Former Pakistan military ruler Pervez Musharraf’s ill-advised return to his homeland could end in no further ignominy than this — an arrest warrant issued on Thursday by the Islamabad high court in a bailable case, and his security guards helping the general flee custody by whisking him out of the court premises to hole up like a fugitive at home.
The state may not yet want a full-scale confrontation, and could use the latest embarrassment in a series of court appearances that have not gone the general’s way as a means of nudging him out of the country, back into exile.
But there’s no knowing how the impetuous and stubborn general will react. Or what kind of pressure his mentors in Riyadh and Washington will bring to bear on a vindictive establishment to bring about a face-saving settlement.
Mortified at the courts ruling him ineligible to contest, effectively ending any hopes he had of making a political comeback, and already seething at the humiliation being heaped on him in repeated court appearances, including having a shoe thrown at him by a lawyer in the Karachi high court, Mr Musharraf could see this as the last straw.
Or not. If he chooses to stay and fight, however, he will face certain arrest in any one of four cases against him. Be it incarceration at home or imprisonment in Pakistan’s notorious jails, he will get a taste of the tactics employed when he sought to intimidate former Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, sitting President Asif Ali Zardari, and the man whom he tried to illegally oust from office — Pakistan’s Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry.
Shorn of the trappings of office, the former commando has few friends left. The political class he propped up have moved on ahead of the key May 11 elections. Mr Musharraf, curiously, has found little support even in the ranks of the military. It’s a vastly more pragmatic, apolitical force under Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who has so far shown little inclination to spare Mr Musharraf’s blushes.
Just as his long-running battle with the judiciary and the electoral victory of Mr Zardari forced him to step down as President earlier, the serious charges he now faces — of imposing an illegal emergency in 2007 alongside the sacking of 60 judges, which is the immediate provocation for Thursday’s court-ordered arrest, as well as his 2006 order to assassinate Baloch leader Nawab Akbar Bugti and failure to prevent the 2007 killing of Benazir Bhutto — could well bring matters to a head in Pakistan’s already volatile political environment.