While they gazed in the mirror and admired their new shoes...

Ready?

I agree with Cernig. Musharraf took the action he took as a means to prevent a power sharing arrangement with Benazir Bhutto. By engineering a situation which brought about martial law and removing the Pakistani Supreme Court from the bench (installing a loyalist in place), Musharraf has effectively shut down any chance for any democracy in Pakistan.

There is every reason to believe, despite the rhetoric falling out of the mouth of Condoleeza Rice, that democracy was less than attractive to the White House. Musharraf, for all his difficulty, remains at the head of a mostly secular administration. Open the door to democracy in Pakistan and the door opens to possible radical Islamic control. One of the worst possible situations they could imagine would be something similar to the January 2006 Hamas victory in democratic elections in the Palestinian Authority. That was bad enough, but to repeat that in Pakistan, replete with nuclear weapons would be viewed as disasterous.

At least one source feels Musharraf acted with the concurrence of the Bush administration.

A former Indian Intelligence Bureau chief said General Musharraf would have taken permission from the United States before imposing emergency in Pakistan.

Speaking to rediff.com, Ajit Doval said the mute reaction of the United States clearly showed the US could have given permission.

That's entirely possible, however that suggests that the Bush administration actually has a handle on what is happening in Pakistan. Given the poor diplomatic performance of the Bush administration on just about any issue, I think they're standing there holding their crotches waiting for a stall to become available. And I'm not the only one.

Stephen P. Cohen of the Brooking Institution is the director of that group's South Asia program and had this to say.

Cohen when informed that the Bush Administration was essentially scrambling to get a fix on the situation in Pakistan, said it was largely due to its not having a coherent policy on Pakistan or a well-developed and permanent team of experts on Pakistan within the Administration.

"It was always a top-down policy and we dealt with Musharraf and assumed that he would deal with Pakistan," he said. "And from day one, the US government mis-estimated his ability to control events in Pakistan," he added, and argued, "Frankly, I haven't seen much in the way of intelligence analysis of Pakistan. We don't have that much expertise in this country because policy was all made on an eyeball to eyeball basis by the President and Musharraf and that's one of the prices you pay when you have highly personalised diplomacy."

The Bush administration, cheering for the return of Benazir Bhutto, demonstrating its elementary-school understanding of foreign affairs, was possessed of the belief that Benazir would be the silver bullet which caused a democratization of Pakistan. It probably never crossed their minds that Bhutto and Musharraf cannot stand each other.

So, either way, we have another fiasco erupting from the mis-estimation of Condoleeza Rice and the lack of depth in the Bush administration.

So unclear and unaware were they that Admiral William Fallon, Commander of U.S. Central Command, in Pakistan to offer troops to assist the Pakistani army in the Afghan border region and to warn against the imposition of martial law, was not even out of the country when Musharraf issued the constitutional order declaring a state of emergency.

Unless Fallon was carrying a different message we haven't heard about yet.

In any case, Musharraf is going to need more than the imposition of martial law to regain control of Pakistan. And if he converts himself to a pure military dictator Pakistan will probably spin right out of control.