By Shuja Anwar | Posted November 28, 2007
To paraphrase Mark Twain's remark about the best month for investing in the stock market: November has been a bad month for Pakistani politics. The others were January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, and October this year. After a turbulent year of civil unrest and terrorist activity, General Pervez Musharraf reluctantly made good on his promise and shed his uniform, handing over his post of army chief to General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. If he had trusted his own army and done just this in the spring, 2007 may have been a different year.
Now, as political insiders indicate, he is getting ready also to remove the state of emergency that he imposed on 3 November 2007, when he upended the constitution, and the Supreme Court, and muzzled the broadcast media. Since then he has been backpedaling, ostensibly to meet the demands of the United States and other interested parties. He hopes thus to remove many of the obstacles that stood in the way of his elevation to the presidency as a civilian and a return to "normal" politics in Pakistan, howsoever defined. The United States, which noticeably has not called for a restoration of the judiciary, a demand of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and most of civil society in Pakistan, appears to want the status quo to remain and not to go to the status quo ante circa 2 November 2007. (And then it wonders why Pakistanis do not have a soft spot for the U.S. administration!)
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