Daniel Markey looks at the implications of the no-holds-barred contest for political power between Nawaz Sharif and President Asif Ali Zardari. With Pakistan’s leaders struggling for their own survival, the US will have a “hard time building sustainable relationships to confront the region’s underlying challenges”. Washington’s leverage in the Zardari-Sharif tussle will be limited, Markey observes, to diplomatic efforts to put a lid on the crisis. Engaging successfully with any possible incumbent—Zardari, Sharif or the Army—would be one of President Obama’s major foreign policy trials.

Introducing the axis of upheaval/ The Times (London)

The “axis of evil”—the term coined by George Bush’s speechwriters—evolves into the “axis of upheaval”, courtesy Harvard academic Niall Ferguson. He describes it as a zone of instability, exacerbated by the current financial crisis, and finds in it historical parallels with pre-World War II Depression-era political turmoil. Pakistan and Afghanistan are in this axis, as is Israel-Palestine, Iran, Asian countries like Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan and some eastern Europe countries. Pakistan, Ferguson says, has a huge population of young men staring unemployment in the face: “the most likely recruits to radical Islamist organisations are not the subcontinent’s millions of dirt-poor slumdogs but the relatively well-off educated twenty-somethings who have glimpsed prosperity only to have their hopes dashed”.

How the West could “lose” Pakistan/ The Guardian

This opinion piece argues that the West has limited powers to control events in a region portrayed as a front-line in the fight against terrorism. Apart from political volatility and economic impoverishment, growing social despondency is proving to be another scourge, with a worldwide poll finding Pakistanis to be the most pessimistic among young Muslims. The US is already embroiled in a losing battle in Afghanistan (Obama has admitted so). With Pakistan tottering on the brink, Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy is beginning to look like a lost case.

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