Pakistan politics has been mired in stagnation for some time now. In September of 2013, Pakistan undertook the first successful civilian hand-off of power in its entire history. Then-president Asaf Ali Zardari was succeeded by the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Despite this milestone, Pakistan’s politics have been full of tumult ever since.

Small but significant political forces refused to accept the legitimacy of the victory of the Muslim League in the fall, 2013 parliamentary elections. What is odd is that on the whole it is not the previous ruling party, the Pakistan People’s Party, that charged electoral fraud but rather the Pakistan Tehrik-i Insaf (PTI or Pakistan Movement for Change) of former cricket star Imran Khan. Also disgruntled are elements on the Punjabi religious right, the neo-Sufi movement of Tahir Qadri. These two political tendencies have staged big rallies all over the country and in the capital of Islamabad demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sharif, which is a little unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, some politicians and economists have complained that Imran Khan and Qadri are taking points off economic growth because of the turmoil they are fomenting.

Ironically, Nawaz Sharif himself set the precedent here, inasmuch as he led an effort to unseat President Zardari, with a long march from Lahore to Islamabad, and he gave speeches threatening revolution and pledging that Zardari would not serve out his five year term (he did).

So the first problem Pakistani politics has to resolve is losing elections gracefully. Al Gore probably actually won in 2000, but decided not to put the country through a highly divisive process by contesting Bush’s victory. Both Zardari and Sharif actually did win their elections in 2008 and 2013, but rivals refused to acknowledge it, undermining the legitimacy of the state. In a good sign, Imran is keeping politics out of his mourning for the dead children of Peshawar.

The military in Pakistan has been too interventionist in the country’s affairs. It was the branch of government that backed the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Group terrorists. The officers believed that such paramilitary terrorist groups would protect Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

For years now, there has been large-scale blow-back from Pakistani military’s unhealthy obsession with extra–judicial means of power, including backing the Taliban and the Haqqani group even when they hit US interests in the country. Since July, the military has been fighting its former allies among the Pakistani Taliban, producing profound resentments among the neo-Taliban.

So the second problem in Pakistani politics is achieving a political culture in which the military is subordinate to elected officials, and in which the military ceases cooperating with paramilitary groups.

The third problem is that the Federally Administered Tribal areas or FATA need to be made a province and integrated into the Pakistani state. The standard of living of people in Waziristan is extremely low. Maybe some of the investment of China in Pakistan could be slotted for FATA. This is an area where some 800,000 people have been displaced by the Pakistani military campaign against militants in North Waziristan. There are torture facilities and bomb-making workshops. These need to be rolled up and FATA needs to be developed.

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AFP from last summer: “Pakistani army confident after North Waziristan offensive ”

On Tuesday, six members of the Movement of Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan or TTP) invaded a school for children run by the Pakistani army in Peshawar

The Pakistani military counter-attacked, with early reports of dozens killed and wounded in the cross fire. Some of the Taliban were wearing suicide bomb vests, and a loud explosion was heard from one of the school buildings.

Unlike the hostage-taking in Australia, which was just a tragedy produced by a lone nut-job, the attack in Peshawar has geopolitical implications and really is the work of persons organized to pressure civilians on policy by routinely blowing them up–the very definition of terrorism.

The Pakistani “Taliban” are a little bit of a misnomer. The word means ‘seminary student,’ and many of those Afghans who flocked to Mulla Omar in the late 1990s actually studied Muslim law and other disciplines. But the so-called Pakistani Taliban are just uneducated men from the Mahsoud tribe in southern Waziristan, an agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas [FATA]. People in Waziristan are Pushtuns, an ethnic group with its own language. Most Taliban derive from that ethnicity. Pakistan’s dominant ethnic group is the Punjabis.

Some of the tribesmen of Mahsoud only declared themselves members of the “Pakistani Taliban” in the early zeroes, whereas the Afghan Taliban went back to the 1990s. Many observers believe that the TTP or Pakistani Taliban were behind the assassination on Dec. 27, 2007, of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Also in North Waziristan is the Haqqani group of terrorists, who had been with the US against the Soviet Union but in 2001 turned on the US as occupiers.

The ambiguities of FATA are enough for a hundred John LeCarre novels. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence is accused of having used or wanted to use the militant Pakistani Taliban and Haqqani group for its own purposes, laying down a marker on the future of Afghanistan.

In 2009, soon after he came to office, President Barack Obama twisted the arm of then Pakistani president Asaf Ali Zardari (the widower of Benazir Bhutto). He succeeded in getting Zardari to launch a major operation against the Pakistani Taliban for the first time. The Pakistani military targeted many of the Mahsoud in South Waziristan, driving others to North Waziristan. The campaign secured some urban areas.

Since July of this year, the Pakistani air force has been bombing positions of the TTP or Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan. The more aggressive policy was adopted by Prime Minsiter Nawaz Sharif of the Muslim League. He appears to be trying to build bridges to Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani.

It is amazing that the US finally got what it wanted, a Pakistani government willing to send fighter jets to bomb the Pakistani Taliban. But that there has been almost no television coverage of this sea change.

*North* Waziristan had always been protected by military intelligence and so had become a haven for al-Qaeda offshoots. But in the past 6 months Pakistani army troops have killed nearly 2000 fighters and deeply disrupted what is left of the Pakistani Taliban. The group that took over the school complains of the perfidy of the government’s bombing.

So this school attack was the Pakistani Taliban taking revenge for the government’s disruption of their terrorist activities. This is not a sign of strength but of weakness, and they lashed out at a soft target. They are facing a major defeat. That is its significance.

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RT: “Taliban takes hundreds of students hostage in Pakistan school, scores killed”

Bilawal Bhutto on Pakistani politics: Renaissance man (via The Economist)

MODELS in skimpy outfits, dancing around a fiery cauldron in a strange homage to an ancient, pre-Islamic past…is not most people’s idea of how to launch a political career in Pakistan. But Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the 25-year-old heir to one of the…

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