Mary Dejevsky: We may yet miss Musharraf

Nothing in his presidency, it might be said of Pervez Musharraf – as of a select band of national leaders before him – became him so much as his leaving it. Deciding to resign rather than face impeachment hardly counts as a noble act. But the dignity with which Mr Musharraf bade farewell yesterday merits a more respectful and considered reaction than it is likely to receive.

In many Western countries, the gut response in liberal intellectual circles could be summarised as "good riddance". In their view, Pakistan's President could never be the civilian politician he tried to pass himself off as after winning re-election last November. He would always be the ambitious army general and chief of staff who snatched power in a military coup nine years ago.

The notion that such a character could ever place the interests of his country above his own was inconceivable. Exchanging his uniform for a civilian suit was no more than a gesture calculated to please. Impeachment, endorsed by a democratically elected parliament, was his entirely justified comeuppance.

At a popular level within Pakistan, Mr Musharraf's chief fault was quite different. A strong leader, someone who undertook to sort out a chaotic political and economic situation, was fine by a majority of voters, whether or not he wore a military uniform. Their complaint was that he had largely failed to deliver at home, while projecting an air of subservience abroad.

The alliance he had accepted with the United States after the attacks of 9/11 boiled down, in the eyes of many, to an acceptance of something akin to client status. Each reported US raid in the tribal areas against Taliban or al-Qa'ida forces was a new illustration of Pakistan's compromised sovereignty. It was not their President's ambition that people could not forgive, but what they saw as the demeaning of Pakistan.

These two opposite perceptions of Pervez Musharraf help to explain how his position became untenable, once impeachment threatened. There was simply no constituency, either at home or abroad, to rally to his cause. Yet every year that he was in power brought a new set of opposing imperatives that had to be weighed against each other and somehow reconciled. Whether it was considerations of civilian and military power, the competing demands of elections and maintaining public order, or the conflicting pressures from post-9/11 Washington and home-grown Islamic militants, Mr Musharraf faced them all. To have remained in power until now and kept Pakistan more or less stable is, itself, an achievement.

You might detect here a sneaking sympathy for Pakistan's President as he finally admits defeat, and you would be right. In access, we journalists enjoy a privilege that we acknowledge all too rarely. We get to meet, and question, political leaders – including heads of state – often at times when they would prefer we didn't: when they are in the bad-news spotlight or under stress. We fancy that we gain an understanding, however limited, of their character.

Mr Musharraf was a military man, and he made no effort to disguise that. His escalating disputes with his Supreme Court exposed an authoritarian side, and perhaps he did not try hard enough to restore democracy. Still, I invariably found him persuasive in trying to explain the circles he had to square. Maybe he tricked us, but I found him more direct than not.

The presidential broadcast he made after 9/11, explaining to his fellow countrymen why they were now to be allied to the United States in its "war on terror" was masterly. But it was also agonising to watch him visibly wrestling with what were clearly conflicting demands of domestic and external security. It was as though he knew that he was sowing the seeds of his eventual defeat; that he was risking not only his political, but his physical survival.

This was a degree of risk that no other member of George Bush's "coalition of the willing" was required to take. Yet Mr Musharraf survived in power the longest. The "war on terror", more particularly the war in Iraq, contributed to the fall from power of every national leader who hitched his star to that of Mr Bush – from Jose-Maria Aznar in Spain, to John Howard in Australia, via the Polish prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. And it was surely a major factor in the resignation of Tony Blair.

With Mr Musharraf's departure – and, as it happens, the withdrawal of the Georgian contingent from Iraq to fight their own war – that coalition, as any sort of viable alliance, is no more. What we have is a United States in the throes of an election campaign that is likely to bring sharp changes in foreign policy, whoever wins, and a reversion to a pre-9/11 pattern of rivalry and instability in Pakistan's immediate neighbourhood.

A quick tour of Pakistan's borders reveals an arc of mostly unrelated turbulence, from resurgent Iran in the west, and an increasingly disorderly Afghanistan in the north-east, to China's westernmost region of Xinjiang in the east. These are all zones of conflict that President Bush and his "war on terror" have helped to activate, but whose consequences Pakistan will be the first to suffer. Then there is India: it comes to something when India can be seen potentially as Pakistan's least troublesome neighbour.

Whoever becomes Pakistan's new president will have many of the same hard choices to make as Mr Musharraf before him, not least in balancing the requirements of internal and external security. In two respects, however, the task should be easier. Washington's post-9/11 preoccupation with the "war on terror", which made Pakistan seem so necessary an ally, is winding down. That will be one less source of outside pressure. And the new president will have a legitimacy that Pervez Musharraf, for all his civilian aspirations, never fully gained. Pakistan's gain, though, is Washington's loss. Any new regional alliance it wants to forge will never be on such advantageous terms.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk