Saturday, just days before Pakistan’s Supreme Court was expected to rule on the constitutionality of President Pervez Musharraf’s recent election, Musharraf declared a state of emergency and dismissed the Court.
“This is,” Philip Oldenburg concludes, “a coup against the Supreme Court.”
Professor Oldenburg is a South Asian expert whose analysis nonetheless rebuts the more dire predictions of recent days. If Musharraf is forced out Pakistan is likely to end up with a similarly “pro-American” leader, Oldenburg says, and he disagrees with alarmist reports such as a Newsweek cover story calling Pakistan “the most dangerous nation in the world.”
“I don’t think Pakistan is dangerous. It’s not going to send waves of terrorists into the world,” Oldenburg says in this conversation. “There’s an implication there that it could explode or implode in some fashion, that we could have a jihadist takeover and you could have some Ahmadinejad or someone like this taking over and doing things. I don’t see that either.”
