Paki-Stunned

Looks like Pervez Musharraf is facing impeachment.

Pakistan’s usually fractious coalition government moved decisively for the first time on Thursday to impeach President Pervez Musharraf, who has been an important American ally in the campaign against terror but who has largely been pushed to the sidelines since his party lost elections in February.

“It has become imperative to move for impeachment against General Musharraf,” said Asif Ali Zardari, the head of the Pakistan Peoples Party, sitting beside Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, at a noisy news conference.

The two, leaders of the main parties in the governing coalition, have barely been on speaking terms in recent weeks, but they joined together in saying that Mr. Musharraf would be required to face a vote of confidence in the National Assembly.

By calling for the vote, they were essentially giving the president an opportunity to step down gracefully before having to confront impeachment proceedings.

As president, Mr. Musharraf — who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999 — still has the constitutional power to fight back against the impeachment by dismissing Parliament.

But to do so he needs the agreement of the army, said Tariq Azim Khan, a former minister of information in Mr. Musharraf’s government and an ally of the president.

In an indication of the gravity of threat against him, Mr. Musharraf canceled Thursday his planned trip to Beijing to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

The sudden cohesion of the coalition and the decision to try to remove Mr. Musharraf comes against the backdrop of a serious economic crisis in the country, a surging Taliban insurgency and popular sentiment that the four-month-old government has failed to deal with the urgent problems facing the country.

It appeared that the two leaders found that the only way they could keep the coalition intact was to attack Mr. Musharraf, something Mr. Zardari had been reluctant to do.

Get that? The only way to keep the ruling coalition of a nuclear Muslim country from plunging into chaos is to plunge the country into chaos by impeaching the President.

Yet another benefit of Bush foreign policy.

PS, at least Pakistanis have the balls to impeach their criminal Presidents. We lag behind the rest of the world once again.