Friday, May 30, 2008
By Tariq Butt
ISLAMABAD: President Pervez Musharraf’s political and diplomatic allies have been maintaining a significant silence at a time when he is being attacked from all sides by his adversaries.
These allies, especially the Pakistan Muslim League and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), have hugely benefited from their alignment with President Musharraf of over eight years.
PML-Q President Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain has gone abroad for his medical check-up. The other top party leader, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, was more concerned about taking on the government for scrapping the Kalabagh Dam project rather than defending the beleaguered president.
A senior PML-Q leader smiled when asked why they had simply abandoned the president and were not coming to his rescue. He promised to call back but didn’t. Some other PML-Q leaders this correspondent tried to contact in order to elicit their response to the renewed onslaught on the president preferred to remain silent.
PML-Q Secretary-General Mushahid Hussain Sayed is also abroad as part of a parliamentary delegation. He has stopped defending Musharraf and has instead been showing reservations over his certain policies.
A large battalion of PML-Q and MQM MNAs, senators and MPAs has preferred not to counter the mounting attack, mainly emanating from the PML-N stalwarts, on the president. “Our defence of the president may not matter much as the support of the Army and Washington to Musharraf will be the real factors in deciding his fate,” a PML-Q leader said. “If they too dump him, he would have to go.”
In the past, senior US officials always made telling remarks whenever they sensed their ally was in deep trouble. These were meant to salvage the president’s position and tell the political leadership that it should forget about getting rid of him in the immediate future. Washington has been silent for quite some time as the president came under increasing pressure.
Even the visit of US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, who was expected to break the lingering logjam to get Musharraf out of the tight spot, had to be called off. The recent meetings of different delegations of American lawmakers with Pakistani leaders have not helped the president either. Rather, during their stay in Pakistan some American senators disparaged President Musharraf.
Amid the silence by the president’s political and foreign allies, his rivals at home are mounting criticism with every passing day. It was this silence or ‘winks’ from some quarters that the PML-N Quaid Nawaz Sharif subjected Musharraf to the severest of attacks the other day.
It had been an enduring standard practice of the MQM supremo Altaf Hussain to aggressively shield the president whenever he was in hot waters. But this time Altaf Hussain has also withheld his public support. Particularly after the induction of his nominees in the Sindh cabinet, he is no more publicly defending the president. Sensing the likely emergence of a dangerous situation, he has now summoned the top MQM leaders to London for an immediate session. :D:D:D
The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) which, after coming to power, was dubbed as a new Musharraf ally has also discarded its policy to go soft on him. Its changed strategy came into light after Asif Zardari termed Musharraf a ‘relic of the past’, standing as a stumbling block between the people and democracy.
However, the federal government’s treatment to the long march of the lawyers, the PML-N activists and others on June 12 will actually expose the PPP’s policy. Musharraf has been “maintaining a deliberate low profile” in the face of escalating attacks. His spokesman Maj-Gen (retd) Rashid Qureshi does keep issuing constant denials and contradictions about the fate of his boss.
It was a common talk in Islamabad’s chattering classes that Musharraf would not be asked by the Army to continue if he said he had decided to bow out. It was also hinted that the premier institution would not allow his “disgrace or humiliation” through impeachment or trial on treason charges as demanded by Nawaz Sharif. It was also being repeated in the capital’s drawing rooms that Zardari was also creating a situation for Musharraf to step down instead of impeaching him.