Pakistani former prime minister Benazir Bhutto (l) speaks during a press conference at her residence with former premier Nawaz Sharif in Islamabad, Dec. 3.

The PPP-PMLN “summit“ in Islamabad has produced a mainstream parties’ agreement to prepare a charter of demands aimed at ensuring free and fair elections in 2008.
Ms Benazir Bhutto and Mr Nawaz Sharif have postponed the matter of boycotting the coming general elections to first address the problem on the basis of which a consideration of an opposition boycott is possible.
While the rest of the political parties in the opposition may have a different point of view, the two leaders think they should first lay down what they want the government to do to allay their fears of a rigged election.
It is therefore important that the ARD-APDM committee charged with framing the demands reflects above all the stance of the two mainstream parties.
The meeting in Islamabad has been held against the backdrop of new developments inside the APDM opposition.
Even as Mr Nawaz Sharif called for the boycott and vowed that he would get the PPP to agree to a consensual boycott, his party’s Punjab president Mr Zulfiqar Khosa put him on notice that in the province where his party has the largest number of votes, the rank and file do not want him to boycott the polls.
Earlier, the central working committee of his party had also developed a divided view on the matter of the boycott agreed at the level of the APDM.
Just as Mr Sharif went into consultations with his ARD partner in Islamabad, Qazi Hussain Ahmad of the Jamaat i Islami consulted with his MMA partner Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the JUI to prepare the ground for a consensus.
It can be said that while Mr Sharif has succeeded in getting Ms Bhutto to commit to some joint action, Qazi Hussain Ahmad has managed only to deepen the rift with Maulana Fazal.
The APDM’s one-line agenda of boycotting the elections unless the Supreme Court of Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry is restored has been rejected out of hand by the JUI which points to the fact that the dismissed court was also the result of a PCO.
Meanwhile, as if to push the opposition to extremes, the returning officers have rejected the nomination papers of both Mr Nawaz Sharif and his brother Mr Shehbaz Sharif.
As his first and immediate reaction, Mr Sharif has vowed that he will not appeal against the rejection.
But the PMLN faction of the lawyers in Lahore has asked him to participate in the elections despite the rejection.
One weak legal opinion is that the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) that exonerated the PPP leadership and others from cases running against them also absolves Mr Sharif on the basis of “equity of law“ despite the time bar placed on the NRO and despite the fact that the NRO doesn’t apply to convicts.
Before the two parties sit down to formulate their charter of demands, they must take a number of facts into account. The PPP leader entered Pakistan much earlier than the PMLN leader--he was sent back once--and has been able to unfurl its campaign effectively.
Its stance that it will not boycott the elections in principle has gradually overcome the generally rejectionist public mood in the country.
On the other hand, Mr Sharif has been compelled to seek solidarity with the APDM and has somehow subordinated his party’s own campaign to the demands of the movement where the biggest religious party--the JUI--is not rejectionist at all.
So we should face the matter squarely. If the APDM were to frame the charter of demands its contents would “ensure“ a boycott; but if the PPP were to frame the demands they would be aimed at ensuring polls without rigging.
If there is tension of interests during negotiations, the PMLN should be more morally obliged to hear the PPP point of view, which is now shared by the PMLN rank and file.
The demands will have to be realistic and should encourage the government and President Pervez Musharraf to “give ground“.
Already there is a rumour that the “establishment“ is ready to restore the Supreme Court of Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry but without him at the head of it.
There is reason to believe that, just as earlier conditions about the timing of elections and the “uniform“ have been met, realistic demands in the planned charter too could be accepted to ensure “unrigged“ polls.
The PPP and the PMLN are free also to agree on the post-election scenario, but that would depend on Mr Sharif relenting on his decision to boycott.
They can agree to amend the Constitution on the basis of the two-thirds majority they are sure to jointly hold after the elections to disband the disabilities placed on their leadership by the outgoing parliament.
This agreement between the mainstream parties is rendered essential by the positive signs among the electorate.
DAILYTIMES.CO.PK

US Col. David W. Sutherland (r) speaking with Sheik Sammi, a tribal leader in Sheik Sa'ad Village, in Baghdad, Aug. 27.

The word ’enduring’ crops up a lot in connection with the U.S. adventure in Iraq. As soon as the U.S. Army occupied the country in 2003, it began work on 14 “enduring“ (i.e. permanent) military bases to turn it into an American bastion at the head of the Persian Gulf. And now U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have signed an agreement to forge an “enduring“ U.S.-Iraqi relationship once the United Nations mandate that currently authorizes the U.S. presence in the country expires at the end of next year.
The U.N. mandate that provides a legal justification for the current “multinational“ force in Iraq was a desperate attempt to paper over the fact that the organization’s most powerful member had launched an unprovoked invasion of another country. The Security Council could not defy or condemn the United States--Britain and the U.S. would both have vetoed such a move--so it chose to give it some diplomatic cover instead. But the next extension of the U.N. mandate, to the end of 2008, will be the last.
The “coalition“ of other countries that contributed troops to the occupation of Iraq is melting away: the new Australian government is going to bring its troops home, the Japanese Parliament has ended the country’s naval support for the Iraq mission (the soldiers had already left), and Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown is searching for a tactful way to pull all the British troops out.
Soon it will just be the Americans and the Iraqis, alone together, and the Bush administration, encouraged by the temporary improvement that the “surge“ has wrought in the security situation in Iraq, is pushing on with its original plans for the country.
Over the next year, the U.S. will negotiate the military, political and economic terms of the “enduring“ relationship with Iraq that was always intended to follow the invasion of the country.
We need not dwell on the unequal status of the American and Iraqi participants in this negotiation, with 160,000 American troops in Iraq and Prime Minister al-Maliki unable, as he put it last year, to “move even a battalion without American consent.“ We may assume that the agreement will ratify the permanent presence of American armed forces in Iraq and grant preferential treatment to U.S. investments in the country. But we might ask, just once more, why the U.S. did all this.
There were no terrorists in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, nor had there been any contact between Saddam Hussein and the plotters of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. There were no “weapons of mass destruction“ in Iraq, either. Indeed, a number of former U.S. officials have confirmed that the invasion of Iraq was high on the Bush administration’s agenda from the moment it took office, eight months before 9/11. But there is no consensus on why it wanted to invade Iraq.
As a colleague once remarked, “I can give you a dozen possible reasons why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, but I can’t give you just one.“
The need to find a new base for the American troops that were causing embarrassment to the Saudi Arabian regime, a desire by the younger Bush to do what his father had failed to do and capture Baghdad, fear that Saddam Hussein was going to start demanding payment for his oil in euros rather than dollars--every sort of petty or preposterous motive has been proposed.
As a rule of thumb, it’s best to assume that U.S. leaders are guided by strategic rather than personal considerations. It is also wise to be suspicious of the simpler oil-related explanations: Saddam Hussein lacked the standing to lead the other oil-exporting states in a switch from the dollar to the euro, for example, even if he was toying with such an idea.
There is no need to invade countries in order to get oil from them. There could, however, be a requirement for large, permanent American military bases somewhere in the Persian Gulf if the goal was to be able to stop oil from the region from reaching some other country. Which country?
The only challenger to America’s status as sole superpower is China, and the Bush administration has spent the last seven years in tireless pursuit of alliances or less formal military arrangements with countries all around China’s borders. (“Containment,“ they call it.) China is heavily dependent on imported oil, and the bulk of its imports come from the Persian Gulf. An American hand on China’s oil tap could be a major strategic asset. Maybe that’s what Iraq was about.
Even this explanation doesn’t make complete sense. The U.S. Navy owns half the major warships on the planet, and is perfectly capable of starving China of oil without any land bases in the Persian Gulf. On the other hand, strategy is rarely fully rational, and the lavish funding of the Pentagon does encourage it to go in for belt-and-suspenders solutions. (Consider the famous “triad“ of long-range bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched missiles, all designed to deliver the same nuclear weapons on the same targets.)
It’s only of concern to historians now, of course, because the “enduring bases“ are just part of the larger fantasy of U.S. victory in Iraq. The “surge“ will end, the insurgents will come back out of their holes, and the attrition of U.S. forces in Iraq will resume its usual pace. They will all go home eventually.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

The likelihood that North Korea’s nuclear disarmament will be completed just a year after Pyongyang announced that it had tested a nuclear bomb has been widely welcomed around the world, with the exception, perhaps, of China.
There are increasing concerns among Chinese academics that Pyongyang’s actions are hurting Chinese interests. Last October’s nuclear test not only unmasked the contradictions of a relationship frequently described as being “as close as lips and teeth“.
It may have led to a further downturn in bilateral ties.
As the host nation of the Six Party Talks and once North Korea’s closest ally, China has reacted to the prospects for disarmament in a decidedly cool manner, with its North Korea experts debating how Pyongyang will harm China’s interests.
“There is no doubt that Pyongyang will create conflicts between China and the United States once it improves its relationship with Washington,“ said Zhang Liangui, professor of international strategic research at the Central Party School in Beijing.
He predicted that it was only a matter of time before Pyongyang took revenge on Beijing for China’s vote to impose sanctions on North Korea at the United Nations last October.
Zhang Yushan, researcher at the Jilin Academy of Social Sciences, however, doubts that North Korea could develop a close relationship with the US in the upcoming months.
After a year of dialog, North Korea agreed in October to shut its main nuclear reactor and provide detailed descriptions of all its nuclear programs by the end of the year.
Furthermore, it has pledged not to transfer nuclear materials, technology or knowledge to other countries. Pyongyang fulfilled one of those promises in July by shutting down the reactor in Yongbyon.
It has yet to make any substantial moves toward providing a description of its nuclear programs.
Chinese academics who question whether North Korea’s pledges to completely abandon its nuclear program are sincere also worry about Washington’s lack of determination to shape a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula after having received Pyongyang’s assurance that it would not transfer nuclear materials, technology or knowledge to other countries.
“China has always seen North Korea’s nuclear weapon issue as the Americans’ problem and has never adopted any strategic plan for itself in the Six Party Talks, which have led to where we are now,“ said Jin Linbo, a research professor at the Beijing-based China Institute of International Studies.
Jin argued that Beijing might have gained nothing but a security threat from its neighbor by hosting the talks.
What has particularly frustrated Beijing has been North Korea’s selfish neglect of China’s interests.
The Central Party School’s Zhang noted that the latest developments have led some Chinese academics who originally had sympathies for North Korea to change their attitudes.
Scoot Snyder, senior associate at the Washington based Asia Foundation, noted that North Korea’s traditional strategy is to play larger parties against each other; having found their country over-reliant on China for critical inputs, North Korean leaders would certainly like to stimulate a competition between China and the United States and South Korea to see who can most effectively win influence in Pyongyang.
ATIMES.COM