Is democracy in Pakistan’s future?

By WND Staff

KARACHI, Pakistan — Kulsoom Nawaz, wife of the incarcerated former
premier, Nawaz Sharif, has pinned great hopes on President Bill Clinton
to put her husband out of harm’s way and to ensure that justice is done
in his case.

“President Bill Clinton can play a big role to promote democracy in
Pakistan. He is one man the army junta is really very scared of,” she
told WorldNetDaily by phone from her home in Lahore.

Sharif, one of the most powerful prime ministers in Pakistan’s
history, was ousted and jailed after an army coup last year. On April 6,
an anti-terrorism court sentenced him to double life imprisonment and
confiscation of all his property on a charge of masterminding a
conspiracy to hijack and crash the plane that was bringing Pakistan army
chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf — now the country’s chief executive — from
Colombo on Oct. 12. Sharif is also facing a number of corruption-related
cases.

Sharif’s ouster is widely attributed to the Blair House agreement he
signed with Clinton on July 4 last year. That agreement led to
Pakistan-backed mujahideen (crusader) forces pulling back from the snowy
heights of Kargil in the Indian side of Kashmir. Arch rival India had
accused Pakistan army regulars of being in the forefront of the Kargil
operations, and Sharif confirmed this allegation last month by saying
over 500 army soldiers and officers had perished in Kargil.

“You are very right,” Kulsoom said when asked if Sharif had been
ousted and jailed just because he wanted to resolve the Kashmir issue
with India. Diehard critics of the ousted businessman-turned-politician
premier, however, say he had a vested interest in two
multi-billion-dollar businesses: sugar export to, and iron import from,
India.

Since independence from British rule in 1947, siblings Pakistan and
India had fought two out of their three wars over Kashmir, and the
hostilities in Kargil last summer had placed south Asia on the brink of
an Armageddon. For over two years now, the south Asian region has been
regarded as the world’s most dangerous nuclear flash point — Pakistan
followed India in conducting atomic tests in May 1998.

Last March, during his visit to south Asia, Clinton stopped in
Pakistan for a few hours. Much to the chagrin of the army rulers, in a
direct, live address to the Pakistani nation on state-run television and
radio, Clinton backed Sharif’s policy of seeking peace with India.

In spite of that, Musharraf has been encouraged by the U.S. policy
shift of engaging even anti-democratic regimes, rather than boycotting
them. Policy planners on Capitol Hill and in the Clinton administration
say boycotts run contrary to U.S. vital interests.

With this backdrop, the Pakistan junta chief last week began
consulting politicians, but his detractors believe such action is part
of the general’s preparations to visit the U.S. this fall.

“The Americans are no fools not to understand why the general is
consulting the politicians now. They can clearly see through his game,”
Sardar Akhtar Mengal, former chief minister of Pakistan’s geographically
largest province, Balochistan, told WorldNetDaily. Mengal implied
Musharraf wants to prolong his rule.

Analysts in Pakistan are divided on whether or not the CIA would like
to work with Musharraf.

“For the first time in history, the CIA was not involved in an army
takeover in Pakistan (last October). The U.S. had propped up five
brigades to support the first army dictator, Ayub Khan, and then the
late Ziaul Haq had complete U.S. blessings because of the anti-communist
war in Afghanistan,” says Hasil Bizenjo, a member of Pakistan’s
disbanded parliament and a staunch Sharif loyalist. “There is no utility
for Musharraf now,” he opines.

However, as a hangover of the Cold War era, today even rogue armies
in Third World countries are thought to be the most reliable ally of the
Pentagon and the State Department in the U.S. fight against the twin
menaces of terrorism and drugs. And the army in Pakistan, reckoned as
the country’s largest political party, is no exception.

“The army had long had the CIA umbrella on it, and acted as an
interface between the U.S. and the local politicians. From Bhutto to
Sharif, any politician worth his name was the Pakistan army’s product.
It’s naïve of the politicians now to want to bypass the soldiers and
join hands with the U.S. to scuttle the institution that fostered them,”
says one foreign policy expert, who requested not to be named.

Quite a few politicians agree that the usefulness of the army for the
U.S., in particular the CIA, is far from over.

“Washington may want to use Musharraf to strike at the roots of
fundamentalism, symbolized by Osama bin Laden. They may also want to
push him for a settlement on Kashmir with India, to enable the latter
[to] better contain Chinese communism,” said Waheed Baloch, former
speaker of the provincial assembly in Balochistan.

Meanwhile, Kulsoom Nawaz’s desire to seek Clinton’s help is
understandable — Pakistan has a bloody and checkered political history.
The country’s first prime minister, Liauquat Ali Khan, fell prey to an
assassin’s bullet on Oct. 8, 1951; a second premier, Hussein Shaheed
Suhrawardy, was murdered in his hotel room in Beirut; while a third
premier, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged to death by Musharraf’s
predecessor, the late Gen. Ziaul Haq.

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A prime minister faces death penalty




Ahmar Mustikhan
is a contributing reporter to WorldNetDaily.