Musharraf's Risky Gambit.(Gen. Pervez Musharraf)(Brief Article)

Pakistan's military leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, wants more legitimacy for his rule, and last week he tried rather desperately to get it. The general is worried that a new Parliament, to be elected later this year, will be hostile to his political ambitions. So he engineered a referendum giving him another five-year presidential term. But the election "campaign" was so transparently bogus that it could end up eroding the genuine support for Musharraf that exists inside and outside the country. No one expected opposition forces to mount much of a challenge to last Tuesday's vote; instead, they just boycotted it, leaving Musharraf to crow like a shameless dictator about his 98 percent victory margin.

Musharraf's core constituency, of course, is the Pakistani military. The conventional wisdom is that he's firmly in control of his uniformed friends. But he's reshuffled his military commanders three times in six months; the first, Oct. 7, was on the eve of the U.S. bombing campaign against Afghanistan. Conservative Army leaders cannot be happy about U.S. forces operating inside the country, especially in North Waziristan, a tribal area near the Afghan border. Another embarrassment was the arrest of Osama bin Laden's lieutenant Abu Zubaydah and 50 other Qaeda activists in Faisalabad and Lahore on March 27. U.S. FBI and CIA agents were present at the bust, but Pakistan's own Inter- Services Intelligence directorate was kept largely in the dark about the operation.