The former Pakistani president has announced his plans to return to politics.
In the spring of 2009, Gen. Pervez Musharraf found himself living in a friend’s spare bedroom in London. Nine months earlier he’d been president of Pakistan, charged with the world’s sixth-largest population and fourth-largest nuclear arsenal. Now he was forced to face more pedestrian concerns. “Should I move outside the city and maybe find something cheaper and bigger, or stay in central London?” Musharraf remembers thinking.
He found a three-bedroom flat off Hyde Park, in an upscale London neighborhood, and settled into unglamorous self-exile. The hard part, he says, is “not having anything to do.” He golfs and plays a weekly game of bridge, usually makes his way around without the trappings of a big security detail, and more or less lives out in the open. (“Even all the delivery guys know where he lives,” a doorman says.) Sitting on his couch one evening in September in a pair of leisure slacks, on the eve of a visit to America to meet politicians and boost his international profile, Musharraf says he doesn’t intend to live this way much longer. He’s been planning an unlikely comeback: after taking power in a military coup more than a decade ago, he wants to win it back through the ballot box. “I call it the call of destiny,” he says.
The 68-year-old’s plan—as he reiterated last week during a stopover in Washington en route to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York—is to return to Pakistan in the spring and contest the country’s 2013 elections. He launched his own political party, the All Pakistan Muslim League (APML), in Britain last year. He’s been campaigning to the Pakistani diaspora and drumming up a political operation headquartered in Islamabad. He’s also been speaking out against the country’s current government, pushing the idea that things were much better with him in charge.
Musharraf resigned the presidency under threat of impeachment, and with angry mobs—led by the country’s lawyers and the man he’d overthrown nine years earlier, Nawaz Sharif—massed below his office window. But he feels vindicated by the problems that have gripped Pakistan since: rising poverty, a sinking economy, growing extremism, a disintegrating relationship with the United States. “As they say, the taste of the pudding is in its eating. And now the people realize that their condition was so good,” he says.
Pakistan’s democratic leaders have failed the country, Musharraf says, and the only answer is help from outside the entrenched mainstream. “There’s a political vacuum.”
This was Musharraf’s justification for staging the 1999 coup that put him in power in the first place. Successive democratic governments had proved so corrupt and inept that even some liberal-minded Pakistanis looked past their constitutional qualms and welcomed the change. Musharraf promised to clean things up and get Pakistan back to a democracy as quickly as he could.
Instead, Musharraf staged an awkward nine-year balancing act between political leader and Army chief. He liberalized Pakistan’s economy, passed progressive reforms, and tried to crack down on corruption and Islamic extremism in the military. But he also changed the Constitution twice to stay in power, stood accused of vote rigging, and provoked a disastrous battle with the courts, sacking the chief justice and setting off the protests that helped push him from power.
Musharraf had a tricky relationship with Pakistan’s political parties from the start, especially the powerful Pakistan Muslim League, whose leader, Sharif, he’d deposed—leading to Sharif’s exile. Even as president and Army chief, he needed to find political support. As Matthew Nelson, a professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, points out, military rulers in Pakistan need some semblance of popular consent. “The military, despite being very powerful in Pakistan, simply does not have enough power to have a lock on the political process,” he says.
The result was the founding, in 2002, of Musharraf’s own party, also named the Pakistan Muslim League (it goes by PML-Q to Sharif’s PML-N). Derided as the “king’s party,” the PML-Q was an uneasy collection of former Sharif supporters and members of Benazir Bhutto’s liberal Pakistan People’s Party. After a referendum to validate Musharraf’s presidency (he was the only candidate on the ballot) and a less-discredited general election later that year, it was apparent that he would need to rely on the same political players he’d said he was out to challenge.
Through the power struggles that ensued, Musharraf seems to have developed an appreciation for popular power. Now he hopes to get some for himself. “I would like to take the people of Pakistan toward me, so that the political leaders, the conventional leaders of Pakistan, are dependent on me because I have the support of the people, rather than me having to depend on them because they have it,” he says. “Leadership is when you don’t have rank and yet people follow you.”
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