NYT : For Musharraf, Reduced Power as the President

For Musharraf, Reduced Power as the President

By CARLOTTA GALL and JANE PERLEZ | November 29, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 28 — A day after resigning as army chief, Pervez Musharraf will be sworn in as a civilian president on Thursday, leaving him with vastly reduced powers and Washington with a far more complex Pakistan to deal with in its fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Bowing reluctantly to pressure at home and abroad, Mr. Musharraf, 64, relinquished his military role in a somber ceremony on Wednesday, ending eight years of military rule. He turned over control of the army to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, 55, a former head of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.

The move sets up the potential of competing power centers in Pakistan, with an army chief separate from the president and the recent return from exile of the country’s two main opposition leaders. That is likely to complicate Bush administration antiterrorism policy here, something officials in Washington were hoping to avoid, and one reason they supported Mr. Musharraf for so long.

Senior army commanders grumbled increasingly in recent months that Mr. Musharraf was so engrossed in his own political survival that he had become distracted from battling the country’s spreading insurgency, Western military officials said.

Though finally stepping down as army chief, he is likely to retain much of his old power as a civilian president, fortified by his emergency decree on Nov. 3, and loyalists he chose at the top of the military, according to Pakistani officials and analysts.

But in fairly short order, Mr. Musharraf, who plunged the nation into political turmoil with his emergency decree and has been a sometimes frustrating partner in Washington’s fight against terrorism, will become a diminished figure, they said, a civilian president in a country where traditionally the power lies with an elected prime minister, or the military chiefs who have overthrown them. Mr. Musharraf came to power in such a coup.

Though General Kayani is considered loyal to the president, the real levers of power will pass to him, and he is believed to favor removing the army from the center of politics, they said. “Kayani is loyal to Musharraf, but also to Pakistan,” one Western military official said.

And as much as Washington has supported Mr. Musharraf, having a chief of the army on the job full time is a change likely to be welcomed. Bush administration officials have already praised General Kayani as someone they can work with.

General Kayani, an infantry commander and a graduate of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, which he attended in 1987 and 1988, has been described by Western diplomats and military officials as well liked and by far Pakistan’s most capable commander.

He has already played a prominent role in cooperating with the United States. He was promoted to full general and made vice chief of Army Staff in October. He immediately visited units serving on the front lines in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and said that sorting out the difficulties plaguing western Pakistan was a priority, a Western military official said.

Even with his new oath of office, Mr. Musharraf will confront considerable political challenges. Before giving up his army post, he transferred the power to lift the de facto martial law to the presidency in a decree last week, and so any decision to lift it remains firmly in his hands.

He continues under intense pressure to rescind the decree he used to suspend the Constitution and appoint a new Supreme Court. The decree has been criticized by opponents and Western diplomats as a blatant move to have his recent election as president confirmed.

Mr. Musharraf is also under pressure to free the senior lawyers and judges who declared his emergency decree illegal and remain under house arrest. Once freed, they are likely to resume their campaign against him.

Not least, with parliamentary elections set for Jan. 8, he will also have to deal with two political opponents who are freshly back from exile, the former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the man he overthrew in a coup in 1999.

Both politicians have called for Mr. Musharraf’s resignation and for changes in the Constitution to curb the president’s powers over Parliament. As leaders of Pakistan’s largest political parties, either could head the next government as prime minister, perpetuating their power struggles with Mr. Musharraf as president.

While the military under General Kayani is likely to support Mr. Musharraf as president, it is unlikely to intervene to save him in further political tests of will, said a former general and political analyst, Talat Masood.

One indication of the mood is a letter that 20 former generals, air marshals and admirals, including Mr. Masood, sent this week to President Musharraf calling on him to resign as head of state as well as chief of the army.

They called on him to lift the emergency and restore the Constitution, withdraw curbs on the news media and release political prisoners. Imposing the emergency as chief of army staff was bringing the armed forces into disrepute, they said.

“The actions he is taking are really detrimental to the state,” Mr. Masood said. They had encouraged other countries to interfere in Pakistan’s affairs, specifically Saudi Arabia and the United States, in a way they never had before, and caused Pakistan to lose international respect, he said. He also criticized Mr. Musharraf for suggesting that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would not be safe if he were not in power, which he said was simply untrue.

One of the hardest things for Mr. Musharraf now may be to stop giving the commands.

“He’s the one who wants to sit in the driving seat,” said Pervaiz Elahi, who served as chief minister of the Punjab under General Musharraf. “As commander in chief and president, I still see him as controlling the army for five years,” he said.

He added that he did not think General Kayani would seek to change anything. “Kayani is a person who just goes by the book,” he said.

Though no longer in control of the army, Mr. Musharraf will retain some levers of influence within the military and the intelligence services, like his personal relationship with Gen. Nadeem Taj, the head of the Inter-Intelligence Services, officials said.

Yet other officials said that even with the extra powers given to the president in recent years, such as chairing the National Security Council, real power resides with the army chief. Unlike the American system, a civilian president in Pakistan is titular head of the armed forces.

“By the law of inertia he will continue to have some hold of the army,” said I. A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. But he predicted that during the coming months Mr. Musharraf’s influence would diminish. “He will still have ears in the army, but he will not be able to dictate to them,” Mr. Rehman said.

Much depends on who forms a government after parliamentary elections, because military appointments, among other things, technically reside with the prime minister, said Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times.

In a recent interview, Mr. Musharraf indicated that he hoped his supporters in the previous governing coalition would be returned with a majority again, but some of those members complain that his own mistakes during the past nine months have damaged their chances at the polls.

A series of high-handed actions turned Mr. Musharraf from a popular domestic figure and a trophy of sorts for Washington — he signed up to the fight against terrorism immediately after 9/11 — to an embattled leader at home and an increasing embarrassment for the Bush administration.

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” President Bush said he appreciated that Mr. Musharraf had “kept his word” to step down as military chief.

“I also hope that he enhances Pakistani democracy, and taking off his uniform is a strong first step,” he said. “And having elections that are out from underneath the emergency law would be a clear signal that he has put Pakistan back on the road.”

Mr. Musharraf’s friends and critics alike point to his decision to dismiss the chief justice of the former Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in early March as his biggest blunder, one that inexorably led to the imposition of emergency rule on Nov. 3.

“He lost his head and tried to fire the chief justice,” said Humayun Gauhar, a friend and the ghostwriter of Mr. Musharraf’s memoir, “In the Line of Fire.”

Mr. Musharraf was prompted by his fear that the increasingly independent court under Justice Chaudhry would eventually rule against him in his effort to be re-elected as president while he remained as army chief, Mr. Gauhar said.

Because of his military mind-set, Mr. Musharraf failed to calculate, Mr. Gauhar said, that the chief justice would mount a popular movement of lawyers against Mr. Musharraf.

“Asking the chief justice to retire was a command,” Mr. Gauhar said. “I don’t think the refusal was ever in his scheme. A civilian would always keep that possibility in mind.”

The firing of the chief justice brought out a latent public dissatisfaction with military rule. Mr. Musharraf’s refusal to give up his military post became the focus of the opposition and obscured many of his earlier achievements, his supporters said.

When he seized power in 1999 and ousted Mr. Sharif, the former prime minister who returned to Pakistan last weekend, Mr. Musharraf was seen as a welcome newcomer who had the ability to clean up the pervasive corruption in Pakistan’s politics. He described himself as a modernizer. He encouraged the opening of independent television stations, and freed up the statist economy.

Born in India in 1943, he came to Pakistan as a refugee at partition in 1947. That status made him an outsider to the feudal society that had produced most of the nation’s rulers.

In the beginning of his rule, he moved swiftly against corruption, said Farook Adam Khan, who served then as prosecutor general for the National Accountability Bureau. But after a year, the general switched gears, Mr. Khan said, stopped pursuing corruption cases and acquiesced to the religious parties in his coalition over various efforts at reforms.

Mr. Musharraf’s supporters say that removing his uniform may come just in time for the president to regain some of his standing.

“As a president without uniform he will help us in the coming elections,” said Mr. Elahi, the former minister who is touted as a likely prime minister if his pro-Musharraf party retains majority.

Carlotta Gall reported from Lahore. Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad. Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.