On Wednesday, General Pervez Musharraf handed over the baton of the army's command to General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani after an elaborate ceremony telecast for the first time in its full pageantry in Pakistan's history.
Earlier the Supreme Court reconstituted under the provisional constitution order that replaced the national Constitution suspended on November 3 had disposed off all challenges to his re-election for another presidential term.
Things are coming a full circle in Pakistan's troubled politics. Nawaz Sharif, the then prime minister, had appointed Musharraf as the chief of army staff on October 7, 1998 ignoring claims of more senior generals to the powerful post.
Musharraf was to have a normal three-year tenure but he held on it tenaciously for nine years because of his belief that the army was the only dependable source of his absolute power.
A future historian may well argue that combining the offices of the president of the republic and the army was a major reason for Pakistan's protracted political instability.
Doubtless, it was the army command that enabled Musharraf to chart an eventful career: the military putsch that brought Sharif down and eventually sent him into a long, if comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia.
Musharraf appointing himself as the chief executive of the state and then the president, a validating referendum in which the ballot boxes filled up without the voters turning up at the polling booths, general elections tailored to produce a compliant parliament, two regrettable reconstitutions of higher judiciary and finally suspension of Constitution by the army chief 25 days before internal and external pressures forced Musharraf to appoint a highly regarded professional soldier as his successor in the army.
It is infinitely sad that Musharraf began his political career by holding the Constitution in abeyance and had to win another term eight years later by suspending it once again. This reflects a stasis in his thinking that contrasts sharply with the dynamic evolution of the nation.
Pakistan is a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual country with a civil society. Musharraf has been enlightened enough to encourage technologies that transform not only modes of production but also patterns of thought.
He has also been mistaken in insisting that they can be bent to serve a medieval political order. His legacy has been marred by the indiscriminate force with which the regime created by him sought to take away the independence of the judiciary and the media to pave his path, in the regime's warped analysis, to another presidential term.
Only time will reveal if the damage done to the legitimacy of this new term by over-enthusiastic apparatchik of an authoritarian government would ever be repaired.
Pakistan has been in turmoil since Musharraf donned his uniform on March 9 to ask Pakistan's chief justice to call it a day. Whatever led to this fateful encounter, it lit the fuse for an explosion of a longing for freedom and a dormant desire for human dignity.
The event locked Musharraf in a costly confrontation with the judges, lawyers and independent media, a tussle that isolated him in Pakistan and abroad.
The defiance shown by the chief justice on March 9 reflected a wider and deeper sense of moral indignation built up over years which became an undeniable call for change.
Without March 9, it would have been virtually impossible to contemplate the return of former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and a worldwide demand for Musharraf to give up the army command.
Bhutto and Sharif are being propelled by popular forces to seek a radical restructuring of the political landscape. Neither of them is willing to become prime minister in the manner of Shaukat Aziz. The future political struggle is for the substance and not the shadow of power.
It would have been a different story if the changes had been made gracefully in deference to the natural law of mutability in human affairs. For far too long, Musharraf relied on the use of force that, in the ultimate analysis, flowed from his army command. It has compounded each and every crisis that besets Pakistan today.
The insurgencies in Balochistan, the tribal belt and Swat, the clamour for the restoration of civil liberties and freedom of media and, above all, the social anger at what is widely perceived as deliberate neglect of the common man by Musharraf's GDP-growth driven economic managers demand a broad-based political government.
Original spirit
Such a government cannot emerge without a fair, free and credible election. Such an election cannot be held without revoking the emergency and without restoring the Constitution to its original spirit and intent.
The nation has no problem with Musharraf's valedictory paean to the army but it would have been happier if he had also advised the military to respect the verdict of the people and the rule of law. That he chose not to do so means that the country still has a long way to go before it becomes a viable democracy.
The situation will test the statesmanship of the political class to the utmost. It will be tempted to increase the pressure to force the civilian presidency of Musharraf to divest itself of the unusual powers accumulated through unilateral ordinances promulgated since November 3.
Then there is the question of a humiliated judiciary. On the other hand, politics is the art of the possible.
The political class may have to opt for a smooth transition rather than a radical transformation of the power structure. Pakistan needs an optimum and sustainable balance between the politicians and the armed forces.
Establishing this equilibrium is a delicate task. It depends partly on Musharraf accepting some loss of power gracefully and lending his weight to the task in the larger national interest. Like the politicians, his sagacity is also on trial.
Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former foreign secretary and ambassador of Pakistan.
