Relations between Pakistan’s civilian government and its military establishment have deteriorated sharply in recent days, leading to widespread speculation in the Pakistani and international press that the military, with the support of the Supreme Court and much of the country’s business and political elite, is preparing to oust President Asif Ali Zardari and the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP)-led coalition government.
On Wednesday the military top brass warned of “very serious ramifications” and “grievous consequences,” after Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani accused the heads of Pakistan’s army and its principal intelligence agency of intervening in a highly contentious court case in defiance of the government and the constitution.
Later that same day, the military responded angrily to Gilani’s dismissal of the Defence Secretary, the civil servant who acts as the pivot in government-military relations. According to all reports, the sacked Defence Secretary, retired General Nareem Khalid Lodhi, was a close confidante of Pakistan’s Chief of Armed Services, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
In response to Lodhi’s dismissal, Kayani called an emergency meeting of army corps commanders. While little has been said about that meeting, highly placed military sources have told the press that the top brass will not cooperate with Lodhi’s successor.
The reputed cause of Lodhi’s dismissal was the support he lent the military in its intervention in an explosive, politically-motivated court case arising from a memo forwarded to the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in the days immediately following the illegal raid that the US mounted deep within Pakistan to assassinate Osama Bin Laden.
The memo, whose authorship and veracity is in bitter dispute, said that the PPP-led government would place “US- friendly” personnel in the top positions in Pakistan’s national-security apparatus and give the US carte blanche to carry out military operations in Pakistan, if Washington assisted the government in thwarting an impending military coup.
Manzoor Ijaz, the shadowy US-Pakistani businessman who first brought the memo’s existence to light in an October op-ed piece in the Financial Times, has claimed that Pakistan’s US Ambassador Husain Haqqani dictated the memo to him, on behalf of President Zardari. Haqqani has vehemently denied the charge and in November resigned as ambassador so as to fight to clear his name.
Although the government has convened a parliamentary committee to investigate “memogate,” the Supreme Court, acting on a petition from the leader of Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and in express opposition to the wishes of the government, has claimed jurisdiction......
Significantly, the Supreme Court has shown no interest in investigating the memo’s claim that the military was plotting a coup last May. Yet Ijaz has alleged that Pasha visited the Gulf States in the days before the memo was drafted to canvass support for a military takeover.
In recent weeks, Pakistan’s highest court has also reiterated its demand that the government petition Switzerland to reopen criminal cases against Zardari on corruption charges—effectively opening up a second legal front against the elected civilian government.
At the beginning of the month, the court ordered the government to explain why it had not acted on its earlier judgment striking down the immunity given Zardari (and thousands of other politicians and government officials) under the former dictator General Pervez Musharraf’s 2007 National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO). The PPP-led government has always balked at the court’s order in respect to Zardari, arguing that under Pakistan’s constitution legal proceedings cannot be initiated against a sitting president.
Then on Tuesday, a panel of the Supreme Court chastized Gilani for failing to ask the Swiss authorities to revive the cases against Zardari and said that if he persisted in ignoring its orders he could be dismissed as prime minster......
Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikar Chaudhry has made a show in recent weeks of proclaiming that the days in which Pakistan’s highest court gives ex post facto legal sanction to military coups are over. But the court’s actions indicate that it is seeking to provide the military with one or more legal-constitutional façades for the removal of Zardari, Gilani and the PPP government.......
Relations between the military and the nearly four-year-old PPP-led government have always been fractious. Early in its tenure, the government attempted to assert control over the ISI, under the principle that the military should be subordinate to the elected civilian authorities, but in the face of threats from the military it retreated in less than 24 hours. Ever since, the government has accepted in fact, if not in name, the military’s effective control of the country’s military-security and foreign policies.
Unquestionably, the unpopularity of the government, which has presided over a deepening economic crisis, while implementing IMF austerity measures and prosecuting the AfPak war, has emboldened the military.
But the government’s weakness does not alone account for the military’s eagerness to challenge the government’s authority, let alone the support accorded the maneuvers to oust Zardari, the PPP’s co-chairman, and the PPP government by the judiciary and much of the Pakistani establishment—especially if such a coup can be given a legal-constitutional imprimatur.
US-Pakistani relations are in deep crisis due to massive popular opposition to the US’s wanton disregard for Pakistani sovereignty and lives and Washington’s relentless pressure on the Pakistani elite to do more in support of the Afghan war, even at the expense of its geo-political interests. Under such conditions, the military is clearly determined to secure and exercise untrammeled control over Pakistan’s relations with Washington.
Second, Pakistan’s elite fears that the current government, after almost four years in office, lacks the popular support and legitimacy to impose the brutal economic restructuring needed to win the approval of the IMF and foreign investors. Recent months have seen growing protests over power shortages, inadequate flood relief, and the government’s privatization program.
Third, as is always the case among Pakistan’s venal bourgeois elite, there is widespread elite anger over the current government’s “corruption”, that is, its monopoly over pelf and patronage. With the government clearly emitting a fin de regime stench, the appetites of the PPP’s rivals have been whetted......
On Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a pro forma statement acknowledging “concerns” over Pakistan’s political crisis and voicing support for a “democratically elected civilian government” in Pakistan. But the scenarios now under discussion in Islamabad and Rawalpindi involve the Supreme Court and military pushing the current president and government from power, while claiming to uphold the constitution and in the name of organizing a timely transition to “an elected government.”
Also Thursday, the US carried out a drone strike in North Waziristan, killing at least six people. In carrying out the second such attack this week, Washington sent a clear message to both the Pakistani elite and people—whatever the political crisis in Islamabad, it will continue to violate Pakistani sovereignty at will and carry out summary executions with wanton disregard for Pakistani lives.

Tensions between Pakistan's civilian government and its military appear to have lessened since Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani made a humiliating climbdown. Before departing last week for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gilani retracted his accusation that the Army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the head of Pakistan’s principal intelligence agency, Lt. General Ahmed Pasha, had disobeyed the government.
“I want to dispel the impression that the military leadership acted unconstitutionally or violated rules,” said Gilani. “The current situation cannot afford conflict among the institutions.”
In late December, Gilani had denounced Kiyani and Pasha for appealing to the Supreme Court to take up a politically charged court case that the government wanted dismissed, the so-called Memogate affair, calling their intervention “unconstitutional and illegal.” In reply, the military high command publicly warned of “potentially grievous consequences” if Gilani did not retract his allegation. This threat lent credence to mounting rumors that the military was actively considering forcing the four year-old Pakistan People’s Party-led coalition from office.
Trying to put the best face on his submission to the military’s threats, Gilani said last week that his December remarks had been misinterpreted and that their true target had been “certain functionaries.” This convinced no one. Titled “A diet of eaten words,” the lead editorial in the January 29 Express Tribune declared, “The [Prime Minister’s] retraction has highlighted as never before in the past: the military has a de facto dominance in the state.”
It has been widely suggested in Pakistan’s media that Gilani’s statement was meant to seal a deal between the government and the military that had been worked out in a lengthy meeting between Gilani, Kayani, and Pasha the day before.
Needless to say, the Pakistani people will never be made privy to the contents of any such deal. But the military will have insisted on unfettered control over Pakistan’s national security and foreign policies, most importantly Islamabad’s relations with Washington, while letting the civilian government serve as the lightning rod for popular opposition to the reactionary AfPak War.
Not, it must be added, that the PPP leadership has had any qualms about aiding the US occupation of Afghanistan or unleashing the Pakistani military on the country’s Pashtun-speaking tribal areas.......
Whatever the truth in the claims of a deal between Islamabad and military headquarters in Rawalpindi, relations between the top brass and the government and within Pakistan’s ruling elite as a whole remain riven with conflict.
Significantly, the Supreme Court, which has a long history of conniving in military coups and power-plays, has not withdrawn either of the two court cases that have been used to destabilize the government—the Memogate case and its order that the government instruct Swiss authorities to reopen corruption cases against PPP co-leader and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari that were vacated under Musharraf’s 2007 National Reconciliation Ordinance.
Bitter struggles for pelf and power have been a defining feature of Pakistani bourgeois rule since the state was created through the communal partition of the subcontinent. But they have taken on an explosive new dimension because of the vast social chasm that has developed between the entire bourgeois establishment and Pakistan’s workers and toilers.
Growing popular opposition to the AfPak War, Pakistan’s decades-long subservient relationship with the US, double-digit price hikes, privatization, subsidy cuts, and the collapse of public infrastructure have given rise to widespread fears within the elite that they could soon confront an Egyptian or Tunisian-type eruption.
But Pakistan’s elite is as impervious to popular will as the North African dictators were. Notwithstanding resentments over the US bullying and Washington’s courting of Pakistan’s archrival India, the six-decades-old alliance with Washington remains at the heart of the Pakistani bourgeoisie’s geo-political and class strategy; the dependent, crisis-ridden character of the Pakistani economy precludes any concessions to the masses.........
The US has bullied and threatened Pakistan to assume an ever greater share of the burden of its Afghan war, by waging war in the country’s northwest Pashtun-speaking tribal areas against Taliban-aligned militias. And it has been the most insistent proponent of IMF restructuring for Pakistan.
In yet another signal that the US will continue to violate Pakistani sovereignty and rain down death on its citizens no matter how much this outrages ordinary Pakistanis and causes political difficulties for its Pakistani elite allies, US President Obama publicly proclaimed for the first time Monday that the US carries out drone strikes inside Pakistan.[Obama asserted that the drone strikes have led to very few civilian casualties, a bare-faced lie!]

Pakistan court to charge Yousaf Raza Gilani with contempt
Saeed Shah in Islamabad
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 February 2012 05.59 EST

Pakistan's prime minister will be charged with contempt of court and has been ordered to appear in person before the supreme court on 13 February, in proceedings that could lead him to be jailed and disqualified from office.

Yousaf Raza Gilani will be charged by the supreme court over his refusal to ask Switzerland to reopen a dormant money-laundering case against his party leader and president, Asif Ali Zardari.

A move to imprison the prime minister could lead to the toppling of the government and the intervention of Pakistan's powerful military to enforce court orders.

The courts and the army appear determined to end the rule of the coalition government led by the Pakistan Peoples party before it completes its term in February 2013.

Since 2009, the supreme court has been trying to force the government to write to the Swiss authorities to restart the prosecution of Zardari, in a case dating back to the 1990s in which it is alleged that he laundered $60m (£38m) while his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was prime minister.

Pakistan snubs US over Osama informer
Asia Times
By Amir Mir
Feb 8, 2012

ISLAMABAD - Pakistan has turned down a demand by United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to release a Pakistani physician who faces treason charges for helping the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the operation to kill Osama bin Laden.

Pakistan's political and military leaders discussed at length Panetta's demand and decided the alleged informer, Dr Shakil Afridi, should not be given leeway, according to highly placed Foreign Office sources in Islamabad. The snub was made in light of a recommendation from the Abbottabad Judicial Commission to register a treason case against him.

Afridi, who the commission has declared a "national criminal", has been charged with conspiring against the state by collaborating with a foreign spy agency, but not yet with treason - a charge that would carry the death penalty. The doctor was arrested by Pakistani security agencies at his house in Hayatabad, Peshawar, 20 days after Bin Laden's death. In his appearance before the commission, Afridi confessed to having set up a vaccination campaign in Abbottabad aimed at collecting DNA samples to establish the whereabouts of Bin Laden and his family.

In a January 28 interview with CBS, Panetta, who headed the CIA when Afridi worked for the agency, urged the Pakistani authorities to release the doctor immediately. However, sources in the security agencies rule out any such possibility, saying he will be tried in accordance with the orders of the commission, tasked with probing the covert American raid in Abbottabad in which the most wanted al-Qaeda chief was shot dead along with his son and two aides.

Afridi confessed to conducting a fake polio vaccination drive in the Bilal Town area of Abbottabad from March 15-18 and April 21-23, 2011 to try and get DNA samples from the residents of the compound in which Bin Laden was hiding.

The four-member Abbottabad Judicial Commission, led by Led by Justice (retired) Javed Iqbal and set up through a resolution passed unanimously by a joint session of parliament 11 days after the raid, is putting the final touches to its report, though it has already directed the government not to hand over Afridi to the Americans and to proceed with the treason charges.

Panetta's statement comes as US lawmakers push for a bill that would give US citizenship to Afridi, who is in his late 40s and has an American wife of Pakistani origin.

Pakistani security agencies continue to interrogate Afridi in a bid to ascertain how the CIA recruited him and several other civilians who have been under interrogation since the Abbottabad raid. This would help them expose the American's recruitment network in Pakistan.

Afridi's arrest has become a thorn in the already tense relations between Islamabad and Washington.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned President Asif Ali Zardari in July last year to seek his help in securing Afridi's release, but her request was reportedly turned down. Clinton was told that the matter was sub judice and only the Judicial Commission could decide his fate.

In a related development, a group of US congressmen has introduced legislation in the House of Representatives seeking citizenship for Afridi. "Today, I have introduced legislation to grant American citizenship to Shakeel Afridi, the Pakistan medical doctor who risked his life to identify Osama bin Laden and help US military forces bring him to justice. If convicted, he could be executed," said congressman from California Dana Rohrabacher on February 4.

"My bill would grant him US citizenship and send a direct and powerful message to those in the Pakistani government and military who protected the mastermind of 9/11 for all those years and who are now seeking retribution on those who helped to execute Osama bin Laden," Rohrabacher said in the House.