Musharraf should find a way out

Many charges can and have been pressed against General Pervez Musharraf. But throwing in the towel is not among them. That may, however, be the only option left for the embattled president of Pakistan these days.

Last Sunday, Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister, returned home from seven years in exile, greeted as he was by crowds of frenzied supporters.

His return not only injects added confusion to the country's chaotic political scene, but an added challenge to the military leader's rule as well.

Meanwhile, Benazir Bhutto, yet another former prime minister recently returned from exile, has retrenched on an earlier commitment to a power-sharing agreement with the president.

And leaders of civil society, from jurists to human rights activists, have enumerated a litany of grievances that they contend will be resolved only if the US threatened to withdraw aid to the regime.

The transition to civilian rule remains cloudy, parliamentary elections scheduled for January 8 notwithstanding. And it remains unclear whether Sharif, who leads the Pakistan Muslim League, and Bhutto, who leads the Pakistan People's Party, would compete with each other in a repeat of their 1990s rivalry or form a powerful election bloc.

Should the latter happen, Musharraf will find that he has no choice but to lift anchor and put out to sea.

A constitutional crisis in a country becomes both inevitable and predictable, as it has become in Pakistan, when a political leader ties his own personal fortunes to those of his own country. As a case in point, Musharraf, in a display of fatuity, told visiting US envoy John Negroponte earlier this month that he alone, as president, can save Pakistan from turmoil.

And trust me on this one: with the constitution suspended, martial law imposed, journalists arrested, lawyers roughed up, protesters beaten, human rights activists locked up, private television news channels taken off the air, and the rest of it, that country of 165 million needs very much to be saved.

The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis now appear to believe that their president is more part of the problem than the solution. Even were elections to be indeed held soon, that alone does not constitute a "restoration of democracy".

Democracy is not just about going to the polls. Going to the polls under martial law (and the general wants you to call it instead a "state of emergency", please), while most of the justices of the Supreme Court have been dismissed and leading activists locked up, does not amount to a hill of beans.

Even Washington, an ardent supporter of Musharraf, is beginning to hedge its bets. Would it soon get tough with the man and threaten to withdraw American aid, of which well over $10 billion has already poured into the nuclear-armed, South Asian nation since 2001?

At first bluff, one's hunch is that the US, which continues to "pursue stability at the expense of democracy", will balk at that. Ever since November 3, when the confrontations began, American officials have been sluggish, or at best ambiguous, in expressing their disapproval at the turn of events.

After all, the US has relied on Musharraf in its "war on terror" and on a commitment by his army and intelligence services to go after extremists in that lawless region known as Waziristan, between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where international borders are blurred and violent men with nutty theological agendas run free.

But more than that, the US has relied on its autocratic ally in Islamabad to insure that its worst nightmare, a nuclear-armed country ruled by Islamists, does not become a reality.

Yet Washington, and perhaps with it the top brass in the Pakistani army, may find that it has no option but to give up on the man. As popular support for Musharraf ebbs at home, so will American backing for him ebb in the White House and Congress.

The notion of "pursuing stability at the expense of democracy" has limits in American foreign policy, especially when its end result is neither the one nor the other.

In 1985, for example, when President Reagan realised that the Philippines's Ferdinand Marcos was determined to hold on to power at any cost, that is, against the mass sentiment of his people, Washington pressured its ally to go.

Unlikely

Moreover, it is unlikely that even the Pakistani military, whose brass have done well under Musharraf's rule, profiting mightily from American largesse, would want to be cast as the repressors of their people rather than their protectors.

Pakistan has chalked up a long record of army coups since it was founded in 1947, with Musharraf being the fourth army chief to seize power. In effect, the country was ruled by military dictators for more than half its history.

The recent violence in that Islamic country, from the bloody standoff at the Red Mosque last July, to the carnage at former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's procession celebrating her return from exile last month, and from the imposition of martial law on November 3 to the improbable spectacle of barricades manned by the washed masses from the legal profession, is proof that Pakistan may be on the brink.

Yes, but who needs another military coup to drag it back from that brink?

It must be made plain to Musharraf that when a political leader becomes part of the problem, it is time for him to make a dignified exit and let his people reassemble their lives and rebuild their civil society.

Not too long ago, President George W. Bush called on Musharraf to "take off the uniform". That would have been good advice were it not for the fact that an army general should not have left his barracks to run a government in the first place.

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.