Planning for a Musharraf in civilian garb
If he steps down as Army chief, Musharraf may find himself newly vulnerable to a hostile civilian politics.
By Shahan Mufti | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 23, 2007 edition
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Islamabad, Pakistan - A newly appointed panel of Supreme Court judges, handpicked by President Pervez Musharraf, is scheduled to throw out the last of the legal challenges to his continued rule Thursday.
The rulings would clear the way for the general to quit the Army and take an oath as a civilian president of Pakistan – as he has publicly pledged he would – for another five-year term.
If he follows the script, President Musharraf will become the first military ruler in Pakistan to quit the Army to become a civilian leader – in itself a testament to the extraordinary challenges the ruler has faced of late.
But it is a move inherently laden with risk and uncertainty. There is no historic precedent to suggest how civil, political, and military forces will react to Musharraf's new placement in the power landscape.
"He thinks he has created a structure in the military and engineered his political party so that both will support him in the future," says Talat Masood, an independent analyst and retired Army general. But there is a "big question mark," he says, over how military and civilian politics will interact with each other, with a civilian Musharraf as a buffer between the two.
While his quitting the Army may placate much of his political opposition, observers say, some others, including an agitated street movement, may remain adamant about seeing the general off permanently. But once he is a step removed from the Army, Musharraf might find himself newly vulnerable in the ring of civilian politics.
Musharraf's decision to quit the Army comes after a year in which the military uniform has become a great liability for the ruler as well as the Army he leads. After the declaration of emergency earlier this month, which effectively brought the country under martial law, Western powers led by the US also decided the general must quit the Army.
"Now the Army needs an interlocutor between the institution and the outside world – the civil politics and international community," say Ejaz Haider, a newspaper editor and former fellow at the Brookings Institution, who focused on the civil-military dynamic in Pakistan. "And they may have decided that Musharraf is the man for the job."
A choice for Musharraf's opposition
The legal hurdles to Musharraf's presidency, which the Supreme Court is now removing, were introduced when a more independent and activist Supreme Court was in place, empowered by popular anti-Musharraf sentiment, and apparently immune to pressures from the executive. Many suspected the court was poised to throw out the Army chief in an unprecedented display of its institutional power, which could have fundamentally altered the historically skewed civil-military power equation.
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