Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf will not fail, world powers will not allow it

Anyone who has been reading the papers lately are aware the President Musharraf of Pakistan has had a tough year.

In May there were a series of anti-government marches. One of the largest marches was spurred by President Musharraf’s suspension of Pakistan’s Chief Justice—the suspension was recently reversed. The second anti-government movement was organized by a right-wing alliance of religious parties, “the Muttehida Majlis-e-Amal, or M.M.A., which has become a significant force in Pakistani electoral politics. The alliance’s imposing patriarch, Liaqat Baloch, was standing on a jeep, exhorting his flag-waving supporters" William Dalrymple. The third group was made of members of the now infamous Red Mosque: a revolutionary group that would like to impose Sharia Law on the state.

This has lead many analysts to worry if President Musharraf would be overthrown by a "radical" group. How radical these groups really are I’m not sure. The State apparatus goes to great length to maintain its monopoly on power and nothing scares state institutions more than groups who don’t recognize its authority: remember the extermination of the Black Panthers or Tiananmen Square, China. Both of these groups, especially the Black Panthers, were not a real threat to the state.

With respect to Pakistan I don't believe an overtly religious and anti-Western revolutionary regime will overthrow Musharraf, though not impossible. The United States and other world powers learned a good lesson from the 1979 Iranian revolution: don't underestimate them. More importantly, the stakes are much higher with Pakistan.

Pakistan is a hugely populous state with a large military that is will equipped with conventional and nuclear weapons. It is unacceptable for the United States and its allies to allow Pakistan to fall into the hands of an anti-Western group.

The White House has already made it clear that they will send troops into Pakistan if necessary. “We never rule out any options, including striking actionable targets,” the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said in response to a question, according to a report from Agence France-Presse.

“The most significant assertion about possible US attacks on targets inside Pakistan came from Bush's Homeland Security Adviser Frances Townsend.

Asked why US should not be sending troops inside Pakistan in pursuit of terrorists, she said, ‘There's no question the president has made perfectly clear if we had actionable targets anywhere in the world, putting aside whether it was Pakistan or any place else, we would pursue those targets.’”

I wonder what China's role is? They are the principle weapons suppliers to Musharraf's regime.