The Pakistan government has done an amazing volte-face within a few days. Immediately after Musharraf declared emergency his juniors in the government were talking of the possibility of the parliamentary polls being delayed by a year. Now the same people are hinting at the elections bring held as scheduled in January. Chances are the emergency will be lifted in a few weeks. Why this flip flop by the Musharraf government?
It is quite obvious that Washington is responsible for this. Bush in public said that Musharraf should lift the emergency and take off his army attire. In private the missive from Washington must have been firmer, bordering at coercion. Condoleezza Rice had darkly hinted earlier at cutting the moolah the US is presently giving to Pakistan.
A weak Musharraf is hardly in a position to refuse to obey his master’s voice [US]. He had earlier in panic declared emergency and gone against the wishes of Washington. He had panicked because the walls are closing from all the sides. The judiciary under Iftikhar Chaudhry was becoming too independent minded for comfort. The Pakistan army is having a torrid time battling the Al Qaeda and Taliban in the frontier areas. The violence is entering the interiors; the massive explosion which greeted Benazir’s arrival and the bombs that shook a district of Rawalpindi which houses the army’s headquarters are examples of that.
The way the US is forcing Musharraf to dance to its tune shows that Musharraf is weak now. This bodes ill for Pakistan and the world. If the Islamist hardliner [along with elements in the army sympathetic to them]make a push for power they can quite easily dislodge the Pakistani dictator. There are no institutions strong enough to resist such a move. Musharraf has been chipping away at freedom of media, independence of the judiciary and has curbed freedom of the opposition parties.
