November 05, 2007	Monday	Shawwal 23, 1428

WASHINGTON, Nov 4: America’s diminishing influence in Islamabad prevented Washington from averting a state of emergency in Pakistan, the US media reported on Saturday.

The emergency was the lead story in all major US newspapers on Saturday, while The Washington Post had two reports on the front page under a seven-column banner headline and a third report inside.

Experts and officials interviewed by these newspapers recalled that in August, a 2am phone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helped pull Gen Musharraf from the brink of declaring a state of emergency.

Two days ago, Ms Rice made a similar plea. This time, the Pakistani president was not swayed. One report quoted Ms Rice as saying that she has had several conversations with Gen Musharraf in the past few weeks — the last one two days ago — in which she appealed to him not to declare emergency. The American Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, had also been exhorting General Musharraf and his top deputies against taking that step, Ms Rice said.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Gen Musharraf’s action required the United States “to move from a Musharraf policy to a Pakistan policy,” building “a new relationship with the Pakistani people, with more non-military aid, sustained over a long period of time, so that the moderate majority in Pakistan has a chance to succeed.”

Other experts described the move as a sharp setback for US efforts to push Pakistan toward democracy, which also calls into question President Bush’s unstinting support for Musharraf despite the general’s growing unpopularity and inability to counter hard-line militants.

Xenia Dormandy, who until last year was the National Security Council’s director for South Asia at the White House, warned that the Bush administration must now start “from the premise that he (Gen Musharraf) is gone, whether the people chuck him out or the military chucks him out. I would be very surprised if he lasts even six months.”

Teresita Schaffer, an expert on Pakistan at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, called General Musharraf’s action “a big embarrassment” for the administration. But she said there was not much the United States could do.

“There’s going to be a lot of visible wringing of hands, and urging Musharraf to declare his intentions,” she said. “But I don’t really see any alternative to continuing to work with him. They can’t just decide they’re going to blow off the whole country of Pakistan, because it sits right next to Afghanistan, where there are some 26,000 US and NATO troops.”

Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the current situation could easily plunge Pakistan into chaos, leading to an increase in violence by Islamic fundamentalists or provoking demonstrations by opposition political parties.

“You could have chaos in the street, or a situation where it would be suicidal for Ms Bhutto to try to participate in the process,” he said, adding, “Either of those scenarios puts the US in a very difficult position.”

“The train is derailed and off the tracks,” said Stephen P. Cohen, author of “The Idea of Pakistan”. “We have to give ourselves a share of the responsibility for this. We placed all of our chips on Gen Musharraf.” At this point, Mr Cohen added: “I don’t think there is anything we can do. We are not big players in this anymore.”

“The coup in Pakistan is a body blow to the administration’s efforts to arrange a shotgun marriage between Gen Musharraf and Ms Bhutto that would have given the appearance of a broadening of Pakistani politics,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and National Security Council staff member now at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center. “Instead of a more democratic Pakistan, we will have a more authoritarian Pakistan. Instead of a more stable Pakistan fighting Al Qaeda, we will have a military regime fighting for its survival.”

Masood Haider adds from New York: The US media and political experts were extremely critical of Gen Musharraf’s decision to impose what they term “defacto Martial Law” in the country and demanded that the Bush administration should ask the military ruler to roll back emergency and hold elections on schedule.

“It’s political power grab” said most analysts noting that the move was essentially to fend off Supreme Court’s decision on his candidature.

Gen Musharraf’s move to seize emergency powers and abandon the Constitution left Bush administration officials close to their nightmare: an American-backed military dictator who is risking civil instability in a country with nuclear weapons and an increasingly alienated public, observed the New York Times.