Deporting Sharif may weaken Pakistan's President Musharraf

Only hours after he returned home Monday from seven years in exile, former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was arrested and deported to Saudi Arabia. Mr. Sharif had returned intending to challenge Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's troubled, US-backed military rule ahead of national elections due before Jan. 15. [Editor's note:The original version misstated the date for Pakistan’s planned elections.]

President Musharraf's handling of Sharif's return reveals the difficulty with which a key figure in the US war on terror must navigate the narrowing gap between keeping his tenuous hold on power and permitting a return to free elections.

Despite his overtures toward a power-sharing deal with another former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, it seems certain that Sharif's arrest and deportation will only further weaken Musharraf, whose popularity has been in free fall in recent months.

"It is remarkable how Sharif's return has completely unnerved Musharraf's government," says Talat Masood, a leading analyst and retired Army general. "The state of terrible insecurity it has been thrown into shows how very fragile the state has become."

"Sharif's arrest and deportation is a disastrous development and extremely bad for the future of Pakistan. It's a flagrant violation of the Supreme Court order and shows the state is simply not prepared to listen to the law. It invites anarchy in the country," says Mr. Masood, referring to the Supreme Court's recent decision to allow Sharif to return from exile.

Since Musharraf tried, and failed, to sack Pakistan's Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry earlier this year, the military leader has faced mounting and unprecedented opposition within Pakistan: from the judiciary, from Islamic radicals and from the mainstream parties that have long argued that it is unconstitutional for the president to also be Army chief.

"In the short term Sharif's arrest may help Musharraf; in the long term it won't," says Hassan Askari Rizvi, an independent political analyst and former professor of Pakistan studies at Columbia University in New York.

"Sharif's supporters will go on building pressure. The opposition parties will go on agitating. Musharraf will face more criticism and his popularity will continue to decline. His problems are far from solved," says Dr. Rizvi.

Last week, the Supreme Court began hearing legal challenges, filed by Musharraf's opponents, to his dual role as president and Army chief.

Last month, the United States, which regards him as a key ally in the war against terrorism, forced him to back down from imposing a state of emergency.

His government is also under attack by militants who are believed to have masterminded last week's suicide bombings near the Army headquarters in the city of Rawalpindi that killed 25 people, including staff of the main intelligence agency.

Amid all this, by Oct. 15, Musharraf will try to get reelected by the national and provincial assemblies.

Nawaz Sharif: An unlikely hero

Sharif, who led Pakistan twice in the 1990s, was toppled in a bloodless coup by Musharraf in 1999 and sentenced to prison on charges of corruption that had long dogged his leadership. But his sentence was commuted in 2000 in a deal brokered by the Saudi royal family. On August 23, Pakistan's Supreme Court ruled that he could fly home.

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