July did not begin well for President Musharraf. First there was the sudden eruption of suicide bombings in the North West Frontier province. These killed scores of government troops and severely wounded Musharraf's interior minister, Aftab Sherpao. Then, on July 6, came an assassination attempt against Musharraf himself "“ the latest in a series which has included two successive bomb attacks on his convoy, and which left 14 of the general's entourage dead, but did not touch their target.
Then there were the lawyers. Although rather less deadly than the jihadis, Pakistan's barristers were in the process of mounting the most serious political challenge to the president since he seized power in 1999. They did this by holding huge demonstrations for the return of democracy. Left to their own devices, the lawyers tended to march in orderly crocodiles beneath their brollies, chanting slogans such as "Save Judiciary, Save Pakistan". But when attacked by Musharraf's riot police, they showed they could give as good as they got. Pakistanis have been glued to their TV screens over the last few months watching the country's barristers, covered in blood, hurling their brollies and banners at the stick-wielding riot police and generally displaying rather more machismo than is usually associated with the legal community.
The catalyst for this sudden revival of Pakistan's pro-democracy movement was the recent attempt by Musharraf's government to remove from office the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Summarily charged with corruption and misusing his position for personal gain, Iftikhar Chaudhry was grilled by a phalanx of generals, then kept for several days under house arrest, with his phones and mobiles cut. The excuse given was that the chief justice had procured a top police job for his son and received favours, including, allegedly, helicopter rides and "a pack of Sensodyne toothpaste".
There were few, however, who bought this version of events, especially given the blind eye Musharraf's regime had been happy to turn to other reported abuses "“ such as embezzlement, nepotism and property fraud "“ by other judges. Most commentators in Pakistan believe Chaudhry was sacked on trumped-up charges as a result of his willingness to investigate suspicious land deals and block the sale of a state-owned steel mill, both of which allegedly benefited army personnel. Most fatal of all, however, was his stated opposition to Musharraf continuing as president without removing his uniform. After months of protests, the chief justice was eventually reinstated by the Supreme Court on July 20, and cleared of all charges. In addition, his peremptory suspension was ruled as "illegal and without lawful authority". It was a huge humiliation for the president, damaging his already battered authority, and greatly reducing the chances of him being returned to power in the forthcoming elections. It also raised the central question of whether Pakistan's Supreme Court would now allow him to continue as both president and army chief of staff.
Yet less than a mile from the promenading lawyers, and at that point largely ignored by the media, lay a potentially far more serious and direct threat. Outside the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, a group of fearsome burqa-clad women were gathering, holding long bamboo canes. They stomped around the perimeter walls of the mosque compound, shouting for the imposition of full sharia law, an Islamic revolution "to destroy the failed political system in Pakistan, which has betrayed the country's poor" and the immediate closing down of all "dens of vice".
Early jokes in English-language newspapers about these "chicks with sticks" gave way two months later to real fear and anger as the women began sending vigilante squads to kidnap brothel owners, harass prostitutes and threaten owners of music and video stores. The security forces at that point did nothing to stop them. It was the ultimate symbol of one of the West's most consistent complaints against Musharraf: his reluctance to take on the radical religious right.
Sheltering inside the complex of mosques and madrasahs "“ one for men, the other for women "“ were rumoured to be dangerous jihadis from Lashkar-e-Toiba and the supposedly defunct Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of Muhammad), both of which were affiliated with Al-Qaeda and had a track record of kidnapping and beheading foreigners. So when I visited, I took the precaution of arriving with a friend. Yusuf is the owner of Islamabad's best bookshop, and had known one of the two militant imams who ran the mosque, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, since he was a left-wing student activist.
We were led inside the complex to an office by two men with walkie-talkies and a third with a Kalashnikov. Inside were more young men with AK-47s slung over their shoulders or strapped to their chests. On one side of the room, a line of bearded men tapped away in Arabic and Urdu on desktop computers.
To my surprise, Abdul Rashid Ghazi looked more like an old hippie, in round 1960s granny specs and a knitted hat, than an Islamic radical. As we sipped tea, Ghazi described his campaign to get rid of Musharraf's elitist, pro-American government and replace it with a more just and equitable Islamic regime. He spoke eloquently, and surprisingly persuasively, in fluent English. "After 9/11, Musharraf made an abrupt change in our policy that was not supported by the people of Pakistan," Ghazi said. "The attack on Afghanistan caused a lot of resentment, and in the name of the war on terror many innocent people were killed, not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq. How can you win hearts when killing so many innocent people?"
He shrugged: "You cannot win hearts through force. You can control bodies "“ you can even torture them "“ but ultimately you cannot win that way. The US is spending trillions of dollars attacking Muslims. If they spent only a fraction of that helping us "“ improving our lives and health, alleviating poverty "“ I for one would have loved them. But Bush is a foolish man. He has opted for a path that has only negative results."
He was equally unimpressed by Bush's ally Musharraf: "In the name of "˜enlightened moderation', vulgarity has been promoted by this government "“ women running in marathons, brothels, pornography in CD shops"¦ All these things have been accumulating in the minds and in the hearts of the people of Pakistan. And now their hearts are boiling."
I asked Ghazi about Musharraf's future. "We want our rulers to be honest people," he replied pointedly. "But now the rulers are living a life of luxury while thousands of innocent children have empty stomachs and can't even get basic necessities. Musharraf is following his own agenda; he is not sincere to the Americans and is not sincere to his own people. There is a lot of frustration now in Pakistan. All you need is a spark." And do you think you will provide that spark? "If they attack us, we are ready for them. We are all armed and we will fight back, sacrifice ourselves for the next generation. Real change could come in six months if they attack us. It will give the momentum needed for revolution. Many of our students are from the frontier and the tribal areas, and their people will rise up to avenge them. The agencies here know this, and they are afraid of the consequences."
Six weeks after he spoke those words, Ghazi was dead. In early July, after several months of apparently ignoring the provocations of the radicals in the mosque, Musharraf's government laid siege to the Lal Masjid after the women from the mosque kidnapped six Chinese women from an Islamabad "massage parlour". For Musharraf, spurred on by an angry Chinese government, this was the last straw. Ten days later, special-forces commandos attacked the mosque complex, backed by hundreds of troops and riot police in heavily armoured personnel carriers. The Pakistani capital had turned into a war zone.
Ghazi was killed in the basement of the building on the morning of July 11. Officially, more than 100 militants and at least 11 special-forces commandos were also killed, though the local media gave much higher figures.
Ghazi had predicted that a bloody end to the siege would help speed an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. "We have a firm belief in God that our blood will lead to a revolution," he said in a statement issued three days before his death. It remains to be seen whether he is right.
President Pervez Musharraf was born in the old city of Delhi in 1943, four years before the creation of Pakistan. Both his parents were well-educated university graduates, and secular-minded: unusually for Muslims, both were keen ballroom dancers, while Musharraf's mother loved music and played the harmonium.
In 1947, amid the carnage of the partition of India, the British finally quit the subcontinent after 350 years, bringing the raj to an end. As Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims murdered each other in a horrifying sectarian apocalypse that left 14.5m uprooted and more than half a million dead, Musharraf's parents emigrated to the new country of Pakistan. This was originally intended as a safe secular homeland for the subcontinent's beleaguered Muslims. Here the Musharrafs settled with their four-year-old in a small two-room flat in the coastal city of Karachi.
Musharraf's father managed to secure a job in the Pakistani foreign ministry as an accountant, and was soon sent to the newly opened Pakistani embassy in Ankara. It was here that the young Pervez spent his early years, growing up speaking fluent Turkish, but with only limited literacy in Urdu. As Musharraf's autobiography, In the Line of Fire, makes clear, the secularising and anti-clerical father of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, remains a great hero of his.
Musharraf entered the Pakistan military academy at the age of 18, and then served both in the artillery and in the commandos, where he was chosen to lead the elite Special Services Brigade. He rose quickly through the ranks, fighting in both of Pakistan's wars with India. Even though he was not especially religious "“ in his memoir he says he had a beloved dog named Whiskey, something doubly unthinkable for an orthodox Muslim "“ he continued to be promoted by General Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator who moved both the army and the country towards a more overtly Islamic identity.
It was Zia who was responsible for initiating the fatal alliance between the military and the mullahs that led to the use of Pakistan's Islamic radicals in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Their recruitment was controlled by Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and jointly funded by the CIA and Saudi intelligence. This began a process whereby the ISI would become the paymasters of myriad jihadi groups intended for deployment first in Afghanistan and then in Kashmir, where Pakistan had a long-running territorial dispute with India. Mosques such as the Lal Masjid were turned into recruiting centres for potential mujaheddin, and places where the intelligence services could liaise with young radicals. It was a role such mosques never fully relinquished.
The Pakistani army saw the jihadis as an ingenious and cost-effective means of dominating Afghanistan "“ something they finally achieved with the retreat of the Soviets in 1987 "“ and bogging down the Indian army in Kashmir. While the ISI may have believed that it could use jihadis for its own ends, to fight proxy wars for it at low cost and low risk, the Islamists followed their own agendas, and over the last few years they have brought their struggle onto the Pakistani streets and into the heart of the country's politics. Ironically, it is groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed, who were originally nourished by the military, that have now turned their guns on their creators: the monster has now turned its full strength on Dr Frankenstein.
This policy of Zia, conceived with the aid and financial assistance of the US, would of course eventually backfire not only on the Pakistani military but also on the jihadis' US paymasters. In the form of Al-Qaeda, which was conceived in the chrysalis of jihadi groups incubated by the ISI in Peshawar, the jihadis would change the course of modern history. Three years before 9/11, in 1998, Al-Qaeda attacked the US embassies in Africa and issued its founding fatwa, declaring that "to kill the Americans and their allies "“ civilians and military "“ is an individual duty for every Muslim, in any country, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [in Mecca] from their grip". The same year, thanks to the patronage of the then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, Musharraf was promoted again, this time to become a full general and army chief of staff.
In 1999, under Musharraf's leadership, and probably as a strategy of his own devising, troops were sent over the border into Indian Kashmir at Kargil, in an entirely avoidable confrontation with Pakistan's much larger and more powerful nuclear-armed neighbour. As a direct result of this, amid the tensions that followed the bloody Pakistani retreat from Kargil weeks later, Sharif dismissed Musharraf. Unwilling to step down quietly, the latter struck back by seizing power in an efficiently managed and wholly bloodless military coup on October 12, 1999.
The fact that many Pakistanis celebrated the coup is a measure of the degree to which they had been failed by their democratic politicians. Benazir Bhutto was a particular disappointment. Although she had come to power on a wave of public sympathy following the judicial murder of her father by General Zia, she soon proved to be spectacularly inept as a ruler, failing to pass a single piece of legislation in her first term. She also gained a reputation for serious corruption. At the height of her rule, the monitoring organisation Transparency International named Pakistan as the second most corrupt country in the world. Bhutto and her husband stood charged with plundering the country to buy estates and town houses in Europe. There were reports of government-owned Hercules planes taking antiquities to the various Bhutto residences, and cases were filed in Pakistan, the UK, the US and Switzerland to investigate her secret bank accounts. It was hard to imagine her successor, Nawaz Sharif, making as big a mess of things, but he quickly managed to do so and the economy teetered towards collapse.
Musharraf seized power promising to bring "true" democracy, law and order, and economic revival. The country's unusual stability and its dramatic economic recovery have been the keys to his political survival. Under Shaukat Aziz, a former vice-president of Citibank and now Musharraf's prime minister, Pakistan is enjoying a construction and consumer boom, with economic growth of around 8%, and one of Asia's best-performing stock markets. The effects can be seen everywhere: in 2003 there were fewer than 3m mobile-phone users in Pakistan; today there are nearly 50m. Car ownership has been increasing at roughly 40% a year since 2001; foreign direct investment (FDI) rose from $322m in 2002 to $3.5 billion in 2006.
If the economic revival made him popular at home, Musharraf's place in the wider world was cemented by his prompt and unambiguous support for the US after 9/11. Reversing a decade of Pakistani foreign policy, he abandoned the Taliban to their fate and embraced Bush's "war on terror". By 2007, according to his own estimate, 672 Al-Qaeda members had been rounded up and arrested in Pakistan; 369 of these were then handed over to the US.
Amazingly, Musharraf took much of Pakistan's political class with him in this decision and, despite his support of Bush, succeeded in forming an alliance with the Pakistani religious parties. In 2002 this alliance swept to power in provinces bordering Afghanistan, in affiliation with the military government. Although the elections were denounced as rigged, liberals have remained largely sympathetic to Musharraf, while most of the country's mullahs, normally outspoken, have remained relatively subdued.
It was Musharraf's ill-advised and illegal treatment of the chief justice that finally broke the eight-year status quo. It has proved to be his biggest single mistake, alienating the liberal half of the country at exactly the moment he most needed their support against the Islamists.
Since the attack on the Red Mosque, things have become much worse. There has been a formal declaration of war against Musharraf's regime by Al-Qaeda, which has pledged to target the general, his government and army in revenge for the deaths of the "martyrs" of the mosque. There has been a further wave of suicide bombings, killing nearly 200 soldiers. Most have been in the North West Frontier province, the area Ghazi predicted would be the first to rise up.
These are crucial times for this fragile but strategic nation. It is also a particularly perilous period for its beleaguered leader.
I had been waiting in Pakistan for 10 days when news came through that President Musharraf had agreed to an interview. I was to report to the military headquarters in Rawalpindi (known as "'Pindi") the following day at 9am. I would be allowed 45 minutes exactly.
Although the vast modernist bulk of Pakistan's presidential palace lies amid the ministries, courts and government buildings of Islamabad, Musharraf has chosen to operate not in this civilian world, but from the heart of Pakistan's army. Leaving the broad, empty avenues of the civilian capital behind, we drove along a stretch of motorway, past the site of both suicide bombings on Musharraf's presidential convoy. Then, passing a pair of decorative self-propelled guns and two armoured cars, we swerved through a checkpoint into the huge military cantonment area that lies to one side of the capital.
It was all a clear reminder of the degree to which the Pakistani army is a state within a state. In her recent book Military Inc, the political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa estimated that the army now controls business assets of around $20 billion and a third of all heavy manufacturing in the country; it also owns 12m acres of public land and up to 7% of Pakistan's private assets. Five giant conglomerates, known as "welfare foundations", run thousands of businesses ranging from street-corner petrol pumps to sprawling industrial plants, from cement and dredging to the manufacture of cornflakes. As one human rights activist put it to me, "The army is into every business in this country. Except hairdressing."
Command House, the residence of the commander-in-chief, is a large red-brick Scots-baronial building which lies within its own vast compound in the heart of the cantonment, at the centre of Pindi's military spider's web. Since the British left, however, the army headquarters, like the army itself, has been markedly Islamicised. The exterior remains much the same as the British left it, with the croquet lawn and lines of pot plants still intact, but the interior has been comprehensively redecorated so that the old gothic arches are now cusped into more Mughal shapes, and latticed screens, marble floors and Persian carpets now replace the old colonial furniture and woodwork. The rooms are fiercely air-conditioned, and the whole interior has a chilly, clean and somewhat antiseptic feel to it.
Bearers in long coats and astrakhan hats ushered me into a waiting room, then glided back and forth bringing cups of green tea and "“ the one remaining colonial touch "“ McVitie's Digestive biscuits. But before the tea had time to cool, there was a stamp of saluting boots from bodyguards in the hallway, and Musharraf's press secretary arrived to escort me to the general.
Musharraf was waiting on a divan in his office, and rose to greet me. In his autobiography he makes proud references to his "most muscular physique", but he is surprisingly petite in the flesh, and speaks with a slightly nasal mutter. From the book, which has a slightly bragging tone, I had expected a self-satisfied man with a back-slappingly bombastic military manner; but he answered questions intelligently in a businesslike style. When I asked him if he felt his regime was falling apart, he didn't hesitate to give an equally frank reply: "There is anxiety. No doubt about it. I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said no." He paused, and looked down while he considered. "But I get comfort from the knowledge that I have done the right thing," he said. "I believe in right and wrong, and if you did the right thing and one has to face trouble for it, then so be it."
So will you allow [the exiled] Benazir Bhutto back to fight in a fair election against you and your allies, I asked. "The parties will campaign as they are," he replied firmly. "No one from outside is coming back." No one? "No one."
I had just been to see Abdul Rashid Ghazi at the Red Mosque the day before, so I asked Musharraf if he did not see Ghazi's defiance as a slap in the face for his regime. Again, he was open and straightforward: "Yes indeed. They are very clearly challenging the writ of the government. But the issue is quite sensitive, and one should handle it carefully. It's an ugly situation, but there are a lot of women in the building, and that dictates that we act with restraint."
It was only when I asked about his suspension of the chief justice that he failed to give a completely frank response. At first he said he couldn't comment on legal matters, but when pressed went on to give the notably unconstitutional answer that "the judiciary had been interfering in the executive"¦ there is a code of conduct that has to be adhered to". When I asked if it was not rather a matter of the military interfering with the judiciary, he gave an answer that stretched credibility to its limits. "The military is absolutely out of it," he said. "When people ask me when I am going to send the military back to barracks, I reply, "˜They can't go back to barracks, as they have never left it.' We have local assemblies and a civilian government. I am the only soldier involved in the government. It's only me."
It is certainly true that his government has a civilian face, and that elections and assemblies have given a non-military gloss to the realities of military control of Pakistan; but to pretend that Musharraf is the sole soldier involved in governing the country is patent nonsense. According to Ayesha Siddiqa, since Musharraf took over, military personnel have "taken over all and every department in the bureaucracy "“ even the civil service academy is now headed by a Major General, while the National School of Public Policy is run by a Lt General. The military have completely taken over not just the bureaucracy but every arm of the executive".
The exchange illustrated one of the problems Musharraf's critics have consistently complained of: that when the truth is inconvenient, he simply tends to ignore it, crossing the frontier from fact into fiction as nonchalantly as he once ordered his troops to cross the border from Pakistan into India at Kargil. This is very evident in his memoir. As a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal noted, "believe little of what you read"¦ Though there's much the book doesn't tell us, it does offer invaluable (and frequently hilarious) insights into the levels of delusion a man may reach when he is accountable to no one, elected by no one and trusted by no one".
If Musharraf's book was accused of having an inventive approach to the facts, it was also widely said to be, as The Economist put it, both "boringly boastful" and "bafflingly rude" about the leaders of other countries. The first time that the general showed either of these tendencies during our conversation was when I asked him what he felt when the world's press published photographs of Dick Cheney lecturing him during a recent visit to Pakistan. At this, the general showed a brief flash of his famous amour-propre. "Dick Cheney never wagged his finger at me," he said, in direct contradiction of pictures beamed across the world. "People may say that, but in fact"¦ Dick is rather a quiet man. A great listener. I talked 90% of the time." There was an irritable pause. Then the general added: "Everyone thinks we had a dressing-down. It's not true." Another pause, then: "At official levels there is total understanding between the US and Pakistan. We're together in the same coalition. There can be differences, but"¦" He left the sentence unfinished.
The most serious problem that the US has had with Musharraf has been his repeated promises to deal with extremism, only to find that he has failed to act against either the madrasahs or the mullahs who have been fomenting the militancy. So I asked him: why did he think Pakistan had become such a centre of militancy? It was, after all, now the acknowledged world centre of Islamic radicalism, and almost certainly the hiding place of Osama Bin Laden.
"Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 there was no such problem in Pakistan," he answered. "We in Pakistan suffered due to the after-affects of that war and the use of the mujaheddin. Our country was flooded not only with 4m Afghan refugees, but freelance groups of Arab and Chechen and Uzbek jihadis. Using some of these, we defeated the Soviets, but that had a fallout. It is easy to criticise with hindsight in 2007. But who in 1985 could imagine 9/11? Nobody could imagine these things."
But what of the Taliban, I asked. After all, in contrast to the strong performance of the Pakistani security forces in arresting Arab Al-Qaeda fighters, not one Taliban leader of consequence has been captured or killed. Was his government really trying to stop their resurgence? "Ah," he said, "this is a more difficult question. To defeat militancy in the tribal areas, we need more than a military strategy: we need political action "“ money and jobs. We need to develop institutions, encourage investment "“ major structural adjustments"¦"
Afghanistan's President Karzai doesn't seem to think you are doing enough. "Karzai was always bad-mouthing Pakistan and blaming the ISI," said the general tartly. "But since our meeting in Istanbul, where we issued a joint declaration, I hope he will stop doing so."
But you managed to catch so many Al-Qaeda fighters, I persisted. How come it's so much more difficult to catch the Taliban leaders? "The Al-Qaeda Arabs were easily identifiable and we had some major intelligence successes," he replied. "But the Taliban are different. They are impossible to distinguish from the local population. Or the 80,000 Afghan refugees who still live in camps around Quetta. In that part of the world, everyone has a gun. And a beard."
With so many bearded, gun-wielding militants about, and their number apparently growing, the future does not look promising for Musharraf. As his answers to my questions showed, and his response to the Lal Masjid incident proved, he seems unable to stop the resurgence of Islamist militancy or the Talibanisation of Pakistan, even in the very capital of the country.
Indeed, the presence of so many heavy weapons in a known centre of militancy in the heart of Islamabad suggests at the very least that the intelligence agencies were turning a blind eye to what was going on, and has led to much speculation about the reasons for this. Was Musharraf trying to scare his western backers by showing how much worse things could get if he were to go? And why, when the decision was finally made to confront the militants, was it done so heavy-handedly? Was there a concerted attempt to kill witnesses to the collusion between the militants and the intelligence agencies? At the very least, the incident seems to exemplify Musharraf's indecisiveness and his managerial ineptitude. He allowed the crisis to fester for five months, and then, without making much of an effort to solve the problem by peaceful methods, sent in the tanks.
Up to now, Musharraf has never really attempted to break the three-decade-old umbilical cord still linking the army, the ISI and the violent Islamic extremists. But it is now clearer than ever that he cannot have the blessings of both the Americans and the Islamists, nor can he continue to dismantle democratic institutions while claiming to be the saviour of democracy. In this battle for the soul of Pakistan, he has to choose. The indications are that the Pakistani military is finally considering breaking with the jihadis it has cultivated for 20 years; but it may now be too late, and it is open to question whether the state is still strong and coherent enough to make that belated choice.
Elections are due in the autumn, and the choices made by Pakistan's electors will not only determine their next president: they will do much to determine the future shape of Pakistan. Throughout the summer, as the crisis with the Red Mosque and the chief justice festered, it was widely rumoured in Islamabad that the British ambassador was doing all he could to forge an alliance between Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's party (PPP) and Musharraf's military government, so uniting the two very different pro-western groupings in the country.
Yet, despite rumours of a secret meeting between Musharraf and Bhutto at the end of July in the United Arab Emirates, such a deal has remained so far frustratingly elusive: Musharraf has been adamant "“ as he was to me "“ that Bhutto would not be allowed back, while Bhutto, sensing her hand growing stronger as Musharraf's fortunes sank ever lower, was holding out for a chance to be allowed back to fight unencumbered by any military alliance, and to have all the corruption cases against her withdrawn. She has also made it clear that she expects the constitution to be changed to allow her to serve a third term as prime minister, and that if Musharraf wanted to continue as president, he would have to leave the army. At the time of going to press, Bhutto remains in exile "“ in the United Arab Emirates and London "“ and banned from returning to lead her party.
In the absence of an alliance between the military and the PPP, the election may be the big opportunity for the country's religious parties to seize power. Traditionally the religious parties in Pakistan have received only a tiny fraction of the vote, but in the election in October 2002, thanks partly to its open sympathy with Al-Qaeda, whom it described as "Arab heroes", the religious coalition Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) fought a campaign under the slogan: "It is a war between Islam and the American infidel."
When the results came through it was found that the MMA had succeeded in more than doubling its representation and sweeping the polls in the two key provinces bordering Afghanistan. They went on to form ultra-conservative, pro-Islamist provincial governments in both border states. There are now understandable fears that, with its ideological allies, it could hijack the protests against Musharraf, and the instability they are causing, just as the Islamists hijacked the civil-rights protests against the Shah of Iran in 1979.
This is something that is true across the Islamic world, from Algeria to Egypt, from Palestine to Turkey: everywhere, Islamist parties of different hues are rising to power as the one really effective opposition to discredited dictators and corrupt nationalist parties. The figures in Egypt, for example, are strikingly similar to those in Pakistan: at the last election in 2005, members of the nominally banned Muslim Brotherhood, standing as independents, saw a fivefold increase in their representation.
Much western journalism has concentrated on terrorist groups, jihadis and suicide bombers. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that in many countries, the Islamists will come to power not through the bomb but through the ballot box, and for reasons often quite disconnected to religion. Across the Islamic world, the religious parties are often seen by the poor to represent justice, integrity and the equitable distribution of resources. This is certainly the case in Pakistan.
So whatever Musharraf chooses, and whether or not he will remain president after the election, it seems clear that Pakistan's battle with itself is far from over. Certainly, few would argue with the notion that one wrong move by President Musharraf now could lead this already deeply polarised and strategically vital country plunging into a state of anarchic violence, outright civil war, or even an Islamic revolution.
William Dalrymple's new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for history