Pakistan: Flashback 2009

Suicide blasts, Zardari’s future dominated Pakistan
Unending suicide attacks that have claimed close to 1,000 lives and anti-Taliban military operations dominated Pakistan in 2009, a year that raised question marks over the future of President Asif Ali Zardari.In the last three months of the year alone, some 600 people, mostly civilians, died in a series of blasts that rocked a vast region, from the restive North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the country’s commercial capital Karachi.
In the most horrendous of these bombings, 177 people, including a large number of women and children, were killed Oct 28 in a suicide attack at a crowded market in Peshawar, the NWFP capital.
No major Pakistani city was immune to the terrorist rampage.
In the last quarter of the year, some 260 people were slaughtered in Peshawar, around 90 in the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, 75 in Dera Ismail Khan in NWFP and 72 in Lahore. The year ended with a ghastly bombing of a Muharram procession in Karachi that left at least 25 dead.
Analysts say there is a pattern to the heightened violence in the closing months of the year. It is seen to be linked to the military’s anti-Taliban operations in the South Waziristan region along the Afghanistan border.
The operations began in the NWFP in April. Within six months, the military had managed to push the militants into their strongholds in South Waziristan. With the armed forces turning to this region in October, the suicide attacks were seen as a last desperate bid to stave off the military assault. The government estimates that close to 2,500 guerrillas have been killed in the two operations.
Even as Pakistan struggled to cope with the wave of killings, President Zardari ended 2009 facing the very real possibility of being jailed in the new year on corruption charges following the repeal of an amnesty against graft.
Should that happen, it would greatly strengthen Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and also see the return of Pakistan’s main opposition party to the ruling federal coalition.
Zardari, who has been engaged in a bitter power struggle with the prime minister, found the ground swept away from under his feet when the Supreme Court Dec 16 invalidated the 2007 National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO). The ordinance had granted immunity from corruption charges to his slain wife and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and he himself besides hundreds of politicians and bureaucrats, enabling many to return home from exile.