Helene Cooper, Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde at The New York Times are reporting that the U.S. Is Looking Past Musharraf in Case He Falls:
In meetings on Wednesday, officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon huddled to decide what message Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte would deliver to General Musharraf — and perhaps more important, to Pakistan’s generals — when he arrives in Islamabad on Friday.
Administration officials say they still hope that Mr. Negroponte can salvage the fractured arranged marriage between General Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. But in Pakistan, foreign diplomats and aides to both leaders said the chances of a deal between the leaders were evaporating 11 days after General Musharraf declared de facto martial law.
Several senior administration officials said that with each day that passed, more administration officials were coming around to the belief that General Musharraf’s days in power were numbered and that the United States should begin considering contingency plans, including reaching out to Pakistan’s generals. ...
"The military is pretty demoralized right now," said Christine Fair, a Pakistan analyst in Washington. "But what keeps Musharraf in the position he is in with the military is the huge largess from the United States."
Juxtapose that next to Jonathan Schell's Pakistan, Bush and the bomb at Asia Times:
The journey to the state of emergency just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, General Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan's intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global George W Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, "You areeither 100% with us, or 100% against us."
The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented seven demands that a Pakistan that wished to be "with us" must meet. These concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan's Taliban regime, which had long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan and had, of course, harbored Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement to rein in the activities of Abdul Qade Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear arms, who, with the knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely hawking the country's nuclear-bomb technology around the Middle East and North Asia for some years.
Musharraf decided to be "with us"; but, as in so many countries, being with the United States in its "war on terror" turned out to mean not being with one's own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999, was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically fateful additional step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will of a foreign master. In many countries, people will endure a homegrown dictator but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from without, and Musharraf was now courting this danger.
A public opinion poll of Pakistanis in September ranking certain leaders according to their popularity suggests what the results have been. Bin Laden, at 46% approval, was more popular than Musharraf, at 38%, who in turn was far better liked than Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7%.
In October, the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland published a poll taken in September in Pakistan:
Just 44 percent of urban Pakistanis favor sending the Pakistani army to the Northwestern tribal areas to "pursue and capture al Qaeda fighters." Only 48 percent would allow the Pakistan army to act against "Taliban insurgents who have crossed over from Afghanistan." In both cases, about a third oppose such military action and a fifth decline to answer. The poll was conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org in collaboration with, and with financial support from, the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Pakistanis reject overwhelmingly the idea of permitting foreign troops to attack al Qaeda on Pakistani territory. Four out of five (80%) say their government should not allow American or other foreign troops to enter Pakistan to pursue and capture al Qaeda fighters." Three out of four (77%) oppose allowing foreign troops to attack Taliban insurgents based in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Musharraf's current term as president ends today, and he is supposed to take a new oath of office. The Supreme Court has told him he isn't legally allowed to take a new oath of office unless he does so as a civilian. But the Supreme Court is under house arrest.
