Does anyone seriously believe this will lead anywhere productive?
Diplomats said John Negroponte had delivered a very strong message for an end to Pakistan’s state of emergency.
Ahead of the meeting, Gen Musharraf told the BBC his country was safe as long as the military was in charge.
He warned that if polls he has promised for January were held under disturbed conditions, the country’s nuclear arms could fall into the wrong hands.
Mr Negroponte, the US Deputy Secretary of State, is expected to try to revive a deal between opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and Gen Musharraf.
He spoke to Ms Bhutto on Friday, saying “moderate forces” should work together to get Pakistan back to democracy.
Mr Negroponte is expected to call for the release of thousands of lawyers and political prisoners and an end of emergency rule as a pre-requisite for a fair election.
Oh joy, Ambassador DeathSquad is lecturing Dubya’s pet dictator on how to play nice and be tame. This should be good.
But hey. At least he’s cracking down on pesky Marxists, like union leader Manzoor Ahmed. Aporrea reports what you won’t be seeing in the US anytime soon.
Oops! Pressed enter instead of shift. Damn my poor typing skills. Anyway, what if the Pakistanis elect a government the U.S. government likes even less than Musharraf like the Palestinians did when they elected Hamas? What if the “wrong people” get elected? I think that is what the U.S. government is really afraid of.
Exactly.
That’s why they interfered in the Mexican elections, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried it elsewhere too (eg. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador) and failed. Penn, Schoen and Berland have cooked up fishy polls in more than one Latin American country, as a pre-emptive measure to create the impression that the US’s candidate was the frontrunner.
We saw in 2002 what happened when the “wrong guy” gets elected in Venezuela. The US tried to corrupt him, and when that failed, they moved to install the “right guy”–a tame business leader backed by a small number of corrupt military high commanders–by stealth and by force. What a shock it must have been to see the people flooding the streets in anger, threatening to erupt if they didn’t get their democratically elected president back. (Not that it’s stopped them from trying again–watch what will happen on December 2.)
So no wonder they’re only trying to put lipstick on the pig that is Musharraf. “Take off your uniform, you look like a military dictator”–duh! He IS a military dictator. And he will be one, in uniform or out. Sending Ambassador DeathSquad to wag the finger at him only underscores the authoritarian layers of irony in all this…
(And of course, we will never speak of the irony of what they say about the democratically-elected president of Venezuela, who is NOT a military dictator, but who occasionally appears in uniform–typically when addressing the armed forces, whose job it is to serve him and the country, not overthrow the one and plunge the other into chaos.)