Ostensibly to protect against “blasphemous” YouTube content, but more likely for political purposes, I’m guessing.

With presumably unintended consequences.

The leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country.

Let’s hope this isn’t the prelude to increased repression there, locking the internet doors in an attempt to block information from getting out.

2 Comments »

Bush and Cheney put most of their eggs in the basket of a military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who has been on a self-destructive downward spiral during the past year that makes Amy Winehouse look level-headed.

So, will he resign gracefully or not?

1 Comment »

From a fascinating post by an American who knows Pakistan well

But what recent events demonstrate even more clearly is that the Bush administration’s policy of relying on a personal relationship with a megalomaniac manipulator like Musharraf to fight al-Qaida has strengthened that organization immeasurably and perhaps fatally damaged the U.S.’s ability to form the coalition it needs to isolate and destroy that organization.

Many, probably most or nearly all, Pakistanis don’t see the “War on Terror” as struggle of “moderates” against “extremists.” They see it as a slogan to legitimate the military’s authoritarian control.

Read the whole post. It also explains the precise mechanism by which  the Musharraf regime steals elections in a way “not visible to foreign election observers.”

No Comments »

Two dozen dead in Karachi

Juan Cole:

The seriousness of the situation in the streets of some of Pakistan’s important towns and cities doesn’t seem to me to be being reported in the US press and media. In contrast, Pakistani newspapers are giving chilling details of large urban centers turned into ghost towns on Friday morning.

Folks, I’ve seen civil wars and riots first hand, and revolutions from not too far away, and this situation looks pretty bad to me.

No Comments »

There were multiple snipers shooting armor-piercing bullets, a decoy suicide bomb, and two of the snipers blew themselves up after firing. There was another attack at the hospital.

A working theory, according to this American source, is that Al Qaeda or affiliated jihadist groups had effectively suborned at least one unit of Pakistan’s Special Services Group, the country’s equivalent of Britain’s elite SAS commandos.

Or not. But clearly they were stone cold professionals. With help.

Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday’s rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts.

Tip: FDL, who also has a fascinating piece by someone who knew Bhutto as a student at Harvard and says she was being groomed, even then, to lead Pakistan.

1 Comment »

So how did the assassin get close enough to Bhutto to be able to shoot her at point blank range? And how did they know when she’d be out of the protective bubble of her car? This seems a well-planned hit that had inside help.

The killing was clearly intended to create chaos and a collapse of the government. Indeed, Musharraf may not last in power much longer.

But why would anyone want to see the 4 horseman unleashed? It helps to recall Lenin. The early revolutionary leaders in Russia wanted to have a new democratic government - in effect they wanted to replace the Tsar with a kind of English system. Ms Bhutto = Kerensky.

Lenin had no ambitions to simply take over the existing state - he wanted to create a Theocracy - a new ideal state based on a religion. AQ have the same desire.

But Lenin had a disciplined mass party and enjoyed broad support. AQ has no such support, not even in Pakistan.

They want chaos in Pakistan that will lead to conflict with India. They want the US to back order and Musharraf so that when M falls, the loss for the US will be even greater. They want Europeans to fear the Muslim immigrants and to have a reaction thus building up the tension inside Europe.

But at some point chaos becomes no one’s friend. Even gun runners and drug smugglers need basic societal stability. Once chaos starts, almost by definition, the outcome is unpredictable.

This creates the ideal conditions for a tribal theocracy.

The brilliance of this move is that while I think I can see how it can all turn out, I can’t think of how I would do anything but follow the script that they have forced upon us. Like in 1914, the powder charges have been laid over 40 years. Now the fuse is lit - the bang is inevitable.

Maybe not. We don’t have to take the bait. There’s no need for the US to do anything militarily and every reason to not do so. Perhaps the absolute best thing the US could do, both ethically and in terms of power politics, is to let Pakistan handle their own problem. Not only would the world breathe a sigh of relief that the US is finally acting sensibly, it would also defuse much of the threat from AQ.

No Comments »

Some thoughtful, if apocalyptic, views on the assassination from blogs

Moon of Alabama

Who did it?

Many people will point to Musharraf, as being behind the assassination, but according to the BBC, someone shot Bhutto and then blew himself up. Suicide bombing is not the hallmark of the Pakistani military, but of the takfiris.

Bhutto had promised to fight the U.S.’s war of terror against the Taliban and takfiris in the tribal North West Frontier State, certainly reason enough for those folks to kill her.

Then there’s the ISI, the shadowy secret police of Pakistan, considered among the best in the world, with murky ties to Al Qaida, Taliban, and more. In reality, anyone could have done it.

Futurejacked

With the death of Benazir Bhutto, we are now entering worst-case-scenario territory. A Pakistan that has devolved into Iraq-style globalguerrilla violence will create a huge node of instability, threatening India and Iran (not that I am losing sleep over that one) and pretty much guaranteeing that Afghanistan will not find stability for decades to come.

A destabilized Iran does no one any good and would simply spread the chaos. Nor does a destabilized Middle East. But we may get that anyway.

Robert Paterson

It has been easy for us to label all of this “Terror”.

I call it the Messy World.

Where there is a belt of so called states where the system shuts down all hope of social progress and produces millions of angry young men as a result. Where in the west, our huge bureaucracies impede any movement and our new belief system of Political Correctness precludes the development of an appreciation for the threat that is before us.

So here we are on the brink.

When extremists jack religion and use it for purposes of political manipulation and control then much madness can result, especially in the absence of any competing belief systems. Given the repressive nature of those regimes, which too often was backed by the US, political dissent was eliminated or marginalized, leaving the angry now no place to go but to Islamists.

3 Comments »