Mushy isnt getting any sympathy from western journalists/analysts 
Eric Margolis | Foreign Correspondent : Home
August 20, 2008
PACK YOUR BAGS, MUSH
President Pervez Musharraf’s long goodbye finally ended Monday as he resigned from office, leaving Pakistan awash in political uncertainty and rising violence.
Pakistanis danced with joy in streets at the fall of Musharraf, who ruled his strife-torn nation of 165 million for nine years. Meanwhile, Washington frantically scrambled to find a replacement for its favorite, most cooperative dictator.
I interviewed Musharraf when he first seized power in 1999. My reaction was dismay. I’d known well every Pakistani leader since Zia ul-Haq in the mid-1980’s.
** After the meeting, I said to myself, `Mush, you’re no Zia.’ I found Musharraf a sour little man with no apparent qualities. He did not deserve to lead the world’s most important Muslim nation.**
9/11 turned Musharraf from a nobody into a prime American ally and national dictator. The humiliated Bush administration needed revenge. Though the plot was hatched in Germany and Spain, Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden’s Afghan base was chosen. But the US needed to use Pakistan’s air bases, supply depots, army and intelligence service to invade and occupy Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s then director general of ISI intelligence, Gen. Mahmoud, told me the US threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if Islamabad didn’t allow Washington to take command of its military forces and bases, and wage war on Taliban.
Musharraf gave in with unseemly haste. He quickly rented the Pakistani Army and ISI to the US for $1.1 billion in official annual payments, and billions more in covert CIA payments to top generals, high officials, politicians and journalists. Musharraf ruled as both army chief and Washington’s paymaster general.
Musharraf sent his soldiers and spooks to fight pro-Taliban Pashtun tribesmen along Pakistan’s northwestern frontier, and allowed the US to use Pakistan airbases and supply depots. Without these bases, the US and its NATO allies could not have waged war in Afghanistan. Thousands of Pakistani civilians were killed by Musharraf’s armed forces.
Over 80% of Pakistanis detested Musharraf and branded him a traitor and American stooge for selling out his nation’s national interests in Afghanistan and Kashmir, and for `dissapearing’ some 1,000 Pakistanis at CIA request. The little general was feted in Washington, but his own people hated him. Finally, he was left without any support at home.
Good riddance, say Pakistanis. But what next? The rival leaders of the democratically elected coalition government, People’s Party chief Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the slain Benazir, and Muslim League (N) leader, former PM Nawaz Sharif, are vying to see who will become the next president or prime minister.
Nawaz is better qualified, but Zardari has a bigger following and the mantle of martyred Benazir. Both vow to restore the judiciary purged by Musharraf with US, British and Canadian backing. But Zardari fears reinstated justices may reopen serious corruption charges that have dogged him for decades.
The powerful military watches from the sidelines. Its dour commander, Gen. Afshaq Kiyani, has so far stayed out of politics. But Washington is pushing him hard to become a new military dictator, something few Pakistanis want. The White House was so preoccupied by its failing war in Afghanistan it allowed the Musharraf dictatorship to turn Pakistan into a volcano of anti-western hatred and violence.
Claiming they were fighting for democracy in Afghanistan, the US, Britain and Canada, ended up supporting Musharraf’s ugly dictatorship. Like those other hated Western-backed despots, the Shah of Iran and Egypt’s Sadat, Mush was discarded when he was no longer useful.