Pakistan

After the shootout at Islamabad’s Red Mosque, the pro-democracy demonstrations against Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf in the months preceding it, and Islamists’ rallies and suicide bombings following it, the United States finds itself in a familiar situation, aligned with a general who grabbed power in a coup but has become politically isolated, perhaps beyond repair. The difference is that Pakistan is now a more dangerous place than it was under the three prior military strongmen, Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, and Zia ul-Haq.

The latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a two-page unclassified version of which was released here Tuesday, found that al Qaeda has largely rebounded from its eviction from Afghanistan nearly six years ago and re-constituted both its central organisation and some of its training and operational capacities, leading to a ‘’heightened threat environment’’ for the U.S. itself.

ELEANOR HALL: The latest US intelligence report released in Washington this morning noted that al-Qaeda has found a safe haven in Pakistan to regenerate...

But at the same time, the Bush administration has renewed its support for Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf, as Alison Caldwell reports.

ALISON CALDWELL: Pakistan's suspended Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, has become a symbol of resistance to President General Pervez Musharraf and his eight-year rule.

WASHINGTON -- The storming of the Red Mosque in Islamabad was a Pakistani action, undertaken for Pakistani reasons. Critical actions of future Pakistani governments, civilian or military, will be taken for the same basic reasons -- and not at the desire of Washington. American presidents can of course bring great pressure to bear on Pakistan, but for obvious reasons, they are unlikely ever to get a Pakistani government to commit suicide on their behalf.

One of the nice things about Pakistan at the moment is that it makes me feel young again. I first went there in 1988 as a stringer for the Times to cover the aftermath of General Zia's assassination and the military-managed "transition to democracy." The inheritors of government were Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s party (PPP), but the military was careful to balance her electoral victory by keeping an ally of theirs, Mian Nawaz Sharif, as chief minister of the most populous province, Punjab.

New America senior fellows Peter Bergen and Anatol Lieven recently returned from Pakistan, having met with leading figures from the government, the military, the opposition, the radical Islamist groups, and the administration of the North West Frontier Province and Tribal Areas.

In the current issue, I write about Afghanistan’s shaky future as the country tries to overcome years of violence and a devastating dependence on opium trade. The books and testimony below help to illustrate a place whose history is fraught with tragedy -- but where a cautious hope for a better life is beginning to take hold.

This January, somewhere in Logar Province, 40 miles south of Kabul, a 20-year-old goat herder named Imdadullah strapped on a bulky black waistcoat lined with packages of TNT. The packages were wrapped with newspaper printed in Urdu -- the lingua franca of Pakistan -- and tied together with a cord that led to a switch attached to a battery capable of detonating the explosives. Glued to the newspapers were nails and ball bearings.

Pakistan may be heading into another of its cycles of mass unrest and political instability. The underlying pattern, which applies to both civilian and military governments, is that this is a patronage-based system in a poor country, with not nearly enough patronage to go around. Other factors, including democracy and religion, are present, but all are coloured by the politics of patronage.

Islamabad and New York -- Five British citizens, four of whom are of Pakistani descent, were convicted Monday of planning to attack targets in the United Kingdom under orders from al Qaeda using fertilizer-based bombs. Their convictions underline the fact that from its Pakistani hub al Qaeda now has the capability not only to plan once-off attacks in the U.K., but is also able to plan a sustained campaign of terrorist operations against the United States’ closest ally. And the ease with which al Qaeda has recruited operatives from the U.K.