As someone who returned to Pakistan after an absence of nearly six years, I found the army more unpopular than I remember it being in the twenty years that I have covered Pakistan. Wherever I went, whoever I talked to, I heard the army reviled. Even the handful of Pakistanis who continue to believe that Musharraf has been good for the country support him personally rather than military rule in general.

Pakistan’s problem is that the army is virtually its only real institution of governance. The judiciary has been contained to such an extent that more than half the judges have been replaced by Musharraf’s handpicked flunkeys. The executive has played so subservient a role that Musharraf has been in total charge. And, political parties have been weakened by exiled leaders and elections held under the control of a military dictator.

Weakened or not, it is political parties and free elections that Pakistan needs if it is to solve its grim problems. Musharraf’s most remarkable achievement has been that he succeeded in convincing the Americans that he was their best bet in Pakistan. Without him, he made them believe, there would be a descent into jihadi terrorism and chaos. The truth is that under Musharraf that descent has happened. Balochistan, Swat and Waziristan all seem to have slipped out of the Pakistan army’s control and in cities like Lahore and Karachi there are shadowy groups whose raison d’etre is Islamist violence. These groups have links with the Pakistani army and the ISI as well as natural links with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and the violence filters into even the rarified atmosphere of Lahore’s drawing rooms.

... contd.