NEW YORK, June 2: A leading international news magazine has urged President Musharraf to shed his uniform, send the army back to the barracks and compete in fair elections, as efforts to cling to power would bring no ultimate gain.

“Protests which started in the legal community have expanded to students, journalists and political activists,” said a commentary in the Newsweek magazine, adding that individuals who hardly knew Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry “now see him as a potential saviour.”

The commentary said the conditions persuading earlier dictators to cling to power remain in operation. A major factor is the willingness of the regime’s external ‘props’ to tacitly support Musharraf’s increasingly authoritarian rule. “As long as he abstains from a brutal military crackdown, he can count on the largely studied silence of the United States and the major powers of Western Europe,” said the commentary, explaining that these governments fear that exerting pressure on President Musharraf may lead to the toppling of his regime and the emergence of an Islamist government.

However, the magazine said, there is little or no danger of such a takeover in Pakistan, and President Musharraf has “done little to disabuse Western governments of this useful canard”.

Arguing that Pakistan’s military will not easily let go of the privileges it has accumulated over the decades, the magazine said that successive military regimes have manipulated the West’s fear of Islamists to consolidate their own positions.

Nevertheless, the report stated, President Musharraf’s days as Pakistan’s leader are numbered since the regime was on shaky foundations even before the current protests began. While conceding that it achieved “some economic growth”, the commentary said that the government “failed spectacularly to contain growing Shia-Sunni tensions and violence across the country. It has also grossly mishandled the increasing restiveness amongst the tribal population of Balochistan by resorting to harsh and cruel repression. Finally, the Pakistani military’s quest for ‘strategic depth’ against its age-old adversary, India, has allowed the remnants of the Taliban to regroup.”—Correspondent