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WASHINGTON - A growing number of voices in Congress, influential think tanks, and inside the Bush administration are urging the White House to reconsider its open-ended support for embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying his increasingly autocratic rule is impeding fair elections, and his usefulness in rooting out violent Islamic extremists has run its course.
As unrest swept through Pakistan yesterday after the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, US officials said publicly they remain committed to their current diplomatic strategy: encourage Musharraf to hold parliamentary elections as soon as possible, and quietly support his increasingly tenuous grip on power.
Nevertheless, Pakistan analysts across the branches of government say privately that they are weighing the US options.
"It's fair to say that we are in a wait-and-see mode," said a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There are always visions and plans floating around. I don't think we are wiping the slate clean and starting over, but of course the passing of Bhutto is a shock and causing people to take stock."
Michael Krepon, an expert on South Asia at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, said the United States should urge Musharraf to delay elections and appoint a unity government with key opposition leaders, easing tensions until fair elections can take place.
Krepon argued that would introduce real reconciliation and political change, as opposed to swift parliamentary elections which many believe will be rigged to keep Musharraf in control.
"There are stellar choices for a unity government," Krepon said. "You could start with those under house arrest, humanitarians, lawyers, untainted politicians, clean civil servants."
Some current and former Pentagon officials recommend that the US government strengthen its relationship with Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, whom Musharraf hand-picked to serve as army chief of staff.
Kayani met with Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte last month in Pakistan, and has maintained strong ties to the US military, studying at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. American authorities believe that Kayani may one day eclipse Musharraf as the most powerful person in the country.
But others argue that Washington cannot support another military ruler and ignore the groundswell of demands for democratic change. They say that Washington should proceed carefully given that past efforts to influence Pakistani politics have backfired; political leaders that the United States supported have lost credibility at home.
"Pakistan is not a very manageable place and our track record has not been good," said Adil Najam, a professor of global politics at Boston University.
Nonetheless, US policy has a massive influence on the struggling South Asian nation. The recent turmoil in Pakistan has ignited a firestorm in Washington over which direction American policy should take there.
Yesterday, Democratic presidential candidates issued their sharpest criticisms yet of Bush's support for Musharraf.
"You cannot begin to get things in order in Pakistan until you end this tyranny of a single man being able to run the country," Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CBS. New Mexico's governor, Bill Richardson, said if he were president Pakistan would get "not one penny more" of nonessential US aid "until Musharraf is gone."
Two of the Republican presidential contenders, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor, said yesterday that if elected they would follow Bush's policy of giving large amounts of aid to Musharraf, a leader they believe can provide stability and fight terrorism in the nuclear-armed Islamic nation.
"Musharraf has done most of the things we wanted him to do," McCain said in an interview yesterday on CBS. He added that Pakistan "was a failed state before he came to power."
President Bush held the same view when he campaigned for president in 1999. When a Boston television station asked him to name the Pakistani general who had just taken power in a coup, Bush couldn't remember Musharraf's name, but said: "It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country. I think that's good news."
Two years later, Bush and Musharraf met for the first time, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The meeting cemented a new alliance between the two countries.
Bush helped push more than $10 billion in military and economic aid to Pakistan, while Musharraf allowed his territory and intelligence agencies to be used to assist the US-led war against the Taliban - a former close ally of Pakistan. Musharraf also opened critical supply lines to US troops fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.
But over the past year, US officials have begun to doubt Musharraf, who has grown increasingly unpopular and has produced lackluster results in fighting Islamic terrorists inside Pakistan's borders. Musharraf's decision to dismiss the chief of the Supreme Court to preserve his power, and later to declare martial law to suppress rebellion sparked widespread opposition and unleashed massive protests.
"The big picture in Pakistan is we have a guy there who is increasingly unpopular and the more we back him the more unpopular he becomes," said Najam, the Boston University professor. "Just about any political leader at this point - even the religious parties - would do at least as much as he is doing in the war on terrorism. And they will do it for the same reason he is: it is in their interest. He is not doing a great deal anyhow."
But President Bush - so far - is believed to remain loyal to Musharraf, a man he says is struggling to bring Pakistan into a modern, secular era.
"Did the US have too much faith in President Musharraf?" Xenia Dormandy, former National Security Council specialist on South Asia who is currently at Harvard University. "I think he has had enormous faith in himself. Musharraf convinced himself that he is the man to save Pakistan, and the US believed that. Whether he still can or not is an open question."
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
