Sunday, November 04, 2007

The Pakistan Problem

Condi Rice announced Washington's reaction to nuclear-armed Pakistan's new dictatorship, according to an NPR clip, saying that Musharraf has been put on notice. She said that while there are difficult circumstances in Pakistan...

"We've been very clear that extra-constitutional measures are not the way to deal with difficult circumstances."

To which Musharraf surely replied, "Waterboarding."


P.S. I understand that, while Musharraf is claiming the need to take dictatorial powers as being the result of the threat of terrorism (careening out of control, one would have to assume), there's the little detail that the Pakistan Supreme Court was about to rule on whether his re-election was legal. Let's try to think about those two things and see if we can't figure out which one is the real reason he shut down the government.

Interestingly, Bush hasn't made any public statement at all. I think he's probably figuring how he's going to pull the same stunt. As W3IAI points out, Condi also indicated that the actuality of Musharraf's dictatorship doesn't matter as long as "elections" go forward. That must be one of those other types of democracies the Bush administration keeps telling us about.

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