M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — Pakistan's chief of army
staff, General Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, is a master at the strategy of starting a
fire and then volunteering to put it out in exchange for concessions. Yet he
was taken aback when President Asif Ali Zardari declined to enter the noose of
imprisonment being prepared for him by the expected return to office of
dismissed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.
Zardari has refused to reinstate Chaudhry,
ousted by his predecessor Gen. Pervez Musharraf, despite urgings from Prime
Minister Yousuf Gilani – who was functioning in tandem with Kayani in wanting a
more pliant head of state than Zardari.
Since then, Kayani has been working at
undermining his nominal superior, ensuring a steady diet of negative media
reports about Zardari, and ensuring backroom backing for those champions of
Punjabi supremacy in Pakistan, the Sharif brothers. The conspirators meet
outside Pakistan, usually in locations in the Middle East, to fine-tune their
plans to ensure the removal of Zardari and the return to center stage of Kayani
ally Nawaz Sharif.
Of concern to democracies about this
Pakistani soap opera is the backing that Kayani has given to the Taliban and
its parasite, al-Qaida. It is no accident that NATO has failed to prevent this
group of louts from retaking one-third of Afghanistan and moving into the rest.
U.S. backing for Kayani has ensured that
the Pakistan military's double-faced policy of secretly helping the Taliban
while publicly backing NATO continues. Now that the Clinton team is back in
office, courtesy of President Barack Obama, the United States is returning to
the 1994-96 policy of backing the Taliban.
