US support to Pakistan unaffected after martial law

US Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, said the emergency declaration in Pakistan "does not impact our military support of Pakistan" or its efforts in the war on terror, according to a report from the Associated Press.

As reported earlier in this blog, the US for all its rhetoric about support for democracy worldwide, will have no choice but to go along with President Pervez Musharraf, hoping to get the Pakistan army to support a US bid to flush out Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists from the country’s North-West Frontier province.

That was Musharraf’s calculation when he went ahead and declared martial law in Pakistan despite earlier protests from the US. That will also perhaps ensure that Musharraf’s army will put hunting the terrorists as the last item on his army’s agenda.

The terrorists are a prize catch that Musharraf can cynically dangle before the US every time the Americans start interfering in his affairs at home.

It is a big mistake for the US to support Musharraf’s government. It will give a boost to anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. It will also make larger sections of Pakistan society potential recruits to Al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism.

As for the Pakistanis, in the past Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister, thought the US would help her bring back democracy and her back to power in Pakistan. In the interests of the country, Bhutto has to for a while put on hold her personal ambitions, and work for a broad coalition with other democratic movements in Pakistan, including that of another former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

Pakistani politicians have to put their heads together to save civil society and democracy in Pakistan. Don’t expect the US to do it for you. They have been very comfortable dealing with dictators in the past in Pakistan, Iran, and Cuba, if their own interests are seen as being served.

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Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has gone ahead and declared a state of emergency on Saturday in Pakistan. Troops have surrounded the country’s Supreme Court building and physically removed Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry who was earlier in the day expelled from the job. The other justices of the court are expected to be asked to take a new oath in favor of the President.

The proclamation of emergency rule, which according to some analysts is closer to martial law with the army in full control, should come as an embarrassment to the US which views Pakistan as a close ally in its war against terror.

The declaration also came in direct defiance of warnings by top American officials, reports the New York Times. The senior American military commander in the Middle East, Admiral William J. Fallon, told General Musharraf and his top generals in a meeting in Islamabad on Friday that emergency rule would jeopardize the extensive American financial support for the Pakistani military, according to the report

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has personally intervened twice in the past four months to try to keep General Musharraf from imposing emergency rule, including telephoning him at 2 a.m. Pakistani time in August. Today, while traveling to Turkey for an Iraq security conference, she reinforced the message, saying, “I think it would be quite obvious that the United States wouldn’t be supportive of extra-constitutional means," New York Times reports.

Don’t expect Musharraf however to reverse martial law under US pressure. For one, US pressure matters little to the President who has the support of the Pakistani army which sees Musharraf as the best way to perpetuate its control. Apart from some few violent protests, the country will settle down to another long spell of martial law.

Which should suit the US well. Although it advocates democracy in its demagoguery, and will likely issue protests, as required by protocol, at the new turn of events in Pakistan, don’t expect US sanctions on Pakistan or its military.

The US at this point needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the US, and Musharraf factored that into his calculations. The epicenter of the war against terror is Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, where Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders are believed to be hiding. So the military in Pakistan will continue to demand more arms from the US and will get them, even if some of those arms are turned against the Pakistani people.

The US has also in the past been quite comfortable dealing with Pakistani military dictators, much to the chagrin of politicians in democratic India who believed that the two democracies should be naturally allied.

This time after a few protests for the galleries, Musharraf and the US will be back to business soon.

That however will be a big mistake for the US to make. The alienation of civil society in Pakistan under Musharraf’s rule, which is likely to get exacerbated under martial law, will only play into the hands of the Muslim fundamentalists who will now start actively recruiting among disaffected Pakistani youth. Martial law in Pakistan will only accelerate the “Talibanization” of Pakistan’s civil society.

At that point, Musharraf may once again need the US very badly. Like the Shah of Iran he will need some place to escape to. It is unfortunate that the US never learns from its past mistakes.

In Pakistan, Musharaff declares emergency

The fragility of political institutions in Pakistan were exposed Saturday when the army-backed government of President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency, according to this report in USA Today.

Musharraf has declared the emergency ahead of a decision of the Supreme Court in Pakistan to a petition challenging his re-election as President, while keeping the post of chief-of-army staff.
The decision was expected to go against him.

Under President’s rule, the Supreme Court and most of the opposition will no doubt be placed under curbs, thus proving the fragility of Pakistan’s political institutions in the face of an army that will not cede control.

Earlier the US, in a bid to keep Musharraf in power, tried to broker a deal with a former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. The former prime minister, who had returned to Pakistan to a tumultuous public welcome, is back in Dubai, probably apprehending the new state of emergency.

The army has played a huge role in the country’s politics, and has often deposed democratically elected governments that are not pliant. Musharraf deposed the government of Nawaz Sharif to come to power. Musharraf is facing civil unrest in the country, including demands that he step down. While he may try to say that that the emergency was declared to contain terrorism in the country’s north western frontier region, this is largely seen as a bid to cling to power.

Defame with impunity on Wikipedia

I agree that information should be free and free-flowing. Wikipedia was built around those principles, and around community-generated content. Unfortunately the community, or more correctly the public at large, is not as responsible as Wikipedia had expected.

Now A French judge has dismissed a defamation and privacy case against Wikipedia after ruling that the free online encyclopedia was not responsible for information introduced onto its Web site, according to this report from Reuters.

Moreover, Web site hosts are not legally bound to monitor or investigate the origin of the information they store, the Judge Emmanuel Binoche said after the online encyclopedia was sued by three French nationals over a Wikipedia article that said they were gay activists, according to the report.

Laws vary from country to country, but the overall tendency seems to be to exempt owners of community edited web-sites and social networking sites from liability for pornography or slander or other such nefarious content.

This ultra-liberal attitude when it comes to content crimes on the Internet leaves me wondering – where does that leave the individual ?

Before the arrival of online community edited news and opinion sites, the main source of potential defamation were public speeches and the newspapers, and in both cases liability for defamation is quite clear. Both the person defaming, as well as the forum which published the defamatory remarks are liable in varying degrees.

Issues of liability aside, because of the viral nature of the online medium, there is no stopping a false rumor before it starts.

Once a story is up on the net, it gets picked up by blogs, other sites, and even online newspapers. Some of them may quote the allegation, and hope to reduce liability by linking to the site from where they picked up the allegation. The upshot is that the slander is all over the place, before you can even say “ cease and desist”. By the time you have been able to identify and send a notice to the site that started it, your reputation is raked fore and aft.

In this context, the need for community edited sites and social networking sites to monitor content, and block content found objectionable is a must. Their liability should in fact be increased to make sure they acquit this responsibility. To be sure Internet companies will throw up their hands, and tell us their sites are so popular that the volume of content is more than they can filter properly.

That is a nice argument – but it is cold comfort to me if someone goes on Facebook or Wikipedia and describes me as a rapist. Sure, I can go after Facebook and Wikipedia, ask them to remove the objectionable material, identify the person who described me as a rapist, and sue him in court. But it may be all too late - the allegation is already all over the Internet.

Google has often used the analogy of the telephone to argue that the Internet service provider should be only as liable as a telephone services provider, who is not liable if a murder is plotted over the telephone. The times have changed. Two people talking on the phone, and calling me a pedophile are just two people. That is the extent of the damage. But if these two people put it out on their Orkut scrapbook or on Wikipedia, that number could jump to millions of people.

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