President Musharraf was right not to declare a state of emergency, one of the few good calls that he has made in six months. That move would probably precipitate his overthrow. Even so, it is hard to see how he can navigate the obstacles in the rest of the year, so widely has trust in him collapsed.

Pakistan’s best hope is for a leader who treats it as a normal country: respecting its Constitution, appealing to the moderate majority and courting the investors who are essential to its future.

It looks less likely by the day that Musharraf is that leader, for all the important improvements that he has made (steadying the economy and taking the heat out of the Kashmir conflict tower above the rest).

The general prides himself as a tactician, but after eight years of striking deals with every side while satisfying none, he has united his opponents against him.

There is an outside chance of orderly elections in January, but it is hard to see many now accepting Musharraf for another term while he is still head of the army. An easily imagined outcome of the likely crises before then is his overthrow by another military figure. If the former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif decide to defy their exile and return, then predictions are worthless given the tumult that would follow.

Television reports of an imminent state of emergency may have been a way for Musharraf to test reaction; if so, he was right to back down. The move would be a brutal and futile attempt to solve his main problem: that there is no constitutional way for him to secure another term as president while remaining chief of army staff.

In his effort to override that constraint, he has turned key groups against him: the small religious parties; the judiciary, by sacking the Chief Justice; then Benazir Bhutto, head of the main opposition party, who has lost huge political capital by trying to deal with a leader whose support is disintegrating.

All the same, Musharraf intends to press ahead with his reelection by the current Parliament on September 15. He will win a second term; there is no other candidate and Parliament is under his thumb, but there will be noisy protest. Then the real trouble starts.

Parliament should dissolve to prepare for new elections, say in January. If Musharraf is not reelected by that new Parliament, he will have no legitimacy. But Bhutto will not throw her party’s large block of seats behind him unless he steps down as head of the army. Musharraf’s choices are all ugly:

— To call a state of emergency, knowing that it might trigger so much protest that senior army figures would tell him to step down;

— To pick a military successor;

— To stay as President but shed his army role, and his power base with it, knowing that the prime minister would turn to the next chief of staff for support;

— To brazen it out: hold the elections and keep his army role knowing that politicians and the courts would challenge him.

Bhutto or even Sharif might surface from this turmoil, but it is hard to plot the course from their perches in Dubai and London. It is easier to see how another military figure might take over – but the current jostling for the top jobs means that there is no single name. The vice-chief of army staff and the Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee, the next most senior after Musharraf, will retire in October. The front-runners for their jobs are Lieutenant-General Ashfaq Kiyani, the head of the ISI intelligence agency, and Lieutenant-General Tariq Majeed, the corps commander of Rawalpindi.

Musharraf likes both, Kiyani for his investigation of the assassination attempts against him and Majeed for the recent Red Mosque operation against militants. Kiyani, who has a reputation for being level-headed and moderate, is particularly popular in the army.

A new military leader might ask the Senate chairman to take over, as the Constitution permits, until new elections; the precedent is the aftermath of President Zia ul-Haq’s tenure.

The United States, in backing Musharraf, has argued that every option is worse, but that argument is getting weak. The general’s perpetual postponement of democracy has undermined the moderate voices who are still, astonishingly, the clear majority.

Pakistan’s real crisis is that it has failed to educate a generation of its ballooning population, with all the potential for radicalism that this represents. It desperately needs a leader who can retrieve the features that still resemble a normal country.

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