Pervez Musharraf could hardly be flattered to think why some people are so eager for him to win Pakistan’s October 6 presidential vote. It’s because he’ll have to step down as armed forces chief before he’s sworn in — as he promised before the Supreme Court decided to let him run again. The general must know how desperately Pakistan’s military needs a full-time commander, especially after he’s spent months too busy fighting for his political life to give the job his proper attention. So Musharraf is widely believed to have chosen a successor: Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the former director general of the military’s powerful spy agency, the ISI. People who have worked closely with him speak highly of his abilities — more highly in some cases than his boss might like. “Kiyani is not only a strong commander,” says a Western military official in Islamabad. “He’s the most competent candidate by far.”

Musharraf’s successor as military chief will need all the skill he can muster — and on several fronts at once. The Pentagon wants him to turn much of Pakistan’s military into a counterinsurgency force, trained and equipped to combat Al Qaeda and its extremist supporters along the Afghan border. As a civilian head of state, Musharraf will need a strong, capable top officer who can revive the fighting spirit of a badly demoralised army.

Extremists have killed more than 200 Pakistani soldiers, and tribal militants have captured more than 250 others as hostages.

Those who know Kiyani say he’s smart, tough, talented — and pro-Western, in the bargain. The son of an army NCO, he climbed rapidly through military ranks. In 2003, when members of the armed forces were implicated in two assassination attempts against Musharraf, the president put Kiyani in charge of the investigation — and applauded the way he got the country’s rival intelligence services working together for a change. “When Kiyani got tough, the problems of coordination disappeared and the agencies started working like a well-oiled machine,” Musharraf recalls in his memoir, In the Line of Fire. Within months Kiyani had unraveled the two plots and arrested most of the participants. He was rewarded in 2004 with a promotion to chief of ISI. Kiyani has earned his boss’s confidence, even serving as Musharraf’s personal envoy in recent talks with Benazir Bhutto.

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