Best columns: International

Pakistan: Why civilian rule is hardly a cure-all

The world thinks Pakistan is on the verge of becoming a failed state and a haven for nuclear-armed terrorists, said Najmuddin Shaikh in the Karachi Dawn. It was hardly reassured by the shameful scenes at Islamabad airport three weeks ago, when Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister whom Gen. Pervez Musharraf ousted in 1999, flew back from a seven-year exile in Saudi Arabia only to be manhandled back onto the plane. Now deeply unpopular, President Musharraf is trying to reach a deal with Benazir Bhutto, another former prime minister in exile and Sharif’s bitter rival. But in sending Sharif packing, Musharraf brushed aside a Supreme Court ruling that Sharif was legally entitled to return. This “ham-fisted” behavior was an act of “pure and utter desperation” by a government operating in “panic mode,” said the Karachi News. Treating Sharif as a “convicted felon” instead of facing him in elections will only make Musharraf more unpopular, and open a “Pandora’s box” of problems.

Yet Sharif is hardly a white knight, said Pakistani journalist Maseeh Rahman in the Hong Kong South China Morning Post. Many voters remember his “autocratic” ways: passing laws to straitjacket the opposition and ruthlessly crushing his critics. When the country’s top judge got in his way, Sharif’s party thugs stormed the court and forced him to quit. By the end of his rule, he was increasingly behaving like a medieval despot and even tried to make Pakistan subject to Islamic law. It’s hard to recall now, but by ousting Sharif, Musharraf was hailed as “savior of the nation.”

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Bhutto was no better, said William Dalrymple in London Guardian. Westerners like to think of her as “one of us,” a Harvard- and Oxford-educated sophisticate who doesn’t have a beard and doesn’t issue fatwas. Yet she presided over massive human-rights abuses, with cases of torture and deaths in prison reaching record levels. Meanwhile, she and her family helped themselves to the public coffers: Her husband, Asif Zardari, was known for pocketing 10 percent of each government contract. By comparison, Musharraf has been decent and competent. On his watch, Pakistan has seen economic growth of 8 percent, developed one of Asia’s best-performing stock markets, and witnessed an explosion of new TV channels.

Even if Bhutto gives Musharraf a veneer of democratic credibility, it’s doubtful that she could help keep Islamic radicals at bay, said Hugh Graham in the Toronto Star. Musharraf’s campaigns against militants in the lawless border regions have failed, and the army has practically given up—recently 300 soldiers surrendered rather than fight. From her cushy exile, Bhutto criticized Musharraf for making deals with tribal leaders, but it’s hard to see this “secular, Washington-backed advocate of women’s rights” doing any better than an army general. The sad truth is that even if Pakistan returns to democracy, it will not make the world any safer from Islamic terror.

How to stop the thieves who steal energy

Editorial

The Herald

Zimbabwe is getting serious about punishing energy thieves, said the Harare Herald in an editorial. Each year, unscrupulous poachers steal 290 million kilowatt hours of energy—a hefty chunk given that Zimbabwe only produces 6.4 billion kilowatt hours per year. Finally, Parliament is considering an Electricity Bill that stipulates “long mandatory jail terms” for those who steal copper wire from substations or illegally tap into power lines. Once a few people are jailed, others should be deterred. The key, of course, will be catching the poachers in the act. It is far too easy “for anyone to quietly clip a pair of cables” to a neighbor’s power line and siphon off free electricity. But “surely it is possible” for the state utility “to audit unauthorized use.” If more energy is flowing through a cable than the meter readings of customers would indicate, then someone is stealing from that cable. “If all else fails, a physical check of residences or businesses lit up in the area one evening should quickly identify” who has pilfered the electricity. Energy thieves often don’t think of themselves as criminals. But they are. It’s time for them to be “hunted down.”

Gaining land while losing credibility

Carlo Strenger

Ha’aretz

Israel could easily become a “pariah state,” said Carlo Strenger, a professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University, in Tel Aviv’s Ha’aretz. Already, an overtly “anti-Israel stance” is increasingly common in Western academic circles. Where Westerners once considered Israel to be a spiritual ally, with Western democratic values, they now see us as “just another problematic Middle Eastern country.” Our often aggressive way of “dealing with the Palestinians and Lebanon” over the past few decades has cost us credibility in speaking of human rights. Each time Israel gains a few square miles of territory—by “building the security wall through Palestinian territories; tearing apart villages, homes, and schools; and expanding settlements”—it draws “one step closer to being disqualified from belonging to the West.” We used to complain that outsiders held us to a different standard than Jordan, Syria, or Saudi Arabia. Yet “the day we are no longer judged by the standards of the West is the beginning of Israel’s end, because it means that the West has decided we are no longer part of it, and hence will not be committed to Israel’s existen