Pakistani Islamists shout slogans during an anti-Musharraf protest rally in Peshawar, July 13.

To Pakistan’s Western allies, the military’s attack on the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad was a crackdown on a Taliban asset, much like crackdowns on other militant organizations across the country.
For the administration of Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, though, the move is viewed as the first blow against an emerging extremist armed movement committed to the enforcement of Islamic sharia law.
A leading figure in this movement summed it up: “God willing, Pakistan will soon have an Islamic revolution.“ Maulana Abdul Aziz was speaking at the funeral of his brother, Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, who was one of more than 60 people killed in the seven-day siege of the Lal Masjid. The brothers ran the pro-Taliban mosque and Aziz was apprehended outside the mosque before the main military action began.
With the Lal Masjid saga all but over now, the second phase in the battle against an “Islamic revolution“ has began many kilometers away in the picturesque Swat district in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Reaction to the events at the Lal Masjid has been the strongest here, as it is home to the banned pro-Taliban Tehrik-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi (TNSM - Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws).
The Pakistan Army has mobilized thousands of troops in the area, and it was declared “highly sensitive“ and parts of it placed under an unofficial curfew.
Over the past few days there have been incidents in which several security personnel have been killed.
Unlike the Lal Masjid’s small complex, this new battlefield will be a huge valley where militants will be able to trap soldiers at sites of their choice, and the army will be free to bomb their hideouts in the high mountains.

Uneasy calm
In the Mingora district of Swat, the military had already made its presence felt. The airport and other important installations were guarded by Frontier Corps and Swat Scouts. All government buildings were protected by bunkers made from sandbags.
Earlier, a convoy of tanks and artillery trucks crossed a bridge leading into town seconds before a bomb went off. The military vehicles picked up speed, but were chased by a civilian car that rammed into the police escort and exploded.
Three policemen and three passers-by were instantly killed.
“I caught a brief glimpse of the suicide bomber as he was about to ram his car into the convoy. He was a bearded man of about 40 years,“ a shaken policeman, Bakht Rahman, told this correspondent.
With the bomb at the bridge and the suicide attack as foretastes, a military operation in the Swat Valley is beyond doubt, probably within a few weeks, if not days.
This will pit the army against a armed insurgency dedicated to an Islamic revolution with the aim to establish a firm base in Pakistan from where it can fuel the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan and ultimately announce a regional caliphate.
ATIMES.COM

President Bush believes that, given time, the war in Iraq can be won. He believes it because he needs to. He will be judged on Iraq and with just 18 months left to his presidency he does not want to go down in history as a failure, a president who led the country into a war it lost. There is no logical basis for his bullishness. No amount of military muscle and billions of dollars thrown at Iraq are going to make for peace and stability there. Thanks to four years of grossly mishandled occupation, it is too late to even think about victories. The US-led military presence is now part of the problem, not the answer. The battle is no longer a military one, it is one for hearts and minds--and it is a battle long lost. The longer US troops stay, the greater the resentment.
It is all very well saying that this is a war that has to be won. That is a wish, not a cold assessment of fact. Wishful thinking does not win wars. There comes a point when facts have to be faced and decisions taken, no matter how uncomfortable. That is the politician’s job.
The argument that Iraq will be in a far worse situation if the US forces pull out may be true but it cannot be the determining factor in deciding whether they stay or go; to stand by it is to deliver the White House into the hands of Iraqi politicians who use the American presence as both a safety net and an excuse for not making their own uncomfortable decisions.
The only others who gain from a continued American presence are those who have been helping themselves to the treasure troves of US dollars that have poured so ineffectively into the country and who will be the first to head off to wealthy exile when US troops finally leave.
The vote in the US House of Representatives for a pullout by April next year shows that the battle for Iraqi hearts and minds is not the only one that the White House has lost. If the Senate does likewise, Bush will of course veto the legislation. But he would be wrong because the vote, the third by the House this year, provides him with the only honorable exit strategy in town. The House does not envisage a total pullout; some Americans would stay to train Iraqi troops and carry out counter-terrorism operations.
The plan offers Bush the chance to be still there and yet not be there. He could then claim that the job has been done, Iraq is now standing on its own two feet, but that the war against terrorism is still being pursued with vigor.
It is an offer well worth taking. Regardless of what he wants, a pullout is going to be decided within the next 18 months. If he does not order it, the Democrats will after they win the presidential election, which they will on present form. Better for him that it is done during his presidency with some measure of dignity, rather than by his successor who will be only too happy to let the world know about the mess that has been inherited, which has to be cleared up and how much it has all cost.
ARABNEWS.COM

In the past two years since Syria’s withdrawal, Lebanon has been sliding slowly into the depths of peril, and the coming months could see the crisis over the presidency plunge it into the abyss. Already, it is clear that the state is no longer functional.
Virtually all of the branches of the government have been hit with some form of paralysis: the Parliament, which was elected on the basis of superficial alliances (that have long since been abandoned) and under a widely rejected electoral law, has not convened in months; a rump Cabinet is operating without any Shiite representation and therefore lacks the backing of a sizeable portion of the citizenry; the president’s legitimacy has never recovered from the blow it was dealt on the day his mandate was coercively extended; and the judiciary is still subject to the constant pressures of politicians.
Given this state of affairs, it is no longer a question of whether Lebanon’s house will collapse, but rather of whether it will be torn down and rebuilt through political means or destroyed again by civil-war style militias.
Lebanese leaders would be wise to seek out the prior option in order to avoid the latter one. Until now, the leadership of the country has been trying to repair the cracks in the foundation and structure of the old house with scotch tape, but such a meager method will no longer do. It is time for a more intensive form of state reconstruction.
One suggestion that ought to be seriously considered is to appoint an interim president in Lebanon. Such a president, who would preferably serve for a period of no more than two years and be ineligible for re-election, could be tasked with overseeing the remodelling of Lebanon’s constitutional processes. Among the structural issues that he or she would need to address are the drafting of a new and broadly approved electoral law and the revisiting of the Taif Accord with the aim of shaping it into a properly functioning constitution, as well as revamping the composition and conduct of government institutions. An interim presidency with a narrowly defined agenda would also ease the fears of Lebanon’s bickering factions that one camp has seized control of the state at the expense of the other.
Over the past two years since Syria’s withdrawal, the fatal flaws in Lebanon’s system have been exposed. The old system may have worked while a foreign power was here to keep it together, but now it only threatens to tear the Lebanese apart.
DAILYSTAR.COM.LB

According to Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley, “The Supreme Court follows th’ilection returns.“ The court may also follow the proceedings of Congress, which has yet to enact legislation restoring habeas corpus rights to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. There, Congress’ indolence appears to have roused the court to action, a welcome development in a complex struggle among the branches of our federal government to safeguard the rights we trumpet to the world. The fates of the detainees hang on that debate, but the outcome also will determine whether America’s most basic freedoms withstand the combined pressures of the war on terror and the neglect of the president responsible for protecting them.
The Bush administration long ago established its place in this struggle: It took the view that foreign terrorism suspects are not entitled to basic American rights, and it tacked sharply away from history in order to abridge civil liberties. As a result, debate on these issues has moved to Congress and the high court, as each attempts to right the administration’s wrongs.
On the day after the last official day of its term, the high court reversed itself and agreed to consider whether the Constitution affords the Guantanamo detainees habeas protection. In action that required the votes of five justices, it fast-tracked an appeal of a decision by a federal appeals court that alleged enemy combatants did not have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal court. In April, the justices had refused to do so.
The justices’ initial reluctance to intervene in the habeas dispute was characteristic of the caution with which they have approached legal issues raised by the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 policies. For example, in ruling in 2004 that inmates at Guantanamo were entitled to habeas protection, the court grounded that right in a federal statute. But Justice John Paul Stevens also noted that habeas corpus is a “writ antecedent to statute É throwing its root deep into the genius of our common law.“
Unfortunately, in enacting legislation supposedly designed to bring the detention system into conformity with the court’s ruling, Congress stripped the inmates of habeas protection. Instead, it provided it only for circumscribed judicial review of decisions classifying detainees and military combatants and of war-crimes convictions by newly established military commissions.
That would have changed with enactment of the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007, co-sponsored by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the panel’s ranking member. But while habeas legislation has cleared the Judiciary Committee, there is no sign that Congress as a whole will approve it. Even if it did, President Bush could veto the measure.
Restoring habeas is the beginning, not the end, of necessary reforms in the Military Commissions Act approved by Congress last year. Important as it is, habeas only gets a prisoner into the courtroom. It doesn’t provide judges with detailed guidance about whether a particular prisoner has received due process.
The problem is that Congress, in collusion with the Bush administration, has provided only a bare-bones process for determining whether an inmate is indeed an unlawful enemy combatant. A so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunal consisting of three U.S. military officers determines whether a suspect is an enemy combatant; the inmate must face that tribunal without the assistance of a lawyer. At the military’s discretion, an enemy combatant may later be tried by a military commission with some but not all of the protections afforded by civilian courts and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The administration will continue to argue that the war on terror requires extraordinary measures. That may be, but the measures adopted at Guantanamo depart so radically from American traditions that they subvert this nation’s standing as a land of liberty. To reclaim that mantle while waging an open-ended campaign against terrorism requires that suspected terrorists have a meaningful opportunity to assert their innocence. We now know well that the administration will not do the right thing. Congress should. If it does not, the court must.
LATIMES.COM

Parliamentary elections will soon be held in Turkey. Although the election results will determine the composition of Parliament, political parties are also focused on the presidential election. This is not a simple discussion. The polemics and the race between the parties have intensified on the subject of the presidential election as if Turkey is electing the president and not parliamentary deputies in the upcoming election. In short, an election is being held within the elections.
“A non-political figure should be elected president“ is the latest remark by Deniz Baykal in the election campaigns. I am aware there is no precise expression in English corresponding to this remark. Actually, every remark and every discussion made during the election process has different meanings. Political competition, a more deep-seated ideological competition and even the competition for power are conducted through the presidential election. The ambiguity over Turkish politics is removed when the codes of the discussions are resolved.
The following remarks by Baykal in the rally held in Barton as part of his election campaign imply that he gave serious thought to the issue and chose the most appropriate words:
“Turkey should seek the president all together. A person who falls under the definition [of a president] by the Constitution, who does not have any intention whatsoever to change the fundamentals of the Constitution should be elected president. This person should also be honest, respectful and impartial.“ The thing that Baykal thinks should be sought is not a principle or a new system; it is a person. This call is based on the personalization of politics. It also says that only people and not institutions or methods can be trusted. This preposition is contrary to even the most basic tenets of democratic theory, which essentially stresses “let us create the rules so firmly that even somebody with bad intentions cannot harm the public when he acquires power.“
The remaining part of Baykal’s remark refers to a president who is apolitical and not an opponent to the regime. The insistence that the president should be elected outside Parliament explicitly indicates that a Justice and Development Party (AK Party) figure cannot be elected president.
Moreover it also accuses AK Party members of being regime opponents. The above condition actually says much about the comprehensive and deep struggle in the presidential race. Maybe this is the point that must be underlined.
Let us recall that Baykal’s remarks represent a response to AK Party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who told a journalist, “The 11th president will be elected with consensus and the 12th by popular vote.“ With this statement the prime minister endorsed the original pursuit of Baykal, who had previously insisted on consensus in the presidential election. Now Baykal has drawn boundaries for the consensus that he sought.
Baykal’s insistence on the election of an outsider president is very strange for a country of parliamentary democracy. This condition would mean the election of a president who is not a parliamentarian. There is no view on Turkey implying that businessmen, journalists or artists may become president; Baykal’s reference to a president like Sezer implies that he wants to see a figure from bureaucracy in the seat of the presidency.
This condition can also be taken as the hostility of the politician, whose existence depends on democracy, to democracy. Preference of a figure from bureaucracy rather than a figure whose legitimacy is based on popular choice is an apolitical approach. It is also contrary to the rule that the elected is superior to the appointed. Only one conclusion can be drawn from the condition: that Baykal favors the continuation of the bureaucratic rule inside the state.
Turkey elected its presidents under the constitution in effect. Two of these presidents were parliamentarians and party leaders. The indifference of the last president, who was an outsider to the national problems, created an environment of mistrust vis-ˆ-vis bureaucracy. The two other presidents, who were responsive to the public demands, developed important initiatives in international arena. They took the lead during their visits abroad and exerted efforts to support the activities of Turkish businessmen in foreign countries. The attitude of the last president who created a block between these initiatives and the presidential palace was severely criticized. For this reason, Baykal’s pursuit of an outsider president poses some practical difficulties.
Now the actual question remains: why is Turkey holding an election within another one, and why is it discussing the presidential election ahead of the general elections?
Mumtazer Turkone
TODAYSZAMAN.COM