Soon we’ll see if Musharraf is a man of his word

When their TV screens suddenly went fuzzy on Saturday afternoon, most Pakistanis felt they had seen it all before. Their country has, after all, spent 33 of its 60 years under military rule. The troops surrounding the TV and radio stations, the phone networks down, the round-up of opponents, the concertina wire across Constitution Avenue blocking off the Presidency, Parliament and Supreme Court . . . all these have been a periodic feature of Pakistan’s politics.

But this time the army chief imposing what amounted to martial law was himself already the President. ‘General Musharraf now has the dubious distinction of being the only man in Pakistan’s history to have suspended the Constitution twice,’ said Husain Haqqani, who has managed to be at various times an adviser to the military, and rival party leaders and former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto.

Unlike previous coups, the main targets of arrest were not political leaders or militants but judges, lawyers and human rights activists.