http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-india_pakistan/diplomacy_2620.jsp
excerpt
But the most unstable element in the new India-Pakistan peace equation is Pervez Musharraf himself. For the moment, the president is being propped up by the Pakistani army and bureaucratic elite, but he is also increasingly under siege by the Islamists who now run two of Pakistan's four provinces and are making governance in the other two extremely difficult. Many Pakistanis now regard the "real" ruler of Pakistan as the "ghaib (absent) imam" - the man that tens of thousands of American soldiers, even more Pakistani ones, the cream of the CIA and the British SAS cannot find. Beneath the surface, the fief of Osama bin Laden seems to run from above the Durand Line to well below Pathan City on the Pakistani smugglers' coast.
The resemblance of Pakistan to the chaos in Iraq is growing. True, the toll of organised murder and mayhem is not yet on the Iraqi scale. But the farsightedness of Musharraf's predecessor and Washington's second favourite Pakistani general (Zia ul-Haq) is bringing it closer. Islamist radicals of different stripes are able to strike at will, and officials who take an "un-Islamic" line are left in no doubt about what awaits them when the khalifat (kingdom of Allah) is finally established in every corner of Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the law and its minions no longer guarantee sanctity of life and limb, especially those of women and religious minorities. Islamic justice has all but replaced the centuries old penal code under which rapists used to be tried - and hanged. One gang-rape victim, Mukhtaran Mai, has eventually been able to tell her story to the world, but many of her sisters are forced to suffer the same indignity in silence. Shi'a Islamic shrines are regularly targeted, and Christians advertise their faith at the risk of their lives. Even television editors are pressed to blank out any scene that shows a popular Pakistani Christian test cricketer crossing himself every time he scores a century.
The voices of Pakistani progressives are clearly heard in the international and local print media, but inside Pakistan they are in retreat. Mullahs on the make are emboldened by the meteoric rise of fundamentalist Islam to influence government policy and the social environment (the renaming of streets honouring "infidels" and not so pious Muslims is one example).
Pakistani governments, at both federal and provincial levels, are in disarray. American pressure to shut down tens of thousands of Islamic madrasa (religious schools) had led Musharraf to embark on a flurry of educational reforms covering the private sector. A mass movement of mullahs and warnings by fundamentalists within the army led him to retreat, then to switch his reformist attention to public-sector schools. At that point, fundamentalists in his own parliamentary party opposed him, and that reform too was scuppered.
The mullahs, like mongrels chasing after a frightened postman, have chased Pervez Musharraf up a tall tree. They can't climb after him but he can't come down. He may try to divert their yapping attention by directing what persecuting power his government possesses on hapless stalwarts of the Bhutto family's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) - ironically, the only one capable of taking on the fundamentalists; or by tolerating attacks on helpless women participating in a marathon. When Asma Jahangir, head of Pakistan's human right commission, can be assaulted in Lahore's main street, how healthy can Pakistan be?
A stone-age recipe
Some observers of Pakistani politics argue that Indian leaders would not waste time negotiating difficult deals over Kashmir with a Pakistani president who was toothless and impotent. A more realistic view is based on Indians' understanding that real power in Pakistan lies with the army, and that any deal with its figurehead Pervez Musharraf will have the army's imprimatur.
In return, so the argument runs, Pakistan's army will continue to back Musharraf for as long as he is supported by American trust and money. This is likely to continue, for Washington desperately needs Musharraf and his army alike. The Afghan crisis is unresolved. The Taliban remain a potent threat. The situation in Iraq is not getting any better. And Saudi Arabia, the root of America's oil interests, remains unstable.
But if an arc of regional crisis is Musharraf's fragile guarantee of power, it leaves two questions whose answers illuminate the Pakistani dilemma:
why don't the Americans force Musharraf and his army to repress the fundamentalists, thus helping to reinforce the hopes of the cautious peace diplomacy between India and Pakistan?
There is only one thing wrong with that. Half the Pakistani army is fundamentalist; the cunning Zia ul-Haq made sure of that by stuffing it with mullah zealots of his own kind
why don't the Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan take matters to their logical conclusion, and (with the help of collaborators inside the army) overthrow Musharraf and seize state power?
There is one thing wrong with that scenario, too. The day the fundamentalists seize power, the Americans - now Pakistan's sole financiers - will pull the rug from under their Islamic feet, and Pakistan's economy will collapse. Even stone-age fundamentalists need money.
So bus diplomacy, Kashmir talks, and Advani's visit to Jinnah's mausoleum should be welcomed. But the history of Pakistan-India relations is a warning not to get too optimistic too soon. And through it all, don't forget the "ghaib imam" laughing in the mountains.