It shouldn't really surprise that Pakistan's political fortunes can turn so murky so quickly. And it shouldn't surprise that the man at the centre of the country's latest gloom is General Pervez Musharraf, who had wrested power from a civilian government in a bloodless coup in 1999.

He promised Pakistanis much, following the kleptocratic Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif governments, and has delivered very little except ongoing political volatility.

But what else to expect from Pakistan, whose post-independence history is littered with one failed state after another?

Take the general elections on Oct 10. Result: a hung parliament. Predictably. After cornering the Election Commission and fiddling with election rules, and with 72 parties contesting the poll, its outcome could only have been that. So, too, the ensuing power struggles.

When others condemned the poll as rigged, the United States called it free and fair.

US and Britain's endorsement is a substantive part of the general's legitimacy at home. And why not? In the still unfinished anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan, Musharraf became Washington's golden-haired boy overnight.

Rig the poll

Musharraf's Act One was to rig the poll in favour of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q). Patrons America and Britain would look the other way, just as they have Musharraf's other shenanigans.

Last April, Musharraf appointed himself president for five years. In August he rammed home 29 constitutional amendments to grab executive power for himself. Then he cudgelled the Supreme Court and marginalised the judiciary by introducing the Legal Order Framework.

The LOF includes presidential emergency powers, and through which Musharraf would wield near-absolute power, backed by his military.

Then, during the election campaign, he promised to transfer power to a civilian government after the poll, and to introduce what he called "sustainable democracy" to Pakistan after decades in the wilderness.

In this re-born democracy, a prime minister would be chosen by Parliament, which was to have sat on Nov 8. But Musharraf would have veto power over who would make the final cut.

With 36 hours to go Musharraf bypassed legal conventions and used the state-owned channel, PTV, to announce a week's "delay for logistical reasons" to the National Assembly's first sitting.

Apparently the three main political groups the pro-Musharraf PML-Q which detests the ousted and fugitive former premier Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party Parliamentarians (PPP) which distrusts and dislikes the six-member Islamic bloc known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) which deeply distrusts the other two, including Musharraf simply couldn't agree on forming a new coalition. None had won a simple majority in the poll.

(However, yesterday Musharraf-loyalist Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali was elected Pakistan's new prime minister in a parliamentary vote. The PML-Q leader won 172 votes from 329 MPs present in the 342-seat national assembly.)

Pliant civilian government

Act Two was to ensure a pliant civilian government, but that hasn't gone to Musharraf's script. If the play has gone awry, it's not wholly because the feuding parties can't agree on forming a coalition but because, in the fog of the global war against terrorism, the MMA won a stunning 60 seats. That has rocked Musharraf, who had thought the poll was stitched up.

In the post-poll shakeout, Bhutto insists her PPP nominee, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, be installed as prime minister, plus for Musharraf to immediately agree to a host of other demands related to her former questionable premiership.

And the emboldened MMA wants its religious leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman president of the Jamuit Ulema-I Islam as prime minister. But neither man is Musharraf's choice. Moreover, Fazlur and his supporters, who are strongly pro-Taliban and anti-American, have vowed to Islamise Pakistan, close down US bases in the country, and end the US's hunt for al-Qaeda.

Musharraf wasn't expecting the spillover into a dogfight. Now his manoeuvrability to further enhance his personal power has seriously stumbled. To regain ground, he could force the three groups to form a national government of sorts, but that won't survive a month of Sundays. Or he could repeal certain constitutional provisions related to floor-crossings, and either bribe or coerce some in the PPP and the MMA to switch allegiance.

But, despite epidemic corruption in Pakistan, few like or trust him. Moreover, such a grubby move will worsen his already plunging popularity. So that plan also looks doomed. Yet none of these is really part of his original calculus.

Sanctions lifted

Here's the kick. The US-led war on global terrorism has produced a new and more complex external and internal geopolitical mix to Pakistan's political economy. While the Commonwealth retains sanctions against Islamabad, the US has lifted all of its restrictions.

Washington now supplies Islamabad with arms and other military including surveillance and training logistics, pledges of US aid worth at least US$1 billion, soft World Bank loans, and a kinder approach by the International Monetary Fund to Pakistan's mounting foreign debt. And now that the US Congress is dominated by 'Bushie Republicans', the promised US$1 billion aid is a done deal.

All of which makes it doubly difficult for Musharraf to entertain the idea of MMA's Fazlur as prime minister while he can easily ignore the largely discredited Bhutto's demands.

The US will not accept the influential Fazlur since he was one of the principal architects of Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime. And he's vowing to derail Washington's pursuit of al-Qaeda operatives.

Equally, Musharraf would be risking the dangled US carrots before him. Their withdrawal will plunge the fragile economy into an abyss, creating monstrous political and social strife for Musharraf. And that will bring the military directly back into Pakistan's politics.

Another real problem for Musharraf: Turkey. In its Nov 3 elections, Recep Tayyip Erdogan's conservative Justice and Development Party (JDP) crushed Bulent Ecevit's pro-West, secular coalition government.

While ostensibly non-Islamist, the JDP has strong Islamic roots. Plus, with the world's Muslims already feeling increasingly under siege by the West's growing militarism, including Israel, Musharraf suddenly has far less manoeuvrability than he had thought.

He'll have to discard his script because now he will have to tread much more carefully as pockets of radicalised Islamism, religious extremism and communitarian violence resurge around the world, especially in South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Political ruse

But there's one other script Musharraf could still pull out from a hidden drawer the one on "sustainable democracy". It's not a new script, though. Regardless of the Oct 10 poll result, Pakistan was already assured of political instability and new power struggles.

The only question was one of degree, and it has worsened. That is why Musharraf's idea of "sustainable democracy" always seemed banal, designed more as a political ruse.

The real idea behind his "sustainable democracy" is 'expendable democracy'. Even if Musharraf had recalled the National Assembly on Saturday, it proved nothing since the internecine power struggle between the PML-Q, the PPP and the MMA (and others) won't end and is likely to intensify.

In fact, Musharraf will milk the rivalries between these groups while sowing seeds of dissension within each. And he will use this to kill off hopes of democracy for the next five years, at least because Musharraf never had any intentions of relinquishing his monopoly on political power.

MANJIT BHATIA is with the School of International Business and Asian & International Studies at Griffith University, Australia