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Concern in Pakistan over Obama’s remarks

ISLAMABAD: United States President Barack Obama’s remarks complimenting the Pakistan Army and projecting the failure of the elected government to deliver basic services to the people as the real problem in Pakistan has caused concern here that Washington is building up the military at the expense of the civilian government.

In an unusually sharp riposte, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said on Friday that the U.S. must realise its support to a military ruler for nine years was the main reason for the weakening of the democratic institutions.

Mr. Gilani asserted that the elected government was not “fragile” as described by Mr. Obama, and that it was functioning effectively.

Mr. Obama said at a press conference earlier this week that his concern was not that the Taliban were going to overrun Pakistan in the next few days, but that the Pakistani government lacked capacity to deliver education, healthcare, access to quick justice, and other essentials to the people, as a result of which it did not enjoy the people’s backing.

He had kinder words for the Pakistan Army, which he said was taking the militant threat seriously, and had begun to realise that the Taliban were the bigger threat to the country than India. Mr. Obama also expressed confidence in the military’s ability to keep its nuclear arsenal from falling into the hands of the militants.

Fast on the heels of these remarks came U.S. media reports that Centcom commander General David Petraeus and other U.S. officials believe the Army to be “superior” to the civilian government.

With President Asif Ali Zardari on his way to the U.S. for what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said would be “intense conversations” — there is also a three-way with Afghan President Hamid Karzai — the Pakistani media have begun speculating that Washington has already lost patience with the country’s elected set-up.

The News, which ran two editorials on the subject on Saturday, said while it was correct that the government had failed to deliver the basic needs of people, “the U.S., which has apparently switched tactics by holding up the Pakistan military as an outfit that understands the key issues, needs to realise that the military cannot deliver on these needs.”

Commenting on General Petraeus’s remarks to Fox television giving two weeks to the Pakistan government to sort out the Taliban and expressing his confidence in the Pakistan Army, the newspaper said it wondered “if beneath this somewhat Delphic statement there is the possibility that America is sensing another military regime in Pakistan – and paving the way for a possible relationship with it.”

Mr. Zardari, the newspaper said, is “going to need more than a fixed smile if he is going to convince Mr. Obama that not only can his government successfully counter an advancing wave of Talibanisation, but it can also deliver the ‘basic service’ no government of this nation has ever delivered.”

The Dawn too said “the new American set-up is sending devastating signals against the civilian government and drumming up the ‘safe’ option of the Pakistan Army.”

Arguing that the Pakistan People’s Party-led government had been in office for little more than a year and was working with very little control over the country’s national security policy, the newspaper warned that “American impatience will only aggravate its problems.”

A New York Times report on Saturday that the Obama administration is reaching out to Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif may go some way in quelling the fears that Washington is contemplating a military alternative.

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