Musharraf resigning as Pakistani president*

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf announced in a televised address
Monday that he is resigning.

By Paul Wiseman and Zafar M. Sheikh, USA TODAY

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf announced Monday that he will
resign, giving in to intense political pressure and raising questions
about the future of the U.S.-led war on global terrorism.

Musharraf is leaving the presidency before the Pakistani Parliament
throws him out. A coalition of his opponents, swept into power in
February elections, has been drawing up impeachment charges against him
and claimed to have the votes (two thirds of Parliament) to oust him.

In a rambling address on Pakistani television, a solemn Musharraf
defended his record and said he was confident he could have beaten the
impeachment charges against him. But he said he was willing to sacrifice
himself to bring stability to his nuclear-armed nation: "Can this
country afford ay more confrontation? ... Can the country afford any
more economic upheaval?"

But in spite of the fluid developments, Musharraf already had been a
declining factor in Pakistani politics in that he not only was under
threat of impeachment, but also had ceased running the army and belonged
to the party that lost elections, said Dennis Kux, a former diplomat and
now a senior policy scholar at the the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars, in Washington.

"He was already a has been," Kux said during a telephone interview
Monday. "Now, the real challenge is for the coalition parties to agree
on constitutional changes, which probably will reduce the power of
president."

In the past week, Pakistani news media were filled with speculation over
Musharraf's fate — whether he would step down, contest the impeachment
charges or use his power as president to dissolve Parliament. Pakistan's
The Nation newspaper on Monday urged Musharraf to resign: "General
Musharraf must see the writing on the wall. It is time he stopped
blustering about contesting the charge against him, lent an ear to the
saner counseling and quit."

Musharraf, a former army chief who seized power in a 1999 coup, had
enjoyed strong support from the White House, which viewed him as a
reliable ally in the fight against Islamist terrorism. After the 9/11
attacks on Washington and New York City, Musharraf dropped his support
for the fundamentalist Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan and
offered logistical support to the U.S. forces that drove the Taliban
from power.

In his 2006 memoir In the Line of Fire, Musharraf boasted that his
government had turned over hundreds of detained militants to the United
States. He also sent thousands of troops to fight pro-Taliban militants
along the rugged Pakistani-Afghan border.

Critics such as journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of Descent Into Chaos,
maintained that Musharraf was playing a double game all along. They said
Pakistan's intelligence agencies secretly supported the Taliban or at
least looked the other way while Taliban fighters launched attacks from
safe havens in Pakistan against U.S. and NATO troops across the border
in Afghanistan. And on Musharraf's watch, militants have seized power in
tribal lands along the Afghan border and terrorized the nation with
suicide attacks, including the one that killed former prime minister
Benazir Bhutto in December.

The U.S. war on terrorism is deeply unpopular in Pakistan. A June poll
of 3,485 Pakistani adults by the International Republican Institute
found that 71% believe that Pakistan should not cooperate with the
United States in the fight against extremism.

Musharraf was initially popular after overthrowing the elected
government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999. His support
evaporated after he sacked the chief justice of the Supreme Court last
year. Outraged lawyers led boisterous street protests against Musharraf.
Last November, Musharraf declared a six-week state of emergency,
suspending the constitution and rounding up hundreds of his political
opponents.

He lifted the emergency decree in mid-December 2007 and allowed
relatively free parliamentary elections in February this year. His
supporters in Parliament were routed, replaced by an unwieldy coalition
of Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League and Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party,
now led by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari.

Journalist Rashid says it's unclear how the coalition will deal with
Islamist militants after Musharraf's departure. So far, he says, the
elected politicians have been focused on internecine disputes, not a
strategy for dealing with the militant threat.

Wiseman reported from Hong Kong; Sheikh from Islamabad, Pakistan