KARACHI, July 23: While political observers find it mildly amusing that individuals who frequently rub shoulders with President Gen Pervez Musharraf socially should address him in a public letter and advise him against simultaneously holding the offices of president and chief of army staff, they note with interest that the letter had the intended effect on at least one of the recipients.

Pakistan People’s Party chairperson Benazir Bhutto was quick to grasp what has been described as an olive branch offered by those who, for the most part, formed the ruling group after Gen Musharraf came to power in October 1999 and styled himself chief executive.

Ms Bhutto said on Sunday that she welcomed the initiative of ‘retired Pakistani diplomats, civil servants, intelligence chiefs and military officers’ who asked Gen Musharraf to ‘separate the two offices of the president of Pakistan and the chief of the army staff and to build national reconciliation’.

The letter urges the country’s political parties to learn from their past mistakes and commit themselves to strengthening democratic institutions and traditions to ensure the rule of law and good governance.

“To achieve these paramount objectives, the political parties must exercise restraint and respond positively to any offer of dialogue to make free and fair elections possible.”

In conversations with Dawn, some significant signatories to the letter sounded a note of caution. They were at great pains to assert that political analysts should not read too much into the correspondence whose contents, leaked to the media on Saturday evening, caused a flurry of excitement not only among opposition parties, notably the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-N, but also in the ruling Pakistan Muslim League.

Former information minister Javed Jabbar, reportedly a close confidant of President Musharraf, who was one of the authors of the letter, said political analysts should be inoculated against conspiracy theories that had lately been doing the rounds.

“As far as the letter is concerned, there is nothing more to it than meets the eye,” he said.

His views were echoed by President Musharraf’s close friend Moinuddin Haider, a retired lieutenant-general, who said he and his like-minded associates had no ulterior motive for dispatching the letter to the president.

“I know President Musharraf very well and I am convinced that he will take the letter in the right spirit,” he said. But former ISI chief Asad Durrani said the letter was issued especially for the benefit of political parties.

“Opposition parties should forsake confrontational politics for national reconciliation. And it is important that this comes about before the 2007 elections. Nobody has trust in the present government and elections organised by it are not likely to be fair. For instance, see what happened in the recent Azad Jammu and Kashmir elections,” he said.

According to Senator S.M. Zafar, whose legal expertise has stood the Musharraf government in good stead on more than one occasion, the letter demands that the next elections be held under an interim government, that the chief election commissioner be absolutely independent and that the offices of president and chief of the army staff are separated.

He refused to explain whether he and other ‘friends’ of Gen Musharraf had any input from the president while drafting the letter.

A bit of secrecy also accompanied the release of the letter. The executive director of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency, which provided a platform for consultations that led to the draft of the letter, Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, said the letter was not originally meant to be released to the press.

“It was dispatched to the president, the prime minister and the country’s major political parties. I think one of the parties leaked it to the press. And then we had to, willy-nilly, release it,” he said.

President Musharraf’s spokesman, Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan, refused to comment on the letter. “There is no need for me to comment on it,” he said.

However, sources close to the president said the idea of separating the offices of president and chief of the army staff actually gave expression to President Musharraf’s wishes who, they said, wanted to do this as soon as he could. They added that the letter was released for the benefit of the country’s political parties.

Interestingly, the letter caught the ruling PML unawares and some attempts were reportedly made to get the story killed.