Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf resigned this week after months of pressure. When he took up office in 1999 after seizing power in a bloodless coup, he promised to restore democracy, but became increasingly dictatorial. The “rot set in” after 2002. Musharraf ordered a referendum on his legitimacy as President, but no opposition candidates were permitted to stand, said The Guardian. He also gave himself powers to sack the Prime Minister and dissolve Parliament. In March last year he fired his Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and dozens of Supreme Court judges who he feared would bar his re-election. This led to a nationwide protest, which eventually saw Musharraf declare emergency rule. His influence shrank after he quit as head of the military late last year. And since his political rivals – the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower Asif Zardari and the Pakistan Muslim League faction (PML-N) led by Nawaz Sharif – swept to power in the February elections, Musharraf has been sidelined, facing the “humiliating threat of impeachment for gross misconduct of violating the constitution”.
Musharraf’s departure is a “welcome reassertion of civilian control”. But the parliamentary rule that preceded his coup was “notorious for incompetence and corruption”. It doesn’t bode well that two of that era’s main players – Sharif and Zardari – are now vying for power, said The Daily Telegraph. It doesn’t, agreed Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian. Even the strongest supporters of democracy fret that infighting and corruption will dominate. Pakistan’s woes include a “polarised and heavily armed populace”, a disastrous economic crisis with inflation at 25%, and the newly emerged ‘Pakistani Taliban’, said Ahmed Rashid in The Daily Telegraph.
The last is a threat to internal security, but Islamic terrorism is also of global significance. Pakistan must be “reminded of its responsibility” to the world, said The Daily Telegraph. The tribal areas bordering Afghanistan are a “springboard for jihadis”, Baluchistan has become a refuge for the Afghan Taliban, and the influence of the madrassas is growing. The US – which underwrote Pakistan’s army to the tune of $10bn to aid its ‘war on terror’ – has long suspected that Musharraf allowed military intelligence to play a double game by sponsoring radicals as a counterweight to Indian influence in Kashmir and Afghanistan. True or not, Pakistan’s new leaders face some daunting tasks, said The New York Times. They must challenge the Taliban and al Qaeda, and tackle the poverty and corruption that have fed “anti-American fury” and extremism. To do that, Pakistan’s civilian government will have to bring the army and powerful intelligence service the ISI under political control, said The Independent.
That will be extremely hard, but there are some positive signs for the next president, said Mary Dejevsky in The Independent. Washington’s post-9/11 focus on the war on terror is “winding down”, reducing external pressure, and the new president will have a legitimacy that Musharraf never fully gained. True, said the FT, but Pakistanis will remain “understandably wary”. Pakistan is in a desperate state and it has “every reason to know bad government is a luxury poor countries cannot afford”.