Khilafah.com

NY Times

By DECLAN WALSH

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The simmering crisis between Pakistan's government and judiciary flared dramatically on Thursday when the Supreme Court announced it would pursue contempt charges against the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, for failing to reopen a corruption investigation into the finances of his boss, President Asif Ali Zardari.

The Supreme Court said it would start proceedings for contempt of court against Mr. Gilani on Feb. 13. If convicted, the prime minister faces up to six months in jail and possible disqualification from public office.

The court order was a significant escalation of long-simmering tensions between the judiciary and the government and threatened to plunge the country into fresh political turmoil as its leaders debate the contours of a new strategic relationship with the United States.

Since 2009, the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, has insisted that the government should write a letter to authorities in Switzerland, asking them to reopen an investigation into corruption allegations against Mr. Zardari stretching back to the 1990s.

The government has responded with stalling tactics, using various ruses to dodge the order in court, while in public it has argued that Mr. Zardari enjoys immunity from prosecution while in office.

But the court's forbearance ended last month, when it ordered Mr. Gilani to appear before it under threat of contempt charges. Amid dramatic scenes Mr. Gilani turned up on Jan. 19, flanked by supporters, and was represented by Aitzaz Ahsan, one of the country's most famous lawyers.

Tensions seemed to ease when Mr. Ahsan promised that Mr. Gilani was ready to debate the immunity issue in court — effectively conceding that the government was ready to resolve the case through legal means.

But that détente ended on Thursday when Mr. Ahsan argued that the government simply could not write the Swiss letter, prompting the court to make good on its threats of contempt charges, and in the process reviving a perilous institutional clash involving Pakistan's top politicians, generals and judges.

"It seems like the court has run out of patience," said Cyril Almeida, a political columnist with Dawn, a leading English-language newspaper. "It's in a mood to wrap this up quickly — either to ensure the government writes the letter, or let the gallows come crashing down on Gilani's premiership."

In mid January, the severity of the crisis fuelled speculation that the military was mulling a possible coup against the government. Whether it escalates further now may now be down to a calculation of politics rather than the law.

Some experts believe that even if Mr. Gilani writes the Swiss letter, prosecutors in that country would be unlikely to re-start the corruption investigation. But Mr. Zardari, who already suffers an unenviable reputation for graft, may be unwilling to hand a political weapon to his rivals — particularly with a likely general election looming before the end of this year.

"Zardari has an aggressive style of politics and feels that confrontation has a certain value," said Mr. Almeida. "But I feel that calculation may change now."

The court drama comes just days after the other judicial crisis facing the government, involving accusations of treason and popularly known as Memogate, started to recede from the front pages.

The central witness in that crisis, an American businessman of Pakistani origin named Mansoor Ijaz, failed to turn up in Pakistan to testify. On Monday, a panel of judges allowed Husain Haqqani, the former ambassador to Washington who faces the gravest charges, to leave the country.

Mr. Ijaz claimed in a newspaper article in October that he had sent a secret memo to the Obama administration in May on behalf of the Zardari government, seeking American help in warding off a possible coup after the Pakistani military was humiliated by the American commando operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Mr. Ijaz later said that Mr. Haqqani was behind the memo. Mr. Haqqani denied the accusation but was forced to step down.

The furor comes at a bad time for the United States, which is keen to resume a diplomatic and strategic relationship that has been effectively frozen since a Nov. 26 border shooting incident in which American warplanes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Pakistan says it now wants to reconfigure the strategic relationship along more pragmatic lines. A parliamentary committee has come up with proposed changes that are due to be debated in a special joint sitting of both houses of parliament, sometime in the next two weeks, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told reporters on Thursday.

Ms. Rabbani Khar had just returned from a trip to the Afghan capital, Kabul, where she met with President Hamid Karzai and Afghan political leaders. The trip coincided with a leaked NATO report based on detainee testimony that highlighted strong links between Pakistani intelligence and Taliban insurgents.

In Islamabad, the foreign minister stressed that Pakistan supported "Afghan-led" talks with the Taliban, and was willing to do whatever President Karzai asked — including mediating with the Taliban and the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network.

There are also signs that the Obama administration is taking a more hard-nosed approach to Pakistan. In the past week Mr. Obama has publicly stated, for the first time, that the C.I.A. is carrying out drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal belt — a campaign that is deeply unpopular in Pakistan.

And the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, admitted that a Pakistani doctor who helped locate Bin Laden at his hideout in Abbottabad, 35 miles north of Islamabad, had in fact been working for the C.I.A.

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