Musharraf walks a tightrope
In the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination in Rawalpindi, Pakistan yesterday, the country continues to descend into chaos. President Pervez Musharraf has some tough choices ahead of him, none of which appear particularly appealing.
The death of Musharraf's leading opponent comes just eleven days before parliamentary elections, in which her party stood to gain a significant number of seats. With Bhutto now out of the picture, her party is fragmented and anchorless; however, since Musharraf's popularity is down somewhere below George W. Bush levels, this event could conceivably galvanize public opposition against him once and for all. Although the aftermath of political assassination is notoriously unpredictable, I think it's safe to assume that any attempt by Musharraf to declare long-term martial law and/or suspend the constitution would result in a backlash like nothing he's ever seen.
On the other hand, it's almost inconceivable that the elections could continue as scheduled. If the people of Pakistan are expected to go to the polls in just a week and a half, without any chance for Bhutto's party to regroup, it would be seen (rightly) as an attempt by Musharraf to marginalize her Pakistan People's Party once and for all.
Pakistan's Interior Ministry is blaming the assassination on Al Qaeda, and her supporters are blaming it on Musharraf's government, either through direct involvement or through a lackadaisical concern for her security. In the end, it doesn't really matter who killed one of the most prominent avatars of democratization in the Muslim world; the middle class in Pakistan despise the Taliban and Al Qaeda even more than they hate Musharraf, and in many respects, all three of those factions are linked through historical funding and support.
If one of them killed her, they all did.
This should matter to all of us, for reasons Juan Cole lays out in his predictably articulate way:
Pakistan's future is now murky, and to the extent that this nation of 160 million buttresses the eastern flank of American security in the greater Middle East, its fate is profoundly intertwined with America's own. The money for the Sept. 11 attacks was wired to Florida from banks in Pakistan, and al-Qaida used the country for transit to Afghanistan. Instability in Pakistan may well spill over into Afghanistan, as well, endangering the some 26,000 U.S. troops and a similar number of NATO troops in that country. And it is not as if Afghanistan were stable to begin with. If Pakistani politics finds its footing, if a successor to Benazir Bhutto is elected in short order by the PPP and the party can remain united, and if elections are held soon, the crisis could pass. If there is substantial and ongoing turmoil, however, Muslim radicals will certainly take advantage of it.
He doesn't paint a very optimistic picture of the conditions necessary to avoid catastrophe:
In order to get through this crisis, Bush must insist that the Pakistani Supreme Court, summarily dismissed and placed under house arrest by Musharraf, be reinstated. The PPP must be allowed to elect a successor to Ms. Bhutto without the interference of the military. Early elections must be held, and the country must return to civilian rule. Pakistan's population is, contrary to the impression of many pundits in the United States, mostly moderate and uninterested in the Taliban form of Islam. But if the United States and "democracy" become associated in their minds with military dictatorship, arbitrary dismissal of judges, and political instability, they may turn to other kinds of politics, far less favorable to the United States. Musharraf may hope that the Pakistani military will stand with him even if the vast majority of people turn against him. It is a forlorn hope, and a dangerous one, as the shah of Iran discovered in 1978-79.
Although many of Bhutto's supporters suspect the Musharraf regime of being behind the assassination, it's hard to imagine even a despot as corrupt and tyrannical as Musharraf being stupid enough to paint himself into such a constrained corner. However, as Cole points out, the shah made the same mistakes.