Juan Cole says the possible death of Baitullah Mahsud, leader of Pakistan’s Taliban Movement and likely mastermind of the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007, is only the second most important news out of Pakistan:
The really big news out of Pakistan in the last week was the finding of the restored Supreme Court that Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s emergency decree of November, 2007, was unconstitutional. The ruling has larger implications, in perhaps suggesting that all of Pakistan’s military coups have been unconstitutional. This is the first time that the Pakistani Supreme Court has so forcefully stood up to the military.
If the American press and political establishment was serious about supporting democracy in Pakistan and the Muslim World, we’d have seen an avalanche of comment praising the Supreme Court ruling as a victory for democracy. I did a keyword search at Lexis under television transcripts and could not find any evidence that anyone in national television or radio except Julie McCarthy at NPR even mentioned the epochal Pakistani Supreme Court ruling!
Consider it reported. I confess to some skepticism about how seriously to take a court decree that military coups are unconstitutional, since military coup leaders don’t generally pay a lot of attention to the niceties of judicial review in the first place. But Prof. Cole calls it “a bigger turning point in Pakistani history than any we have seen since 1947,” so it’s worth knowing about.
