Beyond the battered Swat Valley and other troubled parts of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province and the neighboring Federal Administered Tribal Area, most Pakistanis are probably more concerned by the new petrol tax than by the fight against the Taleban. It is the sort of decision that could have major political consequences. It could well trigger riots, and who knows where that might lead. So far the protests have been legal — but one thing is certain. The tax hike will not improve the popularity of President Asif Ali Zardari.
The action in the Swat Valley is a different matter. Terrorist suicide bombs in the country’s cities brought home to millions of ordinary Pakistanis the need to destroy the Taleban. The belated offensive was popular; the authorities were seen as carrying out their duty to protect Pakistan and Pakistanis from the enemy within.
The danger President Zardari now faces is that this source of popularity is begging to run dry just when he has made the petrol tax decision. Although it has taken three months so far and been a hard fight, the fight against the militants in Swat is seen as all but won, especially now that it is confirmed that the leader there, Maulana Fazlullah, was critically wounded in an airstrike that killed another Taleban leader and is reportedly dying. The removal of so charismatic a figure would cripple the movement, although the reasons why he was able to stir up such militancy remain and will have to be addressed if another does not step into his place.
Petrol tax and the battle in Swat aside, however, a far more potent threat to Pakistan now looms. The statement by a top Pakistani general in an interview with CNN that the army is in contact with Afghan Taleban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and that Pakistan is prepared to broker negotiations between him and the US in return for concessions from Washington on India is a PR disaster.
Whatever the views about the need to talk to sections of the Taleban (and the Obama administration privately has indicated that it is prepared to engage with some elements in the movement), this is bound to reinforce suspicions that the Pakistan military, despite the offensive in Swat, has never severed links with it and, rather than destroying it, has continued to nurture it as useful political tool. The fact that the military is seen to be offering dialogue with Mullah Omar in return for a change in US policy toward India will inevitably be seen as little short of blackmail in both in the US and India.
The statement, moreover, undermines President Zardari’s hard work in building international confidence in Pakistan, not least reaching out to India. Just last week in a much-publicized meeting in Islamabad, he said that Pakistan had to be honest about the relationship in the past with today’s terrorists. They had been “created and nurtured” for tactical political reasons but today no one in the establishment supported them. The statement about Mullah Omar suggests otherwise. It will convince many that the president is not in control of the army and that it is playing a separate political game. That is not in Pakistan’s interests.
Global warming
Excerpts from the editorial that appeared in Friday’s LA Times: This week’s Group of 8 summit has pretty much lived down to the low expectations it generated from the outset, yet it did produce a long-overdue agreement to fight climate change.
The club of industrialized nations agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. It was less than US President Obama had hoped for — he had aimed to get developing countries such as China and India to sign on as well — but it represents the first time the United States has taken the international lead on climate change since the 1990s, and demonstrates to recalcitrant nations that the industrialized world is willing to take responsibility for its outsized contribution to the problem.
Such international pacts are usually meaningless without the backing of Congress; President Clinton, after all, signed the Kyoto Protocol to fight global warming in 1998, but it was never ratified by the Senate. That chamber once again finds itself in a position to overrule the president as it considers a sweeping climate-change bill that was narrowly approved last month in the House. It would fulfill Obama’s G8 promise by meeting the 2050 goal.
The clamor from global-warming deniers has heated up as the nation gets closer to taking action, yet their comprehension of climate science hasn’t improved. A particularly common obfuscation from right-wing pundits is the “revelation” that global temperatures have been declining since 1998, even as carbon emissions during the intervening 11 years have risen. This hardly debunks the climate change theory. The cyclical El Niño phenomenon and heavy greenhouse gas concentrations combined to make 1998 the hottest year in recorded history. And the last decade was on average the hottest ever recorded.
Conservatives are trotting out other long-discredited hypotheses, such as the notion that solar activity rather than greenhouse gases is responsible for rising global temperatures, but the climate bill’s fate in the US Senate will depend less on crackpot theories than on hardheaded horse-trading. With his leadership on climate change at the G8, Obama posited that the United States would no longer ignore a pressing global threat that is largely of its making. If the Senate proves him wrong, it would harm more than our international standing. Those who advocate inaction are gambling with the future of everyone on Earth, and those stakes are too high.
