Today the Supreme Court of Pakistan threw out the last of the legal challenges to the re-election of President Musharraf. The ruling was entirely predictable but it will not resolve the political crisis that has gripped the country over the past several months. It will, in fact, worsen it.

The problem is that the legitimacy of this judgment, and of General Musharraf’s continuing in power, remains in question. The fact that the new court has ruled so quickly and so comprehensively in his favour reinforces the suspicion that when General Musharraf declared emergency rule on November 3 he was in effect carrying out a coup d’état against the old Supreme Court in order to get a favourable judgment.

This appears to have been his main reason for suspending the Constitution, and not the need to take emergency measures to combat Islamic extremism, as was stated at the time.

Thousands of activists and lawyers rounded up in the first hours of emergency rule were freed last night by the authorities, but key legal figures remain in custody. The President of the Pakistan Supreme Court Bar Association is still in jail. Resistance against General Musharraf is led mainly by lawyers and intellectuals, in what has been called the pinstripe revolution.

The former chief justice is effectively still under house arrest, despite the Government’s claim that he is free to come and go. An attempt to visit him yesterday by activists and former Supreme Court judges was thwarted, and they were not allowed to meet him.

General Musharraf’s other act yesterday evening was to enforce a new amendment to the Constitution that bars any actions taken under emergency rule from being challenged in the courts.

It seems clear that whatever manipulation has been done to the courts and the rule of law in Pakistan has been effected for political reasons — to reinforce General Musharraf's power rather than to benefit democracy or to protect the the country against extremism, as was claimed.

Attention will now turn to whether he will take off his uniform and become a civilian leader. Scepticism remains over whether he is willing to fulfil his pledge of retiring from the army, because he will not have the same kind of power as a civilian president. But realistically there is no going back on it because he made a promise to the court to do so, and the international community has been given to understand that he will.

There is a school of thought that says that once he is out of uniform he will lose his power base, which until now has derived from his being the chief of the army. In his place, the new chief of the army general staff will become a major player in Pakistan politics.

Whatever happens, most people believe that the political crisis is not going to end here. I very much doubt that the result will be accepted by the electorate. The fact that General Musharraf was re-elected last month cannot be taken as a measure of his popularity because it was by a poll of MPs rather than a general election. The electoral college was very, very small.

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