If you haven’t seen it already, Mohsin Hamid has an interesting op-ed in the NY Times, asking Musharraf to stop prolonging his rule. [Read it before it goes offline!]

Hamid says that the urban upper classes have been doing well under Musharraf:

My wife was an actress in “Jutt and Bond,” a popular Pakistani sitcom about a Punjabi folk hero and a debonair British agent. Her show was on one of the many private television channels that have been permitted to operate in the country, featuring everything from local rock music to a talk show whose host is a transvestite.

My sister, a journalism lecturer in Lahore, loves to tell me about the enormous growth in recent years in university financing, academic salaries and undergraduate enrollment. And my father, now retired but for much of his career a professor of economics, says he has never seen such a dynamic and exciting time in Pakistani higher education.

But there have been significant problems under General Musharraf, too. Pakistan has grown increasingly divided between the relatively urban and prosperous regions that border India and the relatively rural, conservative and violent regions that border Afghanistan. The two mainstream political parties have historically bridged that divide and vastly outperformed religious extremists in free elections, but under General Musharraf they have been marginalized in a system that looks to one man for leadership.

Hamid tells us that he had for a long time supported Musharraf, voting for him in the referendum a few years ago. But things have now turned sour:

What many of us hoped was that General Musharraf would build up the country’s neglected institutions before eventually handing over power to a democratically elected successor. Those hopes were dealt a serious blow two weeks ago, when he suspended the chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

… He had blocked the showcase privatization of the national steel mill. He had, in other words, demonstrated that he would not do General Musharraf’s bidding. With elections due later this year, and challenges to irregularities like the rigging that took place in 2002 likely to end up in the Supreme Court, an independent chief justice could jeopardize General Musharraf’s continued rule.

Like many Pakistanis, I knew little about Justice Chaudhry except that he had a reputation for being honest, and that under his leadership, the Supreme Court had reduced its case backlog by 60 percent. His suspension seemed a throwback to the worst excesses of the government that General Musharraf’s coup had replaced, and it galvanized protests by the nation’s lawyers and opposition parties, including rallies of thousands in several of Pakistan’s major cities yesterday.

He ends his op-ed with a plea for democracy. The risk of militants coming to power, he says, is simply overstated.

Yes, there are militants in Pakistan. But they are a small minority in a country with a population of 165 million. Religious extremists have never done well in elections when the mainstream parties have been allowed to compete fairly. Nor does the Pakistan Army appear to be in any great danger of falling into radical hands: by all accounts the commanders below General Musharraf broadly agree with his policies.

An exaggerated fear of Pakistan’s people must not prevent America from realizing that Pakistanis are turning away from General Musharraf. By prolonging his rule, the general risks taking Pakistan backward and undermining much of the considerable good that he has been able to achieve. The time has come for him to begin thinking of a transition, and for Americans to realize that, scare stories notwithstanding, a more democratic Pakistan might be better not just for Pakistanis but for Americans as well.

As they say, read the whole thing!

A couple of quick thoughts on the op-ed (and I mean, quick. I love my readers, but it’s crunch time in law school land…) 

1. What Hamid says about the economic opportunities and stability created by the Musharraf regime sounds a good bit like what they used to say about Ayub Khan back in the day. And the widening gulf between regions sounds familiar too from that period. We know how that turned out.

2. One of things I would question Hamid (or Pakistani readers who agree with him) about is why he thinks that a new run of democratic experimentization will turn out any differently than the last few. As Hamid notes, the institutions have not been strengthened. And have any new political figures emerged in this period of military rule that present a credible alternative to the old PPP/PML leadership? And if not, the danger is not that the militant groups will take over power whenever they hold elections - the danger is that when either the PPP/PML are mucking it up again, the vacuum of power and control that militant groups thrive in will only be deepened…

3. None of this is an argument against democratization. It’s important to spot what went wrong: the lack of institutional development. It wasn’t impossible in Pakistan. And it certainly isn’t impossible in Bangladesh. The rhetoric that we are seeing from the SOE government matches very closely the rhetoric of Pervez Musharraf. One hopes that they won’t try to follow him in the casual ad hoc way in which he’s approached the work of nurturing institutions.

4. So what is it going to be? A few years from now, are we going to have Tahmina Anam writing in the NYTimes (in anticipation of her second book) about being “betrayed” by the SOE government. Or will the SOE experiment have silently succeeded - perhaps the way that the Mauritania experiment is as we speak, with substance but little fanfare…