The Scary Unraveling of Pakistan

ChinaFotoPress / Getty Images As Obama announces an aggressive counterterror campaign in Afghanistan, the region’s most dangerous nation—Pakistan—gets more grim by the day. Ahmed Rashid on President Zardari’s loss of control.

Under unrelenting pressure from the army and political opposition parties, President Asif Zardari has ceded authority over Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons command infrastructure to the prime minister. But that may be just the beginning. The move comes as Zardari prepares to hand over further powers to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani in order to avoid impeachment on possible corruption charges, as well as to satisfy the army—which appears determined to weaken him, if not oust him from power altogether.

There has been an unrelenting campaign by the military and political parties who are allied to the army to weaken Zardari so irreversibly that he is forced down from office and a new, more pliant president could be appointed who would do the bidding of the army—viewed by many as the largest and most effective political party in the country. Zardari is seen by the army as too pro-American and unwilling to support the military’s hardline against U.S. policy in Afghanistan, the Afghan government, and India.

There has been an unrelenting campaign by the military and political parties who are allied to the army to weaken Zardari so irreversibily that he is forced down from office and a new, more pliant president could be appointed who would do the army’s bidding.

The turmoil comes at a critical moment.

The U.S., Britain and other NATO countries are now strongly demanding that the Pakistan army do more to hunt down Osama bin Laden and confront the Afghan Taliban leadership—all of whom are based in Pakistan, according to U.S. intelligence.

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a virtual ultimatum to the army and the intelligence services in Islamabad on November 29 to ‘’take out’’ Osama bin Laden, after castigating Pakistan for doing little on the issue. ‘’Three-quarters of terrorist plots that threaten Britain arise from that area of Pakistan,’’ Brown said.

The same tough words are expected to be repeated by President Barack Obama in his speech Tuesday when he outlines further U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Two weeks ago, Obama had sent a private letter to President Zardari urging him to do more to root out the extremists on Pakistan’s side of the border. Gordon Brown will be meeting Prime Minister Gilani in London this week. "If we are putting our strategy into place, Pakistan has to show that it can take on al Qaeda," said Gordon Brown.

The army’s relationship with the U.S. administration is becoming increasingly strained as the military accuses the Americans of failing to put pressure on India to reopen stalled talks between the two countries and also to address Islamabad’s accusations that India is undermining Pakistan through its large presence in Afghanistan.

The tensions may be coming to a head, but they have been building for some time toward the crescendo on Saturday, November 28: the day of Eid, the most important religious festival on the Muslim calendar. That day, an amnesty expired that had protected Zardari—along with more than 8,000 other politicians, bureaucrats and officials—from thousands of charges of corruption, murder, and the like.

That immunity deal, known as the National Reconciliation Ordinance, was introduced in December 2007 to facilitate a deal between the then-president, General Pervez Musharraf, and Benazir Bhutto, so that she could return home from exile and contest the elections freely. After her assassination in December 2007, Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party, or PPP, went on to win the elections, and Zardari, her husband, was elected president in August 2008.

The government was unable to renew the NRO, either through parliament or the courts, because of a ruling against it by Pakistan's supreme court. Hundreds of leading PPP politicians could now be prosecuted for corruption. Although Zardari has immunity from prosecution because he is president, he could still be impeached by parliament. He has previously spent a total of 11 years facing corruption and murder charges that were never proven by earlier regimes.

By giving up control of the official body—the National Command Authority—that controls the deployment and use of Pakistan’s estimated 60 to 100 nuclear weapons, Zardari further conceded another key demand of the army. Key cabinet ministers and the heads of the army, navy, and air force are members of the nuclear authority. But the army manages and controls the nuclear weapons and its budget and personnel are a deeply held secret.