EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

        

 

Pakistan: Marriage of inconvenience

Two armies, one American the other Pakistani, both performing dysfunctionally in this part of the world, need each other

If ever an opportunity presented itself for a civilian government to claw back powers it has ceded to an army whose tentacles extend into every part of life in Pakistan, yesterday was the day. The army, and its premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), were facing an unprecedented assault on their competence after the US raid on Abbottabad. Even talk show hosts, the secular mullahs of Pakistan, turned on them.

How could Osama bin Laden's presence go undetected for six years in a garrison town that is home to three regimental headquarters and a military academy? How could US helicopters grab their quarry from underneath their noses? Hours before the army chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, was due to answer questions like these in a closed session of parliament, the Taliban put down a third amendment for debate: How is it the military failed to protect its own recruits, 66 of whom were among over 80 who died in two suicide bombings in Charsadda, north of Peshawar?

Asserting the primacy of civilian control over a failing military is, however, the last thing on the mind of President Asif Zardari. If his period of office has taught us anything, it is that there is a world of difference between strengthening the democratic project and strengthening a civilian government's hand, as one commentator has observed.

If the summit of the government's ambition is to see out a full term, then a chastened army becomes the ideal partner. One pretends to govern while the other pretends to protect. But nor is that an answer either. Being the chief of Pakistan's army is a balancing act. He heads an empire that has simultaneously threatened to let the Chinese inspect the rotor parts of the stealth helicopter that crashed into Bin Laden's compound, and given the CIA access to Bin Laden's widows. Bigger trade-offs are in the works. Gen Kayani will continue to resist US pressure to go after three groups that the ISI still consider long-term assets – Mullah Omar, the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba. To go after them would be to provoke civil war, the ISI pleads. But the price of pleading impotence may also be high: allowing back all those CIA agents who have just been forced to leave the country, and with them more US operations on sovereign soil.

The bottom line is that Islamabad will not change its strategic posture. The irony of the US relationship with Pakistan is that it may not have to, if the military path currently being pursued in Afghanistan fails to blunt the Taliban's offensive. Two armies, one American the other Pakistani, both performing dysfunctionally in this part of the world, need each other.

Lords reform: Novelty politics

It may be unavoidable that constitutional reform is a question of low politics – but there has to be internal consistency

The draft Lords reform bill is promised within the next fortnight. Its return to the political frontline is both overdue and inauspicious. It sets off with the drawback of looking like a consolation prize for Nick Clegg after the AV disaster. That makes it easy for Labour (as well as the Conservatives) to obstruct. Ed Miliband is already indicating that without a commitment to a 100% elected upper chamber, it is unacceptable. He should leave room for manoeuvre. But Mr Clegg starts on the back foot.

If Lords reform were easy, it would have been done long ago. It is harder now than ever. Most Tory MPs don't care for it while nearly all peers will need their fingers forcibly prising off their delightful bars and libraries. Resistance is hardening; questions are being raised about the rights, at a time of coalition, of the Commons against the Lords. Labour has argued that it extinguishes the Salisbury convention, which gives bills based on manifesto commitments a safe passage. That would make it impossible to use it to impose reform. The counter-argument, that taken together the coalition partners won a greater share of the vote than any recent majority government, might be true but lacks the weight of precedent. Meanwhile, David Cameron has made reform (which he notoriously called "a third-term issue") even more difficult by creating new peers at double the previous fastest rate. There are now 830 entitled to sit in the bloated second chamber, and at the moment only the grim reaper can thin their number. Allowing peers to retire would be a sensible advance; so would excluding serial absentees, and those sentenced to more than a year in prison, as David Steel recently suggested. But it will not be enough.

The experience of the past 10 years shows how important it is that short-term change supports rather than cuts across longer-term reform. Since the abolition of the hereditaries, the Lords has become steadily more assertive. Packing the house in theory gives the coalition a de facto majority, but there have already been more successful revolts – 16 – in this parliament than in the final year of the last. And although there are complaints about ex-Labour MPs importing their tribal customs, and reports that the cross-benchers are getting stroppy too, the big rebellions this week, on fixed-term parliaments and elected police commissioners, suggest it is the newly muscular Lib Dems who are resuming their pre-coalition role as the swing vote.

Securing legislation that would deprive them of their jobs is going to entail an all-out war (there are some who want to see it forced through with the Parliament Act), and that could jeopardise all other government business. This week, Mr Clegg talked of MPs and peers working together on a joint committee, starting by agreeing a way of whittling the Lords down to 200 in the next five years and completing reform by 2025. His words sit oddly with his defence of the creation of new peers, which he says is part of a rebalancing to reflect share of the vote – a rebalancing that has nearly trebled Lib Dems' Lords representation in the past year.

It may be unavoidable that constitutional reform is a question of low politics – but there has to be some internal consistency. To add to the mess, Mr Clegg – anxious to have a saleable commodity – seems willing to accept that up to a fifth of the new upper house might be appointed. He should think more carefully about previous attempts at reaching a universally acceptable solution. No concession will make an elected upper house acceptable to some MPs and peers. Right now, it is beginning to look like a rerun of the AV debacle, with the Lib Dems sinking political capital into an imperfect compromise, and facing probable defeat. The coalition's constitutional ambitions are beginning to look worryingly more like political novelty than new politics.

Unthinkable? Flashman and the prime minister

If there's a Flashman among all of them in the Commons, it's the Hon Gideon George Osborne

There's been some rum talk in recent days of a squirt called David Cameron matching up to Harry Flashman. The cheek, I say! Only this week at prime minister's question time – still the same old nonsense, never changes, not since Gladstone's day – that young chap Edward Miliband announced "Flashman is back". Well, how do you think Flashy felt about that? This Cameron has pink cheeks, slick hair and I'd bet two shillings to the pound he's never been further east than Calais. I know the type – seen it all before – costly school, well-connected friends, stuffed full of prim nonsense about the nobility of society and now, just because he cracked some damn-fool joke in the House of Commons, everyone thinks he's a proper bully. I know a man when I see one and that Cameron has never run away from a fight over the hills of Kandahar and it's an insult to Flashy to suggest I'm anything like him. I've half a mind to search out young Miliband and trounce him (I served his older brother once, out in Kabul during the Helmand campaign, and know that family always ducks a challenge). No doubt I'm uncharitable, but Westminster seems to be run by a gang of chaps without hair on their chin who've never done a hard day's work in their life. I say to hell with the lot of them – though there is one, the Hon Gideon George Osborne, who's more my type, got a spark in his eyes, out for what he can get. If there's a Flashman among all of them in the Commons, it's him.