Islamabad, Jan 1 (IANS) The year 2011 ‘will be crucial’ for Pakistan, a leading Pakistani daily said, adding: ‘It will also be a year of Pakistan’s correction of its unrealistic and unjustified opposing of China befriending India and the US in its strategic thinking.’
An editorial in the Express Tribune Saturday said: ‘In 2011, Pakistan’s number one crisis will not be corruption, inflation or political instability, but the ongoing violence inflicted by the Taliban and the war in Afghanistan that is winding down to its final date in 2014.’
‘The year 2011 will be crucial, as it will decide whether the difference of opinion between Pakistan and America over Afghanistan will be resolved. It will also be a year of Pakistan’s correction of its unrealistic and unjustified opposing of China befriending India and the US in its strategic thinking.’
It pointed out that the year 2010 ended with Pakistan telling the US that ‘it is not yet ready to attack foreign terrorist safe havens in North Waziristan’.
‘This year may also see closer cooperation between the two allies: despite bad public optics, there is close coordination between the two militaries, the intelligence and police forces, through the institution of joint ‘fusion centres and cells’ at different places within Pakistan and Afghanistan.’
Noting that the war against the militants may now be conducted on the basis of intelligence fed by drones surveillance and passed on to the Pakistani military, it observed that ‘what happens to Pakistan in the coming months will depend on how pragmatically army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani handles the situation’.
The daily said ‘it is dangerous to allow anti-American emotion to spread in Pakistan as it plays into the hands of Al Qaeda and the TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) and makes any cooperation with the international effort against terrorism look like a betrayal of the Pakistani nation’.
Pakistan ‘is expected to respond to terrorism in 2011 in two ways: by hating the Americans and by matching the terror of the TTP, with its own political and social extremism’.
Commenting on the flux in the political situation in the country, the editorial said: ‘Coalition politics has predictably soured because of the primitive nature of Pakistani environment, driven as it is by a feudal mindset. No government, even when it has a two-thirds majority under its belt, has looked like it will last very long.’
‘The numerous strange bedfellows have started falling apart and the year 2011 will see a time-wasting unfolding of this tragic theatre, while the common man continues to bear the brunt of a dysfunctional economy, worsened by administrative paralysis in Islamabad and the provincial capitals.’
Making an observation on Karachi, it said that the port city ‘is in for more trouble…The ethnic divisions of the megalopolis and its fallout of target-killing might escalate’.
It was candid in observing that Balochistan ‘will simmer and public sentiment aroused in favour of the Baloch after the killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti, might have to give ground to the Pakistan Army’s unavoidable action against the insurgents there’.
The editorial wound up asking ‘Will the PPP fall in 2011?’
‘For those nourishing their negative hopes…it will come as a shock that any midterm change will not change things much, not even corruption. If it is a national government after the PPP (Pakistan Peoples Party) – which means put together by the army – trouble with India will grow and more terrorist attacks from Pakistani soil will ensue, a recidivism that has got Pakistan nowhere in the past’.
