by Congress. The Pakistani army's makeup and loyalty is too important to be left to chance at a time when it remains the best hope against extremists.

Extremist Threats

The U.S. should encourage Musharraf not to let up as extremists threaten not just the U.S. and Afghanistan but also Pakistan's future.

It is harder to prescribe a response should an ugly Black Swan event happen. I haven't found any U.S. official who has engaged in a successful war game involving Pakistani nukes in extremist hands. Nor can anyone predict how neighboring, nuclear India or distant Israel might react. To the best of my knowledge, there's no contingency plan for responding to a terrorist strike on the U.S. that has its origins in Pakistan.

I hope someone has better answers. But given recent events I fear my Pakistani Black Swan scenarios aren't as far-fetched as many Washington wishful thinkers might hope.

[Ashur]

From CNN:

Police earned cash bonuses for beating and arresting hundreds of lawyers Monday who had gathered outside of Lahore's courthouse, police sources said.

I wonder if they could get Points instead?

[pyrella]

Bhutto is no Angel either:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benazir_Bhutto

Comments from both co-workers, and a lot of people in this article (look at the bottom, don't actually read the article, it's wasted time you won't recover) as an example:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/06/navarrette/index.html


Obviously there's no perfect solution, and massive suspension of freedoms doesn't come close to being one of them. But when you're in between a rock and a hardplace...


I'm just curious as to how long it will be before Musharraf gets lumped in with the Noriegas and Husseins that the US has propped up in the past only to turn and declare them the Tyrannical Dictators Du Jour™

[Fash]

Bhutto Under House Arrest in Pakistan
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071109/D8SQ50I83.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Pakistani police placed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest Friday, uncoiling barbed wire in front of her Islamabad home and reportedly rounding up 5,000 of her supporters to block a mass protest against emergency rule.

Bhutto tried twice to leave by car but was blocked by police after a scuffle with her supporters who tried to remove a barricade. The former prime minister had planned to address a rally in nearby Rawalpindi, defying a ban on public gatherings.

A suicide bombing at the home of a Pakistan government minister in the northwestern city of Peshawar, meanwhile, killed at least four people, police said. The minister was unhurt.

Also Friday, a bomb exploded at a military checkpoint, killing at least two soldiers and wounding five in Kambal, a town about 120 miles north of Peshawar, an army spokesman said. He said the victims were from the paramilitary Frontier Corps.

In Rawalpindi, about 200 Bhutto supporters were dispersed by police using tear and batons. Dozens were arrested, an AP Television News cameraman reported. Later, there was a second, smaller clash between protesters and police. Aside from those incidents, the streets of the garrison city were mostly deserted.

Kamal Shah, a top Interior Ministry official, said a district magistrate had served a "detention order" on Bhutto - who last month escaped an assassination attempt by suicide bombers, an attack that killed more than 145 people - so she could not leave her home.

However, speaking by phone from the scene, Bhutto said that no arrest papers had been served on her.

"If I'm arrested the People's Party of Pakistan workers will continue to fight for democracy and the rule of law," she told reporters who heard the call via speakerphone. She said that 5,000 members of her party had already been detained.

Afzal Khan, an Islamabad police official, said that officers blocking Bhutto's way were following a government order under which she could not hold the rally. The Rawalpindi mayor said there was a "credible report" that six or seven suicide bombers were preparing to attack it.

The crackdown showed that a week after suspending the constitution and assuming emergency powers, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf was not letting up on his political rivals despite saying Thursday that parliamentary elections would go ahead by mid-February, just a month later than originally planned. His announcement came after intense pressure from the United States, his chief international supporter.

Friday's moves will further sour relations with Bhutto and hurt the prospects of the two pro-Western leaders forming a postelection alliance against religious extremism.

Bhutto tried twice to leave for Rawalpindi inside a white Landcruiser with tinted windows, surrounded by about 50 supporters, including several lawmakers, an intelligence official at the scene said.

On the first attempt, Bhutto supporters pulled at a barbed wire barricade on the street to make way for the vehicle, but were blocked by police, the official said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to media. Bhutto's vehicle only managed to travel about 40 yards before it was stopped.

"We are trying to pass through because we want to reach Rawalpindi. There was a baton charge. There was a barbed wire. People in Kashmir were also stopped from reaching here. Those who can reach Rawalpindi, they should try to reach there," Bhutto later told private Geo TV.

During her second attempt to leave, she addressed police through a loudspeaker, telling them: "Give me way. Do not raise hands on women. You are Muslims. This is un-Islamic. We are peaceful."

Police responded by blocking her way with an armored vehicle. So she got out, and joined her supporters, who chanted "Go Musharraf Go!"

"The government says that some suicide bombers have entered Islamabad. If they have any such information, then why can't they arrest them?" Bhutto said.

She also demanded that Musharraf step down as army chief by next week when his presidential term expires.

"He should be retired as the chief of army staff by Nov. 15," she told reporters.

Dozens of police, some in riot gear, were deployed at Bhutto's residence by barbed wire and steel and concrete barriers. Other security personnel patrolled on motorcycles, horseback and in armored vehicles. At least 12 Bhutto supporters were arrested, including a woman who showed up with flowers.

In the second clash in Rawalpindi, about two dozen supporters burst out of an alley, shouting, "Long Live Bhutto!" Police, some on horseback, others banging their shields, chased them away. Other supporters set a tire and garbage on fire. Police fired tear gas shells from an armored personnel carrier, and the protesters pelted the police with stones.

In the northwestern city of Peshawar, police used force to disperse about 300 Bhutto trying to reach Rawalpindi. About 25 were arrested.

Bhutto's decision to join in anti-government protests against Musharraf is another blow to the military leader whose popularity has plummeted this year amid growing resentment of military rule and failure by his government to curb increasing violence by Islamic militants.

Critics say that Musharraf - who seized power in a 1999 coup - declared the emergency and ousted independent-minded judges to maintain his own grip on power. The moves came days before the Supreme Court was expected to rule on whether his recent re-election as president was legal.

Musharraf said the declaration of emergency last Saturday was needed to put an end to political instability and to fight Taliban and al-Qaida-linked militants.

But most of the thousands of people rounded up countrywide have been moderates - lawyers and activists from secular opposition parties. Police have squashed attempts by lawyers to protest. Hundreds of students have also stage demonstrations on university campuses.

Across the normally bustling city of Rawalpindi, where the headquarters of Pakistan's army and Musharraf's residence is located, streets were largely deserted, aside from the two clashes with police. Friday also marked a public holiday in Pakistan. The road to Islamabad had been blocked by two tractor trailers and a metal gate.

"Since the government has not given permission for it due to security reasons, we will not allow any one to gather here for the rally," the city's police chief, Saud Aziz, told The Associated Press.

Police were also on the lookout for potential suicide bombers, who Aziz warned Thursday were preparing a repeat of the Oct. 18 bombing of Bhutto's jubilant homecoming procession in the southern city of Karachi after eight years of exile. She escaped unharmed, but more than 145 people died in the attack, blamed on Islamic militants.

Rawalpindi has also been hit by a series of suicide attacks, targeting the military.

Bhutto's party said its 5,000 arrested supporters were picked up in the last three days across the eastern province of Punjab.

"It is a massive crackdown on our party," said Raja Javed Ashraf, a PPP lawmaker.

The government offered no immediate public comment. But a security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists, said only 1,000 Bhutto supporters had been detained.