Even before Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's resignation on Aug. 18, President Bush cut loose his old ally in hopes that Pakistan will end up a stable democratic ally like South Korea or the Philippines.
But Pakistan also could go the way of Iran after President Jimmy Carter abandoned the Shah in 1979.
The stakes could not be higher. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. It is a central front in the war on terror. And it is besieged by Islamic extremists who already have a secure operating base in the country.
Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in 1999, was President Bush's friend and anti-terrorist ally -- rather like Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and South Korea's Chun Doo-hwan were anticommunist allies of Ronald Reagan.
In 1986, Marcos stole his last election and created a civic crisis. Reagan, influenced by then Assistant Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz and his deputy, Scooter Libby, decided to abandon Marcos and make a bet that democracy was a surer way to fight communism. The bet paid off.
The following year, in South Korea, military rulers Chun and Roh Tae-woo gave way to popular demands for democratic elections. Reagan supported the move after the fact, but it was driven more by the threat that Korea would
lose the 1988 Olympics. But that bet on democracy paid off magnificently, too.
Now, Bush is making a similar wager in Pakistan. There's not much else he could have done, given Musharraf's unpopularity, and Bush did it reluctantly. First, he tried to organize a power-sharing arrangement leaving Musharraf in the presidency while a new democratic coalition ran the government. Now that doesn't matter, as the two ruling parties have won Musharraf's ouster by forcing his resignation.
In June, the White House announced that Bush had spoken on the phone with Musharraf and urged him to stay in the presidency. This week, with his position crumbling, Musharraf tried to call Bush at least twice, according to Pakistani sources. Bush did not take the calls.
It's a good sign that when Musharraf asked Pakistan's army chief of staff, Ashfaq Kiyani, to support his effort to stay in power, Kiyani said that the army would stay out of politics.
Musharraf's adversaries feared he would use constitutional authority he gave himself in his heyday to topple the elected government -- which would have provoked popular unrest and might have put the army in the position of having to fire on the population. Kiyani, in effect, told Musharraf not to take that option.
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