Graceful exit wounds

The manner of Musharraf’s exit

This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.

Most people think Pervez Musharraf is toast. And that, apart from a matter of time, it is a question of how he should go. The American senators who were in Pakistan for last week’s elections have publicly called for a ‘graceful exit’. Well, he’s reportedly building a new home—complete with security bunkers—in Islamabad. “He has already started discussing the exit strategy for himself,” a close friend told the Sunday Telegraph “I think it is now just a matter of days and not months because he would like to make a graceful exit on a high.”

Now the wonderful retired Major General Rashid Qureishi has denied the authenticity of the report, not its content. So it may well be that we will soon see some grace.

It won’t be impossible for Mr Musharraf to hold on to the presidency—but he will have to share power with the politicians and Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani. If he was the sort who could share power he wouldn’t have been in this hole in the first place.

Impeachment—and there’s a lot of political support for this—is not impossible. But as Ali Khan of Washburn University School of Law argues on Jurist, impeachment is for legally elected presidents, not usurpers. “The proper constitutional treatment for usurpers”, Mr Khan writes, is “removal by incarceration”. Since lawyers are a vocal political lobby at the moment, they might insist on meting out the proper constitutional treatment to Mr Musharraf. Such an exit is unlikely to be graceful though.

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