Justice Chaudhary: Pak’s dangerous hero

While suicide bombers are taking Pakistan apart, justice Iftikhar Chaudhary is intent on a populist, and dangerous, purge of politicians. He is getting rid of elected leaders by disqualifying them from office and the man he is ultimately hunting is president Asif Ali Zardari.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court overturned former president Pervez Musharraf's decree withdrawing 8,000 cases against politicians, including Zardari, who is Benazir Bhutto's widower. The cases were withdrawn in 2007 after a compromise that allowed exiled politicians to return to Pakistan and contest elections that they had been barred from because of the pending cases. They did this in 2008 and formed the government. Many of the cases were, Musharraf admitted, political in nature and should never have been filed.

Now Chaudhary has reopened the cases, and as charge sheets are filed, the leaders will be asked to step down. Zardari himself spent over eight years in jail without being convicted. While as president he has immunity from the charges against him, there is now pressure on him from the media to quit office.

Meanwhile, the Taliban are despatching increasing numbers of suicide bombers against cities. There have been 35 suicide attacks since November 1, one every 48 hours. Since June, when the army routed the Taliban from their strongholds in Malakand and Swat, the number of monthly militant attacks in Pakistan, including suicide bombings, have actually gone down from 250 to 170, according to the Brookings Institution. In the frontier province, the attacks have fallen from 160 to 70.

This happened because Zardari assured political support to his army. What Pakistan now needs is an extended period in which its government's focus is only on wiping out the Taliban. There are three reasons why.

First: the window is limited. US president Barack Obama has announced a pullout from Afghanistan starting July 2011. So far, the 'hammer and anvil' strategy — where America attacks from the west and Pakistan blocks the escape of the Taliban in the east, or vice versa — has worked.

Second: the media and the public are not on Zardari's side. Pakistanis generally dismiss suicide attacks as the doing of Israel, India, and America. This is despite the Taliban often claiming responsibility.

Third: Pakistan's economy is not picking up after the recession unlike other major Asian economies. Instability from the suicide bombings has led to capital flight. American aid, currently about $2 billion a year, much of it coming in cash against 'expenses' for tackling the Taliban, will stop after 2014 if Pakistan refuses to continue cooperation.

It is vital to Pakistan, to America, and to India that Zardari, who understands the Taliban threat — his wife was murdered by them in December 2007 — be allowed to finish the job he started. He is capable of seeing it through if Chaudhary leaves him to do the job.

Zardari's primary opponent is Nawaz Sharif. So far, he has maintained that in the interest of democracy he will stand by Zardari. But there will be pressure on him to turn populist as the elections of 2012 approach, and in Pakistan that means being anti-American and anti-war on terror.

So why is justice Chaudhary going after Zardari? Two reasons. The first is that Zardari was reluctant to reinstate him and other judges fired by Musharraf. The second is that Chaudhary is a big hero with the Pakistani public and its media for his defiance of Musharraf. Zardari's war against the Taliban is most unpopular and Chaudhary would love to be seen as the man who ended it. He does not see the consequences that will follow, for America, for India, and, most of all, for Pakistan.

The writer is a journalist based in Mumbai