Pakistan at the brink of Abaddon, with envious right-wing Americans cheering

[BTW, I wrote a post, “Bush losing Pakistan to the Taliban” four months ago.]  

Barnett Rubin and Manan Ahmed have been doing a tremendous job blogging the Pakistani coup. Briefly, the emergency declaration was mostly a slap at the judiciary, with allusions to the war on terror and military morale. But the real causes, Ahmed says, are these:

[Musharraf] did not control Baluchistan where a genuine call for accountability and justice was quashed by horrific military violence – including missile assassinations. Baluchistan should have been afforded our attention in 2005 – but we were too busy in Iraq. It became, contiguous with Waziristan, the outpost and then the center of Taliban/extremist insurgents over the next two years. We insisted on supporting the one person who had no legitimate power to negotiate or fight for over 40% of territorial Pakistan. Can you imagine that?

A number of observers (e.g., Ali Eteraz and, via Cernig, Indian intelligence bureau chief Ajit Doval) think– as I do– that the US approved the coup. Ahmed does not:

Reading between the lines – ie, the english and urdu lines, I venture an opinion that this was not done with the approval of the US/State. Perhaps even done in defiance of them

If Washington really is opposed to the coup, Musharraf is in pretty deep. I’d call it a suicide mission, since he has almost no support in the country outside of the officer corps and because the consequences of his prolonged mismanagement have the entire country in an early state of civil war. Given the ethnic strains, Pakistan is easily capable of fragmenting into three or more countries.

Rubin makes this telling observation:

Judging by the General’s actions, judicial activism is a much more sinister and immediate threat than terrorism, as all of his actions since yesterday have targeted the former rather than the latter. Indeed Musharraf’s agents managed to pirate the codes to prevent Geo TV from uploading its programs to satellite, while Maulana Fazlullah’s FM station in Swat continues to broadcast calls for jihad without impediment.

As Cernig comments:

Sure enough, over on the extreme right’s blogs, commenters are already drawing the parallel between Mushie’s recalcitrant judges and “liberal courts and a lot of liberal judges here in the USA”, in tones that make it clear they approve of Musharraf’s actions and would like to see the same happen in America.

They really do hate America,