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A controversial tweet by the director general of ISPR, Army's media wing, on Saturday sparked a heated reaction from civil society and sections of media. The infamous tweet had come minutes after the Prime Minister's Office issued an executive order seeking necessary action based on findings of the Dawn Leaks inquiry.

Political sources have claimed that the order covered the inquiry reports paragraph 18, which reportedly carries everything agreed upon between the two sides, but it was still not up to the Armys satisfaction. Since the order was made public, or leaked to media, before the relevant authorities including the Army could set eyes on it, the reactions were also given publicly. This is how some defence analysts euphemism for media proxies of security establishment have explained the situation.

Civilian supremacy or civil-military balance is not an easy thing to maintain anywhere in the world. It is a doubly difficult process in post-colonial states with struggling democracies.

The task of creating a workable balance that doesn't encumber the democratic dispensation gets compounded amid competing positions over national security issues. The challenge is tougher in Pakistan where the military establishment has enjoyed unbridled power over national security discourse - which has been extended to cover everything that challenges Army's worldview.

To our relief, since 2008 civilian governments have not been deposed in the dead of the night and electoral exercise has been allowed to continue every five years. Though, what happens between elections remains a function of how 'well-behaved' a government proves to be.

Military establishment's paranoia with controlling national security discourse makes it highly sceptical of even the meekest of attempts by civilians to seek ownership of policy formulation process. In 1990s, late Benazir Bhutto was declared a security threat to the country for trying to do so. Almost 20 years later, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, once trusted ally of the establishment, finds himself in the same position. Sections of media have declared him an agent of the enemy state more than once. The recent instance was just a day before the Army chose to publicly defy the authority of the federal government when an Indian business tycoon Sajjan Jindal visited to see the PM.

The issue of outrageous accusations levelled against a democratically elected prime minister wasn't, surprisingly, seen as that concerning national security. But, the debate over former army chief's high-profile job to lead a sectarian military alliance immediately after his retirement was suppressed, labelling it not only as an attempt to jeopardise Pakistan's relations with a 'generous friendly state' but also as a deliberate attempt to malign the armed forces. The impression one gets is that the perceived maligning of one side is propagated as a threat to national interest, but outrageous accusations against the sitting PM are considered absolutely kosher.

These double standards with which both sides are treated clearly reeks of the rottenness of arguments over national security concerns. But if maligning symbols of Pakistan's sovereignty is akin to breach of national security, it was breached when the PM was called a traitor in the media or when the PMO was humiliated through the ISPR tweet. As things stand, national security argument is applied selectively and it serves narrow and selfish interests of those wielding real power. And real power rests with those who cannot be criticised publicly. Those who dare do so run the risk of going missing.

Against this backdrop, seeking a civil-military balance in Pakistan remains an onerous art few can dabble with finesse. Both sides have repeatedly demonstrated sheer lack of their knack to try out the path.

The foremost challenge in establishing civilian supremacy is to make the military establishment politically neutral. For this to happen, military has to accept that it has to work with the political forces, instead of trying to engineer the democratic system.

In modern democracies, civilian efforts to gain absolute supremacy over military affairs often end up provoking military defiance, especially in the absence of supportive public opinion. In such an event, the military is lionised rather than cowed down, shrinking the space for civilians.

Thus, the PM's hosting of Sajjan Jindal without properly communicating details about his visit to the gun wielders and making public an executive order without first internally sharing it among parties concerned has landed Pakistan into a situation where it has become a laughing stock for the world. Expecting the military to automatically and dutifully yield to absolute civilian supremacy maybe a rightful position but it is not sagacious.

That the genie is out of the bottle, what next? Admittedly, the PM is in a tight spot. He is facing a defiant and unforgiving Army that won't be appeased through cosmetics of the kind attempted by the recent executive order.

If he doesnt take punitive action, he will be perceived as a weak Prime Minister. Whatever the course of action the PM chooses, he should remember that survival will shape the future course of democracy. Waving a red cloth would not only be suicidal but would push Pakistans democracy at least a decade behind. History, as they say, is always written by survivors.

The writer is a staff member and can be emailed at marvisirmed@gmail.com, accessed on Twitter @marvisirmed

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ISPR's tweet and Pakistani democracy - Daily Times

All politics may be local, but you cant get much more local than the elections that will be taking place this week.

Municipalities across the state will hold party primaries on Tuesday as they begin the process of selecting mayors, city council members/aldermen and perhaps other elected city positions, such as police chiefs.

It is an important time for citizens to give their input on one of the most basic levels of democracy. This is where candidates have much more personal contact with constituents, and the issues being debated are more intimate paving of your street, providing more recreational activities or promoting locally owned businesses.

In general, Tuesdays elections will feature Republican and Democratic primaries for the various seats. If no candidate secures more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two will advance to a May 16 runoff.

The general election will then be held on June 6, featuring Republican and Democratic primary winners, as well as independent candidates.

Various cities and towns have their own quirks. For instance, in some of them, all candidates run as one party or as independent candidates in order to cut down on the costs of holding multiple elections.

According to Mississippi law, voters can choose to vote in either the Republican or Democratic party primary on Tuesday. It doesnt matter which party someone may generally favor. The catch is voters can not vote in both primaries. That means you can not vote in a Democratic primary for mayor and a Republican primary for city council.

Tupelo will have three contested races on Tuesday, including an election that will determine the citys mayor for the next four years.

Incumbent Jason Shelton faces a challenge from political newcomer Candice Knowles in Tuesdays Democratic primary. Since there is no Republican in the race, the primary winner will assume the office.

Voters in Ward 2 also choose their city council member on Tuesday, as that race only features two Republicans incumbent Lynn Bryan and challenger Phillip Thomason and no Democratic candidates.

Tuesdays other contested race is in Ward 4, where incumbent Nettie Davis and challengers Tommy Jake Ruff and Gregory Humphrey will meet in the Democratic primary. The winner will be opposed by Republican Henry Daniels in June.

In that general election, races in Wards 3, 5 and 6 also will be contested.

Once again, Journal Inc. is your best source for election coverage. Check the Daily Journal, DJournal.com and our sister publications throughout the region for election previews, results and in-depth articles. Right now, DJournal.com features video forums for each of the three contested Tupelo primary races.

So remember to vote and make your voice heard. And let us keep you informed.

See original here:
OUR OPINION: Municipal elections at core of democracy - Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

WARSAW, Poland Frances Catholic primate has condemned the current presidential campaign as his countrys worst ever and urged Christians to help prevent democracy from losing its sense.

Left and right rivaled each other and had their radical wings, but there was also a center. Now, left and right have stepped back, and the main candidates are divided by other unclear criteria. I have the impression our voters are totally lost, said Cardinal Philippe Barbarin of Lyon.

In an interview with Polands Catholic Information Agency (KAI), published April 26, Barbarin said France was witnessing the twilight of its existing political system as citizens sought out leaders closer to the people in their economic and social realities.

Democracy seems to be losing its sense and being cast adrift by media shabbiness, Barbarin added. This has been our worst-ever election campaign, characterized by the unforgivable accusations, total critiques, violence, chaos and the misleading of voters.

In the first round of French elections April 23, Emmanuel Macron, founder of En Marche!, a center-left political movement, and Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, emerged as the two top vote-getters. They will face off May 7, when voters will choose who will be president for the next five years. Candidates from the mainstream Socialist and Republican parties will not be in the final round.

Barbarin said the success of Le Pen, who has vowed to take France out of the European Union and give French nationals priority over foreigners in jobs, welfare, housing and education, reflected a destabilizing trend also visible in other parts of Europe and the United States.

He spoke of a form of democratic terrorism, which stripped candidates of their dignity by establishing a right to know everything, whether proved or unproved about them.

It seems were dealing with a democracy gone mad, the cardinal said. Although statesmen still exist, theyre unable to get through todays campaign mechanisms, where everything is decided by the art of winning. Those who win are just electoral animals, not competent, rational politicians.

Catholics traditionally make up two-thirds of Frances 67 million inhabitants, although only a small proportion attend Mass.

In a book-length message last October, Recovering the sense of politics, the bishops conference said weariness, frustration, fear and anger in the country had fueled profound hopes and expectations of change, but also cautioned against a search for facile, emotive options.

Barbarin told KAI that the Catholic Church should appeal to citizens not to vote for people with pretty eyes, who can make stars of themselves with media support.

This is a time of decadence, and decadence means certain forms and structures are nearing their end, he said.

As Christians, we yearn for social order, peace and harmony a state based on principles of welfare and participation, where all can make contributions and citizens are subjects of the political community, he said.

But the problem in todays France is the rising disappointment and anger of those who feel ill-treated, rejected and forgotten.

Excerpt from:
Between election rounds, French cardinal deplores 'democracy gone mad' - Crux: Covering all things Catholic

Editors note: This piece will appear in the May 8 issue of The Weekly Standard.

Tony Smith, political science professor at Tufts, is a man on a mission. His mission: save Wilsonianism from its perversions by post-Cold War social scientists, military strategists like General David Petraeus, the RAND Corporationand especially the neocons and neoliberals of the Bush and Obama years. To do so, Smith spends half of Why Wilson Matters in an effort to rescue Wilson by giving his readers a more complete account of Woodrow Wilsons views of history and statecraft. The other half he devotes to an account of how this truer Wilsonianism has been left behind in favor of a more assertive, even imperialist, version reflected in the policies of the last two administrations.

As Smith somewhat backhandedly admits, his first task is complicated by the fact that Wilson never spelled out his grand strategy in a fully coherent manner. And indeed, even in Smiths retelling of Wilson, one is struck by the tensions and contradictions in Wilsons own evolving understanding of both political life and international affairs. In short, Woodrow Wilson is a hard man to pin down.

Nevertheless, from the confusing mass of Wilsons writings, speeches, and policies as our 28th president, Smith argues that Wilsons Wilsonianism can be seen as consisting of four interrelated elements: democracy promotion, open markets, collective security arrangements, and American leadership to push and pull the other three into some sort of consistent vision. But Smith also wants to qualify this far-reaching agenda with a significant addendum: Wilson possessed a Burkean and Darwinian sensibility that such matters cant be rushed. As he told a group of reporters in 1918, if a people dont want democracy, that is none of my business. That was the principle I acted on in dealing with Mexico after invading it in 1914.

Yet Wilsons evolutionary views were no less informed by his progressive sense of history: Monarchies, he believed, were increasingly a thing of the past, the spirit of the times was headed in democracys direction, and equally important, it is surely the manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail. Smith calls George W. Bush far more assertive in this regardand surely Bush was assertive in setting an American goal of ending tyranny in the worldbut it was Wilson who said that upon becoming a great power, the task of the United States would be to teach the South American Republics to elect good men and to extend self-government to Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and asserted even more broadly, when properly directed, there is no people not fitted for self-government. And it was Wilson who, with the conclusion of World War I in mind and the League of Nations to defend, asserted: The goal is not only the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere but also to redeem the world by giving it liberty and justice.

Putting aside the issue of how best to understand Woodrow Wilson for the moment, Tony Smiths real target, is his fellow academics who, through the promulgation of the democratic peace theory and the democratic transition theory, have (to his mind) offered up a jiffy-quick formula justifying a more activist use of power to expand the liberal international order. Its these concepts, combined with an expanded notion of the right to intervene where gross violations of human rights are occurring, that have fueled, he believes, such disastrous overreaches as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

Yet Smiths problem is that the democratic peace theory has proven to be quite strong: Liberal democracies dont go to war with each other. There might be some small exceptions that can be conjured up, but they are so much the exception to the rule that they actually confirm that it is in Americas (and its democratic allies) interest to promote the establishment of democratic regimes when it can. In addition, the old development maxim that liberal democracy could only take root in countries with specific economic and cultural preconditions has been put into question by the huge expansion of democratic states over the past centuryan expansion that has included countries of various economic levels, in every continent, and with diverse religious and cultural backgrounds, including Muslim. In short, politicians and policymakers looking at these trends had good reason to be optimistic.

Smith, whose Americas Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggles for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (1994) was very much in sync with this optimism, is now driven by his desire to disassociate his version of Wilsonianism or liberal internationalism from the interventionist policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. The problem, however, is that in none of the three casesAfghanistan, Iraq, or Libyawas military intervention done principally with an eye to democracy promotion. In the first two, regimes were toppled for reasons of national security and in the last, Libya, to prevent what was becoming a humanitarian disaster that (like the Balkans in the 1990s) held significant security implications for our European allies if not addressed.

Of course, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and the international community have been interested in helping establish a form of representative government in each. The question Smith never asks, and which policymakers must confront, is this: Once a decision was made to remove Saddam Hussein and the Taliban from power, what form of government should have been put in place? Individuals can certainly argue about the initial decision for regime change, but can any democratic leader in this day and age argue that the policy to follow should be well replace that thug with our thug?

Nor can it be assumed, as Smith and a host of others do, that the effort to build stable democracies in such states is an impossible task. The United States certainly didnt come prepared to deal with a post-Saddam Iraq, and when it finally did begin to provide the kind of stability necessary to start the process in a serious fashion, the Obama team pulled the plug on that effort. Its an open question what Iraq might look like today if Washington had stayed the course. And while post-Qaddafi Libya is a bloody messone hardly helped by Barack Obamas post-Iraq, hands-off approach to his military interventionLibyas neighbor, Muslim Tunisia, continues to plug away at moving from autocratic rule to representative government.

If there is a central distinction to be made between Woodrow Wilsons vision of liberal internationalism and the views of those Smith takes aim at today, it lies in what place nation-state powerespecially American powerplays in that orders promotion and sustainment. Wilsons postwar vision centered on a League of Nations in which collective security would be animated by the common will of mankind [that] has been substituted for the particular purposes of individual states. But as internationalists like William Howard Taft and Elihu Root correctly complained, this left the league without an effective enforcement mechanism to address violations of the international order. It lacked the power that only states can bring.

In this respect, Smith is right to say that Wilsons Wilsonianism is different from that of many of the Wilsonians of todaybut not for the reasons he puts forward. Liberal internationalism must rely on the very exercise of national power that it hopes to moderate and direct. In turn, this means living for the foreseeable future with presidents and administrations who understand that the United States remains the indispensible nation, mistakes and all.

Gary Schmitt is co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Safe for Democracy - American Enterprise Institute

Californias quest to tax itself into oblivion looks to be taking another great leap forward, with the state legislature approving a plan that will hike gas taxes by 12 cents a gallon. That will solidify the state's standing as one of the highest gas-taxers in the nation. Add requirements for "clean-burning" gas to existing taxes and Californians were already paying 67 cents a gallon more than the national average to fuel their cars.

The money raised by the new tax will supposedly go to road repairs, but count The Scrapbook skeptical. California is famous for playing a classic shell game. Step 1: Waste money on shiny, unnecessary projects (high-speed rail, anyone?). Step 2: Point to neglected but popular needs such as dilapidated roads, understaffed police departments, and underpaid teachers to justify tax increases. Step 3: Repeat.

Except that in the case of California's latest tax-hike, that standard strategy proved insufficient. Critics are now accusing Gov. Jerry Brown of buying reluctant votes. He succeeded in persuading key lawmakers to raise the gas tax by promising to fund infrastructure projects in their legislative districts. You know the whole process is unseemly when your governor is forced to explain to reporters the subtle nuances between legal and illegal bribery. Which is just what Brown did last week: "When somebody says, 'Here is $10,000, I want your vote,' you got bribery. It's illegal. When someone says, 'You know, I think this bill would be better if you included these projects or these ideas or these rules,' we listen, because that's democracy and that's openness and that is a compromise spirit that makes democracies work."

There you have it: backroom tax-hike horse-trading as the democratic virtue of "compromise spirit." Now you see why California is called the Golden Statethe state finds a way to get all the gold.

* * *

In not necessarily unrelated news, growing numbers of people are leaving California. According to an article in the Orange County Register by urban affairs experts Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, a net 110,000 California residents "outmigrated" last year. The bulk of those fleeing were escaping the densely populated urban areasLos Angeles, The Scrapbook is looking at youwhere Gov. Moonbeam's style of left-wing rule is most entrenched. Even San Franciscothe playground of the leftist plutocrat classlost population to the tune of 12,000 in 2016.

Kotkin and Cox focus on the desire of families to find "affordable, less dense housing." Some have been moving within the state in search of less expensive towns to livemodestly priced Modesto, for instance. But compared with the number moving into California, far more are moving out of the state altogether. Many of them are going to places such as Florida and Texas. Not only is the housing more affordable, but it's clear that for all the double-talk of politicians such as Jerry Brown, people are quite capable of comparing state tax burdens.

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Becau$e That'$ Democracy, Baby - The Weekly Standard