Who would follow Musharraf?

On the list of things that should keep us up at night, Pakistan has to be pretty high. It is a phenomenally unstable state with nuclear weapons. Much as I worry about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Pakistan is currently the country that terrorists would be most likely to get a bomb from.

So I was actually rather reassured to read this piece in The Atlantic which argues that if Musharraf does fall, something which his own increasingly erratic behaviour is making far more likely, he won’t be replaced by some Taliban-lite figure but merely by another unsavoury, gradualist moderate.

“On paper, it looks like a pretty frightening entity. It’s been called one of the world’s most unstable and dangerous states, yet everyone I talked to  – and I talked to a vast array of people – gave me the sense that this place, should Musharraf go tomorrow, wasn’t going to be taken over by radical Islamists or crazy Strangeloveian nukers, but that there would be a kind of grim continuity about the place in terms of policies, in terms of the pursuit of al-Qaeda, more or less along the lines of Musharraf.”