|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Crippling floods for the second year running, a sputtering economy, high inflation and rising unemployment and a devastating breakdown in relations with the United States defined the year for Pakistan
Saying that 2011 was a difficult year for Pakistan might actually win some sort of prize for understatement. This was a year that began with the cold-blooded assassination by a religious fanatic (and member of the security detail) of the governor of the country’s most populous province and ended with speculation rife that the powerful military was once again plotting to send an elected civilian government packing. The murder of liberal and outspoken Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer – who was killed by his police security guard because he spoke in favour of a Christian woman on the death row under the country’s notorious blasphemy laws – probably produced less shockwaves than the subsequent lionisation of his killer by some segments of society. Evidence of this rise of unabashed bigotry in society was further solidified when it claimed the life of the federal minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti even as the ruling Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) was roundly criticised for not showing enough spine in the face of open threats from extremists. By the end of the year, however, it was the PPP that was crying foul over the motives of an activist Supreme Court hearing cases of corruption that still threaten to destabilise the government.
In between such markers of rising intolerance and intrigue, Pakistan also witnessed crippling floods for the second year running, a sputtering economy, high inflation and rising unemployment and a devastating breakdown in relations with the United States. There was also increasingly fractious provincial politics, continuing militancy and conflict particularly in the tribal areas, the killing of 11 journalists, the periodic turning up of bodies of summarily executed Balochis who had earlier disappeared, the conviction by a London court of three of its cricketers in a spot-fixing scam and a controversy over a secret memo sent to the American government that has already led to Pakistan’s ambassador to the US being forced to resign. The warming of ties between Pakistan and India – Pakistan tentatively promised its neighbour the long sought for Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status and India acknowledged a drawdown in militant incursions into Kashmir – were overshadowed by other developments in the region. The friction between the US (increasingly desperate to find a way out of the Afghan quagmire) and Pakistan (increasingly upset at being taken for granted) probably has the most far-reaching geopolitical consequences. It first came to the fore with the arrest in Lahore of an American intelligence contractor Raymond Davis who had shot dead two men. The dust had barely settled on that affair – finally resolved through the payment of blood money – when the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, was discovered and killed by American marines in a daring raid right next to a military academy in Abbottabad. As questions swirled about the complicity or incompetence of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, nationalistic rhetoric reached fever-pitch on both sides. The US attack on a Pakistani border post in November that killed 24 soldiers, and which the Pakistan military believed was a testing of the waters for further incursions into Pakistani territory, finally drove relations to the breaking point. Pakistan, having pulled out of a crucial conference on Afghanistan and blocked NATO supply routes, now demands a redefinition of its terms of engagement with the US even as the US reconsiders its financial assistance. Meanwhile, domestically, the plunging popularity of President Asif Zardari and the continuing unpopularity of his main rival Nawaz Sharif with the country’s military establishment, has spurred the rising star of perennial outsider Imran Khan who held a political career-defining massive rally in Lahore in October. Even as the country gears up for an early election next year previously aloof politicos rush to jump on Khan’s bandwagon. Those threatened by the former cricket captain’s surging popularity accuse him of having the secret backing of the intelligence services. Whether he does or not, the stand-off with the US, which has stoked patriotic sentiment, and a mismanaged economy that has tainted the government have ensured that military chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani once again holds the cards to Pakistan’s future. That is a far cry from the public opprobrium heaped on him and his institution on May 2, the day after bin Laden was killed.
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
Al-Qaida
leader Osama bin Laden, the face of global terrorism, was killed in a US military operation at a fortified compound, near Islamabad. Laden’s death comes almost 10 years after
Al-Qaida’s attacks on the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon, that killed nearly 3,000
persons.
