On dictatorhip, democracy, war and historical examples:
1. Milos Jakes, the last secretary general of the ruling Communist party in Czechoslovakia, should be pronounced "Milosh Yakesh"
2.Erich Honecker, East Germany's Communist ruler, has been forced to resign in 1989 by a conspiracy of fellow Communist Politbureau members after popular pressure against the regime became intolerable. His replacement, Egon Krenz, a Communist functionary, clung to power for only three months before the entire Communist regime has been swept away.
3.Wojciech (not Jaroslaw) Jaruzelski, Poland's last Communist ruler, came to power in 1981 through martial law after all Communist party attempts to cling to power through the civilian party institutions had failed. He held power for eight years amid growing crisis, agreed to an election he foolishly thought the Communists had a chance of winning, was stunned by the victory of Solidarity and had to give up power. His service to democracy was in deciding not to try military repression again in 1989, but that was because of the correlation of forces, not sudden generosity - repression had already been tried and failed and Gorbachev withheld military support.
4. Pinochet tried to retain effective power in Chile after pressure for democratization had become unbearable; he engineered a constitution which secured his position as an army chief and ran a candidate of the Right in the ensuing presidential election of 1987
, an economist and his own former trade minister, Buechli, who, if elected, would have been his puppet. But Pinochet was surprised by the victory of the democratic coalition and had to choose between bowing out or a return to military repression. He chose the former, and even so retained power as army chief for several years later.
5. Kemal Atatürk did not retire from office - he died in office as president of Turkey in 1938. So he is not an example for a dictator who relinquished power.
However, it should be remembered that he had originally been elected by a grand assembly which was if not wholly democratic than certainly representative of the popular mood at the time. And he is the only one of the dictators mentioned who can be credited with consciously working to create the foundations of democracy in an extremely underdeveloped country.
Conclusion: None of the dictators mentioned has really relinquished power out of generosity or conversion to democracy - they had all miscalculated their power to influence events and were forced to yield to a constellation beyond their control.
The self-delusion of Pinochet and the Communist dictators is particularly illuminating: They had all sincerely believed they could have won a free election. This shows how dictators lose contact with reality.
As for Pakistan:
It is not true that the ruling party there had been identical with the Taliban.
The ruling party before Musharraf's coup in October 1999 had been the Pakistan Muslim League.
In Pakistani terms this is a centrist conservative party, based mainly on patronage networks of various regional bosses, big landowners, industrialists and tribal chiefs. Officially its ideology is of a Muslim Pakistan, but that is only for show; it is only using these slogans for naked pursuit of power.
It is mainly defined by its rival, the Pakistan People's Party(PPP), which also calls itself Islamic - all parties in Pakistan do - but is more leftist, again more in theory than in practice.
There are three genuinely Islamist parties in Pakistan, which had never received more than 5% of the vote - combined. One of them, the Jamiat-e Ulema Islami (JUI)
has indeed been strongly allied with the Taliban, helped them and recruited warriors for them
But this party was part of the government only for a short time in the early 1990s, in an otherwise improbable coalition with the leftist PPP.
It is indeed in this time that the foundations for Pakistani support for the Taliban had been laid, with the help of the PPP prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and her interior minister, Major General Nasirullah Khan Babar .
But later the policy had been carried on by a powerful group in the Army and the secret service ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) almost without reference to civilian politicians.
It is true that in this period a shadowy alliance between Islamist circles in the Army and ISI and the Islamist parties supported the pro-Taliban policy.
But this was more like a behind-the-scenes lobby - roughly in the way a pro-Phalanges lobby developed in the Israeli Army and Mossad before the Lebanon War.
The contribution of the Islamist parties was only in their nuisance value - the threat that they would get millions of people into the streets if the government abandoned the Taliban.
But when Musharraf did just that, under U.S. pressure, in October 2001, he just sent the police to arrest the leaders and disperse the demonstrators with baton charges. That was enough.
Still, they are still dangerous - through terrorism, assassination, kidnappings etc.
In short, Pakistan is an unstable country where every party puts Islam on its banner, but only a small minority wants to make it a real Islamic state ruled by the religious authorities.
The military government of general Musharraf
manoeuvres between all these forces and now tries to create a party coalition of its own to support the extension of Musharraf's presidential term, but has managed only to entangle itself in party politics and compromise the Army's prestige, which derives from its being perceived as standing above party politics.
That means that Musharraf succumbs to the same syndrome like the other dictators - losing touch with reality.