ISLAMABAD — President Pervez Musharraf’s Federal Secretary for Information and Broadcasting Anwar Mahmud has, apparently, sent a letter to the Establishment Division with copies to the Prime Minister and the President’s Secretariat requesting that he be relieved from his position with immediate effect.
Musharraf’s exit looks imminent with GEO TV reporting that he had told a British newspaper that he “would step down.”
According to a report in The Sunday Telegraph, Musharraf’s aides are quoted as saying he is considering stepping down as president rather than waiting to be forced out by his victorious opponents.
“He has already started discussing the exit strategy for himself,” a close friend of Musharraf told the newspaper. “I think it is now just a matter of days and not months because he would like to make a graceful exit on a high note.”
“Musharraf may have made many mistakes, but he genuinely tried to build the country and he doesn’t want to destroy it just for the sake of his personal office,” added an official close to the president.
It all started when, in an interview to a local newspaper, Maj. Gen. (Retd) Ehtesham Zameer, the second in command at the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), admitted that the “2002 polls were massively rigged under Musharraf’s direct orders.”
Zameer added that Musharraf was also responsible for “changing loyalties of various deputies and engineering electoral results.”
He admitted that “those acts of his agency pushed back Pakistan instead of taking it forward.”
Zameer’s allegations were seconded by the then Commander 10 Corps (Retd) Lt. Gen. Jamshed Gulzaar Kayani, who was quoted by the newspaper as saying, “All corps commanders had opposed Musharraf’s out-of-the-way support to a faction of Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid) created by the secretary of the National Security Council, Tariq Aziz.”
