Leaders around the world have greeted the resignation of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf as a positive step forward for a country still in the throes of instability. Irfan Husain assesses the mixed legacy of a leader who once enjoyed the support of most Pakistanis. Musharraf's nine years at the helm of the country were not without their successes. The military coup through which he came to power nipped at the bud Nawaz Sharif's attempt to bring sharia law to the country. Musharraf presided over an upturn of Pakistan's economic fortunes. His deregulation of powers to provincial governments came as a long overdue measure in building "democracy" from the bottom up. Given that the disastrous Kargil invasion of 1999 was his brainchild, Musharraf's overtures to hulking neighbour India (the ultimate bête noire of Pakistani diplomacy and strategy) in recent years came as a welcome sign of progressive and wise leadership in Islamabad.
Ironically, his rule was undone by the very factors that sustained it. Pakistan's entanglements in the American-led "war on terrorism" at once bankrolled the military (so enmeshed in the workings of the state) and compromised Musharraf's position abroad and within Pakistan. Yet what suited Washington irked many Pakistanis, particularly those along the eternally restless and lawless Pashtun borderlands. Domestically, Islamabad was damned if it did. Internationally, it was damned if it didn't. In the end, Musharraf's spluttering administration could neither stem the terrorist tide in Afghanistan and India nor could it cool the heated sentiments of its own people, as a new branch of the Taliban insurgency takes shape in Pakistan.
Yes, he was between a rock and a hard place. But his inability to control Pakistan's shadowy intelligence agencies - coupled with Islamabad's unwillingness to shed its anarchic doctrine of "strategic depth" - made the job impossible. Musharraf was further weakened by the loss of the support of urban and secular liberal elites after his authoritarian handling of the judiciary and the period of emergency rule. A fairly-elected government - thin on democratic credentials, thick with track records of corruption - now takes centre stage. One can only hope that its inevitable failures of imagination are not as bad as Musharraf's.