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Zia-ul-Haq, who ruled Pakistan from 1977-88, fused an Islamist ideology with military rule to bring stability to ethnic and social tensions in Pakistan. When he died at the height of his power, Pakistan was plagued by a ten-year “crisis of governability” in which leaders were unable to cobble together a coherent, consistent answer to the question of Islam’s relationship to the state. In this atmosphere, military, civilian politicians, and Islamist forces vied for political control.

In the 1993 elections the Pakistan Muslim League emerged victorious – the first time a center-right party had successfully constructed a philosophy that could appeal to both secular and Islamic voters. Robbed of its status as the sole voice of Islam in Pakistan’s politics, the military, under the command of General Musharraf, turned to the same jihadi-extremism that had brought the Taliban to power in Afghanistan.

In this context, then, the 1999 military coup that brought Musharraf to power was a way for the military to prevent the consolidation of power in the democratic arena. The problem was neither Islam nor corruption, but rather the balance of power in civil-military relations that had gradually begun to shift toward the civilian. Furthermore Musharraf’s reign is only Kemalist in the sense that he uses Ataturk’s vocabulary; in practice he shows no compunction about using jihadi forces in Kashmir, Kargil, and Afghanistan, where he supported the Taliban.

It is generally recognized that, in a free election, the secular, democratic Pakistan People’s Party would win. Thus, in the 2002 election Musharraf effectively handicapped both the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League by barring their leaders from the country, relying instead upon the unified Islamist party, the MMA. The MMA is made up of a Pashtun social base that was threatened by the disenfranchisement of brethren in Afghanistan and that therefore banded together and voted en masse for the first time in the 2002 election. Musharraf’s support of Washington in the war in Afghanistan has therefore strained relations between the military and the MMA. The proposition that the MMA will become a civilian partner to the military (Najan Saifi, a secular Pakistani journalist, claimed that to the military MMA means “Military Mullah Alliance”) is inaccurate. The relationship is rooted in necessity: the MMA is using the war between Musharraf and the popular parties to build itself and its institutions in order to become the representative of Pakistan’s center-right.

Pakistan is a good case study for Washington policy makers who are interested in democracy in the Islamic world. It is well ahead of its Arab contemporaries in terms of democratic indices, and Musharraf seems to be a relatively peaceable ally. Yet Pakistan seems to be moving away from democracy. The lesson, then, is that bad democracy must not be supplanted by dictatorship. Despite his shortcomings, Musharraf’s predecessor, Nawaz Sharif, was more effective in cobbling together a political ideology that served the needs of both secularists and Islamists, Nasr argued. In contrast, Musharraf’s political formula lacks roots, stability, and coherence. He is not the competitor for Islamic sentiment that Sharif was, and he has thus created an ideological vacuum in which Pakistan is more in danger of a radical takeover than it was in 1999.