How long can General Pervez Musharraf (currently President of Pakistan) expect to hold onto power in the face all of this Islamic anger?
As he is a U.S. ally, isn’t his position as President now very precarious?
Precarious doesn’t begin to describe it; this guy wakes up with bombs in his omelette. I’ve lost track of the number of “official” assassination attempts since he allied with the US post-911, and those are just the ones that have been reported. No one’s managed to get him yet though, and he’s actually captured or killed a number of his would-be assassins.
He appears to have the complete loyalty of the Pakistani army, or at least enough of it to keep him alive. Interviews with him seem to present him either as a secularist admirer of Ataturk, or just another tin badge dictator holding on by the skin of his teeth and the ambivalence of his own people. Pre-911 he funded, trained and used Al Qaeda as irregulars against India. Post-911 he would appear to hunt them without remorse. You’d think he was just doing it for show like the Arabs, but Al Qaeda has been trying awfully hard to kill him, so I suspect he’s bagged quite a few. Lest you take him for a nice guy, Pakistan is generally regarded as a miserable place to live and he hasn’t done much to improve it.
I couldn’t have cared less in the beginning, but the guy’s apparent indestructability and enormous balls of steel have made a fan out of me. I just hope he gets out before they nail him, or Pakistan flares into an Islamic revolution. The dude has definitely earned his Swiss bank account and Caribbean retirement.
So yes, it’s precarious.
May I have a citation for this please?
Pakistan- which is in an active war that always has nuclear potential- has a lot more on it’s mind than America.
From Patterns of Global Terrorism, the State Dept.’s 2000 report:
“Pakistan’s military government, headed by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, continued previous Pakistani Government support of the Kashmir insurgency, and Kashmiri militant groups continued to operate in Pakistan, raising funds and recruiting new cadre. Several of these groups were responsible for attacks against civilians in Indian-held Kashmir, and the largest of the groups, the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, claimed responsibility for a suicide car-bomb attack against an Indian garrison in Srinagar in April…”
“Credible reporting indicates that Pakistan is providing the Taliban with materiel, fuel, funding, technical assistance, and military advisers. Pakistan has not prevented large numbers of Pakistani nationals from moving into Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban. Islamabad also failed to take effective steps to curb the activities of certain madrassas, or religious schools, that serve as recruiting grounds for terrorism.”
Full text available here: http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000/2432.htm
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba is widely considered an Al Qaeda affiliate, see http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL33038.pdf.