Pak SC Orders Arrest of PM

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/01/15/pakistan-pm-arrest.html?autoplay=true

Against the backdrop of Mullah Qadri's street march on Islamabad, Pak's Supreme Court has suddenly issued an order for the arrest of Prime Minister Raja Ashraf. So the military has fired its next salvo. Note that the triumphalist Qadri himself was quite unsurprised and gleeful, shouting to mobs that "the first half of the job is done, and the second half will soon follow!" - it sounds as if he was expecting the bombshell dropped by the Court.

But surely, the firing won't end there. Everybody has long known that the PPP govt is on its way out of power, but it's the election of Nawaz Sharif and PML-N which really has the military scared. Ever since Musharraf's coup threw Nawaz out of power and into temporary exile, the army has had bad relations with the Sharifs and PML-N. They're afraid that once Nawaz gets elected, he'll move to clip the wings of the army, with US support. After all, the Sharifs have their political base in Punjab, which is the main rump province of Pakistan, and their govt won't be as fragile as the current PPP govt has been. The military isn't just going to go quietly without putting up a fight, and so we're now seeing their gambit, which will have to soon take aim at the Sharifs.

International markets are already reacting, and the Pak stock market has already plunged by about 3%. The IMF has postponed further loan talks until the political turmoil is over. I'm foreseeing another credit ratings downgrade in Pak's future, regardless of whether they get their govt of military-appointed technocrats. But the main thing to watch for in the immediate future, is just what attack the PakMil-SupremeCourt axis will launch against the Sharif brothers, to politically neutralize them. Whether it's another conviction by the court, or something else, we'll just have to keep watching.