Pakistan crackdown widens as Musharraf insists emergency rule needed to fight terrorism

He was non-committal about how long the emergency would continue and just said that it would last for "as long as it was an utmost necessity".

Parliament was empowered, he said, to delay elections for a year under a state of emergency.

The news conference in the Prime Minister's House was held under the glaring lights of a host of television cameras, though the prime minister and his aides sitting with him were aware that barring the state-run Pakistan Television, none of the local or international news channels could be viewed in the country because of the government ban on private TV channels.

There is no online edition for the Dawn for Nov. 5, and it appears the paper has been prevented from publishing.

In neighbor and frequent rival India, TheTimes of India called Musharraf's act over the weekend a "coup" and chided the US for having backed his initial seizure of power in 1999, arguing that military rulers are not the answer to Islamist violence.

General Musharraf, by declaring an emergency, has pulled off a repeat of his 1999 coup. The first time, though, he struck against an overwhelmingly unpopular Nawaz Sharif and could carry out his coup without much opposition. Events have undergone a full cycle this time. Sharif's past unpopularity is Musharraf's present burden, while the army's image and morale have plummeted. Pakistan has slipped further into anarchy than it had in 1999.

Washington has stopped short of condemning the emergency, with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice not going beyond "highly regrettable". But it needs to consider what it has bought into (being) by aiding Musharraf. Any effort to stem the jehadi upsurge must have a political side as well, which is why stable democratic rule is so essential in Pakistan. And an emergency imposed by a discredited administration is not going to bring it about. It could, instead, provide a further fillip to Talibanisation. New Delhi needs to watch carefully, not least to prevent Pakistan's turmoil from spilling over its borders into India.

Writing in Britain's Guardian newspaper, Peter Preston says that while the involvement of the US and other outside powers in Pakistan have weakened efforts to establish democratic institutions, most of the blame lies with the dominant role the military plays in the country's politics, and the failure of civilian leaders to reform the state in their brief times in power.

Pakistan's seemingly eternal quest for a settled democracy has to go on. But not, alas, in blind faith. Maybe Ms Benazir Bhutto, recalled from exile after much footsy with Musharraf, is freedom's catalyst at last, maybe not. For the first difficulty here is that everyone, including supreme court judges, carries the taint of the past with them. And the second difficulty is that oscillation as usual, where a politician takes over from a military dictator for a year or three, won't operate now because a disgraced army can't slink back to barracks. It has to stay out there and try to hold the ring.

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