WASHINGTON, Aug 12: Pakistan’s ruling coalition may not succeed in impeaching President Pervez Musharraf because the army will not like a former chief to be impeached, observes the official US radio, Voice of America.
It quotes Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert with a US think-tank called the RAND Corporation, as saying that the army is not too fond of President Musharraf for his more controversial actions, but it also wants to avoid any messy proceedings that could smear the army’s reputation.
“The army is in kind of a pickle. It does not want to defend Musharraf,” she says. “But it also does not want its institutional equity to be dragged through the mud, when it is already down and out. So, I seriously doubt that they are [the government] going to get the numbers for an impeachment.”
Ms Fair, who has authored several books on Pakistan and speaks Urdu and Punjabi languages, believes the army will communicate to the government its discomfort with the impeachment move “one way or the other. And I think the army is going to be pretty active in subverting an impeachment”.
Teresita Schaffer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia, tells VOA that “an impeachment could force the army and the one-time general (Musharraf) back into each other’s arms.”
She says that while the army does not want to stick its neck out any more on Mr Musharraf’s behalf, it may not allow him to be impeached either.
“At what point, and with what combination of provocations, have things reached a point where the military leadership will say, ‘You know what, this is not working, we are going to have to go back to our old way of doing things’.”
VOA notes that the bid to impeach the president raises two seemingly contradictory questions: What took the coalition government so long to make what would appear to be a popular political decision? On the flip side, why move against a president who is, for all intents and purposes, effectively devoid of power?
Ms Fair of the RAND Corporation says the Pakistan People’s Party, the senior partner in the ruling coalition, has been more willing to cut deals with the president, particularly because such bargaining won an effective legal immunity for party leader Asif Zardari.
“The very things that got it (the PPP) and also Nawaz Sharif so many votes are the very things that it is disincentivised from moving on,” Ms Fair says. “It does not want to restore the judges. It really does not want to impeach Musharraf because it made deals with Musharraf. And the National Reconciliation Ordinance, of course, is the basis that absolves Zardari from so much from the alleged, and probably likely, wrongdoing.”
Ms Schaffer believes it is very likely that Mr Sharif’s patience wore out, and he threatened to pull out of the ruling coalition, unless his demand for impeachment was met. But, she adds, another power-sharing deal might have been worked out.
“If there were a deal in which Zardari got to be president and Nawaz got to be prime minister again, how would that work? You know, on one level, it sounds like the basis for a concordat,” she said. “At another level, it sounds like a nightmare.”
VOA defines two scenarios: President Musharraf could pre-emptively resign. As president, he also retains the power to dismiss the parliament. But most analysts believe that would be a huge misstep that would only accelerate his impeachment.
“The wild card remains the military,” says VOA, adding that it will play a key role in determining whether the move to impeach the president succeeds or fails.
