Mohammed Haneef’s article on Musharraf’s latest shenanigans deserves sharing.  Its absolutely brilliant.

In my 15 years in journalism, I have covered three coups. And as I walked towards my office last Saturday, I had the cynicism of someone who has seen it all before. As I entered the BBC offices on a chilly Saturday afternoon in London, a senior Pakistan hand, who like me had interrupted his cosy weekend to cover the story, wondered aloud why the general was taking so long before appearing on national television and explaining his actions.

…Last Saturday as I arrived at my desk, Musharraf had already started his address. And it was immediately clear to me that he had fallen into that aging dictator’s familiar trap: He had written his own speech.

I exaggerate because he only occasionally glanced at his notes and for 40 minutes talked, well, gibberish; the kind of stuff that only journalists and think-tank-wallahs would take seriously.

…
I have been accused of punctuation abuse often enough to take these things in my stride, but for the 40 minutes that General Musharraf spoke in Urdu, he didn’t use one proper sentence.

He replaced his verbs with hand gestures, nouns slipped off his shrugged shoulders, adjectives quivered under his desk.

And when he said, “Extremists have gone very extreme,” it suddenly occurred to me why his speech pattern seemed so familiar. He was that uncle that you get stranded with at a family gathering when everybody else has gone to sleep but there is still some whisky left in the bottle. And uncle thinks he is about to say something very profound — if you would only pour him one last one.

It’s hilarious - but sadly so, for as Haneef notes towards the end:

When for the last few minutes of his speech he addressed his audience in the West in English, I suddenly felt a deep sense of humiliation. This part of his speech was scripted. Sentences began and ended. I felt humiliated that my President not only thinks that we are not evolved enough for things like democracy and human rights, but because we can’t even handle concepts like proper syntax and grammar.

But lest you place your hopes in the ready alternative of Benazir Bhutto, her niece, Fatima Bhutto has some interesting - perhaps apt - thoughts in an LA Times piece bluntly entitled as “Aunt Benazir’s False Promise”. Choice passage:

The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law. Yes, she now appears to be facing seven days of house arrest, but what does that really mean? While she was supposedly under house arrest at her Islamabad residence last week, 50 or so of her party members were comfortably allowed to join her. She addressed the media twice from her garden, protected by police given to her by the state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news conference. (By contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news conference has placed hundreds of other political activists under real arrest, in real jails.)

Ms. Bhutto’s political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take part in Musharraf’s regime have signaled once and for all to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise for dictatorship.

I do not envy Pakistan it’s choices. Why is it that I continue to feel that they are in bigger soup than we are, even with our SOE and MUA, FUA, KZ and SH?