#1
Last sentence: if it is to break the hold of criminal gangs on many of its cities, Mexico has no choice but to take a page from James Q Wilson's book. To undertake the Herculean labor of suppressing criminality from the bottom will have terrible consequences, as in Enrique Krauze's chilling analogy to the 1910 Revolution. The only thing worse is the alternative. It is not enough to arrest the drug lords; it is also necessary to attrite the ranks of their gunmen. How much will it cost? If you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford to be a country.
Then Mexico can't afford it.
IIRC, the terrorist Timothy McVeigh was arrested by a state trooper for driving without a license plate, and the trooper did not suspect him of involvement in the OKC bombing 90 minutes earlier.
#2
The USA is not actually following Wilson's book either. From today's LA Times (link):Gun-tracking operation caught top suspect, then let him go
Federal agents stopped the main target of the ill-fated Operation Fast and Furious in May 2010. After they questioned [and then released] him, he disappeared back into Mexico, and the program went on to spiral out of control.
#3
I wonder what James Q Wilson would say about factions of the government being involved in operations such as Fast and Furious which resulted in the deaths of U.S. law enforcement officers and Mexican nationals?
This war is unfolding within and between gangs of criminals, who commit violent acts that are fueled only by a competitive lust for money. This is strikingly different from the revolutions of 1810 or 1910, which were clashes of ideals."
Wow! Nothing of value changed hands! Amazing! Simply amazing! What a difference!
[Dawn] THE first pin to the bubble came with Salala. Americans killing Pak soldiers en masse: it was a made-for-Khan moment.
He could bellow against the unpopular war next door and it would be lapped up by resentful Pakhtuns in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa ... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central... and agitated patriots in the Punjabi heartland.
But the PPP-led coalition was for once alert to the possibilities.
Battered by memogate, unsettled by the rise of Khan, hammered by the PML-N, the coalition took a hard line on the Salala killings. It endorsed the closure of the NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis.... supply route, gave parliament the nod to draw up fresh terms of engagement with the US and made all the noises necessary to make it known that it wasn't going to be business as usual with the Americans any more.
All of that put the coalition in lockstep with the army, which also leapt on Salala as a way to wrest back some space from the Americans and to counter the fallout from May 2 and PNS Mehran.
Suddenly, Khan's wasn't the only act in town banging the anti-US drum.
It's harder to argue that the state -- mostly the political government in Khan's imagination but also the security establishment to some extent -- is America's poodle when they're shutting off supply lines to a war effort and turning away important guests to Islamabad.
Khan's other public misstep was the boycott of the by-polls, partially triggered by his insistence that incoming members of the PTI abdicate public office.
Khan doesn't want his party tainted by what he's lambasted as tainted assemblies, but politics abhors a vacuum. From 1985, parties have figured out that boycotts are a bad idea. They give a chance to new forces or allow old forces to consolidate.
Anyone who's seen Gilani crowing since the record turnout for his son in Multan knows what consolidation can look like.
Spin it anyway they like, and the PTI is trying, but voters turned out for status quo options instead of staying home and waiting for PTI salvation at the next election. That really isn't a place a party hoping to crack the system wants to be in when elections are round the corner.
Anti-corruption and anti-incumbency -- which along with the anti-West/War on Terror mantra form the tripod on which Khan has built his electoral strategy -- have proved to be exactly the small-bore draws that many thought they would be in the patronage-driven politics of rural Pakistain.
In urban Pakistain, too, some of the sheen has come off. Khan's core supporter is young, educated and wants change. He or she is Moslem and fervently patriotic, but not quite of the crazy variety.
So the PTI's linkages to the Difaa-e-Pakistain Council, however nominal, will have some of the little Khanistas running around with face paint on and turning out to swell PTI rallies wondering what exactly is going on.
Support for the Afghan Taliban as noble nationalists fighting off foreign invaders is one thing; cosying up to sectarian monsters running around Pakistain's cities and towns threatening and killing ordinary Paks is quite another.
And all of this before the internal problems of organization and contending with the various egos that the PTI has assembled.
So far, the party hasn't really got anywhere with the nuts and bolts of winning electoral strategies. At the lower rungs,
recruitment of party workers who will help turn out voters on election day and take on funny business at the polling booth and in the counting process hasn't taken off. The little Khanistas with face paint on aren't cut out for that business.
At the candidate and leadership level, because Khan has already put on prime ministerial airs and talks about who he will appoint to head which public corporation and which ministry, egos are already being bruised or unwisely inflated. There's
nothing like the carrot of power and patronage to set off ugly intra-party battles.
And while Khan's unwillingness to listen to or learn from even senior party members isn't very different to that of other party leaders, the difference is that Khan really does know less about politics than your average party leader. So the more
experienced in the PTI leadership chafe all the more when their advice is ignored.
All of this doesn't mean that Khan is guaranteed to slide back into electoral insignificance. A major corruption scandal could yet inject new vigour into the PTI's anti-corruption mantra and gain fresh traction with the voting public.
The reopening of NATO supply routes will give Khan fresh ammunition to attack the government as American lackeys. And as the predictable infighting in the DPC escalates, it could fade from the national radar well before campaign season begins in earnest.
The Pak voter's mind is forgetful and forgiving and the little Khanistas may cheer up again.
But, whether Khan bounces back or not, the best hope for change he could have offered has already gone. Only to the most optimistic did it ever look like Khan could be propelled to power on the back of popular discontent the next time round.
But his rise did shake the PML-N and unsettle the PPP (Zardari has been candid in private about keeping an eye on the PTI, knowing the complications it could create for the PPP's projections in KP and south Punjab).
If Khan had seriously talked up matters of policy and sounded a more sophisticated note on the solutions to some of Pakistain's structural problems, he may -- may -- have forced some adjustments by the PPP and PML-N in their approach to governance and policy.
That alone would have been worth more than a few dozen PTI seats in parliament, assuming that power is only a means to an end, not the end itself -- admittedly a dangerous assumption in Pakistain.
But Khan has given us none of that. Instead, when Jahangir Tareen presented the PTI's power policy, he was promptly accused by Humayun Akhtar of stealing his plan. If the PML-Likeminded thinks you've copied their ideas -- whether true or not -- it doesn't really bode well on the policy front.
Khan isn't dead and buried yet and the competition isn't getting ready to dance on his political grave. But the PTI's purported rivals, the besieged status quo powers, are closer to paying the ultimate political insult: looking in the PTI's direction and shrugging with indifference.
#2
the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI or Pakistan Movement for Justice) party first ran in the 2002 election. They got about 1% of the vote. Khan was the only member of the party to have a seat in Congress.
In 2008, the PTI boycotted the election.
In 2012, the PTI didn't get any candidates elected in the Senate elections.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
03/19/2012 12:42 Comments ||
Top||
When I was last in China they were telling me that they were thinking of opening a factory in either Jordan or the West Bank. I said to them that I had one simple question to ask, were they stark, raving bonkers?
#1
I went to look at the comments after reading the article at the link; "comments closed". I wonder why. I thought the article was interesting, if biased.
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
03/19/2012 15:04 Comments ||
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#2
They have a slanted narrow view of the situation!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Dawn] THE first pin to the bubble came with Salala. Americans killing Pak soldiers en masse: it was a made-for-Khan moment.
