I'm not envying 'Nine Lives' Musharraf at the moment

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. That's the best way to sum up the situation for Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan right now. Musharraf says he had to declare a state of emergency -- suspending the constitution, ousting the chief justice, blacking out independent media -- because Islamic extremists have spread across the country, infiltrated Islamabad and endanger national stability. Those reasons are all true, and dangerously so. But they're also not things that have happened in the past week. As I wrote back in a July column, Musharraf's containment policy of "see no evil, hear no evil" with the al-Qaida and Taliban sympathizers in the North West Frontier Province has been a miserable failure. But even then, when making the decisions that have come back to haunt him, he was pressured to not piss off the populace too much, because he risked driving Pakistanis into the arms of the anti-U.S. Islamist Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal coalition that would enforce Sharia law with a vengeance.

Musharraf is heavy-handed and has no problem acting like a jackass. He's also mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore, particularly as his rule is threatened by the chief justice who, Musharraf states, has headed a court that's freed 61 terrorists. Again, that's not a stretch to believe. It's not easy to cast judgment on Musharraf in the middle of such a mess. After all, the alternative to Musharraf and Bhutto (who also recently narrowly escaped death in a bombing that killed scores) is havoc, oppression, and summer camp for terrorists -- not tucked away in Waziristan.