Friday 16 November 2007
Lahore, Pakistan - Pakistan freed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto from house arrest on Friday hours before a caretaker prime minister was sworn in to oversee elections the opposition say won't be free and fair.
Jail officials left the residence in the eastern city of Lahore where Bhutto has been confined since Tuesday to prevent her from leading a pro-democracy rally against President Pervez Musharraf's emergency rule.
"The government has withdrawn Bhutto's detention order, and from now, she is free to move wherever she likes," Aftab Cheema, police chief of the eastern city of Lahore, told Reuters.
"Police will remain (outside) for her security, but there will be no restriction on her movement."
The United States had hoped Musharraf and Bhutto would end up sharing power after a general election, but they have rounded on each other even before polls take place. Musharraf has pledged to hold the parliamentary elections by January 9.
Bhutto's release comes ahead of a planned visit by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, who will push General Musharraf to end the emergency rule he imposed on November 3 in an apparent bid to hold on to the presidency, and to free thousands of detained opposition figures.
Bhutto's release was welcomed in Washington. U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said other political detainees should also be freed.
"Other steps need to be taken too, including the lifting of the state of emergency," he said.
The National Assembly - which critics say was a pro-Musharraf rubber stamp convened after what they say were rigged polls in 2002 - completed its term on Thursday.
Musharraf swore in an ally as caretaker prime minister - Senate Chairman Mohammadmian Soomro - and a 24-member cabinet packed with Musharraf loyalists to oversee the election.
The opposition rejected the move as part to Musharraf's plan to retain power and said the election would not be fair, especially under a state of emergency.
Detainees Freed?
Bhutto, who was due to hold a news conference later on Friday, has said the possibility of a vote boycott would be discussed at an opposition meeting on November 21.
Lahore police official Malik Mohammad Iqbal said detained women activists would be released on Friday but a Bhutto party official that was only being done to impress the Americans.
"The government is doing this to show their masters that we are so democratic and the caretaker government is neutral," said Latif Khosa, a senator and aide to Bhutto.
Struggling to secure another term of office in the face of legal challenges, Musharraf suspended the constitution, fired judges regarded as hostile to his rule, rounded up thousands of opponents and rights activists, and curbed the media.
He cited a meddlesome judiciary hampering efforts in the war on terrorism. He had been at loggerheads with the judiciary since March, when he tried to dismiss the chief justice.
The United States is worried the turmoil will distract attention from the fight against militants who have been infiltrating into the northwest from Afghan border strongholds.
The army has stepped up efforts to clear militants from one such area, the Swat Valley in North West Frontier Province, where the army says it has killed dozens of militants in recent days.
Musharraf, in power since a 1999 coup, had been due to quit the army by November 15 but that was before the Supreme Court took up challenges to his October 6 re-election by legislators.
He now says he will quit as army chief and be sworn in as a civilian president as soon as the Supreme Court, where judges regarded as friendly to the government have been appointed, dismisses the challenges. The attorney general said the court was expected to validate the vote before the end of the month.
Militants Gain Despite Decree by Musharraf
By Jane Perlez and Ismail Khan
The New York Times
Friday 16 November 2007
Peshawar, Pakistan - Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, says he instituted emergency rule for the extra powers it would give him to push back the militants who have carved out a mini-state in Pakistan's tribal areas.
But in the last several days, the militants have extended their reach, capturing more territory in Pakistan's settled areas and chasing away frightened policemen, local government officials said.
As inconspicuous as it might be in a nation of 160 million people, the takeover of the small Alpuri district headquarters this week was considered a particular embarrassment for General Musharraf. It showed how the militants could still thumb their noses at the Pakistani Army.
In fact, local officials and Western diplomats said, there is little evidence that the 12-day-old emergency decree has increased the government's leverage in fighting the militants, or that General Musharraf has used the decree to take any extraordinary steps to combat them.
Instead, it has proved more of a distraction, they said, forcing General Musharraf to concentrate on his own political survival, even as the army starts its first offensive operation since the Nov. 3 decree.
The success of the militants in Swat has caused new concern in Washington about the ability and the will of Pakistani forces to fight the militants who are now training their sights directly on Pakistan's government, not only on the NATO and American forces across the border in Afghanistan, Western officials said.
After several weeks of heavy clashes, the militants largely control Swat, the mountainous region that is the scenic jewel of Pakistan, and are pushing into Shangla, to the east. All of the sites lie deeper inside Pakistan than the tribal areas, on the Afghan border, where Al Qaeda, the Taliban and assorted foreign and local militants have expanded a stronghold in recent years. In Alpuri, the administrative headquarters of Shangla, a crowd of militants easily took over the police station, despite the emergency decree, Mayor Ibad Khan said.
"They came straight to the police station; it was empty," he said in a telephone interview. The district police officer had run away. "I am still searching for him," Mr. Khan said. Asked why the police station was empty, he said, "I am asking myself the same question."
The shelling of militant positions in several subdistricts of Swat, and in neighboring Shangla in the last several days, was the first significant action by the Pakistani Army in the area, Western defense officials said.
One Western diplomat said a government military briefing Thursday in Islamabad was intended to convince foreign countries of the feasibility of the government offensive. Instead, the official said, the presentation only underscored the Pakistan Army's lack of counterinsurgency skills as it tries to battle about 400 well-supplied and well-trained militants in the region.
In the past, the government has relied on paramilitary forces, the Frontier Corps and the constabulary to control Swat, which is part of North-West Frontier Province.
More than 2,000 Pakistani Army soldiers were deployed to the province in July, but they remained largely inactive, intimidated by the militants' ability to capture soldiers.
The army said Thursday that more than two dozen militants had been killed in clashes since operations began three days ago.
But Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad, a military spokesman, said the army had not cleared the main road in Alpuri by Thursday night.
The local militants in Swat are led by Maulana Fazlullah, a charismatic Islamic cleric, and are fortified by Islamic fighters of Uzbek, Tajik and Chechen origin, residents say. They say that although masks hide the foreigners' faces, it is clear that they do not speak Pashto, the local language.
Mr. Fazlullah leads the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws, a Taliban-style group that has forced the closing of schools for girls and shut down video stores. He delivers his message on FM radio, a technique that the government has not curbed. Civilians in the area said the arrival of the army three days ago was not reassuring.
"The army has moved to the area, but so far I don't see any practical steps for this crisis," said Sher Muhammad, a lawyer, in a telephone interview from Swat. "We are just waiting. The situation is worse than 10 days ago."
Civilians have already been killed, local residents said by telephone.
In Kanju, a town under the militants' control, the army shelled a house, killing four people, said Walyat Ali Khan, a lawyer.
"The army controls the airport," Mr. Khan said. "But the militants openly control the one-kilometer road from the airport to Kanju." The militants also control the 15-mile stretch from Kanju to Matta, a town to the north.
In Koza Bani, another district the militants control, the army has suffered more casualties than the militants, said Amina Khan, who works with a local nongovernmental organization. "I called the mayor, and he said eight soldiers are dead, and only three Taliban are killed," Ms. Khan said.
In Kabal, Fazal Wahab, a pharmacist, said the army and government paramilitary forces now controlled the main road. Three civilians, including a 9-year-old boy, were killed Wednesday by government shelling, and a government curfew that kept people inside on Wednesday meant it was hard to get food, he said.
Several events in the 12 days of martial law illustrate how little impact General Musharraf's greater powers have had on the expanding insurgency.
On Nov. 4, the day after the declaration, General Musharraf approved the release of 213 soldiers who had been held captive by Baitullah Mehsud, one of the most powerful militant commanders in the tribal areas, in exchange for 25 militants captured in August.
General Musharraf acknowledged in an interview this week that some of the militants handed back to Mr. Mehsud were trained suicide bombers, and that one of the militants had been charged with involvement in a suicide attack.
The general said that he was not happy with the deal, but that Pakistan needed the soldiers back.
A suicide bomb attack on a government official in Peshawar last week showed how the militants were aiming at officials allied with General Musharraf.
The government official, Amir Muqam, the minister for political affairs in the tribal areas, survived the suicide attack on his home. His cousin, who was also a government official, was killed in the blast.
The attempt on Mr. Muqam's life sent a chill through the government. He was carefully chosen. He had been a member of a religious party alliance that was sympathetic to the militants, and then switched allegiance and joined the general's political party, the Pakistani Muslim League, several years ago.
General Musharraf seemed so appreciative of Mr. Muqam, that he hailed him at a public ceremony as a special friend, and presented him with a pistol.
Even though the militants numbered only in the hundreds, they would give "a tough time to the army, and they will cost the army a lot," said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a military analyst in Lahore.
He said the army would probably be able to expel the militants from the cities and towns. But the militants would take shelter in the mountains, and could survive the winter unscathed.
The soldiers, almost all of whom do not come from the region and feel like outsiders there, are unprepared for what could amount to a guerrilla war, he said.
Another problem was the intense barrage of propaganda from the religious clerics in the region. The messages exhorting soldiers not to fight a "foreigners war," meaning a war on behalf of the United States, had undermined the morale of the government paramilitary forces that were leading the fight, he said.
"The army has never faced such a serious challenge in the tribal areas or in Swat before," Mr. Rizvi said.
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