He had stayed too long, as dictators do. He considered himself “indispensable”, even as his powers ebbed and support vanished. But Pervez Musharraf, an army coupster turned army-backed president, made a dignified exit on August 19th. In a cogent hour-long address, televised live and delivered with few notes, Musharraf defended his nine-year rule. He denied the charges that the ruling coalition, led by the Pakistan People’s Party, was about to impeach him with, accusing it of pursuing a “vendetta” against him. As he spoke, taut with emotion, its supporters were dancing in the street.

Musharraf’s demise had been inevitable since August 7th, when the PPP and its main coalition partner, the Pakistan Muslim League (N), or PML(N), said they would impeach him. A charge-sheet had been drafted, and was to be presented to parliament this week. It included Musharraf’s first seizure of power in 1999 —at the expense of Nawaz Sharif, the PML(N)’s leader, whom Musharraf imprisoned and exiled — and his second last November, when he declared an emergency as a means to get re-elected president.

By stomping to America’s fiddle — for example, in marching his army into the north-west tribal areas bordering Afghanistan — Musharraf won $11.8 billion in American aid, most of it military. But many Pakistanis hated him for it. They reasonably blamed his policies for a Taliban insurgency in the north-west and terrorism all over, including a suicide attack on a hospital in the frontier town of Dera Ismail Khan on August 19th that killed 30 people.

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