Just as the swine flu episode has begun to wind down, Mexican elites have been seized by another contagion: bloodying each other on the front pages of the newspapers. Actually, the target of most of the attacks has been Carlos Salinas, Mexico’s president between 1988 and 1994, a man already widely loathed for presumed corruption during his tenure.

The new allegations against Salinas, both by his predecessor and a businessman who himself has been deeply implicated in corruption, are unlikely to have any impact on Salinas’s reputation, which is already miserable. Which raises the question: why now? Why is all of this dirty laundry being aired about a man who was president fifteen years ago right at this particular moment?

One possibility is that it is election season in Mexico has just kicked off, and the party that is ahead in the polls is the Salinas’s PRI, the state-party that ruled Mexico for over seven decades. The PAN (the ruling party) in particular has been working hard to revive the PRI’s authoritarian past in order to prime voters to refuse to pull the lever for the party. Because Mexican politics and political parties tend to be dominated by powerful personalities, the more Mexicans associate the new PRI with Salinas, the harder it is to distinguish the new and old PRI.

Whatever the reason for the sudden interest in Salinas, the scandals are indicative of how much the past is still present in Mexican politics. And while Salinas may or may not be all that relevant for Mexico’s future, the decadence of the party in power, the PAN, surely is a matter of concern. That decadence is nowhere more visible than in the ruling party’s tie-ups with the old corporatist power brokers of the past, those same brokers that helped the PRI to consolidate power over so many decades.

The most egregious example of this until recently had been the PAN’s shameless courting of Elba Esther Gordillo, the authoritarian head of the powerful teachers’ union in Mexico. Through strategic appointments of Gordillo’s inner circle to government posts, through policy initiatives, and through alliances with her party, New Alliance, the PAN has sought to incorporate the old corporatist architecture of the PRI into its own governing structure.

This year, the party has gone a step further in its embrace of the old power structure by offering a highly-ranked seat on its party list for the upcoming elections to the head of the second most powerful union in Mexico, the social security workers’ union (the SNTSS, which represents IMSS). The PAN literally stole Valdemar Gutiérrez Fragoso away from the PRI, which had given him a top-ranked seat only a week earlier.

It would be nice if the incorporation of a leading health official into the PAN meant that the health sector was going to suddenly get more attention. As recent reports triggered by the swine flu outbreak have demonstrated, the Mexican health system is severely fragmented, under-staffed, under-resourced and suffers from high absenteeism among physicians. Fixing it requires more money, but also new and improved labor relations and a new professionalism on the part of health workers.

Unfortunately, Mexican-style corporatism likely will have the opposite result: in exchange for electoral support, the administration will take a hands-off approach to the sector, allowing union bosses to treat it as their personal fiefdom. The result will be more corruption and less professionalism. If so, the past is not only present in Mexico, but future as well.

The news media failed to accurately and objectively evaluate the conflict between Russia and Georgia this past summer (2008), and have done little to ease lingering tension. To be certain, the story was not ‘missed,’ coverage of the assault littered news programs. However, half of the story has bee ‘neglected.’

This half has to do with Georgia’s responsibility for the conflict, and more specifically the responsibility of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

There is a disturbing tendency and near-enthusiasm to depict Russia as a marauder. This half of the story received a fair amount of coverage with John McCain claiming ‘today we are all Georgians,’ and Obama echoing these statements from his home in Hawaii. While the media was quick to jump on the familiar story of David (Georgia) versus Goliath (Russia), certain balancing facts were not given their fair shake.

Points for: Russia is a much larger country with an admittedly bad history of exerting force on its smaller, previously sovereign countries. Elements of the Russian offensive were perhaps too violent in their scale – such as refusing to leave Georgia after the conflict had been resolved, including the false-withdrawal of troops from Abkhazia. But these aspects were, for the most part, covered.

Points against: While countries like Ukraine have a distinct population, Georgia does have a significantly large population with claims to Russian citizenship (the controversy surrounding the Orange Revolution is a prime example of tension over sovereignty). The division of Ossetia into North and South is reflective of many years of political separatism. Granted, relations between the two halves have been largely peaceful, excluding Soviet pressure levied in the early 1920s and a more violent separatist attempt by South Ossetia around the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. However, the division is an artificial border in the sense that many people in Georgia are considered Russian citizens and hold Russian passports. The tension between Russian nationals and the admittedly brash Georgian government has been on going, well before the 2008 attacks. Georgian government has banned the broadcasting of Russian television stations and even resorted to violent restraint on the more vocal Russian and separatist communities living in Georgia. Saakashvili’s claim of Russian aggression neglects his own authorized attacks against Russian nationals. This oversight panders to the sympathies of the United States government, whom he expected would support Georgia militarily.

While Saakashvili was unable to win the support of the government, the American public was largely persuaded – helped by the media – that Georgia was the victim of Russian aggression.

This doesn’t mean that Russia was right, or even that it was not an aggressor. The need for Russian military – as opposed to diplomatic – action is debatable, and the delayed withdrawal of troops is a certain indicator of post-conflict aggression, but this is not the full story. The media largely neglected to cover the pre-conflict situation in Georgia and the legitimate history of violence between the Georgian government and a Russian-based division of its population.

Rather than provide this historical context, the media adopted a narrative: small nation menaced by large nation. But this is not the whole story. To be sure, Russia cannot be justly absolved from its actions – but to neglect the actions of Georgia is to neglect, at very least, one half of the story.

Author’s Comment: Several corrections have been made to this article to better match historical accuracy.

Last Friday, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard sponsored a conference to reflect on the fifteen years that have transpired since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. The conference featured academics from both Mexico and the United States. It attempted to describe and debate the nature of political, social and economic change in Chiapas, as well as other poor states, in Mexico since 1994.

The conference was motivated by a central puzzle: since the Zapatista revolt, Chiapas, by most measures Mexico’s poorest state, has undergone massive political transformation, just as the broader country has. And yet the day-to-day lives of poor Chiapanecans seem to have changed relatively little by comparison. How is this possible?

It is worth rehearsing in detail some of the breathtaking political changes noted above. The Zapatista revolt itself enjoyed a certain political success, catching the authoritarian PRI regime off-balance, and leading to a substantial increase in federal financial flows to the state. The Zapatistas also achieved international fame and brought new NGO money and foreign aid to the region.

Indirectly, the rebellion achieved even more. Both Zapatista and non-Zapatista groups took advantage of the insecurity surrounding the revolt to press claims for land reform, resulting in a tremendous redistribution of land from large landholders to small peasants between 1994-1998. Indigenous peasants began to play a more active role in local and state politics as well, as various municipalities elected their first indigenous mayors, and CIOAC, a left-wing peasant group, dominated by indigenous Tojolabales, participated in the state government for the first time.

In 2000, the PRI was swept aside not only at the national level in Mexico, but also at the gubernatorial level in Chiapas. The relationship between the Zapatistas and electoral change has always been ambiguous, since the militants have generally distrusted electoral politics. But peasants who had supported the guerillas in the past opted to vote for change in 2000, and did play a role in the state’s democratic transition. Today, Chiapas is a highly competitive, multi-party state. In 2007 local elections, for example, 8 parties competed.

By any normal standards, this constitutes seismic political change. Yet the peasants of Chiapas today face bleak economic conditions. State GDP has largely been stagnant since the 1990s, and the poor states of Mexico’s South have, as a result, fallen further behind the rest of the country. The solution for most young, male peasants, is increasingly migration to the United States. Chiapas has moved from the bottom third to the top third of states receiving international remittances during this period.

So why haven’t all of these political changes made more of a difference to the lives of ordinary peasants? The conference participants suggested a few reasons. First, even the most ardent supporters of the Zapatistas admitted that the militants, who have largely given up violent struggle, have not replaced it with a realistic alternative tool of social change. Zapatistas today continue to experiment with the creation of “autonomous” zones of power in Chiapas, where they have set up parallel institutions of governance. Panelists disagreed about the efficacy of these institutions in political and juridical terms, but not in economic terms: the Zapatistas have not created a viable model of economic autonomy for poor peasants. At the same time, the turn inward, and away from the state, has rendered the Zapatistas less effective at reforming the Mexican state. While some panelists saw the Zapatista experiments as noble efforts to create alternative political structures that are more democratic than those of the wider society, others argued that the Zapatistas had missed an opportunity to build a broad movement to reform the state.

But of course, the failure of development in Chiapas goes far beyond the Zapatistas. The land reforms of the mid-1990s have not brought economic self-sufficiency, because the redistributed land is of low quality, and has been sub-divided into plots that are simply too small to yield enough for survival. All of this has happened at a time when the Mexican state has offered little in the way of subsidies to small farmers, and has also failed to offer an alternative development path that would move Chiapas up the value chain.

Electoral changes are also, to a certain degree, more apparent than real. A common theme to emerge from the panels was that, in spite of changes in political institutions, such as democratic elections, or decentralization, political practice at the state level in Mexico continues to be dominated by patron-client relationships and high discretion on the part of politicians. Thus, even though the PRI has been humbled, and new resources have been made available to Chiapas, and even though indigenous peasants have entered politics, dysfunctional institutions and corruption persist. The result is a failure to ameliorate basic inequalities. These findings are consistent across states as different as Oaxaca, Mexico and Chiapas.

The failures of the Zapatistas, the government, and other less radical opposition groups has resulted in an increasingly significant flow of migrants out of the state. Sadly, these flows, which are in part caused by the absence of a serious political project to redistribute resources and spur development, probably also contribute over time to the absence of such a project. After all, the support base for a pro-development coalition ought to be young peasants who see no future in the current economic model. But these are the same people who are not around to support such a coalition.

Is a different world possible? The panelists were not particularly optimistic. But, in my view, Mexico is slowly developing a civil society with a broader agenda of state transformation. This agenda should continue to focus on transparency and redistribution, as well as empowering the judiciary and other watch dogs to prevent abuse. Today, this coalition consists of a few small but dynamic groups, like FUNDAR. Over time, it is to be hoped, there will be more groups, particularly at the sub-national level. The road is long, but the journey has begun.

By Guest Authors Michael Barton and Gabriel C. Lajeunesse

General David Petraeus testified last week that militant extremists in Pakistan could “literally take down their state” if left unchallenged. Meanwhile, suicide bombers continued to strike unabated in Afghanistan, even as the international community committed their support to the fledgling democracy at the Hague. The President now has a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. It wisely marshals resources by centering on a core goal: fighting, dismantling, and defeating al-Qa’ida and their supporters. This strategy also hedges against European NATO members’ reticence to offer additional combat forces by providing them the “out” of instead providing trainers, funding, and other military support.

The real challenge to this strategy will be in the execution. This battle, much like the battle for Baghdad during the Iraq surge, will be won or lost by Commanders on the ground, soldiers in the field, and their civilian counterparts. In the years since 9/11 the U.S. has demonstrated the capability and willingness kill or capture senior al-Qa’ida operatives in Pakistan. The network of low-level facilitators, however, is an order of a different magnitude, with its geographic area and scope too vast for a conventional mission with only 21,000 additional troops.

With these additional troops, Generals David Petraeus and David McKiernan can focus on identifying and destroying the al-Qa’ida facilitation networks near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. These networks remain the backbone of al-Qa’ida, moving people, passing information, and acquiring equipment to enable the targeting of civilians and American, coalition, and Afghanistan troops - as well as U.S. supply routes. These networks also use criminal and narcotrafficking enterprises as force multipliers in their efforts to co-mingle with civilians, which remains one of the single most important elements of any successful terrorist organization. A significant amount of intelligence is needed to effectively dismantle such an extensive network, and it will only come as the Afghans begin to trust that the security gains are not fleeting. To be successful, this requires a targeted and fully resourced counterinsurgency effort.

After years in Iraq our Soldiers and Marines are seasoned in counterinsurgency and the community policing that it entails. Living among the civilians, protecting them, and demonstrating our commitment to them as individuals and improve the quality of their lives. Successes like those seen in Brigadier General Shawn MacFarland’s Anbar, or Colonel David Sutherland’s rough and tumble Diyala, will only be seen if the new U.S. forces and partnered Afghan forces are concentrated along the key pipelines that al-Qa’ida depends upon for its survival. Once forces in Iraq moved from secure forward operating bases to exposed combat outposts in the heart of troubled areas, security there improved. One year after applying these techniques in the Iraq surge, violence had decreased 70%. Weapons cache seizures - a good indicator of a cooperating population - increased 60%. The Pakistani’s likewise must learn to adopt these approaches and training missions if they are to build a capable counterinsurgency force. Without such capability, Pakistani leadership and civilians will continue to be picked off, and the Pakistani Army’s status of guarantor of national security will be even further eroded.

The Afghanistan-Pakistan counterinsurgency approach is a means to an end. The goal has never been to establish a Switzerland in Central Asia, rather, it has been to deny al-Qa’ida a base from which it can freely plan and execute terrorist attacks. Applying these additional forces to attack al-Qa’ida’s vulnerability will keep them running, hiding, and on the defensive until the backbone of this network is broken for good.

Mr. Barton served at the White House from 2003-2006; Mr. Lajeunesse is an associate at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and is a former Air Force Special Agent.

Paul Klebnikov   was the American-born editor of the Russian edition of Forbes Magazine. Klebnikov made his reputation as a investigative journalist looking into the business dealings of high-level Russian politicians and aspiring oligarchs. On July 9, 2004 Klebnikov was gunned down on the streets of Moscow in apparent retaliation for his professional activities. To this date the case is still open and no one has been successfully prosecuted for the murder.

To commemorate his memory, friends and family established the Paul Klebnikov Fund  which is designed to promote civil society and rule-of -law in Russia and to reward outstanding Russian jurists or journalists who have made lasting contributions towards this cause.

The 2009 winner is the journalist Leonid Nikitinsky who writes for the Novaya Gazeta.  He was at U. Mass Boston yesterday and this is what he had to say:

According to Nikitinsky today’s Russia is not abiding by the rule-of-law but rather by the rule of what he calls:  the ‘ments’…A ‘ment’ (derived from Russian prison slang) can be anyone who has any sort of state authority, anyone who wears ‘leather straps’ as Nikitinsky stated. They can either grease the wheels for you or stop you in your tracks, but what they all have in common is a license to steal.

Acting according to ‘no ideology or vision or responsibility’ these thousands of bureaucratic ‘locusts’ as Nikitinsky characterizes them, perform only one visible social function: the transfer of assets from ordinary Russians to themselves through endless bribery and extortion. They manipulate arrests, prosecutions and trials. They intimidate juries, blackmail witnesses and even make inconvenient enemies disappear. They will stop only when you write out the check and maybe not even then if they detect that you have more to give.

Despite Putin’s so-called ‘vertical power structure,’ the sheer number of ‘ments’ running rampant throughout the national system makes control virtually impossible. It merely hides ‘a spreading anarchy’ which, accoding to Nikitinsky, the Kremlin is very concerned about.

 In the written comments accompanying his talk he states:

By crude analogy the ‘ments’ dictatorship is not unrelated to Somalia under warlords, or parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan run by armed militias of local tribal chieftains. “Dictatorship of ‘ments’” is driving Russia to anarchy. Unless the process of ‘mentization’ is reversed Russia could end up the world’s largest failed state. The situation is dire.

Indeed.

Last week, Mexico’s Supreme Court received a preliminary report by a special investigative arm of the tribunal that had been charged with looking into human rights violations in Oaxaca. The special investigation had been requested by the Mexican legislature after the violent conflict between the southern state’s governor and civil society in 2006. To recall, in 2006, the state’s teachers’ union joined forces with a coalition of civil activists under the umbrella of the APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca) to call for the resignation of the governor. The governor responded with repression, and Oaxaca came to a standstill as the governor and APPO faced off in the streets. After nearly half a year, the federal police arrived to crush the protests and restore order.

Activists have always claimed that the authorities committed grave human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests and murder. The report, over 39 volumes and more than 6500 pages, substantiates at least some of these claims. It now falls to the Court to decide how to proceed, including whether particular individuals should be charged with criminal conduct.

This is the second major investigative report filed by the Court in recent weeks. Less than a month ago, the Court also released its findings from another 2006 debacle, the Atenco case. This case, to recall, involved a conflict over the use of public space in the state of Mexico, specifically a public square where informal vendors sold flowers in San Salvador Atenco. Disputes between the police and local community led to the violent removal of vendors and accusations against the police of rape and assault. The Court’s report corroborates many of these accusations as well.

On Sunday, El Universal reported that there is a new proposal in the Mexican Congress to raise human rights to the level of constitutional rights in Mexico. Language in the constitution would be altered to reference international human rights standards, rather than the antiquated view of rights as a grant from the state. The reform would also put more emphasis on educating students about human rights in school.

All of this attention to human rights is surely to be welcomed, but the fundamental problem in Mexico is not a lack of knowledge about human rights, nor the fact that human rights do not have legal protection. The fundamental problem is that these rights are not enforced and that people who violate them do so with impunity. Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH) has, for example, done an exemplary job of identifying human rights violations in Mexico since its creation, but has few mechanisms for enforcing redress, and has been criticized for failing to use even those that it does have, such as ongoing monitoring and public shaming of officials. The country’s auditor, which just released its report of expenditure in 2007, while also an exemplary investigator of government waste and abuse, is less able to force public officials to respond to its allegations or reform their practices.

One human rights-related reform in Mexico that might make a difference would be to empower the CNDH to sanction violators who do not reform on their own. Mexico has come a long way in terms of its transparency, but it has done less well at creating institutions that can use this information to actually change the way society works. Mexicans know much more about how money is misused, rights violated, and the economy held hostage by monopolists than ever before. But the impunity continues. The right to have rights doesn’t mean putting them in the constitution, a notorious burial ground for unenforceable claims. It means instead beefing up enforcement. That is the proper focus of reform.

Mexican daily El Universal reports today on a new set of papers detailing the lack of transparency in Mexican industrial relations. In one study, Luis Emilio Giménez Cacho notes that most workers are subject to a “labor regime in which discipline and submission” must be accepted in exchange for benefits. Under this regime, union bosses collude with employers to keep workers docile, while these non-elected labor “leaders” and corporate managers get rich. According to Giménez Cacho, this regime is finally starting to be exposed, as Mexican law protecting access to information has improved. But the sector still has a long way to go before workers gain basic information about their own employment, and control over their own leadership.

Giménez Cacho has written widely about labor relations in Mexico. In another recent paper, he discusses the importance of a 2007 reform in Mexico which forced unions to make their collective bargaining contracts public. While this might seem like little more than a minor regulatory change, Giménez Cacho demonstrates that the data it made available dramatically reveals the perverse nature of Mexican labor relations.

These data show that many corporations have very large numbers of collective bargaining arrangements governing very small numbers of workers in the same geographic space. In spite of their proliferation, these contracts do not differ in substantial ways that would justify the need for so many different arrangements. For example, the natural food store Nutrisa has 58 branches in Mexico City. Each one of them has a different contract with the same union that covers only nine employees. An even more egregious case is that of the union at the department store Palacios de Hierro. The company has 8 different collective bargaining arrangements in Mexico City, all signed by the same union leader, who himself has signed over 450 additional arrangements with different companies. The union boss’s brother and sister also control dozens of other contracts in the city.

Why do large companies maintain so many bargaining arrangements for so few employees with so few union bosses? Presumably because they collude with this small set of bosses to reduce the potential risks of permitting workers to organize themselves into larger units. Chain stores are unlikely to have working conditions so vastly different across a single city that they would require multiple arrangements, and indeed Giménez Cacho does not at any rate find evidence that the contracts differ in appreciable ways. Indeed, in most cases, the contracts were all signed and filed on the same day with the same (minimal) conditions. They may represent an attempt to project the appearance of progressive, union friendly shops when in fact they simply provide cover for the insignificance of “invisible unions” in affecting labor conditions.  Alternatively, they represent “protection contracts,” a service offered by free-lance union “bosses” who accept payments from companies in exchange for guaranteeing labor peace.  Should companies decide not to pay up, these bosses or others will threaten to organize strikes at their shops.

As El Universal points out, unions today are still not required to report on how they spend funds, how often they strike and what the results are, or how much top officials earn. These are egregious violations of the law, and of reasonable expectations of transparency and accountability. But by forcing unions and employers to make the details of contracts known, civil society has been given at least some basic tools to begin asking questions. With time, the inability or unwillingness of unions or employers to answer these questions can generate pressure to mandate still more transparency. As Giménez Cacho himself notes, revelations about the suspicious nature of collective contracts are just the tip of the iceberg.

On top of all the bad news surrounding international banking we can add to the list the findings of a just published report ( Undue Diligence : How Banks Do Business With Corrupt Regimes) from the anti-corruption NGO Global Witness.

The report, although dealing with somewhat dated material, nevertheless paints a devastating portrait of how some of the largest and formerly most prestigious international banks have been complicit in laundering the ill-gotten gains of the some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. Despite the existence of a whole host of regulations and public commitments to social responsibility on the part of institutions like Citibank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, etc. the report condemns these institutions for doing the minimum amount of due-diligence and exploiting every loophole to avoid turning down lucrative deposits.

In my posting last week I made some comments about Equatorial Guinea which were responded to at length by someone from the EG Embassy in London. Although my Spanish is hardly fluent I was able to discern that I was being accused of slandering and perpetuating negative stereotypes about EG.

Lo and behold, but who should top the list of Global Witnesses’ list- of- shame but Equatorial Guinea and their partners in crime, first the now-defunct Riggs Bank,  and more recently Barclays.

Management of the country’s vast oil wealth remains a ‘state secret’ according to President Teodoro Nguema Obiang. He has ruled since 1979 when he executed his brutal uncle to seize power, and has maintained his power through repression and human rights abuses. Members of Obiang’s family control key government ministries. Opposition parties are banned, and political prisoners are beaten and tortured in custody.

 Meanwhile, the ruling family continues to enrich itself. At the end of 2006 Global Witness revealed that the president’s playboy son had bought a new $35 million dollar home in California. He has been reported as earning a $4,000 a month salary as the country’s Minister of Agriculture and Forestry.

But not to appear as unfairly picking on EG,  it should be noted that Gabon, Republic of Congo, Angola, Charles Taylor’s Liberia,  Turkmenistan and their cohort of international deposit-takers also make the list.

The main recommendation of the report is that now that the world seems to be getting serious about regulating shameless bankers it should also close all the loopholes  and address all the convenient ambiguities which allow resource riches from desperately poor countries to find their way into international bank accounts -  now matter how desperately these shattered institutions might need them. 

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that General Ashfaq Kayani, who took over the reins as Chief of Army Staff when Pervez Musharraf shed his uniform in late 2007, played a crucial role in ending tensions between President Asif Ali Bhutto Zardari and opposition rival Nawaz Sharif over the reinstatement controversy. The WSJ article also highlights the strong relationship between Kayani and Chairmen of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen. The two apparently spoke every day leading up to the reinstatement.

Kayani has assured Mullen he has no interest in a military coup, and indeed Kayani’s circumstances are vastly different than Musharraf’s were ten years ago. Before the 1999 coup d’etat, Musharraf had been fired by then-Prime Minister Sharif and decided to seize power rather than acquiesce. Kayani enjoys seemingly civil relationships with the both President Zardari and Sharif. Personal acrimony will not be the motivation for a Kayani takeover.

Still, if Kayani is looking for coup justifications, he needn’t look far. Violence and political instability have plagued Pakistan for months, and according to the WSJ article, are driving fears among Pentagon officials about the viability of Zardari’s government. For the US, a power vacuum in a country full of fundamentalists who would love power would be unacceptable. Kayani, who is respected enough by civilian leaders to have successfully moderated the reinstatement negotiations, might be America’s man for the stabilizing job.

Although Kayani’s middle name is Parvez, he must be a different type of general if Pakistan’s civilian democracy is to survive. Another military coup would dash the hopes of all democratically-minded Pakistanis.

Pakistan’s government has reinstated Ifthikar Chaudhry as Chief Justice of its Supreme Court. The move was long overdue, but is not a cure-all for Pakistan’s problems.

After Chaudhry’s sacking at the hands of former ruler Pervez Musharraf, factions competing for control over the nascent civilian government waged pitched battles over the judge’s fate. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, now Pakistan’s opposition leader, defied house arrest in recent days to lead protests calling for the reinstatement in the streets of Lahore. The situation became so tense that the fragile government finally gave in. In response, a planned “long march” of lawyers to Islamabad was called off. Sharif and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani signed a “Charter of Democracy” intended to normalize relations between the government and the opposition.

Later in the day, a suicide bombing in Rawalpindi that might have targeted that city’s nixed reinstatement rally killed fourteen.

What does this all of this mean for Pakistan? US Envoy Richard Holbrooke is hailing the decision as a “statesmanlike” gesture by President Asif Ali Bhutto Zardari. The destabilizing tensions between Zardari and Pakistan’s legal intelligentsia have been temporarily defused. Yet the Chaudhry protests were a phenomenon confined to Pakistan’s relatively well-to-do legal community. As the Rawalpindi attack illustrated, Pakistan is still wracked with violence, with or without reinstatement protests. Tomorrow, Zardari, Gilani, Sharif and now Chaudhry will wake up to find their country still very much in turmoil.

While continuing military conflict in Pakistan’s Federally-Administered Tribal Area or new Rawalpindi-style attacks might overshadow Chaudhry’s return to office at the end of March, one interesting wrinkle could very well give the reinstatement story legs. Because of latent corruption charges against Zardari that date back to his late wife’s term as Prime Minister, Zardari had to be granted amnesty by then-President Musharraf before he could take part in the September 2008 elections. At the time, Chaudhry held that Musharraf’s amnesty order might have been illegal. He was then removed from his post.

Now that Chaudhry is back, a ruling declaring the illegitimacy of Zardari’s amnesty could be forthcoming. Such a ruling would risk throwing the entire country into another round of convulsions and could very well be suppressed by backdoor dealings. Still, Chaudhry has a penchant for strong public statements, owes something of a debt to opposition leader Sharif, and has a history of defying Pakistan’s executive. Undoubtedly, many of Chaudhry’s supporters in Pakistan’s legal community are expecting proof of the judiciary’s independence. This time though, Pakistan’s president (corruption charges and all) has a clear democratic mandate. Prudence is the wisest of Chaudhry’s options.