Pakistan after Musharraf

PAKISTAN'S president, Pervez Musharraf, survived four assassination attempts, only to be removed from office by his own overweening attachment to power. His complicated relationship with the United States, indeed with modernity itself, was not enough to balance his ambition.

Musharraf announced yesterday that he would resign rather than face impeachment charges he said he would beat, but which would distract the country from its very real economic and security problems. His own fate - a quiet slipping into exile or a criminal trial - is less important than bringing stability to Pakistan, an unsteady nuclear power in a volatile region.

Musharraf took office in a military coup in 1999, then made a risky strategic decision after the Sept. 11 attacks to join the United States in its war against the Taliban. Musharraf's alliance with the Bush administration was unpopular with the Pakistan "street," but resulted in billions in aid.

He presented himself as a reformer, allowing a relatively robust free press, moving to amend the Islamic family laws on rape and adultery, enlarging the academic curriculum at religious madrassas, and even appearing on the "The Daily Show" in 2006 to promote his memoir. He worked to defuse tensions with neighboring India. He often said that the only remnant of his military coup was his uniform - and he shed that in November as he took his third, and last, controversial term as president.

But the seeds of Musharraf's political end had been sown in March 2007, when he violated a basic tenet of democracy by removing the chief justice of the Pakistan supreme court. And over what burning constitutional issue? Whether Musharraf was technically eligible to run for another term. Fearing the ruling would go the wrong way, Musharraf gutted the courts, declared a state of emergency, cracked down on press freedoms and demonstrations, and only stoked the political opposition, enabling the return of his rival, Benazir Bhutto.

When Bhutto was assassinated in December, suspicion landed not just on religious extremists but on Musharraf's government. Now it is Bhutto's party, run by her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, in coalition with the Pakistan Muslim League of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whom Musharraf ousted in the 1999 coup, that has effected his removal. This is democracy, Pakistan-style.

It is good that power has changed hands in Pakistan without violence or another coup. Still, US policy makers can't be naive about the two party bosses who have unseated him. Narcotics and corruption pervade the land. Islamic militants are gaining strength in territories bordering Afghanistan. Pakistan is too dangerous to be allowed to fail.