Pakistan on the Brink: The future of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the West by Ahmed Rashid

Author:Ahmed Rashid [Rashid, Ahmed]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction: General, recent
ISBN: 9781846145865
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

A Sliver of Hope: Counterinsurgency in Swat

MAKING MY way to President Asif Ali Zardari’s presidential palace in the heart of Islamabad for dinner in June 2009 was like running an obstacle course. Pakistan’s once-sleepy capital, full of restaurant-going bureaucrats and diplomats, was now littered with concrete barriers, blast walls, checkpoints, armed police, and soldiers; as a result of recent suicide bombings, the city resembled Baghdad or Kabul. At the first checkpoint, two miles from the palace, they had my name and my car’s license number. I had seven more checkpoints to negotiate along the way.

Apart from traveling to the airport by helicopter to go abroad, the president stays inside the palace these days; he fears threats to his life by the Pakistani Taliban, by Al Qaeda, and even by the intelligence services. Every day he remembers his wife’s murder at the hands of perpetrators whom nobody has yet fully identified. Zardari’s isolation and insecurity only add to his growing unpopularity, his indecisiveness, his fear of making decisions without the military’s consent, and his hopeless disconnect from the public mood. Zardari has also become a know-it-all, refusing to listen to advice, asking nobody’s opinion, and talking nonstop even to visiting dignitaries. Corruption scandals, like those that dogged him in the 1990s and put him in jail for over a decade, are once again rife in the Islamabad rumor mill, although the corruption stories now extend to his chosen prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, and his wife and children. Zardari has totally sidelined the senior figures in the Pakistan Peoples Party who were close to his wife and replaced them with his old friends and business cronies—many of them tainted by corruption.

Zardari has become an excellent behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer, enlarging his coalition government by bringing in new political parties in order to undermine his old rival Nawaz Sharif, whose younger brother Shabaz controls Punjab. Important national decisions are delayed or never made as the country slips into chaos. Pakistan’s entire top leadership—Zardari, Gilani, and General Kayani—are in a state of denial about the reality of what Pakistan is becoming. They have begun to take violence and chaos for granted. “We are not a failed state yet, but we may become one in ten years if we don’t receive international support to combat the Taliban threat,” Zardari told me indignantly, pointing out that the United States had given Musharraf $11 billion between 2002 and 2008, but he had received only a pittance. “We have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs or revive the economy. What are we supposed to do?”1 Zardari believes that the United States owes it to Pakistan to bail it out with billions of dollars.

But the government does not accept the need for improving governance, undertaking economic reform, increasing direct taxes, or raising greater revenue at home, which are the main demands of the international community. One Western ambassador told Zardari bluntly that there is no free lunch: “Why should our taxpayers pay for you, when

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