Hypocrisy or US Foreign Policy 101?(or both)

[bobbylien]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- Clashes erupted in Pakistan Monday as former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was deported to Saudi Arabia shortly after returning home from seven years in exile hoping to campaign against the country's military ruler.

Sharif was briefly taken into police custody at the Islamabad airport about 90 minutes after he arrived aboard a flight from London. He was placed on another commercial airliner about 30 minutes later for a flight to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he has spent his exile.

"It is a violation of the constitution, and it is a violation of the court order under which Nawaz Sharif was allowed to arrive and stay in Pakistan," Sadique ul-Farooq, a close aide to Sharif said according to report from The Associated Press.

The two-time former premier was deported despite a Supreme Court ruling last month that granted him the right to return to Pakistan and urged authorities not to obstruct his return.

Meanwhile, police used tear gas and batons against Sharif supporters near the airport Monday morning and arrested 635 of them, the sources said.

Federal Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said those taken into custody would be released soon.

Police commandoes immediately surrounded Sharif's plane after it landed and boarded it along with government officials, police sources said.

"I have a message of hope. I have a message of tranquility, peace and national reconciliation," Sharif had told reporters on the plane.

After 90 minutes of negotiations, during which Sharif refused to hand over his passport, he was allowed to enter the airport where he was taken into custody and then put on a plane out of Pakistan. Video Watch Sharif's plane at Islamabad airport »

Ahead of his arrival, the Pakistani government arrested more than 2,800 of Sharif's supporters, including members of parliament, police sources said. Most of those arrested were in Punjab province, a stronghold of support for Sharif, police sources said. Also arrested early Monday were Pakistan Muslim League Chairman Zafar ul Haq and Acting President Jawaid Hashmi.

A government official said the arrests occurred because the government has banned public rallies.

Security around Islamabad's airport was also tightened, police sources said.
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A number of journalists said police had beaten them.

After his arrival in Islamabad, Sharif had planned to travel in a motorcade to his home and political base in Lahore, about 180 miles (290 kilometers) to the south, according to The Associated Press.

"If he is arrested, then we will take a legal course," Shahbaz Sharif, who is president of the Muslim League, earlier told CNN from London.

"If he [Musharraf] does anything unlawful or illegal against him ... there will be the whole entire Pakistan against him, and I think Musharraf's days will be numbered," Shahbaz Sharif said. "He's already mortally wounded."

Shahbaz Sharif, who was chief minister, or top executive, of Punjab province, is charged with ordering police to kill five men in Lahore in 1998. At the time of the killings, his brother was Pakistan's prime minister.

It was Nawaz Sharif whom Musharraf deposed in a 1999 bloodless coup. Convicted of tax evasion and treason, Sharif was released in 2000 in exchange for agreeing to 10 years of exile. He has been in exile in Saudi Arabia since then and under the agreement was not allowed to travel or directly take part in Pakistani politics.

But that agreement changed last week, when Pakistan's Supreme Court lifted the exile order and Sharif, who retains his Pakistani citizenship, announced his plans to return.

Sharif has hinted that he may try to regain his position as prime minister, and he has blasted fellow opposition leader Benazir Bhutto for negotiating with Musharraf on a possible power-sharing deal.

Shahbaz Sharif said Musharraf had blocked the roads to Islamabad's airport to prevent people from welcoming his brother back.

Musharraf's popularity has plummeted in recent months. He indicated last Wednesday that he might try to block Sharif's return, according to a report from Pakistan's official news agency.
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But in an interview last month with CNN, Nawaz Sharif said he was not concerned that he would be jailed upon returning to Pakistan because "I am absolutely clean and clear."

"There are no charges of corruption against me," he said. "If Musharraf tries to fabricate false cases against me, we will face them."
I guess democracy doesn't matter outside of Iraq(not that we could do anything about it with the current state of our armed forces). How can we say that we support democracy to the point of invading countries to install it and yet still give money and weapons to tyrannical dictators who actively campaign against democracy? It is because tyranny is alright if the tyrant has a pro-US stance. Oppression and murder is alright if it keeps the price of oil low. The people in the rest of the world can see it even if many Americans are blinded by unwaivering patriotism. Our country has a very bad image throughout the world these days and rightly so.

[Truth_and_Power]

How is this our fault? Do you think this guy will be different than mush?

[tony mitra]

The issue of Pakistan is, like most issues concerning most countries, not quite black and white, but with many shades of gray in between.

I would give a few examples that, to my view, shows the complexity of the situation with Pakistan. First of them is the circumstance of its creation.

Notion of a separate and independent Pakistan was created in the last years of the British Raj in India. For almost a hundred years, resistance to the British Empire within the Indian subcontinent was conceptualized on the basis that the British would eventually leave behind a single unified country called India. But in the last five or six years, the notion of Pakistan was raised, based purely on religious divide, rather than ethnic or cultural divide.

The concept, that all Muslim majority areas to disagree with the rest of Indians wanting independence, and create a wedge between the aspirants of independence, was supported, and even encouraged, by the then British Government just prior to, and during, the Second World War, lead by none other than the famous Statesman Mr. Churchill.

Today, some consider that act, of following a “divide and rule” policy of Mr. Churchill, to be the first instance of creating a new hardcore and fundamentally Islamic nation based on religion and religion alone. Also, Mr. Churchill tried his best, despite many attempts from Mr. Roosevelt to talk him into it, to delay independence of India on his claim that Indians (or Pakistanis for that matter) were unfit to rule themselves in a civilized fashion.

So much so for Mr. Churchill’s famous fight against Hitler to save democracy for the world. Not many western historians are willing to pin the India-Pakistan issue of the lapels of Mr. Churchill, even today. But there are a few that are coming out of the woodworks.

Next, take the ethnic and linguistic mix of Pakistan. As it was created on religion divide alone, they forgot to check issues of ethnicity, culture and language. As a result, the official language of the newly formed state of Pakistan became Urdu, which was not spoken by anybody originally living in the regions that comprised of todays Pakistan (or even Bangladesh, which was part of Pakistan originally). That language was imported from India, by Muslims that decided to cross the border and settle in Muslim Pakistan. This created a language divide that has not yet been resolved.

Next comes the ethnicity and cultural divide. A thin sliver of land bordering India is sort of agrarian or urban, and highly populated with what one might call middle class or poor class city and village dwellers. The rest of the country is semi aried, mountainous, and with people that still live the semi pastoral semi nomadic lifestyle they had been living for thousands of years. There is a severe difference between their lifestyles.

The tribal areas themselves are arbitrarily truncated with part of their original territory belonging to Afghanistan and the rest inside Pakistan. The same tribe now straddles two different countries, and naturally, they do not accept that artificial border.

This is part of the reason why Western forces find the border between Afhganistan and Pakistan so porous, with so called terrorists crisscrossing it at will.

That border, incidentally, is called the Durant line, and was chalked up just over a hundred years ago, by a deal between the ever expanding British Empire, and a harassed Afghan King of the time. The Afghan king was fighting a two-fronted battle, encroachment from Czarist Russia from the North, and encroachment from British Empire from the east. So he gave away half of the tribal lands to the British, against guarantee of no further aggression from the British forces. No one bothered to ask the tribals.

Also, the treaty was to be valid for a hundred years, which has now expired. The current Afghanistan wants that half back, while Pakistan wants to hold on to it.

That is yet another detail hardly every talked about in western press.

That is not all. The southern tribal lands have a lot of gas. That gas is being extracted by the Pakistani Govt, but most of the money goes to the populated east, and very little trickles down to the tribals. That is because over 80 % of the land (where the gas is) is populated by less than 20% of the population, and wealth is shared proportionate to population density, and not based on where the wealth was created.

The tribals do not like to follow Government control, and in essence constitute a semi autonomous region, and have been conducting off and on guerrilla war against the Paksitani Government for a while. All this is quite separate from Taleban and Al Qaeda and the fight against the Kabul regime and NATO forces.

So, the situation is, to put is simply, very complex.

Musharraf is a military dictator. The last two prime ministers have had a lot of corruption charges against them. Each party is entrenched with one or another linguistic and ethnic group. Since there is little effort at bridging the ethnic and linguistic divide, the bitter infighting will continue. The army, meanwhile, enjoys the benefit of being the only power that can keep such an unstable bunch of folks under control, albeit brutally and undemocratically.

What can the US do? First of all, US aid empowered the Pakistani junta, when they were supposed to help the resistance groups within Afghanistan in fighting the Soviets. IN many ways, Taleban and Al Qaeda got the building up strength directly from US aid in cash and weaponry. Osama Bin Laden was a good guy to the Americans in the early 90s before be became a bad guy.

Sooooo, there it is – my own attempt at trying to list only some of the bewildering array of incidences and anecdotes, facts and history, that makes India, Pakistan, or even Afghanistan. If the goings on is anybody’s fault, whose should it be ?

I leave you to ponder that.

Cheers.