Soft coup in Pakistan

Pervez Musharraf has staged yet another coup, this time against himself. Eight years after he overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government, Pakistan's army chief has pre-empted a possibly unfavorable Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of his own re-election. The state of emergency announced by Musharraf, which inevitably suspend the country's constitution and civil liberties, comes as a culmination of months of combustible unrest, both political and religious.

As one of The Subcontinent columnists says in Pakistan it is always wise to expect the expected. It would have been wholly out of character for a wily general to let power slip out of his hands as intimations in the aftermath of the short-lived return of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto suggested. Although Bhutto nearly paid with her life because of suicide bombing attacks on her cavalcade, she is now out of the country, back in Dubai with her family. It is hard to say whether Musharraf had tipped off Bhutto to leave in time or it was just prescient of her to do so. In any event with the imposition of the emergency any prospect of Bhutto's early return to public life in Pakistan look bleak at best.

Musharraf's decision comes over strong advice from Washington not to declare an emergency rule. It shows that he remains his own master despite having been under intense pressures in recent times to kick-start a political process in the country. It is widely believed that one of the consequences of that was a tense rapprochement between him and Bhutto. It is not surprising that he has imposed an emergency rule. What is surprising is that, against his own survival instincts, he took so long to do so.

It would be easy to nurse schadenfreude at the turn of events in Pakistan, a sort of collective 'we-told-you-so' moment. But it is in the interest of the world community that the only nuclear armed Islamic state, which is home to the international rogues' gallery of terror, remains stable. The question is whether that stability can be ensured by an embattled general, who might be extraordinarily good at retaining power but is clearly not invincible.
It is hard to predict how long the emergency will stay in place. Musharraf knows that he has been riding a tiger for the past eight years. He cannot possibly dismount it without being the first prey of that beast.