Pakistan now under martial law

Umm, Ms. Rice? Over there. Apparently Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf didn't listen to you. He did it anyway.

The Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, declared a state of emergency on Saturday night, suspending the country’s Constitution, blacking out all independent television news reports and filling the streets of the capital with police officers and soldiers.

Not that this is unexpected. Musharraf has been threatened from several quarters as to the legitimacy of his presidency - which he first acquired by doing what he just did now. (Does this mean that he just pulled off a coup d'etat on himself?)

The move appeared to be an effort by General Musharraf to reassert his fading power in the face of growing opposition from the country’s Supreme Court, civilian political parties and hard-line Islamists. Pakistan’s Supreme Court was expected to rule within days on the legality of General Musharraf’s re-election last month as the country’s president, which opposition groups have said was improper.

Keep very much in mind that this is a country which, as unstable as it now appears, has nuclear weapons.

The emergency declaration was in direct defiance of repeated calls this week from senior American officials, including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, not to do so. A day earlier, the senior American military commander in the Middle East, Admiral William J. Fallon, told General Musharraf and his top generals in a meeting here that declaring emergency rule would jeopardize the extensive American financial support for the Pakistani military.

Not that Musharraf appears to have much interest in either the Pakistan constitution or that country's supreme judiciary, but this is germane:

Analysts said the emergency-rule decree in effect was the declaring of martial law, because there were no constitutional provisions allowing for such an order. “This is the imposition of real military rule, because there is no Constitution and Pakistan is being run under provisional constitutional order issued by Musharraf as the army chief, not as the president of Pakistan,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, an expert on Pakistani military affairs.

Whatcha gonna do now, George, Dick and Condi? You've been propping this little tin-pot prick up for longer than was healthy.