Musharraf tells Europeans he’s their best bet

Meeting with European leaders over the last few days, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has played the card that proved a winner for him in the past: Their continent’s security depends on Pakistan, and Pakistan’s security depends on his game plan.

The embattled Pakistani leader went home with far less than a resounding endorsement. Instead, the message from leaders like British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana focused on what could eventually undermine Musharraf’s rule: a drumbeat of demands that next month’s parliamentary elections be free and fair.

“I urge President Musharraf to work with all political parties in Pakistan for a peaceful democratic future for the country,” Brown said Monday at a news conference with the Pakistani leader as 200 protesters chanted outside 10 Downing St.

“For Pakistan, credible elections on 18 February are essential,” Brown said. “The priority now for the international community and the government of Pakistan must be to ensure that the democratic process remains on track.”

Musharraf used meetings in Paris, Brussels, London and at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland over eight days to argue that his government has made progress in combating terrorism and extremism -- at one point declaring that Pakistan’s support against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s helped bring down the Berlin Wall.

But analysts say there has been a slight but perceptible change of approach among European leaders confronted, despite Musharraf’s reassurances, with a dangerous security situation in Pakistan.

“We’re seeing a very subtle shift, I think, in the direction of a greater engagement with the political parties in Pakistan, with civil society groups, with lawyers groups. In other words, a very subtle shift away from a policy that was predicated on support for just one man,” said Farzana Shaikh, a Pakistan expert at Chatham House, one of Britain’s premier foreign policy think tanks.

The new approach emphasizes “the need not just to strengthen President Musharraf, but indeed to strengthen Pakistan’s political institutions, which many believe have been sorely damaged under Musharraf,” she said.

The Pakistani leader came to Britain seeking a new trade deal that would expand access to the European market for his nation’s goods; what he left with was a promise of $7 million in aid to educate Pakistani voters and support the election commission’s work and independent monitoring of the upcoming balloting.

Nazir Ahmed, the first Pakistani member of Britain’s House of Lords, noted last week that Musharraf had cited terrorism as justification when he imposed a six-week state of emergency last year.

“Subsequently, he sacked 62 Supreme Court judges and arrested lawyers . . . banned all the Pakistani private TV channels, including the BBC and CNN, and arrested all the political activists,” he said. “How can her majesty’s government trust Gen. Pervez Musharraf to hold free and fair elections?”

Musharraf, who first seized power in a coup more than eight years ago, said in speeches across Europe that his government was doing everything possible to ensure clean elections.

The polling, originally scheduled for early this month, was delayed after the Dec. 27 assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

Amid talk that the U.S. is offering to train Pakistani soldiers to boost their effectiveness against insurgents in the nation’s lawless and remote tribal areas near Afghanistan, Musharraf struck a defiant note. He insisted on several occasions that the U.S. and Britain should focus on controlling the Afghan side of the border.

He said 1,000 new border posts, fencing and a nighttime curfew imposed along the frontier have nearly halved the movement of militants from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

“Let me counter this point of yours that we failed. . . . I think we are succeeding against Al Qaeda,” he said in answer to one question.

“Al Qaeda used to be in our cities by the hundreds. They are not in our cities in the past year: We caught six, seven hundred of them. . . . They are no more in the hundreds in the valleys. So this is our success. We are there, and we are still attacking them,” he said.

“Now if you think success means everything is hunky-dory in five days, no sir, that will not happen. I may say the battle is on, and it may take a long time.”

The message from Musharraf’s side, analysts say, was that despite the political turbulence and violence, his game plan is correct.

“He’s trying, really, to reassure the West and Western leaders that whatever he’s doing is the right thing -- namely having postponed the elections and so on. It’s a confidence-building measure on his part,” said Lawrence Saez, a Pakistan expert at the London School of Economics’ Asia Research Center.

“And even though he has a credibility problem, externally they now cannot do anything else other than to try to give Musharraf some room to maneuver,” he said. “Western leaders are not going to be imposing specific, hard deadlines on him to act in specific ways, other than to assure that there will be fair elections, because there’s no real viable political alternative to Musharraf.”

kim.murphy@latimes.com