Anil Kalhan

(Posted at Dorf on Law and Chapati Mystery)

Right in time for Valentine’s Day, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has sent Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani a love letter – in the form of charges for contempt of court.  That handwriting had been on the wall for weeks now, but was sealed with a kiss on Friday, when a bench of the Court led by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry denied Gilani’s appeal to dismiss the contempt notice served upon him last month.  The appeal hearing itself appears to have been a stormy affair, with Chaudhry and other judges reportedly “almost shouting” at Gilani’s lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan – who happened to serve as the Chief Justice’s own lawyer during the happier days of the lawyers’ movement back in 2007.  “How can you being a senior lawyer write this?” snapped the Chief Justice. “We are very embarrassed by remarks [in your filing].”  He apparently closed the hearing by simply saying, “Sorry, Aitzaz.”  (With great warmth and affection, I am sure.)  If Gilani is convicted of contempt, that almost certainly will disqualify him from serving in Parliament and, therefore, lead to his ouster as Prime Minister.

How did Pakistan find its way to this lovefest? At issue in the contempt case is the government’s unwillingness to fully implement the Court’s 2009 judgment invalidating the National Reconciliation Ordinance, an order promulgated in 2007 by then-President Gen. Pervez Musharraf granting amnesty to thousands of bureaucrats and politicians charged with corruption and other offenses in the years before Musharraf’s 1999 coup.  The NRO was born out of a U.S.-brokered courtship between Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007, when the lawyers’ movement was ascendant, Bhutto in self-imposed “exile,” and Musharraf’s own grip on power slipping away.  (Geo TV’s romantic imagining of the Musharraf-Bhutto courtship can be seen here. Rest assured that the video is SFW; Musharraf does not take off his uniform.)  Channeling its inner desi auntie, the Bush Administration was determined to play matchmaker, hoping that by arranging the political marriage of Bhutto to its loyal friend Musharraf, it could help Musharraf stay in power.  But for Bhutto to be willing to return to Pakistan, she wanted Musharraf to drop corruption cases against her and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, arising from her tenure as Prime Minister during the 1990s.

Needless to say, Bhutto’s leading rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, felt rather jilted by these developments – since only the previous year he and Bhutto, along with the leaders of thirteen other civilian political parties, had signed and agreed to the Charter of Democracy, a preconstitutional declaration which explicitly pledged it signatories not to cut side deals with the military that might advance their own political fortunes but undermine democracy by sustaining the military’s political power. (My thoughts at the time about the Charter of Democracy and the Musharraf-Bhutto courtship can be found here and here.) And rather than raise Musharraf’s popularity, Bhutto’s own standing took a tumble.  As it happened, the relationship between Musharraf and Bhutto fell apart, but the NRO became law anyway, granting amnesty to thousands of individuals, including Bhutto, Zardari, and other senior politicians in Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party.

Almost immediately, the Supreme Court suspended the NRO’s operation, and eventually – after an extended saga that, to refresh your recollections, included (1) Musharraf’s extraconstitutional state of “emergency”, during which he ousted two-thirds of Pakistan’s superior judiciary, cracked down on political opponents, and purported to amend Pakistan’s constitution to preserve his ability to serve as president, (2) Bhutto’s assassination and Zardari’s ascension to become co-chairman of the PPP, (3) elections in February 2008 which decisively repudiated Musharraf and brought a PPP-led government to power, (4) Musharraf’s resignation, and the ascension of Bhutto’s widower, Zardari, to the presidency, and (5) the new civilian government’s eventual (though fitful) restoration of the judges ousted by Musharraf in March 2009, following continued pressure from the lawyers’ movement and Sharif – eventually, after all of that, the restored Supreme Court issued a final judgment invalidating the NRO in December 2009.  The government has dragged its heels on fully implementing that judgment, balking in particular at the Court’s order to write Swiss officials to reinstate an earlier request seeking assistance in pursuing corruption cases against Zardari under Swiss law – a letter that apparently had been withdrawn, owing to adoption of the NRO.

Now, the Court has become “intellectually emotional” about the government’s refusal to implement its 2009 judgment.  In January, the Court enumerated six “unpleasant” options that it was weighing to address the government’s recalcitrance – ranging from outright disqualification of the President and Prime Minister for violating their oaths of office or the initiation of contempt proceedings against the Prime Minister, at one end of the spectrum, to leaving the matter in the hands of Parliament or the people, at the other.  In between, the Court floated the idea creating a commission to monitor implementation of its order.  The less severe options might have exposed the Court as incapable of fully enforcing its order.  But as a practical matter, the Court faces that prospect anyway, since it seems likely that no matter what it does, there will be no effective effort to revive the proceedings in Switzerland before the applicable limitations period runs.  In that light, perhaps avoiding the smackdown that is about to ensue would have been a good enough reason for the Court to exercise the passive virtues in this instance and instead move on, as human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir has suggested, to take up the “thousands of other pending cases” that will necessarily get put on the back burner because of this soap opera.

For its part, why won’t the government simply write the letter to Swiss officials and put this game of chicken to an end, as Jahangir also has urged?  Formally, the government has argued that it cannot do so because now that he is President, Zardari is constitutionally immune from criminal prosecution.  More likely, the move is simply calculated to protect Zardari from legal exposure – and to at least try to avoid the political hit that would result from going on record to request criminal charges against its own head of state and party co-chairman.  At this point, however, as a practical matter that political hit may be hard to avoid no matter what happens.

So both the government and the Court appear to have staked out the most aggressive positions possible when it’s not entirely clear how much either side will gain in the end from doing so.  And the NRO case is only one of several recent instances in which the Court has been clashing with the government over highly charged political issues – including the Court’s implicit invalidation of Parliament’s constitutional amendments to the judicial appointments process in 2010 and its current investigation into the so-called Memogate scandal, which has put the civilian government directly in the crosshairs of the military.  While the Supreme Court during Chaudhry’s tenure has asserted its autonomy from the military, that has not by any means been the Court’s traditional approach – to the contrary, Pakistan’s superior judiciary has a much longer tradition of acquiescing and validating the military’s extraconstitutional moves to usurp power from civilian rulers.

Placed within that broader context, the Supreme Court’s recent assertiveness raises other issues. In their simplest forms, discussions of “judicial independence” – which of course was the principle repeatedly invoked by the lawyers’ movement in 2007 – tend solely to consider the balance between the judiciary’s autonomy and accountability vis-à-vis the executive and legislature.  As scholars have emphasized, however, a more complete understanding of judicial independence requires attention to that balance across a number of additional dimensions and axes. In Pakistan, that requires attention to the looming, shadowy presence of what Kamran Shafi refers to as the “Deep State” – the security establishment and its network of affiliated interests in the bureaucracy and private sector, which has played a dominant role in Pakistan’s politics, economy, and society under both military and civilian regimes.  Indeed, the underlying discourse that has justified the Court’s aggressiveness in these recent cases – an aversion to “corrupt” and/or “incompetent” politicians in the NRO case, the imperative to protect Pakistan’s sovereignty and security from being undermined by those same politicians in the Memogate case – is entirely continuous with the discourse upon which the military’s own interventions have traditionally been justified.  As Muneer Malik – one of the leaders of the lawyers’ movement in 2007 – said last week, “In the long run this is a very dangerous trend. . . . The judges are not elected representatives of the people and they are arrogating power to themselves as if they are the only sanctimonious institution in the country. All dictators fall prey to this psyche — that only we are clean, and capable of doing the right thing.”

Another lawyer active in the lawyers’ movement, Faisal Siddiqi, similarly argues that by setting themselves up as “arbitrators of democratic righteousness,” the Supreme Court judges are playing a dangerous game:

[W]hat are the consequences of the SC deciding the eligibility of politicians on the intellectually tenuous grounds of dishonesty or being ‘ameen’ or a violation of the latter’s oath? And of disqualifying prime ministers, removing presidents and ordering regime change on other grounds? This order signifies a possible transition from a judicially activist court to one that follows the jurisprudence of a legal empire. This new jurisprudence signifies that it is the SC which will determine what an honest/ameen democratic system should look like. . . .

This possible transition to a legal empire is based on the misleading presumption that the panacea for all major problems facing the democratic system lies in the laws and judicial system. Sadly, neither our history nor a comparative political analysis of other countries proves such a legally biased thesis.

What is required is a strong democratic constitutionalism determined by politics, the law and the legitimate use of force. Yes, action should be taken for contempt but no institution should presume a monopoly over democratic integrity and wisdom.

It is precisely because of the limitations of the law vis-à-vis democratic problem-solving that the judiciary should be self-critical and humble in its approach. [link]

The Court’s defenders respond by noting that even as it has challenged civilian politicians, it simultaneously has been standing up to Deep State interests as well.  And indeed, in recent days the Court has moved forward on two sensitive cases involving the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate.  Still, many observers are skeptical that the Court will manage to be genuinely evenhanded in its treatment of civilian versus military interests over the longer term.

In the short term, as Omar Waraich notes, the “most immediate victim is likely to be the government’s ability to function”:

[T]he crisis will consume the energies of an already weak, unpopular and shaky government. As survival becomes a priority, other pressing concerns such as Pakistan’s crucial fight against militancy, its faltering economy, and its desperate energy shortages will be neglected. [link]

And in the meantime, the Deep State can just bide its time.  Pakistan has not been showing the military much political love in the last few years, but if Parliament and the Supreme Court continue to beat each other up, the military’s political fortunes could of course change rapidly – just as they did between 1971 and 1977.  As Siddiqi warns:

It would be a constitutional tragedy if the path leading to the weakening of the present presidency and this PPP government also leads to the unintended consequence of the strengthening of the unconstitutional powers and role of the military establishment. If that happens, it will be of little constitutional significance as to who is to blame. [link]

However weak the military might seem on the surface right now, the Deep State’s tentacles run, well, deep. If Pakistan’s politicians and judges are unable to fashion a workable modus vivendi to consolidate democracy and constitutionalism, in the same spirit as the Charter of Democracy, there’s certainly no guarantee that the country won’t eventually find itself caught in a bad romance with military rulers once again.

(Posted at SAJAforum)

Via Climate Progress:

[T]he big new Time magazine cover story for their European, Asian, and South Pacific editions, Through Hell And High Water, doesn’t make the cut for the U.S. edition’s cover (as the screen capture [below] shows).  In fact, can someone tell me if it made the print edition at all, since I can’t find the story in the table of contents?

Equally significant, the Time story itself never mentions the link to climate change or global warming at all, even though it is pretty basic physics…. [link] 

What does in fact “make[] a school great,” you ask?  You won’t find this in TIME Magazine, but at least according to a pair of reports [one, two] reprinted on the Asia Society website back in September 2008, it is “crucial” for U.S. schools to improve students’ development of “international knowledge and skills.” Ahem.

[HT: Manan Ahmed]

Related post on SAJAforum: NATURAL DISASTERS: How you can help the Pakistan flood victims

Back in July 2009, we took note of what experts then were calling an “impending humanitarian disaster“: the displacement of as many as 2.5 million individuals due to the government’s military offensive in the North-West Frontier Province. Soon thereafter, the Pakistan government announced plans to return displaced individuals to their homes, and mainstream news coverage of the crisis subsided and public attention turned elsewhere.

Seven months later, how does the situation look for internally displaced persons? Writing at Changing Up Pakistan, Kalsoom Lakhani provides an update, arguing that although the IDP situation has been “out of the headlines,” the crisis remains severe….

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

That’s what Audil Rashid and Mian Nazish Adnan sound the alarm about in the July 4, 2009 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, following their recent visits to camps set up to house internally displaced persons (IDPs) fleeing the conflict zone in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. While Americans celebrate the Independence Day weekend with barbeques and fireworks, Rashid and Adnan paint a grim picture of the crisis in Pakistan:

From the very beginning it was evident that the government had underestimated the human cost of the military operation. As several camps were hastily set up to cater to the massive influx of IDPs, reports about the lack of even basic amenities in these camps began to emerge. Excessive heat (daytime temperatures soaring to 40°C and above), no electricity, food and water shortages, poor sanitation, and lack of proper health care are some of the immediate problems being faced by IDPs….

Lack of proper toilets and sanitation, unsafe drinking water, infrequent bathing, high air temperatures, inadequate disposal of solid waste, and the complete absence of a proper drainage system at the refugee camps are the main causes of worry for relief health workers. “This is the making of a disaster. These camps have been established on open tracts of land used for agricultural purposes. There are snakes, rats, and scorpions here. At night, when it is pitch dark because of no electricity, people sleep on the ground and are vulnerable to snakebites”, said M Idrees Mirza, a doctor who runs a private clinic in Rawalpindi city and is working voluntarily in the
camps.

“Conditions in these camps make them perfect breeding areas for mosquitoes and many varieties of insects. In my opinion, there is a very high probability of an outbreak of any disease like mumps, measles, scabies, malaria, diarrhoea, polio, and leishmaniasis”, said another health worker working for a respected NGO who spoke to The Lancet on condition of anonymity. “We need medicines, doctors, and qualified health workers. And we need them urgently. Any delays might result in a human catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.”….

Eager to establish its writ over the Swat Valley, the government seems to have created a health crisis which it may not be able to overcome. [link; registration req'd]

Two letters in the same issue of The Lancet offer additional details. But as dire as the situation has become within the camps, K.M. Bile and Assad Hafeez note in one of those letters that the government camps house only 20 percent of the IDPs — who may now total as many as 2.5 million individuals, almost half of them children:

Without counting the great costs to themselves, families in the local community are looking after more than 1·73 million people, in accordance with the local tradition of hospitality. Most displaced people have been accommodated within family homes; others are in schools, mosques, and other community buildings…. Although a proportion of host families are related to or friends of the displaced people, many have welcomed strangers. [link; registration req'd]

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

Via Reuters (and Sadia Abbas), some breaking news from Pakistan:

The Pakistan government agreed on Monday to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry as Supreme Court chief justice to end a political crisis that has gripped the Muslim nation, a government official said.

The official added that a constitutional package would also be presented.

President Asif Ali Zardari had hitherto stonewalled calls from the opposition led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and a lawyers’ movement to restore the judge.

Chaudhry was dismissed in late 2007 by then-president and army chief
Pervez Musharraf, but Zardari regarded the judge as too politicized and
feared he could pose a threat to his own presidency if restored. [link]

No solid confirmation as yet, but Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani is scheduled to address the nation shortly.

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

Everything old appears to be new again in Pakistan. The latest: government bans on independent television news coverage.

On the heels of an emergency crackdown earlier this week, in which the government of President Asif Ali Zardari responded to the “Long March” organized by the lawyers movement by banning public gatherings and reportedly detained hundreds of opposition lawyers and political workers, Zardari has also moved to block transmission of Geo TV throughout the country:

On the direct order of President Asif Ali Zardari, the transmission of the Geo News was blocked by cable operators in various parts of the country on Friday, which drew flak from across the country.

The transmission was blocked in some parts of Karachi, Hyderabad,
Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Quetta, Multan, Rawalakot, Muzaffarabad, Deepalpur, Sargodha, Nawabshah, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Dera Murad Jamali. [link]

Geo and other TV news channels were previously blocked — for much the same reasons as the present ban by Zardari — by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, first as the lawyers’ movement was gaining momentum in the spring of 2007 and later after Musharraf declared a state of “emergency” in November 2007.

The Geo ban has apparently prompted the resignation of Information Minister Sherry Rehman, a leading member of the Pakistan People’s Party and close confidante of the late former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto:

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

(Posted at Dorf on Law)

Perhaps it’s fitting that Pakistan’s latest crisis has come just as the television series Battlestar Galactica (whose final episode airs next week) is drawing to a close. Between the Musharraf Supreme Court’s controversial decision to declare Pakistan Muslim League-N leaders Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif ineligible to hold public office, President Asif Ali Zardari’s decision to crack down on the lawyers’ movement and other opponents, and the State Department’s apparent decision, at least initially, to respond to the crisis somewhat tepidly, one is left, wearily, with the irresistible sense that all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

To refresh our collective recollection, Zardari’s ascent to power last September came on the heels of an unprecedented movement in which Pakistan’s lawyers and ultimately its electorate decisively rejected then-General-cum-President Pervez Musharraf’s interference with the independence of Pakistan’s judiciary and his authoritarian, martial law-like crackdown on his opponents in the guise of “Emergency.” Like Benazir Bhutto before him, Zardari pledged on many occasions after the election to fulfill the key demands that stirred this mass movement to action: restoration of the judges unlawfully ousted by Musharraf, and in particular, restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Zardari also promised to roll back the powers accumulated in the presidency by Musharraf, restoring the supremacy of Pakistan’s parliament. Well over a year has passed since Pakistan’s electorate delivered that mandate. However, Zardari’s government has neither restored Chaudhry to his position, nor rolled back any of the other extraconstitutional actions taken by Musharraf during the Emergency, nor repealed the sweeping executive powers instituted by Musharraf.

Now, with Musharraf’s still-lingering Supreme Court declaring Zardari’s PML-N rivals ineligible to hold office, Zardari’s government has dismissed the PML-N government in Punjab and imposed Governor’s Rule, leading to civil and political unrest throughout the province. In response to this week’s second anniversary of Chaudhry’s suspension by Musharraf, the lawyers’ movement already had planned a second “Long March” on Islamabad, from March 12 to 16, seeking restoration of Pakistan’s pre-November 2007 constitution and reinstatement of all judges ousted during the Emergency.

Apparently feeling the political heat, Zardari then discovered his inner Musharraf — not on the golf course, as he previously had told the world he would have preferred, but rather in the authoritarian laws inherited from the British:

[P]olice and intelligence officials carried out early-morning raids across Punjab and Sindh, arresting more than 300 lawyers and political activists…. The crackdown began late Tuesday night, with the government invoking Section 144 of the 1860 Penal Code, a law from the British colonial era that forbids public gatherings of four or more people. As whispers of imminent arrests gathered momentum and local television channels exhibited lengthy lists of intended targets, many prominent lawyers and politicians went into hiding, just as they did during a crackdown operated by former President Pervez Musharraf….

Indeed, many of the people allegedly on the lists were last arrested in late 2007, when Musharraf imposed emergency rule….

Athar Minallah, a prominent lawyer, maneuvered himself out of being arrested from the driver’s seat of his car. “I locked myself in the car, and the police didn’t know how to get me,” he said. “So I called the television cameras who were only two minutes away. I began giving live interviews from the car, addressing the Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, directly. After a while, Mr. Malik came down himself and shouted the police officers away.” [link]

Perhaps seeking to out-Musharraf Musharraf, Zardari’s government has even played the terrorism card.

During the 2008 campaign, President Obama sharply criticized the Bush administration’s approach to Pakistan, asserting that by

coddl[ing] Musharraf, we alienated the Pakistani population, because we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that basically said, ‘Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he’s our dictator.”….

That’s going to change when I’m president of the United States. [link]

So how has the new administration responded to this week’s events? State Department spokesperson Robert Wood’s initial response did not go all that smoothly:

‘You haven’t been clear at all about where the US stands on what’s going on in Pakistan,’ said a journalist.

‘I have given you what our position is. I can’t give you an assessment of what’s taking place right at this moment on the ground,’ said Wood.

‘That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, what is your position on reinstatement of the chief judge,’ the journalist asked.

‘That’s something that’s going to have to be determined by the Pakistanis in accordance with their laws and their constitution. I can’t go beyond that,’ said Wood.

‘But when President Musharraf installed a state of emergency to avoid the reinstatement of the judges, you had called for the reinstatement of the judges,’ the journalist reminded him.

‘Look, I’m giving you what the policy is right now. And as I’ve said, this is something that needs to be worked out within Pakistan’s political sphere in accordance with its laws. That’s about the best I can give you,’ said Wood. [link]

Still, to their credit, Wood and other diplomats, including special envoy Richard Holbrooke, have publicly expressed concern about Zardari’s restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, and have urged Pakistan to act in accordance to the rule of law. Will it make any difference? As when the crisis over the judiciary first began, hum dekhenge. Again, and still.

The South Asian subcontinent continued to feature prominently in the presidential race this week, as Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama clashed over U.S. policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan during their debate on Friday night. In the New York Times, David Sanger characterizes the exchange as a "role reversal," with Obama seeming "more aligned" than McCain "with President Bush’s current policy of authorizing American special forces to cross the Afghan-Pakistan border into Pakistan’s tribal areas that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have used as a sanctuary."

Video of the exchange to the right. Other reactions to the debate, along with excerpts from the debate transcript, after the jump.

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

(Posted at Dorf on Law)

Like a number of others, I did a series of double takes upon hearing some of John McCain’s comments on Pakistan during this exchange in last night’s presidential debate:

MCCAIN: Now, on this issue of aiding Pakistan… We’ve got to get the support of the people of — of Pakistan….

OBAMA: [T]he problem, John, with the strategy that’s been pursued was that, for 10 years, we coddled Musharraf, we alienated the Pakistani population, because we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that basically said, “Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he’s our dictator.”

And as a consequence, we lost legitimacy in Pakistan. We spent $10 billion. And in the meantime, they weren’t going after Al Qaida, and they are more powerful now than at any time since we began the war in Afghanistan.

That’s going to change when I’m president of the United States.

MCCAIN: I — I don’t think that Senator Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power. Everybody who was around then, and had been there, and knew about it knew that it was a failed state. [link]

Perhaps McCain is being tutored on foreign policy by his vice presidential nominee, because I got lost in a hailstorm of nonsense there. McCain’s insistence upon the need “to get the support of the people of Pakistan” is all well and good — and I’m sure that the people of Pakistan would have welcomed that sentiment back in the winter, when Musharraf was trampling all over them. Instead, McCain unconditionally backed Musharraf at every turn, hailing the General as a “legitimately elected” president in the face of all evidence to the contrary. McCain even went so far as to call Musharraf a “scrupulously honest” man who had “done a pretty good job” and deserved the “benefit of the doubt” in the aftermath of his Emergency and Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. I do not know when, precisely, the moment was when McCain looked into Musharraf’s eyes and got a sense of the man’s scrupulously honest soul, but McCain’s character reference came several years after the Pakistani public got a good look for themselves, when the General brazenly reneged on a public promise that he would step down as army chief of staff.

But what should we make of McCain’s puzzling claim that Pakistan was a “failed state” before Musharraf’s 1999 military coup? The assertion goes well beyond defending the Bush administration’s unconditional support for Musharraf in recent years against Obama’s criticism. Rather, McCain necessarily seems to be asserting that Musharraf’s decision to overthrow Pakistan’s democratically elected government in the first place was justified. It turns out McCain has made this assertion before, asserting on the campaign trail in Iowa that Pakistan was a “failed state” before Musharraf came to power because it “had corrupt governments and they would rotate back and forth and there was corruption.” Of course, reasonable people can certainly disagree about how precisely to define a “failed state,” but it seems a stretch to put late-1990s Pakistan in that category. It’s also not as if Pakistan fared particularly well in this respect under Musharraf. At least according to the index developed by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy, Pakistan was at pretty serious risk of becoming a “failed state” during each of the last three years of Musharraf’s tenure as president. In any event, having “corrupt governments [that] rotate back and forth” certainly cannot be what defines a “failed state,” as McCain would have it. By McCain’s definition, one might conclude that India was a failed state in the late 1980s and again in the late 1990s.

McCain’s justification of Musharraf’s 1999 military coup is yet another example in which he seems to be singing a rather different tune than he was eight years ago. Recall that McCain was running for president when Musharraf overthrew Nawaz Sharif in 1999 — indeed, he was explicitly asked for his views about Musharraf’s coup in an interview only a few weeks later:

LARRY KING: How about military takeover bringing stability in Pakistan?

MCCAIN: Well, it may have brought some semblance of stability, but we only want the institutions of democracy that — to prevail in this and every other country in the world, and to have to resort to a military coup is not something the United States should support. The — I think [Gov. Bush's] point was that this was a very corrupt government that was overthrown, but it’s — in my view, it’s still not a reason to overthrow it. It’s a reason for us to do everything we can to help clean up that corruption and have the rule of law prevail in Pakistan and every other country in the world. [CNN, Larry King Live, Nov. 15, 1999, via Nexis]

UPDATE (9/28/08): Teeth Maestro rounds up some reactions to the debate by Pakistani bloggers at Global Voices.

UPDATE (9/30/08): Matthew Yglesias reports that he asked William Milam — who, as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan at the time of Musharraf’s 1999 coup, “was certainly ‘around then’ and ‘had been there’” — for his view of whether Pakistan was a “failed state” before Musharraf assumed power. Milam’s response:

[W]hile there were a lot of things wrong in Pakistan during the years leading up to the 1999 military takeover, Pakistan was not a failed state as we normally define such states. I am on record as stating publicly that, having come to Pakistan from Liberia a year before the takeover, I had a pretty good idea of what failed states look like, and [Pakistan] was not one. [link]

(Posted at Dorf on Law)

For decades, the late Vincent “the Chin” Gigante was renowned for his methodical efforts to convince the world that he was crazy. Or, if not the world, at least the judges before whom prosecutors sought to convict the well-known crime boss on charges ranging from bribery and racketeering to conspiracy to commit murder. Gigante went to painstaking lengths to convey the appearance that he was mentally ill and therefore incompetent to stand trial, wandering around Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers while either muttering to or having boisterous arguments with himself. (And on occasion, for good measure, scooping up cigarette butts off the sidewalks and trying to smoke them.) While the so-called “oddfather” never received the Oscar that he so richly deserved, he did manage to avoid facing trial for many years before finally being tried and convicted by a jury in connection with a conspiracy to murder a former associate in 1997. Gigante ultimately was forced to admit in 2003 that his decades-long performance was indeed a ruse, and he accordingly pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Along the way, dozens of prominent experts offered confident diagnoses asserting that Gigante was in fact mentally ill.

Today, many Pakistanis are wondering whether they have an “oddfather” of their very own, in the person of Pakistan People’s Party co-chairperson Asif Zardari, the artist formerly known as “Mr. Ten Percent” and the widower of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto:

[C]ourt documents filed by Mr Zardari’s doctors suggest he had been diagnosed as suffering from a series of serious conditions including severe depression, dementia and post-traumatic stress disorder. He had even experienced suicidal thoughts….

The details of Mr Zardari’s mental health examination, revealed yesterday by the Financial Times, were presented to a court in London to support an application to delay a now-defunct corruption case that was being brought against him by the Pakistan government. His lawyers presumably were looking for reasons to persuade the court to postpone the hearing – something they were successful in achieving. [link]

**

Zardari could remember neither the birthdays of his wife and children, nor more than a handful of facts from two short stories he was read. “He had difficulty focusing, concentrating and paying attention, is persistently sad, chronically anxious and apprehensive. He stated that he has had suicidal thoughts, but has not made any suicide gestures,” Mr. Reich wrote.

Another March 2007 diagnosis – by Philip Saltiel, a New York City-based psychiatrist – said emotional and neurological problems suffered by Mr Zardari because of medical treatment and imprisonment had resulted in “emotional instability” and “deficits in memory and concentration”. Mr Saltiel wrote: “I do not foresee any improvement in these issues for at least a year.” [link]

Almost a year and a half later, the revelations about Zardari’s court filings place him in a bit of a quandry. On the one hand, as with Gigante before him, the opinions offered by Zardari’s experts may have helped fend off some of the many court cases around the world charging him with corruption and fraud. On the other hand, in the aftermath of Pervez Musharraf’s resignation, Zardari now wants to become president of Pakistan himself, and is the presumptive nominee for that office of his party and, apparently, of the Bush administration, which has rather clumsily dropped whatever pretense of neutrality it had left. Of course, one might readily believe that having a touch of the crazy is a time-honored prerequisite to holding high political office. However, the Pakistan Constitution does not permit an individual to become president if he or she has been “declared by a competent court to be of unsound mind,” and authorizes removal of the president on the ground of “mental incapacity.” Even in the absence of any formal court order declaring him of “unsound mind,” therefore, Zardari may have placed himself in the somewhat awkward position of having rendered himself potentially removable — through his very own defense strategy — from the moment he is sworn into office.

Zardari’s associates claim that he’s not crazy, he was just a little unwell. (I know, back then you couldn’t tell.) After all, they note, Zardari languished in prison for many years, claims to have been tortured, and even feared being killed while in custody. Under such circumstances, says Zardari friend Wajid Shamsul Hasan, “[a]ny human being” would have suffered. Zardari’s true condition is, of course, difficult for any outsider to assess. And certainly one can and should have sympathy for the possibility that he could have suffered mightily if subjected to torture and inhuman treatment while in prison, as he has claimed. Nevertheless, Zardari’s associates seem to be suggesting that during the past year — in which he has endured not only the trauma of his wife’s tragic assassination, but also the stress of being unexpectedly thrust into a high stakes leadership position — his earlier afflictions not only have not been exacerbated, but in fact have gone away altogether. He has now fully recovered, they say, and is “fit as a fiddle.”

Whatever the actual state of Zardari’s mental health, Pakistan’s lawyers and judges must continue to find themselves perplexed by Zardari’s behavior since Pakistan held elections back in February. More than six months after the Pakistani electorate decisively repudiated Musharraf and made clear its desire to see the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and the other judges ousted by Musharraf, Zardari’s government has yet to make any meaningful effort to reinstate those judges or roll back the other constitutional changes that Musharraf imposed by decree during the Emergency. Zardari has broken one promise after another about the judges to his coalition partner, Nawaz Sharif, leading Sharif to temporarily pull his Pakistan Muslim League ministers out of the cabinet back in May and, more decisively, to pull his party out of the government altogether earlier this week. Zardari has openly acknowledged reneging on his deals with Sharif about the judges, the most recent being a written agreement to reinstate all of the ousted judges within 24 hours after Musharraf’s impeachment or resignation. Zardari has justified breaking his word by asserting that his agreements with Sharif are “not holy like the holy Quran and the Hadith,” but rather can be modified as convenient. Somewhat inconveniently, however, with his latest agreement Zardari also reportedly told Sharif, “Let’s take an oath on the Koran this time that I will fulfill all my promises.”

And the mixed messages continue. Last week, Zardari told Newsweek that he “personally [is] in favor of the chief justice, but there is a position in the party, which says that he has become too politicized in the last many months and he has been leading rallies.” This week, by contrast, Zardari cryptically said that “perhaps [he] cannot reveal the whole truth to the nation” about why he has been unwilling to move forward with the reinstatement of all of the ousted judges. Zardari also was reported to have suggested that a coalition partner, the Awami National Party, supported him in opposing restoration of all of the ousted judges, but later was forced to “clarify” that statement through a party spokesperson after the ANP protested to the contrary that they have consistently supported restoration of all of the ousted judges.

In the aftermath of the February elections, Zardari was hailed by many as a statesman for his role in building a broad coalition aimed at national reconciliation — and for being able to do so only weeks after mourning his wife’s death. With respect to the judiciary, however, more recent reviews of Zardari’s performance have been decidedly less favorable. Reports have consistently indicated that the principal source of Zardari’s reluctance to permit reinstatement of all of the judges ousted by Musharraf — and his reluctance, in particular, to see the Chief Justice return to office — is a fear that independent judges might permit the corruption charges against him to go forward. (Pressure from the Bush administration not to restore the judges could well be another factor.) However, Zardari’s own experience suggests that perhaps he has nothing to fear from an independent judiciary at all. Maybe he simply needs to press his legal and medical experts back into service, and to invest in a nice bathrobe and a comfortable pair of slippers.

(Cross-posted from SAJAforum)

This morning, Aitzaz Ahsan, the President of the Pakistan Supreme Court Bar Association and the leader of Pakistan’s “lawyers’ movement,” spoke to a large audience at the New York City Bar Association about the lawyers’ movement, the importance of an independent judiciary, and the role of U.S. policy in Pakistan’s judicial crisis. During the past year, the New York City Bar has played an active role in support of Pakistan’s lawyers and judges — organizing a solidarity rally with other area bar associations after Gen. Pervez Musharraf imposed “emergency” rule in November, issuing a statement strongly urging Musharraf to restore the rule of law, and awarding an honorary membership, one of the organization’s highest honors, to Pakistan Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

In his remarks, Ahsan thanked U.S. lawyers and bar associations for their “unstinting support for constitutionalism, rule of law, and reinstatement of an independent judiciary in Pakistan.” He said that last November’s rally — which drew hundreds of New York lawyers to the steps of the courthouse in lower Manhattan — “was an unprecedented collective action, and it was noticed throughout Pakistan.” Ahsan expressed his view that “what has endeared the people of America to the people of Pakistan, despite the adversarial policies of the American administration, has been the support of the bar associations.”

Following his address at the New York City Bar, Ahsan briefly talked to SAJAforum about the lawyers’ movement, the prospects for reinstatement of the judges ousted by Musharraf, and the role of Pakistan’s media:

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

(Posted at Dorf on Law)

It’s been quite a saga, one that has captured the attention of an entire nation and indeed many people around the world. An establishment figure who, only a year and a half ago, seemed politically invincible now faces what can only be described as a stunning defeat. The path from there to here has been a remarkable one. The movement that helped bring about this moment has drawn its energy from groups who have surprised many observers with the breadth and depth of their political engagement. As this movement steadily grew over the course of 2007, the political climate accordingly intensified, culminating this January and February in an extraordinary campaign and a stunning set of election results.

But to the unending frustration of many, here we are in June, and the durability of any meaningful resolution remains somewhat unclear. Back in February, it seemed to many observers that at least the first round of that anti-establishment political campaign had reached a swift conclusion. But then February dragged into March and April, and a series of controversies and arguable missteps followed. Leading members of the Bush administration and their allies started to complicate matters by inserting themselves into the fray. Now that summer has arrived, a common question continues to be on the minds of many: will this drama really end any time soon?

The past week has finally raised hope that some sort of resolution is at hand. However, it is still not at all clear that the road ahead will be a smooth one — to the contrary, many signs point to a rather bumpy political ride. For one thing, political figures who owe electoral success to a grassroots movement will now be held accountable to it: the movement that fueled electoral victory will not look kindly upon any sort of compromise or power-sharing arrangement if such a deal jettisons its principles and values. And of course there remains the formidable challenge of dealing with a powerful establishment figure who retains intense support in politically influential quarters. With some erstwhile allies abandoning ship — apparently to the point of insisting upon an earlier departure from the political scene than anticipated — there has been much talk in recent days of the possibility of a “soft landing” or “dignified exit.” The end of this particular political chapter may finally be drawing near.

**

Whatever the fate of Pervez Musharraf himself, there remains the complicated question of how Pakistan’s governing coalition might roll back the legal and institutional changes that Musharraf imposed by decree during last fall’s Emergency. For the past few months, the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party has been equivocal about its interest in rolling back Musharraf’s Emergency — indeed, to date the new government even continues to retain Musharraf’s Attorney General in that post. Last week, however, it was reported that the PPP had prepared a lengthy draft package of legal changes which includes, among other things, reinstatement of the judges ousted by Musharraf during the Emergency. Based on that draft text, which is incomplete and may still change, a few things are worth noting.

First, the draft proposal is an elaborate constitutional package, not an executive order or even an informal announcement of the kind made by Prime Minister Yousef Gilani back in March when he ordered the immediate release of the judges detained by Musharraf. The use of a lengthy package of constitutional amendments as a modality of rollback seems to implicitly concede that the legal regime imposed by Musharraf during the Emergency — what I have referred to as an “extraconstitution” — was in some manner lawful or legitimate. After all, as Babar Sattar has written, “[a]n illegal order is simply void and doesn’t need to be reversed through law making.”

While a cute textual argument can be made that the language of the draft constitutional package sidesteps any direct acknowledgment of the legitimacy of Musharraf’s extraconstitution, the argument seems a bit too cute by half, especially since in substance the package appears to adopt a number of the very changes made by Musharraf during the Emergency. The package would also at least partially indemnify against treason both Musharraf himself and the judges who affirmed their allegiance to him in violation of the Supreme Court’s order enjoining Musharraf’s Emergency — a move that would necessarily involve some measure of acquiescence to Musharraf’s extraconstitution. (Although the proposed amendments explicitly provide that Supreme Court or High Court judges who validate any extraconstitutional abrogation of the Constitution would cease to be judges and may be found guilty of high treason under Article 6 of the Constitution, the amendments appear not to extend those consequences to the judges who validated Musharraf’s extraconstitutional Emergency in November.)

Second, the draft package would limit the power of the presidency. The key amendments include a provision repealing Article 58(2)(b), a provision added during the 1980s by General Zia-ul-Haq which confers power upon the president to dissolve Parliament, and a number of provisions transferring specific powers from the president to the prime minister. These provisions would restore the constitutional balance of authority in favor of Parliament over the presidency, as originally contemplated by the Pakistan Constitution of 1973, and will be welcomed in many quarters. Under the PPP’s coalition partner Nawaz Sharif, Parliament actually repealed Article 58(2)(b) during the late 1990s, with support for the repeal coming from across the partisan spectrum. Musharraf, however, restored the provision following his first coup d’etat in 1999. The availability during the 1990s of a means by which the executive could dissolve Parliament facilitated a state of affairs that Husain Haqqani has referred to as “military rule by other means.” Especially over the medium and long-term, it certainly would remain to be seen whether the Army would go along with the elimination of these provisions.

Finally, while the draft package would reinstate the judges ousted by Musharraf, it apparently also includes a number of provisions designed to limit judicial independence and to place the judiciary under tighter parliamentary control, most notably by limiting existing judges’ terms of office and making changes to the judicial appointment process. For months, both Musharraf and the Bush administration have been actively maneuvering to prevent Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry’s reinstatement, and earlier proposals floated by the PPP leadership reportedly would have excluded Chaudhry from the restoration package altogether. When those proposals met with resistance from the lawyers’ movement, civil society, and Nawaz Sharif, the PPP leadership now instead seeks to limit the chief justice’s term of office.

A key issue lurking in the background of the dispute over the judges is the fate of the National Reconciliation Ordinance brokered by the Bush administration between Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto, which purports to indemnify Benazir and her widower, PPP Chairman Asif Zardari, and to dismiss all of the corruption cases pending against them. The legality of the NRO has been challenged, and an independent judiciary with Chaudhry at the helm may or may not validate it. So far, Zardari has largely seemed disinclined to take his chances about that.

So far, both the lawyers’ movement and Sharif have been relatively unimpressed by the constitutional package, regarding many of its features as too much of an accommodation with Musharraf, his extraconstitution, and his handpicked judges. Sharif has pulled the ministers from his Pakistan Muslim League (N) party out of the cabinet, although he has not pulled the PML-N out of the coalition altogether. The lawyers’ movement has scheduled a “Long March” to Islamabad for the coming week — and remarkably, over a hundred rank and file PPP members of Parliament have indicated their support for the Long March.

Today, Musharraf said that all other things being equal he would prefer not to be a “useless vegetable,” and that if the Parliament’s constitutional package leaves him without “any role to play, then it is better to play golf.” (His spokesperson, however, was quick to note yesterday that Musharraf “has not packed … his golf bag” just yet.) Back in January, after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, Zardari said that he would groom their 19-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, to take the helm as PPP chairperson, and that when Bilawal is “responsible enough,” then he, too, could leave politics to “go and play golf.” Lame duck President George W. Bush has apparently stopped playing golf, but has by no means stopped expressing strong support for his friend Musharraf. (Recall that Bush famously asserted that Musharraf had not “crossed any lines” during the Emergency.) Maybe Musharraf and Zardari will soon find themselves accusing each other of cheating on the golf course, rather than in politics — with Bush serving as caddy, reviewing the scorecard, and trying to broker a deal between them.

A film screening and discussion with:
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Kiran Khalid, documentary filmmaker
Anil Kalhan ’93, Professor, Fordham Law School
Ali Ahsan, Speechwriter, United Nations

* * *

Smith-Buonanno Hall, Brown University

When: Fri, Apr 11, 2008

4:00-6:00pm

Where: Brown University

Smith-Buonnano Hall, Rm 201

East of Brown Street between Meeting and Bowen Street, Providence, RI

Sponsored by Brown South Asian Students Association and Brown Journal of World Affairs

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-

The Center for Place, Culture & Politics Presents

Demystifying Pakistan: Understanding the Current Crisis

A panel discussion on the military in Pakistani politics, society and economy; emergency, martial law, and the rule of law in India and Pakistan; the rise and subsequent fall of electronic media under President Musharraf; and the politics of democratic protest in Pakistan.

Panelists:

Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa, Visiting Professor, South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania and author of Military, Inc. : Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (Pluto Press, 2007).

Anil Kalhan, Visiting Assistant Professor, Fordham Law School.

Kiran Khalid, documentary film maker and producer, Good Morning America and director, “We Are Not Free,” a documentary short to be screened at the panel.

Dr. Sahar Shafqat, Associate Professor, St. Mary’s College of Maryland and Member of the anti-Musharraf/pro-democracy movement in Pakistan.

Moderated by Saadia Toor, Assistant Professor of Sociology, College of Staten Island.

CUNY Graduate Center* * *

When: Fri, Mar 28, 2008, 6:00-8:00pm

Where: CUNY Graduate Center

Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall
365 Fifth Ave, at 34 St, New York

(Posted at Dorf on Law)

This week, the people of Pakistan have raised the stakes in their nation’s constitutional politics. However, the Bush administration, John McCain, and others seem not to quite understand the significance and meaning of this week’s election results:

The US and Britain are pressing Pervez Musharraf’s victorious opponents to drop their demands that he resign as president and that the country’s independent judiciary be restored before forming a government.

In a strategy some Western diplomats admit could badly backfire, the Bush administration has made clear it wishes to continue to support Mr Musharraf even after Monday’s election in which the Pakistani public delivered a resounding rejection of his policies….

Yesterday morning, a US diplomat based in Lahore spent two hours with Aitzaz Ahsan, leader of the lawyers movement, laying out the US position. [link]

**

US Senator John McCain, the Republican Party presidential hopeful, has rejected calls for the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf following Monday’s elections, saying he is a “legitimately elected” Pakistani leader. [link]

Perhaps none of this should be all that surprising, given that both Bush and McCain have been wildly wrong about Pakistan at just about every turn. Still, after an election in which the Pakistani people are experiencing a profound “moment of hope,” having turned out in apparently record numbers to give Musharraf and his backers an anti-incumbent thumping unlike anything seen in Pakistan’s history, Bush and McCain seem to lack a grip on reality as they continue to stand by their man so obstinately.

Pakistan’s leading politicians have treated the Bush administration’s efforts to plead Musharraf’s case as the punch line to a bad joke, agreeing to form a coalition government that doesn’t include any lingering remnants of Musharraf’s party, as Washington would have preferred. Reports indicate that the framework underlying the new coalition government will be a revived version of the Charter of Democracy, a preconstitutional declaration signed by Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto on behalf of their parties in 2006 (and about which I’ve written previously). The Charter — which, among other things, pledges to restore the Pakistan Constitution to its pre-Musharraf state and proscribes its civilian signatories from seeking military support for partisan political advantage — was almost rendered a nullity by the Bush administration’s efforts to broker a deal between then-army chief Musharraf and Bhutto. With an agreement between the major political parties for its revival, however, the prospects for rolling back the legal and institutional damage wrought by Musharraf’s Emergency may now be considerably increased.

What would rollback entail? Personality-driven media reports in the United States have emphasized the possibility of impeaching and removing Musharraf from office. Such a move — which might be understood to implicitly concede the legitimacy of Musharraf’s highly contested reelection as president — would require a two-thirds majority vote in the National Assembly, which the coalition may or may not attain, and sufficient support in the Senate, which remains stacked with Musharraf supporters. However, in speculating about impeachment, these news reports seem to have the math of rollback precisely backwards. Far from being a “legitimately elected” president, as McCain would have it, Musharraf’s suspension of the Constitution in November “by use of force or show of force or by other unconstitutional means” has rendered him potentially guilty of “high treason” under Article 6 of the Pakistan Constitution. In the past, Pakistani coup leaders (including Musharraf himself after his first coup) have avoided prosecution for treason by strongarming the incoming parliament into amending the Constitution specifically to indemnify their extraconstitutional actions — an act which itself requires a two-thirds vote. Musharraf’s opponents, therefore, do not need two-thirds support in parliament to resist him. Rather, it is Musharraf himself who needs two-thirds support from parliament to avoid the possibility of being charged with treason. In a parliament now dominated by Musharraf opponents, that indemnification obviously will not be forthcoming, although it is possible that the parliament would be willing to indemnify him in exchange for his resignation or other concessions.

The only thing potentially standing between Musharraf and a treason prosecution, other than the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, is his own unilateral order purporting to indemnify himself. That decree is of highly questionable legality, but if the new parliament nullifies the many laws and constitutional amendments that Musharraf tried to decree during the Emergency, then that order would in any event be swept away as well. (Indeed, the Charter of Democracy pledges to go even further by rolling back Musharraf’s earlier constitutional amendments, some of which grabbed power for the presidency and the army at the expense of parliament and the prime minister.) Moreover, if the new parliament restores judicial independence, by reinstating the approximately 60 judges who refused to swear loyalty to Musharraf in November, then it is unlikely that the Pakistan Supreme Court would uphold Musharraf’s attempt at self-indemnification. (Most notable among these judges, of course, is Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, whom Musharraf, carrying himself in a highly presidential manner, recently called “the scum of the earth, a third-rate man, a corrupt man” in an interview with Jemima Khan.) A restored Supreme Court might even invalidate Musharraf’s reelection as president, as it apparently had been poised to do on the eve of his crackdown in November.

Would either the invalidation of Musharraf’s decrees or the restoration of Pakistan’s ousted judges require a two-thirds vote of parliament? Both Chaudhry and Aitzaz Ahsan say no, and it would be rather odd if the answer were otherwise. (For his part, Musharraf has opined that “[l]egally there’s no way this can be done,” but we can safely leave his legal opinion to one side for the moment.) Even if Pakistanis were to avert their gaze from the extraconstitutional illegitimacy of Musharraf’s actions — and the election results seem to demonstrate, rather decisively, that they have not done so — there seems no reason why the incoming parliament could not invalidate those actions by a simple majority or even just an order by the prime minister, especially given the massive repudiation of the legitimacy of Musharraf’s Emergency by the Pakistani people. As Chaudhry has said, “I was deposed by an Executive Order and I can be restored by an Executive Order. There is no need of two-thirds majority of Parliament.”

Math aside, how far the new government will be able and willing to go in directly confronting Musharraf remains unclear. The extent to which the Pakistan Army will back Musharraf in any constitutional confrontation also remains somewhat uncertain. Ahsan and the lawyers’ movement have called on the new parliament to restore the ousted judges before March 9th, the one-year anniversary of Musharraf’s initial attempt to oust Chaudhry, and have indicated that they will conduct a “long march” to Islamabad if that doesn’t happen.

Clearly, the election results and formation of a new coalition government are only the first steps towards rollback. The intensity of Pakistan’s constitutional politics remains high, and the path to fully achieving rollback remains a challenging one. Still, many Pakistanis now rightfully feel, with Mohsin Hamid, “a cautious, soul-gladdening optimism.” Maybe even the “audacity of hope.”

Please join the South Asian Bar Association of New York for its first dinner series event of 2008:

Democracy and the Rule of Law in Pakistan in the Aftermath of Elections:
A Conversation With Ali Ahsan

On Monday, February 18th, Pakistan will hold general elections, culminating a year of tremendous political controversy and uncertainty but also a year of tremendous political activism and mobilized civic engagement. Will the coming elections be free and fair? In the aftermath of elections, what are the prospects for democracy and the rule of law in Pakistan?

Join SABANY for a post-election conversation with Ali Ahsan, a New York lawyer and SABANY member who is also the son of the leader of the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan. He recently returned to New York after spending two months in Pakistan, where his father remains in detention under house arrest. The conversation will be moderated by Anil Kalhan, visiting professor at Fordham University Law School.

Date:
Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Diwan RestaurantVenue:
Diwan Restaurant
148 E. 48th Street (Between 3rd Ave and Lexington)
New York, NY 10017

Time:
7-9pm

Admission*:
SABANY Members $25
SABANY Public Interest Members and Students: $15
Non-Members $35

*Admission also includes a 3 course meal.

RSVP to Swati Parikh at swatiparikh@gmail.com

Ayesha Siddiqa is a military and political analyst and the author of the recent book, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy. She is currently a visiting faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and writes columns for various international and Pakistani newspapers. She previously was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Ford Fellow, and has served as a correspondent for Jane’s Defense Weekly. She also has served as a civil servant in Pakistan and is the only woman to have served as the Director of Naval Research. Siddiqa earned a Ph.D. in War Studies from King’s College, London.

* * *

When: Thu, Jan 24, 2008, 6:00pm

Where: Fordham Law School
140 W. 62nd Street
(Between Amsterdam & Columbus Avs)

Rm 430 B&C

Sponsored by:
Fordham Law School Dean’s Office
Fordham South Asian Law Students Association
Leitner Center for International Law & Justice
South Asian Journalists Association
South Asian Bar Association of New York

Fordham Law School, 140 W. 62nd Street

Questions? Email fordhamsalsa@gmail.com

Your Call, Jan. 2, 2008 – Pakistan After Benazir (KALW 91.7 FM)

What has been the fall-out of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination? On the next Your Call we speak with a panel of South Asians about the events since the bomb in Liaquat National Park. Bhutto’s 19-year-old son has been pushed to the helm of the Pakistan People’s Party. President Musharraf says elections will be delayed until February but can the weakened Musharraf stay in power until then? The United States has had close involvement in the politics of Pakistan for nearly four decades: what role should it play now? It’s Your Call, with Sandip Roy and you.

Guests:
Anil Kalhan in New York
Visiting Professor of Law at Fordham University Law School

Sharmeen Obaid in Pakistan
Documentary filmmaker and reporter who has covered the aftermath of terrorism’s rise in South Asia

Ahmed Junaid in Williamsburg, VA
Author and a leader in Pakistan’s expatriate community of liberal Muslims.

Click to Listen: Pakistan After Bhutto

(Posted at Dorf on Law)

This week, the Pakistan People’s Party named Benazir Bhutto’s son, Bilawal, as chairperson of the party, even though he is only 19, still in college, and will not be leaving school to become a full-time politico just yet. His father Asif Ali Zardari and two others will serve as regents in the interim. Certainly, young Bilawal has to be one of the world’s first major political leaders to have an active Facebook page at the time he entered politics. It’s hard not to understand and agree with Tariq Ali’s response to the news:

The Pakistan People’s Party is being treated as a family heirloom, a property to be disposed of at the will of its leader.

Nothing more, nothing less. Poor Pakistan. Poor People’s Party supporters. Both deserve better than this disgusting, medieval charade.

* * *

That most of the PPP inner circle consists of spineless timeservers leading frustrated and melancholy lives is no excuse. All this could be transformed if inner-party democracy was implemented. There is a tiny layer of incorruptible and principled politicians inside the party, but they have been sidelined. [link]

In the immediate aftermath of losing the charismatic Benazir as its leader — and on the eve of a national election — I suppose it’s not altogether surprising that the PPP’s leadership would readily defer to the wishes expressed in her will by turning to a familiar name to serve at least as the symbolic leader of the party. (I’m not so sure he’s a familiar face to most Pakistanis, especially since he’s spent much of his short life abroad and out of the public eye. Indeed, as you can see from the photo above, his “Facebook” profile doesn’t even have a “face.”) And we don’t need to single out Pakistan — dynastic politics of one form or another are a way of life to varying extents in many countries, including such celebrated democracies as India and the United States. (One observer has even described dynastic politics as an “American tradition.”)

Still, as Ali also noted last week, “[t]o be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organisation.” I suspect that it will take stronger and more durable electoral processes outside of the political parties, in Pakistan more generally, in order to catalyze greater internal democracy within the political parties. Would that be enough? Perhaps not. Indira Gandhi and her spawn retained a dominant role within the Congress Party even after being voted out of power in 1977, and of course the 2008 election here in the United States could end up replicating the “Benazir-Nawaz-Benazir-Nawaz” pattern of 1990s Pakistan with a crudely analogous (and longer-lasting) “Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton” pattern of our own. (Grover Norquist thinks we need a constitutional amendment to put a stop to all of this.)

But the importance of meaningful electoral processes cannot be dismissed altogether, since they do create spaces where other political leaders can emerge. Free and fair elections also would give the public as a whole something they did not really have in Pakistan even during the 1990s: an opportunity to hold parties accountable for their internal decision-making by voting their leadership out of political office, no matter what families those leaders come from. After all, contrary to speculation from as recently as the summer of 2006, we are not going to see Jeb Bush’s name on the primary ballots this spring, and were he a candidate, I can’t imagine that he would have carried the Bush dynasty to a resounding victory.

Related post: The Math of Rollback

Continue reading at BusinessWeek….