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Pakistan is a nuclear power, and it was the West who provided them with the technology.

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Question:
What can -- or should -- be done if there is a likelihood of conservative Muslims ascending to power? And furthermore, who should do it? Should the nuclear arsenal be left intact? If not, what is the wise choice?

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The Supreme Court has emerged as a check on Musharraf's dominance since his failed attempt to sack the country's top judge earlier this year that sparked a nationwide protest movement.

It is already hearing petitions challenging Musharraf's holding of the post of army chief and president simultaneously and his eligibility to contest upcoming presidential elections. It is also pressing the government to provide information about the fate of hundreds of people allegedly held by Pakistan's shadowy intelligence agencies on accusations of terrorism and anti-government activities.

Analysts say Monday's decision to expel Sharif will deepen Musharraf's unpopularity in Pakistan and reinforce impressions that he is an authoritarian leader. It also could undermine the legitimacy of legislative elections due by January 2008.

Ali Ahmed Kurd, a senior member of the Pakistan Bar Council, said lawyers across the country were boycotting court proceedings to protest Sharif's deportation.

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By the way, The Brussels Journal seems to have a very strange tone in some of its other articles. And the adverts are even worse. I happened to click on one of them (for The American Spectator) and was shocked by some of the crackpot stuff I read.

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Now take the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), the secessionist Flemish Party previously known as the Vlaams Blok until a court ruled it illegal in 2004. The Blok has longstanding links to Nazi collaborators. One of the party's founding members is Karel Dillen, who in 1951 translated into Flemish a French tract denying the Holocaust (possibly the only French text for which a Vlams Blok party member has ever shown sympathy). For many years, the party's chief selling point was its call to forcibly deport immigrants who failed to assimilate. It also made plain its sympathies with other far-right wing European parties, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France.

But that's changing. Younger party leaders, realizing their anti-Semitic taint was poison, began making pro-Israel overtures. And the party's tough-on-crime, hostile-to-Muslims stance began to attract a considerable share of the Jewish vote, particularly among Orthodox Antwerp Jews who felt increasingly vulnerable in the face of the city's hostile Muslim community. Today, Vlaams Belang is the largest single party in the country.

Then there are the government's actual policies. In April, Belgians were shocked by the murder of a teenager named Joe Van Holsbeeck, who was stabbed to death in Brussels's central train station by two Gypsy youths, at the height of the afternoon rush hour, in broad view of dozens of onlookers. (Apparently, the killers wanted his MP3 player.)

Amid a pervasive and growing sense of lawlessness--Belgium's per capita murder rate, at 9.1 per 100,000 is nearly twice that of the U.S.--the murder became the occasion of much national soul-searching. When Jean-Marie Dedecker, a senator from the ruling Liberal Party, opined in an op-ed that "policemen look the other way in order to avoid being accused of racism," he was rebuked by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt for "inciting hostilities."

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But again, the rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda in the Northwest Frontier Province was not behind Musharraf's decision to plunge the country into political turmoil. Musharraf's concern first and foremost is to strengthen his own hand in dealing with the secular opposition to his military rule

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It is dangerous to stand up to a military dictatorship, but more dangerous not to. The moment has come for the Western democracies to show us in their actions, and not just in their rhetoric, which side they are on.

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The shah was America's friend, just like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. He was our staunch ally against the bogeyman of that time, the Soviet Union, just as Musharraf has been America's partner in fighting al-Qaeda. The shah ignored America's admonitions to clean up his undemocratic regime, just as Musharraf has. And as the shah's troubles deepened, the United States hoped that moderate opposition leaders would keep the country safe from Muslim zealots, just as we are now hoping in Pakistan.


And yet the Iranian explosion came -- a firestorm of rage that immolated any attempt at moderation or compromise. A similar process of upheaval has begun in Pakistan -- with one terrifying difference: Pakistan has nuclear weapons

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.......confident believers in the usual dreary pendulum of Pakistani politics � corrupt democrats, followed by authoritarian generals, followed by corrupt democrats � overlook how profoundly the country's changed. Its political dynamic has a new player: Islamism. Miss Bhutto says, oh, don't worry about that, it's a lot of hooey got up by Musharraf to persuade Washington to prop him up for another half-decade.

Really? Pakistan is both a nuclear power and a nation that cannot enforce sovereignty over significant chunks of its territory. Large tracts are run by the Taliban. The organization responsible for perpetrating the bloodiest assault ever on the U.S. mainland is holed up there and all but untouchable. The air routes between Karachi and Heathrow, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow are the vital conduit between the jihad's ideological redoubts and the wider world. What do the perpetrators of the Daniel Pearl beheading and the London Tube bombing and the thwarted martyrs of innumerable other plots all have in common? Pakistan. Fritz Gelowicz, arrested a few weeks ago in Europe, is an ethnic German who converted to Islam and graduated from a Pakistani terrorist camp. Unlike Britain and Canada, Germany has no longer-standing imperial ties with Pakistan, yet a ramshackle economically inconsequential basket-case of a state now has ideological converts in almost every corner of the world. Mohammed Umer Farooq is a conventional first-generation moderate immigrant to the west who serves happily as pharmacist at the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry base in Alberta. By contrast, his daughter Nada Farooq says she "hates Canada" and was involved in a plot to behead the Prime Minister. In North America, Britain, Scandinavia, Australia and Pakistan itself, elderly grandparents who practice the Indian sub-continent's traditional Sufi Islam have seen their grandchildren embrace hardline Deobandi Islam, essentially a local variant of Wahhabism � and then sell its virtues to pasty-faced white blokes with names like Fritz. The Bhuttos and their sometime rivals, sometime allies of convenience the Sharifs couldn't run the country competently before it got hollowed out by the radicals. But the experts assure us they're now the answer to the woes of a nuclear powder keg.

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Originally posted by AMH v2.0:
[Here's a pretty good analysis by Mark Steyn regarding the current leadership situation in Pakistan. :

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...Pakistan is both a nuclear power and a nation that cannot enforce sovereignty over significant chunks of its territory. Large tracts are run by the Taliban. The organization responsible for perpetrating the bloodiest assault ever on the U.S. mainland is holed up there and all but untouchable...

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No comparison, of course, but I just had a thought -- I wonder what would happen in the USA if the federal government tried to disarm the militias and fringe groups...