Today’s post was started on 11th November but tweaked as things developed in Pakistan. It will cover:

Pakistan
The markets
Walk
Detention before charging

While buying the Sunday paper this morning I noticed the front cover of this week’s Economist with a cartoon of President Musharraf and the line ‘Time’s up Mr Musharraf’ (or something like that). I find the Economist a bit dry so I didn’t actually buy it (or sneak a look at what they had written about Pakistan) but they seem pretty sure that the President was on the way out. In fact Pakistan’s ‘deciding factors’ seem pretty obscure. It definitely doesn’t seem to be the mass of Pakistanis or foreign powers (not at the moment at least) so the real power brokers would seem to be the army and the intelligence service and, though there may be restiveness about President Musharraf’s government in the lower ranks and the junior officers, the generals are not going to want to embark on steps that undercut the prestige of the country’s armed forces. However, they may very well want policies that are less costly to army morale and life.

The army’s interests seem to add up to clipping President Musharraf’s wings rather than ousting him, a policy that is less obliging to the western allies than up until now. Despite all the calls from abroad for the elections to go ahead, it seems as if western politicians are stacking the building blocks in the wrong order. They want democracy as the foundations without considering how fragile Pakistan’s statehood would be if you tried to take the army out of the equation. Successful democracies all have effective armies and flourish in spite of them but a country without an army is power vacuum. Maybe they think someone like Benazir Bhutto will be able to keep Pakistan onside in the war against Al Qaeda but this doesn’t seem probable. According to yesterday’s paper, Benazir Bhutto’s relative freedom of action (until yesterday) must have signified some measure of implicit understanding must remain between her and the President.

It looks as if the President and the Pakistan Peoples Party will progress in a sort dance of the crabs towards elections in the New Year. Mr. Musharraf will remain president and have a Prime Minister that he may not really like but can at least tolerate (like George III) and he’ll let someone else takeover as army chief of staff – or take off his uniform, as western leaders phrase it. At some point in 2008 or 2009 Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry will get his job back as Chief Justice. If Musharraf’s enemies do engineer his removal, the outlook becomes less certain. This would only be a good move if the politicians involved could guarantee the loyalty of the army.

In fact, Pakistan seems a lot like India in World War II, with Congress and politics in abeyance while the conflict continued. Civil disobedience carried on, nevertheless, just as the Pakistani lawyers have been protesting about martial law. The difference was that there really was a realistic hope that the politicians could manage independently of the army, if they were given a chance in the 1940s.

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The markets

Hmm – that may be right. The dive on the stock markets over the last two weeks is what might be called the bankers’ crash as its followed hard on the heels of news about losses caused to banks by collateralised debt obligations and has affected bank shares more than most. In its own way the last two weeks seems to have been a panic of Northern Rock proportions. Take Lloyds TSB for example, whose shares dropped down to around 460 pence without any hints of it being directly implicated in the sub-prime crisis. At this level, if next year’s dividend is equal to this year’s, it would be about 7.5% of the share’s value. This would mean that anyone buying the shares at the end of the recent panic could hope for a profit of £1.20 a share (made up of next year’s dividend and, say, a rise of 85p in the share price to get it back close to the level it was trading at before the slide began). Of course, there will be some firms that will have lost money on US investments and their shares are likely to stay lower than they were (but maybe not as low as they are now) for the foreseeable future.

I don’t see how Mervyn King justifies his remark that Northern Rock depositors were being logical by withdrawing their money from the bank. Unless they had over £2,000 on deposit, their deposits were already 100% guaranteed by the government so, surely, queuing all that time must have been unnecessary.

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The Walk

This was on Saturday afternoon and, for once, was a stroll from the front door. There’s two or three good walks to be had straight from home. The only problem is the noise of the traffic on the A3 droning along in the background. Saturday’s walk was to Eashing Bridge, which is a quaint stone structure, built by the monks of Waverley Abbey, I believe (or, at least) on their behalf. The big plus of this walk is that you get a lot of afternoon sunshine, even with the sun low in the sky in November. This friendly golden light outweighs the inconvenience of the noise of the traffic.

Eashing Bridge is actually a place as well as a bridge. There’s a giant mill, now converted into commercial ‘units’, a pub, the Stag (which I’ve yet to visit), some stone terraced houses and some rather more stylish residences on the far side of the bridge. The near-side has a quite impressive cliff face showing above the roofs of some of the houses.

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The writing is going fine; I reckon I’ve just passed the halfway mark in point of words written. The last chapter written was pretty technical so I feel I’m on the right side of a challenge.

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The Observer seems to have given Henry Porter permission to mount a campaign against the government desire to increase the time the police can hold terrorist suspects without charging them. I guess he right but it’s one of those issues of principle where it’s difficult to get people to imagine what it could mean for them or where it could lead to. However, today’s revelation that the UK already detains people without charge for far longer than any other western country brought some much-needed clarification.