Pakistan: It's About Power, Not Terrorism

For six years, the West has turned to Pakistan's General Musharraf to maintain stability in the world's laboratory of extremist Islamic terror. Events in Pakistan have rippled west and northwest to Afghanistan and Central Asia, to Europe all the way to Great Britain, and throughout the Middle East.

Now, Musharraf appears to be on the political ropes, with one of his main adversaries about to arrive at Islamabad Airport, and the other right behind him.

So should the West worry? The answer is yes and no -- for those worried about Pakistan itself, politics is about to revert to its venal and stormy norm; but nothing is likely to change in the national security sphere.

In a piece just filed on line, my friend Zahid Hussain of The Times of London says that Musharraf will try to defuse the arrival tomorrow (Monday) of Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan by putting him right back on a military plane to Saudi Arabia. Here is the first paragraph of Zahid's piece: Pakistani authorities are expected to deport Nawaz Sharif, the exiled former Prime Minister, back to Saudi Arabia as soon as he returns to Pakistan tomorrow in a bid to topple President Pervez Musharraf. Read story

Steve's comment: There is very little chance that Musharraf will salvage his position; he will have to step out of politics, opening the way for a political rematch between the country's pair of two-time prime ministers -- Sharif and Benazir Bhutto.

So much for the experiment with political reform that Musharraf claimed to be initiating with his 1999 coup against Sharif after the then-prime minister effectively almost murdered him and a planeload of passengers by refusing an airliner carrying them landing rights in the country.

The current degree of absurdity is illustrated by the industrialist Sharif's almost unchallenged depiction of himself as a fighter for democratic ideals. Few seem to recall Sharif's political beginnings as a 1980s creation of the ISI, the country's intelligence agency. Having lost favor with the Army since that impolite treatment of Musharraf in 1999, he is now painting himself as a man of the people.

Politics aside, Pakistan's bulwark of stability -- the Army -- will certainly salvage itself, with or without Musharraf (I think without). Washington and the rest of the West will continue to have their partner, to the degree Pakistan has been one, in fighting the al Qaeda radicals using Waziristan as a base.