Traditionally, ambitious generals in Pakistan and other banana republics use the alleged misrule and corruption of civilian governments to justify their dissolution of elected parliaments. They then proceed to try their half-baked experiments in the name of 'clearing up the mess' they claim they inherited.

Now, however, we are in the peculiar situation of having an elected opposition that might trigger yet another military intervention. Even by Pakistan's unenviable reputation of decades of direct and indirect army rule, this is a very bizarre state of affairs: here we have a government cobbled together by the ruling junta after a carefully scripted run-up to the elections, and the generals still aren't happy.

The mistake they made, of course, was not to strike a deal with one or the other of the two most popular parties in the country, the PPP and Nawaz Sharif's faction of the Muslim League. Instead, they opted to try and keep both of them out of power. The predictable result is that Musharraf and his fellow generals face the embarrassing possibility of dissolving an assembly that has just started functioning.

Many arm-chair democrats - the ones who hold forth on the antics of the elected representatives they never bothered to vote for or against - profess their disillusionment over the performance of the current parliament and its deadlock over the Legal Framework Order. The daily disruption of proceedings by a vocal opposition shouting 'No LFO, No!' and 'Go Musharraf, Go!' is seen by them as a sorry waste of public funds and parliamentary time that might be better spent in legislating matters of grave importance. They see in these public manifestations of dissent further evidence of their contention that Pakistan is not ready for democracy.

While the raucous proceedings in the National Assembly might well upset those who prefer well-mannered debates in the Westminster tradition, the fact is that what is happening today in the Pakistani parliament goes to the heart of democracy. What is at issue is not a group of shabby politicians agitating for more power, but about the sanctity of the Constitution and who shall exercise the right to amend it. Zia, soon after he took power, once said that the 1973 Constitution was a slim volume he could rip to shreds whenever he chose to. But that document has outlived him and might yet survive his successors.The same democrats who sneer at our elected representatives assert that if Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif could amend the Constitution to serve their purpose, why shouldn't Musharraf? The short answer is that no matter what the motives of past parliamentary leaders, the fact is that they had a two-thirds majority with them. Even though I disapproved then, as I do now, of many of these changes, I accept their legality. The LFO has no such sanctity and that is why it cannot and must not be incorporated into the Constitution without a proper debate and vote. To accept it through military fiat would open the floodgates for all future adventurers to chop and change the much-abused Constitution to suit themselves.

The other dimension of the current political crisis is the difficulty being experienced by the local bodies elected on a non-party basis under Musharraf's famous devolution plan. Now that elected provincial assemblies and governments in place, they are trying to reclaim the powers their predecessors earlier enjoyed, and view the councillors as upstarts.

However, given the political investment made by the military rulers in creating this grass-roots system, Musharraf has a vested interest in keeping them going. All the contradictions many of us had pointed out when this exercise in political restructuring was being planned have surfaced.

Basically, Musharraf's woes started when he insisted on holding a referendum to gain legitimacy, but succeeded in exposing himself as a politically isolated but power-hungry general. He was advised to pursue this chimera by a group of generals who had never voted in their lives, and understood nothing about the political dynamics at work. Having been let down by the King's party in this fraudulent exercise, he persisted in placing all his eggs in the Gujrat Chaudhries' frail basket after the October elections.

But having seen that the emperor wore no clothes, the opposition he had helped create has ganged up against him. Indeed, the coalition government his intelligence agencies have stitched together for him is such a fragile creature that without constant life support, it will go rapidly into terminal decline. The opposition, on the other hand, is probably the most powerful grouping our parliament has yet seen.

Time and again, power has been usurped by uniformed men whose belief in their own abilities to right the country's many wrongs is matched only by their incompetence. Each time they have tried to impose their ill-conceived solutions on a reluctant nation, they have ended up by damaging the system even further. In all these years of failed plans that have ended up in the rubbish-heap of history, it has never occurred to these amateur political masons that they are out of their depth, and really have very little idea of what makes civil society tick.

Many columnists and editorial writers have expressed the view that the legislators now protesting against the incorporation of the LFO into the Constitution were aware of its existence when they stood for elections, and should therefore have no objections to the 28 or so amendments Musharraf wants to insert into the Constitution. They miss the point that once these elected members meet in parliament, the institutional dynamics change, for the sum here is greater than its parts.

But this is what happens when you try and fine-tune the elections and their aftermath to suit yourself. Had Musharraf cut a deal with Nawaz Sharif or Benazir Bhutto, he might have achieved a more stable and reliable government. As it is, Jamali's shaky coalition is very susceptible to blackmail, as is Mehar's provincial government in Sindh.

This is the price Musharraf is having to pay to cling to power. When he decided to allow only graduates to contest, he and his advisers thought they were being very clever by eliminating so many of the old guard from the elections. However, the graduates now shouting 'Go Musharraf, Go!' are as prickly about their powers under the Constitution as their predecessors were.

When Musharraf and his comrades-in-arms were indulging in their favourite pastime of political engineering, their constant refrain was that they were aiming at better governance. Is this truly what they think they have given us?