Red Mosque spill-over into North Waziristan
I wrote about North Waziristan yesterday but it appears that either (a) I wrote it in my dreams, or (b) the USENET line eater bug evolved out of cyberia and manifested as a MT feature. Anyway, the gist of what I wrote was that I'd not been writing about the standoff at a mosque in Islamabad because I didn't think that situation very relevant to the question "Is Pakistan?" Compared to the questions of which political parties and leaders are allowed to contest the next election, of whether Musharaff will run again, and if so, again as head-of-army and head-of-state, of whether there is an independent judiciary, of whether Baluchistan or the Waziristans or ... even the Sind have greater or lesser access to the real centers of military and civil power in the Punjabi Military and its State, a firefight between dozens of bearded suicides and several reinforced companies of infantry, with air and armor executing some fire missions is ... well ... absurd.
In fact, it is something of a distraction from the real problems faced by the Musharaff regime within the Punjabi Military, serving to legitimate the current notion of "Pakistan" and its dominant institutions. One actor or another, whether Musharaff or Bush or Bhutto or ... will use it as a pretext.
Over the weekend the truce between Islamabad and the North Waziristan ended. The September 2006 peace agreement between center (labeled "legitimate") and periphery (labeled "Taliban") called for the removal of military checkpoints in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), which the military unilaterally imposed while conducting defense reduction operations at the Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa (Red Mosque) in Islamabad, resulting in at least 75 KIA.
Predictably, there was a response. A military convoy traveling into North Waziristan was engaged with a vehicle-transported munition which killed 24 soldiers and the following day Taliban men distributed pamphlets in Miranshah, the main town in the tribal agency, announcing that the Shura [trans: council] had scrapped the September 2006 peace agreement with the Government. Another convoy was targeted with three vehicular-transported munitions in the Swat district, which killed 10 soldiers, and a paramilitary recruitment center in Dera Ismail Khan was engaged with yet another vehicular-transported munition, which killed 18 paramilitarys.
The net of the weekend is that the government employees and their families left the provincial capital of Miranshah Sunday, and the government radio station there went silent for want of staff.
The Chief Minister for the NWFP is trying to keep the military from treating every school, hospital and public building as targets for search-and-seize (or destroy) missions, and the district's jirga of notables, representatives of different political parties and district nazims (chiefs and sub-chiefs) criticised the provincial government for calling out the army, finding no urgency sufficient to justify the deployment of thousands of troops in Swat and Lower Dir.
Your pick for which actor(s) used the stand-off at the Lal Masjid as a pretext. The Pakistani Foreign Office went on record that it was "absurd" to suggest that the government had taken action against the Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa administration to appease the United States, and "as far as the government of Pakistan is concerned, it has not scuttled the deal and negotiations with the tribal elders are continuing."
In other news, yesterday the charge of judicial misconduct against Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry was withdrawn. The exercise of over charging a targeted political figure, in this case the Chief Justice, is now reduced to just allegations that the Chief Justice Chaudhry abused his office for securing a government job for his son and privileges/protocol for him -- a slightly absurd charge given the nepotism of the Musharaff regime. Recall that the Constitutional issue is whether General-President Musharaff may legally exercise both the head-of-army and head-of-state authorities, and whether he may legally stand as a candidate in the next election for head-of-state. Chief Justice Chaudhry is of the view that the Constitutional answer to both questions is "no".
