"Compared to Pakistan, Iraq Looks Pretty Good"

This quote is attributed to an aide to Secretary of State Condi Rice. To say that the situation in Pakistan is unstable fails to convey anything like the fragmentation taking place. Experts on the region have no idea what will happen within the next few hours, much less days.

I read about the crisis with a kind of prickly, obsessive dread because I've been there. In 1976, as a skinny impressionable college student majoring in Asian Studies, I spent several months in Pakistan, mostly in Lahore but also in Peshawar and Karachi. At that time Benazir Bhutto's father and the Pakistan People's Party were in power, but Islamic fundamentalists were openly advocating change and the relationship between the government and the real powers in the country (the military and a small coterie of wealthy families) was strained. Unless you have been in Pakistan it is difficult to grasp how tenuous are the structures of government and the rule of law. There is no sense of momentum or continuity to any of the societal institutions that we take for granted, except perhaps for the military.

To get some notion of the extreme state of chaos that now prevails, watch the video clips on this blog. President Musharraf has declared a state of emergency ("emergency plus," actually, a kind of euphemism for martial law) and shut down the seventeen-member Supreme Court that appeared ready to rule that his presidency is invalid. A new chief justice was appointed, but only a few justices rallied behind the new leader. Although under house arrest, the existing chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudry, with the support of a dozen or so associate justices, has declared the president's declaration of emergency powers invalid.

Underlying the crisis is an unthinkable development, the weakening of the vaunted Pakistani Army, the most durable institution in the country. Setbacks against the insurgents in tribal areas (including the recent surrender of 300 soldiers), the spreading of the conflict to ostensibly government-controlled places like Swat, and a wave of desertions and suicides among the troops have shattered military morale.

Benazir Bhutto was out of the country when Musharraf acted but is supposed to have returned already. Whether she and the civilian political parties will have any ability to moderate the situation is a mystery. The big cities like Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi are bracing for suicide bombings and insurrection. Osama bin Laden, lurking in the tribal hinterlands, has everything to gain from the dissolution of social order. Although it is impossible to guess which of a half dozen scenarios will play out (strikes, civil war, protests, U.S. military presence, riots, military crackdown, secession, incursion by perennial enemy India), none of them are good, and at this point the U.S. has little ability to influence the course of events.

Iraq is very bad, but Pakistan has a few things absent in Iraq -- Osama bin Laden himself, for one, and a stockpile of atomic weapons. Yes, compared to Pakistan, Iraq looks pretty good.