U.S. to Send Special Envoy to Confront Musharraf

November 13, 2007
U.S. to Send Special Envoy to Confront Musharraf
By HELENE COOPERWASHINGTON, Nov. 12

The Bush administration is dispatching a high-level envoy to Pakistan to tell the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, face to face that the United States will not be satisfied with his plan to hold elections unless he first lifts emergency law, administration officials said Monday.
While welcoming the news that General Musharraf would hold elections in January rather than delay them, they questioned whether elections could be legitimate if held when the country remains effectively under martial law, with opposition parties in lockdown and unable to campaign or assemble freely.
“The president thinks we need to lift the emergency rule in order to have free and fair elections,” said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman. A senior administration official said that it remained an open question whether free elections could be held that reflected the true wishes of the Pakistani people if General Musharraf continued to jail or otherwise detain the opposition.
The comments reflected increased frustration within the administration over General Musharraf’s power grab, as well as mounting uneasiness about how much longer Pakistan can continue in the present chaos before descending into further instability. The plan to send an envoy to Pakistan was described by administration officials who declined to elaborate further about the mission.
Publicly, Bush administration officials say that they continue to support General Musharraf, who is still viewed by the Pentagon as America’s best option for tackling operatives of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s frontier provinces. “Nobody is ready to cut him off at the knees yet,” one official said.
But the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, said that many people within the administration were worried that General Musharraf’s missteps would soon so erode his base at home that he could be forced to give up power.
To prepare for that possibility, the Bush administration has been taking care in recent days to try to distinguish between its support for Pakistan and its support for the general.
When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example, told the ABC News program “This Week” that “we’ve been in close contact, as you might imagine, through our embassy, through our ambassador there, with all parties in Pakistan,” she was signaling that the United States was hedging its bets in Pakistan by reaching out to civilian institutions and nongovernmental organizations, administration officials said. “This is not a personal matter about President Musharraf,” Ms. Rice said. “This is about the Pakistani people. And the United States has been dedicated to helping the Pakistani people come to a more democratic path.”
Further complicating the issue for the Bush administration so far has been the continuing political tug of war between General Musharraf and the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto: Ms. Bhutto keeps announcing rallies to oppose the general’s emergency rule, and he keeps putting her under house arrest for what he says is her own safety.
The Pakistani authorities issued a seven-day detention order against Ms. Bhutto on Monday in a bid to stop her from leading another planned protest march this week from the eastern city of Lahore to the capital, Islamabad.
General Musharraf’s deputies said they had received intelligence suggesting that Ms. Bhutto could be a target for militants. While American officials say they, too, have been worried about Ms. Bhutto’s safety, one official said the detention order fits neatly with the general’s emergency powers decree.
“He wasn’t exactly running to put her under house arrest when she first arrived,” the official said, alluding to the suicide attack on Ms. Bhutto’s convoy after her arrival in Karachi last month.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting.