The Good News Coup?

Military coups used to be messy affairs, rife with panic and barricades and bloodshed. After the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Pakistan last week, there was cheering. In the span of 48 hours, army chief General Pervez Musharraf detained Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, sacked the Cabinet, suspended Parliament and the constitution, and imposed virtual martial law. Yet most Pakistanis barely shrugged. Shops remained open. Telephone service was restored. Children went to school. In Sharif's hometown of Lahore, people danced in the streets and distributed candies to celebrate the coup. "We don't want democracy," said Mohammed Tariq, 22, a taxi driver in the capital, Islamabad. "We just want law and order and stable prices."

As the country fell under total army rule late last week, few Pakistanis regretted the snuffing out of democracy. Militant Islamists tied to Afghanistan's Taliban government hailed the downfall of Sharif, who had suddenly clamped down on fundamentalist groups inside Pakistan following a three-week spasm of sectarian violence that left 40 dead. "There should be no elections in Pakistan--there should be a Taliban-like system in Pakistan," said the chief of the Harkatul Mujahideen, a militant group whose training centers were attacked by U.S. cruise missiles last year. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, twice sacked for alleged corruption, praised the junta for removing Sharif and told TIME she might return from exile in London once army rule is lifted. "I'd like to go back," she said, "but not to add to the commotion."

The exuberance of Pakistanis was understandable. Their country is drowning in $32 billion of foreign debt, and Sharif had behaved like a petty tyrant. "People were so fed up," said former President Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari. "They thought a weight had been taken off them."

Even in Western capitals, the usual jitters were tempered by widespread relief that Sharif was gone. Although U.S. Ambassador William Milam met with Musharraf to inform him of Washington's "profound regret about the military takeover," the U.S. was not all that upset by last week's events. The Asian subcontinent has been a source of heightened anxiety for the U.S. since the spring of 1998, when India tested nuclear devices and Pakistan responded with its own nuclear tests. The two countries' dispute over the territory of Kashmir brought them to the brink of all-out war this year. The Administration prodded Sharif to scale back his army's adventurism in Kashmir and exacted his cooperation in cracking down on terrorist training cells in Afghanistan. But Washington had come to believe that Sharif was digging his own grave and dragging his country into it. "Things were basically falling apart," says former CIA chief Robert Gates. "It had been a steady, slow, downward spiral."

Still, the coup does not solve the various problems that make the region one of the most dangerous places on earth. While Musharraf is a liberal Muslim and most of the army's top brass are moderate, U.S. analysts say fundamentalists have made inroads in the lower ranks of the military. A rise in fundamentalism under the new regime could set off another wave of sectarian killings and would unnerve India, which responded warily to the coup. Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was expected to resume peace talks with Sharif in November, but the coup has made that unlikely. Last week Indian forces were on high alert, though no one anticipates an outbreak of hostilities. Given the Pakistani army's past misconceptions about Indian strategic thinking, the risk of war is ever a concern, as is the safety of the rivals' nukes. "Nobody has a clue what kind of procedures they have devised to be able to ensure the safety and protection of these [weapons]," says Gates.

Pakistanis are used to army rule. The military has run Pakistan for 25 of the 52 years since the birth of the nation. But an early period of military rule ended disastrously with civil war, armed confrontation with India, and the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. And the legacy of the last military strongman, Zia ul-Haq, who was killed in a 1988 plane crash, is the country's so far unviable democracy. There had been little longing for the military's return to politics, but the ineptitude of Sharif's government and his self-serving brand of management made a confrontation with the military--still the country's strongest institution--hard to avoid. Relations with Musharraf were clearly sour by July. After meeting with Clinton, Sharif ordered the military to retreat from the Indian side of Kashmir. The announcement infuriated army commanders. In a last grasp for control, Sharif decided to fire Musharraf last week and replace him with Khwaja Ziauddin, head of Pakistani intelligence.

But Musharraf had planned for just such a move. Within two hours of the announcement of his dismissal, troops loyal to the general seized Pakistan's TV headquarters and a convoy of army trucks carrying soldiers pulled up to the Prime Minister's mansion, where they took Sharif and Ziauddin into custody. Musharraf was on a plane from Sri Lanka bound for Karachi. Sharif loyalists told the pilot to divert the plane to the town of Nawabshah, where Sharif had reportedly arranged to have Musharraf arrested. When the plane got stuck in a holding pattern, Musharraf entered the cockpit and ordered the pilot to land in Karachi. When it touched down, the aircraft had five minutes' worth of fuel left.