Pakistan: A View From the Ground
So it would appear that Musharraf is a General no longer, though undoubtedly his protege General Ashfaq Kiyani will closely follow his demands for the time being. Kyani is a former head of the ISI and this is also significant. Presumably he himself is already a man with great influence.
Amit Pandya reports from Pakistan, and his findings are a little surprising. But it is a good point that by her perceived closeness to Musharraf and the US, Bhutto has put herself in a tricky position in future elections.
Pandya also points out that for democracy to flourish, the opposition needs to unite, Islamists and the political mainstream alike, but at the time being this does not seem to be the case. Musharraf's gamble with the state of emergency may well have fractured any alliance against him but his doffing of his military role today and promise to end emergency rule once he is sworn in a civilian president will go a long way towards appeasing his US sponsors. He is perhaps more wily than we previously imagined.
Stimson - Pakistan’s Brighter Future: The View from the Ground
While not unimportant to Pakistanis, the principal demands of the US government are less important than the longer term political developments in the society. The elections to be held in a little over a month are not considered significant. Whether the General retires as Army Chief and serves as a civilian President has also become entirely unimportant. The key issue is whether he leads the country, and the actual role of the Army in the government.
The army remains indispensable to any future political order because of the tenacious hold that it has now established in the national economy, and because Pakistan, under any government however democratic, will face armed challenges from within or without. However, there has also been a widespread and growing sense that its long and repeated interference in politics has harmed both the political development of Pakistan and the integrity of its principal mission of national defense against the country’s enemies.
The main political parties, those with sufficient support to be political players in their own right, offered a poor alternative. Widely discredited by their tenures in government in the 1990s, both the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (PML(N)), were viewed askance by many Pakistanis of democratic conviction. Indeed, many considered the Musharraf regime’s survival a result of the public’s distrust of the large political parties.
