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WASHINGTON: Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf faces no immediate threat to his rule despite violent protests over his removal of a top judge, a senior US State Department official said Wednesday.
"I don't think it's too much of a question of (Musharraf) being toppled or serious unrest in country," the official said when asked whether Washington was concerned that growing protests could lead to the military ruler's overthrow.
"It doesn't seem that way at the moment. I don't see any signs of that," said the official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, as Musharraf came under increasing pressure to quit over the judicial crisis.
But the United States, the official stressed, was concerned that the judicial crisis could be "opportunity for critics to say that this is a political manipulation and not something based on a factual problem."
Musharraf, a key US ally in the "war on terror," is facing the biggest crisis of his eight years in power since ordering the suspension of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on March 9.
In the US House of Representatives Wednesday, the administration of President George W. Bush came under fire for relying heavily on Musharraf instead of prodding for greater democratic progress in the nuclear state.
The judicial crisis "highlights the fact that the return of Pakistan to democracy is an issue that has slipped in emphasis if not in actual importance," said Democratic Representative Gary Ackerman.
"The administration seems content to only speak with President Musharraf and portrays him as the indispensable man. The truth is, for our goals to be achieved in Pakistan there should be more than one phone number there to dial," he said, chairing a House panel hearing on US policy on Pakistan.
Elections in Pakistan are scheduled for later this year or early next year, "but if past is prologue, these elections will be no freer and no fairer than any others," Ackerman said.
Pakistan's Supreme Judicial Council, comprising senior judges, is to hold a hearing into Musharraf's allegations of misconduct and abuse of office against Chaudhry beginning on April 3.
The senior State Department official said it was "hard to render judgment on the whole process" until the hearing was held and called on the Pakistani authorities to let the council "do its work as it is designed to do.
"What we have said is we are concerned, we are watching carefully, we want them to proceed very carefully. We will follow this turn by turn as it proceeds," he said.
The official warned that the allegations against the chief justice were serious and could be easily be misconstrued as political.
Chaudhry's removal has sparked violent protests across Pakistan as well as the resignation of eight judges and a deputy attorney general.
Opposition supporters have suggested that Musharraf wants to weaken the judiciary to make it easier to pass potentially controversial legislation ahead of the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections.
The US official said one of the assets Pakistan had was "a judicial process with some integrity" and that it was "something we have often pointed to being an important part of Pakistan's makeup despite the military government."
Although Musharraf has been a stalwart US ally, there are some costs for Washington in focusing its policy solely on supporting him, especially if he alienated the secular, moderate political forces in order to tighten his own grip on power, said Lisa Curtis of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
She told the congressional hearing Wednesday that there was a need for the United States to "extend contacts and visibility with a variety of civilian leaders" in Pakistan.
"It would indeed be tragic if, in seeking to win over Musharraf and his military, we lost Pakistan," warned Marvin Weinbaum of the Middle East Institute, another Washington-based think tank. - AFP/yy
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