generalspeaking

Abandoning Pakistan

Pakistanis loathed Pervez Musharraf, and breathed a collective sigh of good riddance on his reluctant departure. The country's vast community of lawyers, so utterly enraged by General Musharraf's removal of the country's chief justice campaigned, lobbied and marched incessantly for his departure. His was most certainly the toughest of all possible positions.

He had taken it upon himself to remove a corrupt government and president and replaced it with his own. A military coup, albeit a fairly bloodless one, rather than a staid parliamentary election. The people of Pakistan want it all, to be secular when they want to be, to be fundamentalist when it suits them, to be democratic above all, but to retain their right to endemic corruption.

It's tradition, part of the culture, imbibed with the entire geography's water resources, sprinkled there liberally by a chaos-minded jokester who became too utterly bored, watching the planet gradually cool and solidify into great granite mountains, deserts and fertile plains.

The country, alight with the possibility of bringing back Benazir Bhutto whose two terms of governance gave her husband ample opportunity to indulge in graft, lost all confidence in itself on her predictable assassination, and hastily drained its savings out of the country's banking system to swift it into Swiss banks.

Oops, a country with a collapsed financial system, and no money left in the country for investment. Presenting the late Benazir Bhutto's widower with imminent bankruptcy. Nothing personal here, his own finances are intact, like all other Pakistani upper- and middle-class citizens, but the country, that's another, lamentable story altogether.

The citizens of Pakistan, those who have wealth, money to spare, have no confidence in their country's ability to retain wealth. Their crisis of confidence has drained the country of its ability to conduct business, inspire the investment of international capital, to create opportunities to advance the country's agenda of self-sufficiency.

Now its president, Asif Ali Zardari has dispatched his senior financial officials to Washington and to London in the hopes of securing a brief life-line of ten billion, which they've been assured the Gulf States will be certain to match. Otherwise, Pakistan will be unable to meet its debts, let alone fund itself into solvency.

Pakistan seeks the confidence of the world at large to rescue it from its own incompetence and the lack of support and confidence of its own people. About a hundred-billion should do it. Good trick.

And then there's the reality of a country teetering on the brink of another kind of collapse; complete capitulation to fanatical Islamism. This, recall, is the country that elected Benazir Bhutto's father's Pakistan Peoples Party on the promise he would make life easier, fairer, for the massive numbers of indigenous poverty-stricken Pakistanis.

Instead, he took scarce public funding and invested it in experimentation that led to nuclear advancement, and eventually nuclear armaments. The better to square off with hated Hindu India. Pakistan, on the cusp of representing as a failed semi-democracy surrendering to Islamism, has a nuclear arsenal.

Its beloved, respected and much-acclaimed senior nuclear scientist who happily sold nuclear technology to North Korea, itself now disseminating that information throughout the Middle East, is a celebrated hero.

Pakistan has abandoned all reason. It's so unfortunate that the world simply cannot afford to abandon Pakistan.

Labels: Troublespots, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Friday, October 10, 2008