Musharraf’s Last Stand

At a political and constitutional level, the crisis in Pakistan is actually good news. Civil society has mobilized. The print media have been utterly fearless in its criticism of the president. Musharraf's actions have given the parties an agenda to get passionate about, and so far they have not succumbed to the infighting that often destroyed them in the past. It would be a mistake to romanticize Pakistan's democrats. Many are feudal, corrupt and pliant. But increasingly there are some young and talented ones emerging as well. The polls may be rigged, though there are fewer opportunities than before for massive illegalities. The king's party may be able to buy allegiances after the elections. But it is also possible that Pakistan's political class might surprise us with its maturity.

There is a solution to Pakistan's political crisis, one that will allow Musharraf to leave on a high note. First, he must hold free and fair elections. Musharraf's current plan is to wield power as part of a troika—the Army chief, the prime minister and himself as president. This will work only if he is the weakest leg of that stool. He has already appointed a decent man as head of the Army, and he can allow a stable parliamentary coalition to elect a prime minister who can run the country. Musharraf should recognize that he has become far too controversial to be able to lead his nation and should instead recede from power. The example to follow is Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, now universally feted for bringing democracy to that country. Musharraf is said to be convinced that he is indispensable to Pakistan's future. He should remember the words of another general turned politician, Charles de Gaulle, who, when told he was indispensable to France, is said to have replied, "The graveyards are filled with indispensable people."

That still leaves Pakistan's other, more dangerous, crisis—the new jihad. Once nestled within the tribal areas of Pakistan and in neighboring Afghanistan, groups of militants have now begun to move freely into the settled towns and cities of the east. In the past year there have been 46 suicide bombings, killing more than 1,000 people. Attacks have taken place almost everywhere in the country. Most major political figures have been targeted, as have the police. In the past six months Army cantonments have been repeatedly attacked, and last fall two buses filled with officers from the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency were blown up. And, of course, in December, the country's most popular leader was killed.

The most troubling aspect of this wave of terror is that no one in Pakistan seems to understand why it's happening. Everyone I spoke to, from President Musharraf on down, was taken aback by the violence. When I asked the president about it, he began a long, rambling answer that decried blowback from the Afghan jihad in the late 1980s. But those fighters are now 50 years old. The ones blowing up Pakistanis are a new generation of young jihadists, motivated, networked and competent. If Musharraf has few answers, the political parties have largely ignored the problem, as have most journalists and commentators (with some important exceptions).

Theories abound. The Pakistani military was never fully committed to battling jihadists. Having spent decades training fighters for Kashmir and Afghanistan, the Army withdrew support but would not kill or arrest its former charges. While true at first, things appear to have changed in the past year. The armed forces are taking the battle to the militants, which explains why the jihadists are now targeting the Army in return. There remain some defense experts, like Talat Masood, a retired general, who argue that even now, the Army is softer on Afghan and Kashmiri jihadists, believing that keeping those places somewhat unstable is in Pakistan's long-term interests. (The Army assumes that the United States will eventually tire of the war and leave, and India will benefit from a stronger Afghanistan.) "The idea that a stable Afghanistan and India mean peace and development—that's something that the Pakistani Army doesn't really believe in its heart," says Masood.

Washington itself bears a significant part of the blame. The Taliban were never really defeated after the fall of Kabul. They simply went into hiding and regrouped, and yet the American Army declared victory and left. "You outsourced the most important battlefield of the War on Terror to NATO troops that did not have the mission, training or will to actually fight it," says PML leader Hussain. (The Pentagon is now considering sending an additional 3,000 Marines to southern Afghanistan.) The rise of the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas was also ignored. The first military operation there took place in 2004, two and a half years after the jihadists had retreated there, largely because the Pakistani Army didn't want to get bogged down in an area marked by disputed borders and fiercely independent people.