FIRST WAX THE JIHADIS:

STRONGMAN FOR DEMOCRACY (Amir Taheri, December 30, 2004, New York Post)

[I] think Musharraf is right to continue wearing his two hats, at least for some time. Why? For starters, Pakistan is at war.

Sinister forces are at work not only to sabotage democratic development but also to destroy the fabric of the Pakistani state. This is not a conventional war, but an asymmetric, low-intensity, one, waged by terrorists and their allies who can't be easily pinned down and dealt with. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2, last year designated Pakistan as one of three countries (along with Saudi Arabia and Iraq) serving as battlegrounds for his perverted version of jihad. Osama bid Laden confirmed that strategy this year.

In such a war, any nation — let alone Pakistan, which still needs generations before it consolidates its identity — would need to mobilize its resources under a unified command to deal with the enemy.

Yet combining the presidency and command of the army should not exclude checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution. As president, Musharraf would be commander-in-chief of the armed forces in any case. Thus keeping his uniform and army position need not mean anything more than a matter of expediency at a time of war.

Another reason Musharraf is right to combine the two positions relates to the condition of the Pakistani armed forces and security services: Both need to be reorganized and purged of the elements that don't want Pakistan to become a modern democracy.

It is no secret that Pakistan's military, especially its security services, have been infiltrated by jihadists over the past 25 years. It will take many years for a new generation of officers, brought up in a different cultural and political context, to dominate the military and security establishment. The best person to chaperon such a generation is Musharraf, who is probably the only senior Pakistani officer to both understand the problem and enjoy the trust of the younger military.

Finally, Musharraf's decision to keep his two posts may prove beneficial on the basis of the law of unintended consequences. The longer he keeps his uniform, the harder it would be for him to cut a properly political persona.

Had he studied the life of his model, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), more carefully, Musharraf would have known that the Father of the Turkish Republic quickly shed his uniform and transformed himself into a political leader. By keeping his uniform, Musharraf renders the emergence of an army-based political movement that much more difficult. And that, in the medium and long-term, is good news for Pakistani democracy.

Pakistan's opposition parties must understand two facts. First, their nation is passing through the most dangerous phase of its existence.

Second, Musharraf is not, indeed cannot be, understood solely by reference to Pakistan's prior military rulers — Gen. Iskander Mirza, Field Marshall Muhammad Ayub Khan, Gen. Muhammad Yahya Khan and Gen. Muhammad Zia Ul-Haq. I met all those gentlemen on several occasions, often for long conversations. All had a profound, and well-hidden, distrust of the common Pakistani people. Also, they believed that politics was too important to be left to politicians.

Musharraf is different. He is not the scion of feudal families, as almost all his predecessors were. Born in New Delhi into a modest family, he does not despise the common people. Unlike almost all other Pakistani military rulers who claimed Persian, Arab or Turkic ancestry (to distance themselves from their origins in the Subcontinent), Musharraf has no qualms about the ethnic heritage of his forefathers — a heritage shared by a majority of the Pakistani people.

The circumstances that brought Musharraf to power also matter. In a sense, he was faced with a dire choice: Either let himself be murdered by the government of the time, or accept the high command's plan for a bloodless coup.

One more difference: Musharraf is alone among Pakistani military rulers in having submitted himself to elections, thus acknowledging, at least tacitly, that power comes out of the ballot box and not the barrel of a gun.

I may well be proved wrong, but Musharraf seems to me the right man for Pakistan in the right place and at the right time.