Pakistan: Is civilian government doomed again?

It hasn’t even been four years since Pakistan’s army ceded power, yet already there’s talk of a new coup, said Asad Hashim in AlJazeera.com. The Supreme Court is trying to force Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to press corruption charges against President Asif Ali Zardari, who was elected amid public outrage at the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, in December 2007. Pakistan’s powerful generals say Zardari has conspired with Washington against them, and warn darkly of “grievous consequences.” In a dramatic court appearance last week, Gilani refused to reopen old corruption cases against Zardari, declaring, “I will not throw him to the wolves.” But for all his bravado, it is hard to see how the government can stand up to both the courts and the army until next year’s elections.

The courts pose the most immediate threat to civilian government, said Mohammad Taqi in the New Delhi Tehelka. The enmity between those institutions goes back a long way: Top judges have a history of protecting military “usurpers” like Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf, and of validating martial law. Their hands are “stained with the blood” of the country’s first elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father, whose “judicial murder” they agreed to in 1979 at Zia’s behest. The judges are still smarting over how long it took Zardari to reinstate them in office after democracy was re-established in 2008. Given their history, you can hardly blame Zardari for dragging his feet.

As I see it, the sooner Zardari and his “brazen” cronies are gone the better, said Ali Ashraf Khan in the Islamabad Pakistan Observer. These politicians go on and on about democracy, yet their only concern is lining their own pockets. They condemn their predecessor, Musharraf, for allying with George W. Bush in his war on terror, yet murderous drone attacks have doubled on their watch. They knew all about Washington’s plans for an invasion to kill Osama bin Laden last year, yet did nothing to stop it. The way they’ve kowtowed to America amounts to “high treason.” The last straw was when a leaked memo—apparently written by Pakistan’s ambassador on behalf of Zardari—emerged begging the Pentagon to intervene to scotch an imagined coup threat.

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An outright coup is unlikely, said Reza Sayah in CNN.com. Pakistan has changed in the past decade. A “fiery and remarkably free” media has emerged, and it will not hesitate to cause trouble for the generals, who are in no hurry to make themselves the target of popular discontent. The judiciary is also more independent, and it won’t let itself be “strong-armed” into supporting a coup. The clincher is that the military stands to lose American support worth billions of dollars if it suspends democracy yet again. If the army’s main aim is to get rid of Zardari, it may be smarter to simply be patient and wait until voters boot him out next year.