Musharraf Tightens His Grip

When a surprise state of emergency was declared in Pakistan, the first people who poured out into the streets to protest were clad in dark suits and ties. Lawyers, the backbone of the country's secular elite, quickly found themselves being tear-gassed, beaten with batons, and hurled into waiting police vans. The United States offered some rhetorical condemnation, but President Bush is clearly reluctant to move too forcefully against Pakistani strongman Gen. Pervez Musharraf, whom the administration has placed firmly at the center of America's counterterrorism strategy.

Supporters of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto being arrested outside her home.

(Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images)

Musharraf's moves—including suspending the Constitution, shuttering independent TV stations, and sacking many top judges—are a brazen rebuff to Bush's high-profile pledge to spread democracy. The irony is lost on few Pakistanis. "Until a few years back, only the illiterate and hard-liners were against the U.S.A. in Pakistan, but now, a majority of Pakistanis believe that America has double standards about democracy," says Zahid Hussein, who works as a translator at a Karachi publishing firm.

But it is not just whatever credibility remains of Bush's democratization efforts that is at risk. Musharraf's actions have intensified doubts about his ability to hold on to power, as well as about the longer-term stability and political disposition of this nuclear-armed nation. This time, after all, it isn't the hard-liners being attacked in the streets but the moderate forces that America would most like to court. "What is at stake here is the ability of a relatively unified and confident political system to face down intimidation from religious extremists," says Robert Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Islamabad. "The concern we should have is that a different, less strong, and less confident leadership in Pakistan would take the course of appeasing the extremists in a way that would give them a free hand to maintain camps and coordinate terrorist activities far afield. In this case, undermining democracy weakens the counterterrorism effort as well."

Sensitive time. The state of emergency comes at a particularly sensitive time for both Bush and Musharraf. Even as Bush is relying on the Pakistani leader to go after what U.S. intelligence agencies warn is a reconstituted al Qaeda safe haven in western Pakistan, Musharraf has been facing serious challenges from opposition parties, as well as the country's newly assertive Supreme Court.

Nobody was fooled by Musharraf's assertions that emergency rule was aimed at taming a runaway court that was recklessly allowing terrorists to go free. It was clear that Musharraf feared the court was going to try to block him from a second term as president, ahead of parliamentary elections originally scheduled for January. "The whole exercise is aimed at keeping one person in power," says Saeed Rizvi, a young computer engineer in Karachi, who like many Pakistanis offers the comparison to U.S. support for the unpopular shah of Iran before the 1979 coup. "I fear that if the U.S. doesn't desist from its blind support to General Musharraf, Pakistan will turn out to be another Iran, where every ceremony begins with anti-U.S. slogans."

Under pressure, Musharraf did publicly promise to hold elections, although he said the polls could be delayed a month. Mostly, however, it has been a humbling lesson in the limits of U.S. power. "I think we have to acknowledge to ourselves that we have less influence on Pakistan than we believe or that the Pakistanis fear," says Wendy Chamberlin, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

Bush's critics complain that he has overpersonalized U.S. policy by focusing too much on Musharraf. "We need to get on the right side of history," says Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and presidential hopeful. One path could be to send a tough message to Pakistan's military, which helped bring Musharraf to power eight years ago in a coup. Biden suggested last week that Congress could cut off some U.S. military aid, particularly impending sales of F-16 fighter jets, as a signal that U.S. support is conditional.

The other path is to boost Pakistan's opposition leaders, particularly former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who returned last month after eight years of self-exile. After months of trying to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with Musharraf, Bhutto came out last week firmly against his emergency declaration. Pakistani sources say that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Bhutto to "give some more time" to Musharraf, but U.S. officials have also warned Musharraf against cracking down on her supporters. She was, however, put under temporary house arrest Friday to prevent her from leading a protest march.