Few Pakistanis will lament the enforced early departure of Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan's president as a result of long-running attempts by the country's political opposition to have him impeached. Musharraf was deeply unpopular with ordinary Pakistanis, loathed by former prime minister and head of the Pakistan Muslim League, Nawaz Sharif, and barely tolerated by the widower of former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and the man who leads the Pakistan People's Party in a precarious parliamentary ruling coalition, Asif Ali Zardari. Not even the country's military, which might be expected to exhibit some loyalty to a former chief of staff, expressed much sorrow at his resignation, and President George W. Bush, once his stoutest defender, concluded some time ago that Musharraf was either unwilling or incapable of preventing Taliban forces from using Pakistan's lawless tribal regions as a redoubt from which to launch offensives against NATO troops in Afghanistan and should be sidelined.

How different it might have been had Musharraf accepted his time was up when his political party, the PML-Q, won only 15 per cent of the seats in elections in February. Had he retired gracefully then, clearing the way for a return to democracy, Musharraf might have been forgiven his past sins and lauded for his selflessness and sacrifice. Now he will be remembered chiefly for the obsessive, vainglorious attempts to legitimise his presidency, which included rigging the 2002 presidential elections and, in 2007, sacking the country's entire Supreme Court in an effort to overturn the constitutional ban on military officers seeking high office for two years after they retire from the army. Musharraf's failure to address Pakistan's social inequalities and economic woes and his inability to contain extremists who want Pakistan to become an Islamic theocracy of the sort that existed in Afghanistan before the Taliban were overthrown in 2001 will also figure prominently in his political obituaries.