Pakistan's ruling coalition falls...duh! -The iPINIONS Journal

There’s no guarantee the PPP [headed by the widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Asif Ali Zadari] and PML-N [headed by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif] will be able to put aside long-standing hostilities long enough to mount a joint political coup d’état….

Nothing justifies Musharraf’s dictatorship quite like the chaos among the country’s opposition parties…. Sharif and Bhutto have discovered that the only politician they hate more than Musharraf is each other…. Instead of leading a joint boycott of parliamentary elections in January – as both vowed to do, they have decided to lead their respective parties to the polls.

[Musharraf suffers humiliating defeat at the polls, The iPINIONS Journal, February 21, 2008]

Less than a week after joining forces to compel president Pervez Musharraf to resign, the leaders of Pakistan’s ruling coalition, Asif Ali Zadari (left) and Nawaz Sharif (right), fulfilled my prophecy that they would soon find that they hate each other more than they hate Musharraf.

Citing a “string of broken promises” by Zadari, Sharif announced on Monday that he is withdrawing his support from the government. Whatever the case, it did not take them long to disabuse Pakistanis of any hope that they would be able to work together to cure the country’s crippling economic woes and combat al-Qaeda’s increasingly violent insurgency.

Therefore, having rid the country of their boogeyman (who at least enforced some degree of stability), Zadari and Sharif now seem determined to plunge Pakistan into sectarian political warfare that will make the conflict between Sunni and Shia in Iraq seem like a schoolyard row.

And this political warfare will not only raise questions about Pakistan as a responsible nuclear power but also compromise its ability to fight insurgent terrorists on the real front in the war on terror; i.e., on the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.