Musharraf: The End
Last March, just after the appointment of a new Prime Minister in Pakistan, I wrote: "So where does this leave Musharraf? On his own, and virtually powerless. Was this the game plan all along? Who insisted he must hang up his army uniform? Who also insisted that he must go ahead with promised parliamentary elections, even after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto? Did his friends in Washington and London know that this is how it would end up?
"The fervent hope in Whitehall now seems to be that he will fade gently into the night. A retirement home already awaits him, I'm told, and he's being encouraged to accept the end of his political career with as much dignity as he can muster."
Which is what he has now done. His time was clearly up, but Pakistan's problems remain. It has a barely functioning coalition government, in which the two main partners share little more than a hatred of Musharraf. Now, I suspect, their hatred of each other will once again take centre stage.
But they have other, rather more important work to do. There is growing instability along the border with Afghanistan, where both the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and Washington are increasingly convinced that Taliban fighters are holed up.
Ever since September 2001, Musharraf was Washington's man. Now that he's gone, there's going to have to be some rapid bridge-building with Pakistan's new leaders, especially Nawaz Sharif, who has little love for Washington.
Pakistan's previous experience of civilian governments has been no happier than its experience of military ones. Neither Nawaz Sharif nor Benazir Bhutto's widower, Asif Zardari, inspire huge confidence in the West, both having been tainted by corruption allegations in the past.
But the government they formed was the result of remarkably free elections held in the aftermath of the assassination of Benazir. Pakistan can now claim to be a democracy again, if an imperfect one. Whether that translates into tangible benefits for the people -- and for the region -- is now the over-riding question.
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