Toppling Musharraf: Heat rises on Pakistani leader

Minutes after India's cricketers beat Pakistan in Lahore last week, a casually dressed man with a moustache strolled confidently across the ground and was handed a microphone. Relaxed and smiling, Pervez Musharraf looked every bit the modern politician, delighting the crowd with jokes about India's star batsman's long hair. The style was more Bill Clinton than military dictator. And there was scarcely hint that this was a man who had survived two assassination attempts, or that he is struggling to hold his turbulent Islamic nation together and is now facing renewed threat as Pakistan hovers on the edge of an anti-Western implosion.

Just 24 hours after the cricket international the centre of Lahore was in flames and dead bodies lay on the streets, as the crisis over the "blasphemous sketches", as Pakistanis call the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, moved into a new, violent and for Musharraf, treacherous phase. After a week in which protests spread like a rash across the country, many of them violent, Musharraf intervened yesterday to ban a mass rally planned for the capital, Islamabad, and ordered the detention of hundreds of ringleaders.

Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, the religious party that called yesterday's rally, was placed under house arrest. Just hours earlier he had warned of a nationwide campaign to unseat the President if Musharraf were to hinder the protests. "We will not stop till we achieve our objectives against the present rulers," he said. "General Pervez Musharraf is acting as the representative of western civilisation and is fighting a battle against Islamic values."

For Musharraf to crack down with force is therefore a high-risk strategy, giving his opponents a pretext to raise the temperature further. He now faces his toughest 10 days in power as the countdown begins to a visit from George Bush. Unless Musharraf can quell, or at least contain, the dissent before then, the visit looks set to be engulfed by the "rolling campaign" of street protests that Pakistan's religious parties have warned they can deliver.

This crisis is no longer just about cartoons. It has become entwined with the desire by Musharraf's Islamist enemies to destabilise him by fanning a much wider uprising against what they see as his traitorous alliance with America.

The Pakistani leader is also the army's chief and still, as far as we know, has the most powerful wings of the military firmly on his side. But Pakistan is also still a hotbed for al-Qa'ida-affiliated extremists and jihadi militants hiding out and training in the wild ungovernable provinces along the border with Afghanistan. Twice, they have tried to blow up the President.

The Taliban, who fled here after being driven from Kabul, have not gone away either. Musharraf's removal, by elements who believe he is not Islamic enough, could open the way for dramatic regional instability, the threat of jihadists getting hold of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, or provoking a nuclear war with and India, and what Bush himself once warned would be "the worst form of Islamist militancy" in South Asia.

The American flag and branches of Kentucky Fried Chicken have already been burned in most street protests. In Peshawar, crates of Pepsi Cola and DVDs of Hollywood films were ransacked from shops and symbolically destroyed, and posters appeared showing not just the Danish Prime Minister but George Bush beside him, their grinning faces superimposed on the bodies of a pair of dogs.

How the protests tipped into deadly clashes with a wider political focus and the potential to topple Musharraf is murky. But then since Pakistan's birth in 1947 its politics has been murky and violent. And its leaders have a history of meeting violent ends variously ending up exiled, jailed, or ousted in coups. One was hanged and one died in an unexplained air crash.

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