PAKISTAN'S troubles did not end with the resignation last week of former President Pervez Musharraf. On the contrary, the rupture this week of the coalition between the parties of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, suggests that Pakistan's several overlapping crises are becoming more acute than ever.
Pakistan is both a nuclear power and an ambivalent host to local and Afghan Taliban militants as well as foreign Al Qaeda terrorists. So its problems inevitably become Washington's problems. The passage from an increasingly autocratic Musharraf to the shady pair of Zardari and Sharif has left the Bush administration facing the fallout from yet one more policy failure.
Bush gambled on Musharraf and lost when the former army chief fired Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, touching off a political crisis that undermined his own government. The administration then put its chips on a forced partnership between Bhutto and Musharraf and lost that wager as well. Recently, Washington's unacknowledged favor seems to have landed on Zardari, on the theory that his liberal, secular party may be more inclined to wage a serious struggle against Islamist extremists.
But the danger of choosing sides in Pakistan's power struggle was evident this week, after the disclosure that State Department officials chastised the US ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, for his private contacts with Zardari. In a note leaked to The New York Times, the assistant secretary for South Asia, Richard Boucher, complained that Khalilzad had veered from "a public line that we are not involved in the politics" of Pakistan "or the details."
In other words, Khalilzad made it hard to maintain the cover story that Washington is impartial in the struggle between Sharif, who has a history of support for Islamist forces, and Zardari, who spent eight years in jail on corruption charges.
Zardari broke a pledge to reinstall Chaudhry out of a fear that the jurist would overturn an amnesty from corruption charges that Musharraf gave Zardari. Zardari also recalls that Sharif had him imprisoned twice in the '90s.
The Bush cover story about impartiality ought to be the real policy. It is not possible to foresee who will come out on top in the Pakistani power struggle, and American intervention is likely to produce only one more losing bet.
No favorites in Pakistan
PAKISTAN'S troubles did not end with the resignation last week of former President Pervez Musharraf. On the contrary, the rupture this week of the coalition between the parties of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, suggests that Pakistan's several overlapping crises are becoming more acute than ever.
Pakistan is both a nuclear power and an ambivalent host to local and Afghan Taliban militants as well as foreign Al Qaeda terrorists. So its problems inevitably become Washington's problems. The passage from an increasingly autocratic Musharraf to the shady pair of Zardari and Sharif has left the Bush administration facing the fallout from yet one more policy failure.
Bush gambled on Musharraf and lost when the former army chief fired Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, touching off a political crisis that undermined his own government. The administration then put its chips on a forced partnership between Bhutto and Musharraf and lost that wager as well. Recently, Washington's unacknowledged favor seems to have landed on Zardari, on the theory that his liberal, secular party may be more inclined to wage a serious struggle against Islamist extremists.
But the danger of choosing sides in Pakistan's power struggle was evident this week, after the disclosure that State Department officials chastised the US ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, for his private contacts with Zardari. In a note leaked to The New York Times, the assistant secretary for South Asia, Richard Boucher, complained that Khalilzad had veered from "a public line that we are not involved in the politics" of Pakistan "or the details."
In other words, Khalilzad made it hard to maintain the cover story that Washington is impartial in the struggle between Sharif, who has a history of support for Islamist forces, and Zardari, who spent eight years in jail on corruption charges.
Zardari broke a pledge to reinstall Chaudhry out of a fear that the jurist would overturn an amnesty from corruption charges that Musharraf gave Zardari. Zardari also recalls that Sharif had him imprisoned twice in the '90s.
The Bush cover story about impartiality ought to be the real policy. It is not possible to foresee who will come out on top in the Pakistani power struggle, and American intervention is likely to produce only one more losing bet.
