Pakistan's military myth

What has Pervez Musharraf bequeathed Pakistan? The "president-general" steps down from power at a time of great political and violent unrest, with the civilian government falling to pieces and insurgencies wracking the country. Irfan Husain chronicled the Musharraf years last week on openDemocracy, finding morsels of good in the soup of ultimate failure. Shaun Gregory, however, is far less generous. Musharraf, he argues, was a strongman who encouraged (and relied upon) the myth that "the Pakistani army is all that stands between Pakistan and chaos." Yet the army was and continues to be the single biggest obstacle in Pakistan's path to a more peaceful secular and democratic future. If the country's civilian leaders, like Nawaz Sharif, continue to nurture ties to the more unsavoury potentates of the military, Pakistan's crises will be unrelenting.