The axe has fallen on the judiciary (Iftikhar Hussein Chaudhry). At the Supreme Court level, 12 judges have bowed out while in the provinces 48 judges have found themselves without a job. While confrontation will intensify in the coming days, the alacrity with which some of the key vacated slots have been filled indicates a national divide that might help the Musharraf administration to control the situation. He has a political coalition which will back him, and he has politicians like Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Ms Benazir Bhutto who opposed the “revolutionary” intent of the confrontationists and may now cooperate if the situation doesn’t get out of hand.
In the “struggle” for democracy, the retreat of the state in the face of Al Qaeda’s terrorism had been either “denied” or subordinated to the higher goals of untrammelled democracy. The unrealistic, and some would say adventurist, confrontationist slogan was: get the general out of the system, dump the “American agenda”, and terrorism will vanish overnight. On the other hand, the warlords who spearhead the Al Qaeda thrust in Pakistan put forward conditions of ceasefire that no one pays heed to: removal of America and NATO from Iraq and Afghanistan and the proclamation of Islam of the Taliban variety in Pakistan.
