How he missed all the buses, including the Nobel Prize

By Hamid Mir

ISLAMABAD: Was the fallen Pervez Musharraf living in a fool’s paradise right till the end? He may have been.

Just a few minutes before his speech he told one of his close friends that the coalition partners will start fighting with each other very soon, there will be more political instability in his absence, people will come out on the streets in the next six months and they will demand “come back Musharraf”.

That is the reason Musharraf is not leaving Pakistan. He will stay in Pakistan under heavy security and he will wait for the people to call him back. He is sadly mistaken. The people of Pakistan have already rejected him and his policies on Feb 18. They were sick of him and that was why even George W Bush abandoned him in his last days but Musharraf still thinks that Pakistan cannot survive without him.

He claimed in his Monday speech that Pakistan was about to be declared a failed state in 1999 but he rescued the country and brought a new recognition for Pakistan. He never mentioned Kargil which gave a bad name to Pakistan, he never mentioned anything about the judicial crisis that he created in 2007 and he never mentioned anything about the assassination of PPP leader Benazir Bhutto.

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An interesting prediction abt Musharraf's return to the political scene :)

Excerpt from a story published in The News, August 19, 2008

Musharraf's insistence that he would stay in Pakistan is again based primarily on the calculation that until the two major parties break up he should be provided a safe stay and when they break up, he would re-launch himself, probably as a leader of the Karachi-led Mohajir population, with or even without, the blessings of Mr Altaf Hussain.

This streak of leading the Karachi political scene was more than evident in his recent visits to Karachi where he tried to create his own lobby of businessmen and mohajir leaders, almost to the exclusion of Altaf Hussain and his hard core supporters.

Musharraf's address one night a few weeks ago to a select group of Karachi businessmen, where his strong supporter Governor Ishrat ul Ebad was present and Karachi Mayor Mustufa Kamal made his famous, but mysterious, comment that within a few months the geography of Karachi may change, was seen by Altaf Hussain as an attempt to challenge him on his turf.

Within hours of that Musharraf address, his first after months of post-Feb 18 polls hibernation, Altaf Bhai had to arrange his own gathering of Karachi businessmen and address them from London. Why this need for a parallel event felt by the MQM headquarters in London was obvious: Mr Musharraf was trying to hijack his party and Altaf Bhai is not an amateur in fighting turf wars. Soon thereafter both Governor Ebad and Mayor were summoned to London for whatever happens to MQM men when they err.

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