Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation:
A new round of political upheaval has been triggered in Pakistan, with the Supreme Court’s decision to void the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) that provided a get-out-of-jail-free card to key civilian leaders of Pakistan. Included among those leaders are its utterly corrupt president, Asif Ali Zardari, and several top officials, including the minister of defense and the minister of interior. Those ministers, and others, have been told by the authorities not to leave town, i.e., they are forbidden to travel abroad, and pressure is on Zardari to resign.
If Pakistan has any hope of breaking the military’s stranglehold on power, that hope rests in the civilian parties, including Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party — the party of the late President Bhutto and his daughter, Benazir, Zardari’s late wife, who was assassinated on her return from exile — and the more religious-centered Pakistan Muslim League (N) of the Sharif brothers, including Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister. Neither the PPP and the Muslim League, however, are true mass-based political parties. Instead, they have become vehicles for the personal and political ambitions of the corrupt families who control them. By default, the leadership of the democratic, civilian movement in Pakistan has fallen instead to the lawyers’ movement and to the courts, but it’s hard to see how those forces could emerge as a credible political movement that could lead the country. In Pakistan, nominally a democracy, actual democrats are few and far between, and it will take a long time for any of Pakistan’s political parties and movements to put down roots and grow into true democratic parties. Meanwhile, it isn’t clear that the army will allow that to happen.
More here. [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]