A WEEK after Benazir Bhutto's assassination in cold blood prompted a furious public response across Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf's ability to steer the country out of this latest political storm appears to be increasingly in doubt.

Even if the chaos which has now engulfed the country begins to recede, there is every chance of Pakistan chugging along from one political deadlock to another as its ruler seeks to solidify his own fragile position. During his eight-year rule, the former general turned recently elected president has repeatedly defied his political foes with his well-known penchant for putting on a brave face in moments of adversity. This time round though the scope of the challenge faced by President Musharraf is far too profound to be tackled easily.

Indeed, a Herculean effort will be required to take Pakistan out of its present spate of uncertainty and take it towards building the foundations of an unprecedented national unity. That challenge lies well beyond the capacity or scope of a single leader, especially a controversial one like Mr Musharraf.

Pakistan's well-endowed military which has ruled the country for more than half its life as an independent state also has few solutions to tackle the present challenge. In the heat of the moment recently, politicians from the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-i-Azam), who still indirectly rule the country through their card-carrying members in the present interim administration, have suggested that a total breakdown will lead to an 'extreme' situation.

For Pakistanis, hints of 'extreme' situations are indeed only reminders of the possibility of returning to martial law. For the sake of argument, if indeed General Ashfaq Kiyani, the new army chief, staged such a takeover, he will quickly face the tough question of what must follow as stabilising action beyond ordering his troops to seize strategic locations and leading individuals.

Unlike the past when coups were popular at least in the short term, this time around a new coup will find few takers across the country. The controversies built up under Gen Musharraf's command of the military will not change the popularly dismissive attitude towards the once accepted notion of the military being the option of last resort to save Pakistan.

In the immediate aftermath of the fallout from Ms Bhutto's assassination lies a combination of issues principally tied to Pakistan's tragic political history while it carries on being a country locked in increasing internal disarray.

Yet another high-profile Sindhi politician returning home in a coffin is hardly encouraging for the people of the province, where scepticism over the idea of future association with the Pakistani federation remains a recurring political theme. Matters were made worse by the way the circumstances surrounding Ms Bhutto's tragic death were tackled by the ruling regime. Has anyone heard of a lethal lever in the sunroof of a Toyota Land Cruiser?

Javed Cheema, a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army and now the official spokesman of the ministry of interior, took it upon himself to come up with what he thought was a sound explanation of exactly how Ms Bhutto's life was taken. Mr Cheema, now no more than an official 'Baboo' in our interior ministry, was keen to make us believe that inside the sunroof of Ms Bhutto's vehicle was a lever against which she struck her head so forcefully that she received a fatal wound.

Not just a horribly ridiculous account but indeed a frivolous way to demean a major tragedy.

As if Pakistan's khakis were not in enough trouble already with a long exposure to the numerous facets of civilian life, they must now also cope with faux pas from one of their formerly own, to of course little productive consequence.

Even before Ms Bhutto's assassination, Pakistan's outlook was suffering badly in a year when President Musharraf in his previous position as also the chief of army staff brought it upon himself to pick battles on an unprecedented number of fronts. Going to war against the judiciary and the media, not to forget some of the unnecessary curbs on opposition political parties and members of civil society, were cases all too well documented to be easily forgotten.

Ms Bhutto's assassination has not only exposed the failure of President Musharraf's regime in providing security to a variety of Pakistanis from common citizens to high-profile politicians. More vitally, the bigger failure now must come from a demonstrable inability to pick up the pieces and set a new direction for the future of the country.

Even the promise of elections will not help repair the damage already done as the polls cannot lead to political stability if an increasingly unpopular leader remains in charge of Pakistan. While the president will inevitably try exercising so-called checks and balances on a new political and parliamentary order, his foes will probably lose no opportunity to reject his future political experiments.

As long as Mr Musharraf is in power, his future political road map will ultimately hinge on one objective — to save an increasingly beleaguered and potentially reckless president. Even if the president succeeds in getting the right balance of political forces inside parliament, there is no way he will be able to change the popular mood which is increasingly anti-government and more dangerously even anti-state.

For even the president's loyalists, if indeed the past year has been a reflection of the future, the year 2007 will be remembered more for President Musharraf repeatedly shooting himself in the foot rather than beginning to stabilise what is clearly a government surrounded by much political disarray and disorder.

But now with Ms Bhutto's tragic assassination comes another dimension to this increasingly acute challenge. The idea of Pakistan holding together as a federal state with its four constituent provinces can only be successfully pushed ahead through a credible democratic order. The lack of credibility surrounding the head of the state — President Musharraf — will however remain an almost insurmountable road bump. There is little that pro-Musharraf politicians or the pro-Musharraf mandarins in government or even the Pakistani military can now do to restore the president's credentials which have been frittered away since March last year when the suspension of Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry became the first shot fired in an increasingly reckless campaign to take all power, irrespective of how that will be seen by the large mass of the people of Pakistan.

The bottom line is simply that controversies surrounding Gen (retd) Musharraf have raised more questions than thrown up answers, not just over the future of Pakistan's democracy-starved politics but in fact over a range of complex challenges faced by the country. What is happening in Pakistan today is a powerful reminder of the country's tragic political history. Looking at the future, the record from the past year speaks for itself.

The writer is an Islamabad-based journalist.

bokhari62@yahoo.co.uk