Pressures Mount on Pervez Musharraf

Consul Negro Pontus has gone to Isloo to seek Perv's advice about how to prolong one's staying power. Dubya is concerned about waning power and going lame this year.

Options to consider:

Put Hillary in and out of house arrest and let Bill frolick all over the outside world
Arrest Alex Rodriguez when he shows up
Get John Edwards a hair transplant and banish him to Soodi Arabia
While it's tempting to fire the Supreme Court, Dubya should leave it alone - after all the SC made him Prez.
Shut down CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, the History Channel, the Food Network, and ESPN. Just keep FOX and the Christian Broadcasting Network on the air.

Beena, it is a good piece as always – with your usual comprehensive overview!

I do not believe the US has a desire to back Musharraf unconditionally or permanently. Without the support of the population or at least their passive acceptance of his rule– he has no credibility, he can not get anything done and is therefore worthless to anybody on the outside.

Mr. Bush is trying very hard to hold on, for now, to the remnants of what was his policy of “be friends with the Khakis, hope they behave internally and can be used as a stick externally”– which has now gone kaput! But he will most likely change his words after the latest envoy provides his “on site” appraisal. Mr. Mushy’s latest flip-flops on “now she’s arrested – now she isn’t!” are more worthy of the circus gimmics rather than any well-thought-out acts of a national leader.

This is not to justify rule by the military anywhere but the problems that Pakistan faces are, perhaps, not going to be easily solved no matter who rules the country. With a violent extremist religious struggle against the country's secular institutions it is not going to be easy to sort matters out - look at how long it took India to solve the crisis in Punjab alone and how many horrors that entailed.

However, it is to be hoped that President Musharraf would come to understand that the best thing that could happen would be for the people to decide what they want and then move from that point onwards. At he very least, he would not have to face the opposition of those who might even end up supporting him if he were to let them have their say. The most powerful armies in the world can run whole nations only upto a point, a fact that, I am sure, the General would have learned about when he was a cadet learning about military history around the world.