Word: musharraf
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...civil war, Pakistani security services nurtured the Taliban and shoehorned it into power, ensuring that Afghanistan was ruled by a client of Islamabad. After al-Qaeda struck the U.S., Pakistan's key ally demanded support for a military campaign to oust the Taliban, the hosts of Osama bin Laden. Musharraf tried to bridge the gap by urging the Taliban to give up bin Laden and his organization. When that failed, Pakistan was forced to support the U.S. - or at least, not stand in the way of its assault on Afghanistan...
...Musharraf's personality, however, that explained either his rise to power or his demise. His bloodless coup was not the product of some megalomaniac instinct on his own part; Musharraf was acting as the representative of a military institution whose leadership perceived itself to be under attack from a civilian government it viewed as corrupt and inept. That same institution had governed Pakistan for much of its history, and it was as head of that institution, and in consultation with its top echelon, that Musharraf ruled. It was only when the military leadership opted to retreat from running the government...
...military has opted to retreat from running the government in the face of overwhelming public opposition to Musharraf amid economic turbulence and mounting pressure from the West over Pakistan's role in enabling the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. It leaves the job of governance to a cast of political leaders for whom the military brass holds a well-established contempt, but nobody doubts that if the military's red lines are crossed, it always has the option of installing a new man in khaki. The military may have already signaled the limits on acceptable civilian authority last month, when Prime...
...brink of war. Still, so dismal had Pakistan's outlook been after a decade of the self-serving political duopoly of Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League, that many in the West and in Pakistan's urban middle classes saw Musharraf as a harbinger of stability and progress. But 9/11 and what followed ushered in a crisis from which the general never fully recovered...
...urban middle class was happy to back Musharraf against domestic extremists, and they applauded his initiatives to challenge the influence of conservative Islam in education as well as the liberalization of the Pakistani media that had occurred on his watch. But the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan quickly became highly unpopular at home, and the buildup to the war in Iraq increased the alienation of broad sections of Pakistani society from Musharraf's alliance with Washington...