Under pressure over impending impeachment charges, President Pervez Musharraf announced he would resign Monday, ending nearly nine years as the head of one of the United States’ most important allies in the campaign against terrorism.

Speaking on television from his presidential office here at 1 p.m., Mr. Musharraf, dressed in a gray suit and tie, said that after consulting with his aides, “I have decided to resign today.” He said he was putting national interest above “personal bravado.”

“Whether I win or lose the impeachment, the nation will lose,” he said, adding that he was not prepared to put the office of the presidency through the impeachment process.

[snip]

Mr. Musharraf has been under strong pressure in the past few days, as the coalition said it had completed a charge sheet to take to Parliament for his impeachment. The charges were centered on “gross violations” of the Constitution, according to the minister of information, Sherry Rehman.

The rhetoric from the coalition mounted over the weekend, but the leading politicians wavered on an exact date for bringing the charges, thus leaving a window for Mr. Musharraf to leave.

In his speech, Mr. Musharraf tore into the coalition for what he called their failed economic policies. He said Pakistan’s critical economic situation — a declining currency, capital flight, soaring inflation — was their responsibility. In contrast, he said, his policies had brought prosperity out of near economic collapse when he took charge in 1999.

He then gave a laundry list of his achievements, ranging from expanded road networks to a national art gallery in the capital. Although Pakistan’s literacy rate hovers around 50 percent, and is much lower among women, he took credit for new schools.

The army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan, stayed publicly above the fray in the past 10 days. But in remaining studiously neutral and declining to come to Mr. Musharraf’s rescue, the new leader of the army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvaz Kayani, tipped the scales against the president, politicians said.

Labels: democracy, Democratic sellouts, impeachment, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf

Picture this: A terrifying new report is delivered to the U.S. President. It states starkly that al-Qaeda is in the last stages of preparing to attack the United States. But the response is…nothing. The President takes no action, and the report goes basically unreported in the media.

We’ve heard this story before. But this is not the infamous August, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” This happened just over a week ago, when the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a scathing report about the mounting danger of a reconstituted al-Qaeda growing and plotting in the tribal sections of Pakistan. The President’s reaction now, as it was in 2001, was silence.

According to the report, “al-Qaeda’s central leadership, based in the border area of Pakistan, is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the United States…” In 2002, after the al-Qaeda-supported Taliban was forced from power in neighboring Afghanistan, al-Qaeda members and their Afghan extremist allies fled across the border into the mountains of northwest Pakistan, known as the “Federally Administered Tribal Areas” (FATA).

The FATA is desperately poor, undereducated and underdeveloped, with a per-capita income of less than seventy cents per day, half the Pakistani national average. It was in this region—where millions of Afghan refugees fled during the Afghan civil and anti-Soviet wars of the 1980s and 1990s—that the Taliban built the backbone of its army: recruiting, indoctrinating and training a generation of “holy warriors” in radical madrassas. The region’s literacy rate is 17%, leaving a massive educational void to be filled by extremist education. There are about 300 religious madrassas registered in the FATA and potentially hundreds more unregistered Islamic schools. Evidence indicates these schools foster public support for Islamist extremism and terrorism. The Taliban succeeded by taking young refugees who looked forward to no schooling, no jobs and no path in the world, and giving them a religious education, a position in an army and both a spiritual and social purpose.

al-Qaeda and the Taliban have built a new, safe home in the FATA from which they can train and prepare to launch more terrorist attacks across the world. This GAO report demonstrates clearly that they are succeeding in this endeavor, in part because the White House has failed to plan adequately, and act effectively, to defeat our primary enemy.

I suspect that U.S. domestic politics is the primary reason the White House has all but ignored this report, at least in public. Ironically, while the administration has failed to seriously confront this problem, the Republican Party has repeatedly won the presidency and lower elections by banking on its macho image and playing the tough guy, portraying their Democratic opponents as effeminate wimps. (Their campaign has already begun to use the same smear campaign on Barack Obama, pitting him against John McCain and his prisoner of war record.) This Republican machismo translates into a governance love affair with massive, explosive weapons systems like National Missile Defense. It means belittling most international policies designed to support development (economic, political and social) in the underdeveloped regions of the world where terrorism is most easily born. It means investing in large-scale military resources (useful to fight the Nazis or the Soviets) at the expense of “soft-power” tools proven more effective at defeating terrorist groups.

The vast majority of conservative, liberal and moderate national security experts—including General David Petraeus and other counterinsurgency gurus now gaining prominence in the U.S. military—recognize that we can only close these safe havens and defeat al-Qaeda through mostly non-military means. But as the GAO report states, that current U.S. policy directs literally 99% of all funding for Pakistan's FATA toward military and security efforts, and less than 1% for development. Defeating al-Qaeda will require something more than a 1% solution.

This macho image plays well into the President’s Iraq policy as he and his supporters brandish phrases such as, “Bring it on” to challenge insurgents, and label their Iraq policy critics as cowardly “surrender monkeys.” Again, while this is politically advantageous for their own constituencies at home, it has locked the President and his would-be-successor John McCain into a fixation on Iraq when the real threat to the U.S. is in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Labels: 2008 election, al-Qaeda, icepick meet forehead, Pakistan

The chaos spreading across nuclear-armed Pakistan after the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is part of the price for the Bush administration’s duplicity about al-Qaeda’s priorities, including the old canard that the terrorist group regards Iraq as the “central front” in its global war against the West.

Through repetition of this claim – often accompanied by George W. Bush’s home-spun advice about the need to listen to what the enemy says – millions of Americans believe that Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders consider Iraq the key battlefield.

However, intelligence evidence, gathered from intercepted al-Qaeda communications, indicate that bin Laden’s high command views Iraq as a valuable diversion for U.S. military strength, not the “central front.”

[snip]

So, instead of seeking a quick ouster of U.S. forces from Iraq and using it as a base for launching a global jihad – as Bush and his supporters claim – al-Qaeda actually saw its strategic goals advanced by keeping the United States bogged down in Iraq.

To some U.S. analysts, the logic was obvious: “prolonging” the Iraq War bought al-Qaeda time to rebuild its infrastructure in Pakistan, where the Islamic fundamentalist extremists have long had sympathizers inside the Pakistani intelligence services dating back to the CIA’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Charlie Wilson’s Blowback

That CIA war, lionized in the new movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” funneled billions of dollars in U.S. covert money and weapons through Pakistani intelligence to Afghan warlords and to Arab jihadists who had flocked to Afghanistan to drive out the Russian infidels. One of those young jihadists was a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden.

[snip]

Though Bush eventually acknowledged that most of Iraqi resistance was homegrown, he still asserted that al-Qaeda planned to use Iraq as the launching pad for a global “caliphate” from Spain to Indonesia, another alarmist claim that scared some Americans into backing Bush’s war policies.

“This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia,” Bush said in a typical reference to this claim in a Sept. 5, 2006, speech. “We know this because al-Qaeda has told us.”

But many analysts saw Bush’s nightmarish scenario as preposterous, given the deep divisions within the Islamic world and the hostility that many Muslims feel toward al-Qaeda, including its recent much-heralded rejection by more moderate Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar province.

Also, according to a National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community in April 2006, “the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent global strategy, and is becoming more diffuse.” [Emphasis added.]

The NIE also concluded that the Iraq War – rather than weakening the cause of Islamic terrorism – had become a “cause celebre” that was “cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

The grinding Iraq War – now nearing its fifth year – also prevented the United States from arraying sufficient military and intelligence resources against the reorganized al-Qaeda infrastructure in Pakistan and the rebuilt Taliban army reasserting itself in Afghanistan.

Labels: Pakistan, Rudy Giuliani

Edwards spoke in Waukon this afternoon about having calls in to Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf. Then, at his second event in Decorah, he told Iowans that he got his call returned.

“He called me,” Edwards said, “because I told the ambassador I’d like to speak to him. I met him a few years ago, which I think I told you earlier, and we had a conversation in which I urged him to continue the democratization process. He told me, he gave me his assurances that he intended to do that, and we also spoke about having international independent investigators allowed into the country for transparency purposes, for credibility purposes, and we spoke briefly about the elections.”

Edwards is the only candidate to have said publicly that he received a call from Musharraf today. Edwards did not join in the fight between rivals Clinton and Obama over which candidate has the best foreign policy advisers, and asked what this conversation does for his own foreign policy credibility, Edwards referred back to the complexity of the issue.

“I think that the most important thing is to understand what’s actually happening within Pakistan, the complex nature of the problems there, and to be visionary about what America needs to be doing,” he told reporters.

Labels: Benezir Bhutto, diplomacy, John Edwards, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf

Labels: Pakistan, terrorism

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide bombing that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, a party aide and a military official said.

An Associated Press reporter at the scene saw body parts and flesh scattered at the back gate of the Liaqat Bagh park in Rawalpindi where the rally was held. He counted about 20 bodies, including police, and could see many other wounded.

The road outside was stained with blood and people screamed for ambulances. Others gave water to the wounded lying in the street. The clothing of some of the victims was shredded and people put party flags over their bodies.

The bomb went off just minutes after Bhutto spoke to thousands of supporters and she appeared to be the target of the attack. Farahtullah Babar, the spokesman for her party, said her vehicle was about 50 yards away from blast which went off as she was leaving the rally venue.

Labels: Pakistan

"The U.S. has made clear it does not support extraconstitutional measures because those measures take Pakistan away from the path of democracy and civilian rule," Rice said after attending an Iraq neighbors conference in Istanbul, Turkey. "Whatever happens we will be urging a quick return to civilian rule."

Labels: Pakistan, parsing

the biggest gathering, about 2,000 lawyers congregated at the High Court in the eastern city of Lahore. As lawyers tried to exit onto a main road, hundreds of police stormed inside, swinging batons and firing tear gas. Lawyers, shouting "Go Musharraf Go!" responded by throwing stones and beating police with tree branches.

Police bundled about 250 lawyers into waiting vans, an Associated Press reporter saw. At least two were bleeding from the head.

Aftab Cheema, the city police chief, said lawyers started the trouble by throwing stones. However, Sarfraz Cheema, a senior lawyer at the rally, condemned it as police brutality that "shows how the government of a dictator wants to silence those who are against dictatorship."

"We don't accept the proclamation of emergency," he said.

Clashes also were reported in Karachi, where 100 lawyers were arrested, and in Rawalpindi, where at least 50 were detained. In Multan, dozens of lawyers chased a car bringing two newly appointed judges to the high court, chanting "Shame on you!" and "Traitor judges!"

Labels: Pakistan