Two things are needed for the current train of events in Pakistan to have a happy ending. One is that ex-general and more-or-less-president Pervez Musharraf accepts his rejection by Pakistan’s voters gracefully and leaves office without too much fuss. “This is the people’s verdict against him. He should accept the facts and he should not create hurdles and rifts,” as former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whom Musharraf overthrew in 1999, put it.
In that case, Musharraf’s problems are probably terminal. In the parliamentary elections of