Musharraf is walking the tightrope

When Pervez Mus- harraf went on na- tional television just days after a US air strike killed a group of villagers close to the Afghanistan border this month, many people expected the Pakistani president to broach the controversial issue of Islamabad's support for US President George W. Bush's 'war on terror'.

His personality may have been honed in authoritarian military camps, but unusually for an Asian leader, he appears to relish encounters with the media, print or electronic.

This has been a great boon for a leader who came to power six years ago not through a democratic election but as a result of a military coup. Whether it is to justify his continuation in power, or to defend his radical shift in policy towards the US, or even to talk about the deadly attempts on his life by Islamic militants, the blunt yet articulate general has never shied away from the line of fire.

But after the American air strike on January 13, for the first time General Musharraf ducked.

The bombing of Damadola village in a restive tribal area close to the Afghan border was intended to take out Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-ranking al-Qaeda leader after Osama bin Laden. Instead, it killed 13 men, women and children attending a wedding, and resulted in a wave of indignation across Pakistan.

While Islamist parties organised street protests, a prominent Pakistani strategic analyst demanded that Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz postpone his scheduled visit to the US, recall the ambassador and ask for an apology from Washington. It did not help that the Damadola incident was the second cross-border military strike in recent weeks by Afghanistan-based US forces, in a region where the Pakistan army, thanks to Washington's prodding, has already stationed 70,000 troops to hunt for bin Laden and other al-Qaeda fugitives.