 The New York Times on Sunday, while noting the "contradictory" government statements about Akbar Bugti's death, said that the army was the only constituency Gen Musharraf cared for and "so long as elections are brazenly rigged, opposition parties are banned and Washington's uncritical support remains guaranteed, General Musharraf has little incentive" to take up any of the vital challenges he faced. The newspaper, claimed by the liberal elite to be America's most respected, said the Musharraf government "often acts like a garden-variety military dictatorship".
| Why yes he does, doesn't he? That's an order of magnitude better than acting like a garden-variety Islamofascist state, and two orders of magnitude better than acting like a failed, terrorist ridden Islamic state. |
In a stinging in a French way editorial, the newspaper said there were dangerous international terrorists hiding out in the mountain caves of Pakistan, but the 79-year-old Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, the Baloch tribal leader, politician and rebel, was not one of them. "Now Mr Bugti is dead and the impoverished but energy-rich province of Balochistan is in an uproar after an ill-explained military operation last month. After a week of contradictory government statements, the only things now clear are that Mr Bugti's body was buried in the rubble of his blown-up mountain hideout, and that antigovernment fury in the restive province is at a new pitch of intensity."
| Going after Bugti might not have been the smartest thing Perv could have done, but it was easier than taming the ISI and the Talibs in Wazoo, and Perv is always willing to do easy first. So Nawab is titz up and the Talibs live to fight another day. Did we expect anything different? |
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