Re: Musharraf will not be in office by this time next year.
International analysts also believe Mush is on his way out
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\06\13\story_13-6-2007_pg7_18
Doubts grow over Musharraf’s political longevity: US paper
WASHINGTON: American analysts both inside and outside the government are expressing new doubts that President Pervez Musharraf will be able to hold onto power through the summer, according to a report in the New York Sun on Tuesday.
The challenges facing Gen Musharraf have led some analysts in the US intelligence community to begin questioning whether the military will support the current regime for much longer. A Musharraf exit could deal a stinging blow to America in the war on terrorism. “President Bush has lavished the Pakistani leader with arms sales and low-interest loans while keeping mum on his spotty human rights record. The logic has been that the general, who himself came to power in a 1999 military coup, had dismantled his pre-September 11, 2001, policy of supporting the Taliban and would be the best possible option for US interests in Pakistan. But the strongman’s grip on power appears to be loosening, with a number of analysts citing as evidence last month’s showdown inside Islamabad’s Red Mosque … after Musharraf tried and failed to launch a military strike on the building,” the report notes.
According to the newspaper, it is now an open question within the intelligence community whether the order the president gave to storm the mosque was disobeyed or never given. A former Pakistan analyst for the State Department’s policy planning staff, Daniel Markey, said this week that it “was very hard to know” whether officers would follow every order the military receives.
Markey, who left government in January and recently returned from Pakistan, also said it was too soon to say Musharraf’s political demise is a certainty. “There is the potential rosy Pakistan next spring, with some sort of negotiated relationship where the military feel reasonably comfortable with a new civilian government,” he said. “But that is if we get that far. For the chief justice issue crisis, the political debate, the street protests that have been associated with that, people are raising questions about Musharraf’s stability in a way that I have not quite heard before.”
According to another analyst, Spencer Ackerman, within the US intelligence community, and in Pakistan, there’s a growing belief that Musharraf’s days are drawing to a close – and possibly within the next few months. It may be time for the US to face what it’s long feared in the nuclear state: the prospect of chaos, rising Islamism or anti-Americanism that follows Musharraf.
But the hope – among Pakistani military officers and politicians, to say nothing of US diplomats – is that the “increasingly inept and unpopular” Musharraf can be eased out of power while the US slowly distances itself from him, allowing for as smooth a transition as is possible.
Over the past few weeks, US intelligence has started to conclude that Musharraf is on his way out. “It is the sense people have, and it’s been out there,” says Rob Richer, a former deputy head of CIA operations who has met Musharraf personally and long worked with the Pakistanis on intelligence issues. “This is the view of both senior (US intelligence) officials and people who follow the issue closely.” He believes the Pakistani military leader is “looking for an exit strategy.” According to Richer, “He believes his successor has got to be someone who supports the military but it won’t necessarily be someone in uniform. There’s no obvious candidate … At this point, he’s looking for the right person, a right-winger, someone who understands the army.”
According to an unnamed former Pakistani official two Pakistani generals who came to Washington in recent months brought the message that “continuity in policy can be ensured without the continuity of an individual, while at the same time, a democratic process can proceed.” In other words, the US can wean itself off of Musharraf without fear that the US-Pakistani alliance is at risk, and will likely have some kind of election to point to that blesses the result. Not many see the Islamists as able to take control.
