Alone in his labyrinth

Even after declaring himself civilian president of Pakistan and getting an endorsement from India’s national security adviser to the effect that New Delhi considers him Pakistan’s ‘elected’ leader, Pervez Musharraf remains a general at heart. Since his command post is intact and his intelligence machinery has not reported his rout to him, Musharraf continues to insist that he faces no political crisis.

If only the western media would stop reporting bad things, he told Newsweek’s Lally Weymouth last week, things in Pakistan would be as stable as they have been since he took power in the 1999 military coup.

An opinion poll conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in November showed that Musharraf’s approval ratings in Pakistan have sunk lower than those of President Bush in the United States. Sixty-seven per cent of Pakistanis want Musharraf to resign immediately whereas 70 per cent believe his King’s Party (the Pakistan Muslim League-Q) does not deserve re-election. Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), with 30 per cent support, emerges as the single largest party in Pakistan’s multi-party system.

Instead of facing the facts, Musharraf’s spokesman has turned around and made the absurd argument that a poll of a few thousand people cannot represent the views of 160 million Pakistanis. Until a year ago, the IRI polls showed Musharraf as quite popular in the country and at that time none of his supporters questioned the validity of opinion polling methodology.

The unavoidable truth is that Musharraf’s political support in Pakistan has almost evaporated. Even after the official withdrawal of the state of emergency, Pakistan’s ruler is virtually ruling by the strength of the state, not on the basis of his personal credibility.

There is bad news even for Pakistan’s permanent institutions of state in the latest IRI poll. The Pakistan Army has long been the most respected institution in the country and it enjoyed a favourable rating of 80 per cent in IRI’s polls over the last several years. In the most recent polls, the army’s rating first dropped 10 points to 70 per cent and now stands at 55 per cent — a further slippage of 15 percentage points.

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