US
Reaffirms Support For Musharraf
By Vilani Peiris
& Keith Jones
22 May, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
Bush administration has reiterated its support for Pakistan’s
military strongman, General Pervez Musharraf, in the wake of bloody,
government-orchestrated attacks on opposition protesters in Karachi,
May 12 and 13, that left more than forty people dead.
The violence, which was perpetrated
by armed thugs of the pro-Musharraf Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM),
was aimed at stamping out a mounting wave of anti-government protests.
But on Monday, May 14, most of Pakistan’s major cities, including
Lahore, Peshwar, Quetta, and especially Karachi, were paralyzed by a
general strike called by the opposition parties to protest the previous
weekend’s violence. There is a “complete strike in Karachi,”
conceded the police chief Azhar Faruqi to the Guardian. The next day
large numbers of teachers demonstrated in Lahore against government
plans to privatize the education system.
Musharraf’s attempt
to sack the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has served as the trigger
for the anti-government protests. But the protests are the product of
deep-rooted popular opposition to Musharraf’s authoritarian rule,
support for and complicity in the US’s wars of aggression against
Afghanistan and Iraq, and his implementation of neo-liberal economic
policies, which have increased economic insecurity and social inequality.
At a press briefing last
Wednesday, US State Department spokesman Tom Casey pointedly refused
to make any criticism of Musharraf or his political allies for unleashing
terror on the streets of Pakistan’s largest city, then reaffirmed
Washington’s support for the man who doubles as Pakistan’s
president and chief of armed services.
In response to a multi-part
question that solicited US reaction to the Karachi violence and suggested
there might be “concern” within the administration that
Musharraf is “losing the handle on the situation,” Casey
began by observing that the violence had abated, without breathing a
word as to who had fomented it, and concluded by declaring, “I
don’t think our assessment has fundamentally changed about him
[Musharraf] or his role in Pakistani society.”
The previous day, US special
envoy Ronald Neumann had pressed Pakistani officials during meetings
in Islamabad to step up efforts to combat the Taliban in Pakistan and
to cooperate more closely with Afghanistan’s US-installed government.
Neumann told reporters Musharraf had not reached his “full capacity”
in fighting “terrorism and extremism.” But he also made
clear that Musharraf remains a pivotal ally of the Bush administration
in the “war on terror”—that is in the US drive to
gain a strategic stranglehold over the oil supplies of Central Asia
and the Middle East. “I don’t think Musharraf has reached
the end of the line,” declared Neumann.
A former US ambassador to
Kabul, Neumann said Washington would provide additional funding to Pakistan
to increase military patrols on its border with Afghanistan.
According to a report in
Sunday’s New York Times, the Bush administration has rejected
calls from the US military for Washington to tie the payments that it
makes to the Pakistani military for logistical support for the Afghan
occupation and fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan to “Pakistan’s
performance” in the so-called war on terror.
These payments, which are
dubbed “coalition support funds,” are said to have averaged
$80 million per month since October 2001, or equal to about a fifth
of all Pakistani military spending, and to have surpassed a total of
$5.6 billion.
The Times linked the White
House’s refusal to threaten Islamabad with a cut in “coalition
support funds” to its fears for the future of the Musharraf regime:
“The administration, according to some current and former officials,
is fearful of cutting off the cash or linking it to performance for
fear of further destabilizing Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, who is facing the biggest challenges to his rule since he
took power in 1999.”
Musharraf’s March 9
suspension of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on corruption
charges was a transparent attempt to stage-manage his “re-election”
as president. Although Chaudhry had given his legal blessing to Musharraf’s
1999 coup and other patently unconstitutional acts, he has authored
a number of decisions that cut across the government’s agenda
since becoming chief justice. This caused Musharraf to fear he couldn’t
count on Justice Chaudhry to provide a judicial fig-leaf for his phony
re-election this fall by a presidential college comprised of the legislators
elected in military-manipulated elections in 2002.
But the general-president’s
attempt to rid himself of the uncooperative judge has backfired, becoming
a catalyst for popular protests, while serving to alienate much of the
legal-juridical establishment.
Justice Chaudhry has a long,
dishonorable record of serving Musharraf and the military and as a judge
has upheld the capitalist socio-economic order that has condemned Pakistani’s
toilers to abject poverty. If he has emerged as something of a popular
figure, it is because his defiance of the general-president and pro-democracy
speeches stand in marked contrast with the actions of the various bourgeois
opposition parties. While repeatedly promising to launch a “final
struggle” against the Musharraf regime the opposition has in fact
continued to cooperate with it.
Thus the six-party Islamacist
alliance, the MMA, voted in December 2003 for constitutional amendments
sanctioning Musharraf’s 1999 coup and his remaining head of the
armed forces while president and, to this day, the MMA serves in a coalition
government in Baluchistan alongside the principal pro-Musharraf party,
the PML (Q).
Meanwhile, Benazir Bhutto’s
Pakistani People’s Party (PPP), which poses as a progressive even
“socialist” party, has long been involved in negotiations
to strike a deal with Musharraf under which the PPP would be given a
share of power in return for supporting the general remaining president
till 2012.
The Bush administration and
the British government have been actively promoting a PPP-Musharraf
partnership. Bhutto, for her part, has been courting the Bush administration
by promising to be a more effective supporter of the US “war on
terror” than the current Pakistani regime.
But there are many obstacles
to a deal between Musharraf and Bhutto, including fears within the PPP
that support for their party, which already suffered a huge erosion
due to its implementation of IMF policies when it led Pakistan’s
government in the late 1980s and 1990s, would hemorrhage were it to
throw in its lot with Musharraf.
Moreover recent events have
caused Bhutto, at least for the moment, to publicly downplay the imminence
of a deal with Musharraf. No doubt she calculates that she can extract
better terms from a weakened Musharraf, but also that before committing
her party to partnering with the general she should first find out whether
he will be able to ride out the storm. Speaking with the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation radio service last week, Bhutto said now was not the time
to negotiate with Musharraf about “an emerging partnership.”
But she could envisage working with him if he “were to make the
compromises necessary to respond to the sentiments of the people.”
Bhutto is now urging Musharraf
to “call a round-table conference of all political leaders, including
the exiled prime ministers, to evolve a consensus for transparent elections.”
Musharraf, meanwhile, has
vowed that neither Bhutto, nor Nawaz Sharif, whom he deposed in his
1999 coup, will be allowed back into the country before the elections.
And in what has all the trademarks
of a contract-killing, Hammad Raza, a registrar of the Supreme Court
was murdered May 14 at his home in the capital of Islamabad. Raza was
to be a key witness for suspended Chief Justice Chaudhry. One of Chaudhry’s
lawyers, Tariq Mehmood, told Reuters, Raza “was witness to many
things, like the chief justice said in his petition that some files
were removed from his chamber on the day he was suspended.” Raza’s
family is challenging police claims that the murder was the result of
a burglary. They report that he was under “much pressure”
in the days prior to his murder.
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