Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteI am just a beginner, and I know it!
However, even with but a thin band of web impressions, introductions may be ventured
More transitioned from my conversation at the "Mayhem" (www.modelmayhem.com) . . . .
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The question was, "Commart, reading between the lines it seems like a u/s backed coup is in the offing? Is that your take too?"
My answer, far out of proportion to the length of the query:
http://pakistanidefenceforum.com//index.php?s=4baf987a2c3502ff651517d3f6dc2de8&showtopic=78066
Pakistan's military needs no assistance from the United States or anyone else when it comes to shepherding Pakistan into a more contemporary and democratic future. With more than half a million active troops and a little less than that in reserve, the defense forces overall may be as diverse in background and outlook as the population from whence they have come.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashfaq_Parvez_Kayani
When former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf agreed to cede his position as the country's top general, he appointed General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to the post. As dictatorships and junta go, Musharraf's was, I think, unlike any other in the world: an open press positively blossomed during his tenure; with some problems, no question, he nonetheless brought his country to "fair and open" elections; toward the end, he handed the keys to his old military to a close associate with substantial power of his own; and then, finally, he left office hounded by much the same lunatic political behavior party hardliners, left or right, seem to want to practice in America.
Musharraf's Pakistan was no Burma nor like any other penny ante dictatorship of which I've been aware.
To better understand it, one may look over Turkey's transition from an Islamic empire to a secularized majority Muslim state:
"For about the next 10 years, the country saw a steady process of secular Westernization through Atatürk's Reforms, which included the unification of education; the discontinuation of religious and other titles; the closure of Islamic courts and the replacement of Islamic canon law with a secular civil code modeled after Switzerland's and a penal code modeled after the Italian Penal Code; recognition of the equality between the sexes and the granting of full political rights to women on 5 December 1934" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Turkey).
The Wiki entry looks like a first cut, but feel free to delve into other online histories as well as visit the country's web pages and online newspapers.
Pervez Musharraf's father, educated in India and installed in Pakistan's Foreign Service served as ambassador to Turkey during Musharraf's childhood. (For more information about the former president: http://pervez.musharraf.net/Pervez_Musharraf.htm).
Here is Pakistan's problem with Musharraf and the American as well as general western relationship with him:
"Musharraf is considered a moderate leader by Western governments. Many believe that Musharraf is sincere in his desire to bridge the Islamic and the Western worlds, and has previously spoken strongly against the idea of the inevitability of a 'clash of civilisations' between them. Musharraf's emotional ties to the United States may be conjectured to be significant since at least two close members of his family live there: his brother, a doctor, lives in Chicago, and his son lives in Boston. His son has a Bachelor's degree in Actuarial Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and works for a benefits-consulting firm in Boston. Musharraf's only other child, a daughter, is a graduate of the National Council of Arts in Lahore and is an architect. Musharraf's elder brother, who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a Civil Service officer in the Government of Pakistan, and also worked at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome before retiring" (again: http://pervez.musharraf.net/Pervez_Musharraf.htm).
I'd like to be a new kind of writer as the world has grown its inventory of a new form of politician: multilingual; duty stations in many countries; families dispersed across the globe and contributing wherever they are--such as these turn out world leaders as much as national ones.
Musharraf in retirement may nonetheless embody the spirit of the military he left behind, and that military, imho, has a daunting but not impossible task given the makeup of the population in its totality:
1. Install government in the resistant but equally troubled autonomous tribal areas. Contrary to the underlying thoughts of the hate-America-first crowd, many if not most tribes have themselves suffered at the hands of visiting Arabs and bankrolled Taliban (oh . . . let's not forget the U.S. helped with that too back in the Soviet-influenced Afghanistan days) who have been able to treat the Pakistani state and its policing forces with contempt to this point, and that partly because the state's military has backed them as a weapon of its own.
My, how times change.
2. Preserve Pakistan's boundaries and, right along with them, its national self-esteem.
3. Placate the constituency (remember: 50 percent illiterate--inexcusable, but it's a fact; predominantly schooled by conservative religious clerics and consequently passionately Islamic in the way that wants to violently avenge the works of Danish cartoonists) by drifting toward it to avoid revolution on one hand and on the other preserve its more contemporary character and democratic and tolerant sentiments.
Pakistan strikes me as a much fractured country and one with some notable extremes in its cultural and political makeup, but it has an army that is itself much representative of it but placed through its leading personalities well into the frame of contemporary western-influenced international leadership culture.
Afghani, American, and Coalition troops should be quite happy to stay out of Pakistan, but the same may expect the Pakistani military to assert itself in its autonomous regions and to bring the country closer to so far predominant international norms rather than have it revert to an Islamic theocracy, and a militant and nuclear armed one at that.
In light of the freight of a bickering legislature and an uncertain administration--the late Benazir Bhutto meant to reduce her husband's presence on the political stage, and, of course, now he, Asif Ali Zardari, has inherited her constituency and been elected president himself--Pakistan's military may remain the most coherent power in Pakistan, and it may well inform Zardari's stance as he grows into his job.
Certainly, and this with some forgiveness or erasure, we'll never know, of alleged transgressions elsewhere, Zardari is now Public Figure Number One, the same as Musharraf was, and may turn out the target of the same scapegoating--blaming convenient others for all that goes wrong--that starts with Jews, chews on Americans for a while, points the finger at Danish cartoonists, and ends only with whoever is not closest to one's self.
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